Stimulate the US economy.

A meme going around now tells people to "stimulate the US economy, not China's. Buy American-made goods! Shop at American businesses." This ignores the fact that American corporate leadership made the decision decades ago to move manufacturing to countries with lower labor and environmental standards, because American workers were insisting on a better deal from management, and American citizens didn't want to live in a toxic hellhole. So the owners of  manufacturing exported the misery and filth. Along with it went the paychecks.

The drop in living standards in this country was not immediate. Overseas production made products cheaper. Credit cards made buying too easy. A person could still aspire to move up the pay scale and get a cushier job, so the loss of manufacturing jobs was less apparent unless you happened to live in a factory town that collapsed within weeks after the major employer shut down. Most people only think about the relationship of job to paycheck. Take money, purchase necessities. Use money left over to purchase non-essentials. Yeah, you should save some, but in the 1980s, interest on savings plummeted, and lots of people went too far with their credit cards. A series of recessions were largely caused by excess consumer debt. I don't know what the official explanation was, but looking from the sidelines it appeared that people got overextended, pulled back, recovered a bit, and began to spend again. We end up living on the expanding shell of a hollowed-out economy because nothing has a basis in reality.

The current disease crisis brings us face to face with essential reality. What do you need? Water, food, shelter, and varying degrees of social interaction and cooperation. The social aspects can be described as love and belonging, esteem, and self actualization, but those are outgrowths of your ability to contribute to and receive physiological needs. I won't say that you don't need them. Even an introvert likes to have a friend or two.

Water depends on a clean environment and control of corporate interests that would privatize the resource and profit from its distribution. Can you say Nestlé? Food depends on clean agriculture and a dispersed food production system that puts sources near end users as much as possible. Agricultural land has been devoured by suburban sprawl. Zoning and community association rules restrict or forbid gardening in some places. There are economic advantages to operations of a certain size. Any size garden requires time and attention that you have to take from other things. Some are more commercially viable than others.

Shelter depends on affordability. It also depends on finding a suitable site. Settlements used to depend on the availability of water and food. If something else drew a population, like a mineral mine in a desert, the money generated by the mine could pay for the import of necessities not provided by the local environment. The same is true of a manufacturing facility that might need a higher population than a region was able to support with its naturally occurring resources. The ability and willingness to transport food formed the basis for factory farming in the first place. So did the ability to redirect whole rivers to irrigate places with sunshine, but little water.

Once we got in the habit of moving things around to suit ourselves, it was easy to believe that we could get away with more and more of it, playing musical chairs until suddenly the music stopped, as it did last month. And here we are.

The bike business has always been international. In the 1970s road bike boom, European component companies dominated the spec, even on the flagship of American bike building, the Schwinn Paramount. The Paramount was everything that the rest of the Schwinn line was not: lightweight, butted tubing, lugged frames with French Nervex lugs, made-in-Italy Campagnolo dropouts,  and Campy componentry. The rest of the boom depended on either European or Japanese companies using European or Asian parts. There hadn't been a complete American bike industry since the end of the 19th Century, more or less. There still isn't. Nor does there have to be.

We're human beings living on a finite globe. The economy is not a battleground. The war analogy works nicely for capitalist emperors stirring up their troops, but you can't push problems around a globe without shoving them up your own ass sooner or later. The time is now. Lube up. The reckoning has arrived. You want the economy to improve in this country? Support improvements in the country where your jobs went. Make labor more expensive over there, so that over here doesn't look so bad anymore. Either that or go, hat in hand, to the corporate powers in this country and say that you're willing to work for shit wages for them, as the better alternative to having no wages at all. Admit that upward mobility was always a long shot, more of a myth than a reality. Keep voting that their taxes should be nonexistent. Keep agreeing that they have no obligation to the nation in return for the money that they hoard in tax shelters and dribble out in charitable gestures to causes that appeal to them. Let the air be brown again, and the rivers catch fire. Good times, man.

Improvements in manufacturing technology are making more and more people obsolete. Even the people in high tech careers find themselves dangling over the abyss, at risk of obsolescence and unemployment. There are too many of us already for the majority to count on achieving relaxing lifestyles. Priorities are going to change. The basics are going to start looking pretty good.