STOP THE INVASION

Once upon a time in America, there was an American company, "Joe's Twiddles." Joe's Twiddles had a long history in America that began when a man named Joe figured out a way to make a better twiddle. Americans loved Joe's twiddles and bought them by the bezeezle. Joe hired American workers to make the twiddles. He hired Americans to service the twiddles. He hired Americans to handle the customer service phones, accounting, and every other aspect of his business. He also bought supplies to build the twiddles from other Americans and American companies. You see, America was important to Joe, and Joe was important to America.

A typical mid-20th-century American success story, Joe became very wealthy selling and servicing twiddles. He gave a lot of money to charity and to his church. He was looked up to by those in his community. Joe's employees were loyal, his customers were loyal and he swore to never forget that his success never could have been if it were not for the dream-making wonders that were possible only in America. He made sure that his family and everyone who worked for him understood the importance of this fact also.

Joe's success made him feel deeply patriotic, very proud and extremely loyal to America and it citizens. He thanked God for having been born into a unique culture like no other before it in God's creation. He often gave thanks to God publicly and in company meetings; this made people admire him even more. Everyone who knew Joe was certain that he was incapable of doing anything to harm his countrymen and women; Americans like Joe just didn't do such things, even when it meant that doing business sometimes cost him a little more.

Sometimes Joe was practically forced to be very innovative in order to to compete with cheaper foreign twiddle makers, but each challenge of this sort only seemed to make Joe's company, and his twiddles, better. All of this being so, it soon came to pass that Joe's company was known across the land for its slogan and mission statement, "We build the Greatest American Twiddles."

Eventually Joe passed away and his kids took over. Having been educated in public schools in the latter part of the 20th century, Joe's kids had been somewhat indoctrinated away from the drive, morals and ethics their father had tried very hard to instill in them. You see, this group called "the ACLU" had made sure that schools were made into "values neutral" places, lest they offend someone who might possess or wish to explore moral codes considered deviant by the majority.

Nobody seemed very surprised that Joe's kids soon tired of running the business; they lacked what it took to twiddle for a living. So, with the help of a bunch of lawyers and accountants, they took the company public. They did keep some shares out of family loyalty, but they mostly cashed out and left the business.

Soon, a newly renamed Joe's Twiddle and Twiddle Service Corporation (JTTSC) was being run by a corporate board of directors. For the first time, the company was one step removed from Joe's deep, abiding sense of commitment and thanks to America for being a wonderful and unique cultural and business incubator.

Over time, there was less and less talk in the halls of the company about the wonders of a nation that set the stage for many concepts like Joe's to flourish. And there certainly was no talk about God because the company lawyers said He might be deemed offensive by someone, an employee, a customer, a pet...whatever.

Eventually people at JTTSC forgot the way that Joe had always thanked God for making an America that allowed his sweat and effort to so positively affect his family, his loyal employees and his loyal American twiddle customers. The disconnect from the ideals that Joe loved and built his business upon was soon in full-swing.

Ten years and several changes to the board of directors later, some hotshot young accountant at JTTSC figured out that the company could save 5% of its overhead if it moved its twiddle manufacturing operations to Japreaindichin, a region of the earth ruled by despots, tyrants and profiteers. It boasted a low standard of living for everyone but a small and absurdly wealthy elite. Work was done in sweatshops; there was zero government regulation of work conditions. The employee prevailing wages wouldn't buy fish-food for a guppy in America. Of course it would be less costly to manufacture twiddles there, and JTTSC's board of directors didn't feel the obligations Joe had felt during his life really mattered any more. They'd never even heard of such things.

Not at all.

So, the board of directors looked only at the numbers on the accountants' reports and legal briefs in front of them, considered the investors (or was it their own investments in JTTSC?) and promptly moved manufacturing operations to Japreaindichin. They didn't bother to look to see if any deeper ramifications might affect America as a result of their action.

They didn't bother to change the company slogan either. But they did lay off 1000 career twiddle-makers.

American consumers were at first a bit shocked by this turn of events, but the board had planned for this upset. Using their market clout, they drove the worldwide price of twiddles down, temporarily...just long enough for the people who were upset to cool down.

Not many Americans noticed a few months later when some government agency reported in a press release that the 1000 unemployed twiddle makers were for the most part unemployable; the press must've missed the announcement. Or might it have had something to do with the increased money for advertising that JTTSC was sending them?

Americans also didn't know, because they weren't told, that their tax bills reflected the cost of retraining and social services for poor twiddlers. They weren't given the information that showed the ties between the increased cost of their health insurance to the uncompensated care bills incurred by the former twiddlers and twiddler-dependent families.

Some Americans might have noticed that the unemployment figures reported by the government went up, but government soon took care of that by removing the former twiddlers from the unemployment figures in the next reporting period. You see, many of the twiddlers had given up on finding new jobs because twiddling was all they knew how to or wanted to do. So the government didn't consider them to be unemployed since they weren't looking for work. Poof! The twiddlers weren't "officially" unemployed any more!

The irony that American consumers ended up paying more on the side of taxes and premiums than they saved in the cost of twiddles was lost on most everyone. The fact that people that didn't even use twiddles were, in effect, subsidizing twiddle manufacture, sales and service didn't get published anywhere.

Few paid much attention when the price of twiddles soon went back up to a level higher than it had been before either. It was too bad the media tired of reporting about it and didn't have a single reporter who knew diddly-squat about twiddle economics to figure out what really had happened. However, the stockholders were very pleased by this turn of events when they got their dividend checks and saw the stock prices rise; we can only wonder if they would have cared to learn that the price of their profit was born by all Americans via cost shifting and taxation.

A few years went by and that weasly little accountant (remember him?) who figured out that it would be just swell to move manufacturing offshore was promoted to CFO of JTTSC. At about the same time, the Internet came along and compressed the world. The new CFO, still out to make a name for himself and stroke his own ego, figured out that it was now possible to move most of accounting (not his job, of course), and all of the other white-collar service jobs to Japreaindichin also. It would save another 7% of overhead. The Board of Directors loved the idea. So, they voted to move the service jobs overseas too.

The cycle of layoffs repeated itself and the hidden costs passed on to consumers still remained misunderstood by the idiots in the media. They didn't seem to care much anyway, they were more than happy to report about the rise in suicides, the increased substance abuse and the other ills that had cropped up in the communities around the now empty JTTSC home office and factory. They reported mostly on what sells newspapers and garners viewers: pain, suffering and blood. It never occurred to them that the social deconstruction they covered was all linked to the former twiddle-makers and those who previously had made a living selling stuff to the extended twiddle-maker family.

In the next few years, twiddles became much more complex due to technological advances, so the demand for Twiddle Certified Professionals (TCP's) went up dramatically. The call went out to Americans to pay thousands of dollars for Twiddle certification courses, but the reward was a higher income that could easily offset the cost of such classes.

What these suckers...er...Americans didn't know was that at the very same time that they were toiling to master the intricacies of twiddle technology, the twiddle lobby was begging Congress to allow for the import of TCP's from Japreaindichin. For about a year, the newly certified American twiddle technicians did very well...while they were unwittingly training their lower-paid Japreaindichinese replacements! Who knew that immigrants on work visas could afford to live much cheaper than Americans straddled with mortgages, healthcare costs and the other trappings of American culture and society? Who knew that they didn't mind living with 14 people in a two-bedroom apartment?

Such is the sad story of the Great American Twiddle, which isn't really American at all any more. From a truly American perspective, the biggest thing we probably should wonder about is good ole Joe, you remember Joe? That patriotic, charitable American success of a man?

How do you think he would feel about his company today?

The End