In a rare instance of real journalism, ABC news aired a report on the increasing number of foreign workers being contracted and imported into the United States for the purpose of rebuilding U.S. infrastructure.
Indeed, ABC journalist Chris Cuomo of the Bringing America Back division of ABC News has reported that, out of the various different infrastructure repair projects being undertaken in the United States, a sizeable portion of those projects have been outsourced to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, who have then imported their own workers for the projects.
For instance, Cuomo cites a $400 million renovation of the Alexander Hamilton bridge in New York, a $7.2 billion California project to build a new bridge in order to connect San Francisco and Oakland, and a proposed $190 million bridge project in Alaska as examples of foreign firms and labor being imported in place of what should have been American workers.
Understandably, union workers in Alaska began airing angry television commercials protesting the granting of Alaska’s bridge project to Chinese Corporations. “This is not the time to send more jobs to China,” the ads said. “Our tax dollars will provide hundreds of jobs there. Not at home.”
Indeed, in many cases, U.S. firms state that they are able to and would have met the guidelines set forth by the state governments in regards to their infrastructure projects. However, the contracts still went to their Chinese counterparts.
Some Californians are angry at the outsourcing, In the case of the San Francisco-Oakland bridge, the outsourcing of contracts cost the state a rough estimate of 3,000 American jobs and a potential $1 billion boost to the economy as other industry and worker spending was expected to take place as a result of the project.
“It would have had a multiplier effect because it would not only have given thousands of Californians jobs but also the subsequent spending would have been reinvested back in our economy,” said California Assemblyman Luis Alejo.
However, when Tony Anziano of the California Department of Transportation was asked why Americans were not contracted for American infrastructure projects, his response seemed to hint that American industry itself lacked the skills and infrastructure to undertake the task. In fact, Anziano centered in on a claim that American fabricators have a shortage of welders in order to justify the blatant outsourcing of American jobs and American projects to Chinese firms who hold the advantage of Chinese government subsidies and virtual slave labor wages paid to its workers.
Yet, in his television report, Cuomo states that American companies are, in fact, capable of meeting the requirements of these infrastructure projects and would have done so if only given the opportunity.
He stated:
The US firms say ‘absolutely.’ They say they could have done this job. And there’s a bigger point here. It’s not a level playing field. The Chinese firms are state owned. They don’t pay their workers as much. That’s why the ‘Buy America’ laws were passed. If states can get around them, Diane [Sawyer], we’ll never bring America back. You have to enforce the rules and let American companies play.
However, while Cuomo is right when he says that “It’s not a level playing field,” his analysis regarding “enforcing the rules” lacks the foundation of understanding the source of such foreign involvement in American infrastructure projects to begin with.
Indeed, Cuomo shouldn’t be so surprised. After all, foreign companies have been contracted to work what is rightfully American jobs for some time.
For instance, foreign companies have been given contracts to collect tolls on American highways in the past and are increasingly being awarded contracts to do so currently.
In some cases, foreign companies are even allowed to purchase the roads themselves.
Even national security concerns do not outweigh the obsession with “free trade” and the bypassing of American workers as the United States has even signed contracts with Brazilian companies for the production of U.S. Air Force light attack aircraft.
In the end, it isn’t that China or the individual American states aren’t “following the rules.” It is that there has been well over forty years worth of planning and development of guidelines for the purpose of bringing in a borderless society where wages and living standards are brought down to the lowest possible level.
It is that the rules themselves have been designed to stack the deck against American companies in favor of cheaper foreign labor. It is the same set of rules that has facilitated the outsourcing of American manufacturing to other countries, whose wealthy businessmen are now buying up American land and property for a fraction of what it is worth.[1]
Ever since agreements like GATT and the WTO were introduced and the subsequent trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA were signed as well as numerous individual agreements between the United States and China, the global society built on slave labor was put into motion.
Indeed, the deindustrialization of the West and the shift of all but the most militaristic of jobs to the Chinese and third-world nations has been a roaring success from the point of view of those who have developed the plan. It is only the “little people” at the bottom who continue to scratch their heads and wonder “why?”
Thus, the Chinese companies truly are playing by the rules – they are only doing so in a game that was rigged a long time ago.
