IBM had informed its managers in mid-October of the plan to replace workers at IBM in Southbury, Connecticut; Poughkeepsie, New York; Raleigh, North Carolina; Dallas, Texas; and Boulder, Colorado...Some workers would be informed by the end of January, after which they would be expected to train a foreign replacement in the United States for several weeks, the Wall Street Journal said.

In conversations with friends lamenting on the current state of the American worker, I have repeatedly observed that two decades ago, a time in which manufacturing was moving out of the Northeast, workers found themselves in competition with cheaper laborers in other parts of the US (mainly the south - Tennessee or Texas).

NAFTA put Americans in competition with cheaper labor in Mexico (this was the underlying story to Michael Moore’s first documentary, Roger and Me).

Today, we (Americans and ironically, Mexicans) are now in competition with cheaper labor in Asia (China and India).

The question is of course, how low can you go?

Also, without good paying jobs, who will buy all these goods and services? The dilemma of capitalism in the new millennium.

I found this interesting treatise on capitalism, it’s downloadable as an e-book in pdf form and worth reading just to see if you don’t agree with a lot of what its author writes.