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."
They really think we're as idiotic as they are.
Me: (slowly standing and applauding)
Wow... what a brave position for you to take there.
And this is all Bush's fault ??
I guess that government interference in foreign trade being bad only applies to the US government. Every foreign government gets a pass becuase they subsidize exports to drive American industry out of teh market place so they can then exercise monoply or political power from the end result.
Now I challenged you before to rpovide some quantitative evidence that a tariff does not provide a net benefit to teh USA I have previuously provided you a link to a multiple regression analysis showing a tariff did provide a benefit net to the USA. There are others. If your statement is true about a tariff lowering teh standard of living then someone should be able to back it up with evidence.
Nice to know you support Al Sharpton over George Bush. You are a solid conservative.
People like me?? Almost everything he has done has been against what I believe. He's hardly pandering to me!
You were responding to my point about export taxes being illegal under the US Constitution.
I do not support tariffs on exports.
You managed to sound like you did.
Just because your unable to read and comprehend what is said, don't attempt to lie about what I wrote.
Why Poohbay, it's not like you to just give out partial information. Tariffs would be charged on imports. As for teriffs charged on exports, other nations charge tariffs on our exports all the time, some as much as 40 percent.
Knowing that you would object to tariffs on imports, I explained to you that other nations charge those on our exports to their nations all the time.
Now, if you're still not able to understand this simple concept, why don't you just suffer the humiliation of not understanding and not make a total --- out of yourself again.
So were you out cheerleading the big $15 billion throwaway on AIDS in Africa? That kind of money could actually go a long way to bailing out California --- and remember --- there is no cure for AIDS, that money was thrown away.
Ha! I think you just came up with the new slogan for Free Republic!
What do you call huge steel tariffs to prop up manufacturing jobs and massive government payments to farmers?
Are you going to rob me? Better bring the kevlar. Want a job? I can find something for you to do around my house if you can't think of anything someone else might want done. By the way, I call it liberty, capitalism is just a description of how it accumulates wealth.
They are going to dismantle the system because it is putting them into the poor house.
Being put there? That's an interesting way of looking at it. What do you think you are owed, and by whom? You have to earn a living, sir.
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 can't build a wall high enough to trap capital, all you can do is lure it. High taxes and regulaton are chasing out capital, robbing me won't change that for you. After you eat what you steal from me, what will you do? Find another victim?
You see the world as a brutal game of "Monopoly" where people are run over by the free market steam roller.
No, I see it a place where opportunity must be pursued and free rides aren't guaranteed.
A nation of angry folks with plenty of time and poverty on their hands will do something about it. Count on it.
Still not scared of you. Sounds like you don't know how to create work for yourself, you need someone to provide you a job. You need us, we don't need you. Or do you expect to be the American Mugabe's henchmen? Is that what you're hinting at?
You see your fellow countrymen as pawns in your international chess game and don't have any respect or regard for their plight.
No, I see them as human beings, that have to earn their keep. I don't want you putting a gun to my head and telling me I can't trade with someone else just because they offer a better deal than you.
You would not want me to be Emperor.
Of course I don't, your fixed pie world view tries to take, not create, and expects to be provided for, not provide for themselves. I realize the world only gets better by people trading effort for effort, not compulsion.
you have no allegiance to any nation, as you have declared yourself the defender of borderless globalism.
I don't think imaginary lines should give you the right to pick my pocket.
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.
So? You're the one who wants to create a bureaucracy to make that determination, as if a legion of new leeches will suddenly make us richer. Oh, it might help you keep doing what you're doing, for a little while, if you can stop me from trading freely with someone else. But that happens by making millions pay more for their goods and have lower standards of living, and you feel no shame, you feel owed.
Governments have long determined the requirements for trade and commerce with their nations.
You didn't have to pull off the mask, I had you pegged, commie.
America seems, at the moment, the only country to be the world's sucker and not demanding fair, reciprocal access to markets.
The American government does demand it, difference is they don't punish American citizens just because Japanese, etc. citizens are being punished by their government's with higher costs imposed the government.
Thanks. Same for yours and Howard Dean's posterior (or whoever the DNC nominee ends up being).
Cyclical downturns usually means lay off as assembly lines or some factories, but what we're witnessing now is the shut down of tool and die businesses, we're closing down the means of production. IT obviously didn't pan out as a replacement for manufacturing, we're closing that down too. And the entire garment industry.
You can't really believe that no jobs for Americans is a good policy.
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