1960'S: BUY AMERICAN

It was during this era that I began to see America's manufacturing industries descend into the long journey to obscurity. With American laborers living the high life with salaries and benefits bestowed on them by union negotiations, with CEO's and other executives receiving unbelievable bonuses, and with the increasing cost the manufacturers added to American products to offset those expenses, the door opened wide for enterprising countries to bring their much lower priced products into America. And did they ever bring in lower prices! I have first hand experience with foreign imports. Back during my years as an employee in a ball and roller bearing distributorship, I began to see Japanese bearings entering the country at an alarming rate. If a specific bearing sold from an American price book was $12.00, the Japanese version would be $5.00 or perhaps $7.00. In the very beginning, the standard reaction of both industry and unions was to label the imports as shoddy junk and not fit to be a quality replacement part. That mantra was quickly dismissed when it was discovered that the quality of the product was every bit as good as the import. We were urged to "BUY AMERICAN." China wasn't even in the picture back then. However, as the Communist Chinese nation adopted "imperialist" American capitalism, a very very formidable competitor came on the scene. Slave wages in China, as compared with those of a union shop, brought America into an economic downturn which changed us from a manufacturing economy to a service-oriented, technically oriented economy. The smokestacks are gone. Today it is nearly impossible to find any product that doesn't carry a Chinese or other foreign label.