The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.\u00a0 The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America ran the world politically and economically.\u00a0 The captains of industry were in a position to expand their businesses on a scale never before seen.\u00a0 American companies dominated the global market in just about every major category of manufacturing.\u00a0 That expansion employed two generations of Americans in a way that hadn\u2019t been seen before.\u00a0 Americans came to believe that each generation would be richer and happier than the one before.\u00a0 Everyone would have a nice home.\u00a0 Everyone\u2019s kids would go to college.\u00a0 Everyone would prosper.<\/p>\n
Now the 1970s was the first wake-up call.\u00a0 With an energy crisis and a financial crisis and the first big recession in twenty-five years Americans were worried and confused.\u00a0 But along came Ronald Reagan and the wonders of deregulation and before you know it \u201cGreed is good\u201d and the good times are rolling again.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 So slowly but surely, they moved their manufacturing operations off-shore.\u00a0 They went to Mexico and the Philippines.\u00a0 They went to Japan, South Korea, China, then Thailand, Vietnam and finally Myanmar.\u00a0 Anywhere except here.\u00a0 So, thirty years later the rust belt now looks like a third world nation.\u00a0 Towns and cities are filled with houses that haven\u2019t been painted in decades.\u00a0 Main streets are full of abandoned and dilapidated commercial and industrial properties.\u00a0 In fact, the towns are now empty of young people.\u00a0 Only the old people are hanging on, living off their social security and the dregs of their savings.<\/p>\n
In the big coastal cities, there were still white-collar jobs to be had running these nominally American corporations.\u00a0 And tech companies provided high paying jobs for IT professionals.\u00a0 But in the last ten years even these jobs are more and more being off-shored.\u00a0 The hollowing out of the American work force is almost complete.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There have to be jobs for Democrat voters after all.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 And the next generation after that is acutely aware how bad things are out there.\u00a0 None of that post war optimism exists.\u00a0 But what lingers is the sense that Americans have been double crossed.\u00a0 They\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 They allowed the states that they supposedly represented to be picked clean of factories and warehouses and retail businesses.\u00a0 They were paid off to ignore the dismantling of the industrial base of the United States of America.<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s already done.\u00a0 No one will be going to jail for it.\u00a0 George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton got their cut.\u00a0 Obama did too.\u00a0 And George W. Bush sent all those unemployed Midwesterners to Iraq to be blown up by maniacs with road-side IEDs.\u00a0 That\u2019s ancient history now.<\/p>\n
But that sense of being double crossed still lingers among the dispossessed but still living victims.\u00a0 I guess the only question is will there be any kind of attempt to save what\u2019s left of America\u2019s people?\u00a0 Donald Trump did something.\u00a0 He called out the outrageous trade deals that his predecessors inflicted on us.\u00a0 He boosted energy production and even did something to try and get some jobs brought back here.\u00a0 So of course, they unleashed COVID and the BLM riots to crash the economy.\u00a0 Then Dementia Joe applied the coup de gr\u00e2ce.\u00a0 He shut down the energy industries and unleashed hyperinflation.<\/p>\n
Assume that Americans successfully pry the federal elective offices of President and Congress away from the Democrats in 2022 and 2024.\u00a0 Will the Republicans follow the lead of Trump or his successor to try and force corporate America to reinvest in this country?\u00a0 Sure, they\u2019ll be busy trying to clean out the Deep State (if they\u2019re interested in anything more than business as usual) but just as important is fixing the economy.\u00a0 And the only way to do that is to return all those manufacturing jobs.\u00a0 But will they do it?\u00a0 If they don\u2019t there won\u2019t be a generation after the one growing up now.\u00a0 That\u2019s simple arithmetic.\u00a0 No jobs, no families.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The post-WWII boom made two generations of Americans remarkably prosperous.\u00a0 The generation who fought the war and their children lived in a time when America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[25,3766,3674,381],"class_list":["post-20750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-jobs","tag-off-shoring-manufacturing","tag-restoring-america","tag-trade"],"yoast_head":"\n