The Hollowing : Chips, Apparel, Mfg et al

Wow.
I am still in the lengthy Chapter IV. Pages 56 and 57 really pound the point of the poignant book title well. So, for years we have been exporting apparel all over, and by 2010 apparel laborers will be nearly extinct in the US. However, the BLS -Bureau for Labor Statistics - shows productivity increases for the disapating apparel industry of 3.1% per year from 1987 to 2003. Hmmm...this all began before China was even a capitalist threat. So it all started slowly, innocently, how can we unlock shareholder value by utilizing cheaper labor, creating bigger margins, and larger profits.
Then, the US pioneered the semiconductor chip, and we were again on top of the world, dominant in manufacturing and exporting of the silicon wafer. Wait...bigger margins and larger profits if we outsource, exploiting cheaper labor markets. And then...
It started as a pop, then a pow, and then a boom, boom, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!!!!! China is a capitalist competitor of the nth degree, using bargain basement labor and now exploiting us, exploiting us for our appetite for material goods, goods which we have exported our desire to produce. We are just now starting to see the effects of price competition, diminishing margins, and the foreign monsters are running us out of the businesses that we pioneered. Why? Because we gave them the technology and processes when we exported the production to them for the sake of better margins then, and shrinking profits and industry now, and our debt related to the current account just ratcheting ever so higher and higher....Free Trade, or is it? Like a regal water oak, beautiful and strong, elegant and nimble, but not a live oak that lasts several centuries, a water oak that looks like a live oak but rots from the inside out, and after nearly a century of prosperity, it can be dead in a mere couple decades....