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."
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.
You have yet to say one intelligent thing this thread.
Abandon their churches ? What garbage. If you drive through a black inner city neighborhood you see practically a church on every block. What white neighborhoods have that ? In church attendance blacks vastly outdistance whites.
But the socioeconomic collapse created by the destruction of the low-semi skilled stable jobs that were the black community's base, the despair in the wake of deindustrialization, disempowered the respectable and empowered the gangbanger. If social mobility by obeying the rules and following the law is destroyed, you will have street culture becoming pervasive. When you have idle young men with no education and no future you have big trouble. You have it in Saxony, Russia, the British Midlands, etc. wherever deindustrialization has essentially left a generation without hope. Is it so hard to understand that people's values will be derived from how they perceive the world operates ? Is it so hard to understand that callousness is returned as viciousness and depravity ?
Do you know what kind of garbage is flowing out of so many of these churches? In the early 20th Century, the Abyssinian Baptist Church was one of the most influential, Christ-filled, churches this country has ever seen. Now, it is a Communist-loving dumphole that has not a clue.
But please, don't look to renew the spirit in these churches in these communities. Keep making excuses for the gangbangers and thugs terrorizing the black communities. Blame it all on CEOs and free traitors and capitalists and Republicans and everyone else you can find. I'm sure with that approach things will change and the Black churches and unity will be back to what they were in no time.
"We're all doomed."
Proposed concept behind NAFTA in 1979
Reagan himself was a dreamer, capable of imagining a world without trade barriers. In announcing his presidential candidacy in Nov. 1979, he had proposed a “North American accord” in which commerce & people would move freely across the borders of Canada & Mexico. This idea, largely overlooked or dismissed as a campaign gimmick in the US, rankled nationalist sensibilities in the neighboring nations. But Reagan was serious in his proposal. Though he traveled only once outside the North American continent during his first 57 years, he was neither insular nor isolationist. California has windows to the world in Asia, and Reagan thought of the US as a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic one. He also had a Californian’s consciousness of Mexico and an actor’s appreciation of Canadians, who are well-represented in the film community. The dream of a North American accord would drive the successful pursuit of a US-Canadian free trade agreement and a future-oriented “framework” trade agreement with Mexico.
So who exactly did you mean by this?: not concerned with the plight that is upon this country!
So we're not all doomed?
This proposition is brilliant!
Who knows? She never says anything - she's too busy going to cocktail parties in her philosophical home D.C. and figuring out ways to make our government bigger and more intrusive.
Now, now, speak no ill of Giddy. She's too busy 'helping' the tobacco industry here in NC to be concerned with textiles right now.
Although if I were you, I'd check with WalMart to see what Giddy's position on textiles is....
This proposition is brilliant!
Sweet. FReepers supporting salary caps now. Hey, who's up for some Communism?
Just for fun, though:
Look at all the Democrat Party Files on Texas_Dawg's computer!!!
This proposition is brilliant!
Actually, it isn't, unless you're a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist commie prevert.
Please remove me from your ping list. If I wanted to be pinged to communist preversions, I'd register on DU.
Annoyed? My party controls the White House, Senate, House and majority of the state's governorships, and will only gain even more in 2004. Why would I be annoyed?
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