Auto woes highlight end of U.S. industrial age

[DainBramaged]

Some 3 million manufacturing jobs have vanished since 2000

These are transformational times in a nation rooted for a century in a life of lunch buckets, calloused hands and belching smokestacks. That life is being upended and it's on to new, more ephemeral things.

America doesn't build like it used to. Services R Us.

The auto executives and labor bosses who came to Washington pleading for a bailout represented a waning industrial age that delivered decent wages, good benefits and stable employment for millions, over generations.

They could not help but look like yesterday's men, grasping for a chance at tomorrow.

They stood not just for a gasping industry or a shrunken labor movement but for America's wrenching transition from the familiar ways of putting food on the table and kids through college.

How many people do you know who go to work each day and make something you can hold or touch?

In most places, probably not many.

Not even in Trenton, N.J., where the bold sign on a railroad bridge boasts "Trenton Makes, the World Takes," harking back to when it made rubber, wristwatches, parachutes, linoleum, armaments, glassware, fine china, toilets, cars, wall plaster, farm tools, mattresses and cigars.

Now it makes policy and bureaucracy, mostly employing people in state and local government. In that state, one worker in 10 makes something, down from one in two in 1950.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28209112/

[BeatleBoot]

1. It ain't over yet

Before the automobile was invented, Detroit was the premier manufacturer of wood burning stoves for over a century.

One thing I know, both in my heart and in my mind: We never give up.

And it ain't going to happen this time either.

It's going to get worse before it gets better, but it's going to get better.

Here's to the journey we are going through...


:toast:


Stay positive!

[DainBramaged]

3. Doin my best, I may even take up beer drinking again if my doctors let me!

:beer:

[BeatleBoot]

4. Lol!

We may be brewing our own soon!

[tabbycat31]

2. I drive by that railroad bridge

from time to time, and I remember my cousin telling me that was one of the first thing she learned how to read. Sadly in her lifetime (she's 14) I doubt Trenton "made" anything. I don't even remember a manufacturing based economy in my lifetime (I'm 28)

[DainBramaged]

5. Taylor ham, Case's pork roll, Trenton pork roll

All still made in Trenton NJ. Grew up on it. Still eat it once a week (SHop Rite had it on sale last week)


http://home.att.net/~casesporkrollstore/Family.html

http://www.jerseyporkroll.com/

http://www.manta.com/coms2/dnbcompany_dvbvj

[JDPriestly]

8. That's food, not industrial production.

[DainBramaged]

9. And? We can't talk about something good which still comes from Trenton?

:eyes:

[JDPriestly]

11. The problem is not that America does not produce food, it is that

America does not produce industrial products other than military equipment or maybe a few big planes (which are also mostly manufactured overseas).

[DainBramaged]

12. Absolutely true. Not for a long time

[jwirr]

6. I remember those old geography textbooks that looked at each state

and what their products were. What do they teach about US geography these days?

[Uben]

7. What their products used to be, of course

What else could there be?

[DainBramaged]

10. You mean those textbooks sold on Ebay as antiques?

Now they call it Social Studies, and it has been correctness-washed to the point that kids don't even know where Africa is on a map.