It’s not just manufacturing gone overseas [View all]

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/11/155430/commentary-this-column-was-made.html

Posted on Wednesday, July 11, 2012Modified Wednesday, July 11, 2012

This column was made in the USA

<snip>It’s not just manufacturing gone overseas. Cut-rate accountants abroad now do Americans’ income taxes, cheapo radiologists read their X-rays, bargain-priced architects draw plans for their new homes, low-paid loan officers ponder their mortgage applications. Manufacturing, medicine, the service industry — chunks of it have been outsourced. And now journalism.

But while you may be reading this column on an iPad assembled in southern China, I promise that the words were manufactured in South Florida. In 2004, I wrote what at the time I thought was an absurdist piece of satire, suggesting that I too had been outsourced. “A team of software engineers, call center operators, tax accountants and street urchins now assembles this column in Calcutta, cobbling together 20 inches of verbiage, checking the spelling, writing a headline and transmitting the product to Miami hours before deadline — a feat unobtainable under the old system. All this for a tenth of the cost of employing an aging American journalist. Without the mood swings.”

It was great fun, a fine joke, imagining South Florida politicians along with “gun nuts, cock fighters, gay bashers, no-helmet-by-God bikers, feral cat feeders, silk-suit lobbyists and others fond of e-mailing rather creative and contemptuous characterizations my way,” would actually be disparaging a collection of disinterested foreign laborers half a world away. snip

It’s like a modern variation of that famous Martin Niemöller lament from pre-World War II Germany. First they outsourced the factory jobs, and I didn’t speak out. Then they shipped out the service jobs and I didn’t speak out. Then the docs. And then they came for me.