The global treadmill

An article from the LA Times depicts the hard edge of globalization.
Personal experiences break through to give the lie to the boosterism.

Oh, by the way, tell me again: What was it that was supposed to
happen when we all bought those nifty personal computers?

He'll Take Your Job and Ship It
Atul Vashistha's firm helps U.S. companies cut costs by sending work abroad.
Sorry, he says, but it's a case of move up or lose out.
By Warren Vieth
Times Staff Writer

April 27, 2004

SAN RAMON, Calif. — Atul Vashistha might help move your job overseas one day. He would like you to understand why.

Vashistha, 38, is one of the leading practitioners of "offshoring." His San Ramon consulting firm, neoIT, helps U.S. companies cut costs by sending work to India, the Philippines and other nations with cheaper labor. By his own estimate, Vashistha's deals are providing wages to 50,000 workers overseas. Many of those paychecks used to go to white-collar workers in the United States.

Since he was a boy growing up in India, Vashistha wanted to be a global entrepreneur. To get from there to here, he rejected tradition, devoured new information, sought out opportunities and repeatedly retooled himself to respond to changing circumstances.

If he can do it, he says, so can you.

"If you're a Web programmer, I'm sorry, you have no right to think you can keep your job in the U.S. if you're using the same technology that existed four years ago," Vashistha says. "You've got to keep moving up. You've got to keep going back to school…. If you're not going to do that, you're going to lose your job."

*****
In the midst of the melee, Vashistha has stepped forward as an apostle of offshoring, corporate shorthand for shifting jobs abroad. In his view, it's important for workers to hear the truth — even if it hurts.

Like it or not, Vashistha says, Americans are now part of a global competition for labor. With the advent of the Internet and high-speed telecommunications, virtually any job that can be done at a computer or over the phone can be moved to countries where wages are much lower. And U.S. companies that resist the trend, he says, will be swept away by rivals.

That may spell disaster for workers who are cast aside, Vashistha acknowledges. But there is good news too: In the long term, companies that save money this way will generate new jobs, he says, which will go to workers who are willing to reinvent themselves.

*****
For some workers, Vashistha's arguments ring hollow. Clifford Cotterill is one of them.

A software engineer for one of the companies on neoIT's client list, Cotterill, 55, managed to dodge several previous rounds of workforce cuts. But he was recently told his job would be sent to India in May, three months shy of the date he would qualify for early retirement.

"I've always taken classes, picked up new technologies. I have pages of training I can include on my resume," Cotterill says. "They're not really being honest."

Vashistha says he empathizes with workers like Cotterill. But he knows there's not much he can say about the long-term benefits of globalization that would solve the immediate problems of people who get ground up in its gears.

"It is very painful, and I understand that," he says. "To tell somebody who is 55 years old … you've got to go back to school. But that is the new reality of being competitive."

Fighting "sub-humans"? -- a sad commentary on the American
military's view of Iraqis

From the Telegraph comes an unsettling report. It brings to mind
similar sentiments among many soldiers in the Vietnam quagmire who
came to see the enemy, indeed the Vietnam people as a whole, as "gooks."
The news story is not at all surprising, given the overall attitude of Americans
about the human dimensions of the war, for example the total lack of coverage
in our media about the numbers of Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed or injured.
It is deeply assumed -- beyond any need for comment -- that those people simply
do not matter.




US tactics condemned by British officers
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 11/04/2004)


Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.

One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.

The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.

"The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn't in Iraq. It's easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them."

The phrase untermenschen - literally "under-people" - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slaves and gipsies.

Fantasies and realities of robot war

The idea of replacing human solidiers with automated devices for
fighting wars has been an obsession in the Pentagon since the
1960s. During the Vietnam War, for example, there were elaborate
plans to build an electronic barrier separating North from South, a
network of sensing devices that would identify enemy traffic and
guide strikes from the air. Much of the technology that makes possible
today's computers and the Internet derives from decades of
government funded research, development and production originally
justified by any all out push to create the "electronic battlefield."

A recent article by Conn Hallinan, "The Rise of the Machines," comments
on the most recent steps in this ongoing, throughly deranged misuse
of American science and engineering, i.e., scientists, engineers and your
tax dollars. He writes:


The press had lots of fun with the recent robot debacle in the Mojave Desert. Competing for $1 million in prize money, 15 vehicles headed off on a 142-mile course through some of the most forbidding terrain in the country. None managed to navigate even eight miles. The robots hit fences, caught fire, rolled over, or sat and did nothing.

However, the purpose of the event was not NASCAR for nerds, but a coldly calculated plan to construct a generation of killer machines.

Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Mar. 13 “race” was part of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) plan to make one third of the military’s combat vehicles driverless by 2015. The push to replace soldiers with machines is impelled by an over-extended military searching for ways to limit U.S. casualties, a powerful circle of arms manufactures, and an empire-minded group of politicians addicted to campaign contributions by defense corporations.

This “rise of the machines” is at the heart of the Bush administration’s recent military budget. Sandwiched into outlays for aircraft, artillery, and conventional weapons, are monies for unmanned combat aircraft, robot tanks, submarines, and a supersonic bomber capable of delivering six tons of bombs and missiles to anyplace on the globe in two hours.

. . . . The military’s interest is in part a function of the Vietnam Syndrome: lots of aluminum caskets and weeping survivors play poorly on the six o’clock news. While so far the Bush administration has managed to keep these images at arm’s length by simply banning the media from filming C-130s disgorging the wounded and the slain, as casualty lists grows longer, that will get harder to do.

The lure of being able to fight a war without getting your own people killed is a seductive one. “It is possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a conflict without ever leaving the United States ,” Lt. Col. David Branham told the New York Times last year.