At 05:06 AM 7/7/04 -0700, Nancy Mulvany wrote: >However, we no longer feel that this particular issue deserves to >standalone with a white paper, FAQ, etc. Personally I am very concerned, >alarmed, and discouraged by the amount of personal information that is sent >outside the United States to countries that are beyond the legal reach of >our privacy protection laws. However, I do not see this as a "writer's issue." I agree it is a citizen's issue rather than a writer-specific issue. For that matter, government support and usage of offshoring is also a "general" rather than a writer-specific issue. It seems to me that offshoring as an issue is so broad, and the writer-specific comonponent of it is so tiny in economic terms (though, of course, not in its affect on our members), that *any* effective campaign is going to have to be on the general rather than the specific. And it will have to be fought in alliance and cooperation with other unions and organizations, rather than independently by us on writer-specific grounds. I believe that right now we (the broad general "we") are all caught up in an economic-ideologic offshoring tidal wave. The "offshoring is good for you" mantra has been accepted and is being repeated everywhere, even by people who are losing their jobs. It's like a form of mass hysteria, a mental stampede as it were. But in order to rein in offshoring (to say nothing of stopping it), we first have to build a broad popular consensus that offshoring is NOT good for everyone, and is NOT the greatest thing since sliced bread (which I also don't like). So before we can do anything else, we *first* have to get our members, and our target constituency, and the public at large to begin questioning the so-called benefits of offshoring. The way to do that is to attack offshoring at its two most vulnerable points--government using our tax dollars to offshore jobs and data security. Once folks begin to question those two limited aspects of offshoring it then become possible to raise other less obvious problems with offshoring. In terms of reining in this mad rush to offshore everything, I believe that our only hope is to *first* win legislation restricting offshoring of personal data and limiting offshoring of government work paid for with our tax dollars, and *then* expand that legislation to other areas. So, I do believe that focusing on these two spearate issues, and developing materials on them, it needed. I think it would be much better to keep these two issues separate as a kind of one-two punch than to try merging them together. --bruce >I think it may make more sense to fold some of the material I have gathered >in Bruce Hartford's drafts for the "Stop Government Support for Offshoring >Our Jobs" campaign. > >What do you think about this? Have we lost our focus? Or, would it best to >work with Bruce? > >-nancy > >Nancy Mulvany