Outsourcers Are Tomorrow’s Economic Villains

By

Sherman N. Miller

January 2, 2007

When historians look back at 2006 it will be difficult for them to understand how the synergistic relationship once shared between big oil companies and automobile companies became prey to the illusion of shortages. Whenever the media reported on some world crisis or pending bad weather, this bad news offered justification to the oil speculators to raise the price of oil a few more dollars which became an escalating tax on the American workers. The US Government appeared impotent in stopping this economic carnage.

            As a small stockholder of the Ford Motor Company, I feel great stress to read reports such as “DEARBORN, Mich, Nov. 29, 2006 – As part of a key objective of its North American turnaround plan, Ford Motor Company confirmed today that so far this year about 38,000 of its UAW-represented hourly workers have accepted package offerings for voluntary separations from the company” http://media.ford.com . This news report suggests that there is economic carnage currently underway in the United States with the loss of 38,000 high paying American jobs and the loss of quality customers for the host of industries that depend on these people’s paychecks. It is like legitimizing socioeconomic genocide of a small US city.

Nieman Watchdog’s June 14, 2006 article, “For oil industry, profits are one big shell game,” is very disquieting. This article has credence when you consider that Nieman Watchdog has an academic underpinning of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

“The (oil) industry claims that the current high level of profit simply represents the workings of the market – resulting from temporary supply interruptions. High prices are necessary to efficiently reallocate the short supply to where it is most needed. This efficient allocation, however, comes at an extraordinarily high price. Does efficiency really require the transfer of billions of dollars from consumers to oil companies? If, as we may expect, we are likely to see future supply problems, how much of this ‘efficiency’ can we afford?”

The Associated Press puts a dollar figure on the economic carnage presently forcing many American people into economic servitude in a July 21, 2006 article, “Oil industry Q2 profits bubble higher.”

“Whatever the political fallout, the industry has done right by Wall Street's standards. The five oil behemoths releasing quarterly results next week — BP (BP), ConocoPhillips (COP), Chevron (CVX), ExxonMobil (XOM) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA)— earned an estimated $33.6 billion, 32% more than a year earlier, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.”

Imagine how many good American jobs would be saved if the US automobile industry was making 15 billion dollars profits per year versus their evading bankruptcy. When I was a young man I might have heard statements like, “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” I might have heard something to the effect that GM stood for generous motors. If there is any substance in these statements, we might argue that America’s dependence on foreign oil is morphing into the economic fissure that is rapidly leading to the fall of the world capitalist experiment.

Will 2007 become the year that America stops paying lip-service to energy independence and continues to import the Third World mindset of having two classes of people – rich and poor? Perhaps the speculators are quietly celebrating the decimation of the middle class for middle class people may reunite into a resurgence of America’s once strong labor unions. It is now time for the prosperity pendulum on growth of the labor movement to sway back in the direction of a rebirth of the working men and women sharing in the bounty of the United States of America. On the other hand, the speculator may want to be highly concerned because today’s outsourcers may find themselves vilified as tomorrow’s economic villains.