Paul Craig Roberts March 15 2013
Over a decade during which the US economy was decimated by jobs off-shoring, economists and other PR shills for off-shoring corporations said that the US did not need the millions of lost manufacturing jobs and should be glad that the “dirty fingernail” jobs were gone.
America, we were told, was moving upscale. Our new role in the world economy was to innovate and develop the new products that the dirty fingernail economies would produce. The money was in the innovation, they said, not in the simple task of production.
As I consistently warned, the “high-wage service economy based on imagination and ingenuity” that Harvard professor and offshoring advocate Michael Porter promised us as our reward for giving up dirty fingernail jobs was a figment of Porter’s imagination.
Over the decade I repeated myself many times: “Innovation takes place where things are made. Innovation will move abroad with the manufacturing.”
This is not what corporations or their shills such as Porter wanted to hear. Corporations were boosting their profits by getting rid of their American employees and replacing them with lowly paid foreigners. Porter’s job was to reassure the sheeple so that no outcry would materialize against the greed that was hollowing out the US economy.