Part of the problem America is facing more and more each day is that the commercial market inside America and around the world is globally based. For almost every item you can buy or the nation’s industries can make or invent, there is a comparable item made somewhere else. For example, buying a car made in the USA means you have equivalent models to choose from made here and elsewhere around the globe. But does that car made in the USA have parity, is it equally as good, as the model made overseas? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. That’s the global economy, reliant on buyers’ taste and needs.
Boeing makes wonderful aircraft for travel and cargo. But then so do Airbus, made in Europe. Airbus already sells more large jet planes than Boeing. Bombardier in Canada and Embraer in Brazil sell more medium sized passenger jets. Can we say that Airbus and Boeing are equivalent top-notch manufacturers? Perhaps yes. But their parity in passenger jets is false since parity means equal, and they are no longer equal in turnover or innovation.
All around the world people respect American achievement. Using successful jet planes as a symbol of American know-how and status, it is hard to forget how important the Boeing 747 Jumbo was across the planet, nor the earlier travel industry leaders of the Boeing 707 and the MacDonald Douglas DC8. These achievements put much of the world’s respect for made in America on the map. Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Intel are also known as American bastions of excellence even as they farm out manufacture overseas. Hollywood is still the world’s top film and TV production powerhouse.
There was a time when the finest audio equipment was made in America. The finest TVs were made by RCA in Indiana. When Japan’s Sony and Akai began making stereo tape recorders and playback equipment in the early ‘60s people scoffed that they could possibly have the technology. Jokes were foolishly made that because Japanese workers had smaller fingers they could make everything smaller. When Japan turned to the car business (and Honda to motorcycles), American media said people would never buy anything designed over there as it wasn’t, could not be, as good as American made. Same thing with Korean manufacture of cars — Hyundai and Kia. And cell phones — Samsung now make more cell phones than Apple and Motorola combined. And computers, and clothing, and electrical components, and microchips … the list of previously only USA-made industries has ramped up around the globe and is growing.
And yet, globally, people have respect for American goods. They prefer shopping for Boeing first. Buick is a luxury success in Beijing. Apple and Intel are standard bearers. That respect is based on our democratic open market and overall moral fairness as a people. Only good people can make a safe airliner. If you had a workforce using exactly the same aircraft design, components, and materials in China, Pakistan, Russia, or Iran, would you trust your life to that plane? Why not? Because those countries currently have no parity with American ethic, American know-how, American trustworthiness.
All that can change if the moral and ethical backbone of the country is destroyed. Our economy will collapse, even if there is parity of planes like Airbus and Boeing, because buyers will not want to support a failed democracy, a proto-fascist government. So when you think of the elections next year, realize it is not just about politics, it is about the very lifeblood of American industry. No one, around the democratic world, will want to shop here since they can shop for parity goods elsewhere without supporting a failed democracy in the USA. Your vote to save our industry counts.
Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.
