After several years in the transportation industry, I can tell you that even products labeled "Made in the USA" products often have components that come from overseas. "Made in the USA" is a marketing tool and very often is just plain not true. Part of the reason is that there are Very Very few companies of any size that are not multi-nationals or owned by multi-nationals. Also, since everything is done with a profit motive, it makes sense in terms of that type of thinking, to go where the expenses are the cheapest.
For instance, there used to be a factory that "made" cheap tools near where we lived. We knew people that worked there. Take, for example, a hammer. The hammer head and handle were manufactured in China and then shipped to this factory. According to the "Made in the USA" rules, if the hammer head was heated up to a certain tempurature and whacked once, within the legal definition of "Made in the USA," the hammer head could be said to have been "made" in the USA (it's got something to do with the legal definition of metal work/blacksmith type stuff, in "making" something)...then the handle could be put on and it could be sold as a hammer that was "Made in the USA" when in the spirit of "Made in the USA" it wasn't.
Now it's not just cheap components or toys that are made overseas, IT jobs and customer service jobs are going overseas in droves, as many on this board have had personal experience with. I'd venture to say that it is not possible to live in modern Western society and "strain out" everything from your life that was "Made in China" or Taiwan, or India, or a maquiladoro in the Mexican border...
Squeeze every penny of profit out with no consideration of human rights, quality or environmental regulations...that's just the way corporations work nowadays.
Edited because I forgot to say: It's a downward spiral...people in general aren't willing to pay extra for stuff when they can get the "Made in China" (or wherever) item cheaper. And as people's real incomes go down (partially as jobs are shipped overseas), they simply can't afford to shop with their consciences rather than their pocketbooks. How often have you heard about abuses by Wal-Mart? That they keep their employees at just under full-time so they don't have to pay benefits, and sell stuff made by child labor in sweatshops...yet who "has" to shop at Wal-Mart because they just can't afford to shop anywhere else? The poor (especially the rural poor, in my experience). Because they can't afford to shop anywhere else.
