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After he leaves Forsyth Community College, I hope he drives by all the closed down textiles mills, furniture factories, and other abandoned manufacturing sites that are strewn across the industrial graveyard that is known as Winston-Salem and the Triad!
Ten or fifteen thousand biotech and "green" jobs are not gonna replace industries that once employed 100's of thousands in jobs that small towns and cities (as well as larger ones)in NC have lost over the last 15 years!
He's been running from Washington and the problems our country faces so fast since the election our heads should be spinning like Linda Blair's...from Asia, then Portugal, then a sixteen-stitch round of basketball, then an overnight haul to Afghanistan for four hours to make our troops think everything is as planned. Some of us can see the picture clearly.
The worst part is for those handful of green jobs the state will give away billions in tax revenue so those companies can close up shop and move elsewhere in three years.
I swear the incompetent way we handle luring new employment sectors here is exactly like the Monorail episode of the Simpsons.
Well the fact is that NC has become a joke and an afterthought when it comes to manufacturing and industry.
I don't know what it is, but all around us in SC, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Viriginia, you have shiny new manufacturing operations opening up all the time. Go to trade and industry websites and read about all the investment that US and especially foreign companies are investiing in these areas. Even old line industries like textiles are getting new investment. Look at all the Shaw Industries operations in Georgia. Auto industry is moving in these states also.....yet NC is left out!
All NC has is RTP with some biotech/pharma stuff here & there and in the eastern part of the state a buncha chicken, hog, and turkey slaughterhouse operations.
And every time you DO hear about a new manufacturing operation, you will read where the company shook down the state or county for millions in tax incentives!
Cities like Winston-Salem and Durham, with it's "progressive" and "forward-thinking" politicians have done NOTHING to keep REAL industry. All they have done is run it out. Liggett and RJR come to mind!
Sorry folks, but hospitals, university research centers, and some foreign R&D labs is not enough to keep the tenth most populated state in the US employed!
Those other states don't have the conservative incentives policy that we developed under Gov. Hunt. Sure, we don't always abide by that panel's recommendations, but we are not as quick to throw hundreds of millions at every potential employer the way SC, Mississippi, Alabama, etc. do.
I don't think we want to emulate such regressive states as SC, MS, and AL, who only attract industry because such states are notorious for anti-labor exploitive policies and climates. Give me one RTP anyday over the work climate of those Deep Southern states. RTP competes with high wage and high education locales such as Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, Boston, places worth emulating.
I don't think we want to emulate such regressive states as SC, MS, and AL, who only attract industry because such states are notorious for anti-labor exploitive policies and climates. Give me one RTP anyday over the work climate of those Deep Southern states. RTP competes with high wage and high education locales such as Silicon Valley, Northern Virginia, Boston, places worth emulating.
Well, I get your point, but RTP is not gonna carry the whole state now is it?
Not everybody lives within driving distance to RTP or Charlotte (banking).
If you read my post and think about what has happened to cities like Winston-Salem, Gastonia, Burlington, and, too a lesser degree, Durham (even with RTP) and Greensboro, you will realize that those without advanced degrees in specific fields or those with trade education have little opportunities anymore in NC.
IT, biotech/pharma, R&D, and other so-called "hi-tech" fields are political and media (bedfellows) driven hype that makes young people all think on the same page when they go to college nowadays.
Young people are unaware of what made America great in the first place.
IT, biotech/pharma, R&D, and other so-called "hi-tech" fields are political and media (bedfellows) driven hype that makes young people all think on the same page when they go to college nowadays.
Huh?
I know lots of people who are doing alright for themselves by being on these pages.
I know lots of people who are doing alright for themselves by being on these pages.
Apparently you live in a vacuum then. There are a hundred times as many who are NOT doing alright for themselves because:
1. They don't live near an RTP type site.
2. They don't have the specialized training that alot of RTP jobs require.
3. They can't afford to do the above!
Remember the 4800 people who lost their jobs in '03 in the Kannapolis area when Pillowtex (Fieldcrest Cannon) closed down their huge facility? Remember when David Murdoch rode in and said everything was gonna be OK because a $1.5 billion NC Reasearch Campus was in the works to create jobs for the area?
Seven years later and how many jobs are there?
The few hundred that were created DIDN't go to the displaced Pillowtex workers. They went to RTP leftovers and folks from other states.
When the President any other politicians go to colleges and talk about "biotech this and green technology that" and the governor visits Cree and Talecris and tells us how this is supposed to be the future of the NC economy, they are lying to us and themselves because, in the end, the few thousand jobs that RTP or similar sites and biotech/pharma create annually will never absorb the TENS OF THOUSANDS of jobs lost annually in traditional manufacturing in NC over the past 15 years!
^So are you suggesting the colleges should not be teaching IT and other high-tech curricula? You said these fields are "hyped up", but there's a reason kids choose to study them...JOBS! Which is kind of the point of Obama's visit--to highlight the great work FTCC is doing to prepare people for these jobs. I don't disagree that NC's job market has taken some tough hits. But longing for the past isn't going to help improve things, I'm afraid.
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