Outsourcing - the Biggest Mistake

Over the last decade or so, as the United States moved toward becoming more of a global economic system, deregulation of businesses was most likely thought of as a good idea, but as the rich and powerful usually do, they started finding ways to take advantage, or as they would call it, "opportunities", of the global market, all in the name of what they term, "profit growth".

I worked in the Information Technology field over the last 22 years and we saw the beginnings of IT jobs being outsourced to other countries and knew that we would all be facing losing our jobs sometime in the future. Our country's manufacturing was actually the area where jobs were first affected by outsourcing. Over the last decade, our country has progressively moved toward being mostly consumers, rather than producers. As corporations began to see the huge cost savings of paying cheaper labor wages to workers outside the U.S., the seeds of what is happening to our country now were planted and grew like weeds...out of control. As regulations were loosened to promote global trade, businesses did whatever they could to cut costs.

We have become aware of how outsourcing has sent U.S. jobs overseas, but now we are seeing daily product recalls of our food, baby cribs and cars. As U.S. workers no longer make these products and services, they are no longer as strictly regulated as they used to be. Our country must bring purchasing globally and producing our own products and services into balance. This will mean regulating companies and forcing, or enticing them to create jobs that make the products and produce the services inside the U.S.

Stricter regulations will not be an easy task, as we can all see now in what is happening with healthcare reform. Make no mistake...healthcare is primarily a business oriented "thing" and has gone mostly unregulated for years. Big business has been running wild and free for at least a decade and it will resist tremendously to attempted regulations now. The current economic and healthcare media circus is really a simple issue of the "rich and powerful" doing everything they can to stop the movement of being regulated. If you think about those who denounce regulations, why wouldn't they? Does anyone profiting by being left alone ever want to start following rules? Does a burglar want laws?

What is happening in our country is an issue of class separation or a widening of the "haves" and the "have nots". It is well known that the poor have gone poorer, the middle class has stayed flat or gone poorer and the rich have benefited by growing in historic proportions over that last couple of decades. This class issue is steadily moving toward a rumbling unrest that is most likely to become more and more visibly violent. When people become steadily oppressed, they will go so far before they become enraged and abandon reason. We can see it happening in the town hall meetings and tea bag protests. This is also a time when people can be influenced by anyone who knowingly tries using this fear and anger for their own agenda. These are times when reason, rather than emotion should be our guide.

We are seeing the tsunami hit us, much too late to stop. All we can do at this point is struggle to survive the flood, clean up and most importantly, rebuild, but hopefully rebuild to prevent future tsunamis.

As a side note, we can look to these times to also be a guide for how we live on and care for this planet. If we continue to ignore how treat the Earth, as we did with our country's economy, and ignore the warnings of our scientists, we will likely find ourselves dealing with the natural results in the same way....too late to prevent, but having to deal with how to survive.