Detroit: Empire of Rust | National Review Online:
"The UAW's stranglehold turned one of America's most prosperous cities into a wasteland."
I'm not a fan of the UAW. Or the Teamsters. Or the UFCW. Or any Union, for that matter. But in the case of Detroit, I think the blame needs to be placed at the feet of the politicians who gutted America in the name of 'Free Trade.' For many years now our politicians have been exporting 'living wage jobs' overseas. And it will take more than singing Solidarity Forever! to bring those jobs back home!
Here is an excerpt from Patrick Buchanan's great book: The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy
"No site better captures yesterday's America than Detroit, forge and furnace of America's democracy. Detroit is the burned out case of American cities. The Empire of the Sun has its revenge. Japanese imports helped kill the city that built the weapons that destroyed the empire. Now grandsons of the soldiers of the imperial army work at high paying manufacturing jobs once held by the fathers of ten-dollar-an-hour retail clerks in Macomb County.
"But why blame the Japanese? We did it to ourselves. We Americans created a post war trading regime, in which, over 25 years, Japan bought 400,000 American cars while selling us 40 million Japanese cars, a ratio of 100:1. One president after another sat still while a third of America's greatest industry was shipped off to Japan...
"Americans no longer make their own cameras, shoes, radios, TVs, toys. A fifth of our steal, a third of our autos, half our machine tools, and two-thirds of our textiles are made abroad...
"The decline and fall of Middle America was neither preordained nor inevitable. It was engineered in Washington D.C. Wages have fallen and the standard of living of American families has stagnated because of a basic law: the law of supply and demand. The price of labor has been dropping because the supply of labor has exploded...
"Having declared free trade and open borders to be American policy, why are we surprised that corporate executives padlocked their plants in the Rust Belt and moved over seas? Why keep your plants here when you can manufacture at a fraction of the cost abroad, ship your goods back, and pocket the windfall profits that come from firing $20 an hour Americans and hiring fifty-cent-an-hour Asians? A pair of Nikes that sells for $150 in the United States costs $5 in wages to make in Indonesia. Any wonder that Nike president Philip Knight is the fifth richest man in America, with $5.2 billion, while his Indonesian workers make 31 cents an hour?" (Emphasis mine)
Recommended reading:
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