Tag: off-shoring manufacturing

Bring Back Our Jobs

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In the 1990’s America began off-shoring almost our entire industrial footprint.  I saw some of that migration first hand.  China hired American engineering companies with the technology and experience to build petrochemical synthesis plants.  And they built them in pieces, shipped them to remote sites in China and then assembled and even started them up for the Chinese.  On their own it would have taken the Chinese generations to learn all the particular technologies and avoid all the hazards in running plants that produce all the myriads of organic materials that the US chemical engineering companies like Dupont pioneered in the early twentieth century.

And we did it on purpose.

Now multiply that by the number of other products that we used to make in America and you have an inkling of the betrayal that Wall Street has wreaked on us.  And the result is the wreckage that we call the Rust Belt.  But it’s not just the Midwest.  Every area of the country has been hollowed out.  Even the most cutting-edge manufacturing, the most valuable computer chips are made in Taiwan.  And it’s even worse than that.  Even our food is now imported from Asia and South America.  That is how much American businesses hate us.  So, if I want to sum the whole thing up, the boardrooms of American business eliminated the American middle class to globalize their operations and minimize their labor costs.

And reversing this project is what I think is the highest priority of anyone who loves this country and the people who call themselves Americans.  It really doesn’t matter to me if the people who work to fix this call themselves Republicans or Democrats.  Populist might be the closest thing to a label for the project.  Obviously, anyone who is getting most of his income from Wall Street lobbyists and insider trading tips is not on this team.  It’s not Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi or the Bushes.  Maybe it’s Donald Trump.  He sounds like he understands some of what’s going on.  He talks about tariffs and that’s part of what needs to be looked at.  But where I see the tariffs helping is putting them on American companies who try to sell cars and other products made in Mexico and Cananda and elsewhere as if they were “Made in America.”

We’re missing about a hundred million good manufacturing jobs in this country.  That’s about what it would take to restore the middle class in this country.  Of course that will do a lot of damage to China, India, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America.  Well, that’s too bad.  Charity begins at home.

On-shoring American manufacturing will take decades.  Of course it will.  It took forty years to off-shore it.  But every step the government takes to worsen the economics of off-shore manufacturing will work to improve the job prospects for our grandchildren.  And now is the time for legislation.  The Republicans have (slim) majorities in both houses of Congress and a sympathetic president.  All that is needed is for Trump to co-opt a few Democrat votes.  Who knows, he might even get someone like Bernie Sanders to sign on for some of the votes.

But the important thing is to prevent this country from turning into a feudal system with the super-rich lording it over a peasant class hanging on by the skin of their teeth.  There is still a chance to turn this around.  Come on Mr. Trump, to make America great again, you have to resurrect the middle class.  Bring back our jobs.

Will America Get Another Chance?

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The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.  The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.  The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.  American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.  That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn’t been seen before.  Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.  Everyone would have a nice home.  Everyone’s kids would go to college.  Everyone would prosper.

Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.  With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.  But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it “Greed is good” and the good times are rolling again.

But what nobody noticed, or at least no one in the big cities noticed was that corporate America had decided that employing Americans was too expensive and unnecessary.  So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.  They went to Mexico and the Philippines.  They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.  Anywhere except here.  So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.  Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven’t been painted in decades.  Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.  In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.  Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.

In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.  And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.  But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.  The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.  There are still jobs at hospitals and government agencies that are tasked with servicing the needs of the human flotsam and jetsam that are still clinging to life in the battered US economy.  There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.

So, the second generation after the WWII generation, the Millennials were the first generation to discover that they would be worse off than their parents.  And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.  None of that post war optimism exists.  But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.  They’ve been sold out by corporate America but more correctly, they been sold out by the federal government that allowed these corporations to abandon their countrymen to joblessness and poverty.  They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.  They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.

Well, it’s already done.  No one will be going to jail for it.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.  Obama did too.  And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.  That’s ancient history now.

But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.  I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what’s left of America’s people?  Donald Trump did something.  He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.  He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.  So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.  Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de grâce.  He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.

Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.  Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?  Sure, they’ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they’re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.  And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.  But will they do it?  If they don’t there won’t be a generation after the one growing up now.  That’s simple arithmetic.  No jobs, no families.