Crawling Back to Even

For much of my professional life I have been leery of the so-called global economy.

The phrase global economy sounds hopeful, but is worthy of your skepticism.

The global economy has become a red flag. In recent years many of us have fretted about the sacrifices required by a global economy.

When someones says global economy, what I hear is:

I want to give away your living wage job to someone willing to do it for less, so that I can make more money for myself on the back of some poor schmuck.

I am cynical when it comes to the global economy mantras I hear. Many of these mantras are spoken from the exclusive clubs of concentrated wealth. For the US, NAFTA started the floodgates.

It is time to reverse the outpouring of living wage jobs from the US. Some legislation protecting living wage and decent salaried jobs makes sense -- if your concern is for quality of life for you and your neighbor.  One place to start is with high-tech advanced manufacturing.

The prospect of good manufacturing jobs in the United States is not a fantasy. Germany and Japan enjoy high wages and run major surpluses in manufactured goods; so can we. Our economy will thrive only when we make what we invent.
~Susan Hockfield, MIT President

How does the US crawl back to an economic system that makes sense for people? In the industrial age, the mantra was to increase productivity. Technological advances have given us so much leverage on productivity, it has become irrelevant. Many living wage jobs have disappeared because of technological changes (e.g., email replaced the need for most mail delivery).

How does the US manufacture a recovery? How does a nation of people brought to its knees by anti-people, pro-corporation policies crawl back to even?