5/24/2011 2:47:00 PM

Los Angeles Times: U.S. manufacturing attempts a high-tech comeback

Los Angeles Times

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An unusual public-private partnership to build a high-tech industrial cluster in Albany, N.Y., could provide the framework for economic revitalization nationwide.

By Don Lee, Los Angeles Times

May 15, 2011

Reporting from Albany, N.Y.
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If there's hope for 51-year-old Brett Miller, then you could say there's hope for the American dream.

When Miller was a boy, upstate New York and the Hudson River Valley embodied the industrial might of the nation and the broad-based prosperity that made middle-class families such as Miller's the envy of the world.

For 40 years, his father earned a good living from the sprawling General Electric Co. complex in Schenectady that built steam turbines for the nation's electric power companies and nuclear engines for its submarines. When he retired, he had a comfortable pension.

No such dependable future awaited the younger Miller. A wave of corporate downsizing in 2009 abruptly ended his career in marketing, and he's been unemployed ever since.

"I'm starting over," Miller said.

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