Three years ago, I said to an American Professor from the U.S. Army War College in Washington, in respect to the campaign to return American lost Blue Collar jobs to Asia, that these jobs would never return. They were gone for good.
He retorted that that was precisely so, but I was missing the point, he said. America did not expect, or want, the majority of those humdrum manufacturing jobs back. They should stay in Asia. The Élites, he said, wanted only the commanding heights of Tech. They wanted the intellectual property, the protocols, the metrics, the regulatory framework that would allow America to define and expand across the next two decades of global technological evolution.
The real dilemma however, he said was, "What is to be done with the 20% of the American workforce that would be no longer needed: that was no longer necessary to the functioning of a tech-led U.S. economy?"
In fact, what the Professor said was but one facet of a fundamental economic dilemma. From the seventies and eighties onwards, U.S. corporations were busy offshoring their labour costs to Asia. Partly, this was to cut costs and increase profitability (which it did) - but it also represented something deeper.
Comment: While "progressive" policies can have an important and useful place in politics, what the Dems are moving towards, along with their Technocratic brethren, is nothing less than a full blown Totalitarian state - for which the benign-seeming social justice veneer of Build Back Better/Green New Deal legislation is just a highly cynical ruse and marketing ploy.