Now, consider secondary effects of the disaster. When a disaster interrupts major infrastructure facilities, such as communications, transportation, and energy, your business's ability to function is greatly impaired. Workers can't travel and report to work. Customers can't travel to company premises or visit those companies online.

If a disaster's effects are relatively short-lived (meaning only hours or a few days), most businesses can recover. The organization can satisfy pent-up demand for services when it resumes its most critical business processes, usually those processes directly associated with revenue generation or customer service.

If a disaster's effects are more persistent, customers may temporarily divert their demand for goods and services to other suppliers (if other suppliers are available). The nature of the goods or services that an organization provides helps determine whether that organization can recover from a disaster that lasts for more than a few days.

When we opened up international trading, a variety of things can happened. Suddenly the highly unionized workforces of our factories and other industrial enterprises (that, before, were sheltered by tariffs, embargoes, and the lack of organized mass shipping availability for quite some time after the industrial age) became uncompetitive in comparison with the more efficient working forces of the east. Corporation executives were more than happy to build factories in countries where the people would work for 30 cents an hour rather than deal with the spoiled American workers who came to expect exuberant wages because of years of organized protests and union battles. Factories were uprooted from many key areas where they once provided for the economic well-being of thousands of American families, causing workers who were skilled in factory labor to suddenly have to seek a new occupation.

As if this were not bad enough, the corporations who outsourced the factories began importing the products they manufactured through foreign labor. The corporations began marketing the products at extremely low prices (which were far cheaper than prices of the products being manufactured by the unionized American factories). The corporations sold the products to the very people who lost their jobs when the American factories closed. It was by appealing to the financially vulnerable position of the thousands of ex-factory-workers, that the corporations were able to successfully corner, both the consumption and production ends of the market at simultaneously. All of this created an extremely competitive economic force that put considerable strain on the remaining American straggler factories that still offered union wages. The retail businesses that did not buy from the corporations suffered because people would rather buy from the stores who sold the cheap foreign products at cheap prices. A system of dynamics encouraging the survival of the most globally-economically-fit emerged; all other economic entities suffered.

The retailers, and other close-to-home commercial-end businesses had to adapt to the newly introduced “global dimension” of the economy in order to survive; the only way for them to do this was to begin buying from the foreign factories. The foreign corporations could afford to produce the items at a fraction of the price American factories were required to charge in order to pay for the materials and labor and still make a profit. The American public, who were affected by the closing of the factories, could resist purchasing the extremely cheap items from the retail stores, seeing the inexpensive items as an answer to their plight…little do they know that they were becoming the sole instruments in orchestrating the fall of the American economy.

Here is the point where we scope down where we can view the effects of these things upon the personal lives of American citizens: morally, economically, socially, and emotionally. Money, as we are coming to understand increasingly as the economy falls, is what governs the lives of everyone in this era. The presence of money or the lack thereof is the main factor that pre-selects one man for success and another for failure. From all that we have described about the opening of mass trade in the global economy, we see that the American poverty level is rising rapidly (as more money goes out and more cheaply manufactured items come in). When the poverty level rises, once-honest people could be coerced into finding dishonest means for survival, since the city area that once depended upon the factory for its income can no longer support all of its residents, who do not cease requiring resources themselves. The area becomes a ghetto after the factory vanishes; a ghetto where the only type of trade that flourishes is the illegal kind. The surrounding cities whose residents were employed by the factories now suffer, as they have thousands of newfound dead weight to support. Other businesses suffer since people can no longer afford to patronize them as often. Since people can no longer afford as high taxes, the cities must cut down on some of their features in order to accommodate the bare cost of running; this would include such municipalities as quality in education, police and fire department staffing, and recreational apparatuses (sort of like how the organs within a starving animal begin to shut down in order to conserve initial life of the body).

In the face of a rising crime rate, the city can afford increasingly fewer and fewer police officers; this would cause the officers available to have to choose, which crimes hold a higher response priority than others, allowing the lesser crimes to go relatively unchecked. The housing value in the affected areas decline, and as people move away from the affected area, they flood the job market in other areas, causing the area of adverse economic influence to increase its radius…somewhat like a ripple in a pool. Beyond all of this, the American family must change its dynamics, in order to adapt to the new conditions of the falling economy. Parents in working class to middle class families may need to acquire a second or even third job in order to maintain the same quality of lifestyle they were used to before the economic decline; this would cause the children of said family to have less supervision and parental interaction. Children may become more susceptible to adverse influences in the absence of adequate parental supervision; this might cause them to be more likely to fall into peer pressure, which might ultimately lead to them being more likely to make poor decisions regarding drugs, alcohol, and other vehicles of delinquency.

Parents of low to middle-income families might be less patient and not as emotionally responsive to the needs of their children if they are sleep deprived from working multiple jobs. Their stress level could adversely affect their usually good parenting abilities. People, who were just barely straddling the poverty line before, might now find themselves plummeting far enough below it to require the aid of such governmental programs as EBT Bridge cards, and welfare in order to escape losing their home or assets. In the presence of a high-stress working life, certain people might become more prone to substance abuse in order to cope with their problems. Lastly, the increasing price of the educational system causes combined with the declining individual’s financial ability would hinder people of certain positions in the economic stratification system from rising out of poverty.

There is one solution that has the potential to solve all of the above stated economic problems in America; that is to instate a governmental agency whose sole purpose is to review the average cost it takes an American factory full of unionized laborers to create product X. The agency would then determine the amount of money it takes on an average to create the same product X overseas. After this, the agency would subtract the latter amount from the former amount and impose a tariff on all these imported products that is equal to the difference of the two amounts. This would, when put into effect, level the economic playing field, and make it unprofitable for companies to import the inexpensive foreign-made goods; it would suddenly become unprofitable for giant corporations to utilize the cheap foreign work force, since they would still have to pay a phenomenal tariff on each product, they import into the States (the tariff could go into a fund that could provide for free college education of passionate students, and possibly even free government provided medical).

American business would once again be competitive in its own arena. It might then be possible to see a reverse in virtually every part of adverse societal development. People could afford to live and enjoy life again rather than being locked into the mechanical monster that is the current American economy and the poverty level would fall to a new and unprecedented low. The unemployment rate would be minuscule, if existent at all. This of course would take some transitional steps to accomplish, but by realizing, we need to control the flow of national economics out into the global economy, and in doing so…the ideal American dream could become the American reality.