Chuck Spinney: Re-Industrialization of the USA

 Return to Industrial Production May be the Way Ahead

by GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY, Counterpunch

 The crisis that began in 2008 has brought the deindustrialization of the US and Europe, at the center of the global economic system, to the forefront of the debate. President Barack Obama has made it a key issue of his re-election campaign. There is a new word, “insourcing,” the opposite of “outsourcing” or sub-contracting. The idea is to return industrial production to national territory.

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As long as the general neoliberal framework, with all its elements — the hegemony of the capitalist classes and financial institutions, the complicity of senior management, financialization and globalization — remains unchallenged by “financial repression”, of the kind that took place in the US during the postwar period, all attempts to fight the process of deindustrialization, no matter how successful, will continue to be retrograde. They undermine what remains of the social gains made in the preceding decades, without making any clear contribution to the re-establishment of growth and the rebuilding of employment.

GÉRARD DUMÉNIL and DOMINIQUE LÉVY are economists and co-authors of  The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 2011/.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is a very important article.  A government with intelligence and integrity would re-industrialize using the Open Source Everything ethos combined with the localized food-energy-water model.  As the authors point out, as long as criminal mind-sets continue to dominate government and industry, re-industrializing in the old form will make no difference to the public at large.

See Also:

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust