Sputtering Without Energy and Industrial Policies

We have neither an industrial nor an energy policy. Is it any wonder our economy is a mess?

The United States, a onetime nation of broad-shouldered cities where goods were made and sold, is becoming the moral equivalent of the hollow corporation. It rapidly is turning into a place where little is designed, developed or manufactured -- except profits and losses gained and suffered from gambling on Wall Street.

That is one reality.

Another is that America, a onetime First World nation, is becoming a Third World country, one that has no manufacturing infrastructure but, instead, does the lowest-wage bidding of foreign-owned companies that have received hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives and other financial breaks to set up shop in "business-friendly" states.

"Business-friendly," in this context, often translates to "nonunion" -- states such as Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia -- states that might as well hang signs warning: "Union Organizers and Union Members Not Welcome Here."

It is no accident that almost every major foreign automobile company -- BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota and Volkswagen -- put assembly plants or other facilities in one or several of those states, often with the eager assistance of state officials blessing the arrival of the foreign companies with tax breaks and other goodies.

The foreign-owned enterprises often have been praised by their supporters in state and local governments and in media outlets as generating the right kinds of jobs -- employment that lifts formerly jobless and minimum-wage people from poverty without giving them the average $56,650 a year in wages or the expensive medical and pension benefits enjoyed by United Auto Workers-represented production workers at General Motors, Ford or Chrysler.

It seems a "good wage" is one that does not encourage serfs to start thinking of themselves as masters of their fate.

It is ironic.

It was GM, Ford and Chrysler in conjunction with the UAW that helped to create a viable middle class in America, especially in the nation's African American and other minority communities. It was GM, Ford and Chrysler that helped America win World War II and fight the Korean and Vietnam wars by producing many of the weapons and much of the equipment used by the United States in those conflicts.

But here we are today engaged in a debate over whether we should bother "bailing out" Detroit, whether we should allow the Big Three to die an ignoble death in our current economic milieu of wildly fluctuating fuel prices, crippled banks, failing insurance companies and frozen credit markets.

After all, the thinking goes: we don't need the Big Three as long as we have BMW and Toyota. Well, here's hoping that we continue to live in peace with Germany and Japan.