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Whaen the forum ctivity level incrases in the morning the free-trade kooks wil come on the thread to tell us these are buggy whip industries that should be exported while the displaced workers should become high level investment bankers talking to each other over telephones.

Pat Buchannan and Ross Perot did not get very many votes, and still would not get very many. Those 2 were the strongest supporters of American jobs, and who were against NAFTA, etc.

I dont think most people care that Americans are going to lose all of our manufacturing and technical jobs.

Kaiser Aluminum last week announced a deal to sell its Tacoma Tideflats smelter to the Port of Tacoma, which will likely flatten it to use the site as a container terminal; that smelter once employed more than 350 workers.

How many will the container terminal employ? Given the salraies earned by ILWU longshoremen ($80K+) this could be a net gain for the local economy.

Keywords in article:

"steelworker"
"miner"
"lumber mill"
"smelter"

Key quote:

Jobs come and go, companies come and go, industries come and go; that's one of the hazards of living in a system with a certain degree of economic freedom. They come and go for reasons too timeless to call a trend -- the business cycle, bad or short-sighted management, changing technology or customer tastes, depletions or shifts in raw material supplies.

Could government play a huge role in why jobs come and go? Specifically government regulation in the environmental area?

Let's face it; the United States and particularly liberal Democrats want to kick the steel, mining, logging, and smelting industries to the curb. To anyone with money, the local steel mill, surface mine, sawmill, or smelter is a bad neighbor that could just as easily exist in a foreign country. NIMBYism and its government attendant are hammering many of the nails into the coffin of America's basic industries.