Via the “Tunnel Rat”‘s excellent High Tech Insurgent website. Tunnel Rat is a fine US IT worker, currently slaving at a Hindu-infested US IT firm. His identity is a closely held secret. He is widely hated by Hindu Indian H-1B job thieves and their parasitical cheering section, which sadly includes much of the US Left, of all people.
The US IT worker is an icon, a dying icon, dying like the buffalo exterminated on the US plains. A traitor class of US upper middle class and upper class managerial and corporate elite have conspired to kill the best and the brightest of US minds, our great IT workers, by importing vast numbers of Hindus to steal their jobs.
Many of these great Americans were forced to train their replacements before they were fired. One man trained his replacement for some days, was summarily fired, and then went out into the parking lot and bullet a bullet in his brain. Those are the remains of the US engineering elite, scattered on the asphalt like those splattered brains. While the first responders race to the scene to mop up the blood and guts, the rich and their henchmen and hired guns party it up in their mansions and yachts. They could as well by swilling the blood of US workers instead of the alcoholic spirits they down, for the effect would be the same.
Americans, stupidly, worship the US high tech corporate elite as some variety of “cool,” “modern,” or “hip” capitalist. But a capitalist is a capitalist barring a few nonconformists rebelling into ethics or outdated noblesse oblige or whatnot. But I have always said that the IT capitalists are some of the worst capitalists of all, particularly the corporate software vendors, who sunk corporate evil to new dives. There is nothing cool or hip about them. They are not even modern, except where modernism has trashed a lot of the decency of old business culture and replaced with a capitalism stripped of anything human or humanitarian at all.
Noblesse oblige is so 1950′s. Ford is is in the ground with Henry. All of that is outdated now. If you don’t believe me, to to Harvard Business School and ask around. The talk now is all profit maximization, globalism, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation, efficiency and externalities. An “externality” means the notion that a corporation should have any duty to anyone other than its shareholders. Their communities, consumers, workers or our shared environment or state be damned. Responsibility? What’s that? Revoke their damned charters already.
Alas, poor middle class Americans, I knew thee well!
Many of the IT workers on this site are very rightwing, as is typical among highly paid workers, who do not see themselves are real workers. They are hostile to unions and very pro-capitalism but anti-corporate capitalism, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Much of their scattered and unfocused rage is misdirected into Libertarianism, neoliberalism, rightwing populism, the Tea Party, the get rid of the Fed movement and other nonsense. This is what happens when people don’t have a proper sense of class consciousness or understanding of economics and economic systems.
Nevertheless, I see them as allies.
I would love to promote worker ownership of high tech firms as a possible way out for them: kill neoliberalism and even capitalism while promoting the cooperative movement, rent-seeking and other forms of self-interest and allowing tech workers to maximize their salaries and other privileges even vis a vis other workers, which is the root of their rightwing politics – they see themselves as a “worker elite” that is better than other workers and hence they are not really workers somehow, but instead, bizarrely, they are “capitalists.”
But a worker is a worker, and they are all exploited and easy fodder for MBA types looking to reduce “externalities,” no matter their salary. IT workers as workers should ally with other workers, form unions and whatnot instead of their enemies, the bosses and managers, and join the working class movement, which after all is a movement of all workers, high paid and low paid.
Tunnel Rat: C.Z. Nnaemeka has a great essay that touches on America’s obsession with worthless apps, Wall Street get-rich-quick schemes, and the hi-tech junta’s tendency to ship in indentured servants from India instead of training and utilizing the millions of veterans, single mothers, middle-aged, and Appalachian rednecks. She sums it up nicely here:
…Meet the people who have the indignity of being over 50 and finding themselves suddenly jobless. These are the Untouchables of the new American workforce: 3+ decades of employment and experience have disqualified them from ever seeing a regular salary again. Once upon a time, some modicum of employer noblesse oblige would have ensured that loyal older workers be retained or at the very least retrained, MBA advice be damned. But, “A bas les vieux!” the fancy consultants cried, and out went those who were ‘no longer fresh.’ As Taylor Swift would put it, corporate America and the Boomer worker “are never ever getting back together.” Instead bring in the young, the childless, the tech-savvy here in America, and the underpaid and quasi-indentured abroad willing to work for slightly north of nothing in the kinds of conditions we abolished in the 19th century.
For, in the 21st century, a prosperous American business is a soaring 2-storied cake: 1 management layer at top thick with perks, golden parachutes, stock options, and a total disregard for those beneath them; 1 layer below of increasingly foreign workers (If you’re lucky, you trained these people before you were laid off!), who can’t even depend on their jobs because as we speak, those selfsame consultants – but no one that we know of course — are scouring the globe for the cheapest labor opportunities, fulfilling their promise that no CEO be left behind…
Tunnel Rat again: This is a great read, and I recommend it to all those interested in hearing a shocking indictment of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, VC’s, academia, MBA’s, and the rest of the collaborators that have colluded with the likes of Vikek Wadhwa to promote the denigration, displacement, and discrimination of the American IT worker.
