The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele Page A

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    THE BIRTH OF APPLE
    Defenders of free trade and the ruthless corporate behavior that often accompanies it contend that the fate of companies such as Vise-Grip, while sad for those who lose their jobs, is merely part of a natural process of the American economy renewing itself. The nation, they say, is constantly being reinvented as old industries and companies give way to new ones. Along the way, old jobs are eliminated or offshored. It’s easy to assume that perhaps older companies such as Vise-Grip did not keep up with the times (though it did) or that its invention was no longer relevant (the Vise-Grip remains a hugely popular tool). But the story must be different for twenty-first-century innovators. Surely current innovations are valued more highly and treated more carefully so that their benefits can be shared by the communities that supported their creation? If only that were true. Look no further than the story of an iconic American company, Apple Computer.
    The story has been told many times of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, tinkering with electronic components in the Jobses’ family garage, built the first Apple computer in 1976 and launched the personal computer industry.
    Like William Petersen of Vise-Grip a half-century earlier, Jobs and Wozniak had an idea, and their curiosity and ingenuity enabled them to create a new product from it. And like Vise-Grip, Apple was soon manufacturing its products for sale, first from a building south of San Francisco and then in an assembly plant in Fremont, California, on the other side of the Bay. Soon additional plants in Elk Grove, California, near Sacramento, and Fountain, Colorado, near Colorado Springs, would be turning out Apple computers. For the two new plants, the future looked especially bright.
    Apple’s Elk Grove plant, opened in 1992, became the centerpiece of Sacramento’s campaign to attract high-tech companies. Other computer makers soon followed. By the mid-1990s, the Sacramento area was considered the computer manufacturing capital of the United States. Apple’s Elk Grove plant, which manufactured circuit boards and desktop computers, operated seven days a week and employed 1,500 persons.
    About the same time, the Apple plant in Fountain went into production and soon became the company’s largest manufacturing facility, turning out 1 million PowerBook and desktop computers a year. It was a state-of-the-art facility that helped the Colorado Springs area attract other high-tech companies. The emergence of this new industry was a relief to the area, which had long been dependent on the ups and downs of defense contracts from Washington.
    Apple seemed to be following the classic path of industrial development that Vise-Grip and scores of other domestic manufacturers had taken for years. A creative entrepreneur invents a product, builds plants to make it, and markets it to consumers, all the while employing ever more people to build the product. This is win-win innovation.
    But Apple changed the rules, and the story diverged from the pattern that U.S. manufacturers had followed for decades. Rather than continue to open new plants in other U.S. cities and expand existing operations, the company, following the examples of other computer and electronics makers, moved production offshore, largely to China. Just twelve years after it opened, the Elk Grove plant was closed, “cutting out the core of what used to be one of the brightest stars in the region’s high-tech constellation,” as the Sacramento Bee put it. Apple sold the Fountain plant to an electronics firm in 1996. The new owners continued to manufacture Apple computers under contract for three years until production there also moved abroad. Today the 250,000-square-foot building sits vacant, a painful reminder of what was once a thriving tech industry.
    As recently as 2000, Colorado Springs was riding a high-tech job boom. But since then, with the closure of the former Apple plant and