From: "Roberta Wilson" <bertaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > huh, I know you're just having fun, but even fun can be misconstrued and > give the impression that we actually think this is an Indian problem. Yes, it was a bit of graveyard humor. Here's yet another article that discusses the implications of offshoring on American society. yrs, andreas www.andreas.com The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class: A Cautionary Tale ____ .... another trend may well be defining the future of U.S. intellectual labor. As U.S. states suffer from revenue shortfalls, and burgeoning college and university enrollments, large tuition increases are often bundled with escalations in class size, reduced course availability, and shrinking financial and infrastructural resources. Combined with the concurrent neo-liberal political redefinition of higher education as a private rather than a public good, "sticker shock" one-year increases (of up to thirty-nine percent at the three public universities in Arizona, forty percent in the California State System, and thirty-two percent in the University of Texas System) may well signify that elites are no longer willing to subsidize American public higher education, once they have gained global access, via digital communication networks, to cheap and competent intellectual labor. This essay explores the links between these two defining moments of early twenty-first Century America, with an eye on the possibility that affordable public higher education, and its attendant importance as a vehicle of social mobility, may soon be thought of as an artifact of the Twentieth Century. If so, we are witnessing the digital death rattle of the American middle class, and an escalating and intensive restratification of the American class system. http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=402