I would suggest that they did not suck it dry at all. They just left because it became possible to (a) hire labor for much less in other countries (b) it became easier to move capital (and profit) between countries. There's still plenty of life left in the midwest, but it would need (metaphorically) good irrigation and even a little fertilizer. Globalization robbed it of those things.
Globalization did not ‘rob’ the Midwest or ‘sucked it dry’ or whatever. Anymore than than the Asian economies were BEING robbed and sucked dry by the Midwest before the switch.
See what I mean? Capital is bidirectional and always has been.
Nope, this is categorically false. Historically, the movement of capital was extremely limited. You could not just decide to invest <big-number-of-currency-units> in a foreign country, and you could not just repatriate the profits that might arise from the investment.
For the last 50-100 years, the world has shifted quite dramatically towards making both capital and profit able to move across (many) borders much, much more easily.
Only the EU stands as an example of political and economic changes that also allow similar free movement of labor.
> How did this living system die? Well, it became infested with parasites, didn't it? Parasites of the neoliberal globalization investor type, who sucked it dry, then fled overseas for riper pastures.
Also: inflexibility, non-adaptation, and homogeneity.
Inflexibility: as workforces in the Industrial Belt were largely unionized, they refused to accept radical wage cuts (i.e. GM and Ford could pay $3 an hour in Mexico vs. $30 an hour in Detroit).
Non-adaptation: is this the notion that a heavily parasitized organism could survive by delivering more of its resources to the parasites? Labor costs were cutting into profits and dividends, and labor costs could be reduced by writing trade deals that eliminated things like tariffs on cross-border capital flows.
Homogeneity: completely unclear what this is supposed to refer to. The models of cars produced by GM and Ford in Mexico, or the types of steel and aluminum produced in China and imported to the US, seem to be more or less the same as was once produced domestically. Do you mean 'workforce diversity' perhaps (although I don't understand how that would factor in)?
It's curious how the corporate media is so resolutely opposed to discussing the Rust Belt issue, and the related ongoing financialization of the US economy, even though that's the key deciding factor that gave rise to Trump's surprise victory in 2016.
What you mean here is that the hard-fought gains of the labor movement over 100 years or so were drastically cut or eliminated, because what used to be economically infeasible (using overseas labor, moving capital overseas and repatriating profits) became not just feasible but desirable, thanks to specific legislative and administrative changes enacted by the US government.
Without those changes, the workforce of the Industrial Belt would not have been characterized as "inflexible", but rather smart employees who had negotiated a respectable cut of their employers profits and were able to enjoy life a little more because of it.
Are you saying we should be cautious when using simple biological analogies to describe complex human social behavior?
Or is that just an ad hominem attack on the concept that investment capitalism is fundamentally flawed, and is in fact more of a destructive force than a creative force relative to industrial capitalism in the competitive market model?
Consider: is the situation where a cabal of Wall Street billionaires control almost all decisions about industrial production (basically the current USA system, with some outliers, see Tesla's upset of the car cabal) really all that different from a situation where a cohort of Communist Party insiders make all such decisions (Soviet Union), or where a fascist state-industrial combine (IG Farben - Krupp - Nazi Party) does?
Neo-fascist, neo-communist, neo-authoritarian, neo-feudal - investment capitalism has a long history of involvement in all such behavior, dating back to Lloyd's of London investing in the slave trade, or the behavior of various British Crown Corporations in India.
