This fucking guy is making disastrous decisions and he's only been in office a few weeks.
Obama Deals Another Catastrophic Blow
Published 02/05/09 Dustin Ensinger - Print Article
E-mail - editor@economyincisis.org
President Barack Obama dealt another catastrophic blow to American workers recently by announcing Diana Farrell, to his National Economic Council where she will serve as a deputy economic advisor, according to computerworld.com.
Farrell is the former director of the McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Co.'s economics research arm, and is a notorious proponent of outsourcing and further expanding the job-killing H-1B visa worker program. In fact, she has made millions advising companies to offshore production as a cost-saving measure.
Now, unfortunately, she will have the ear of the most powerful man in the world.
Farrell is either ignorant, a liar, or both. At McKinsey & Co.’s, she was the lead author of a “research” paper titled, "Offshoring: Is it a Win-Win Game?" that wrongly concluded that the U.S. gains “substantial benefits” from outsourcing production, further proving the old axiom that there are “lies, damned lies and statistics.”
In the preposterous report, Farrell falsely claims that, “Policymakers should let offshoring continue” because “[it] has such a limited impact on the U.S. jobs market, its effect on U.S. wages will also be negligible, even in the computer and data-processing industry.”
The entire report reads like some sort of twisted manifesto on exactly how to destroy the American economy as we know it.
Farrell claims that “continuing to allow offshoring and free trade in services will benefit the United States as a whole.” However, all credible research - that is not financed, conducted and promoted by a company that makes a living advising other companies to outsource production - points in the opposite direction.
Public Citizen found that, in the first three months of 2004 alone, over 48,000 American jobs were outsourced. From March 2001 to March 2004, American software producing industry lost 16 percent of its jobs due to outsourcing. And Goldman Sachs found in a study that 15,000 to 30,000 American jobs were lost monthly between 2002 and 2005 directly as a result of outsourcing.
Some estimates claim that as many as 14 million American jobs could be outsourced in the future and according to the Gartner Group, an IT consultancy firm, at least 25 percent of all American IT jobs will be offshored by 2010.
Job losses are just the tip of the iceberg. Typically, companies that hire H-1B visa workers or offshore production pay significantly lower wages, which drives down the earnings of those Americans that stay in the industry. As outsourcing increased dramatically in the middle of the decade, average salaries for application developers, database engineers and systems administrations fell by 17.5 percent in 2002, 14.7 percent in 2003 and another 5.4 percent in 2004. Those workers displaced through outsourcing, on average, lose 24 percent of their earnings after relocating to a lower-wage job.
The fact that Farrell failed to acknowledge the reality of the outsourcing epidemic is disturbing. The fact that she may not have realized the havoc outsourcing is wreaking on the economy and may actually believe her own propaganda is downright scary.
