India Outsourcing Firms are Learning the Washington Lobby Game.

[illinoisprogressive]

Interesting to read this to find out how our jobs, or what is left of them, are being taken away through a slicker and very inside Washington way.
we really need to get the lobbying interests out and get honest candidates who will not sell us, the jobs or the country out for their own greed.

http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Aug272007/eb2007082621598.asp


Now as the 2008 US election starts to sizzle, the Indian outsourcing firms have returned to win Washington over as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever. They have hired a former high official in the administration of President George W Bush as a lobbyist. They are humanising the issue by bringing Americans they have hired into meetings with politicians.

Play politics

They work with research firms like Brookings Institution to generate sympathetic research. They host cocktail hours on Capitol Hill. They have learned to play politics, urging members of Congress whose districts benefit from trade with India to support them on outsourcing.

And most strikingly, they have mastered the Washington art of waging proxy battles through local front organisations, which spare them from appearing to be foreigners with an agenda. They provide facts, figures and arguments to trade groups like the IT Association of America and to Indian-American political groups

The Indian companies are mounting this effort out of fear that the pressures of the US presidential election will induce candidates to lash out at Indian vendors. Their business model is a perpetual lightning rod: the companies carve out tasks from their American clients and perform them more cheaply back in India or other low-cost locations.


snip



Preparing resistence

The Indian vendors’ main worries are the Democratic candidates Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose campaign has flirted with anti-outsourcing rhetoric, and John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, who is running an explicitly populist campaign.

The Indian executives believe that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, also a Democrat, is more sympathetic to their cause, but they are concerned that she would be compelled to match the others’. “People are trying to make it an issue again,” said one Washington lobbyist who represents some Indian companies.

[antigop]

1. Quelle surprise! Indian executives believe HIllary "is more sympathetic to their cause". n/t

[draft_mario_cuomo]

2. And CEOs in America prefer Obama yet you guys disregard that

Which is it? Do executive opinions matter or not?

[antigop]

7. non sequitur n/t

[valerief]

3. I'm amazed she hasn't started wearing a sari. nt

[draft_mario_cuomo]

4. Yeah, because she is controlled by those evil brown people!

:crazy: And those idiot New Yorkers voted for her at a 70% rate? Don't they know she is in the pocket of brown people?

[Colobo]

5. Good post!

[madrchsod]

6. gee whiz -could the "senator from punjab"

have anything to do with this? ya money talks and american jobs are outsourced to india or they come here for cheap...

[Larkspur]

8. These companies are vultures

It's disgusting that any American politician would support them.