You’re not billed as an economist, but this exerpt from “View from Lazy Point” sure is spot on, with identification of the corporate greed that is devouring our country.

Now the trick is “how to stop the avalanche”.

Out here in Colorado, we use dynamite to head off potential avalanches when we have too much snow. This saves lives and reduces property damage.

A few months ago the Feds tried to take away the dynamite used for the above purpose.

The Feds backed away when they received a virtual landslide of protest against this action.

H’mmm, maybe there’s an object lesson there.

Regards, Lyda

In the cases i’ve watched, especially logging in the Northwest, it’s not that workers are too busy putting bread on the table; it’s that they’re too loyal to a company that is not loyal to them and feeds them disinformation. In that case (and there are many others, that create the whole tone of the country), they blamed environmentalists for putting restrictions on logging, when actually the reasons the mills were closing is that they were sending logs raw to Japan. From the air I saw mountains of logs on the docks, being loaded into ships bound for Japan, while mills were being shuttered all over the Northwest and the logging companies told workers that the Spotted Owl, Endangered Species Act, meddling enviros, and liberals in general were the problem. In reality, 95 percent of the forests were clearcut, most of the logs exported. And that was that. Only 5 percent were protected. Satellites show that. But that’s not what the loggers and mill workers were told. That’s in my book “Song for the Blue Ocean.”

Writ large, corporations have sent all our jobs to China, India, and elsewhere so they can pay next-to-nothing to unionless sweatshop- and child workers. They tell people throughout the rust belt that liberal regulations killed their jobs, when in fact the causes were de-regulation and moving jobs to poor countries so very rich corporations could get very, very rich at the expense of America.

It’s true that exported American jobs redistribute American wealth and help people who need jobs. But if America, with about 200-300 million people, became the envy of the world by building itself a broad middle class based largely on manufacturing what we all bought and sold to one another, why can’t China and India, each with a billion people, do the same for themselves? If they need our help, American consultants could show them how to create jobs and build an economy. As it is now, we have not only sold out American jobs and created depression throughout our former Midwest manufacturing centers, but China is stealing us blind on U.S. technology—while repressing public information and free speech. That’s not a model. That’s a catastrophe for our country.