With his State of the Union address, President Obama delivered an important message that Congress and the American people need to hear: our nation's leaders must pass legislation that creates American jobs now.
America, our shining city on a hill, has been blessed with great fortune in our proud past, but as the President noted, every generation faces new challenges and new opportunities. We must be bold and forward looking, never forgetting that America's prosperity has always relied on hard work, solid education, and well-maintained infrastructure. We're a nation that has always thrived when we've built things - the light bulb, the automobile, the Internet, and the GPS. We need to build things again. We need to Make It In America
This fall I was invited to cover the the Keep It Made In America Tour put on by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. I spent a week driving around Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, ejoying the fall colors and visiting small towns all along the way.
I live in Silicon Valley where in spite of the high unemployment -- still 10.6% -- it's still pretty nice here, so the extent and especially breadth of the decline of so many cities and towns was a shock. Everywhere you go you see America's infrastructure crumbling! Of course I know this has been going on, but when you actually come from somewhere that is still pretty nice and see it firsthand - and everywhere - you really see it.
When it comes to getting around, Americans love to consider the question of "what if...?"
As a result, our cars have evolved into "land yachts", our trucks have become "monster trucks", and the desire to drag our living spaces around with us has morphed into converted busses with rooms that pop out of the side, a Mini-Cooper hidden under the master bedroom floor, and self-tracking satellite dishes that fight for space on the roof with air conditioning equipment.
And for more than a few of us, "what if...?" has even extended to "what if my car...was a jet car?"
In today's improbable reality I'm here to tell you that Chrysler engineers asked that exact same question, for roughly a quarter of a century, and as a result they actually designed and deployed seven generations of cars with jet engines-and they came darn close to putting the eighth-generation design on sale to the general public.
It's a story of pocket protectors and slide rules and offices full of guys who look a bit like Drew Carey...but as we'll see in Part Two, it may also be a story of technology that couldn't be perfected "back then", but could be reborn in our own times.
The last major auto plant in California has closed today. NUMMI, a joint project between GM and Toyota, was eventually shifted entirely to Toyota when GM pulled out of the deal. Toyota has decided that it does not need the plant on its own.
Toyota Motor Corp. has decided to close its auto plant in the Bay Area city of Fremont early next year, eliminating about 4,700 jobs and bringing large-scale automobile production in California to an end.
Executives of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., the joint venture Toyota set up with General Motors Corp. in 1984 to operate the sprawling assembly plant, told its workforce this morning that the plant would shut down in March, according to a union member who attended the meeting. (LA Times 8/27/09)
Other than a few small auto parts plants and minor facilities, like Tesla's new facility in the bay area, the auto industry has almost completely left California. Now, we were never a huge auto manufacturing state relative to our size, but this is a landmark. However, it is symbolic of our ailing manufacturing sector.
If California is to really recover from the last 3 boom-bust cycles, we are going to need to build a truly balanced economy. We can't build it on real estate or computer programmers alone, we need it all. And a key part of that is a vibrant manufacturing sector.
Now, some of this will come with the "green jobs" expansion, but green jobs alone probably won't provide California enough of a manufacturing sector to really create a balanced economy. One would suppose that this is why politicians like John Garamendi were falling all over one another to get NUMMI to stay. They realize that this is a very real issue.
In order to create real meaningful manufacturing sector jobs, we'll need to provide companies with what we have always done well here in California: providing a qualified and abundant workforce and a good infrastructure. However, with the recent budget cuts, we are growing increasingly in danger of falling behind in both areas.
The way to really build a solid manufacturing sector isn't to engage in the race to the bottom that some states engage in, but rather to provide an excellent value with excellent resources. California can do that, but we can't keep slashing and burning through our state government and expect to stay competitive.
John Garamendi has been seeking votes in California for well over 30 years. He first took a run for the Governor's mansion in 1982, and was set to do so again in 2010 until the seat in CA-10 opened up, and he was inspired to return to Washington, where he served in the Clinton Administration in the Department of the Interior. He has the most diverse record of anybody in the race, with stints at the federal level, the state legislature, and in two statewide offices, as the Insurance Commissioner and now Lieutenant Governor. In our interview, we discussed health care, lessons learned from regulating insurance, No Child Left Behind, saving the NUMMI plant in Fremont (more on that from Garamendi here), and foreign policy in Iran. I found Garamendi to come at issues in a very comprehensive and thoughtful way, and you can see this for yourself below. A paraphrased transcript follows. (flip it)
