Raise the Hammer

For the last 40 years, prosperity, wealth, and “progress” have rested, at least in part, on a grotesque process of auto-cannibalism—it has also been called “dis-accumulation” by David Harvey—of a society that is devouring its own.

Traditional forms of primitive accumulation still exist abroad. Hundreds of millions of former peasants, fisherman, craftspeople, scavengers, herdsmen, tradesmen, ranchers, and peddlers provide the labor power and cheap products that buoy the bottom lines of global manufacturing and retail corporations, as well as banks and agribusinesses. But here in “the homeland,” the very profitability and prosperity of privileged sectors of the economy, especially the bloated financial arena, continue to depend on slicing, dicing, and stripping away what was built up over generations.

Once again a new world has been born. This time, it depends on liquidating the assets of the old one or shipping them abroad to reward speculation in “fictitious capital.” Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s. Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. Since the turn of the millennium alone, 3.5 million more manufacturing jobs have vanished and 42,000 manufacturing plants were shuttered.

Nor are we simply witnessing the passing away of relics of the nineteenth century. Today, only one American company is among the top ten in the solar power industry and the U.S. accounts for a mere 5.6 percent of world production of photovoltaic cells. Only GE is among the top ten companies in wind energy. In 2007, a mere 8 percent of all new semi-conductor plants under construction globally were located in the U.S. Of the 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, none were made in the U.S. The share of semi-conductors, steel, cars, and machine tools made in America has declined precipitously just in the last decade. Much high-end engineering design and R&D work has been offshored. Now, there are more people dealing cards in casinos than running lathes, and almost three times as many security guards as machinists.

http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/steve-fraser-the-archeology-of-decline

At the risk of additional downvotes, yet another example of how painfully convoluted and short-sighted economic policy has become in recent generations.