Posted on 02/17/2024 9:47:40 PM PST by SeekAndFind
WEIRTON, West Virginia - Most people in this town will tell you they’d rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.
It isn’t just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there’s also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.
Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.
“It’s just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years,” said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, “Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives.”
He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were “used to be this” and “used to be that.”
Ryan Weld of Wellsburg, 43, grew up in downtown Weirton right behind the local funeral home.
“When I was growing up in the ’80s, the mill was still going at full tilt with Weirton Steel employing 10,000 people, including my grandfathers,” he said.
The Republican state senator said things started to slow down here in the mid to late ’90s after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted:
“That dramatically changed the landscape of downtown, went from a bustling the last age group that remembers the shops and stores and restaurants of downtown.”
He believes NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, essentially made it hard for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and expensive Environmental Protection Agency guidelines compete with places like Mexico.
The towns all up and down the Steel Valley died hard.
“The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers,” Weld said.
“That was true in the ’80s and ’90s, and that is true today.”
Forty years ago, the Democratic Party started to slowly shed its working-class base, but not quickly: Democratic officials would still show up for decades at union rallies, putting their arms around workers’ shoulders and telling them they have their back while at the same time enacting regulations and trade agreements that stripped them of their livelihoods and dignity and made ghettos of their once beloved communities.
By the 2012 Obama reelection, they traded their New Deal Democrat legacy voters for ascendant groups: minorities, young people, college-educated elites, and single women, all done without so much as a Dear John letter.
The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.
And then there is the press covering the voter who will decide the next president: Few if any of them come from places like Weirton or Youngstown, Ohio, so they have little understanding of their worldview. Things that give people from here purpose, such as living close to extended family, are not as valuable to someone who has been transient for most of a career.
In short, we are heading once again into an election where very few people in Washington truly understand how remarkably devastating this mill closure is.
Instead, it is a wire story at best, soon forgotten if measured at all. They truly do not understand how much the loss of the dignity of work has changed American politics.
That this tone-deafness is still happening 14 years after Barack Obama was given notice in the 2010 midterm elections and eight years after Donald Trump won the presidency is pretty staggering.
The Democrats once attracted these voters, but they’ve moved on to the social justice crowd and don’t appear to want to anymore. I’m not sure if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) does, the press does not, and the new “very online right” is certainly not the reflection of a center-right voter in middle America. The online right just seems hell-bent on making them seem like Taylor Swift conspiracy theorists. (P.S. They’re not.)
Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College, said Washington elites on both sides of the aisle, media elites, and now online conspiracy elites just don’t get Middle America even after this recent economically and politically difficult decade.
“Few things bond people/citizens together like trying to make a living in the real world, the dignity of work, and raising a family,” he explained, adding these bonds that cut across all divides — geographic, racial/ethnic, religious, gender, ideological/party, and even at times socioeconomic.
“If there is one thing we have learned over the past decade, it is that this bond over the difficulties of making an honest living can and does create unlikely coalitions of voters,” he said. “Even disparate voters from the likes of Bernie Sanders supporters to Trump supporters can agree on this.”
Indeed, economic dignity and survival make strange bedfellows.
Brad Todd, founding partner of OnMessage and co-author with me of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, said one thing is for certain about 2024: “We are about to read a million new stories that quote zero people who are actually going to decide the election.”
Brauer said the dignity of work is at the very core of the American experience, “Yet the elites of this country still just don’t understand, while average Americans just keep getting financially squeezed more and more.”
Weld said it is incumbent on local elected officials such as himself to be the advocates of Middle America.
“I do what I do because of that. The empty buildings were already there when I was in college and high school, and it pisses me off,” he said. “I don’t think anyone fought hard enough for that from happening. We shouldn’t keep having to read again, again, another story about a town dying hard and a vacancy of no one caring.”
They 100% do care.
Their plan is to kill it off.
...... That title is so typical of "Political" reviews. The actual Truthful short Title should be a pure and simple read like a Bumper Sticker and posted EVERYWHERE ......... "Democrats Don't Care."
.
It is worse than that.
Democrats and most republicans want just that, it is actually part of their plan all along.
“ The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.”
Republicans are just as bad as democrats. They are big time free traders and China lovers. And you might have noticed they fought Trump tooth and nail on the wall and China and the trans-pacific partnership.
Foreign forever wars and illegals are their priority
bttt
There, fixed it.
(Middle America Is Dying,)
All according to plan.
I saw what George W Bush had for priorities in 2007:
1) nation building elsewhere
2) illegals
and the whole stinking lot of political whores loved H1-B
Anything BUT Americans
Has anything changed?
No. It’s only gotten worse.
But the fools worry about pronouns....
Obama Seeks to Knock US Down a Peg
By Thomas Sowell, Monday, 01 October 2012, newsmax.com
Much puzzling behavior by Barack Obama falls into place when we go behind the image that he projects (”Obama 1”) to the factual reality of the man’s whole life and thrust (”Obama 2”). Obama himself is well aware of the nature and importance of his image. In his own words, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” An 18th century philosopher put the matter bluntly: “When I speak, I put on a mask. When I act, I am forced to take it off.”
Many of Barack Obama’s actions as president of the United States reflect neither political expediency nor an attempt to promote the best interests of the American people. Take, for example, his bowing low from the waist to foreign leaders. No president of the United States had ever done that before. It gained Obama nothing with the voters, nor was there any reason to think that he expected it to. Why then did he do it?
What did it accomplish? It brought the United States down a peg, in the eyes of the world, something that he has sought to do in many other ways. These bows were perfectly consistent with his view of a mal-distribution of power and prestige internationally, just as his domestic agenda reflects a felt need for a redistribution of wealth and power within American society. It is not just the United States, but the Western world in general, including Israel, that needs to be brought down a peg, from the standpoint of the ideology prevalent among the people with whom Barack Obama has allied himself consistently for decades.
Against that background, it is not at all puzzling that President Obama has clamped down on offshore oil drilling by Americans in the Gulf of Mexico, but has actually encouraged and subsidized offshore oil drilling by Brazil with our tax dollars. Nor is it surprising that he imposes draconian restrictions on industrial activities in the United States, in the name of fighting “global warming,” while accepting the fact that Third World nations that are beginning to industrialize will generate far more pollution than any restrictions in America can possibly offset.
That is another example of international redistribution — and payback for perceived past oppressions or exploitation of the West against the non-West. So is replacing pro-Western governments in the Middle East with Islamic extremist governments. Some people may have gotten focused on the issue of Barack Obama’s birth certificate because so much of what he has done seems foreign to American ideals, traditions, and interests. But birth tells us nothing about loyalty. One-time American Communist leader Earl Browder was descended from the Pilgrims.
Those who have questioned whether Barack Obama is really a citizen of the United States have missed the larger question: Whether he considers himself a citizen of the world. Think about this remarkable statement by Obama during the 2008 campaign: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that every other country is going to say, ‘OK.’” Are Americans supposed to let foreigners tell them how to live their lives? The implied answer is clearly “Yes!” When President Obama went to the United Nations for authority to take military action and ignored the Congress of the United States, that was all consistent with his vision of the way the world should be.
How has Obama gotten away with so many things that are foreign to American beliefs and traditions? Partly it is because of a quiescent media, sharing many of his ideological views and/or focused on the symbolism of his being “the first black president.” But part of his success must be credited — if that is the word — to his own rhetorical talents and his ability to project an image that many people accept and welcome.
The role of a confidence man is not to convince skeptics, but to help the gullible believe what they want to believe. Most of what Barack Obama says sounds very persuasive if you don’t know the facts — and often sounds like sheer nonsense if you do. But he is not trying to convince skeptics, nor worried about looking ridiculous to informed people who won’t vote for him anyway. This is a source of much polarization between those who see and accept Obama 1 and those who see through that facade to Obama 2.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford U.
The politicians and bureaucrats are having a fire sale of America. They are stripping its assets and resources and selling what remains to the highest bidder.
That’s why so many of the “elite” are building bunkers or homes on remote islands.
Next, China can come in and Build Back Better their communist/socialists utopia.
Long ago I worked as an engineer for NASA. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my neighbor across the street is also a former NASA engineer! He's done amazing things renovating his home.
The young people around here are amazing too. I would adopt them all if I could.
Basically, the GOP has given up on places like Weirton and Youngstown because they recognize that these places can’t be fixed. As one guy from the area told me several years ago: “The industrial base in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania and the West Virginia panhandle wasn’t decimated by ‘globalism.’ It simply got old and outdated, and then it was moved to places like Arkansas and Texas.”
He used Middletown, in western Ohio, as an example of everything that’s wrong across much of the Rust Belt. That town once had (and may still have) a reputation as the fentanyl capital of the U.S., with all the hallmarks of a fading Rust Belt town. And yet if you go just a few miles away into eastern Indiana you will find thriving towns with growing industries that support plenty of blue-collar jobs. As this guy admitted with great disappointment: “These industrial towns are dying because Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania are terrible states for manufacturing companies to do business.”
There plan is to eliminate us
Only Obama can make LBJ look like the best President for Black Americans.
Martin and Malcolm tried to warn them, they etc.
I spent some time in a dying factory town in PA. The older people were the most welcoming Generous, helpful people I have ever met. 60 years ago that town must have been a wonder.
There is a major drug problem among the young. The first hints of black and Hispanic flashy young outsider men to take over the drug trade.
And the health care system there slow-walked my friend’s cancer diagnosis. Two months from first diagnostic scan to seeing oncologist. He lives in another state, rides a circuit, in town.once every week or two. They could have told my friend she needed to go to the big city, and they didn’t.
They voted for Joe Manchin and they are now reaping the reward.
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