What a great post! You know, there are a good number of us here on FR who remember very clearly the streams of workers leaving the factories and mills when the shifts changed; some of us remember leaving ourselves.
In my town, the mills are all closed and the shoe industry is dead. We still have shoes and sheets...from China and Vietnam and Indonesia and Malaysia. The names on the products are the ones we grew up with and the owners of those companies are richer than ever...and the children and grandchildren of their former workers are flipping burgers or collecting welfare to support their 3 illegitimate kids.
Thanks, especially coming from my intellectual superior! I've seen the old mills in New England. All on rivers because they were water powered back in the day. People came from everywhere to work in them. From Quebec which was very poor back then. From Ireland, from Lithuania, from Greece, from Portugal, from Italy and so on
More recently our southern mills and textiles have been hollowed out by NAFTA and GATT
In my town, the mills are all closed and the shoe industry is dead. We still have shoes and sheets...from China and Vietnam and Indonesia and Malaysia. The names on the products are the ones we grew up with and the owners of those companies are richer than ever...and the children and grandchildren of their former workers are flipping burgers or collecting welfare to support their 3 illegitimate kids.
Someone said---
"We shifted from being a producer oriented economy to a consumer economy when the real big money found out they could make a larger return on WalMart then they could at GM" They make more money in malls and retailing and the consumerism ethic (which is kind of brainless in my book) than in producing and manufacturing and the work ethic
Production is more masculine while consumption is more feminine and dependent
GM of course was once our largest corporation at roughly 100 billion in sales 9 years ago.....That's when WalMart became number one