Lou Dobbs is angry and he's not going to take it anymore

In his new book about outsourcing, the television journalist tells us that he is shocked, SHOCKED, that corporations are treating American workers like crap.

By Andrew Leonard

Sep 9, 2004 | Lou Dobbs is pissed off. It seems that American CEOs are busy selling out the American worker. Their rush to outsource and offshore every job that can possibly be moved overseas is threatening the "American way of life." Their belief that the free market will, in the long run, solve all problems has become an almost "ecclesiastical" act of faith.

To some people, the revelation that American business executives are out to screw workers is not, shall we say, breaking news. But for Lou Dobbs, a financial journalist who anchors his own hour-long television show every weeknight, we are suddenly living in perilous times. In "Exporting America," a slim but forceful tirade that is a print extension of his TV show's main hobby horse, Dobbs takes on the legions of free-market apologists who argue that outsourcing is just an example of efficiently working capitalism. He stresses repeatedly that those who are losing their white-collar, high-paying jobs are not getting good new jobs. Instead, while CEOs rake in ever more obscene amounts of cash and corporations get away without paying taxes and politicians of both parties smile benignly, American working men and women who once had decent livelihoods are now waiting in line for part-time jobs at Wal-Mart.

Dobbs' opponents, aggrieved at the unexpected and unseemly sight of a major cable news show anchorman spouting left-wing, pro-worker propaganda every night between 6 and 7 o'clock, have trashed him in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, calling him a "communist" and a "protectionist." This annoys Dobbs no end. So what if his rhetoric sounds as if it was lifted from the poster of an anti-globalization activist about to go wilding in the streets of Seattle or Miami? Dobbs takes pains to note that he is no "fire-breathing liberal." He is, instead, a lifelong Republican, a fervent believer in free-market enterprise and a staunch advocate of capitalism.

This presents a conundrum. There is much to appreciate and take notice of in "Exporting America." There is no doubt that the American worker is under threat, and the coddling of corporate America by state and federal politicians is unquestionably outrageous. As Dobbs recommends, tax laws need to be rewritten, and the exporting of American jobs to countries with lax environmental regulations, abysmal humans rights records, and an awful treatment of workers is in many ways unconscionable. And, although Dobbs is careful to include Democratic politicians in his comprehensive pillorying, he also makes clear his disgust at a Bush administration that will do nothing to help the American worker. He isn't optimistic about Kerry, but hey, a slim hope is better than none.

However, one has to wonder where Dobbs has been for the past half century. He would like us to believe that outsourcing is a relatively recent trend, and one could perhaps make that case if one defined the term as meaning merely the transfer of white-collar jobs overseas. But the effort on the part of corporate America to improve the bottom line by exploiting cheap labor all over the world has been going on for decades. The destruction of the American textile industry, to take but one example, was accomplished long before anyone started worrying about high-tech programming jobs moving to Bangalore.

American corporations, large and small, are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing in a capitalist system. And while in some cases this can be attributed to greed (as hinted in the subtitle of Dobbs' book: "Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas"), that is by no means true in every case. Every businessman or woman is under an imperative to operate as efficiently as possible -- that's just good business.

If American workers end up getting stiffed by the logical extension of free-market ideology -- championed most strenuously and energetically by the very political party of which Dobbs claims to be a lifelong member -- well, that's just too bad, isn't it? Suck it up, Lou! To paraphrase Tom Hanks' character in "A League of Their Own": "There's no crying in capitalism!"

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