Why the USA is unsuitable for offshoring

[Updated: I thought of a few more] Is anyone else troubled by the racial overtones of the current wave of anti-outsourcing and especially anti-offshoring sentiment? If you have read Introduction to Real ITSM you will know how scornful I am of outsourcing. What troubles me is that the recession-fuelled backlash going on right now in the USA seems to be focused on how you can't trust Indians and all foreign places are dangerous. This seems ignorant and racist. Anyone who reads the papers knows what an unsuitable country the USA is for doing business...

A classic recent example is CIO going on about dangerous foreign places. To see Bangkok at number two on that list is to know these people haven't been past the shores of the shining seas. I'm safer doing business there than in Atlanta. I was there (Bangkok, not Atlanta) during the recent uprising, with the media full of tanks in the streets. An ITIL author and I went within a few blocks of the action, viewing tourist attractions and having a nice cold beer. I'd have been more nervous in Los Angeles. (I have been to LA and Atlanta. Atlanta is one of the only places I've been in a bar brawl when I wasn't a barman - it turned out to be off-duty drunk white cops beating up a black guy. Ironically the other one was tourists vs. lady-boys in a beach-disco in southern Thailand - the same place where a cop offered me a lift home one night on his scooter.)

I'd love to see a ranking of cities that included American cities judged by the same criteria: violent crime, hurricanes, rioting, power failures, terrorist attacks, dangerous police, civic and commercial corruption, overloaded infrastructure, pollution, power wastage... Miami, Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington DC...

Anyone who reads the papers knows what an unsuitable country the USA is for doing business:

• the citizens are armed
• most cities have no-go zones
• crime rates are high, gangs run rampant and engage in running gun battles, drugs are a serious problem
• it has one of the highest murder rates in the world and certainly the highest "going postal" mass murder rate in the world
• it is the world headquarters of corrupt private enterprise, so much so they recently had to introduce Sarbanes-Oxley to try to limit it
• both parties of its government are captive of the business power-base - there is no working class representation
• it has an unofficial caste system of oppressed underclasses who riot violently making whole cities unsafe. Until recently (in world terms) slavery was legal
• the people are into weird cults and beliefs
• it has been subject to some of the biggest terrorist attacks of modern times (World Trade, Murrah Federal Building)
• its government attacks its own citizens with tanks (Waco) and soldiers (Kent State)
• it attacked more other countries in the last hundred years than anyone but the Germans, the Japs and the Russians - the probability of the USA being at war with someone is higher than any other country right now
• it fought one of the biggest civil wars in history once already
• its largest states regularly call for succession
• it can't control its own borders and is overrun with millions of economic refugees
• it allows cities and states to maintain their own armed police forces outside government control
• its police forces regularly use violence, gas, guns, electric shock weapons and paramilitary tactics
• it all but exterminated its indigenous population
• it tortures and illegally imprisons foreign prisoners
• it has one of the world's highest rates of incarceration and state execution (yes amazingly they still kill people)
• its civil emergency services are unreliable and completely failed in a recent devastation of New Orleans
• the country is peppered with aging nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage
• it publicly acknowledges its increasing exposure to hurricane danger in all Eastern seaboard cities and the entire West coast is a hotbed of volcanic and earthquake activity

It is unstable, dangerous, violent, corrupt and wacko.

And don't even get me started on those Europeans. War breaks out there at the drop of a hat...

Of course I do work with the USA. My servers are offshored there. I know it is a reasonable place to offshore to because I am not ignorant enough to go solely on the entirely true list of facts above.