Why do Western countries allow their "crazy" classes to set policies that eventually destroy the country's businesses, their people's independence and their freedoms?

it's a business decision;

"Petro's Off-Shoring Jobs"

IT, call centers, CAD, auto, appliances etc been though this.

Blame Obama, but include Bush, Clinton, Bush,Reagan,....

Outsourcing has been going on for years, as puddin n pie mentions. Let's recall that a ton of our manufacturing has been outsourced to China, hence we don't really have a sound economy anymore. As I've mentioned before, Peter Schiff says it's going to take a long time to convert the shopping malls into factories.

Royal Dutch Shell? Would that be the petroleum profiteering syndicate owned by Queen Beatrix? Queen of Netherlands. Queen of Bilderberg.

I think it was either investigative reporter Dan Estulin or Jim Tucker who infiltrated the 2009 Bilderberg meeting where these Euro elites decided to collapse the western economies with bank and monetary failures and create a global "treasury" (IMF)collecting global taxes (COP14 carbon tax) and divert investment/development capital to the new globalist-designated wealth engines of India, Asia-Pacific and Bejing.

Shell is the 3rd Bilderberg corporate member to pull capital out of the US this year. This does not bode well for the length of the US recession.

BO is just an usher in this theater, nothing he can or will do to stop it. The decision for extended US ressession/depression was made long before he was even a glint in the CFR's eye.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/bilderberg_2009_179.html

Oh, are you people starting to wake up to the consequences of outsourcing? Welcome to my world.

Question for Nancy Pelosi:

Do you know what happened to people like you during the French Revolution?

Why do Western countries allow their "crazy" classes to set policies that eventually destroy the country's businesses, their people's independence and their freedoms?

---favill

many fold answer,

Unions are so selfish they do not realize they are the main reasons jobs are sent to "cheaper" nations

The left hates western civilization and everything the white man has accomplished so all this slow destruction is part of a long term plan,

and the usefull idiots - gullible uninformed brainwashed people who vote left no matter what are also a huge part of the problem

The main stream media is actually a division of the liberal parties of rich nations and it is a propaganda machine used to brainwash people like lemmings to go jump in the river ( climategate is one good example of this )

and I could go on and on.

The left is full of western-civilization haters and/or self loathing and/or extremely selfsih people ( Al Gore being one of the most selfish leftist I can think of as he is doing all this climategate scamming stuff stuff for himself and NOT for the planet )

This is a race to the bottom that has started long before Obama. You can pay someone in the Philippines 5% of what an American would earn for the same work. No amount of tax cuts can offset that.

Put yourself in their shoes. They see a possible excess profits tax, an increase in capital gains tax, a new cap and trade tax, a new epa ruling declaring co2 a polutant, etc. coming at them. I would run too.

Capital unlike labor does not have to respect borders. It will go where it is respected most and treated best.

"Capital unlike labor does not have to respect borders. It will go where it is respected most and treated best."

Yep.

How much oil does the Netherlands have?

A Calgary based Saudi oil company, TAQA, tried to do this, outsource jobs to India, and got told to shape up or lose their right to extract resources in Alberta.
They thought they could bypass the royalty regime by outsourcing the production accounting duties in India.

Shell is one of the "Big Oil" funders of the Global Warming scam.
Shell has figured out how to get in on the ground floor and milk the scam for all it's worth.
Having their cake and eating it too.

I've always subscribed to the "I'll push this car a mile before I fill up at Petrocan" philosophy, for Shell I'd push the car 2 miles rather than fill it at one of their stations.

The Captain wades into domestic production... and finds a trend.

http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2009/12/this-chart-deserves-more-attention.html

Outsourcing is a great thing. Billions of people are no longer in dire poverty because of it And we in north America and Europe has vastly lower costs of living than we otherwise would have.

Free trade works. It is not always perfectly free, but the alternative is a far meaner existence for all of us.

Hey Oz, remnants of the NEP for me too - never filled up at a Petrocan

No, Gord, we have vastly lower QUALITY of living than w/o outsourcing. It just never occurred to anyone, that if there was no outsourcing, out individual incomes would have continued to grow instead of staying level or declining over years, inflation adjusted.

I did not have a raise since 2000 (adjusted for inflation) but the taxes, car insurance and prices keep growing.

You can't distort accounting no matter how many times you state your opinion.

Your statement that

> Billions of people are no longer in dire poverty

is another collectivist gaffe that this site is now so frequently featuring. Basically you, Gord, just proved that you are a closet collectivist in wolf clothes, just like me.

Countdown to deletion of this post: 3... 2...

It does not occur to the proponents of outsourcing, that the regimes in the countries that now get all jobs are now tied to the low incomes of their people and cannot allow those to increase under threat of loosing the lucrative manufacturing contracts altogether.

Basically the West is saying: you get the job as long as it's cheap. And they stay cheap.

Do the accounting, you will realize how blindly you were following communist seduction designed to funnel wealth from the West to the com-block.

Aaron, I've also heard that the "green factories" classification in some countries means that the kids working there don't get air conditioning

Perhaps the numbers of Chinese children working in the factories is exaggerated. But that's not the point. The point is that regulatory framework for business in the West is being artificially siffened in order to force exodus to the 3d world.

Only a short sighted would believe that the labour cost will always remain low. It is impossible in the market economy.

The betting everyone is doing on outsourcing means one of two things: they either believe that there is a cap on workers income, or they have no choice. Either way those who believe that outsourcing is a blessing for Chinese is either ignorant or dishonest.

Shell will be able to continue operating in India, without the locals giving them any grief or guilt. They'll be thankful for the jobs.

That's a lot of tax revenue that just left Houston, that Obama won't get his hands on.

I've been working on outsourced projects in the Philippines for 4 years now. The work my company does for our clients can't be done profitably back home in Canada or Stateside because minimum wage laws make our costs higher than our clients can afford to pay.
We can save our clients about 30% on their costs, perform at same or better quality as back home, and still turn better profit by doing the work overseas. The client can use these cost and performance savings to compete better and win / retain customers. The customers spend less for the service, so they have an economic advantage.
So the clients win, the customers win, my company wins.
Who loses? The unemployed people back home in Canada that could be doing this work if the govt hadn't interfered in the labor market. Also the people who are working and paying taxes to support the folks now out of work.

Do the accounting, you will realize how blindly you were following communist seduction designed to funnel wealth from the West to the com-block.

The owners of the outsourcing corporations remain here. They are the ones making a killing on that. Yes, some poor slobs in China or India now make $5 a day instead of $2. Yay for them. But the real 'transfer of wealth' is from west middle class to global plutocrats.

And since when India, Mexico, central America and the Philippines are part of the 'com-block'?

The problem with you right-wingers is you think it is the socialists that are out to get you, when it is the rich elites that are getting you. But I guess it's easier to bash the poor, even though they are absolutely powerless.

And before you call me a leftist, I am neither.

The rich elites are socialists. Just look at Soros or in the mirror.

Whatever.

Pinochet, Suharto, Marcos, Trujillo, Pahlavi were not 'socialists'. And yet they crushed freedom and human rights as ruthlessly and effectively as Stalin and Mao did, even though they did not reach the latter's body counts. And who put those despots in power? Big corporate interests.

Money buys power. Power is the enemy of freedom.

Fighting the outsourcing of unskilled labour is pretty much impossible, and trying will only hurt Canadian consumers and exacerabte poor buisiness practices.

The best thing to do would be to get government out of the way of innovators and capital, reform education to better serve the needs of modern employers, and make sure regulatory frameworks do not punish high-tech manufacturing and resource extraction.

Right RL, because all of those engineers and developers at tech companies were all just a bunch of unskilled yobs. And the 'education' argument has just gotten so old. No matter what kind of engineers the Western nations turn out, and no matter how skilled they are, you just can not find one that would invest in five years of expensive and difficult education to make 5$/day. Sorry, try again.

Additionally, I should indicate where I stand on the whole issue. Ultimately I believe that the market dictates pay, and that people will always seek employment in sectors where the pay is perceived to be good in return for the amount of effort that has to be expended.

My favorite argument of today put forward by certain business lobbies (i.e. OCRI) indicate that we are experiencing an extreme shortage of engineering talent when every major tech company is laying off, freezing hiring, or pay (or all of the above). They then continue to piss and moan about young people not pursuing a career in technology. Well, sorry fellas, once again, the market is at work and the technology field is not perceived as being a viable place to put one's long time career initiatives into.

In a sort of strange way, this also fits into the category of 'going Galt'.