Manufacturing is the priority

An apparent sub-plot to the financial crisis, the future of the american ar industry is of greater importance in the long term than the economic impact of the current recession. The financial crisis is a wake up call – because it is better to stop now before the debt situation gets even worse. Refreshingly, it sweeps away much of the vapid optimism about liberal progress, free trade etc. The agenda of world government is partly revealed in Gordon Brown's calls for governance of the financial and economic sphere. We get down to brass tacks.

Yet a short-term consequence of this crisis is the meltdown in the US car industry, All three US manufacturers could close with a loss of 300,000 direct jobs and apparently 2.5 million indirect jobs. Whole states will be decimated in economic terms and national employment would rise to 10%. The future of the US as a manufacturing country hangs in the balance: this impacts on the viability of the US as a great power because scientific and technological advances are stimulated by a healthy manufacturing sector. America is a country where the ideology of internationalism is not as dominant as here and popular feeling is voiced more strongly than in Britain, where there are not the political and media diffusion of power to challenge the established view that manufacturing is not necessary. That this is the establishment view is evidenced by the Rover crisis, where no major party would dare raise the issue of saving the company by British finance. Instead, we practically gave it to the Chinese, who fleeced it for its research and development portfolio, so hastening their march to industrial and technological supremacy. I am not blaming the Chinese; they are simply advancing their own interests by legitimate means; however, we are allowing ourselves to become weak. The ideology of facile internationalism is the the opiate that makes industrial suicide palatable.