The article "Unmade in America: the true cost of a global assembly line" struck me as appalling. It is unreal how heavily our country (as wealthy as it claims to be) rely's so much on other countries for functional production of consumer goods, oil, technology, and more.
When I first read this article a variety of things ran through my mind, one having nothing to do with consumer goods like
Dell and Enron. I was actually thinking about the war and how a major premis for the war in Iraq is because of oil. On Sept. 11, 2001 New York city faced a tremendous tragedy, not only in human lives, but in the economy. For anyone who was in New York that very day, I can firmly say all hell broke loose. Stores closed everywhere serving tremendous financial losses all over the world and in families pockets. Now this is New York, one of the biggest cities in the world. Now, imagine if a similar event happened in any of the other major cities and countries in the world like Hong Kong, Taiwan, all over China, or Colombia even. How often have we bought T-shirts, plates and bowls, or whatever else that read the label: "Made in Hong Kong"? I can tell you, in my lifetime I have seen them atleast a thousand times. Now very often do I find labels that claimed it was Made in the USA. What about Colombia? Most of our coffee comes from there and coffee is a worldwide favorite amongst college students, buisness men and women, corperate officials, travelers, etc. All of these goods (computers, coffee, clothing, etc) appeal to a global market because most human beings need these goods to function properly in their every day lives. If something were to happen in one of these countries, once again the economy would drop and people would begin to fear that history would repeat itself in another Depression.
In terms of the Command and Control Model I think
Elena put it quite simply. There is a major breach in the communication fields between countries and it seems that most are not able to "oversee and maintain an organized structure of production". Which is probably why economys suffer from so much downsizing.
In
Jessica's blog, she speaks about sweatshops. Thats another issue I'd like to raise for a moment. If so many of these countries(like the US) claim to be wealthy, and produce so many goods to countries all over the world, you would think companies like
Nike and other unmentionables could afford to pay their workers more then 5 cents a sneaker. While corperate "business people can afford to go traveling with their families on numerous occasions for pleasure purposes while their workers slave back in their countries scraping for food and shelter. Its just sick.
