Ken's Small Business Server Blog

I watched the news tonight. China is making children’s toys with toxic lead in the paint and components. The government and private agencies do not have enough staff to check all the toys flooding into this country from overseas for the Christmas rush. The FDA has only checked about 10% of the overseas pharmaceutical manufacturing plants that make pills and medications we all use daily. Most of the pills available on the internet that you might ‘think’ are coming from Canada are actually coming from some of the darkest corners of the world, unregulated and uninvestigated.

Someone is going to get hurt – or worse.

Many large hardware manufacturers and IT firms have outsourced parts of their companies to overseas shops. I recently worked with a major vendor that didn’t seem to have anyone on staff but an Indian in a bucket. Heck, my Microsoft Partner Representative is in the Philippines, and sounds exactly like Microsoft Sam. The first message he left me I swore was automated until I returned the call.

Whatever happened to doing business with good ole Americans? I am not anti-international, nor am I trying to be prejudiced or even racist. I have a very internationally diverse ‘best friends’ list with which I endeavor diligently to maintain contact, despite workloads and distances. It just seems to me that we have worked so hard as a country to cut costs and open up international trade, all at the expense of enslaving less prosperous country’s workforces, that we have done so to the detriment of our own economic wellbeing. We seem to have forgotten to do business here at home all because of cost. The GAP has ten year old children sold into slavery, making clothes for the US. Would we do that to our children? No, but we have done it to theirs.

Suck it up America - sometimes the cost of doing what is right is steep.

I ask you, what is right about any of this? How can we play in a global economy at full price tariffs and yet let goods fly into every port we have at a discount? The IT market in the US nearly died from outsourcing, and many of those that weren’t displaced jumped ship to another vocation.

All I am saying is, let’s keep it at home, at least when we can. We are, on almost every level, the Gold Standard that the World aspires to. Do your part. Save the environment. Save the whales. Save the animals. Join Greenpeace. But for Pete’s sake, you won’t be able to do a single one of those things unless you Save our Country.

Do the right thing. Buy American. Impeach Hillary.

Ok. Rant over.