In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades. It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.
You need to understand this if you want to understand what the US future is going to look like in the near future. I have to keep reminding people that college educated people are in the minority in the US. Jobs that *require* a university degree to do are even less than the number of "degreed people" out there. Generally speaking the "ideal" capitalist labour market is a pyramid with manual labour (manufacturing) at the base employing the most numbers of people and the number of people employed falls the higher you go to the point. What the US has done, slowly but surely is cut off the bottom part of the pyramid on the assumption that the remaining portion would be theirs to monopolize. The idea that the US would be the intellectual labour market of choice for the world. Of course, this racist and white supremacist ideology (that is what it is) assumed that other people and places were not able to develop intellectual capital and therefore the "West" would always be "the brain" of the world. As skilled workers in IT and other "intellectual" jobs are finding out, their cheap counterparts in other countries can program, account, design, etc just as well as they can, if not better now that the educational system in the US is falling apart.
It's not that people in manufacturing in the US weren't exploited. They were, but not to the extent that they are now. Back then people were apparently bright enough to figure out that paying these workers decent wages allowed them to consume. Consumption is it's own issue but we'll not deal with that here. Now these businesses do all they can to squeeze workers by pitting them against people in other lands who, having lived with next to nothing will gladly work for what for an American would be sub-poverty (as in live in a cardboard box under a freeway) wages. But hey...Americans get cheap shit at Walmart, Target and Dollar General.
And these companies are now so bold as to attempt to dictate to the US govt. what tax rate they are willing to pay to remit income they have stashed away in other countries. Can you imagine YOU telling the IRS that you won't pay your taxes until you come to an agreement as to how much YOU think you should pay. This underscores what we are seeing with "austerity" measures being enacted across the world as bankers do everything that they can to avoid taking actual losses by making sure that the governments they put into a bind make sure to pay their bills. But that's another topic for another day.
