A Journey in the fields of broken dreams

Ray Tapajna work experience centers around Cleveland Ohio.  Ray spent about sixty years working  for major corporations and in his own businesses in the Cleveland area.  Join his  journey in the global economic arena for a vivid portrait of the work day during better times.

Ray was raised in a family food store in Lakewood Ohio and later started several businesses in the Cleveland area. He had his own computer business for more than 25 years and also worked directly for major computer corporation and traveled to the Silicon Valley regularly.

Cleveland then was a center  of the technology  and Ray directly sold related items to China - (exports not imports ) and other accounts in Canada. He sold the last computers Made in the USA from Lakewood Ohio.

His sales, prospect and client list  book that he carried for more about thirty years, shows many companies that had 5,000 or more employees. 

He saw thousands of computer companies close down in just a the tri state area of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. He also saw hundreds of computer manufacturers close down with many having branch and regional offices in the Cleveland region.  He estimates that there were about 50,000 workers in the region supporting these computer corporations.  He opened branch and regional offices himself in downtown Cleveland, Lakewood, Rocky River and also in Michigan and Canada.

Now all of this gone due to free trade and globalization with more than a million workers losing their jobs in the computer industry alone.

Ray became an advocate for workers human dignity and fair trade in 1992 and went online in 1998.  See more of his story at http://tapsearch.com/about-ray-tapajna/  [1] and his most popular blog is at http://therationale.com [2] which explores the latent response of religion and philsophy to the global economic arena.  His main sites are at http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews [3] and http://tapsearch.com/flatworld [4].

All are invited to tell their story about their work life and  how much better things were during in the past.  There are plenty of economic models that should be reviewed from the past and restored in our times.

About 25 companies and businesses that Ray was part of are gone.  Some existed for more than a hundred years until free trade came and stole the American Dream from us. Only one company still exists and it is owned by the French government.

Now Ray rides past many of the places that were once full of manufacturing and other business activities. Now he sees major avenues full of empty storefronts, factories and office buildings.

He shows a way to help restore the local economy by starting from the bottom up instead of the other way around. See

Shopping our ways out of jobs - Wal-Mart [5]