A Gathering to Define America’s Future

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[via The Detroit News] The National Summit, a three-day event (June 15-17) at the Marriott Renaissance Center is billed as “a gathering to define America’s future,” and aims to create consensus recommendations for increasing the country’s competitiveness in the areas of technology, energy, environment and manufacturing.

“Our goal is nothing less than to reinvent our economy,” Beth Chappell, Economic Club CEO Beth Chappell said in welcoming remarks. “We’re going to compile these proceedings into America’s to-do list.”

The summit was launched two years ago when Michigan’s troubled economy was an anomaly. Now that economic crisis has spread across the land and throughout the globe, the Detroit gathering takes on new meaning, said Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co.

“Unless you’ve been living on another planet for the last year, you have a pretty good idea of why we’re here,” Ford said in the opening session.

Ford pointed to Detroit’s historic global leadership in manufacturing and innovation during the last century in his remarks, nothing that while the summit was not focused solely on the Motor City’s ongoing woes in the current crisis, “We’re also on the fault line of the economic earthquake that has shaken this nation.”

Ford also noted that the United States stands alone in not promoting and protecting its essential industry with an explicit manufacturing policy.

“In Detroit, we’ve seen first hand that having no policy is a bad policy,” he said. “Other countries understand this, and they work to maintain a healthy industrial base.”  >> Read more here.