I wont expose the group here, but there's a broad network of technology directors from Amex, that have all been hiring and promoting eachother for 20 years. Very tight nit networks of nepotism, in some cases, brother and sister working together
All that really matters is the Amex brand, and so all the tech was considered back office, and unimportant.
Also, once a company enters some kind of monopoly status, very little matters in the quality of their product.
I have to say I was relieved when my Amex card issuer switched to visa because owning an Amex is a pita. I think they build their business on various rewards programs, the brand itself is garbage in my eyes.
Zero pushback from exec level, zero acknowledgment even though it's obvious. Very deflating for employees.
The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters.
The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.
Both parties are being funded by the same people, so both parties play ball with the same set of funders.
Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.
This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.
Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.
Most people I know, everywhere in the world have mixed views on most topics.
Let alone the fact that ideologies tend to change, modern rights are way more populist and economically-socialist than they were 2 decades ago. See Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc, where governments make money fall on the poorest, on the elderly, etc ignoring their historical electorate (middle class).
If I could filter "conservatives are X and liberals are Y and it makes no sense" type thought, I would, because it's a driver of this impression.
Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).
Also, you're resigning the biggest part of the conversation (immigration and residency policy and enforcement, especially with regards to employment) to an implication in a parenthetical?
You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.)
Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.)
It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.
I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.
What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?
Why is protectionism working for China?
> People don't buy American cars
53% of cars sold in the US are assembled in the US versus 18% assembled in Mexico.
> things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more.
The total cost of manufacturing wages only account for 5-15% of the MSRP of a vehicle. So moving manufacturing from an expensive country to a cheap country only changes the price by maybe 10% due to the impact of wages.
When a system takes the money from the economy and delivers it to the capital class and foreign workers, what happens to that economy? We don't know. We're gambling it will somehow be ok. We are also losing the 50% of taxes that comes from individual workers, so add in losing that velocity of money vector going through the government as well.
It doesn't seem like a sustainable system, nor a cheaper system. Only a very risky short term gamble.
This poor fellow talks about what happened to him as if it's something new. This form of outsourcing has been exploited ever since the internet became fast enough!
If anything, it's possible that AI will result in all those Indian offices being shut down.
Don't work harder than your boss. Find a leader who is worth following.
Visa: $3 trillion, 52% Mastercard: $1.4 trillion, 24% American Express: $1.1 trillion, 19% Discover: 0.3$ trillion, 5%
And then, yeah, when the time comes that the work needs to be delivered, odds of it actually being done, let's say 50/50 at best.
Does your manager even want to know the truth? Mine does, but that's only the case because I changed managers 4 times before I found one that I can reasonably believe tells the truth to his superiors.
The Indian manager has the power to fire that employee, finding another job is difficult, so from the employee's perspective it's safe to just say yes.
Obviously, time and time again has proven that outsourcing is not always more efficient.
But...
They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners.
Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.
In other words, the only reason foreign industry threatens domestic jobs is because it's cheaper to produce the same thing in these countries and the cost savings are being passed on to domestic consumers.
Sometimes I wonder if we're simply living in different realities. You may claim it's not worth it, but you can't claim it's not happening. Just go to grocery and see the prices of Mexican avocados and everything.
We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.
That was your existence.
This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.
A few hundred bucks a year ain't gonna move the needle at this point.
Protectionism is "working" for China because it's still a poor country, it was much poorer only a generation ago, and when you have no industry, it's easier to deliberately keep people poor for a little longer in exchange for more jobs. Once the pipeline is built, it's just societal inertia.
But I have to wonder how much it working out for China is just "China is still poor, so people have little choice." Among millions of Americans decrying outsourcing of American jobs, how many are willing to work under an average labor condition of China if they were given the opportunity?
Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.
So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.
And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.
I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.
This plus capital controls would reduce a lot of economic inequality between countries. It would be super, super rough in the short-term but probably globally beneficial in the long term. I believe Bernie Sanders was proposing this back in 2016.
How do you propose to compete with foreign workers when the government prevents you from matching their employment conditions within your own company?
- The massive regulatory burdens on American businesses are dissolved in order to permit genuine competition with the globe
- Economic protectionism is applied so that the heavily regulated American business can compete on price with less-regulated foreign businesses
In both cases, the prices of goods would increase--in the first case, less than the second. But both would be better than the current status quo, in my opinion.
I don't want to live in a country where I have to pay American prices for goods and services, but the owner class only has to pay foreign prices for labor and supply. I have no desire to be outcompeted by foreigners while my hands are tied by local laws.