Category Archives: Outsourcing

May 22, 2013

Apple Gets the Abuse It Paid For

Posted on May 22, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Senate Democrats hauled Apple, Inc. before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations today to ask why the company (legally) pays so little in taxes and keeps so much of its cash overseas (legally, again).

I love Apple products. But politically speaking, they’re playing the game–and getting the abuse they paid for.

In 2012, according to OpenSecrets.org, Apple employees gave nearly 73% of its contributions–to all federal candidates, not just for president–to Barack Obama. And that was the GOP’s best year with Apple donors.

In the past 22 years, Apple employees have given overwhelmingly to Democrats. Republicans barely figure.

It may come as a shock to some Apple employees that Democrats want to damage their company. Some Apple employees, however, might agree with their party–adopting the cognitive dissonance that characterizes so much of the left intelligentsia, which is faintly ashamed of its success but jealously guards its influence.

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Posted in Law & Courts, Outsourcing, Tax

March 16, 2013

Donald Trump: ‘Stupid people’ run America

Posted on March 16, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Trump said it is sad that the U.S. system encourages non-European immigration while discouraging European immigrants who “study at our universities” and then upon graduation leave and take their training to other nations “that compete against us.”

“Our country is in very, very serious trouble,” Donald Trump told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C. today.

“Likewise, the Republican Party is in serious trouble,” he added.

The outspoken real-estate mogul ticked off a list of concerns: The economy, illegal aliens, American Crossroads, Republicans and in particular the Obama administration.

“We’re run by either very foolish or very stupid people,” he said in his speech. “What’s going on in this country is unbelievable. Our country is a total mess, a total and complete mess, and what we need is leadership.”

Trump blasted the Karl Rove-founded super PAC American Crossroads and the failure of the candidates it backed last year.

“When you spend $400 million and it’s a failure, and you don’t have one victory, you know there’s something seriously, seriously wrong,” he said.

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Posted in Business, Conservatism, Economy and Debt, Education, Immigration, Outsourcing, Republicans/Neo-Cons

January 21, 2013

‘Bob’ outsources tech job to China; watches cat videos at work

Posted on January 21, 2013 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Developer at critical infrastructure firm outsourced job to China for a fraction of his six-figure salary, Verizon researcher finds.

Showing what can happen when companies don’t periodically review network logs, a software developer working for a large U.S. critical infrastructure company hired a Chinese firm to do his job so he could spend time surfing Reddit and watching cat videos.

Details of the 2012 incident, investigated by Verizon’s security services group, was recounted this week in a blog post by Verizon security researcher Andrew Valentine.

According to Valentine, Verizon was asked by the infrastructure company to investigate some strange activity in VPN logs for a network that was set up to let remote workers securely log into corporate networks.

Last May, the unidentified company’s IT security department started monitoring logs generated at their VPN concentrator and discovered an open and active VPN connection originating from Shenyang, China.

“This discovery greatly unnerved security personnel,” Valentine wrote. “They’re a U.S. critical infrastructure company, and it was an unauthorized VPN connection from China. The implications were severe and could not be overstated.”

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Posted in Business, Outsourcing, Technology

September 9, 2012

General Motors Is Headed For Bankruptcy — Again

Posted on September 9, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

In the 1960s, GM averaged a 48.3% share of the U.S. car and truck market. For the first 7 months of 2012, their market share was 18.0%, down from 20.0% for the same period in 2011. With a loss of market share comes a loss of relative cost-competitiveness. There is only so much market share that GM can lose before it would no longer have the resources to attempt to recover.

President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again. The company is once again losing market share, and it seems unable to develop products that are truly competitive in the U.S. market.

Right now, the federal government owns 500,000,000 shares of GM, or about 26% of the company. It would need to get about $53.00/share for these to break even on the bailout, but the stock closed at only $20.21/share on Tuesday. This left the government holding $10.1 billion worth of stock, and sitting on an unrealized loss of $16.4 billion.

Right now, the government’s GM stock is worth about 39% less than it was on November 17, 2010, when the company went public at $33.00/share. However, during the intervening time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by almost 20%, so GM shares have lost 49% of their value relative to the Dow.

It’s doubtful that the Obama administration would attempt to sell off the government’s massive position in GM while the stock price is falling. It would be too embarrassing politically. Accordingly, if GM shares continue to decline, it is likely that Obama would ride the stock down to zero.

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Posted in Bailouts, Business, Outsourcing

August 21, 2012

WHAT is SCYTL & WHY Should You Be VERY, VERY Concerned? Goodbye ACORN hello SCYTL!

Posted on August 21, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Forget the fact that Barack is once again providing jobs for people in another country; there are much bigger fish to fry in this story.

Finally, there seems to be growing concern about vote fraud. Over the last couple of months I have attended meetings about vote fraud and have become more alarmed that it may extend beyond our borders. See: Nov 2012 vote tabulation raising concerns like: True the Vote (http://www.truethevote.org/) and The King Street Patriots among others, have been reaching out to teach us what they have learned. Based on some of that information, and a suggestion in an email from The King Street Patriots, I decided to help some of my friends and family participate easily because many people are good at forwarding emails, but do not follow through… (See sample letter below).

Here’s another of those quiet, subtle, but very dangerous little stories that has somehow slipped past all the mainstream media outlets.

The United States of America has a brand new private VOTE COUNTING company that the Obama administration has personally handpicked.

The company is called Scytl and it is based in Michelle Obama’s most favorite vacation spot, Barcelona, Spain.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Fraud, Obama, Outsourcing, Radicals

July 23, 2012

‘Fruits’ of free trade by Pat Buchanan

Posted on July 23, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Free trade, NAFTA, GATT, the WTO — what they all produced is a Magna Carta of the transnational corporation, which looks longingly to the end of nation-states and the arrival of world government. Did the Republican songbirds of globalization not understand this?

Mitt Romney is today the beneficiary of some desperate counsel from alarmed Republicans on how to escape the snare in which he has found himself.

Democrats are charging that Romney was still chairman and CEO of Bain Capital between 1999 and 2002, when the company was advising some of America’s premier outsourcers.

The facts are in dispute. But the evidence seems to be on the side of the Romney camp — that he did not run Bain after he went off to fix the Salt Lake City Olympics. Yet the matter raises a larger question.

What has the Republican Party got against outsourcing?

Did not the Republican Party come to the rescue of NAFTA and GATT when Bill Clinton cried for help in fighting off the wicked protectionists?

Did not the GOP foreign and economic policy elite endorse entry into a World Trade Organization where we have no veto and one vote?

The Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and National Association of Manufacturers, all GOP allies, proclaim the right of U.S. corporations to move production out of America — to where taxes are lower, regulations lighter and labor cheaper.

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Posted in Economy and Debt, Outsourcing, Pat Buchanan

June 29, 2012

The Obama Administration is Training Offshore Foreign Workers to Take your Job

Posted on June 29, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

The fact they must train foreigners also shows offshore outsourcing has nothing to do about skills and everything to do with slave wages. There are plenty of Americans, right now, losing homes, who cannot make rent, who know how to program in Java! Add in the number of Americans who would love to be educated and trained in I.T. and software development, the numbers are assuredly above 500,000.

If this doesn’t get your blood boiling then you’re dead. The Obama administration is spending $36 million dollars to train foreign workers in foreign countries for skills needed to offshore outsource your job. I’m not making this up. $36 million dollars to educate foreign workers, when the U.S. unemployment rate is at crisis levels. Our government is paying for education, classes and training so foreigners can get the skills needed to do American jobs.

Despite President Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.

USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.

“To help fill workforce gaps in BPO and IT, USAID is teaming up with leading BPO and IT/English language training companies to establish professional IT and English skills development training centers,” the U.S. Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in a statement posted Friday on its Web site.

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Posted in Employment, Obama, Outsourcing, Technology

June 13, 2012

3 Years After Taxpayer Bailout, Bank of America Ships Jobs Overseas

Posted on June 13, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

Needless to say, the outsourcing is bad news for an already hurting US call center industry, which has shed some 500,000 jobs during the past four years—about 10 percent of the total. The CWA hopes to reverse this trend by pushing the US Call Center and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that would make any company that outsources call center jobs ineligible for federal loans and grants.

Bank of America, which last fall announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers, is about to go on a hiring spree—overseas.

America’s second-largest bank is relocating its business-support operations to the Philippines, according to a high-ranking Filipino government official recently quoted in the Filipino press. The move, which includes a portion of the bank’s customer service unit, comes less than three years after Bank of America received a $45 billion federal bailout.

Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines “has secured its place as the world’s fastest-growing outsourcing hub.” Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the “big four” US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.

A spokesman for Bank of America, Mark Pipitone, was unable to provide additional information about the bank’s offshoring plans on Friday. “We have employees and operations where we can ensure that we best serve our customers and clients,” he told me in an email.

The bank’s outsourcing comes amid rising concerns about the security of customers’ financial data in the hands of foreign contractors. In March, undercover reporters for England’s Sunday Times met in India with “IT consultants” who claimed they were call center workers and offered to sell them credit card and medical information for 500,000 Britons—including account holders at major banks such as HSBC.

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Posted in Bailouts, Business, Employment, Outsourcing

May 10, 2012

Outsourcing Computer Technology

Posted on May 10, 2012 by ifnm| Leave a comment

U.S. universities have educated enough Indians and Chinese to fill every high-tech job American firms have to offer. The false claim that only drudgery jobs are outsourced is laughable. It is just one more example of an entire industry slipping away from the grasp of America.

As the U.S continues to outsource its jobs and move production offshore, manufacturing is not the only industry that’s being damaged. University of California professor Norm Matloff warns that outsourcing and H-1B visas, which bring foreign workers into U.S. firms, are destroying the U.S. software engineering profession. Computer science departments have been stymied, because they are heavily dependent on research and faculty funds from the very firms whose outsourcing practices are destroying the occupation in America.

Falling enrollments mean fewer faculty positions and graduate students. Despite their funding being threatened by fewer enrollments, most computer science professors are unwilling to contradict their corporate benefactors’ erroneous claims that outsourcing is good for America.

Instead, the professors acknowledge that programming is a lost occupation for Americans and claim that there is still a future for American students in designing computer systems—a field dubbed “computer software systems architecture.” Matloff, a computer science professor himself, does not agree with this. He points out that it is impossible to design computer systems without having years of programming experience. If you lose programming, you lose the base for the occupation, and all the rest goes offshore as well.

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Posted in Business, Employment, Outsourcing