"In Hard-Hit Ohio Steel Town, Trump and Sanders Resonate"
NBC
In Hard-Hit Ohio Steel Town, Trump and Sanders Resonate
3/12/16
LORAIN, Ohio - The landscape here looks like a wasteland. And it's about to get worse.
Two steel mills in this city, 30 miles west of Cleveland on Lake Eerie, are set to close by the end of March, laying off hundreds of people in an area that has seen jobs slowly erode for more than two decades.
The final 130 workers at Republic Steel will be out of work when the plant rolls its final order of steel tubular products for oil drilling and fracking equipment in two weeks. And at U.S. Steel, the final 200 workers will also be out of jobs at the end of March.
"It's a sad month," said Brian Sealy, a union official for the United Steelworkers in Lorain. "Overall the trickle-down effect on this community - the closed-up downtown - continues.
That trickle-down effect is devastating to a community like this."
Downtown Lorain is dotted with boarded businesses and deteriorating buildings while dollar stores and run-down used car lots fill in the gaps. The downtown is mostly empty, hosting building after building of blight and despair.
60% of downtown Lorain sits empty
It's a much different scenario than 30 years ago in the 1980s when the steel mills, the largest employers in town, were busy and employed more than 10,000 people.
Now the town of 64,000 people is facing a deficit of more than $2 million dollars in large part because of the loss tax revenue from steel workers.
Union workers blame trade deals, especially the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, passed in 1993. And with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, another trade deal with Asian countries, on the verge of passing, Sealy said the future looks blight.
"There's going to be a lot more offshoring of jobs and that's going to affect us directly," Sealy said.
The closing of the steel mills and the looming threat of TPP, are coming to the fore while a contentious presidential primary is heading straight to Lorain as Ohio holds its primary Tuesday.
In this traditionally Democratic stronghold, Donald Trump is working for those voters who feel that their livelihood is in jeopardy.
The county of Lorain backed with 58 percent President Barack Obama in 2008 and 56 percent in 2012.
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Sanders, meanwhile, also has a presence in this working-class enclave of northeast Ohio. He, too, deplores the trade deals and often criticizes his opponent Hillary Clinton for her husband's role in passing NAFTA and her support of TPP until she came out against it during her presidential campaign.
Sanders' campaign office, however, is volunteer-run and -funded. Alan Pugh, who has never participated in politics before, opened the office in downtown Elyria. He and fellow volunteers pay for the rent and all the utilities out of their own coffers.
"Having Bernie and Donald trump both having offices down here speaks to an anti-establishment mentality so the end of establishment politics and economics. People are looking for something a little different than they've experienced in the past 30 years," Pugh said.
Sealy is living it.
"We're struggling everywhere right now. To us it's a crisis."
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/hard-hit-ohio-steel-town-trump-sanders-resonate-n536746
Bernie tried to warn US!!
1991
And Bernie means it. Trump is just saying what he knows resonates. Republicans will never try to stop Democrats from sending our jobs off shore to be done by others at slave wages so that millionaires can become even richer. Only Democrats from within can stop our party leaders from continuing to kill our working class.
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