Opinion
America for Sale: The Destruction of the Middle Class
Exclusive commentary by Frosty Wooldridge
and Stephany Gabbard


Mar 31, 2004

The biggest yard sale in American history is taking place. Unfortunately, it’s America and everything American is being sold at rock bottom prices. Everyone wants in on the action; corporations, our government, political representatives of both houses, the elite and anyone who thinks they can make a fast buck gambling with our children’s' future.

Politicians motivated by the pursuit of votes and a constant supply of cheap labor are tripping over themselves in a nauseating display to give illegal aliens driver’s licenses, free K-12 education, in-state college tuition and free health care. They are willing to give privileges to foreign nationals who are here illegally while our own citizens go begging. Try 18 million unemployed Americans!

American corporations bleed jobs to India, China, Mexico and Bangladesh faster than a meat packing plant renders beef cows on the slaughter line, and just as callously. American companies showing no loyalty to this nation will outsource or off-shore jobs or services they know can be made or done cheaper in foreign countries, where billions struggle for a living. Lou Dobbs lists on his web site 350 American companies that are "either sending American jobs overseas or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor instead of American workers."

The bizarre is becoming the norm. American software engineers are laid off to make way for cheaper H-1B and L-1 visa holders from India and elsewhere. Adding insult to injury, Americans must train their replacements with the threat of losing their severance pay if they decline.

Pat Buchanan states that we have lost 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since President Bush's inauguration. They just vanished!. Buchanan states, "By industry, the job losses are heaviest in computers, where 28 percent of all the manufacturing jobs that existed when Bush took office are gone. In semiconductors, we lost 37 percent and communications equipment--job losses reached 39 percent in three years. One in three textile and apparel jobs has disappeared, and the losses continue to run at the rate of 100,000 jobs a year."

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. This country currently suffers $420 billion annual trade deficits and we are now a mind numbing $7 trillion in debt. Consumer debt hit $2 trillion last month, according to Tom Brokaw.
When a nation hands its manufacturing base over to other nations without a whimper and then turns around and sells out its Internet Technology industry as well, then we become consumers with no production. Buchanan continues describing our downfall: "We don't make televisions any more. Our trade deficits in cars, trucks, televisions, videocassette recorders, automatic data-processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking."

"After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony."

If that’s not enough to make you weep, unscrupulous American companies that are hooked on cheap illegal alien labor like crack addicts are squeezing the American middle class even harder. The law of supply and demand, or one of the simple concepts we learned in kindergarten, goes something like this: Lots of illegal aliens ready to work for nothing drive down the wages of Americans trying to earn