No Longer

I might have mentioned how Sacramento lost several dozen manufacturing jobs recently with the shuttering of the Kramer Carton Company, located in the hole of the SMUD campus doughnut. In all likelihood, SMUD will acquire this property (what better way to do it than under a distressed sale) and our forty five year dream of a contiguous property from 59th to 65th will be complete.

The link shows what sorts of manufacturing jobs were lost: offset printing and sheet feed operators, gluing, material handlers...these are the exact sorts of jobs that defined America for decades, that sustained families, that truly created things. We are losing them all to cheap packaging products made in Thailand that'll fall apart if it so much as sprinkles outside, but that's what we wanted. We got what we wanted; cheap merchandise and no jobs.

I make a bold claim that I produce electricity, and by most accounts I can stand by that argument, even though I sit in a cubicle all day...but the truth is, no one runs in hamster wheels to produce power. The protection relays I set are manufactured in Monterrey, Mexico, Markham, Ontario, and Reading, England. No Westinghouse or General Electric relays are manufactured here in our America anymore, where once they were exclusively built here for every U.S. utility and every other utility everywhere else in the world. Total domination.

No longer.

We're too good for that now. We're too busy shuttling our kids off to day care in our Land Rovers (made overseas), to our jobs in sales, finance and insurance (managing the affairs of products produced elsewhere), and back to our private 3,850 sq. ft. starter mansions, to our ribeyes (produced 1,500 miles away in some, some, well, somewhere) on the stainless grill (manufactured elsewhere) by the pool.