I think that I know where you are going with this. I acknowledge that manufacturing is way down in the USA, but blaming the unions goes too far. It must be remembered that it was the unions that allowed the establishment of the middle class. We no longer must buy our goods at the company store with company scrip.

I think that the fault lies with the failure of our government to recognize that wholesale expansion of trade with the third world would ruin our standard of living. Perhaps this ignorance on the part of our government was by design, and at the behest of the the multi-nationals. Paul Krugman another Nobel-Prize winner suggested that we divide the world into enterprise zones to protect the standard of living of the American people.