I just want to comment on the state of industry, manufacturing and engineering in the country today. I just watched a program on Public Television about the cruise ship the SS United States. It is mothballed somewhere and potentially is going to be refitted into a modern cruise ship for Norwegian Lines. The program said that there isn't a shipyard left in the US that can handle the work. No one has the skills and experience with this kind of work anymore. All this kind of work is done overseas in China, in Korea, in India, wherever the cheap labor market is these days. Add to that the lax environmental regulations in other countries and you have to wonder if shipbuilding and that kind of work can ever be done in the US again.
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Jump to manufacturing. We have sent everything we used to do to other countries. The machinists and toolmakers and metal craftsmen are no longer working their trades. There is no one in the coming generation who can or wants to enter these trades. All that know-how, all that experience, all of it is going to be lost. What happens when those good jobs that paid a living wage are all gone? What happens when factories that sustained families and communities and cities are all gone? What jobs are left for people to do?
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Back when the issue of free trade was being discussed in the 90s, the experts all said that even if we send all our manual labor jobs overseas, we will always have the higher value added jobs of design and engineering. Well, those jobs are going overseas too as the developing nations who graduate far more engineers every year than the US figure out that they can learn from past design and improve upon it with their own style and technological innovations. The ease of use of CAD software and the spread of PCs insures that any high school kid in China is probably more proficient at the new way of design than a kid in the urban US.
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I am not going on a protectionist rant here. I applaud design and innovation from all points on the compass. After all, a good idea is a good idea.
What gets me, what deeply troubles me is that we have slipped so far down and don't realize it. In the era of the energy emergency, we need smart people to design and engineer technological breakthroughs. We also need to have our manufacturing base back. We can't and shouldn't offshore all our manufacturing. Our own people need good jobs, need trades and careers. We can't settle for having our entire manufacturing base be reduced to almost a cottage industry in the space of a generation simply for the almighty dollar and corporate greed.
Look, when crunch time comes and our trading partners start tightening the screws, how can we ramp up our own industry again if it is all gone.
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I mourn the loss of the railroad tracks that used to crisscross the continent. The automobile and truck did that mode of transportation in. As did the now, now, now mentality of overnight shipping. Then the land for the tracks was sold off. Tracks were torn up. Steel sent off to be recycled in China, in India. Rights of way lost. Now as gasoline and oil prices spiral out of control and our foreign oil suppliers squeeze us harder, transportation and freight by rail is a pipe dream.
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But then the bottom line will always win out. Lowest bid (=cheapest, worst solution) always wins. Quality is a memory. Electronic devices are obsolete while still on the store shelves. Everything is disposable. Just buy another one. Rather, just order another one. We can have another one from the factory in China is a few weeks. Our money pours out for gewgaws, but nothing of substance.
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Quality is gone. The phrase "They just don't make 'em like they used to" is more appropriate today than every before.
Technological innovation is gone. Did you hear the one about the government putting a moratorium on all solar projects on federal lands? Apparently some pencil-pusher is worried about the impact of all these solar panels on the environment, particularly in the best solar area in the country, the Southwest desert. Can you believe it? Only in America.
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We need a complete revamping of the educational system in this country. We need to develop a generation of innovators and technological thinkers and doers. We need to bring back trades and craftsmanship. We need to have something akin to the space race, but for energy independence and environmental clean-up. Everyone should read Friedman's The Earth is Flat.
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When all the good jobs are finally gone, we will all be selling hamburgers to each other for something below the cost of living. While the temperature rises and the weather gets wackier every year. While rich financiers and speculators screw up our retirement money. While the government tramples individual rights and freedoms and starts wars that it can't finish or win. Unless things change on our current path, we are in for a sad end. We are in the twilight of our greatness. And no one seems to care.
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Just my two cents.
