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I grew up in Ohio, in a town where most folks worked for GM. Ford was practically a dirty word. As I grew up, though, "Ford" was replaced by the other "F" word: foreign. By that time, I was working for a division of GM myself and I was frequently advised not to park a foreign car in the parking lot unless I was looking for an insurance claim. I remember distinctly, in fact, the time that a nearby lot full of new Honda's were vandalized - apparently the vandals didn't realize they had been assembled in the company's Marysville, OH plant (the company currently employs 13,000 Americans).
Though well intentioned - the economy was crumbling and my hometown was part of a larger "Rust Belt" created by the export of jobs - the vandals were misguided. Buying American is complex, largely because even determining what is American is complex. If I buy a GM vehicle am I supporting American workers? Or the maquiladoras of Mexico? Or corruption in the UAW? It's simpler if you look at what fuels the car. Gasoline is a derivative of crude oil. Right now, over 75% of the world's crude oil reserves are controlled by the OPEC member nations. In case you don't recall 7th grade geography, OPEC is comprised of 11 countries including Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Indonesia, Algeria, and Nigeria. Countries, in short, which lack political and social stability. This is a region where ten short years ago the U.S. went to war to preserve stability, where we continue to maintain an active military and political presence to this day (pause to pay your respects to the sailors of the USS Kohl). Moreover, OPEC reserves are estimated to last merely another 80 years - certainly within our children's and grandchildren's lifetimes - if managed well. In 1996, the US imported almost half of its total crude oil consumed. But as our newly elected president will hasten to point out, the US has plenty of untapped oil reserves. So why worry? Because oil exploration is costly - to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is also dangerous, especially when exploring remote areas such as the Alaskan wilderness or deep-sea reserves. It is time consuming - a decade is typical from exploration to actual usability of the resource. And it is an absolute environmental nightmare, from the exploration to the drilling to the refining to the transportation (so painfully brought to our attention by the recent spill near the Galapagos Islands).
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