The following column by Jim Hightower appeared in my local newspaper this week. As usual, I believe he is saying things that need to be said, and I hope more people start to listen.

Why give to CEOs who take?

Something major is taking place in our country that corporate chieftains don't want us talking about: Jobless Creep.

It's no longer blue-collar families that are seeing their jobs hauled offshore to faraway havens of low-wage production. Now it's hundreds of thousands (and soon to be millions) of wellpaying whitecollar and high-tech jobs that are being shipped overseas by America's wage-busting CEOs - and joblessness is creeping quietly but relentlessly upward, ensnaring families that previously thought they were solidly entrenched in the upper reaches of the middle class.

CEOs are paranoid about any public discussion of this explosive movement, but internally they giddily exult at the prospect of essentially abandoning our country and its middle-class in order to fatten their profits on foreign workers. IBM, which is leading the way, even has coined a corporate euphemism for moving more and more of its white-collar jobs out of the country: "Global sourcing." The rush is on. A Microsoft executive has instructed department heads to "Think India" and to "pick something to move offshore today."

This is deliberate job destruction, but it is also much more -- it's an open assault on America's middle-class and on America's unifying social ethic that "we're all in this together."

Corporate executives and their apologists say that this is simply the immutable workings of the market and that, after all, the CEO's sole responsibility is to enrich the bottomline of top shareholders, with no obligation to an American middle class.

Fine ... but if CEOs have no obligation to us, why should we feel any obligation to them? As they separate themselves and their corporate fortunes from the well-being of our families, communities, and country, we should begin to separate them from the special tax breaks, enormous subsidies, regulatory favors, political privileges and all other advantages they've gotten
from us.


JIM HIGHTOWER,a native of Denison, Texas, is the author of "Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back" (VikingPress).

Dell moved the majority of its helpdesk office to India, but because of customer complaints, they brought the helpdesk people back to the states. With Dell, the problem was the competence and understandability of the Indian workers, but it shows that customers, if they care enough, can force a corporation to keep jobs in the USA.

The problem, of course, is that most Americans simply don't give a (*)(*)(*)(*) so long as it is not their job that is getting outsourced. Otherwise, who could explain how Wal-Mart has customers?

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"George W. Bush surrounds himself with smart people the way a hole surrounds itself with a donut." —Dennis Miller