3 Rounds with John Stossel

When did John Stossel become an apologist for Wal-Mart, HP, and every other American corporation that chases cheap labor around the globe like a pit bull in heat? Is Stossel serious – a serious journalist – when he claims that outsourcing jobs to India and Mexico actually benefits Americans, or is he little more than a paid propagandist with a massive bully pulpit?

Frankly, the man strikes me as unhinged, caught up in his own myth. On ABC’s 20/20 last night Stossel was trumpeting the virtues of outsourcing – how it lowers prices for goods and services for American consumers, and even better, how outsourcing creates jobs in America!

What Stossel failed to explore is the sort of jobs that outsourcing creates, how much these jobs pay, or whether or not the jobs come with employee benefits. It seems fairly obvious that many people in America today are cobbling two or more part time jobs together in order to earn what they once made at a single job. And how many part-time jobs come with benefits like health insurance, vacation allowance, or a pension? Now that the biggest players in corporate America are following the Wal-Mart model, I’d guess the answer is very few.

So sure, outsource one decent job and create three low-wage, no benefit, part-time jobs, and the statistics on job creation might look peachy on a chart or graph. A rum-addled dingbat might look at such statistics and get the idea that it’s morning in America, the best of times.

What Stossel the corporate apologist misses is the zero sum nature of the global economy. Except for the economic elite, most Americans are treading water, an accident or a misstep away from destitution. It doesn’t take much insight to see what has happened during the past thirty years: we’ve trapped ourselves in a downward spiral. Corporations export jobs to cheap labor havens and import products. Yes, goods from China and Mexico and Sri Lanka are cheap and plentiful, but if this weren’t the case, how would American consumers – whose wages have been stagnant for years – be able to afford them?

How would average working Americans forced by corporate and government policies to shoulder more and more risk for their own health care and retirement afford anything but the cheapest goods in the world?

We’re screwed because our economy is based on an endless cycle of spending and consumption; we’re screwed because we’ve been conditioned by an endless corporate drumbeat to accept a failed ideology.

I don’t want to debate John Stossel as much as I’d like to get him in the ring for three or four rounds with 14oz. gloves. The only way he’s going to understand my working-class outrage is through a serious ass-whipping.