For three years I worked for (Company ABC of America) in (my home town) and it was bought out by (Company XYZ of India).

We had 30 branches. Twenty were immediately closed, and the other ten were converted to CA branches in markets that didn't have CA branches. The current CEO is from India, and he took advantage of a special law passed during the Y2K panic -- one million green cards were made available to citizens of India (certified software engineers) to emigrate to America and help with Y2K. Within a space of 6 months EVERY American was replaced by a green card Indian. Every One!

One day the Indians from New York showed up and we were given an hour to use the boxes they provided to clear out our cubicles. It took me a year to find another job, since 100 of us were thrown into a small IT market in (my home town) without any warning.

The outsourcing in the piece you sent me simply cuts out the middle-man process. You don't have to continue bribing Congress for more green cards: you just send the work directly to Bangalore.

The Democrats have not thought through any of this. The superficial knee-jerk answers the chat room cowboys came up with don't come anywhere close to what is needed. Consider this:

When I began with Univac I was an Assembly level programmer. My job was to go over COBOL dumps and improve the code generated by the 1968 COBOL compiler -- which was often inefficient.

Then I began to ride herd on a dozen programmers and design and create groups of applications -- I designed major solution suites of applications. That put me in the field with salesmen as the technical rep who worked the DP Manager while the salesman worked the Controller for financial approval.

Finally I was promoted to be the salesman in the territory from (deleted). (Deleted)was my geographic center. My former software team continued to be my support, and I cycled several of them through trips with me, as my technical reps, while I sold computers.

During the three years I did that, I sold dozens of mainframe computers; and did away with more than 100,000 jobs. None of those jobs was ever recreated somewhere else. Book-keepers, and middle level accountants were like corn before a corn-cutter. Banks and insurance companies no longer had rooms full of comptometer operators when I got done. That kind of room ceased to exist in American business. Those jobs vanished. Many other entire career paths vanished. That's what IT did back then, that's what it has done for 35 years, and that's what it still does now! It doesn't create anywhere near the number of jobs it destroys. And the machines are not taxed for the work they do on our behalf. Machines that replace people don't pay FICA or income tax or anything at all.

That was exactly how I sold those multi-million dollar air-conditioned-room mainframes. We did a survey, we listed the jobs we would eliminate, if the annual salaries were not enough to pay for the machine in 18 months, we proposed additional applications and the elimination of additional jobs until the personnel cuts paid for the machine. We wrote up the proposal, had the art department make the visual aids and we walked in and sold the bank or insurance company the entire bill of goods.

They gobbled it up with their spoons. YUM.

It is now 35 years later and it has come full circle. White collar workers, MBAs from Harvard and Yale are looking for work for 18 months and never get called in for interviews.

The current "RECOVERY" is a Bush illusion. It includes no job creation. It simply looks to a modest but steady increase in the Dow Jones industrial average, which is now above 9,000 and says "Look the Recession is Over!" The way they rigged that was to cut the capital gains tax and dividend tax to nearly nothing. They made it enough better to be in Colgate, Merck, General Motors, and Du Pont that keeping everything in U.S. Bonds no longer made sense. So some bond safe-haven funds got liquidated and put into some of the stodgy dividend-paying old time companies. That ran up the stock market.

America will continue to lose jobs -- and at an ever increasing rate. Only the richest 1% have a chance.

During the Reagan and George-the-First years (1980 - 1992) America's average family income increased by 12%. Which sounds great. But when you check into which sectors of our job market got the bulk of that increase, the Congressional Budget Office figures are DISTURBING to use your term.

The top 20% of the American work force took home 105% of the 12% increase from 1980-1992. Like you I screamed "That can't possibly be!!!" But the C.B.O. pointed out that in fact it was what happened: BECAUSE THE OTHER 80% went down 5%!!! In fact, during that same period the number of American families below the poverty level went from 44 million to 93 million. That's disturbing.

So when I tell you the Democratic Party isn't within a mile of considering the real problem, you can now see I am guilty of a massive understatement. The Republicans, ever since Newt Gingrich's Contract On America, have been trying to turn America into Brazil: 5% live like princes, 95% are reduced to serfdom and squalor. You can see from their work 1980 to 1992: they have perfected their method to an art.