Republican Civil War Spills Over Into The Battle For High Speed Rail And An American Future

I learned a lot about the relative economic development of India and China in Robyn Meredith's 2007 best-seller, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us, and last year I applied one of those lessons to a post about India's newest airport. Meredith had used the pace of airport development in the two countries as a metaphor for the advances made in China and the plodding, endemic backwardness of India.

I bet anything that President Obama has read The Elephant And The Dragon, and that its lessons about infrastructure development were on his mind when he gave the State of the Union Address-- with its largely unheeded call for a Sputnik Moment-- last week.

Largely due to Chinese authoritarianism-- and Indian democracy-- China has surged light years ahead in infrastructure. In India, writes Meredith, "companies must navigate antiquated customs processing, variations in taxes and byzantine rules for transporting goods between Indians states in addition to the crumbling highways, decrepit airports, and what-me-worry ports... Progress on India's development projects is on again, off again, as if ambivalent India still can't decide whether it wants to be part of the modern world. The city of Bangalore's airport is a prime example. Originally built in 1942, the airport has changed little in the past sixty-plus years. It's white tile floors, poorly lit corridors, and shabby stained chairs-- needed for the long wait at the lounge conveyor belt-- make the airport look as if it belonged in the developing world. One might find a thin airport worker leaning against the wall, asleep, or another staffer eating his dinner at a table set up near passport control, not far from a neatly stacked pile of fifteen-foot-long tree branches. A rumpled red carpet, held in place with duct tape, shows the way outside, where a crowd of perhaps 250 people-- waiting relatives, taxi drivers, hotel touts-- mill about at nearly any time of night or day... The Chinese government's drive to build superior physical infrastructure-- tens of thousands of miles of highways and modern airports-- allowed China to dominate manufacturing exports. Without high-capacity, dependable modern infrastructure, the world's sophisticated supply chains simply don't work." Writing in 2007 Meredith pointed out that although "China's big cities already have new airports, the nation intends to spend more than $17 billion in order to build over forty additional airports by 2010."

U.S. infrastructure, part of a post-WW II economic boom, hasn't kept up-- and, in fact, has been starting to crumble for lack of upkeep. Obama is talking about a 21st-century explosion in high-speed rail, and the deranged and partisanship-above-nation-driven Republican Party is talking about ending spending. I dug up a two-year-old post about why China has managed to surge ahead while the U.S. stagnates. I'm tempted to republish it, but I'll leave it to you to hit the link and read as much of it as you'd like. I'll just point out an overtly political passage as a lead-in to what I want to write today about high-speed rail.

China is a partner in capitalism but not in democracy, not by any stretch of the imagination. A rare upside to their authoritarian government is that there is no formal obstructionism permitted to hamper the government in a crisis. They have no Grand Obstructionist Party in China. They have plenty of corruption on all levels, including at the highest U.S.-like levels, but without a political party actively working to see the government fail-- regardless of how that hurts the nation-- China has been able to act with far greater speed, agility and purpose to take defensive action against the global depression. While partisan hacks of dubious patriotism-- like Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Cornyn (R-TX), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Richard Burr (R-NC), David Vitter (R-LA), John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)-- act with single-minded intensity to sabotage President Obama and prevent his program to rescue the country's economy from being enacted, China's government has acted with requisite haste to head the worst of the effects of the downturn off at the pass. This augurs poorly for the United States, although not for China's unofficial chief American lobbyist, Mitch McConnell.

Rabid right-wing ideological hacks like newly elected governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have turned down federal funds for their own states to build high-speed rail-- much the same way the ambitious right-wing governor of New Jersey sabotaged a much-needed new tunnel to New York for the same narrow-minded, reactionary reasons.

In a hearing this week, Republican Representative John Mica of Florida, the new chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Republican Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, chairman of the subcommittee on railroads, pipelines, and hazardous materials, called for massive public-private partnerships way beyond federally subsidized Amtrak to bring true high-speed rail to the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor. Shuster even used the “I-word’’ currently being flayed by many Republicans: “Failing to invest in the critical Northeast Corridor will ensure continued congestion.’’

But too many other Republicans want to derail everything. The new governors of Ohio and Wisconsin gave back $1.2 billion in stimulus funds for high-speed rail projects, campaigning against them as taxpayer waste. The Republican Study Committee, a caucus of 175 House Republican conservatives, wants to completely de-fund Amtrak and high-speed rail. Caucus chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio asked in 2009, “Why should we subsidize an industry that will directly compete with the automobile industry, which is so critical to our area?’’

Undeterred by such sentiments and the new Republican majority in the House, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry plans to file legislation in the next few weeks that would boost high-speed rail even more. His general plan calls for the development of a national high-speed railway system with spokes radiating up and down both coasts and across to the Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest. The legislation would provide for up to $20 billion in competitive grant funding for projects that deliver train speeds of at least 110 miles per hour and incentives and preferences for projects that can deliver speeds above that.

Unfortunately, there are more Republican officeholders in power like Florida's crooked governor Rick Scott than like somewhat more sensible congressional realists John Mica (R-FL) and Bill Shuster (R-PA). Mica desperately wants high-speed rail in Florida, while Scott opposes it:



Mica, whose Florida district would benefit from the rail project, is chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and he said he's "pleased that President Obama has helped to launch a system for improved passenger rail service for our nation." Shuster of Pennsylvania is another booster of the plan regardless of the partisan divide. "I believe it's good for America to develop a high-speed rail corridor in the Northeast corridor. It's a place we have to start. We have to accomplish it, because then I believe all of America, in the various corridors around the country, will want high-speed rail if they see success here."

Many of their fellow Republicans are eager to support it as well, but campaign strategists under Boehner and McConnell are urging Republicans to stick with their obstructionist policies and to deny Obama any victories, regardless of how it impacts the country. Obama, along with both the business community and labor unions, may be talking about investing in the country's future; the GOP doesn't see beyond the 2012 elections and their own careers.

Dan Smith, a transportation associate with U.S. PIRG, said the president showed a willingness to make big compromises in the lame-duck session, and that could be a model for transportation policy.

"I think infrastructure could come in, in the form of a compromise where members of Congress from both parties see that it's in their interest" and will help the people in their districts, he said. "There's no such thing as a Democrat or Republican road project or rail project."

In the Republican response to Obama, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said all the president's initiatives, including the stimulus bill, have brought the nation to the brink of fiscal breakdown. Ryan said Obama has increased spending on domestic government agencies by 84 percent, including the "failed stimulus" that included spending on rail, highways and transit.

"All of this new government spending was sold as 'investment,'" Ryan said. "Yet after two years, the unemployment rate remains above 9 percent and government has added over $3 trillion to our debt."

Nonetheless, David Goldberg, communications director for smart-growth group Transportation for America, said fissures will eventually form between Republicans.

"Frankly, there are a lot of Republicans that represent unions and districts that really want that congestion relief from a new rail line," he said. "I'm just saying that they're out there."

With No Obstructionists Sabotaging Its Stimulus Program, China Takes Advantage Of The Worldwide Economic Slowdown

With Obama contending with obstructionists like Palin, DeMint & Bayh, China poses grave threats to the country

When Robyn Meredith wrote her NY Times best selling The Elephant and the Dragon about the rise of India and China, Bush was still playing at being president and the catastrophic results of years and years of ideological Republican governance hadn't yet manifested as the economic meltdown Obama inherited. In fact, when Meredith was writing, anyone who talked about an impending economic meltdown was ignored or derided as a kook. But her book was about China and India and how their developing roles would impact America and the rest of the world, so no one paid much attention to her prescience when it came to our current financial crisis. Her crystal ball sure was working:

With the brisk growth the global economy has enjoyed since 2002, these should be the best of times. As in past expansions, the U.S. unemployment rate was expected to fall-- and it did. American workers have become more productive each year, which normally leads to widespread raises. But the swelling economy has not led to fat paychecks this time; instead median hourly wages after inflation declined 2 percent from 2004 to mid-2006. For Americans, the missing link in a suddenly internationalized economy is improved pay. Much factory work has already moved overseas or has been automated, and America's blue-collar workers are earning less than they did in 1973. The migration of white-collar jobs [to India] has begun. Those who have lost jobs frequently must accept pay cuts when they find new work. Most of those who have kept their jobs aren't getting raises that run ahead of inflation, much less ahead of productivity increases. The reality is that many workforce changes have already begun and are likely to accelerate in coming years as more and more companies move jobs offshore and otherwise adjust to the rise of India and China.

Unfortunately, most households are unprepared for the turmoil: during the 1990s, the American savings rate began its plunge from over 8 percent to negative 1 percent in 2006. Americans didn't register much of the pain of smaller savings, first because stock prices soared in the 1990s, then because house prices began to zoom upward about the time the stock bubble burst. Housing prices have halted their powerful run-up, so many Americans may soon feel the weight of their unprecedented, credit-fueled spending binge.

Those looking closely see that American standards of living are already being pinched for all but the richest Americans. Middle-class expenses are way up, largely because of increased health care and college costs. Unless Americans make big changes, keeping up with the Joneses may mean going backward and downsizing the American standard of living. Some indicators show that Americans have in the past decade already begun to slide, but many haven't yet begun to feel it.

When all the pieces of the global economy work together smoothly, all the players involved benefit. In this decade a clear pattern has emerged: China became factory to the world, the United States became buyer to the world, and India began to become back office to the world.

But there are risks to both East and West as the strands of the global economy intertwine. As the world economy interconnects, the United States, China and India become more vulnerable to local disruptions in each other's economies. For instance, if the U.S. housing bubble bursts as quickly as the American stock rally ended in 2001, home prices in the country could plunge. Many Americans who had been feeling flush would suddenly feel poor, and many would be saddled with payments for home loans worth more than their houses. If that happened, a broad economic slowdown would follow, and many Americans would be forced to tighten their belts drastically, spending less on everything-- including made-in-China goods stacked on store shelves. A U.S. recession could force Chinese factories to shut down or lay off workers, most for the first time ever. Indeed, worries about a U.S. slowdown push stories about the U.S. housing market to the front page of newspapers half a world away in China. At the same time, India's army of computer programmers and call-center employees could also feel the ripple of a downturn in the U.S. economy. Indians wouldn't be answering so many 800-number calls from shoppers buying plane tickets or other goods. On the other hand, because service jobs can move across the globe quickly, American companies fighting to stay afloat might accelerate their movement of white-collar jobs overseas in a downturn that desperately crimps their profits.

China is a partner in capitalism but not in democracy, not by any stretch of the imagination. A rare upside to their authoritarian government is that their is no formal obstructionism permitted to hamper the government in a crisis. They have no Grand Obstructionist Party in China. They have plenty of corruption on all levels, including at the highest U.S.-like levels, but without a political party actively working to see the government fail-- regardless of how that hurts the nation-- China has been able to act with far greater speed, agility and purpose to take defensive action against the global depression. While partisan hacks of dubious patriotism-- like Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Cornyn (R-TX), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Richard Burr (R-NC), David Vitter (R-LA), John Boehner (R-OH), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)-- act with single-minded intensity to sabotage President Obama and prevent his program to rescue the country's economy from being enacted, China's government has acted with requisite haste to head the worst of the effects of the downturn off at the pass. This augers poorly for the United States, although not for China's unofficial chief American lobbyist, Mitch McConnell.

The global economic downturn, and efforts to reverse it, will probably make China an even stronger economic competitor than it was before the crisis... China’s leaders are turning economic crisis to competitive advantage, said economic analysts.

The country is using its nearly $600 billion economic stimulus package to make its companies better able to compete in markets at home and abroad, to retrain migrant workers on an immense scale and to rapidly expand subsidies for research and development.

Construction has already begun on new highways and rail lines that are likely to permanently reduce transportation costs.
And while American leaders struggle to revive lending — in the latest effort with a $15 billion program to help small businesses-- Chinese banks lent more in the last three months than in the preceding 12 months.

“The recent tweaks to the stimulus package indicate a sharper focus on the long-term competitiveness of Chinese industry,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a former China division chief at the International Monetary Fund. “Higher expenditures on education and research and development, along with amounts already committed to infrastructure investment, will boost the economy’s productivity.”

The international economic slowdown is also doing some things that Chinese authorities had tried and failed to do for four years: slow inflation, reverse what had been an ever-growing dependence on exports and pop a real estate bubble before it could grow even bigger.

The recession in most of the large economies in the world is inflicting real pain here-- causing a record plunge in Chinese exports, putting 20 million migrant workers from within China out of their jobs and raising the potential for increased and sustained social unrest. But as President Hu Jintao told the National People’s Congress last week, “Challenge and opportunity always come together-- under certain conditions, one could be transformed into the other.”

To that end, Chinese companies are shopping for foreign businesses to acquire. The commerce ministry announced late Monday that it was greatly easing the government approval process for Chinese companies seeking permission to make foreign acquisitions.

Over the past two weeks we've seen blatantly partisan, self-serving moves made by ambitious Republican governors Mark Sanford (SC), Rick Perry (TX) and Bobby Jindal (LA) to stand in the way of Obama's Stimulus package. Yesterday a cold wind blew down from Alaska: "Gov. Sarah Palin is refusing to accept over 30 percent of the federal economic stimulus money being offered to Alaska, including dollars for schools, energy assistance and social services."

The news Thursday drew anger from those who accused Palin of putting her national political aspirations ahead of the state's interests, and admiration from others who say she has courage to turn down money that would expand government. The state Legislature will have an opportunity to override her decision.

...Palin first told the news media that she's turning down nearly half the federal stimulus money -- but later conceded that does not count the Medicaid money she is accepting. That brings down what she's refusing to 31 percent of what the state government could get. Local governments and nonprofits could still compete for stimulus grants.

The biggest single chunk of money that Palin is turning down is about $170 million for education, including money that would go for programs to help economically disadvantaged and special needs students. Anchorage School Superintendent Carol Comeau said she is "shocked and very disappointed" that Palin would reject the schools money. She said it could be used for job preservation, teacher training, and helping kids who need it.

The clueless soccer-mom is feeling intense anger from both sides of the aisle and it is likely that the Republican-dominated state legislature will override her with Democratic help. But why should she care about special needs students when she is far more qualified to parrot negative attacks on the president's humanity than on accomplishing anything for the poor residents of her state. At least she'll have two Senate allies in undermining Obama now that Begich has declared himself a member of Bayh's anti-Obama bloc. I wonder if Palin can see China from her front porch too. The DNC will launch a nationwide campaign today to combat Republicans and their right-wing Democratic allies who are trying to destroy Obama's program by sabotaging his budget. Lets hope it works-- and that we don't wind up with Sarah Palin and Evan Bayh stumbling around trying to figure out which way is up... for all of us.

"What we're really saying," said a Democratic strategist involved in the campaign, "is that this is a budget here, but all of these pieces...they're so central to function the economy, and this budget is a downpayment on any substantive reform that the president seeks on those - in those areas. If President Obama doesn't get a significant placeholder for health care reform, what are the prospects that you're going to get that going forward?" 

The same is true, the strategist said, of Obama's energy and education reform proposals.

And if the obstructionists keep up their partisan warfare against the president and he's unable to contend with the biggest threat we're now facing as a nation-- the world ditching the dollar as its reserve currency, which is a distinct possibility-- the game's over for us in terms of living beyond our means. This country will be barely recognizable a decade from now. DeMint, Cornyn, Burr, Palin, Bayh, Sanford, Boehner... the whole lot of them couldn't hurt America more if they opened the front gates to bin-Laden.

China, India And America-- Discovering A Contagion Beyond Bird Flu: The New Global Depression

I loved Slumdog Millionaire. It, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, both of which I also loved, were the only Oscar nominees I've seen. And I'm glad for them that they all won some of the awards. OK, so Slumdog wasn't exactly, as Salman Rushdie was quick to point out, cemented in reality. But the universality of the movie was one of hopefulness, the kind of hopefulness you get in a fairy tale. And this morning the nation of India, despite some reservations, exploded into the kind of joy the country feels when their team wins a big cricket match (if not the world cup).

Its depictions of filth and brutality fueled angry blogging and stray street protests. It drew unusually intense scrutiny, from how much its child actors were paid to what the composer A.R. Rahman would wear to the Oscars. But on Monday, as India woke up to news of the spectacular wins by Slumdog Millionaire at the Academy Awards, this movie-mad country went “Jai Ho.”

The victory by Slumdog was embraced as India’s own.

“What a day it has been for India!” gushed a television news anchor mid-morning. It dominated television news throughout the day. News of a hepatitis B outbreak in western Gujarat State and a southern politician’s threatened hunger strike seemed minor news by comparison.

“We rocked the world,” an Indian percussionist named Sivamani declared... “The winners have done India proud,” [Prime Minister Manmohan] Singh’s office said in a statement...

Never mind that “Slumdog” tells a story of stunted, shafted slum children, precisely a story that promoters of the New India have diligently sought to obscure with tales of prosperity and bling. India seized on its Oscar wins as a sign of its arrival on the world stage.

Since 1969 I've been to India 5 times, once for nearly a year and last year for just a week. At the very minimum, the New India exists very much side by side with an Old India that New India isn't eager to see portrayed for foreigners. When I reported back from Delhi in December, 2007, I talked about the two worlds living side by side in a very physical way:

I guess they're so small because they don't eat any protein-- or much of anything-- and neither did their parents, grandparents or ancestors. I'm not in India anymore; I'm in Thailand. You don't see much of that kind of grinding, horrific poverty in Bangkok. Nor do you see the levels of garish displays of conspicuous consumption like you see in Delhi. You see some and you do see some people in appalling poverty. But it isn't anything like the extremes you see in India. In Delhi wherever I went on the streets there were always clusters of small, very dark, very skinny people. They're everywhere, and no one seems to notice. There are hundreds of millions of them-- more of them in India than the entire population of the United States! And no one seems to notice them. They don't own anything but the rags on their backs and I've never been able to figure out how they exist. The begging can't possibly support them, even if every tourist and every trendy call center-walla give (far from the case; no one notices them)... Families laying in the filth and dust with stray dogs night after night, wrapped in their rags, bundled around a little fire burning garbage. Delhi's cold. I've being see it since I started coming to India in 1969. It's just unfathomable. Has anyone cared about these millions and millions of people since a right-wing religious fanatic assassinated their champion, Mahatma Gandhi 60 years ago?

By chance, I'm in the middle of a book by Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us. We took a look at one aspect of it a week or so ago as Americans were told that China's economy, which has been largely bolstering our own, is very shaky.

This morning Ken wrote brilliantly about the negative synergy, much of it based on anti-union policies, between the U.S. and China plunging the world economy down into what Harold Meyerson referred to as "a bottomless pit." The offshoring of our manufacturing jobs has also meant the offshoring of some of our unemployment problems-- and this is having catastrophic consequences in both China and India, referred to in The Elephant And The Dragon as, respectively, "the brawn and the brains" of the newly globalized economy. "In China, where exports dropped 17.5 percent in January, tens of thousands of factories have closed, and the government estimates that 20 million migrant workers -- rural Chinese who moved to manufacturing zones for the work -- have lost their jobs." Their main customer, U.S. consumers, can't buy what they're producing because decades of anti-worker/anti-consumer governance-- through Reagan, 3 horrific Bush terms and a bit more benign Clinton terms-- have left Americans in debt and our economy collapsing, while right wing politicians refuse to come to grips with the dangers for our society as they play out their divisive political strategies for grabbing power at whatever cost... to the rest of us and to the nation.

This morning's NY Times includes a story about China's economic meltdown by Andrew Jacobs that I fear not enough people will bother to read or grasp. The implications, however, go way beyond China's borders.

As the global economic crisis deepens and the demand for Chinese exports slackens, manufacturing jobs in the Pearl River Delta and all along the once-booming coast are disappearing at a stunning pace. Over the last few months, more than 20 million migrant workers have been cast into the ranks of the unemployed... and wages have been cut by a third as orders from the United States dry up. Last year, 2,400 factories in and around Guangzhou closed.

The international economic collapse that is fueling unrest across the globe (governments in Iceland and Latvia fell and this weekend saw 120,000 angry protesters marching in hard-hit Dublin), is spreading to rural China. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told his Cabinet the worst is ahead and that "The country's employment situation is extremely grim."

As Robyn Meredith put it in her book, written in 2006, well before the economy began to implode, "China's most pressing social problem is the fast-widening gap between the rich and poor in a nation where a mere generation ago almost all comrades were equally poor. China's rural population, plus nearly everyone over 30, are fast being left behind by more prosperous city dwellers." This population-- plus New India's-- is what Western capitalists were depending on as the markets of the future. 220 Starbucks have blossomed across China since 1999-- selling a cup of coffee for what it costs to feed a whole family a substantial lunch. "It's all about status and being able to show off," explained a senior planner for Ogilvy & Mather in Shanghai.

There is a lot of showing off going on. Only 15 years after ration coupons were in circulation, China now has more than 400 shopping malls, including four that are bigger than the Mall of America in Minnesota.

Western companies admit that they have been counting on the naivete of Chinese consumers to sell them their products. Chinese TV viewers are impressionable and tend to believe whatever they see on TV. But those strategies are going up in smoke as the economy spirals downward, along with our own. And in their headlong rush to follow the advice from Wall Street and righting DC think tanks, "China's social safety net has frayed over the past decade. Just one in every four people in China has health insurance now, only 14% have pensions, and with 25% of education costs shifted to parents, school dropout rates are rising, particularly in low-income rural areas." It means the Chinese stop spending and save, save, save... for the rainy days that have come.

So why is this so crucial to us and how did it happen? In his post this morning, Ken talks about the trampling on the rights of workers-- by crushing the effectiveness of their unions-- in both China and under the right-wing governments of the U.S. That has helped enable capital's dream scenario of jobs moving around the world in search of ever lower wages. Meredith again:

The aim is to lower costs, and few schemes would be considered too elaborate in the pursuit of that goal. Consider Ford's assembly line. In 2006, the Ford Motor Company paid its American workers $27 an hour-- $52 if you include the cost of health insurance and other benefits [enough to live a middle class, consumerist lifestyle and buy the products Ford and other companies make]. These highly skilled members of the United Automobile Workers union are perfectly capable of building dashboards, for instance, along Ford's assembly lines. But if Ford instead hires a unionized Michigan auto parts supplier to deliver the dashboard, then pays the Ford employees only to attach it to the rest of the car, it will be much cheaper because the supplier pays its workers about $15 an hour, or $25 an hour including benefits. And if Ford hires a non-union supplier, say, in North Carolina, to build the dashboard, wages are closer to $10 an hour, $16 with benefits. That gives Ford a cheaper way to get its dashboards [although those workers won't be able to buy its products]. If Ford's supplier subcontracts to other companies around the globe to build pieces of the dashboard, it can deliver the dashboard to Ford for even less. So the supplier might buy speedometers from a factory in China that pays $2 a day, have the behind-the-dashboard wiring sent from a $4-a-day factory in Mexico, and buy the heating vents from yet another Chinese factory, where workers earn a dollar a day.

And what John Kerry referred to during the 2004 presidential election, "Benedict Arnold CEOs" certainly didn't have their single-minded sociopathic avarice satiated by wrecking the country's (ours) manufacturing base. They moved right along to the service sector as well, the sector of the future we were told would free us from the drudgery of manual labor. Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers: "We are talking about our highest-paying and best-skilled jobs that corporate America is getting ready to export. It will only lead to increased unemployment, lower wages, and fewer benefits for America's middle class." That was in 2003. It's all come true since then-- with a bang. And now we're being asked to bail out the titans of industry and greed-obsessed banksters who put these policies into play.

[M]ost Americans and Europeans don't realize that hundreds of thousands of low-wage white-collar workers are being hired overseas. The public is unaware because companies conceal their new hiring practices. Companies sending jobs overseas often insist that workers there be trained to camouflage their accents to sound more like their Western customers. Many telephone calls are answered by eager young Indian college graduates who try to blend in by adopting American or British accents, using fake western names and talking about football or soccer scores from the caller's region... Ford Motor Company has two hundred accountants based in Chennai who prepare corporate tax returns worldwide, jobs that were not visible to Ford customers before they went to India.

And now American taxpayers are being forced to bail out these Benedict Arnold corporations that have proceeded with these schemes so that shareholders would get fattened dividends and managers obscene bonuses (while destroying America's economy). Economist Alan Blinder, chairman of Princeton's Economic Department, who served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Congressional Budget Office and on Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, is as big a fan of offshoring as less idealistic and more greed-driven Republicans. He has claimed offshoring won't cause massive unemployment; he was mistaken, although, in his defense, he has claimed that the policies he advocated would require massive economic and social adjustments. The policies proceeded-- without the massive economic and social adjustments. Let me end on another sobering note. White collar workers in India making a few dollars an hour (as low as one-tenth of what an American worker makes) have been making the decisions for banks in America about which mortgage loans to finance and which to reject and what rates insurance companies will charge which customers.