Made in America?

Checked out the Ford Fusion in front of Costco the other day. This hybrid vehicle boasts 41 mpg, the most in its class. Motor Trend hailed it as car of the year.

This Ford Fusion, however, is made in Hermosillo.

Hermosillo is in Mexico (unmentioned on the sticker) where Ford started building vehicles in the 1980s or when the first "jobless" recovery began in the United States.

Coincidence? Hardly.

We, apparently, are in the beginning of another jobless recovery. This time, though, promises to be worse than the previous ones.

As we ship jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere, fewer Americans have work. It's one of the things they apparently don't teach in business schools in this country: Fewer jobs means fewer employed. Fewer employed means less income. Less income means less buying power. Less buying power means fewer items purchased. Fewer items purchased means less factories are needed.

With the national jobless rate at around 10 percent, Oregon is about 12 percent and Central Oregon about 15 percent. The "underemployment" in Oregon is about 22 percent, third worst in the nation. Underemployment refers to those who work at jobs far beneath their previous experience or are working less than they would like to.

Over the weekend, the New York Times looked at the current "recovery" in an article grimly titled: "The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs."

Here's a paragraph that sums up the problem:

"Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks."

Halliburton, the government oil and gas gian/Iraqi contractor once fronted by Dick Cheney, moved its headquarters offshore to avoid paying taxes on the billions it collected from the U.S. government. Even capitalists apparently don't believe in our form of government.

The article also notes that while job growth was 2.4 percent annually in the 1980s and 1990s, it had been 3.5 percent a year from the 50s to the 70s. Well, during the past 10 years, the annual job growth was 0.9 percent.

The companies that do hire workers are building fortunes on the backs of part-time, temporary on contract employees with no benefits, certainly not health insurance.

In fact, part of Wal-Mart's business strategy is to shift their health-care costs onto the public sector at the same as it tries to fight any change to improve public heath care.

So, it is no wonder that General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt. More companies will either move all production overseas or go out of business altogether.

With Americans out of work, what will they be able to afford, particularly now that easy credit is now history?

Free-market capitalism rests on the assumption that unfettered markets are self-correcting and maintain a balance within the system. Well, we've seen the result of the free market with the collapse of the financial system.

The very same people who decry government intervention in the marketplace turned to the government for help. Once they got this aid, they then blamed the government for going into debt to bail them out. Biting the hand that feeds them has proved quite profitable.

We've long been conditioned to consider socialism and communism to be the greatest threats to our capitalist society. Well, capitalism is quite capable of destroying itself as we've witnessed the past couple of years.

There once was a theory that said if the rich had to pay little or taxes, the money they saved would then "trickle down" to the masses to form a robust economy.

As tears stream down the faces of the jobless and the underemployed, we have the true meaning of "trickle down."