OUTSORCERY

I realize that I never finished my story about the BellSouth DSL pitchman. I'm on the "do not call" list, but I suppose according to the rules of that list, BellSouth can call me all they want because I'm a customer of theirs (not that I have a choice if I want a land line). Anyhoo, I answered the phone even though the caller ID didn't register a number I recognized.

Turns out it was a gentleman from an East Asian nation, probably India. I didn't ask where he was calling from, but I could hear him really working hard to put his "American accent" training to good use. Such good use that I could hardly understand him. I wanted to tell him to just speak in his regular Indian accent so I could understand him better. Please don't misunderstand me, by the way--I harbor no ill will toward citizens of India. The ill will I harbor is toward BellSouth, who sent jobs that Americans could do over to India. When I say Americans, I mean me and my friends. Telemarketing is a job that nobody cares for, but it's something we could do if we couldn't find anything else. And a lot of my friends are looking for something else these days.

Well anyway, he told me about the DSL service and finally got around to mentioning the price, which is $20 cheaper than the cable modem we currently use. So I signed up for it. I'm screwed either way--paying too much for a monopoly on cable modem service, or paying for extra services from a company that sends American jobs overseas. Lou Dobbs would be disappointed. As he was reading me the fine print of the contract, I finally told him I was having a hard time understanding him (by this time, he had abandoned all pretense of being American and was speaking rather quickly over a bad connection). But whatever, we'll see how the new service works out.

But speaking of Lou Dobbs, that guy is awesome. He makes no bones about being against outsourcing and talks about it on his show every night. And he's not a pansy about it either. He knows his stuff and will not let anyone bullshit him about it. Business leaders criticize him as waging a holy war against outsourcing--but that ain't criticism, that's the highest of compliments.

Because honest work for decent pay is getting harder and harder to find here in these United States, regardless of one's education or skill level. Not only that, as author David Cay Johnston argues in a Buzzflash interview about his great book "Perfectly Legal":


Meanwhile, people in the middle class and the upper middle class are confronted by two things. A growing share of their income is going to taxes, and we have seen falling wages for the bottom, about 40 percent, of Americans; stagnant wages for the next 40 percent of Americans; infinitesimal growth in income for the next 10 percent...

That's why outsourcing, gigantic deficits, tax cuts for the wealthy, and illegal, expensive wars are BAD FOR THE AVERAGE U.S. CITIZEN...and one way to start changing that is to throw Bush out of office.

Speaking of that, Scarborough had the pathetic, backstabbing "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" on his show last night and prompted me to write this letter to the show:

(can't retrieve it from my email right now...I'll put it up later...it basically reiterates my comments from a few days ago under "Context Counts")