There'll be a crush of cameras at the front door of the White House on January 20 as scores of media outlets scramble to record the moment that the new president walks in. But, wait--who're those people who'll be sliding in quietly behind him? They're the ones who'll spend the next four years whispering in the president's ear, sitting in strategy sessions, running presidential councils, filling agency slots, and pulling the levers of executive power.
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When the most progressive of us can only compete in an election if they have 100's of million of dollars to advertise themselves it leaves us with few choices. The monied people/businesses decide who will be heard. Our elections are democratic in name only.
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OUTSOURCING NEWS, LUXURY, AND BABIES
Just when you think that the off-shoring craze has surely peaked, here come more stories of globalization gone wild.
McClatchy Company, the California-based newspaper chain, has announced that copyediting and design work for certain sections of its Miami Herald will be done by a New Delhi corporation with the mind-boggling name, Mindworks Global Media. The work to be handled for the Herald from 8,400 miles away includes editing and design for a weekly section on community news.
Meanwhile, Waterford, the classy crystal maker that has been in Dublin, Ireland, since 1783, has cut half of its Dublin workforce and moved a chunk of its production to Poland and the Czech Republic. Eastern European workers will be paid a fourth of what the Dublin artisans got to make this pricey, quintessentially Irish glassware, which ranges from chandeliers to champagne flutes. Waterford's CEO says that prices won't be reduced and that consumers don't care where the crystal is made.
And some couples don't care where their baby is made either. There's a growing global industry of outsourced pregnancies, with clinics in India offering local young women from very-low-income families to be surrogate mothers for well-off, infertile couples from America, Taiwan, and elsewhere. The couples provide their own fertilized eggs, pay a fraction of the going rate for surrogate moms at home, and--voila!--the "wombs for rent" clinics deliver a baby.
In the globalization follies, the wealthy scour the globe for ever-lower priced workers to service their every need.