Tipping point

I had really thought it common knowledge that manufacturing was the engine that drove the creation of the middle classes in America but I have to wonder because hardly any of the experts discuss it. Some say ‘education’ is the key. That’s really not true in one sense and sort of true in another. First of all what good is a college education if there are no jobs for people with degrees? Secondly, people don’t necessarily need a degree when they could be trained on the job, there’s no education like actual experience. But the whole education as opposed to experience debate is beside the point which is without manufacturing the economy, whatever an economy is, will stay the way it is or get worse until some genius figures out a way to bring manufacturing back to these oiled shores. And frankly I just don’t see that happening.

Another ignored problem that is related to the education/experience thing is America is slowly losing its capability to even be the manufacturing giant it was. The most valuable engineers in any manufacturing plant are the experienced engineers, engineers with degrees who also have years of experience. Without those the company would be at the mercy of greenhorn engineers right out of school. There is nothing more useless than an engineer without experience (no offense meant to young engineers). If you recall the history of the Japanese auto here in America you might remember that the first Japanese cars to arrive were much more like the little British cars like the Hillman Minx and such than they were like American cars. The Japanese invested heavily in learning about quality control for years and today they build some of the most reliable cars on the market and that only comes with experience. And engineers are only part of manufacturing.

Then you have a shelf life anyway. If you are out of work too long your shelf life expires. When I was a mechanical designer new design programs appeared on the market with more and more rapidity and companies dumped them as fast as new ones appeared. This meant going back to school at night or in between jobs just to keep up. The last one I took was for a program called Pro Engineer, a solid modeling program and a powerful engineering tool, which cost six thousand dollars to attend. Right after that the job market dried up completely but you get my drift regarding shelf life. Even if jobs magically appeared I doubt I could even qualify for one any longer since I haven’t worked in manufacturing for years. I still know how to design stuff but I wouldn’t be up on whatever program companies are using (somewhere) to do their designing on hence I have become a dinosaur, useless in the eyes of companies. Naturally I find it stupid because there isn’t a program in the world that can turn a layperson into a designer. There are a whole slew of other issues like the need to specialize but this is getting boring. The point is the longer America does nothing to cause a resurgence in manufacturing we may reach the point of no return where we would have to begin from scratch while other nations would have a huge edge on us or to spell it out we may never again regain our manufacturing capability which would be the end of the middle classes or as things already are.

This is why I think most people are idiots. They rant and rave about building a Mosque in New York and elsewhere, they are distracted by what are largely idiotic distractions engineered to do just that. But when it comes to the important issues most cannot even recognize them, even if they fell in their lap. They talk about Obama’s “historic” moment as president and agonize over being patriots and god knows what other ridiculous nonsense, mostly their genitals I suspect. Oh god, global warming! Glen Beck is an asshole! Oh god, what shall we do, Beck is an asshole! Oh no, the Tea Party will destroy us all! Oh bullshit, what is destroying us all is our government wasting our resources on wars whose basis is domestic politics pure and simple because nothing else explains it and not spending it on job stimulus and coming up with legislation that makes it more attractive for manufacturing companies to reside here and employ Americans.

It all has to do with greed pure and simple. It has nothing to do with the ruling elite deciding the working class had it too easy, the elite could care less what the working class does or thinks. The ruling elite saw that they could use cheap labor in China, Mexico, Taiwan, India, and elsewhere so they forced legislation that allowed them to do just that. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t Victorian mores it was profit. You can set aside all the pissing and moaning over illegal aliens, terrorists, leakers, peepers, and cheaters because there are only two burning issues of the day and those are the imperial wars and jobs. Everything else, even though important, should be set aside to first resolve these two issues which of course is why it won’t happen. Instead we get Glen Beck and Terror Babies, Terror Babies – I could scream.