Posted on 07/12/2018 10:45:18 AM PDT by Hojczyk
The city of Danville, Virginia sits in the bellybutton of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a hat-toss over the North Carolina border and about 85 miles northwest of Raleigh. It’s low hill country and Danville straddles the frothy, chocolate-milk waters of the Dan River. Downtown, once a booming trade district, today is a decomposed industrial husk, a tidy cluster of silent rectangles ensnared by broad, ghostly thoroughfares built for a time in the not-so-distant past when people and goods poured in and out of town. Those days are gone, perhaps never to return.
The story of Danville is one echoed in countless communities across the country, a gutted middle class left for dead in the wake of sweeping international trade deals in Washington, applauded by liberal economists and a lockstep media portraying such policies as inevitable, ultimately good, and a win for the American consumer–a narrative usually coupled with condescending and disdainful attitudes toward displaced workers for a perceived inability to sprint ahead with the times.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
This is a must read article...
Today, somewhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of all products sold in U.S. Wal-Mart stores are from China. Following such deals to their eventual end reveals an even more grim future for the American middle class if trade borders continue to dissolve.
If the U.S. and China, for example, were to enter into a single labor and goods market, wages would then converge. Whereas a factory worker in China was making, say, $3 an hour and a comparable worker in the U.S. made $30 an hour; the Chinese worker shoots up to about $15 an hour, and the American worker’s wages collapse to the same. In China, everyone is happy and rich. In the U.S., the government would be overthrown.
“We have free trade within the 50 states,” Stumo says. “By impoverishing our middle class with this offshoring driven by free trade policy, you’re killing the U.S. consumer market, which drives growth, because they have no money. Five or ten percent cheaper prices is overwhelmed in this stage by lack of production and stagnant wages,” he says. “The U.S. middle class cannot afford to fund the rise of other countries anymore.
There are a lot of mining ghost towns in the west too. The world changes. Before the days of government assistance, when your town’s economy dried up, you moved away.
Now, people hang around, sealing the fate of their children.
I moved from Seattle to rural KY. I’ve been to a lot of these towns. I’d love to live near some of them, but I’m at retirement age. I would never, EVER consider raising a family in one unless someone chained me to the concrete and my wife was already pregnant.
Danville, VA today reminds me of what Asheville, NC looked like 40 years ago which was a run down mountain town with 1/3 of the downtown boarded up after a majority of the local manufacturing had either shut down or laid off a good portion of its workforce.
That said if industry ever returns to Danville it has all the components necessary to become a revival city with lots of character.
Danville is a charming old town, grand history, grand old buildings and mansions downtown. It is dying but not quite so badly as the writer depicts. There’s a very nice road course and racing country club just east of town, VIR, Virginia International Raceway. Several recreational lakes nearby. It’s not without appeal, Southside VA is very conservative, real estate is cheap there as well as in Caswell County NC just south of town. And, while you might be able to see the Blue Ridge in some parts of Danville it’s certainly not in them. I have no idea what “the bellybutton” of the Blue Ridge is and have never heard that term before.
And subsist by cooking or consuming meth.
Welfare has stopped natural economic migration processes leaving dependent towns full of single mothers and crack heads.
And subsist by cooking or consuming meth.
I own a movie on DVD called The Wild and Wonderful White’s of West Virginia.
It’s a documentary about a notorious Boon County family. In one scene, one of the daughters is in a recovery room after giving birth. She’s waiting to find out if they will giver her custody of her new baby as she does a line of coke with her sister.
...ping....
Wow, sounds like LA in the 70's except for the giving birth part, she'd have aborted.
She didn’t get custody.
The textile industry didn't grow up in places like Danville, Virginia in the 1880s. In this country, it actually had its roots in the 1790s in New England. The displacement of industry has been almost a constantly recurring theme for generations in this country. And interestingly, the pace seems to accelerate as companies and entire industries make very rapid decisions and have no qualms about walking away from capital investments that cost millions of dollars to build.
Oh, so more like Miami in the 80’s then.
In HS, we drove from Greensboro to Danville to buy Stroh’s beer.
I have to say that I’m really shocked at how many people I meet here look like they stepped right out of Deliverance.
But to be fair, it’s because all income levels rub shoulders in these rural areas. We all shop at Wal-Mart (though Amazon is changing that) and we mix pretty much everywhere else.
When I lived in the Seattle area, I’d go to music in the park on Mercer Island. Little mixing there. That’s why they allowed alcohol. And I belonged to the Cascade Bicycle club. Same thing. I did find myself in some “seedy” places from time to time.
Globalization finally got around to hollowing out communities in the South, who suddenly realized that the folks in Flint and Youngstown had a point all this time.
That formed the basis of the Trump Coalition.
This is kinda funny. I live near Danville and Greensburg Kentucky.
It’s sad to see small towns and cities failing. Given the high rate of crime and drug use that people have taken to, would there even be enough employable people for investing entrepreneurs who wanted to revitalize the place to draw from? Wonder what was key in Asheville’s resurrection?
Peach
Danville is the home of the Last White House of the Confederacy. A friend’s dad was a docent there which was funny because he had a thick NYC accent.
Danville was also home to the Tank Museum which was worth every penny of the admission price.
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