Almost 50 million Americans are on what used to be known as food stamps.

that's 20% of the US population.

how many more millions will it will take to make the government rethink its welfare strategy ?

yeah they blame it on the war but first of all on the president, now they will blame Obama as if replacing him with a fresh republican would make any difference.

and finally they will blame it on the americans, they will say americans waste too much, spend too much, do too many debts, consume too much, etc etc

if you're poor jobless and sick you'll be told it's only your own fault because you're a spiness loser and a disgrace.

And the CEO says "You don't like it? No problem! We'll close the plant and move to another state with a thousand people willing to work for us. Or we'll just go to Mexico."

well, same with Getty and Istock ... in their eyes photographers are dime a dozen, guess they hope we'll be replaced by hordes of third world suppliers ?

however, unlike factory workers we cannot be easily replace with cheap mexicans or vietnamese, even indians and philippinos aren't invading the stock industry and they're the only ones in asia with good enough spoken/written english to keyword and all.

why they're not joining stock in droves ? i don't know but so far that's the way it is.
as far as i see only western expats here are into stock, reportage, newswire agencies, etc

as for america, they will certainly devalue the US dollar to stay afloat, little by little to avoid troubles, but for the local workers it's gonna be bad, very bad, just like it is in europe now, and even in parts of china they're moving out to cheaper areas or even to vietnam, laos, cambodia, myanmar.

Nikon itself opened a new factory in the Laos border and will probably close or partially close the other factory in Ayutthaya near Bangkok.

now, what's cheaper than Laos ? hmm ... Cambodia, but just a little bit, probably they skipped Cambodia because of the awful infrastructures and widespread corruption, same issues they would face in Indonesia by the way and what about Philippines ?

but this is the trend, china is now too expensive and many will move to greener pastures.

so we're already witnessing the second or third stage of global outsourcing :
the chinese are now complaining that south east asians are "stealing their jobs" !