Twenty days after his meeting with congressmen, President Trump signed increased tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum into law.
The move was met with mostly derision from the media. “Trump Misleads The Public On Steel Tariffs,” read the headline at Forbes. “Trump steel tariffs may leave these U.S. steelworkers jobless,” wrote Reuters. “The Real Danger of Trump’s Steel and Aluminum Tariffs,” blasted the New Yorker. “U.S. allies see Trump’s steel tariffs as an insult,” wrote the Washington Post.
At the signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump was surrounded by steel and aluminum workers who then asked the president to autograph their hardhats. Almost immediately after news spread, citing the tariffs, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel announced it would re-open an idle plant in Granite City, Illinois, and hire 500 new workers.
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.
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Those Southerners of us with gray hair can still smell the furniture plants and textile mills that gave our small towns life and propelled the young into adulthood. We worked summers at one plant or mill along with our neighbors and family. Paychecks were stuffed in the local branch savings accounts to fund our next chapter and we learned quite a lot about human dynamics, problem solving, and life. We all saw the end on the horizon, when the politicians were elbow deep in the pockets of the banks and their M&A divisions, all crowing about "new age, new era" and "transitioning from manufacturing to service economy" with "shareholder value" on all their black tongues. NAFTA was the icing on the cake, the cake of manure we were all forced to eat. Every bite. And made to smile about it.
ReplyDeleteThe same play was performed in the North but on a different stage: the unionized work force was destroyed more slowly but more effectively and the effects will be in the genes of their offspring for generations.
Well hell. You know what? Screw all that. The past might be dead but I'll be damned if I will submit to eating another sh** sandwich. And good luck getting me to smile. We, the normal people of the United States, have been hypnotized and led along a path to slaughter by the people we entrusted to protect us. I think things are beginning to change, but it is time to cut the strings of dependence on "the global good" and take care of our own by our own means.
Cheers y'all.
Thanks.https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2018/07/comment-on-va-left-for-dead-in-danville.html
DeleteDan Patterson: Amen to all you said!
ReplyDeleteReminds me of areas in Michigan and Ohio.
Might I add that both political "parties" have contributed to dismantling, destabilizing, and driving down wages.
both political "parties" have contributed to dismantling, destabilizing, and driving down wages.
DeleteIndeed.