Authored by Salena Zito via The Washington Examiner,
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.”
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Doesn’t care? LOL it is what they want and what they are doing, they want middle America dead. The elites and the slaves to serve them, nothing in between.
What these bastards did to the US is beyond criminal. I grew up during the late 70’s-early 80’s in Ohio and saw the de-industrialization happen right before my eyes. The end results are not pretty. You have to stop and ask why would those in charge allow this to happen. I think we all know the awnser.
Even though Bruce Springsteen is an elitist Liberal POS, this song ring true….
Learn to TWERK !
Now that Merca has transitioned to a NIGGER-BASED economy the learning to code happy horseshit needs to be thrown on the trash heap of history.
Learn to code , so you can be replaced by Indians.
Brought to you by “based” Mike Lee (R) Utah
Nah, white people twerking would be “cultural appropriation”!
Not just steel either. The US let China dump paper in the USA putting out so many small town, single employers that depended on paper-mills for high paying/OJT jobs. Not just paper jobs, apprenticeship programs in the trades, stationary operating engineers, chemists, and heavy equipment operators.
DC only exists because there was a middle class to support it financially. The politicians will become casualties just as the ret of us once the cabal has no further use for them.
I think that’s wishful thinking. They’ll be the last to become casualties.
Just which politicians in any level of office across the entire length and breadth of the United States couldn’t be functionally replaced by his or her photograph?
Yes, the useful idiots are always the last to be causalities, once their usefulness is gone.
D.C. stopped pandering to the middle class as soon as they didn’t need to. Instead of trying to serve thousands or millions, now all politicians have to do is serve a handful of Jewish patrons.
Buy em from China. Keep reducing American production capability of damn near everything. Soon the country will implode.
’tis the plan.
I’ve been telling folks for more than 20 years that the only thing ‘made in America’ is children — and 90% of them have no ‘local content’ …
NAFTA 20TH ANNIV – PEROT GIANT SUCKING SOUND
SNL used to do prophetic skits:
“They altered pictures of my daughter….”
Classic!
I was born and raised in Allentown, PA. Graduated from Lehigh & Penn State. That was 1971. Even back then I couldn’t get a STEM job in PA. It turned out to be a blessing – I found much higher employment opportunities elsewhere.
Allentown was unique. There was the Bethlehem Steel, Mack Trucks, ATT, and many more. People made very high wages for blue collar jobs. Shopping on Hamilton Street (main street) was very close to better stores in NYC.
Then the shit-hit-the fan. First Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt (a loss of about 15,000 jobs). Mack Trucks moved to a southern state, the final nail was ATT closing.
In 1997 I went back for a funeral. My uncle Bob (everybody needs an uncle bob) told me the town wasn’t fit for white men.
Currently it’s a welfare haven for Puerto Ricans. That wonderful downtown doesn’t exist anymore.
I know the Admin lives somewhere in Bucks? county. If he could do a little research about the Allentown NIZ it would make a good article. In order to rehab Allentown, the legislature passed a law unique only to Allentown center city called the NIZ. All taxes generated in the NIZ (with the exception of school district and city taxes) can be used to pay debt service on any financed improvements within the NIZ. This ‘free money” has lead to tremendous corruption.
The NIZ improvements are supposed to draw more workers into Allentown center city. However all this has done is take jobs away from smaller towns around Allentown.
The former mayor Pawlowski is in a Federal Prison for 15 years.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ed Pawlowski
41st Mayor of Allentown In office
January 3, 2006 – March 9, 2018
Born Edwin Everett Pawlowski[1]
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Political party Democratic
Edwin Everett Pawlowski is an American politician who served as the 41st Mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He held the office from 2006 until his resignation in 2018, following his election to a fourth term in 2017. He resigned after being convicted on 47 federal charges related to corruption as mayor of Allentown.
(pawlowski)
So now it’s the Polacks?
What about crypto-polacks?
Dutch – the unions killed the steel plants. The steel plants were enormously inefficient by the 70s. The workers would strike and demand, and get, extremely high pay. The companies wouldn’t automate because of the cost to pay workers, and because workers would strike if they tried. So along came Japan and Korea, who could produce steel with literally 1/20th the labor that was used per ton in the US.
The unions did this to the steel industry. They wouldn’t allow companies to automate, and companies allowed it because they thought there would never be any competition. Both were wrong.
But if the steel companies had automated, there still wouldn’t be any steel worker jobs today, or at least very few. It doesn’t take many workers to make steel.
Maybe that’s why we needed major tariffs, you can’t compete against slave labor.
Korea and Japan didn’t have or need slave labor. They had efficient steel plants. They made steel with 1/20th the labor the US plants used. So, you propose keeping inefficient plants going by increasing tariffs. Just how will that help the US? Paying much, much higher prices for steel than the rest of the world does will help the uS exactly how? Those tariffs would just go to feathering union nests at a cost to the rest of society. Here is an idea – become more efficient.
BS. They know and love it as it’s all by design. I can’t believe their are still those that refuse to see how our suffering is hilarious to them and they want us dead; I mean the MSM reminds us of it daily.
There are small towns still growing in the USA. With less regulations and taxes. But there are fewer and fewer.
I started calling Bathhouse Barry’s policies, the Trickle Up Poverty program and it has continued unabated under his third term
The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers
Ross Perot was quite prescient
Back when this was being implemented we who squawked about it were told to take off the tinfoil hats and embrace the future. We didn’t want the mini-wage and welfare future the demopublican republicrat party had on offer but our betters overruled our concern.
Now we’re getting the fentanyl and UBI they had in mind in the beginning.
On the flip side if DC died I wouldn’t give a fuck.
In a “Historic Trip to establish Diplomatic Relations” w/communist china?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_visit_by_Richard_Nixon_to_China
🤣 TRAITORS to the Nth ° ?
tricky Dick nixon, along with pat buchanan, and a few other “dignitaries”, SOLD THIS COUNTRY OUT !!!
The MAIN Termite in the WOOD-Work?
“In July 1971, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing during a trip to Pakistan, and laid the groundwork for Nixon’s visit to China. This meeting was arranged and facilitated by Pakistan through its strong diplomatic channels with China.”
Henry Alfred Kissinger ⬇︎⬇︎⬇︎
Revelation 2:9 “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and [I know] the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but [are] the synagogue of Satan.”
Revelation 3:9 “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.”
Weirton is about 20 miles down-stream from here and Weld’s sentiment rings true. It’s been a slow motion death crawl for the last 40 years.
The rust belt has the name for good reason. From the Ohio valley to the lakes, our nations heartbeat industries have been given/taken away.
All of that said, the 30k foot view shows plenty of blame to go around, from onerous (over)regulation from .gov to the unions demanding more and more, even as the companies they worked for were taking on water. I had a HS friend that was making 30k or 40k in ’79 as a laborer at Crucible in Midland, PA., 10 miles UP-stream. Tough work but that was serious jack back then.
Greed from both sides sank that ship.
I’m not anti-union or pro-corp., just observations from a small business owner who has watched it all go down.
Manufacturing and steel making jobs have been automated away. Unions accelerated the issues for sure by not allowing steady automation, which often led to a catastrophic collapse in the end.
Point #1 … people — i.e., voters — will NOT decide this election … Dominion voting machines will … period.
I grew up in Cleveland (born in ’47) … and when I was in law school in ’75, I came across a white paper that was talking about the immense economic powerhouse that was Cuyahoga County, OH — of which Cleveland is the major city.
Up until about ’70 or so, Cuyahoga County reportedly had the highest output of manufactured goods of any county in the United States … and, if it had been a Sovereign Nation, would have been one of the top 10 economic powerhouses in the world. I worked in the steel mills off and on in the summers of ’70, ’71 & ’72 — and I recall when I was on the way to work on the night shift how The Flats area of Cleveland had this tremendous orange glow lighting up the sky for miles in every direction. That was the light of people working — the steel mills were often running 3 shifts per day …
But there was more than steel in Cuyahoga County in those days … every major industry had strong representation there: autos (Ford, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Chrysler); chemicals; steel (J & L, USS, Republic); iron ore boats came into the unloading machinery along the Lake Erie waterfront every day; paint; chemicals; oil refineries; copper tubing; etc.
Now? Well … since the ’80s or thereabouts, the biggest product of Cuyahoga County is poverty and corruption … and the destruction of whole neighborhoods in Cleveland by arson, etc.
Crime there is rampant — Cleveland is one of the seldom-named high crime cities …
Cleveland and Cuyahoga County aren’t the only places that the United States died — economically or otherwise — but they’re a good example of what has happened across the land due to the short-sightedness of union bosses that constantly negotiated higher wages that cost jobs — especially in light of NAFTA and other anti-American worker legislation … or the opening of trade with china … or the opening of the borders by LBJ in ’65 … all making up ‘death by a thousand small cuts’ in the lives of tens of millions of United States Citizens and Taxpayers.
And for what? Cui bono?