Toon: Deindustrialization,part 1

[n2doc]

[mahina]

1. Excellent. You communicate the feeling of the place and this moment perfectly.

You should be published widely. Good luck!

[surrealAmerican]

2. k & r

[hedgehog]

3. I worked at a steel mill that is now slowly dying.

Once I pulled some prints and realized that the pumps I was looking at had been installed during WWII - that one reason we are free today is because of steel that came out of that mill. Of course, one reason that mill is dying today is that it hasn't received new investment since WWII!

[Selatius]

4. The fact is the second it became safe to move factories off-shore, Wall St. took the opportunity.

The reason why the US became such an industrial powerhouse was because every other industrial production center in the world either faced being bombed to bits or occupied by an enemy foreign army. The same was still somewhat true during the Cold War. This is why American businesses preferred production remain at home until such time that it became safe to exploit cheaper labor overseas.

Imagine the chaos if in the early 1900s manufacturing businesses decided to off-shore production to China. The Japanese would be burning down those factories by the 1930s or simply taking them over for their own purposes when Japan went on its rampage in mainland China.

We would have been in a position where we literally had almost no domestic industrial capacity to convert over to fight and win World War Two. Cities like Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, Milwaukee, etc. produced the goods that won a world war. Now, they're just "rust belt" cities.

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. K&R

My mom used to go on quite a bit about her mother's Packard. Too big to fail is too big.