Pat Buchanan hits the nail on the head....

I bitched about selling our industrial base to foreign countries for over 20 years! I even voted for this guy because being a factory worker in the 70's and 80's I knew how a hard it was to do something else. If you were stuck with a high school diploma or less you would look forward to "gentile poverty " at best without a good paying factory job.

Millions of us were raising families and there was no way to get a college education or start a successful business and maintain a decent standard of living and not work at the plant.

But our jobs slowly then rapidly were shipped over seas and booze, drugs, and unemployment checks were all that was left as working class  America became known as "the rust belt".

Does anyone think it will ever change back? Or will we have to kill everyone on the planet just to eat?

Don't be surprised if that is all that's left to keep us going!

Manufacturing's dismal decade

.....far exceeding our trade deficit in crude oil. A decade of such deficits in manufactures has devastated the industrial states.

From December 2000 to December 2010, 22 states lost a third or more of their manufacturing jobs. Massachusetts, New York and Ohio lost 38 percent of their manufacturing jobs, New Jersey 39 percent, North Carolina 42 percent, Rhode Island 44 percent, Michigan 48 percent.

Political result: Free-trader John McCain lost all seven, including the formerly "red" states of Ohio and North Carolina.

Trade in autos, trucks and parts, an industry in which America was dominant in the lifetime of many of us, tells the story.

Last year, the United States ran a trade deficit in autos, trucks and parts of $110 billion. The deficits with Germany, Japan, South Korea and Mexico account for that entire total.

Consider South Korea. Though she has an economy one-fifteenth the size of ours, she exported to us 12 times the dollar volume of trucks, cars and parts that we exported to her.

Rather than make a free-trade agreement with South Korea, why not tell our friends in Seoul: We are tired of arguing with you folks about opening your markets to our goods. Since you folks buy less than $1 billion in autos, etc., from us, while you sell almost $12 billion in your cars and trucks to us, you keep your market. We're taking back ours.