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Dennis on Outsourcing American jobs
The exodus of jobs from our shores and the "race to the bottom" for workers around the world is an obvious result of NAFTA and the WTO, both of which make it impossible to place taxes or tariffs on outsourced work. The search for countries where workers are unrepresented and environmental rules are lax must end. NAFTA, WTO, "Fast Track" legislation, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas must be rejected and replaced with Fair Trade policies in which bilateral trade agreements are negotiated to provide for living wages for workers and environmental safeguards. Canceling NAFTA and the WTO will enable the U.S. to protect high-tech jobs from outsourcing. This, plus careful monitoring of H-1B visa practices, will slow the tide of outsourcing.
"Outsourcing" is a process in which American jobs, mainly in technological fields, are contracted out to countries where wages are significantly lower. According to the February edition of Wired Magazine, the typical salary for an American programmer is $70,000 a year. The typical salary for a programmer in India is $8,000 a year. U.S. companies are expected to ship 200,000 jobs a year to India in the near future, in pursuit of these lower wages, and we have already lost a significant fraction of our manufacturing jobs to countries overseas.
The Bush Administration has embraced the concept of outsourcing American jobs overseas as a new form of international trade. Where is the patriotism in this? In this continued loss of control over the development of our own technology and materials, and the continued loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs, we are creating serious threats to our national and economic security.
I am advocating a new policy to replace our current H-1B and L-1 visas, a policy that does not put skilled American workers in the high-tech industry at risk. There are many tech-industry jobs that could be done by Americans who are out of work, and often the immigrants who come to our country on H-1B visas find themselves in indentured servitude situations.
We must not tolerate the loopholes and offshore profit shifting that corporations engage in to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. We must also take a much harder line on corporate crime by increasing the roles of the FTC, the SEC, and the Justice Department in addressing it.
We live in strange times when patriotism merely extends to unnecessary wars and not to protecting the lives and welfare of American families by keeping jobs here. It is necessary to promote a new corporate responsibility and sense of shared commitment, so that the race to minimize wages for workers and maximize shareholder profits in already profitable businesses is considered unpatriotic and punishable by tax policy. We must reject Bush's efforts to transfer more and more wealth upward, by creating an intelligent tax structure that promotes the public good.
My entire mission is aimed at increasing the benefits to the public good, specifically by keeping American jobs in America. My campaigns are financed completely by ordinary individuals, not large corporations. I am not beholden to any corporate interests; there are no strings attached. My campaigns and work represent all the people of our nation, not just the wealthy elite.
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