In recent months, President Obama reversed his campaign promises on trade issues - first by dropping his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA and then by pushing to pass NAFTA-style trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. Now, with the unemployment crisis persisting, the key jobs question is once again front a center in American politics. Specifically: How do we create jobs here at home and build our most valuable 21st century industries?
The first and foremost answer is that our government should stop doing stuff like the program described in this stunning new report from Information Week:



Now look, I'm all for a robust foreign aid budget - we don't do nearly enough to help the developing world. However, using foreign aid money to specifically help private corporations "take advantage of low labor costs" in the developing world - that's not "aid," that's rank taxpayer subsidization of for-profit exploitation.

Right now, Even if we do not reform our atrocious trade policies that incentivize the ongoing wage-cutting race to the bottom, the least we should be doing is investing every single available dollar we have in job training and job creation here at home. Doing the opposite - actually using public dollars to intensify that wage-cutting race to the bottom - is grotesque.

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...

It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, and the president was ALWAYS a hero.

Not when I was 5! All I knew about the President (or any of them) was that they were heroes.

I'm withholding judgment on this until all the facts are in. It's small potatoes in the grand scheme of thing, but is symbolically bad.

Did you read the article? They don't dispute a word of the plan. They spend 1/2 a page explaining the difference between outsourcing and offshoring (thanks?) then the remainder dismissing the fact that it is happening at all because "it's a paltry sum".

Yes, I read it. It also made the argument that this is about foreign aid to a devastated country desperately in need of such aid. I'm ok with that.

So, when Republicans do it, it is "shipping hard working American jobs over-seas to maximize profits and allowing Big <insert industry here> to exploit desperately poor people in underdeveloped nations" but when Democrats do it, it becomes the ultimate act of self-sacrificial altruism?