Making Things
There are reasons why the United States and its allies won World War II. First and foremost was the sacrifice of our GIs as well as the good people of Europe who fought to free themselves of their conquerers. Running a close second, however, is one major fact; the industries of the United States simply out-produced the Axis alliance by a huge margin. Ships, airplanes, jeeps, trucks, tanks, artillery, rifles, ammunition, bombs, clothing, food, tents, communication gear; American factories poured out the material necessities that allowed allied forces to push the aggressors back to their borders and then to crush them decisively. Without our factories and our labor force, the WW II could not have been won.
During WW II there was no distinction between defense and consumer industry. Auto manufacturers, such as Ford, GM and others, converted their capacity to build bombers and fighter aircraft, designed by Boeing, Lockheed, Douglass and other airplane companies while rolling out trucks, tanks and other motorized vehicles for our highly mechanized military. Every machine shop in the country was enlisted in the war effort and they responded by running three shifts per day. Our steel mills and foundries were up to the task of supplying the raw materials for manufacturing that kept those factories humming. Despite the heavy losses of men and material on the battlefield, our stuff could not be kept from landing on their shores. America was about the business of making things.
Fast forward. There are now countless corporations trading on stock exchanges whose sole customer is the United States Government and more particularly, the Pentagon. American defense industries are locked into building arms for wars that are not being fought; arms that have evolved frighteningly high acquisition costs and yet are unsuitable for current threats. Meanwhile, consumer industries, once the backbones of our economy, have stripped the United States of most of its manufacturing capabilities and sent them overseas. They did so to take advantage of lower labor costs but the benefit came not in lower prices for consumers but in ever higher profits for financiers and corporate managers.
Today our military’s highly computerized fighting machines and communication devices are increasingly dependent on components and chips that are manufactured overseas, particularly in countries that have no sympathetic investment in America’s national interests. The immediate result is that our balance of payments to foreign entities are so out of whack that the United States may have to beg the very countries to which we outsourced our manufacturing capabilities to finance and supply our next big war. There is no guarantee that they will be willing to do that. In fact, they may be the countries that we will be fighting. Imagine the United States sending our military to fight the very countries that were (by then, it will be past tense) supplying their aircraft and missile guidance computers with chips and their fighting machines with sub-assemblies? We could not have won WW II under that scenario.
America is no longer about the business of making things. The American people did not vote to outsource our jobs. It was the insatiable corporate appetite for more profits, propelled by the quarterly demands of Wall Street markets that rewarded managers hugely for cobbling together systems – especially the Damocles-Sword of outsourced manufacturing – that produced continual short-term growth at the expense of the long term health of our economy. In turn, the markets cobbled together their own systems for even more profits that fueled both the late unsustainable boom and the current uncontrollable bust. All because an unelected few decided that they could make more money if we stopped making things here.
In my opinion, evidence is mounting to indicate that our corporate class – by investing in placing heavy and even light manufacturing plants and jobs overseas – has invested in the seeds of America’s eventual destruction. I hope that I am wrong.
