Commentary: Manufacturers Know All About
Economic Collapse
By Richard McCormack
editor@manufacturingnews.com
September 30, 2008 Volume 15, No. 17
It is sad what has happened to the United States.
For years, as editor of Manufacturing & Technology News, I have heard dozens of domestic
manufacturing company CEOs talk about an impending "collapse" of the U.S. economy. These
were the men who were in the unenviable position of having to close their companies or shut
down factories and watch as most all of their competitors did the same thing.
These were the men who implemented Six Sigma, lean, ISO 9000, and the Baldrige National
Quality and Shingo Prize criteria. They were leaders who agonized over having to move the
world's most efficient production capacity from the United States to Mexico and China in order
to stay in business, because no matter how good they were, it wasn't good enough to survive.
They could compete with other companies, but they could not compete against other
COUNTRIES -- countries that cheated in every way imaginable.
These manufacturing company CEOs were men who loved their employees. Who grew up with
their employees. Who knew their families. Who knew in their hearts the economic, cultural,
moral and physical destruction that was being wrought upon their communities.
U.S. manufacturing company CEOs died many deaths, watching as Wall Street mavericks and
their economic ideological apologists in the U.S. federal government, in Congress and their high-
paid agents in Washington, D.C., forced hundreds of thousands of dedicated, hard-working
Americans into the street, to fend for themselves in a game that was rigged against them.
Has the financial class driven through the heartland of America lately? Have they not taken
AMTRAK between New York City and Washington, D.C., passing through the industrial back
lots of Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton and Newark? Have they not seen an
American landscape stretching for thousands of square miles that loo