Dismantling, selling off factories – final nail in the coffin for U.S. manufacturing?

Is it in our national interest to sit idly by while our manufacturing plants and equipment are being dismantled and sold to the highest bidders – sometimes for scrap? If we have any hope of revitalizing our “real” economy, we should conserve this plant and equipment capital. Instead it seems we are squandering, piece by piece, any potential we have in the future to recreate a manufacturing capacity. Decades of capital investment being auctioned to overseas bidders who will now be able to replicate our former manufacturing economy but without the vast amount of capital we had to invest originally.  

                                                                                                                                      Today’s story from The Detroit News by Louis Aguilar: ”Factories for sale: Machinery auctioned off to buyers around the globe” 

 ”Here on the factory floor of what used to be Synergis Technologies Group, the bidding for the Clearing 1,500-Ton 2-Point Straight Side Press soon becomes a global race. A starting offer of $16,000 for the 35-foot-high stamping press with baby-blue trim is placed by a local scrap dealer, one of 350 bidders who have showed up at Wednesday’s auction at this tool-and-die plant outside Grand Rapids. Within minutes, a representative for South Korean manufacturers chimes in for $20,000. Via the live Webcast — with some 170 participants from such faraway locales as Bursa, Turkey; Zagreb, Croatia; and Birmingham, Ala. — comes a bid from Hyderabad, India, for $40,000.”

The dismantling of infrastructure for small change

For a possible payout of $3.00 per pound, people are hauling ladders out to highways and taking down the electrical wiring.  The highways then go dark.  The thieves sell the copper wiring to a recycler, if they survive.  This is a stark example of the true state of our economy:
“Freeways going dark as thieves steal wiring; one man is electrocuted”
Associated Press, March 6, 2008

A Highway Patrol officer urged the public today to report suspicious activity that could point to thieves removing copper wiring from lighting along Southland freeways. Wiring theft has become a plague hitting freeways on the average of once a week, CHP Officer Jennifer Hink said. “They’re blacking out our freeways.”