About three semesters ago, my students in a college research class were given the assignment of investigating our relationship to China insofar as manufacturing, importation, and product safety standards were concerned. This was about the time of the Mattel toy problem at Christmas.
We had quite a number of very talented and dedicated academic librarians helping us with our searches. The librarians thought this was a very worthwhile research project and gave their all to it.
What I learned was very depressing. First, and probably most important, NOWHERE were we able to find anyone in academia or the business schools questioning what the U.S. was doing. There were hardly any articles in scholarly journals that questioned the practice of switching manufacturing to China.
It appears that not only have our politicians let us down, the academic structure of our country has, too. It is designed to study this type of thing and, under normal conditions (meaning NOT bush), advise on the well-being and health of the economic structure of the country (in addition to many other types of issues).
I still have much of the research saved, so if anyone wants to know particulars, I could be persuaded to go back through the files.
Ramping up the country's manufacturing backbone would be very difficult, if I remember correctly.
Much of this, however, might have been due to "will." At that time, there was no will whatsoever to restore our mfr'g base.


Cher