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."
It doesn't matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes.
Sorry, the 16th Amendment says they are constitutional.
Of course. And ever since free trade in America, things have gotten much, much worse. Now, you have to do all that and there aren't even schools or homes any more. We all live in the streets and eat mush out of dumpsters... all because of those damn free traitors.
They are going to dismantle the system because it is putting them into the poor house. The American people are becoming poorer by shipping all of their decent jobs overseas and there will be a political upheaval whether smug name-callers like you want to admit it or not.
You see the world as a brutal game of "Monopoly" where people are run over by the free market steam roller. History shows people don't long suffer economic hardship without taking action against their leaders. A nation of angry folks with plenty of time and poverty on their hands will do something about it. Count on it.
You see your fellow countrymen as pawns in your international chess game and don't have any respect or regard for their plight. Americans are out of work, and you say, "Tough." They will remember people like you and so will I.
You would not want me to be Emperor. I would set you adrift at sea, permanently, designating you "the man without a country," because, by your own words, you have no allegiance to any nation, as you have declared yourself the defender of borderless globalism.
I am no genius but a corporation employing mostly foreigners is foreign and it won't take a genius or a bureaucracy to recognize that.
Governments have long determined the requirements for trade and commerce with their nations. America seems, at the moment, the only country to be the world's sucker and not demanding fair, reciprocal access to markets.
OpinionJournal.com (2/8/02) (halfway down the page)
This Crummy Outhouse Is for the Byrds
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill had a tense confrontation with Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia yesterday. The Washington Post reports it turned into a game of one-downmanship:
"They're not CEO's of multi-billion-dollar corporations," Byrd said of the voters. "They can't just pick up the phone and call a Cabinet secretary. In time of need, they come to us, the people come to us," their members of Congress.
O'Neill said he objected to what he called Byrd's inference.
"I started my life in a house without water or electricity," said O'Neill, who grew up in a low-income St. Louis, Mo., household. "So I don't cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch."
"Well, Mr. Secretary, I lived in a house without electricity too, no running water, no telephone, a little wooden outhouse," said Byrd, who was raised by his aunt and uncle in West Virginia's coal country.
It's a bit reminiscent of a Monty Python skit, "The Four Yorkshiremen":
Eric Idle: We used to live in this tiiiny old house, with greaaaaat big holes in the roof.
Graham Chapman: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
Terry Jones: You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!
Michael Palin: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin' in a corridor! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
Idle: Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
Chapman: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
Jones: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
I've bought bought 6 properties for less than 150k (that is the total for all six) it just depends on where you live.
You can get one helluva nice house where I live for 80k, drive 2 hours north to Columbus same house would cost you upwards of 300k. Why? Because apparently living in the city is supposedly 200k more desireable.
Lots of jobs around here at 8-10 bucks an hour starting and you can afford to live a nice life at that wage with a two income family in our area. But, the work is boring and hard. Food Processing plants, furniture manufacturing, paper production, stuff like that.
Yeah, and I heard we are all gonna die...
I'm wondering how many of the French elite didn't realize anything was wrong till they were being led up the gallows steps?
154 replies already!
You realize that you sound like a typical 1960s hippie? "Smash the corporations, man! Power to the people, man! Up against the wall, capitalist pigs!"
You see your fellow countrymen as pawns in your international chess game and don't have any respect or regard for their plight.
Forgive me for having more concern about my own well-being instead of submerging my interests to those of "The People."
Americans are out of work, and you say, "Tough."
I've been out of work. I survived.
The only problem is what they are building is in 3rd world nations
"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."
I believe that is the goal of the New World order. The aim being the to make people believe the only future hope for them or their children is a new international government. Our Supreme Court Justices are already ahead of this curve
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.