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.”
In 2018 these people had a chance to replace Manchin but stayed with their Democrat roots. The working class like Charlie Brown kept believing that Lucy the Democrat would really let them kick the ball.
THAT says it all, “These industrial towns are dying because Ohio and West Virginia and Pennsylvania are terrible states for manufacturing companies to do business.”
One piece missing is that these areas are Staunch DEMOCRAT and Heavily Unionized. They STILL VOTE HEAVILY DEMOCRAT today.
YOU CAN’T FIX GENERATIONAL STUPID!!!!
Yes, all part of the ultimate global government and the 2030 agenda. Biden has said, multiple times,”YOU WILL HAVE NOTHING, AND BE HAPPY.” Don’t know about you but I won’t be.
Shouldn’t matter. Apparently, red states want to go on their own. This is a way to start.
Exactly. America isn't merely being left to die. The WEF/derpstate/uniparty cabal has white hot hate in their eyes and their fingers around our throat strangling us.
NAFTA? How about them selling us out to China?
It is not that DC doesn't care: DC is actively working to kill it.
The clean, ghetto-nurtured boy in the WH “did not know” tax-financed
US intel exists to protect the safety and security of American families.
So Obama had a ball with US intel——he put all 17 tax-rich intel
agencies at 2016 candidate Hillary’s campaign disposal to get
something she could pin on Trump.......
Obama also ordered tax-enriched US Intel to tap foreign spy ops
to surveil 26 innocent Trump associates in the 2016 election runup.
Americans were specifically targeted by tax-paid agents:
<><>they were targets of US Intel and Obama’s law enforcement
<><>targets for shady intel collection and misinformation,
<><>targeted to covertly initiate contact
<><>to slyly manipulate
<><>to covertly develop useful intel harmful to Trump.
By March 2016, fun-loving Obama was sending tax-paid agents agents to the UK,
Australia, Italy —the Israeli Mossad in Italy at a Brits MI6 intel school there.
Then... whoppee......Obama and Hillary “found” Trump had “colluded with Russia.”
Similar articles have been written in each decade since the 1960’s. Democrats and Republicans together have pursued policies that have one goal. Increase dependence upon and thus the power of government.
The middle class isn’t dying.
It’s being murdered by Deep State.
It’s premeditated with a whole lotta malice aforethought.
"Their plan is to kill it off."
Well, that's OK... All the young folks can just learn to code.. Global warming will keep them warm, and China will keep them fed.. (spit)
The Robert C. Byrd Rustbelt
NAFTA was the first big step in the Globalists Jihad on America, both parties have jumped on the bandwagon and are doing everything they can to destroy the Middle class in their effort bring this country to it’s knees.
But on the other hand, we learned from Nancy Pelosi that the unemployment checks these people will receive will Stimulate the Economy.
DC? ACDC Highway to Hell.
America’s middle class is dying because the progressives in washdc have been doing everything they can to kill it.
if this is a newsflash, you haven’t been paying attention over the passed 20+ years
Communists deplore a healthy, prosperous middle class because it’s one of the greatest impediments to their ascendancy. This alone explains the war on middle class America.
That’s because all DC is interested in is illegals, Israel, and Ukraine. The hell with those of us who are required to pay their bills.
DC doesn’t HAVE to care. DC no longer has to win hearts. DC counts the votes…
A middle class doesn’t exist in a socialist banana republic. The politicians and Congress are the proletariot and they are intent on destroying the middle class.
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