Nothing like watching old movies . . . .

Watched again the other day an old movie, “Independence Day.” Okay, it’s not THAT old, but it has been around for a while. Anyway, there is one scene in it where the president of the United States gets locked into an alien’s mind and sees what the aliens have in mind for the human population of the planet. “Extermination,” he says, when he is finally freed from the alien’s telepathic grip.

Upon revisiting that movie scene, it dawned on me why listening to my company’s quarterly report the other day had so shaken me.

Our “bosses” have in mind for us, the American medical transcriptionists and editors who do the work the company sells and greatly profits from, exactly the same plan that the aliens in “Independence Day” had for human beings: Extermination.

That is not isolation paranoia-borne hyperbole or exaggeration, it is simply fact.

The more work they can send overseas, the better their profit margin. They were positively gleeful over the fact that they’ve managed to offshore 46%--up from 44%!--of transcription in the last quarter, and the picture only gets brighter (for them)!

They were equally happy that 77% of dictation now goes through speech-recognition programs before it gets to a transcriptionist. This makes them happy because they pay us much less, and in fact, unfairly less, for lines we edit than for those we transcribe. Anything that makes us, the workers, poorer, makes them richer--of COURSE they’re happy about that.

There was also some mention of a 19-million-dollar tax windfall of some sort or another, no specifics were provided although I suppose they are all still bowing and praying to Mr. Bush for that. Astonishingly, they didn’t use that tax windfall to enhance or create American jobs. Go figure.

I will never name the company for which I work, for a variety of reasons, some of them pretty obvious, and also because it doesn’t matter. The same scenario has been playing out in a lot of companies, a lot of industries, over a whole lot of years. If it hadn’t been, there would be no “Occupy Wall Street” movement--there wouldn’t have to be.

What I still have not figured out is what the corporate and political honchos, the 1%, think the result of all this will be. To me, it looks like, at some point, the misery will have to begin to trickle UP. Our economy is about 75% consumer-driven, last time I heard. What happens when you eliminate consumers by eliminating anything above a subsistence wage? What happens to the healthcare system (10% of the economy, I think I’ve heard), for instance, when only 1% of the people can afford healthcare?
I don’t know, I honestly don’t.

When I figure out some way to prevent what looks increasingly to me like the impending destruction of America, and not just economically, I’ll happily post it. Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart, so I suspect I’ll never have to write such a post.

Cheers!