Fishwrapper - Advance to the rear
South surrenders its economy to Yankees and foreigners selling low-wage jobs
Some folks had a political statement to make last week. I know, just about everyone and their mangy dog had urgent political messages they wanted to shout at the rest of the world during the final hours leading up to the election.
But the people who got my attention were manning the Factory Shoals Road overpass on Interstate 20. About a dozen gentlemen and ladies, and a few of their progeny, happily waved what one of them told me was the “real State of Georgia flag” at motorists. We’re speaking, of course, of the pre-Roy Barnes banner emblazoned with Dixie’s St. Andrew’s Cross, look away, look away.
For these indefatigable champions of a lost (and hyperbolically embellished) cause, this was the political issue. It’s not one that, only hours before a presidential election, gets me in a lather. I do find it hard to separate that flag from other symbols of hate — burning crosses, swastikas and Georgia Christian Coalition Fuehrer Sadie Fields’ face come to mind. But why, I asked myself, does anyone care about that silly rag as we’re about to decide an election that could dramatically alter the nature of our country?
I’ll take the overpass “flaggers” at their word that their motive was to preserve their “culture,” misbegotten or otherwise. The group was rushing away to their next demonstration by the time I got off I-20 and found my way back to Factory Shoals, but I did manage to yell to one guy as he was leaving, “What if the South had won?” He shouted back, “We’d be free.”
Now that’s a thought, isn’t it? Moneywise, we’re not free. We’re just cheap.
It’s only fair to warn you that in a minute I’m going to talk about weighty matters such as investments and economics. Don’t be frightened. I’m going to coat all of the econo-babble with easy words, some from real people I met during a month of travels around the South. (If you didn’t read Creative Loafing’s “Voices of the South” cover story last week, you can receive absolution by going immediately to atlanta.creativeloafing.com/ 2004-10-28/cover.html.)
The circuitous logic behind mentioning the unreconstructed Confederates is that what they symbolize culturally isn’t far removed from the economic policies of Georgia’s leaders — indeed, those of the political bosses of every state south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
That similarity is shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot backwardness. We face the rear and give the Rebel yell, “Charge!” Put another way, just as the flaggers are still fighting a war we lost 140 years ago, so, too, is our economy rooted in decades-out-of-date thinking.
When CL photographer Jim Stawniak and I set off on our 2004 Dixie Tour, we pledged not to argue with people. It was tough to keep that promise. And the question that bugged us most was: Why do Southerners doggedly vote against their own self-interests? True, the Bush camp derided those of us who are “reality based,” and Fox News and airwave airheads such as Neal Boortz constantly disgorge fiction and distortion. But you’d think people would at least be able to recognize when economic policies — I’m talking about how much cash is in your wallet — are toxic.
One answer to the conundrum — it’s been suggested by Yankee reporters, and a few bred here — is that Southerners suffer from culturally induced lack of intellectual capacity. After all, Georgia and the other Southern states fight furiously for the privilege of being dead last on almost every scale of academic performance. And, with about a third of the nation’s population, we have only an anemic 10 percent of the Nobel laureates.
Repeatedly, Stawniak and I ran into hardworking, salt-of-the-earth Southerners who had been screwed by the economy. They knew, for example, that Bush’s tax breaks that gave them pennies larded six-figure benefits onto billionaires who’ve never had to work. (Don’t believe me? The largest single category in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans is “inheritance.”)
But I found only a handful of people out of the hundreds we interviewed that understood the trillions of dollars of deficits swamping America. And no one — absolutely no one I talked to — was aware that “debt” is a commodity. Who owns much of the debt Bush has run up? Why, such shrewd investors as the blood-drenched Commie bastards who enthrall more than a billion people in China. They’re every bit as awful as Saddam Hussein, but they’re our trading buddies so we overlook their little excesses. And since the Red Chinese are our bankers, maybe you can understand why we have such an unlevel playing field in our trading relations. It’s going to get worse in January when the final barriers fall on cheap Chinese clothing imports — and another 600,000 Americans, most in the South, will see their manufacturing jobs go poof!
One of the best examples I found on the road of the South’s peculiar detachment from economic reality was Barbara Turner. With her husband, Jim, she runs a delightful restaurant in Greenville, Ga. She recited the whole litany of economic woes in the South — factory closings, lost jobs, no opportunities for kids. And she understood that the Bush administration has dug us into an economic hole it may take generations to climb out of.
But Turner without hesitation said, “I have to stay with Bush.”
In her case, as with many Southerners, I suspect the reason is the “religion thing.” Republicans have adroitly commandeered the Lord. Ever since the War of Northern Aggression, white Southerners have been alienated from the political system. So it was easy for Republicans to exploit first race and then religion. With preachers thundering on “cultural” issues, Southerners joined the crusade and neglected to notice that, economically speaking, they were getting screwed — and doing it to themselves.
From one end of the South to the other, we encountered people distressed at the loss of jobs. Some understood that multinational companies were shipping jobs overseas. But few Southerners understood why we’re so vulnerable.
The answer is simple: Just like the flaggers, we are fixated on the past. Much of our economy is rooted in methods and technologies of previous centuries. Yet, when our antiquated factories and mills close, we are left bleating, as did Etles Henries, a Democratic activist in Beaufort County, N.C., that the only issue is, “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” The obvious question is, “What do we do?” No one, George Bush or John Kerry, had much of an answer.
Elevating the backward gazing to public policy, we have Southern governors falling over themselves to bribe companies to set up shops here. In recent days, Georgia officials were ready to stuff $17 million into Kmart’s cash register (and the state toyed with sweetening that with another $13 million) to get the retailer to move its corporate staff here. That’s about $2 taken from every man, woman and whippersnapper in the state. It’s called corporate welfare.
What would Kmart do? It would fire about 2,000 workers in its current home state, Michigan, move a handful of top execs here, and hire maybe 1,500 people. Hmmm. Why? Because it would shed high-paying jobs in favor of dirt-cheap payrolls in Georgia — and, the numbers suggest, force people to work far longer hours so that corporate chieftains can collect bonuses for being “efficient.”
Michigan will probably outbid (on its taxpayers’ dime) Georgia. But the Kmart deal was small potatoes compared to, say, $71 million (about $8.50 squeezed from each Georgian) that will be given to Toyo Tire to create a whopping 350 jobs. Then there was the (thankfully failed) scheme to gift DaimlerChrysler with $320 million (each Georgian’s share: $38) including $9.4 million in cold cash just to make the auto giant’s execs feel good.
What has been the experience with such corporate blackmail? The companies come, stay long enough to exhaust the tax breaks and other incentives, and then go looking for another state or Third World nation to rip off.
Is there hope for such self-flagellating economic policies?
“We’ve got to look beyond the traditional Southern strategy of cheap land, cheap labor and low taxes,” says Jim Clinton, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Clinton’s outfit annually carries out the astounding (for the South) task of looking forward. And based on current trends, we have a lot to worry about.
Among some of the board’s findings:
- The export gap between the South and the rest of the nation — what we would have shipped out if we’d kept pace with the Yankees — is about $28 billion a year. Had we been performing at that level, there would have been 382,000 new, high-paying jobs in the South.
- That’s unlikely to change soon because, as stressed in the board’s Not Invested Here: The 2004 Southern Investment Index, “In both public and private sector investments, the South lacks the investment to become more of a leader in the innovation economy. ... If the South were performing at the national average ... billions of additional dollars would be available for investment in the region’s businesses and citizens. Our sub-par performance in two critical areas — venture capital and industrially performed research — especially hampers the South’s economic progress.”
Clinton says he understands that Southerners are “frustrated, and rightly so” over the dearth of job creation — especially in the “knowledge economy” positions critical for the future.
“We too often see state officials trying to lure jobs just for the numbers,” Clinton said. “It takes 10 to 15 years to create the type of jobs we really need.”
The “ultimate limiter” on job creation is the knowledge and skills of citizens. Again, things don’t look rosy for the South. Our children, at every grade level, fall behind the national average in reading and math.
“Our goal,” Clinton said, “shouldn’t be to just be the location for branch plants. That won’t create high-paying jobs. Our goal should be to invest now, create the knowledge base so that we’ll have the high-paying jobs a decade down the road. That’s the trick.”
The question, then: Is it possible to teach an old dog, or the old South, new tricks?
Group Senior Editor John Sugg — who says, “If you’re wondering why I’m not chortling or sobbing over election results, it’s because our deadlines were Tuesday, but wait until the fireworks in my next column” — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
But the people who got my attention were manning the Factory Shoals Road overpass on Interstate 20. About a dozen gentlemen and ladies, and a few of their progeny, happily waved what one of them told me was the “real State of Georgia flag” at motorists. We’re speaking, of course, of the pre-Roy Barnes banner emblazoned with Dixie’s St. Andrew’s Cross, look away, look away.
For these indefatigable champions of a lost (and hyperbolically embellished) cause, this was the political issue. It’s not one that, only hours before a presidential election, gets me in a lather. I do find it hard to separate that flag from other symbols of hate — burning crosses, swastikas and Georgia Christian Coalition Fuehrer Sadie Fields’ face come to mind. But why, I asked myself, does anyone care about that silly rag as we’re about to decide an election that could dramatically alter the nature of our country?
I’ll take the overpass “flaggers” at their word that their motive was to preserve their “culture,” misbegotten or otherwise. The group was rushing away to their next demonstration by the time I got off I-20 and found my way back to Factory Shoals, but I did manage to yell to one guy as he was leaving, “What if the South had won?” He shouted back, “We’d be free.”
Now that’s a thought, isn’t it? Moneywise, we’re not free. We’re just cheap.
It’s only fair to warn you that in a minute I’m going to talk about weighty matters such as investments and economics. Don’t be frightened. I’m going to coat all of the econo-babble with easy words, some from real people I met during a month of travels around the South. (If you didn’t read Creative Loafing’s “Voices of the South” cover story last week, you can receive absolution by going immediately to atlanta.creativeloafing.com/ 2004-10-28/cover.html.)
The circuitous logic behind mentioning the unreconstructed Confederates is that what they symbolize culturally isn’t far removed from the economic policies of Georgia’s leaders — indeed, those of the political bosses of every state south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
That similarity is shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot backwardness. We face the rear and give the Rebel yell, “Charge!” Put another way, just as the flaggers are still fighting a war we lost 140 years ago, so, too, is our economy rooted in decades-out-of-date thinking.
When CL photographer Jim Stawniak and I set off on our 2004 Dixie Tour, we pledged not to argue with people. It was tough to keep that promise. And the question that bugged us most was: Why do Southerners doggedly vote against their own self-interests? True, the Bush camp derided those of us who are “reality based,” and Fox News and airwave airheads such as Neal Boortz constantly disgorge fiction and distortion. But you’d think people would at least be able to recognize when economic policies — I’m talking about how much cash is in your wallet — are toxic.
One answer to the conundrum — it’s been suggested by Yankee reporters, and a few bred here — is that Southerners suffer from culturally induced lack of intellectual capacity. After all, Georgia and the other Southern states fight furiously for the privilege of being dead last on almost every scale of academic performance. And, with about a third of the nation’s population, we have only an anemic 10 percent of the Nobel laureates.
Repeatedly, Stawniak and I ran into hardworking, salt-of-the-earth Southerners who had been screwed by the economy. They knew, for example, that Bush’s tax breaks that gave them pennies larded six-figure benefits onto billionaires who’ve never had to work. (Don’t believe me? The largest single category in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans is “inheritance.”)
But I found only a handful of people out of the hundreds we interviewed that understood the trillions of dollars of deficits swamping America. And no one — absolutely no one I talked to — was aware that “debt” is a commodity. Who owns much of the debt Bush has run up? Why, such shrewd investors as the blood-drenched Commie bastards who enthrall more than a billion people in China. They’re every bit as awful as Saddam Hussein, but they’re our trading buddies so we overlook their little excesses. And since the Red Chinese are our bankers, maybe you can understand why we have such an unlevel playing field in our trading relations. It’s going to get worse in January when the final barriers fall on cheap Chinese clothing imports — and another 600,000 Americans, most in the South, will see their manufacturing jobs go poof!
One of the best examples I found on the road of the South’s peculiar detachment from economic reality was Barbara Turner. With her husband, Jim, she runs a delightful restaurant in Greenville, Ga. She recited the whole litany of economic woes in the South — factory closings, lost jobs, no opportunities for kids. And she understood that the Bush administration has dug us into an economic hole it may take generations to climb out of.
But Turner without hesitation said, “I have to stay with Bush.”
In her case, as with many Southerners, I suspect the reason is the “religion thing.” Republicans have adroitly commandeered the Lord. Ever since the War of Northern Aggression, white Southerners have been alienated from the political system. So it was easy for Republicans to exploit first race and then religion. With preachers thundering on “cultural” issues, Southerners joined the crusade and neglected to notice that, economically speaking, they were getting screwed — and doing it to themselves.
From one end of the South to the other, we encountered people distressed at the loss of jobs. Some understood that multinational companies were shipping jobs overseas. But few Southerners understood why we’re so vulnerable.
The answer is simple: Just like the flaggers, we are fixated on the past. Much of our economy is rooted in methods and technologies of previous centuries. Yet, when our antiquated factories and mills close, we are left bleating, as did Etles Henries, a Democratic activist in Beaufort County, N.C., that the only issue is, “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” The obvious question is, “What do we do?” No one, George Bush or John Kerry, had much of an answer.
Elevating the backward gazing to public policy, we have Southern governors falling over themselves to bribe companies to set up shops here. In recent days, Georgia officials were ready to stuff $17 million into Kmart’s cash register (and the state toyed with sweetening that with another $13 million) to get the retailer to move its corporate staff here. That’s about $2 taken from every man, woman and whippersnapper in the state. It’s called corporate welfare.
What would Kmart do? It would fire about 2,000 workers in its current home state, Michigan, move a handful of top execs here, and hire maybe 1,500 people. Hmmm. Why? Because it would shed high-paying jobs in favor of dirt-cheap payrolls in Georgia — and, the numbers suggest, force people to work far longer hours so that corporate chieftains can collect bonuses for being “efficient.”
Michigan will probably outbid (on its taxpayers’ dime) Georgia. But the Kmart deal was small potatoes compared to, say, $71 million (about $8.50 squeezed from each Georgian) that will be given to Toyo Tire to create a whopping 350 jobs. Then there was the (thankfully failed) scheme to gift DaimlerChrysler with $320 million (each Georgian’s share: $38) including $9.4 million in cold cash just to make the auto giant’s execs feel good.
What has been the experience with such corporate blackmail? The companies come, stay long enough to exhaust the tax breaks and other incentives, and then go looking for another state or Third World nation to rip off.
Is there hope for such self-flagellating economic policies?
“We’ve got to look beyond the traditional Southern strategy of cheap land, cheap labor and low taxes,” says Jim Clinton, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board in Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Clinton’s outfit annually carries out the astounding (for the South) task of looking forward. And based on current trends, we have a lot to worry about.
Among some of the board’s findings:
- The export gap between the South and the rest of the nation — what we would have shipped out if we’d kept pace with the Yankees — is about $28 billion a year. Had we been performing at that level, there would have been 382,000 new, high-paying jobs in the South.
- That’s unlikely to change soon because, as stressed in the board’s Not Invested Here: The 2004 Southern Investment Index, “In both public and private sector investments, the South lacks the investment to become more of a leader in the innovation economy. ... If the South were performing at the national average ... billions of additional dollars would be available for investment in the region’s businesses and citizens. Our sub-par performance in two critical areas — venture capital and industrially performed research — especially hampers the South’s economic progress.”
Clinton says he understands that Southerners are “frustrated, and rightly so” over the dearth of job creation — especially in the “knowledge economy” positions critical for the future.
“We too often see state officials trying to lure jobs just for the numbers,” Clinton said. “It takes 10 to 15 years to create the type of jobs we really need.”
The “ultimate limiter” on job creation is the knowledge and skills of citizens. Again, things don’t look rosy for the South. Our children, at every grade level, fall behind the national average in reading and math.
“Our goal,” Clinton said, “shouldn’t be to just be the location for branch plants. That won’t create high-paying jobs. Our goal should be to invest now, create the knowledge base so that we’ll have the high-paying jobs a decade down the road. That’s the trick.”
The question, then: Is it possible to teach an old dog, or the old South, new tricks?
Group Senior Editor John Sugg — who says, “If you’re wondering why I’m not chortling or sobbing over election results, it’s because our deadlines were Tuesday, but wait until the fireworks in my next column” — can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.