Reply #12: Actually we DO have the capability and capacity

[BumRushDaShow]

to make or grow almost everything in the world right here in the U.S. (including in our tropical state of Hawai'i and tropical territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, V.I., etc). That is the beauty of this country - because each of our states is like a country in size, and our territory offers land, water resources (in certain parts), and climates from polar to tropical. I.e., we really DON'T have to import anything outside of the exotic. There used to be acres and acres of pineapple and sugar cane fields in Hawai'i... now gone as we import these things because of cheap labor elsewhere. We have capped our oil wells and closed our silver mines. We have allowed farms to go fallow and subsidize those farmers BECAUSE they produced SO MUCH (thus deflating the price).

In essence, the American worker HAS BEEN the most productive in the world and that productivity has actually killed us due to the economic system that this country chose to adopt - capitalism. And thanks to unfair trade policies, our exports have essentially been dwindled down to guns, bombs, and trash. No one wants our beef (cattle grazing land being another benefit of this beautiful land) or our grain.

Outside of the cost of investing anew - we at one time HAD all of these types of manufacturing facilities. I live in a city that has the largest gasoline refinery on the east coast (Philadelphia metro). There's nothing stopping the creation of more refineries in the U.S. except the "not in my backyard" argument, that has torpedoed almost everything newly industrial of late, and this includes power plants. The very real concerns of toxic manufacturing processes and their effects on the environment has contributed to this hardened position, which has lead to this decline here. But rethinking these processes to contain the negative impacts must happen in order to reboot an industrial U.S. Inovation in manufacturing processes has essentially taken a back seat to the easier "solution" of offshoring the "problem" overseas and eating the cost of shipping the finished goods back here.

The other problem is that greed and expectation for generating a "profit" have been indoctrinated into the U.S. business school psyche and "cheap labor" to maximize profits has effectively helped our industries to disappear.