Made in the USA

Do you want to know when the economic mess will be over with? Do you want to know when this country will get back on track and our standards of living will improve? Well boys and girls, I can tell you when. Come here and listen closely to me...the economy will get back on track when the stuff we buy is made in this country again. Simple, isn't it?

You see kids, the 1940's and '50's was our last real economic expansion. And by 'real economic expansion' I mean it was a time when millions of people made good money and got good benefits on their jobs which enabled them to buy houses, cars, and send their kids to college. Almost everyone shared in the economic prosperity, not just the top 10 percent of the richest folks in the country. And the reason why we had that big economic expansion that lifted our parents and grandparents out of poverty was because most everything we sold in this country was made in this country. Your family and friends and neighbors worked in all those factories that made the TV sets, the recliners, the gas guzzling cars, the frozen foods, the cans they put Spam in, the Spam that was eaten, and so on. And they made good wages for doing so. And the companies back then took an interest in the communities they had their factories in because they had to, they wanted to keep their workers happy so that they would continue to work and produce so that they, the company that owned the factory, could make profits.

Somewhere along the line American business decided it wasn't making enough money and that the American worker was being greedy by asking for things like health insurance and a 5 day 40 hour work week, so they decided to shut those factories down and move them to Mexico, China, and other places. And for a time this worked out okay because we kept right on buying the stuff that we used to make that was now being made overseas.

But then it caught up to us and now we're paying the price with this global economic melt down. The economic house of cards is collapsing around us, as well it should. It's just absurd to think that any system like the one we've got can succeed. You can't keep wages and benefits low and expect people to be able to buy the flood of consumer goods that are made in cheaply in China. If you are out of work because your job got sent to a Communist country then you're not going to be able to afford what ever it is they're going to make and export back to us. The mantra for big business for the past 30 years has been 'profit at any cost!' and now that cost is finally being felt.

When we bring manufacturing back to this country and we do it in an environmentally sustainable way then we'll see this mess begin to fade away. And when we restore some sane regulation to big business, banking, and Wall Street we'll get the other part of our economic house in order. One of the things I learned from reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, she's another of my celebrity girlfriends by the way, is that the way out of the mess that Milton Friedman hath wrought with his free market fantasy bullshit is through a mix of government take over of certain key industries and by retaining manufacturing inside a country that has been hard hit by outsourcing.

It's my feeling that we'll have a saner more economically and environmentally viable world when we stop making American consumer goods in China and make them here instead. Our planet will thank us when we stop telling people in India that they have to use their land to grow flowers for florist shops in El Segundo, California and Sioux City, Iowa. Your kids and your grand kids will thank us if we stop burning so much gas and oil to bring the cheap sweatshop made clothes from islands in the Pacific to the malls of America and Canada.

If we make here, in an environmentally and economically sustainable way, then we'll all benefit.

(This post was inspired in part by this post by Matty Boy and by an increasing sense that the people at the top really don't know what the fuck they're doing.)