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Edited on Sun Nov-19-06 03:22 PM by The Deacon
Could be nearly as bad as the penalties we've accepted by membership in the WTO. When I was a kid, my family (5 kids & 2 parents) was able to buy a house, own two cars (one new, one older) and take a vacation every summer on one salary. This was true of my neighbors (six kids plus two parents on one side, three kids plus parents on the other, newly married couple across the street could even afford a GTO as a "fun car" while they drove their Buick for everyday) as well. In my hometown were the headquarters of Beechcraft, Cessna & Lear Jet. Boeing had its second largest plant there. The headquarters of Coleman (maker of camping products) was there as well. Today, all of the homegrown aircraft companies are owned by out-of-towners (one Canadian), Boeing has sold its plant & the workers now have fewer benefits & lower pay and Coleman was purchased by Pearlman, who sold off pieces to help pay interest & converted a cash-heavy retirement fund into a series of annuities with companies of shaky finance. Many of the smaller companies which supplied parts to the aircraft plants have shut down, unable to compete with low-wage countries. In the town where we bought that house (Hutchinson, sixty miles from Wichita) one of the largest employers was Dillon's, a local grocery chain. They had unionized butchers who were glad to cut you any specialty cut you wanted, a warehouse group & trucking group that paid so well that humble warehouse workers were able to send their kids to college. They've been taken over by Kroger's, the butcher's union has been busted & Fleming Foods (the spin-off of the warehouse & trucking group) is defunct. When I was a kid, televisions were made in the United States by union workers who spent their entire lives at the same plant & retired to decent homes in the suburbs. When I was a young boy Chrysler was an American company. I took my first overseas flight on Pan American Airways - an airline which doesn't even exist any more. There was a regularly scheduled service from Hutchinson, KS (a town of 60,000) to Liberal, KS with a stopover in Garden City (towns about the same size.) There is no regularly scheduled service out of Hutchinson any more. And there are only two major airlines still owned by Americans. And both of them are in perpetual bankruptcy in order to break labor contracts. We made steel, automobiles, radios, televisions, airplanes, computers and textiles. Today we sell hamburgers to each other (the Service Economy.) All hail the World Trade Organization & low import duties.
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