No Shoes for American feet...and the coming collapse...

29 years ago, this month, I got fired as a buyer for one of America's oldest and best-known Shoe Companies--which shall remain nameless for now. I was a 30-year old junior executive moving back to my rural hometown from the New York City suburbs where I'd been in a similar position for a lighting fixture manufacturer the previous four years.

This was during the middle of the "outsourcing craze" and some (very few, actually) were just beginning to see what it really meant--the end of good paying, self-satisfying, dignifying jobs... the end of the real American dream, and the end of the real American economy. I complained about the outsourcing, and complained once too often to greedy, deaf, upper-management ears about what this would do to our company.

They fired me.

Four years later the 124-year old shoe company went out of business. (You can still buy the brand, go to the "outlet stores" and you still know the name, but not one speck of that shoe has anything to do with America, anymore.)

Shoe manufacturing is an incredibly complex business. The designs, the machinery involved, the skilled labor--even the more mundane things like the thread suppliers, leather and dye suppliers, shoe lasts (which many younger American's may have never heard of, or seen) the right injection molding machines and the compounds (and the right release agents) to make the soles.

All of that is incredibly complex, and all of it involved knowledgeable people doing their jobs well and RIGHT, all the way up and down the supply chain in order to produce a beautiful, comfortable, long-lasting pair of American shoes.

ALL OF THAT is now GONE. And most of it is irreplaceable. All the skilled labor is now dead or beyond retirement age. All of the suppliers are gone, the equipment has all been broken up and sold for scrap metal. The lasts have been landfilled.

Donald Trump, bless his heart, can talk all he wants about bringing manufacturing back to America, but when we finally do go to war with China, you will see how complete the breakdown has been, how truly HORRIBLY RAVAGED our economy had been ravaged, and you will begin to see Americans everywhere--within several years-- with no shoes on their feet, and no way to get any.

Greed for that "cheap third-world wage" led the bosses of my 1990s era to commit the worst kind of treason against the American people--to literally sell out the soul of the American economy (the manufacturing base) to destroy what made America great, and left the citizens with no shoes on their feet.

AND shoes are only one example. In industry after industry--things we import by the container load from a country that hates us-- from machine tooling to television sets, to motorcycles...lighting fixtures...we've lost it all, and getting it all back (if we ever do) is going to be tremendously expensive and tremendously difficult--far beyond what most Americans can even imagine.

We can talk all we want about the Saul Alinskys, and George Soros's of the world who are, indeed, trying to ring the last vestiges of decency out of our political system. And, yes, it's important to fight COMMUNISM and to maintain our Constitution any way we still can. But the death blows have already been dealt to our economy--where the rubber meets the road. AND IT WAS AMERICAN EXECUTIVES of the generation before mine that did that to us, WILLINGLY AND often with no real thought or conscience decision to betray.

BUT BETRAYAL IT WAS, and when those huge container ships finally stop coming...and they will...We will all learn the price of neglect...neglecting to hold our leaders accountable the way others in what we used to call "the third world" do.... BY TAKING TO THE STREETS.

We're too comfortable and too fat, and it is going to take those uncomfortable holes in the soles of our feet to finally drive us into action--if it's not too late.

Sadly, though, it is. It took over hundred years for the American shoe industry to get to the amazing place it was at in the early 90s before it all went away, and it will take at least a generation to get it back when the time comes.

That's a lot of cold feet...