The Next Call To Consume

The Sacramento Bee's editorial this morning -- it argued that as Toyota closes the NUMMI plant in Fremont on April 1, Toyota Motor Corporation shouldn't be shocked if Californians don't show up in their showrooms in the future.

What? Are you kidding me?

California is no longer a place to make stuff -- its role in the global economy is to consume stuff. We are exceptional enough such that we don't have to actually perform work anymore. Our job, under globalization, is to manage, finance, leverage, and insure other nation's manufacturing efforts. We want cheap merchandise and we don't want to pay the high wages to other Californians to have them manufacture it...so off to Vietnam, South Korea, and Bangladesh our manufacturing jobs go. They are educating their own engineers, their own production managers, they offer economic and tax advantages and they have a massive resource pool. So goodbye to the last auto manufacturer in the most autocentric state in the nation.

The NUMMI plant will represent the single largest loss of employment in California during this mild recession; 4,700 jobs and several thousand "ancillary" jobs that support the plant. And if the pattern for all former auto plants in California is followed, in its place will sprout a new mega-consumption-depot-complex with thousands of great paying retail sales associate jobs -- each one paying more than enough to buy that median Fremont home at $531,861. This will be just fine with me. We'll need even more consumption depots when our next president announces the next call to consume. It'll come. In the wake of some future national trauma the future president will compel us to go buy stuff -- a car, a tent trailer, a new wardrobe, electronic gadgets, a drum set, knitting needles, new shoes for Billy, you name it. Buy For America!

Tell me that we've laid out our Californian living arrangements such that our populace can live without a new Toyota every six years. Tell me that our autocentric state will voluntarily boycott Toyotas because of some plant closure. Right. Like our loss of HDVT manufacturing has somehow led to fewer people plying HDTV showrooms in the U.S.

The plant closure will eliminate 2,000 daily round trips across 580 through the Altamont pass because 48% of the plant workers live in the Central Valley. 70 million fewer miles will be driven annually and 75,000 fewer barrels of sweet Nigerian gold will be burnt. Closing NUMMI will get California back on the green track. Once it gets converted into that mega-shopping-complex and once "local" Fremont workers staff it, well, the green-ness of a local economy will shine through. All those Tracy, Ceres, and Stockton plant workers will have to find work in Tracy, in Ceres, or in Turlock, where unemployment hovers around 22%. They can do it. They are resilient Californians. They are exceptional.