Reply #120: On the other hand

[PATRICK]

This has been going on for years, the disadvantages of off-shoring jobs have multiplied with no end to the trend, even if there are shoddy products and results- even harm to consumers. Selling to out of work Americans is making less sense. Wages abroad have to decrease to balance this out and pressures overseas are to increase wages and better conditions.

But maybe the math is on a collision course with greed. Americans will not be slavish enough to entice back jobs before the consumer class gets ruined first. China as a nation has a top-down planned and regulated economy plus incredible financial strings attached to our debt. Ours is afflicted by "multi-national" self interested plutocrats. The relationship we had with Japan and even the Arabs is not the same at all when the Cartel and then the Japanese pushed us hard during the seventies and eighties. Back then we had movies dealing with the foreign ownership effect on unions. Now we might have a movie or two about unionizing back at the bottom. Yet that story had been better set overseas as well.

The flight of capital and jobs is like our blood oil resource depleting well past its "peak" and leaving a human desert behind. A lot of that capital, that product consumerism is unsustainable and vitally misdirected, anti-green destruction. If this were a dramatic ebb and flow of a sustainable economic picture seen through the centuries it would be one thing, but it is coupled to several other disasters, fatally interlinked and related.

One small thread of insanity from this cloth only illustrates the whole, like shipping apple juice concentrate all the way from China and mixing that slurry into "American" containers. Other nations are destroying themselves with a difference such as Africa destroying subsistence farming to export cash crops top enrich the few or the Chinese polluting an already stressed land to the point of uninhabitable ruin. That hardly seems sane on its face yet it is fundamental to fair trade globalism. That is to release the monstrous fantasy growth of corporate fortune from local responsibility to anyone, anything, anywhere. Unquestionable, unstoppable insanity and waste to the point where any change would be nothing short of miraculous much less correctable. There are more threads and patterns connected to the arterial loss of American jobs. They are pumping us dry- and a lot of it is irretrievable even if there was an effective will somewhere, anywhere.