Posted on 08/25/2003 2:05:47 PM PDT by snopercod
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- This year's highly publicized job losses in North Carolina manufacturing, including the Pillowtex bankruptcy, could mean trouble next year for President Bush in a region that was a stronghold in 2000.
Bush won more than 56 percent of the vote in both North Carolina and South Carolina in 2000. But his strong support of free trade has turned some against him in the South, where U.S. trade policies are blamed for the loss of jobs in textiles and other manufacturing sectors.
Andy Warlick, chief executive officer of Parkdale Mills in Gaston County, said he doubts he will repeat his 2000 vote for Bush next year.
"He made a lot of promises and he hasn't delivered on any of them," Warlick said. "I've had some firsthand experience of him sending down trade and commerce officials, but they're just photo ops. It's empty rhetoric."
Fred Reese, the president of Western N.C. Industries, an employers' association, said executives are beginning to raise their voices against Bush and are planning education and voter drives.
"We're seeing a new dynamic where the executives and employees are both beginning to see a real threat to their interests. You're going to see people who traditionally voted Republican switch over," Reese predicted.
The hard feelings were on display days after Pillowtex's July 30 bankruptcy filing, when Republican U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes walked into a Kannapolis auditorium to meet with former workers.
"Thanks for sending the jobs overseas, Robin!" shouted Brenda Miller, a longtime worker at the textile giant's Salisbury plant.
In December 2001 Hayes -- who is an heir to the Cannon family textile fortune -- cast the tie-breaking vote to give Bush the authority to negotiate "fast-track" trade agreements, trade treaties that Congress must vote up or down with no amendments.
At the time, Hayes said he won promises from the Bush administration that it would more strictly enforce existing trade agreements and pressure foreign countries to open their markets to U.S. textiles.
"Are we pleased with the way they responded? Absolutely," Hayes said. "Are we satisfied with where we are? Absolutely not."
Jobs in many industries have fled overseas since 1993, when Congress passed the Clinton-backed North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. About half the textile and apparel jobs that existed in 1994 are gone.
Since Bush took office in January 2001, it is estimated North Carolina and South Carolina have lost more than 180,000 manufacturing jobs.
And even more textile jobs could be out the door once quotas on Chinese imports expire at the end of next year.
Republican U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger voted for NAFTA and fast-track, and has seen his 10th District lose nearly 40,000 jobs, primarily in the textile and furniture industries.
"Certainly, there's a political cost to any controversial vote no matter which side you take," he said. "People are casting stones, but we're trying to pick them up and build something."
Democratic U.S. Sen. John Edwards voted against fast-track in 2002 after voting for an earlier version. In 2000 he voted for permanent normal trade relations with China.
Recently, though, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Edwards has attacked Bush's trade policies and called for fairer trade measures.
Robert Neal, vice president of the local chapter of the Pillowtex workers' union, said Hayes has worked to try to ease the impact of job losses in his district.
"Though he (Hayes) voted for fast-track, he is really concerned about the workers and their conditions in the state of North Carolina," Neal said.
Not everyone feels that way.
Reese is organizing 1,500 manufacturing companies across North Carolina in an effort to leverage what he calls a new voting bloc.
In South Carolina, voter drives are planned for the first time at Milliken & Co., which has about 30 plants in the state. Mount Vernon Mills of Greenville, S.C., is forming a political action committee.
The company's president Roger Chastain, a one-time Bush voter, doesn't expect to support the president or Jim DeMint, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Ernest Hollings.
"We're basically liquidating our whole middle class, polarizing people on the two extremes, have and have-nots," Chastain said of the manufacturing job losses. "We'll be a Third World country."
Using government to artificially raise the price of goods isn't going to help us, it's going to lower are living standards.
This was a 1150 square foot house to give you an idea of how small and insignifigant it was, but it was where I grew up. My dad, the machinist could buy it, with no high school education, and not sweat the mortgage payments. I could buy it now... and be in debt up to my ears, and have my wife work while our kids are growing up. If you believe that this is all about SUV's, you are mistaken. The manufacturing economy died in Southern California. We are paying the concequences in the urban black and hispanic areas. There was a burgeoning black, working class family section of town. It collapsed as soon as the manufacturing jobs did.
Whoop dee doo I know. Time for more of your smart alec remarks. Spare me. People are hurting out there. I am fine. My father won't be. He is a Boeing subcontractor, and they are laying off, and building in China. No biggie for you. But for a man who immigrated to this country, served in Vietnam, and has worked his tail off for 40 years, early retirement isn't going to be pretty.
You and your lawyer buddy OPH, are not being effective with your taunting btw. People out there are in pain with job cuts, reductions. Even if you think that this is the correct way of the market, and that we will grow in other areas, mocking those in pain, and those who though you may feel misguided are concered about that pain, well frankly sucks. Not every person is cut of the same whole cloth. I agree with you on several things non related to trade. I am not a fan of Pat Buchanan. I was for the war in Iraq. It's much easier for you though to belittle, stereotype. Just something to think about.
Move?
Mine has. Goods are much cheaper, and we can afford more of them. I guess we'd be better off if we could only buy higher priced, lower quality goods, and couldn't choose from the productive output of the world. Now, if a family feels the need to 'keep up with the Joneses' they can got the two income route. It's their choice what is more important to them. Imagine for a moment if your home only had in it what a home in the 1950's had (when a TV cost half the average annual wage). Are you saying you couldn't pull that on one income? People always want more, what they do to achieve it, and what they balance against it, is up to them, as it should be.
Only on FR is a 1,478% increase in the value of your home a bad thing.
If I based the entire value of my life on whether I had a job and two cars, I guess I would be too. But seeing as how the average American lives a life better than 98% of people in this world can even dream of, and one better than 99.9999999% of human beings that have lived on this planet would have been able to mentally comprehend... I'm still not up for using the federal government to punish everyone else for their temporary "pain".
So have those of the overwhelming majority of this country.
If you really believe that having entry level houses valued at $340k is a good thing for society, I see where the issue is. You say, great on the person who owns it now. Screw young couples. Just because a young couple used to be able to buy a house in California easily before, it's just too bad they can't now.
That is what you believe. Fine. I differ. I think the inner cities, wandering fathers, divorce, decay in society are a result of your attitude. After all, one can afford that house by selling drugs. That money is still green isn't it?
Yeah... surely it has to do with money, right? Surely it couldn't be because a bunch of black and white liberal atheists (of which I'm neither) convinced the inner-city's populations to abandon their churches for government programs, right? Nah... had to be the evil CEOs or something.
Seriously. Do you think we are lying. Do you think all the blue collar dads in the 60's sold cocaine to pay for housing?
Damn, why don't you check out the real U.S., and not just California? In Destin, FL, you can get a 1,900sq ft., 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath with garage house, minutes from the beach, for $200,000. Last time I checked unemployment is ~3%. Take the $140,000 left over (well, whatever you get after taxes) and start a business. Or whine and wish the government would 'do something' when the government is what is ruining California...
I elected to stay at home with my kids until they were school age---but I'm not blind to reality or history. As to high wages for blue-collar workers? Mark Twain said it best: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
Neighborhoods change. Cities grow. Countries change. The world changes. Life goes on. I have shown you and Tokhtamish countless statistics that prove economically the average American family is much better off... that the average American take-home pay is 12 times greater now than it was in 1960 yet prices are only 6 times greater. But you just dismiss those. No one says you get to live in the same neighborhood your dad's dad lived in. Things change. But there are far more places in America now where life is even easier.
One huge difference here is that ultimately, I don't give a flip about how much people make. I hold people responsible for their bad actions no matter where they are and what their situation is. I have met people outside this country that are so dirt poor and oppressed that it would make both your grandfather and mine look like kings. They have no hope of ever being any richer, and yet... they are more genuinely happy than people I know with tens of millions of dollars. The black community was once like this... because it believed in something bigger than any economic number. Sadly, for the most part, it's not now. And it has piss poor leaders teaching it to blame everyone else and look for happiness in the most bogus areas. (And all of that goes for much of white America too.) Yeah, it sucks that in this world people lose their jobs and are poor. But ultimately, if you or anyone else is telling me they are mad and unhappy, I've got one question for them, "What's up with you?"
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