[Fluid Power]

California,

Nicely put. I agree with what your are saying but I feel that the comments are a little general. From an economic stand point, Japanese, Korea and China are not playing fair in our market. By manipulating their currency, it allows them an unfair advantage in our market place.

I do agree with your comments on GM legecy costs. (the negotiators of the old union contracts just pushed the buck to the later generations.)

The point the article made to me is the US market is only so big, and by buying goods made by foreign companies, in the US, is not really helping the US. Be it cars or toys etc. Auto's are what makes the front page.

Owning an industrial engineering firm that design builds and installs machines for industry, I am faced with this on a weekly basis. I live in Ohio, there is a Honda car plant, motorcycle plant, the Anna engine plant (the largest engine manufacturing plant in the world) and about 150-250 suppliers for these Honda facilities. Having been in business long before the Honda plants were even here, Guess how many engineering jobs I have gotten from any of the plants? If you guessed ZERO you would be correct. It is a small world I live in business wise, and my competitors have had as much success as I have at doing work with them.

You know who gets the work? There is an industrial park that houses some Japanese industrial engineers....They do all of it. To top it off, they buy Japanese parts (pnuematic cylinders, valves, controls etc) to put on the machines. Where do they get parts? From a Japanese parts house, that imports it from Japan. I was in plant this week looking at a safety guard for a new press. This plant does metal stamping for Honda. Where were the presses from? Japan. In fact every peice of equipment in the plant has been brought over from Japan. Care to guess where the dies are made that they use to form the parts? Sony computers, Panasonic TV's in the break room, I could go on...

Me? 99% of the products we represent and use on a daily basis are made in Chicago, Bimba air cylinders, Barrington Automation, Wilkerson FRLs, Parker, etc. All made here.

The article just hits close to home for me. I am not complaining about business, it is very good and I have been fortunate. But, this week, we had 2 plants close that we have done business with every year for the last 15 years..Keystone Powedered Metal (auto related components) and Lancaster Glass......

Darren