CLINTON, W.Va.
The first phase of the recession may be over, but recovery has not visited America’s industrial heartland.
And the country that’s being imagined in Washington doesn’t leave much room for smokestack brawn. In an economy structured around low-wage service jobs and high-paying “knowledge worker” jobs, there isn’t much room for the American yeomanry.
The past 35 years have seen the upper Ohio Valley’s status greatly reduced, but the current moves by the political elite are the most aggressive yet and come after a period of elevated expectations.
The time for green shoots in the upper Ohio Valley was a few years ago, when energy prices were high, global steel demand was huge, and cap and trade was a matter for grad school discussions, not legislation. Old coal mines reopened and foreign investors came hunting for mills to buy.
And the industrial uptick was good news for everyone in the region.
West Virginia is still running a budget surplus from the coal taxes of the good years. Ohio led the nation in capital investment. Pittsburgh became one of America’s most livable cities.
In a country crazy for retro, the upper Ohio Valley was like a midcentury chrome and Formica dinner table discovered at a yard sale. Kind eyes could see past the rust spots.
In little taverns where people wash down pepperoni rolls with cold Iron City beer to the sound of video lottery terminals chirping and pinging away in the background, the talk was still mostly about football — high school on Friday, college on Saturday and the Steelers on Sunday. But notes of optimism about the valley crept in, too.
So-and-so’s daughter had moved back home to take a job at the bank. A cousin had heard that he might have an inside track to get on at the new plant that would turn coal into diesel fuel. Had you heard about the new shopping center going up on the hill? A Target and a Starbucks.
After losing ground since the mid-1970s and being reduced to a population of 4 million from a peak of double that in the 1960s, people weren’t thinking about getting back to the glory days. But the idea of breaking the losing streak sure had appeal.
But even the hope of losing less has faded.
The problem is that the global downturn shrank steel and coal markets at just the wrong moment. The retraction came as the 2008 election results told everyone in the carbon-producing world that America would not be the place to do business for the near future.
Little towns in Brazil, Russia, India and China are happily belching smoke into the atmosphere, just as little towns here did 50 years ago. It’s dirtier along the Hai River in China than it is along the Ohio today, but a hopeful outlook tends to make soot seem less noxious.
I wonder how you say in Mandarin: “Smoke in the air means bread on the table”?
Cap and trade may be stalled in the Senate now, but investors expect that sooner or later, President Barack Obama and the Democrats will succeed in clamping down on manufacturing.
In exchange, the elites are offering the millions of voters here and the tens of millions more like them the gauzy promise of green jobs and the very real possibility of screwing up their health care in the name of “bending the cost curve.” Their tax money went to the bright boys at Goldman Sachs and now Wall Street is making big profits while the mines and mills stay closed.
Plenty of folks here voted for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election because they thought Obama was too elite and too detached to give them much consideration. Those voters are feeling vindicated.
If you live on the East or West coasts, you might imagine that the troubles currently being caused by holdout Democrats from places like the Ohio Valley as just a bump on the way to a cooler, more European America.
But Obama once warned his fellow elites about this very moment when he said that Democrats had lost ground with folks here for not delivering on past promises: “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them. …”
As they’d say around here, yinz ain’t seen nothing yet.
