Undersourcing is the American Way

The Way to Hell is Paved with No Intentions
© Marc Leeds
6/28/2007

Outsourcing is easy to understand. Businesses hire outside firms for tasks that would cost too much to complete in-house. Sometimes those outside firms are just down the street. Lately, the news on outsourcing is all about American firms exporting various processes to subsidiaries or other companies located outside the country. Just last week there was a piece in the news about a U.S. firm that received a government contract for three million American flag patches for various uniforms. The company illegally outsourced the job to Taiwan. Companies are able to save considerable amounts on overhead, but the result is fewer job opportunities for the American worker. Yes, this way lays the globalization debate.

Undersourcing is a different matter. It, too, has its roots in the desire to hold down an employer’s costs. In this case, however, the jobs aren’t going down the street or Madras, India. No, the jobs are just going down in value. How so?

It’s simple. Some employers would rather hire two part-timers than one full-time employee; refuse to offer benefits such as medical insurance or a retirement plan; or offer only freelance positions with little prospect for advancement or enhanced job security.

It’s a slight twist on the “just-in-time” production theory. Hold only enough inventory or production capacity to manufacture according to immediate demand. Businesses are able to tap into a desperate portion of the workforce that scrambles to complete the short-term goals of companies.

Some jobs can’t be exported. The obvious examples are vital services provided by firefighters, police, paramedics and teachers (though Internet-based distance learning is beginning to impact the education industry at the college level).

The prospects for the American worker are perilous. As more people seek satisfying work that fits their busy lifestyles filled with children’s school schedules, PTA meetings, play dates, after-school tutoring, music lessons, sports practice, ballet, orthodontist appointments, caring for aged parents, etc., fewer people will qualify for job-related health insurance and retirement benefits.

There will be more opportunity for off-the-books income, but that negatively impacts future Social Security benefits and the general contribution to the current tax base. Off-the-books income can also negatively impact one’s ability to develop credit-worthiness, a problem faced by potential homeowners and car buyers.

Corporate undersourcing contributes to diminishing the prospects for contract workers. Workers who intentionally seek only short-term contract employment may limit their professional upward mobility, gambling that their future financial capability will take care of itself and that they (and perhaps their family) will not need any more medical care than they can afford out of pocket.

This is a vicious cycle that has its roots in two laudable goals: corporations need to care for the bottom line and workers need to put family and personal concerns at the center of their lives. These goals should not compete with each other. The conflict arises from our job-related health and retirement systems that discourage creative people from working for various employers.

Until all workers and their families are covered by health and retirement systems comparable to other countries (those not spending their nation’s wealth and financial futures on fallacious wars), America will continue to be beset by companies looking to get by on the cheap and workers having to sacrifice family concerns so they can be strapped to a life limited by their cubicled existence.

We need healthy companies. We need healthy families. The current system of employment-based healthcare and the general difficulty of retirement account portability takes a financial toll on employers and workers and negatively impacts the ability of concerned parents from fulfilling their family obligations.

We have reached the point where our traditional employment model has been overtaken by healthcare, retirement, parenting, care-taking for extended family, schooling (especially the troubled-learners and those coming from families with insufficiently educated parents) and a myriad number of other conflicts. Until we come to grips with the idea that undersourcing is immoral due to its anti-family nature, we will continue to expand the number of people living at the margins, and in the long run that means greater costs to the general taxpayer to cover the shortfall of both companies and families.

Stop the Madness. Keep Shooting.

Stop the Madness. Keep Shooting.
By Marc Leeds
August 1, 2006

For those urging a quick cease-fire in the face of what they perceive to be excessive and disproportionate violence wreaked upon Lebanese civilians, forget about it. Among other things, war is almost always about the tragic deaths of civilians.

What is happening in the Middle East is more than war. It is the promise of genocide and reaches beyond ethnically cleansing the Middle East of a Jewish state. Israel—and the worldwide Jewish community in general—is simply the target of origin, as they seemingly always have been. It is not Israel that says it must drive its neighbors into the sea or be bombed back to the Stone Age. A culture predicated on learning, scientific and philosophical inquiry, and that peacefully but vociferously struggles with the various strains of its own belief system is more interested in advancing the human condition than it is with eradicating other cultures.

It is becoming cliché, and for some simply cynical to say that Western civilization is at stake. All that is of a Judeo-Christian origin is at stake. The fallacy of the Bush Middle East Democratization Doctrine is that if the populist ideology of the Islamic world were to become the de facto policy of its various governments, Israel would be set upon by all its neighbors. That same populism would declare war on the Western world. Now that Iran and North Korea have solidified their relationship, there is enough seed money to advance their combined nuclear aspirations.

Hezbollah’s recent introduction of a slightly longer range rocket only begs the question of the utility for creating a buffer zone of any size in southern Lebanon. It is inevitable that the rocket capabilities of Israel’s foes will eventually morph into more potent launch vehicles with sophisticated guidance systems. Under those circumstances, what good is a buffer zone?

The best that can be had at this point is continuing the fight to degrade the weapons and personnel of Israel’s (and the West’s) genocidal neighbors. Realistically, this will only push back in time the point at which the West’s terrorist foes will be capable of fighting with any sort of technological equivalence. In the meantime, Arab extremists will have to rebuild infrastructure and house their refugees.

The argument that increasing the number of refugees and civilian casualties will only turn the average Arab against Israel and its Western supporters is, in a word, bogus. When given an opportunity to express themselves with any sort of democratic voice, Arab populations have voted into power parties that support anti-Western and anti-Israeli sentiments (just note the very public rise of Hamas and Hezbollah as both militias and political parties dedicated to the eradication of Israel). Even our new friends in Iraq are expressing support of Hezbollah’s goals.

What the West needs to expect is what Israel has experienced throughout its existence: periods of intense warfare punctuated by brief periods of sporadic deadly skirmishes. These less intense periods also include mostly ineffectual diplomatic discussions. We haven’t yet reached that point with the current conflict in Lebanon. President Clinton’s protracted talks with Israel and the Palestinians at least produced a time of relative peace, despite the fact the Palestinian electorate voted down a plan negotiated by Arafat that would have delivered 94% of all the land they claimed. In the end, the democratic voice of the Palestinian people rejected compromise and recently installed their terrorist base, Hamas, as the true voice of the people.

It may seem cruel to sit in the United States and advocate that Israel determine when it should cease fire. After all, we are not yet under direct fire and we have little understanding of the hardships and devastation faced by those on both sides of this conflict. But one thing is sure. Israel has assumed a defensive military posture since its inception and has never known peace. Israel can not afford to lose a single war.

Copyright (c) 2006 Marc Leeds. All rights reserved.

Suspicious Minds

Suspicious Minds
(on Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and George Bush)
by Marc Leeds
3/14/2006

This is a column about sports. Or is it politics. It could be about the wonders of medical science or just about our willingness to overcome our sense of wonder. But above all, this is about Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and George Bush.

Let’s see if we have this straight. Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong never failed a drug test. The San Francisco Chronicle reporters who claim to have the goods on Bonds and his alleged steroid use can only retell the stories of those who have implicated themselves in baseball’s steroid abuse scandal. They have no explanation for Bonds’s ability to pass all those drug tests.

Nevertheless, many believe that the sanctity of America’s pastime requires Commissioner Bud Selig suspend Bonds from playing this season to protect the records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. A suspension would be the equivalent of a death sentence on Bonds’s career, based on nothing more than well-written suspicion. There is the matter of Barry’s terrific musculature, but that is beside the point.

The real point is that the allegations against Bonds cover a time period prior to baseball having any rules governing steroid use. Even if Bonds used steroids, and there are still those pesky tests he passed, he didn’t break any baseball rules. He may have broken U.S. law, but it is not Major League Baseball’s business to act as the government’s surrogate and impose penalties that keep a man from pursuing his chosen profession.

But he is Barry Bonds. The press hates him, fans are at best split in their opinions about him, and he shows little interest in voluntarily surrendering his Fifth Amendment rights and coming clean—whatever the story may be. But they are his rights.

Then there is the case of Lance Armstrong. Everybody loves him. Except the French. But that just adds to his badge of honor because America’s unofficial position is that we hate the French.

Armstrong won seven consecutive Tours de France bicycle races, all after enduring surgery and grueling chemotherapy treatments to defeat testicular cancer. His daily menu, similar to those of most world class athletes, is largely composed of multisyllabic nutritional supplements.

The French have tested Armstrong a gazillion times, no doubt due to the rules of their beloved race but probably moreso because they are incredulous that a testicular cancer survivor, a guy who sits on a rock-hard splinter of a bicycle seat, can so regularly blow away the field. They haven’t said so, but the French probably feel Armstrong enjoyed an unfair advantage by having one testicle removed. He’s not exactly straddling the seat they way his competitors do.

The point is that Lance never failed those drug tests. Armstrong has his detractors who claim to have assisted him with illegal doping, but those pesky tests still say otherwise. Either a guy who rides a bicycle all day is smart enough to hire evil genius chemists to outwit an entire country, a country that is a member of the exclusive nuclear club, or else he beat the tests because he didn’t cheat.

That brings us to George Bush. He was under the impression that Iraq was bulking-up on weapons of mass destruction. All the tests the United Nations ran proved otherwise. He took us to war without proof. He also believed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he said that our military could win with reduced forces because our technological superiority made us more nimble yet more forceful than in years gone by. Grateful Iraqis offering tea and flowers would quickly greet our troops. Didn’t happen.

If George Bush were a French bicycling official, his suspicions may have thwarted a well-tested Lance Armstrong from setting a record that few believe will ever be beaten or equaled.

If George Bush were commissioner of baseball, his suspicions would probably demand that he suspend a well-tested Barry Bonds from achieving home run immortality.

But Bush’s suspicions have proven worthless and self-defeating. He circumvented process (the United Nations’ inspection committee looking for WMD in Iraq; the U.S. Constitution concerning warrantless wiretaps against the nation’s citizens, secret torture prisons around the world, and bogus military tribunals) and could be censured by the senate if it shows any spine and respect for the nation’s laws.

In retrospect, Bush’s suspicions were unfounded but he was still free to take action. There are plenty of suspicions in Florida and Ohio that Bush actually lost his two presidential elections. Interestingly, there is no chance of taking action on those suspicions. Apparently, not all suspicions are created equal.

For journalists and conspiracy theorists of all political stripes, a suspicion is a terrible thing to waste. Nevertheless, leave Barry alone. For the moment, the proof is on his side despite whatever his neck size may be. And leave Lance alone. He’s retired from cycling and proved he’s twice as good as his competitors with just half the equipment.

Bush, well, he’s another story. His proven falsehoods distracted the nation’s attention from more vital threats and flaunted the Constitution. Still, there is no recourse for Bush’s flops.

Sports records exist as single line entries in record books and now databases, once in a while with asterisks. Historical records are written with extensive footnotes and documentation, nuanced by partisans. In the end, sports legacies harm no one. The same can not be said for political legacies.

Copyright (c) 2006 Marc Leeds. All rights reserved.

American Unhistory (or Bombing Iran)

Marc Leeds
Friday, April 14, 2006

If you think Americans have trouble with math, that is nothing compared with how terribly stupid and blind we are concerning history. This is not an indictment of the American educational system, that’s for another occasion. This is about our inability to learn from history.

Oh, how tired this topic is, and we haven’t even gotten to the subject of the hour. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine reports that the United States is making contingency plans to preemptively attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment and support facilities before they can develop weapons grade nuclear materials. Hersh may not be liked in many establishment quarters, but his reputation for breaking stories from My Lai to Abu Ghraib is unassailable.

Expert military analysts believe this could slow down Iran’s efforts for anywhere from two to five years. Then what? Does the United States launch another attack? Wait for a more agreeable government to be democratically elected, one that will neither pursue nuclear enrichment nor threaten Israel? Or do we repeat America’s 1953 mistake of organizing a coup and installing a government of our choosing? That last option gave us the Shah of Iran, and that eventually led to the 1979 student riots in Tehran resulting in the overthrow of the Shah and what is commonly referred to as the Iranian Hostage Crisis. That 444-day ordeal helped elect Ronald Reagan president and solidified a hard-line theocracy in Iran, the seminal moment in creating the current staredown between Muslims and the Western world.

It’s too easy to blame Islamic extremists for all the various crises coming out of the Middle East. That is not to say that Islamic fundamentalism is without fault. Fundamentalism of any stripe is dangerous, just look at the assault on personal freedoms by the politically savvy Christian right wing in the United States. And wasn’t it a sitting four-star general and Army Chief who proclaimed, in uniform, that “our God is stronger than their God.” That’s the kind of thinking that starts rock throwing, except that generals with such mindsets have really big rocks they can throw.

So getting back to the matter of bombing our sand-bound, oil rich, nuclear capable, anti-Christian nemesis forward to the year 2011 (the estimated outer limits for their full nuclear recovery after our muscle-flexing), what do we do then? What would Jesus do? That’s really the question our right-wing government should be asking itself, but Jesus did not wear robes with embroidered patches from sponsors in the military/energy-industrial complex.

History must be our guide on this point. We failed to make friends in Iran in 1953; we lost the ethical high-ground achieved post World War II with our persecution of Vietnam; we failed to make friends in South America when we supported Pinochet; and our embargo against Fidel’s Cuba is a failure. Our decision-making capabilities have proven shortsighted at best, and that’s putting it mildly. The reality is that our leaders’ narrow views are bound by the election cycle and the deep corporate pockets that help candidates pander to a religiously hijacked right wing that continues to vote against its own best interests.

If our current predicaments, from oil dependency to poorly chosen political alliances, are to be resolved with the prospect of greater economic, political, and human justice outcomes, then perhaps we can look back to the poignant lessons to be learned in History 101 and the words of President George Washington’s Farewell Address. Among many other wise pronouncements, Washington (with input from James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Chief Justice John Jay) tells America to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

For some it is cliché to recall the words of our founding fathers this way. Many would argue that the world has so radically changed that such maxims of the past no longer apply as they once did. Three-cornered hats may be quaint for the tourists, but such philosophizing is no longer the strength of America. How sad. The nation was once enraptured by the prospect of liberty and equality. It’s cliché to bring up such matters now unless it is in the context of the theater or the study of antiquities.

We need to learn that we cannot bomb our way out of the prospect of a nuclear Iran. If our desire is to ward off nuclear proliferation, then not only must another way be found but we must be prepared to apply more enlightened strategies with other countries wishing to develop such technologies—because surely there will be others. And perhaps enlightenment is what we should be studying. It’s another one of those quaint notions that eventually gave rise to the American Revolution.

Copyright (c) 2006 Marc Leeds. All rights reserved.