You Told Me We Would Change Them..

  

"A Joe Big-Ass Corp Exec Wonders How It All Went So Badly"

Canon G7x Mark II
Snapseed

The amount of recent US pearl-clutching about China has me reminiscing about the Joe Big-Ass Corporation's love of the Chinese labor market back in the 90's and my ill-advised / naive efforts to undermine that romance.   The China of today that our elected officials and TechBro Exec-U-Teefs are so concerned about is the very same country we started shipping tons of US software jobs to just a few years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. China's gain was America's loss. Thousands and thousands of Americans lost their jobs as a result... The bleeding never stopped throughout most of the 90's. I administered at least one Reduction In Force (RIF) every year from the mid-90's into the early aughts.  "Offshoring", as we JBAC cogs called the practice, also helped to keep wages depressed in the USA.. Double win for the exec-u-teefs!!   When I raised objections to my management chain about doing business with such a brutal, authoritarian, regime I got a variety of responses: A Senior Techbro Blowhard (STB) called me out in front of a conference room filled with over a hundred colleagues and tried to shame me saying: "Roy - What's the matter? Don't you think that the Chinese workers deserve jobs too?" I responded that as an American, I didn't give a shit about Chinese jobs - I cared about American jobs. That conference room got real quiet real quick..   [As you will no doubt note - I have a flair for saying unpopular and/or career-limiting things in front of dozens of people...] A Director at JBAC (and my boss) concocted this happy bunny story:  "Look at it this way Roy. Our presence will make them better. We will change how things are done there by our example." (of course - this was patent bullshit then and even more naively bullshit now)   It was a JBAC VP, of all people, who gave me the most honest, no bullshit answer of all. "We will do business with them because it will save us money and it is legal to do so.."   Boom.    It all be about the Benjamins, yo!   So -- at long last -- here is my point.    The Chinese government is the same brutal old bitch it ever was - only more so - aided and abetted by US tech.  Who (the actual fuck) did the JBAC Big Brains think they were dealing with in the first place nearly 40 years ago and why, for the love of Christ, is it suddenly now such a big deal? US Pols and TechBros can't possibly be surprised that China is a bad actor on world influence, human rights and trade practices..  So - this breathless display of 'concern' over China - is it all just theater? Just a hook to hang re-election hopes on? A convenient fund-raising ploy?  Anyway - reminiscing about the old days is fun, but one can't spend all one's time entertaining fond memories..   Onward.   ~