STOP DIGGING! START CLIMBING

I love this country. I want it to prosper. It isn't,
right now. To fix it, we must understand what has
gone right, and what has gone wrong. When you're
in a hole you need to do two things: stop digging, and
start climbing.

My last blog gave a grim picture of our economic situ-
ation. Perhaps unduly grim. There are always new
technological breakthroughs, like the inter-net, that
can radically alter the situation for the better. We
need to proceed however, on the basis of where we are,
and what we know now.

What we know for sure is that we are losing, for the most
part, our manufacturing base. Some of the people losing
jobs there are being retrained and get into jobs in health
services, computers, and education. But most find only
lower paying jobs in food service, retail clerking, cleaning
and other domestic chores. Increasing numbers of such jobs
are temporary or part-time, without benefits. People can't
support a family on these incomes, and are falling out of the
middle class into the underclass. That bodes ill for our
democracy. Our strength in the past has been a large,
prosperous middle class. But that was based on industrial
expansion and manufacturing. The countries that are now
in rapid industrial growth are China, India, and Brazil. (And,
in a lesser degree, the southeast Asia "tigers."

If we want to become competitive with the fastest growing
world economies, we need to re-industrialize. And we need
to do that while ending our addiction to foreign oil and other
fossil fuels. Otherwise global warming will increase at a
frightful pace! The reason I'm so pessimistic is because our
Congress is dysfunctional. As I said in the last blog, it's a
house of ill repute. Its favors go to the highest bidder. Many
congress-people deny global warming is a problem. Instead
of weaning us from dependence on oil, they want to just do
more drilling!

So we need a new industrial revolution based on developing
"green" energy resources. There is technology available to
make the switch. What isn't available is vision and imagina-
tion, along with investment capital. Wall Street won't in-
vest in environmentally friendly projects unless and until
they can see the same kinds of return on investment that
they get in China or other hot markets. Our old people that
own the pension funds are the only available source of capi-
tal for the green revolution (other than the government).
It's up to us, the oldsters to save our dying economy by
using our money and our votes intelligently (and patriotic-
ally) to reindustrialize the country.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net