Reality check:
Call me what you will, but I guess I'm just a conspiracy theorist or something as I tend to view the world as a global 'Corpocracy,' with multinational firms pulling the strings of 'democratically elected' leaders here and abroad, much to the demise of the average American.
Corporations are profit-maximizing machines. They seek out the cheapest labor and resources and avoid costly environmental and labor regulation - this is logical for them as long as the costs of this are externalities, to be born by others.
The problem in this new, flat earth is that Americans are going to have to realize that unless this global Corpocracy is reigned in somehow, in a coordinated fashion, human labor will be the lowest cost and more pressured commodity of all, and that means Americans are going to have to come to grips with the very real fact of falling real wages for themselves and their children and they have to bid their services against those they never had to do so before.
Americans have only begun to feel the effects of this new reality. And it will only grow at an accelerating pace in the coming years, as fabrication and capital can be located anywhere, and there are billions of humans willing to bid aggressively for work, and the fruits of their labor can be shipped all over the globe at record speed thanks to an excellent and efficient transport complex.
And, to really highlight how cheap labor is, factory towns in entire Chinese Provinces are being literally disassembled and shipped to Vietnam and Thailand, because the going rate of 50 to 80 cents per hour was far more expensive than the bids made by Vietnamese and Thai labor - rumor has it by a factor of 3x.
While America was still digesting the notion of incredibly cheap Chinese Labor, Chinese factory owners have move aggressively into Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam (especially), to cut their already low labor costs.
Good luck in this world of 20 cent per hour labor, America. You'd better develop truly skilled and high tech industry producing goods and services that no one else can, guard the recipe with your blood, and consider economic prosperity as vital as the most fundamental aspects of national defense if you hope to maintain or raise your citizenry's living standards.