FIRE burns down the house, with the kids in it

[don]

19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Make You Weep

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first "post-industrial" nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.

It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today?

Waste paper. Yes, trash is the number one thing that we ship out to the rest of the world as we voraciously blow our money on whatever the rest of the world wants to sell to us. The United States has become bloated and spoiled and our economy is now just a shadow of what it once was. Once upon a time America could literally outproduce the rest of the world combined. Today that is no longer true, but Americans sure do consume more than anyone else in the world. If the deindustrialization of America continues at this current pace, what possible kind of a future are we going to be leaving to our children?

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable. Every single month America does into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

So what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.

'Highlights" include:

The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001

Dell Inc. has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.

The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

In America today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.

Etc. etc.

It's all right out in front of us but America can't handle the truth. Hasn't for some time.

All 19 cited at: http://www.businessinsider.com/deind...s-since-2001-1

http://www.businessinsider.com/deind...#ixzz10lUVWn2L

[don]

Re: FIRE burns down the house, with the kids in it

That day, downtown Buffalo, gutted in recent decades by greener suburban grass and the closing of the nearby steel mills, was itself a kind of sign of the times, perhaps emblematic of some of the desperation and anger upstate that Mr. Paladino seems to have tapped. A 10-minute walk from Paladino headquarters, and on the same block of Main Street as the Hyatt Regency hotel, a strip of empty storefronts spoke silently of the upstate New York that time forgot: For sale, for lease, reduced, the stickers begged.

Rose Nails, Buffalo Beauty Supply, Mr. D’s Fashion Corner for Tots to Teens, J. P. Fashions — all were empty, and looked, from their lettering, as if they might have been for the past 40 years.

At the abandoned Happy Garden Chinese Fast Food restaurant, the red lacquer doors were swung open, as if the last owners could not be bothered to close them on the way out. Cobwebs on a metal gate surrounding the restaurant flickered whenever the day’s hot, strange wind blew.

A few blocks down, the bell of the light rail — the great hope of industrial town revitalization everywhere — gave a muted clang. A man in a wheelchair stopped to rattle a plastic cup at a man sitting on the sidewalk, his back slouched up against the glass of yet another empty storefront.

The two men stared dully at each other before the first moved on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/ny...igcity.html?hp

[flintlock]

Re: FIRE burns down the house, with the kids in it

Hey I know one way to balance the trade deficit. Declare war an export. Bada Bing! Problem solved.