I can remember, while working as a Product Manager for an industrial controls company back in the year 2000, how very impressed I was that countries with vastly different cultural differences and currencies were finally getting their act together, and simplifying things for their global trading partners.
While Eurailing in the 80's through countries including Germany, France, and Holland, with meager resources for my trip, it became a fear-wrought exercise, upon arriving at the Central Rail Station of each city I visited, to seek out a currency-exchanger who would not too harshly exploit a young, naive first-time visitor from upstate New York. The fear was double while exchanging U.S. Dollars for East German marks in the DDR's former capital!
So it's with sincere sadness, having known and befriended so many folks in that part of world over the years, that I see the European project going backward. Of course, this would all be very abstract for me, if it weren't for the current terrible and interconnected state of all economies around the planet. "Contagion" - like the lethal virus depicted in the recent reality-inspired movie - is what is on everyone's mind at the moment.
In LinkedIn and other global forums I participate in, the resurgent Social Darwinians of the world - with their pretend short-term memories - promote the idea of Moral Hazard, and forget the successful long-term thinking of great leaders like George Marshall. How convenient it is to blame the un-employed for being un-employed, or to blame the indebted nations for building such a deficit!
In the middle of all this global chaos, many good, intelligent, disciplined and hard-working people have lost their jobs and income, and along with that, their dignity. I need to count myself among those people.
But persevering, I move on, and continue to apply for jobs and think outside the box for what the next gig might be for this 40-something engineer. Along these lines, a Chinese (PRC) solar manufacturer - the first manufacturer *anywhere* to do so in the past 11 months - has spoken with me about the possibility of distribution in New York. Yay!
As my luck would have it though, within weeks of contact from my potential Chinese supplier to a systems integration firm idea of mine, a national effort - promoted on television and Internet in the U.S. as an "American" initiative - began. This effort is likely also financed in-part by German and other European solar OEMs, and has begun to make its way through the U.S. Congress and cable television. Tariffs on Chinese solar products may not be too far off into the future.
So how strange it felt last week, while at a SUNY New Paltz event designed to spur U.S. solar manufacturing, that I had to admit I was in talks with a PRC solar OEM. As an engineer, I've trained for and worked in U.S. manufacturing since the 1980's, and grew-up in the 1960's and 1970's with manufacturing all around me in the Albany & Hudson Valley region.
In the 1970's, my mom worked in a felt mill in Rensselaer, my grandfather was a unionized machinist during World War II in Poughkeepsie, my Dad, his brother and sisters worked at IBM in Poughkeepsie since the 1950's. But in this strange new world we all live in now, my first and best offer was from what Richard Nixon used to call the "Red Chinese"!
So as not to leave folks reading this blog piece in too much despair, I share a comical song here of Georg Kreisler, an Austrian Jew who passed recently that I'm just now starting to learn about. Georg returned to Europe after the second world war and amazingly made a career in Europe the way Tom Lehrer made a career in the U.S. back in the 50's. Thank you, paid GrooveShark.com subscription, for allowing me to catch up with Georg's life-long catalog! If Mr. Kreisler could be successful in a place where they tried to annihilate his people, than my own difficulties are small in comparison.
While Eurailing in the 80's through countries including Germany, France, and Holland, with meager resources for my trip, it became a fear-wrought exercise, upon arriving at the Central Rail Station of each city I visited, to seek out a currency-exchanger who would not too harshly exploit a young, naive first-time visitor from upstate New York. The fear was double while exchanging U.S. Dollars for East German marks in the DDR's former capital!
So it's with sincere sadness, having known and befriended so many folks in that part of world over the years, that I see the European project going backward. Of course, this would all be very abstract for me, if it weren't for the current terrible and interconnected state of all economies around the planet. "Contagion" - like the lethal virus depicted in the recent reality-inspired movie - is what is on everyone's mind at the moment.
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| Image Courtesy Wikipedia |
In LinkedIn and other global forums I participate in, the resurgent Social Darwinians of the world - with their pretend short-term memories - promote the idea of Moral Hazard, and forget the successful long-term thinking of great leaders like George Marshall. How convenient it is to blame the un-employed for being un-employed, or to blame the indebted nations for building such a deficit!
In the middle of all this global chaos, many good, intelligent, disciplined and hard-working people have lost their jobs and income, and along with that, their dignity. I need to count myself among those people.
But persevering, I move on, and continue to apply for jobs and think outside the box for what the next gig might be for this 40-something engineer. Along these lines, a Chinese (PRC) solar manufacturer - the first manufacturer *anywhere* to do so in the past 11 months - has spoken with me about the possibility of distribution in New York. Yay!
As my luck would have it though, within weeks of contact from my potential Chinese supplier to a systems integration firm idea of mine, a national effort - promoted on television and Internet in the U.S. as an "American" initiative - began. This effort is likely also financed in-part by German and other European solar OEMs, and has begun to make its way through the U.S. Congress and cable television. Tariffs on Chinese solar products may not be too far off into the future.
So how strange it felt last week, while at a SUNY New Paltz event designed to spur U.S. solar manufacturing, that I had to admit I was in talks with a PRC solar OEM. As an engineer, I've trained for and worked in U.S. manufacturing since the 1980's, and grew-up in the 1960's and 1970's with manufacturing all around me in the Albany & Hudson Valley region.
In the 1970's, my mom worked in a felt mill in Rensselaer, my grandfather was a unionized machinist during World War II in Poughkeepsie, my Dad, his brother and sisters worked at IBM in Poughkeepsie since the 1950's. But in this strange new world we all live in now, my first and best offer was from what Richard Nixon used to call the "Red Chinese"!
So as not to leave folks reading this blog piece in too much despair, I share a comical song here of Georg Kreisler, an Austrian Jew who passed recently that I'm just now starting to learn about. Georg returned to Europe after the second world war and amazingly made a career in Europe the way Tom Lehrer made a career in the U.S. back in the 50's. Thank you, paid GrooveShark.com subscription, for allowing me to catch up with Georg's life-long catalog! If Mr. Kreisler could be successful in a place where they tried to annihilate his people, than my own difficulties are small in comparison.
