Outsourcing Services – Moon of Alabama

September 29, 2004

Outsourcing Services

There is a clear and present danger of more government jobs to be outsourced to foreign nations. A new bill, H.R. 10, which can be researched here, is coming to the floor of the House of Representatives.

Section 3032 and 3033 of the proposed bill will allow the government – at its sole discretion – to transfer people it is obliged to care for to other countries.

These foreign countries will then be tasked by the US government to provide the social care and health services that the government vigorously claims it is legally beholden to provide now. This is an absurd way to save the taxpayer’s money and a huge step back from the blessings of the New Deal.

Through this bill a significant number of US government personal that, up to today, provides valuable social and health services to the inhabitants and guests of the United States, will loose their well paying jobs adding to the army of unemployed the current administration has already created.

Katherine at the Obsidian Wings has more information in her recent piece. Please join her in writing to your Representative and thereby help saving US government jobs for US workers.

Context Links:
NYT: Showdown Likely …
WaPo: Irresponsible …

Posted by b on September 29, 2004 at 11:36 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The scary thing is that when I read this:
Section 3032 and 3033 of the proposed bill will allow the government – at its sole discretion – to transfer people it is obliged to care for to other countries.
I thought–WITHOUT SURPRISE–that the republicans had engineered a bill to send sick, old, and indigent Americans to third-world nursing homes.
And that just as few citizens screamed when Greenspan warned that social security was no longer secure–so too, no one was going to much cry foul on this exotic new form of outsourcing.
How scary is it that a US citizen could interpret Bernhard’s coy sentence in such an uncoy manner and NOT be surprised?
How long until the republicans do consider outsourcing the aged and feeble-minded that are on the public dole to Poland, Sri Lanka, or India?
That solution is, after all, the natural extension of their value system.

Posted by: koreyel | Sep 29 2004 14:17 utc | 1

Over at CounterPunch there ia an article about outsourcing by Paul Craig Roberts. It is good.
The American people are being played for fools.

Posted by: jdp | Sep 29 2004 16:05 utc | 2

@koreyel
Exactly! I had the exact same reaction. Japan has actually tried this strategy already with their senior citizens, sending them to countries in Latin America with large Japanese emigre groups. Yes, it creates scandals.
I wrote the following letter to my Representative. Those of you who know more about politics, could you suggest ways to make letters to Congress more effective.
LETTER:
I am writing about Sections 3032 and 3033 of H.R. 10, the “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004.” These sections allow ANY SUSPECTED TERRORIST to be deported from the U.S. to places where they will be unprotected from torture. The clear result of these sections will be to hobble grassroots politics (non-avaerage views are constantly accused, as you well know), and instead take us a step toward dictatorship.
Or, more plainly, the bill casts us into a world of serfs and masters. Merely by labelling someone a “suspected terrorist,” not all, but rather certain parts of the government become our masters. The one so-called protection in the bill is that the newly detained serf is “allowed” to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that they will be tortured if deported.
How will the detainee be able to prove certain torture? This would only be provable after such a new system had already degraded all expectations of justice for anyone accused of terrorism. This bill is asking to put the U.S in the position of the old USSR, and it is making a serious bid to destroy the actual community of feeling among citizens, police, and politicians in the United States.
Edward Markey has introduced a bill to outlaw extraordinary rendition. Please cosponsor this bill and work to gain support for it among your colleagues. This is a defining resolution, and representatives need to know that opposition to a growing torture/prison state is also growing at the grassroots level. Please let your colleagues know that their choice to prevent or encourage degrading shameful torture will not disappear into yesterday’s news.
Sincerely,

Posted by: Citizen | Sep 29 2004 16:13 utc | 3

Koreyel,
Bingo! Another reader with the same reaction. Interesting to see how our point of view and mindsets have been affected in the last 4 years of hell. I don’t know which is more scary, the way we interpreted it, or what it really means.

Posted by: NEPAJim | Sep 29 2004 16:54 utc | 4

Section 3032 and 3033 of the proposed bill will allow the government – at its sole discretion – to transfer people it is obliged to care for to other countries.
When I wrote the above I didn´t think anyone could take it seriously. It was obvious to me that by those lines every reader would know it to be satire.
Looks like I was wrong and that scares me. If the informed and intelligent readers here swallowed the line, there is something wrong.
You may say that under this administration anything is possible and therefore the line could be taken as realistic. But with the always-first-thought of “cui bono”, who is benefitting, it should have been clear that there would be no corporate benefit from such outsourcing, but many corporate loosers (pharma etc.). Thereby this was impossible to be a standpoint of the current administration.
I was pinning the high believe of an Iraq-9/11 connection on the US media not on the people who believed it. But if it is so easy to deceive I should probably shift the blame?
Hey did you know that America Will Be Occupied By UN Troops?

Posted by: b | Sep 29 2004 19:20 utc | 5

Dana Priest and Charles Babington are writing on the new torture outsourcing plans in todays WaPo: Plan Would Let U.S. Deport Suspects To Nations That Might Torture Them

[The law] also would allow U.S. authorities to deport foreigners convicted of any felony or suspected of having links to terrorist groups to any country — even somewhere that is not a person’s home country or place of birth, contrary to current practice. The CIA already has such authority, under a secret presidential finding first signed by President Bill Clinton and expanded by Bush after Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA has taken an unknown number of suspected terrorists apprehended abroad to third countries for interrogation.

Posted by: b | Sep 30 2004 6:43 utc | 6

Recommended:
Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story in the Oktober New York Review of Books.

It has become a cliché of the Global War on Terror—the GWOT, as these reports style it—that at a certain point, if the United States betrays its fundamental principles in the cause of fighting terror, then “the terrorists will have won.” The image of the Hooded Man, now known the world over, raises a stark question: Is it possible that that moment of defeat could come and go, and we will never know it?

Posted by: b | Sep 30 2004 7:32 utc | 7

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