Gangs of New Jersey - Part 6
Gangs of New Jersey - Part 6
Date: Saturday, March 15, 2003 12:59 PM
H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
The New Jersey legislature tabled Sen. Shirley Turner's
anti-outsourcing bill (S1349/A2425) because they didn't want their
betrayal of American workers to go on public record. This cowardly
tactic will only provide them with temporary cover because the truth
cannot be held back for long.
NASSCOM hired Hill & Knowlton, the lie-for-hire PR firm, to strong arm
the assemblypersons in the NJ legislature. Hill & Knowlton became
infamous during the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. They were hired by Kuwait
to concoct a story to whip up support for Operation Desert Storm. The
daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the UN wept as she told Congress
about the horror of dying infants. Th PR scheme by Hill & Knowlton was
proven to be a fraud. (read the second article below for more info)
The NJ legislature committed a huge blunder by allowing Hill & Knowlton
to lobby on the behalf of NASSCOM. This episode reeks of scandal and
corruption that will only get worse as they allow S1349/A2425 to
wither. They would be well advised to vote in favor of this bill before
it blows up in their face. Hill & Knowlton left a stench that will
linger in the halls of the legislature as long as they continue to
oppose S1349/A2425.
Everyone that wants to protect American jobs should contact New Jersey
newspapers because this story will be a gold mine for ambitious
reporters. Scandal and corruption always makes good press and the
legislature is offering this story on a silver platter. Once this story
becomes public the legislature will be forced to do the right thing.
They must reject the allure of the lobbyists, because if they don't,
they won't be able to escape their legacy of betrayal.
Use this link to contact New Jersey newspapers:
http://newslink.org/cgi/find.cgi?3=&2=usnj&1=news
This newsletter will be sent to the NJ legislature and the following
newspaper emails. Feel free to forward it to others.
letterstotheeditor@northjersey.com
raregood@starledger.com
bmalone@njtimes.com
jjletters@jjournal.com
egoldberg@sjnewsco.com
newstips@pressofac.com
editor@trentonian.com
cnletter@c-n.com
letters@thnt.com
yourviews@app.com
http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20030310/opinion1.shtml
The inexorable BPO job shift
For over a century now, the New York Times has been printing All the
news thats fit to print, and is widely admired for its integrity and
sound judgement. But on 13 February 2003, in Section W, Page 1, Column
3, appeared an article titled Software Success Has India Worried. The
article contended that the Nasscom software conference, being held that
week in Mumbai, was dominated not so much by concern over economic
downturns and threats of war but mainly by worry about the growing
threat of a political reaction against outsourcing.
Is the United States going to start turning its back on outsourcing,
the lifeblood of Indias software and services industry? boomed the
NYT article in its opening thunderclap.
Huh!!??
I must have really, really, really missed something at the conference,
because most all that I have been hearing and seeing everywhere around
me, are energetic projections on the heights to which the Indian
ITES-BPO sector is headed; serious debates and workshops on how to get
there quicker; reports of new multimillion-dollar contracts being
bagged every other day; and a thriving sector that seems set to
catapult India forward into economic ecstasy.
The hook being used by the NYT writer was of course the pending New
Jersey legislation that, if passed, would restrain government agencies
in that state of the US from farming out state contract jobs offshore
to persons other than US citizens. Scary? Hardly, when you consider
that US government contracts have anyway accounted for way less than
five percent of business to the Indian IT services/BPO industry.
The issue has been blown up by the Indian general- and financial press
too, as the harbinger of a desolate morrow for Indias BPO ambitions,
wherein the US private sector too would follow its public counterpart
and toe the patriotic line, if only to cosy up to government agencies
for smooth and favourable treatment.
Get serious, guys! Business does what business has to do, in order to
remain competitive, cost-effective and profitable. Private enterprise
is in the game to make moolah, and will do what it takes mostly by
honest and ethical means to make more and more moolah, local
unemployment concerns notwithstanding. And although the US may have
double standards on everything from global warming to nuclear
disarmament, its industry and the government it controls is very well
aware that outsourcing and offshoring, especially to countries like
India, is probably the greatest thing to happen to its economy since,
well, Alan Greenspan.
The rationale behind outsourcing was never more clearly stated than by
Hewlett-Packards services head Ann Livermore when she said (quoted
by CNETs News.com): We think customers are going to put a lot of
pricing pressure on the consulting and integration market. We are going
to aggressively move everything we can offshore.
Similar logic has been prompting global giants like GE, American
Express, Standard Chartered, HSBC, Delta Air Lines, America Online, and
some 300 others from the Fortune 500 list, to do business with Indian
IT services companies, and thats extending to BPO as well. Why, the
Indian offshore development model is so attractive that even the big
boys of consulting, including IBM, EDS, Accenture, KPMG, etc, are
expanding their facilities in India, just to remain cost-competitive
with the likes of TCS, Wipro and Infosys. When you have a company like
GE stating that it saved $500 million last year because of its ITES
set-up in India, thats very compelling reasoning indeed for myriad
others to follow suit.
Nevertheless, the so-called BPO backlash because of unemployment
concerns remains a very real issue. The New Jersey legislation move has
reportedly already triggered similar initiatives in other parts of the
US. In Europe, several more companies might well follow the lead of
British Telecoms employee union, which is resisting the setting up
of a BT call centre in India. Weighed against the flood of outsourcing
thats coming our way, the protests seem trifling.
Complacency or smugness would however be suicidal. Thats why its
heartening to note the mature and impressive way in which things are
being handled by Nasscom and the Indian software industry, which in
fact has all along been indirectly helping the American economy get
back on the fast track. Nasscom has been trumpeting that the American
banking and finance sector alone has saved $8 billion in the last four
years due to outsourcing, and that Indian companies and their
affiliates contributed $215 million as taxes in the US last year. In
the next few weeks, expect to see strong lobbying against shortsighted
legislation, through Nasscoms global PR agency Hill & Knowlton. It
would be unfortunate if we have to go even further and take up the
cudgels at the World Trade Organisations redressal disputes forum to
protest that the Great Promoter of Free Trade is now contemplating
potentially restrictive trade practices.
Anyway, self-preservation being a natural human trait, its not
surprising that there are vociferous protests from all those losing
their jobs to the offshore shift. Yet thats the inevitable fallout
of this next wave of globalisation. Its happened so many times
before in the history of the world the manufacturing shift that took
place a few years ago being just the most recent in a long string of
periodic upheavals. This is the first time, though, that India is going
to be the major beneficiary.
While that happens, Ill end with this message to the New York Times:
Yes, we definitely sympathise with the 3.3 million Americans who will
lose their jobs by 2015 as a result of the offshore shift, as estimated
by Forrester. But no, were certainly not worried about the future of
our IT services and ITES-BPO industry. Got that?
- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com
http://santafenewmexican.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=7324946&BRD=2144&PAG=461&dept_id=367954&rfi=6
COMMENTARY We Say Liberation, You Say War Crimes
By TERRY ALLEN | Alternet / New Scientist 03/12/2003
People form human letters opposing a war on Iraq and the use of
depleted uranium shells (DU) during a rally Sunday, March 2, 2003 held
in a park in the western Japanese city of Hiroshima where more than
220,000 people were killed in the world's firs
hether I hate Saddam or not, and I'm not saying I do," one man told me
quietly during my recent trip to Iraq, "I hate America -- the
government, not the people -- for what it did and is going to do to our
children."
His is not a lone voice. The vast majority of the Iraqi people I spoke
to believe the United States committed war crimes during the last Gulf
war in 1991 by using depleted uranium (DU) weapons deliberately to
cause cancer and inflict birth defects for generations to come.
Propaganda? Perhaps. But when so many people believe it in a country
the United States hopes to "liberate" from oppression, it cannot be
lightly dismissed. With war seemingly unstoppable, there is a gaping
disconnect -- in Iraq and many other parts of the world -- between how
the United States sees its history and future with Iraq and how others
see it.
In 1991, American gunners fired a million rounds of DU projectiles to
destroy Iraqi armored vehicles. DU rounds are far more effective than
regular ammunition at penetrating armor: They are denser and generate
intense heat on impact, and literally burn their way through. The heat
also causes the radioactive DU to disintegrate into fine particles that
contaminate soil, water, air and people.
The Pentagon does not deny that DU carries risks. Washington tightly
regulates its creation and use, and mandates disposal into low-level
radioactive waste dumps. But in Iraq, DU blows in the desert wind
across its still-radioactive battlefields; it clings to old tank
bodies; it contaminates the environment.
The Pentagon insists that the health effects are insignificant and are
an accidental by-product of a useful technology. Be that as it may,
Iraqis believe that DU is intended to cause long-term health
consequences. The fact that there is no way to prove the extent of harm
-- much less U.S. intent -- is beside the point for Iraqis. It is the
perception that counts.
>From Baghdad to Basra, and from government officials to foreign-trained
doctors and impoverished mothers, the Iraqis I talked to all believe
that DU is causing an epidemic of cancer and birth defects. According
to Jawad Khudim al-Ali, director of the cancer ward at Saddam Teaching
Hospital in Basra -- the area most exposed to DU -- cancer rates are
now 11 times what they were before the last war. Doctors at the
hospital wheeled out for me an elderly woman, who they said was dying
of cancer caused by DU. The gravity of her situation was clear, even
though the cause was not.
A few days later in Baghdad, I wandered without a minder for hours
through Saddam City, a sprawling slum that houses many of Iraq's
internally displaced people. In a tiny grocery store, I talked through
a Jordanian translator to the proprietor about daily life and
preparations for the war. She was "more than 60 years old," and 35
people lived in her tiny house. Soon family members joined the
conversation, and neighbours leaned in through a paneless window.
A woman arrived holding a baby. She gently peeled back the infant's
clothes to show me a red tumor, convoluted and fist-sized, on the
infant's back. "DU did this to my baby," she said. "The doctors told me
that if the tumor is removed, he will probably die. Tell that to Bush,
please, and ask him why his father did this to my child." Others told
of birth defects they believed were caused by DU, or of a child with
leukaemia who could not get medication because of the embargo. "I am
afraid to get pregnant," said one woman, as others nodded. And each was
convinced that DU was deliberately intended to inflict this long-term
damage; this was not "collateral damage."
They "knew" this just as surely as Americans "knew" in 1991 that Iraqi
soldiers had thrown Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die on hospital
floors. After the incubator story had successfully demonized the Iraqi
military and ennobled the cause of liberating Kuwait, it emerged that
it had been concocted by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the
UN, who wept as she told Congress about the horror of the dying
infants. She had been put forward to the hearing by the public
relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Then as now, Iraqis and Americans alike
have demonized the enemy with a toxic stew of fact, half truth and
utter nonsense. The subtlety of the seasoning varies, but the effects
are always poisonous.
In the impending war, the Pentagon will again use DU weapons, and again
controversy will flare in the United States over just how dangerous
they are to American troops and Iraqi civilians. But in Iraq, there is
no debate. And if the United States succeeds in taking over the
country, it may come to understand another "side effect" of DU: the
widespread belief that the "liberators" committed heinous war crimes.
In such a climate, American prospects for nation building in Iraq are
hardly bright.
Terry Allen has just visited Iraq as part of a medical and human rights
research team sponsored by the Center for Economic and Social Rights in
New York.
)Santa Fe New Mexican 2003
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