Winners and Losers

NAM’s Shopfloor.org blog writes up an interesting “60 Minutes” piece from this last weekend about how Caterpillar is thriving amid a globalizing economy. Too often in government economic policy (and far too often on Lou Dobbs’ show) we focus on stories about the “giant sucking sound,” the closed factories, and the jobs heading overseas. We don’t look closely at places like Caterpillar or companies like Tony Raimondo’s Behlen Manufacturing, whose Chinese subsidiary and overseas growth has helped to employ more workers in Behlen’s Columbus, Nebraska headquarters. In fact, the steel from Behlen’s Chinese team, will make up this summer’s Beijing Olympics basketball pavilion. That’s pretty cool for the workers in Columbus, but it’s not a big headline on the economic pages.
This is, in essence, the heart of a major problem for presidential candidates in the 2008 race: As the global market expands, it