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 ...
Some places never really recover from economic decline.
Somebody told me to read a book, which was about what happens to factory toens when the factory shuts down.
The summary I was given, was that some towns have worked more than others to attract new business.
I also heard that Pikeville Kentucky, is a success story as they have greatly expanded a college campus, which helps offset the decline of coal.mining in eastern Kentucky.
But the economic dislocation is very hard to overcome. If any employer which employs thousands shuts down, there’s no way that a new business will hire all those old workers , to do the same job b they are skilled in, at the same pay, in a new business.
bkm
Bump.
Wasn’t Danville the last capital of the Confederacy?
And subsist by cooking or consuming meth
People think of the inner city but small town America has a very serious drug problem.
Isn’t Danville that City that’s at the end of a 3-mile grade?
“Wonder what was key in Asheville’s resurrection?”
People figured out it was a great environment in which to live. Then the hippies and artists moved in. Now it is just a traffic mess.
There aren’t many products that have remained the same, the price of which can be compared over a forty or fifty year periods. But I can think of one.
During the early 1970s, I bought Levi’s 501 jeans in my size (32x34 mostly) for $7.00 a pair and they were most all made in the USA. I can recall paying up to $17.00 in the mid-80s, but haven’t purchased that particular jean much since, and some production was still in the USA, but much had been moved overseas.
Now, with all the production having been moved to cheap labor nations, the price of Levi’s 501 jeans is around $40.00 per pair, some prices a little less and some more.
I believe the idea that consumer prices are significantly lower after all the offshoring of US manufacturing is largely a a myth, or an outright lie. Most cheaper foreign made products are just that, cheaper, but inferior products. But I don’t think anyone could prove much consumer price savings on products that have actually remained the same over the past 40 or more years.
There are empty factories all over, the problem Danville has is it’s in a state that is not especially good to do business in. Reshoring is benefiting those with lower taxes, fewer regulations, and right-to-work.
Wreck of the Old 97
We have never had Free Trade, no country ever has. Generally it is a straw man for Protectionists to make points against. Theoretically it explains and shows how free trade maximizes economic goals.
Small towns are being destroyed, not by free trade, but by the infrastructure costs which can’t be spread over as large a group of rate payers. Federal guidelines, for example, requires sewage treatment to produce an effluent which is nearly drinkable. This is enormously expensive and in some cases unnecessary. Drinking water is subject to the same kind of restrictions.
Then you have the major problem: the lack of opportunity in small towns and even small cities.
Young people leave to a place they can make a living and have opportunity. My experience is illustrative. I was raised in a small town and loved life there but upon getting the education modernity requires found there was no place for me there. My education would have been wasted. It wasn’t in Chicago.
Everett has Boeing’s 787 plant. Nobody has worked harder to make life difficult for Boeing than Everett. Seattle did for a time. Boeing warned them over a decade. Then one day, without calling Gary Locke, or the mayor of Seattle, they announced they were moving, and didn’t know where yet.
Both asked why they didn’t get a phone call, an attempt to keep them on board. The CEO at the time replied, “We’ve been calling for 10 years. We didn’t see the point in one more phone call.”
Boeing is the only thing supporting the middle class in Western WA. The tech companies don’t really do much - they’ve created an elite upper middle, and then a bunch of East Indian and Asian communities, many of whom have families crammed into really expensive apartments around where those companies are.
Boeing then announced South Carolina. Spinning that up has been painful for them, but worth it. The unions don’t cause near the problems they did before.
Every bit of tooling Boeing buys now is shipped such that it comes in cases on wheels. The idea is that at any given time they can take an assembly line and send it to SC.
The greenies have largely shut up too, even the ones in Seattle.
If the West Coast doesn’t fix itself, the tech business will move inland. It’s already started.
Bad immigration policy has so badly screwed up the US that it will take likely 50 years or so to fix.
One thing I AM seeing - most job placements now explicitly say ‘no visa’, and that you have to be a US citizen to apply.
Progress.
There are hundreds of Danville like communities across the nation's fly over country. I am surprised they survive given the economic events of the last twenty-five years. Yet I worry about what if the Trump economic boom does not reach these communities. Will these voters abandon the MAGA revolution?
The American Armoured Foundation Tank and Ordnance Museum is well worth the visit.
Went to college in Danville, 1959-61. Yes, last Confederate Capital. Yes, Wreck of old ‘97 was going to Danville. Tobacco markets were booming then and the smell of tobacco filled the whole city in the Fall. Dan River Cotton Mills was the big business. All gone now. In front of City Hall was a stature of a cousin of mine, Harry Wooding, who was long time mayor of Danville. As initiation into college frat, I had to jump up, put my arm around him and give a speech. I recited lines from “Hamlet.” “Speak the speech, I pray you. Etc.”
I’m surprised at many of the comments on this thread. Many sound like they come from Barrack Obama supporters, that the job losses were just natural events and the jobs are gone and they’re not coming back.
Actually, the jobs and industry losses were due to US government polices and were totally predictable, and many will come back if the voters continue to support, and grow in support, of President Trump and his polices.
What douche bag comment. You deserve to rot in hell with all the other traitors.
They've been trying to build a coal export terminal in Washington State (Longview?) for years, an impossible task.
Believe it or not, coal from Wyoming and Colorado is being exported through Baltimore and Newport News instead. After Boeing turns out the lights, Washington will be wishing they had that coal terminal.
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