After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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The corporate abandonment of america
For years now, American blue-collar jobs have been hauled offshore to faraway havens of low-wage production. Now hundreds of thousands (and soon to be millions) of well-paying whitecollar and high-tech jobs are being shipped overseas.
IBM, which is leading the way, even has coined a corporate euphemism for moving white-collar jobs out of the country: "Global sourcing." A Microsoft executive has instructed department heads to "Think India" and to "pick something to move offshore today."
OK, if CEOs have no obligation to us, why should we feel any obligation to them? As they separate their corporate fortunes from the well-being of our families, communities, and country, we should separate them from the tax breaks, subsidies, regulatory favors, and political privileges they've gotten from us.