The decisive moment in Shawnie Peters’ life in this historic election year will arrive in the middle of next month, a week or so after Americans make their choice between presidential candidates Democrat Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain.
That is when Peters and 250 others will lose their jobs on the assembly line at a plant that makes diesel truck engines in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio.
Her version of the American dream — a well-paying union job, family home, two cars, savings and trips to Europe — began unraveling in July when her husband lost his job in the first round of job losses at the plant, which is jointly owned by General Motors and Isuzu.
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
Soon both will be out of work.
“It is an incredible position to be in when you have a house payment, a car payment, a baby,” she said. “It’s scary.”
Those personal tragedies, replicated across Ohio and other industrial states this election season, could well decide who wins the White House.
Ohio has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1964.
The winner, this time around, will be the candidate best able to convince working-class voters that he can turn around the economy, create new jobs and lower taxes.
The economic upheaval has already forced Peters to make some drastic changes. She put up for sale the house where she hoped to bring up her toddler son. Peters did not want to be caught in a situation where she would be unable to keep up with the mortgage payments.
She and her husband began making plans to leave Ohio for another state where they might have a better chance of finding jobs, such as North Carolina.
And Peters started rethinking her political allegiances. An independent, she voted for US President George W. Bush in 2004. Now she believes he is the main culprit for her economic troubles.
“I believe there were just measures that could have been taken, oversights that obviously they just looked past, especially in the stock market,” she said. “Somebody should have seen this coming months and months and months ago.”
But it took time before Peters could translate her anger at Bush into support for Obama. She watched the debates, she read up on the candidates’ programs. She liked Obama’s promise to create jobs and expand health coverage, but she was troubled by the provocative comments of his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Peters finally made her mind up last Sunday after the former US secretary of state Colin Powell came out for Obama.
“I don’t think that McCain is in touch with the needs of the new American family. I just don’t think he is in touch with today’s struggles, today’s economy, today’s younger people. This is not my grandma’s economy any more. Unfortunately, I think that is where John McCain is in his mindset,” she said.
Similar calculations appear to be under way across Ohio. After running even or behind McCain for months, Obama now leads the Republican by an average of six points in the state.
That represents a dramatic reversal of Obama’s performance in the state against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary, when Obama was defeated everywhere except four urban centers with a heavy African-American population.
Recent polls suggest that Obama is broadening his appeal across the state. He is also beginning to challenge the Republicans’ dominance of the towns south and east of Dayton, which Bush won easily in 2000 and 2004.
Since then, the Dayton area has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs. It has lost more than 30,000 jobs since 2000, and each plant that goes under sets off a chain reaction of job losses. On Dec. 23, another GM plant, making SUVs, will close, with immediate job losses of 900. It is hard to find anyone who says they haven’t somehow been affected by the economic crisis or who doesn’t fear they soon will be.
The companies that supplied parts to GM are closing. Other firms are cutting costs or laying off workers. Local restaurants are closing. Small businesses are having trouble hanging on.
For Mike Skowronski, the downturn turned him from the owner of a small carpet and floor maintenance company to a low-paid hourly wage earner.
“I’m not very happy to work for someone else, especially making the little change that I am making here. It’s certainly nowhere near US$65 an hour as what I’m used to — US$8 is a long cry from US$65,” he said.
Skowronski voted for Bush in 2000, but he is furious now, blaming the present occupant of the White House for the economic downturn.
At the moment, he insists he is not going to vote for either candidate — McCain or Obama — though he will cast his ballot for congressional candidates.
But the Obama camp and its allies are hopeful that Skowronski will come on his side in the end.
James Clark, the president of the IUE-CWA, the industrial arm of the Communications Workers of America, which operates at the GM plant, argues that the downturn has forced workers to acknowledge where their real economic interest lies.
“We have in our manufacturing facilities a substantial number of Republican workers, but they are waking up. They have seen their family members lose their jobs. They have seen workers in their plants lose their jobs,” he said.
Before the downturn, he estimated that about 50 percent of Dayton’s manufacturing workers were Democrats. Now, after talking to workers outside the plant gates, he is convinced the figure is closer to 70 percent.
Others remain unsure about Obama even as they turn away from Bush.
Andrea Mallory, a worker at a packaging plant, has been looking for a better job since January, when she qualified as a pharmacy technician. She has already lost the family home, moving into a rented apartment. Now she is thinking of taking a second job to support her three children, or possibly leaving the area to look for work.
“I’m just making it,” she said.
Mallory, who is African-American, voted for Bush in 2000 and for Democratic Senator John Kerry in 2004. This time around, the choice is agony.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) were born under the sign of Gemini. Geminis are known for their intelligence, creativity, adaptability and flexibility. It is unlikely, then, that the trade conflict between the US and China would escalate into a catastrophic collision. It is more probable that both sides would seek a way to de-escalate, paving the way for a Trump-Xi summit that allows the global economy some breathing room. Practically speaking, China and the US have vulnerabilities, and a prolonged trade war would be damaging for both. In the US, the electoral system means that public opinion
They did it again. For the whole world to see: an image of a Taiwan flag crushed by an industrial press, and the horrifying warning that “it’s closer than you think.” All with the seal of authenticity that only a reputable international media outlet can give. The Economist turned what looks like a pastiche of a poster for a grim horror movie into a truth everyone can digest, accept, and use to support exactly the opinion China wants you to have: It is over and done, Taiwan is doomed. Four years after inaccurately naming Taiwan the most dangerous place on
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
RSS