Well, it's been a while since I've had anything to say to you guys, but I figure the New York Times doesn't bother to write articles about your hometown everyday. It includes a fairly decent video to accompany the article, with plenty of shots that make Newark look a lot nicer than it actually is.
The thing about Newark is, it really is in a bad way. It's right at the forefront of the collapse of the manufacturing economy and the rise of the service industry. Right now, it's running around an 11% unemployment rate. I think one of the things that gets lost in discussions of rural and suburban unemployment is the inability of people to go elsewhere. A lot of people say, "Well, why can't they just move to where there are jobs?" Moving costs money. You need a car to have a job in a place like Newark, and of course you need a job to have a car. There's only a hilarious parody of public transportation. And once you're wrapped up in debt, what else is there for you to do? It's a crushing feeling, and you can feel it hovering over the city. In the same way success builds on success, failure is a hard thing to escape.
Showing posts with label hometowns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hometowns. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Hometown Update
The 60 Minutes piece about my hometown of Wilmington aired two days ago. Video's here. It was certainly emotional for me to watch, though I suppose I'm an easy target. You can see my mother playing bells in the sequence at the church, and if you're fast enough you can catch my girlfriend and I in the back corner of the small audience.
I'd love to label myself a prophet for having predicted the nature of the piece, but there's nothing prophetic about identifying the pain that emanates from certain and impending loss.
That loss, having mostly taken place, will be consummated in three days, when DHL operations in Wilmington cease. Watching the piece viscerally brought home the fact that my reason for coming to Washington has thus far been an abject failure. I've mentioned it before, and I've never said it as bluntly, perhaps even to myself, but I came here because of my hometown. I came here to help in the best way that I knew how. And because I knew what was happening in Wilmington wasn't an isolated incident. 70,000 jobs were lost yesterday. Yesterday. Almost ten times the number that were lost in Wilmington.
I was never so naive as to think that I'd come here and get a job that directly related to helping my hometown. I knew it would take years of hard work, compromise, and smart decision-making before I'd be in a position to do anything substantive.
Politics is an end unto itself, and is only loosely related to governing when it is at all. Politics is the art of winning. I came to Washington because I thought I knew how to win. Nothing in my life has ever made sense to me the way politics does. Like 60 Minutes, I thought I knew what sold, and how to sell it. I thought I'd come here, bust my ass, work twice as hard and learn twice as much as everyone else, and make myself an asset to a Congressional or Executive office. I thought somebody here had read Horatio Alger. I thought my time struggling to decide what I wanted to do with my life, living outside the U.S., traveling the world and accumulating friendships and experiences would be an asset and not a detriment. I thought...
Instead, I'm awash in a sea of Ivy league grads that have planned on working on the Hill since they were in utero. I'm 29 and feel like a dinosaur in an environment that's dominated by people fresh out of college getting the jobs that I'd donate a kidney for. I'm someone with almost no meaningful connections in an environment where who you know is more important than what you know, and what you can do never even comes up. I certainly know some people, but connections aren't really useful unless someone is willing to pull a string for you, and like Wilmington, even if you have heard of me, you sure as hell don't owe me any favors.
I've applied to 41 jobs on the Hill since my internship ended in December, and haven't even received a polite 'no thanks' from a single one. I've gone through 19 different cover letters, searching for the magic words that might land me an interview or chance, wondering all the time if they get read or not, if I should keep applying, keep setting up informational interviews, keep writing emails that rarely get answered.
Like everyone else, dreams or not, I've got to pay the rent, and that necessity has to be measured against why I came here in the first place. The reality is that I'll have to quit focusing on Hill positions soon.
I know my story's not special. There are lots of people in the same boat or worse. You can't be from Wilmington and not know that.
I've got to go now. I'm heading down to a Hill office. I heard the new Senator from Oregon is still staffing up and thought I'd drop off my resume. I could email it, but it's more likely to get looked at if I drop it off in person. It's snowing in Washington for the first time this winter, and being from Ohio I've missed the snow, so the walk should be nice.
Update: Ok, so upon reflection this was a ridiculously self indulgent post. If I didn't have a policy of never pulling posts (whether or not I subsequently regret them) I'd certainly axe it. Blah, blah, looking for jobs sucks. I officially apologize for taking up even a small part of your day with this sad sack shit.
I'd love to label myself a prophet for having predicted the nature of the piece, but there's nothing prophetic about identifying the pain that emanates from certain and impending loss.
That loss, having mostly taken place, will be consummated in three days, when DHL operations in Wilmington cease. Watching the piece viscerally brought home the fact that my reason for coming to Washington has thus far been an abject failure. I've mentioned it before, and I've never said it as bluntly, perhaps even to myself, but I came here because of my hometown. I came here to help in the best way that I knew how. And because I knew what was happening in Wilmington wasn't an isolated incident. 70,000 jobs were lost yesterday. Yesterday. Almost ten times the number that were lost in Wilmington.
I was never so naive as to think that I'd come here and get a job that directly related to helping my hometown. I knew it would take years of hard work, compromise, and smart decision-making before I'd be in a position to do anything substantive.
Politics is an end unto itself, and is only loosely related to governing when it is at all. Politics is the art of winning. I came to Washington because I thought I knew how to win. Nothing in my life has ever made sense to me the way politics does. Like 60 Minutes, I thought I knew what sold, and how to sell it. I thought I'd come here, bust my ass, work twice as hard and learn twice as much as everyone else, and make myself an asset to a Congressional or Executive office. I thought somebody here had read Horatio Alger. I thought my time struggling to decide what I wanted to do with my life, living outside the U.S., traveling the world and accumulating friendships and experiences would be an asset and not a detriment. I thought...
Instead, I'm awash in a sea of Ivy league grads that have planned on working on the Hill since they were in utero. I'm 29 and feel like a dinosaur in an environment that's dominated by people fresh out of college getting the jobs that I'd donate a kidney for. I'm someone with almost no meaningful connections in an environment where who you know is more important than what you know, and what you can do never even comes up. I certainly know some people, but connections aren't really useful unless someone is willing to pull a string for you, and like Wilmington, even if you have heard of me, you sure as hell don't owe me any favors.
I've applied to 41 jobs on the Hill since my internship ended in December, and haven't even received a polite 'no thanks' from a single one. I've gone through 19 different cover letters, searching for the magic words that might land me an interview or chance, wondering all the time if they get read or not, if I should keep applying, keep setting up informational interviews, keep writing emails that rarely get answered.
Like everyone else, dreams or not, I've got to pay the rent, and that necessity has to be measured against why I came here in the first place. The reality is that I'll have to quit focusing on Hill positions soon.
I know my story's not special. There are lots of people in the same boat or worse. You can't be from Wilmington and not know that.
I've got to go now. I'm heading down to a Hill office. I heard the new Senator from Oregon is still staffing up and thought I'd drop off my resume. I could email it, but it's more likely to get looked at if I drop it off in person. It's snowing in Washington for the first time this winter, and being from Ohio I've missed the snow, so the walk should be nice.
Update: Ok, so upon reflection this was a ridiculously self indulgent post. If I didn't have a policy of never pulling posts (whether or not I subsequently regret them) I'd certainly axe it. Blah, blah, looking for jobs sucks. I officially apologize for taking up even a small part of your day with this sad sack shit.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Too Small to Save
I've written about what's happening in my hometown in previous posts here and here. Long story short, after losing 9K jobs in a town that has 14K people, my town has become the milk-carton metaphor for the greatest economic downtown in generations.
Spirit lifting rhetoric has been plentiful, substantive action has not. A while back, governor Ted Strickland drummed up some blatantly ridiculous anti-trust talk. Then, Senator Sherrod Brown boldly "took up the DHL job fight" -- asking the company to "re-think" their proposal to pull out operations. This effort was met with exactly the amount of success you'd have guessed. Of course, the officials rode into town for all the nationally televised press conferences and scored the press hit. I'm not saying they don't care. I'm sure they do.
But, at the end of the day they sit around with their senior staffs and access the situation in a politically candid manner. And the situation is this: Boy, that sucks for them...but, really there's nothing we can do. We can't make DHL keep a business unit that's hemorrhaging money. The majority of laid off workers aren't unionized, and so don't have a national lobby, (due to a long and storied history of anti-unionization tactics), they're not in a swing voting district, and if you're a Democrat, you know you're not getting those votes no matter what happens. If you're a Republican, you are, and you're probably not predisposed toward any kind of government intervention to begin with. It's really important that Strickland/Brown Inc. do something though. Maybe try to secure a couple of million in aid, and work on an earmark or two. Get somebody to start beating the aforementioned anti-trust drum, which is a pipe dream at best, but will get them in all the papers and provide them with the appearance of being proactive.
Sherrod Brown even "devoted" a full-time staffer to the issue, though a review of his web site would suggest that perhaps that's no longer the case. I don't know what this person was supposed to do (working in a Senate office, and being familiar with the office structure, I'd wonder what kind of a staffer they were, and to what extent they were concentrating strictly on this issue). Full disclosure: when I was looking for an internship I wrote an email to Brown's office offering to assist this person in any capacity I could, whether or not the position was paid...an offer that still stands. As is often the case on the Hill, I never heard back. That's the tragedy of the Hill really. Getting a chance to do anything worthwhile is so difficult. There isn't a person in the world that would work harder and be a more effective advocate for Wilmington than I would. I really believe that. But, when no one in your family is a BFD (a Hill abbreviation for "Big F&*#ing Deal"), and you didn't go to Georgetown, getting that chance can be depressingly difficult. Staffs often consist of 25 people with 25 separate agendas, with political and office inertia sometimes precluding aggressive constituent advocacy instead of enabling it. Like a golfer with a lead going into the back nine, the beating pulse of politics far, far too often consists of a two word mantra: avoid mistakes -- not really a recipe for substantive change and bold action.
500 words into this post, and it's turned into a cartoon fire hose; just flinging me around as I futilely try to direct the flow. I'll try to meander into something resembling a point.
I went home for Thanksgiving. It was right after the job cuts were formally announced (they'd been all but certain for months). It would all be over on January 31. During the holiday weekend I spoke to quite a few DHL employees. Some at the bar over drinks, one or two at an annual day-after-Thanksgiving touch football game, one was a friend's parent. There wasn't a lot of complaining, just a bitter acknowledgment of an even more bitter reality. No severance packages to fall back on. Not much talk of where they'd find work when things closed up.
My girlfriend, in Wilmington for the first time, kept asking, "so what will they do", or "what happens after they (DHL) close"? What, indeed.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we both went to see my mother play in a multi-denominational bell choir, at the Quaker church -- my family's church. 60 Minutes had a camera crew at the church for a feature they were doing on Wilmington. They said they were there to cover the "day's biggest community event" which they thought, "captured the essence of the town". I guess. Though, as my girlfriend and I left the church we saw that part of an adjacent street had been blocked off for what must have been a better attended event (only a couple of dozen people, many of them family members, sat in the mostly empty pews of the Quaker church).
You can kind of see the story, right? Soon-to-be-economically-devastated small town, where the "town-folk" sparsely fill the pews on a Saturday, listening to a local bell choir, politely and quietly clapping after each song. Get some footage of the grim-but-determined laid off workers. Find another worker or family member that's so upset about their future prospects that they cry. The former being men, and the latter a woman. Not on purpose of course, that's just the footage they got. After all, small towns reinforce gender roles, they don't defy them. Nobody will be talking about bringing in new green-collar technology jobs. Nobody mentions approaching the federal government for bailout money. Hell, with any luck the weather will be overcast while the camera crew's in town. The last shot of the segment could be a series of late-model sedans and pick-ups pulling out of the DHL lot in the morning after third shift ends. No music or narration, just the sound of car engines and the thick exhaust, rolling out of tailpipes on a cold morning. All very rural and blue collar. Again, not on purpose, it just worked out that way. Can you see the story now? Two full segments I bet. Don't miss next week's exclusive interview with Katie Holmes.
After briefly speaking with the 60 Minutes crew and watching them interact with community members at the church, I couldn't get those pictures out of my mind. I felt pissed off, a feeling that hasn't abated in the intervening week.
I'm the consummate realist. I get it. I get why we don't get bailed out and Wall Street does. I get why we don't get bailed out but Detroit does. I get why 60 Minutes wants to do a feature on Wilmington. I get why we'll have 25% unemployment and become the face of the most difficult economic environment in generations. I get that it has to be somebody.
But, for the last week I just haven't been able to shake just how goddamn unfair it all is.
The citizens of Wilmington didn't make knowingly high risk gambles with other people's money, become obscenely rich in the bargain, and then demand trillions of dollars because they were "too big to fail". They didn't fight tooth and nail against regulations that might have made their products economically feasible or disingenuously and systematically deny mounds of scientific evidence because it was economically lucrative. They didn't send politicians whose job it is to advocate for them to demand 10's of billions of dollars to ensure the continued production of products that no one wants.
They just went to work everyday, with marginal benefits and almost no job protection. They busted their asses, sorting freight, loading planes, and working third shift for 20 years, and watched as that company was sold to a bigger German company. They watched as company executives made fortunes due to the acquisition, and were told that this move would ensure the company's long term survival and prosperity.
Now they've lost everything, they're informed that they get to bail out bankers who are still, unbelievably, unconscionably, receiving their year end bonuses and going on elaborate corporate junkets. They get to bail out Detroit executives that don't believe in global warming. They get to spend $1 trillion on Obama's stimulus program and the 2.5 million jobs he'd like to create (crossing their fingers and hoping that a couple of them make their way back to Clinton County). Flint bails out Malibu. The Spartans bail out the Persians. The hen bails out the fox.
Chuck Todd said the other day, "...And maybe it's because we also don't know anybody that works at GM...We don't know those families. But, we do know somebody at JPMorgan Chase." He's said that, or variations of that, on several occasions as the fools on MSNBC tried to figure out why GM's panhandling effort was less successful than Wall Street's.
The unfortunate truth is that Wilmington isn't even Detroit. Not by a long shot. If Chuck Todd and the gang don't know anybody that works for GM, Wilmington doesn't have a prayer. No bailout money for us. We wouldn't have even known who to shake our cup at. The verdict: Too small to save.
I'm a realist. If I pull back and take a deep breath I might understand why it has to be this way. But, cold rationalization is no substitute for rent or a heating bill. It's no substitute for help either, and even though I want to more than anything, I have no idea how.
Spirit lifting rhetoric has been plentiful, substantive action has not. A while back, governor Ted Strickland drummed up some blatantly ridiculous anti-trust talk. Then, Senator Sherrod Brown boldly "took up the DHL job fight" -- asking the company to "re-think" their proposal to pull out operations. This effort was met with exactly the amount of success you'd have guessed. Of course, the officials rode into town for all the nationally televised press conferences and scored the press hit. I'm not saying they don't care. I'm sure they do.
But, at the end of the day they sit around with their senior staffs and access the situation in a politically candid manner. And the situation is this: Boy, that sucks for them...but, really there's nothing we can do. We can't make DHL keep a business unit that's hemorrhaging money. The majority of laid off workers aren't unionized, and so don't have a national lobby, (due to a long and storied history of anti-unionization tactics), they're not in a swing voting district, and if you're a Democrat, you know you're not getting those votes no matter what happens. If you're a Republican, you are, and you're probably not predisposed toward any kind of government intervention to begin with. It's really important that Strickland/Brown Inc. do something though. Maybe try to secure a couple of million in aid, and work on an earmark or two. Get somebody to start beating the aforementioned anti-trust drum, which is a pipe dream at best, but will get them in all the papers and provide them with the appearance of being proactive.
Sherrod Brown even "devoted" a full-time staffer to the issue, though a review of his web site would suggest that perhaps that's no longer the case. I don't know what this person was supposed to do (working in a Senate office, and being familiar with the office structure, I'd wonder what kind of a staffer they were, and to what extent they were concentrating strictly on this issue). Full disclosure: when I was looking for an internship I wrote an email to Brown's office offering to assist this person in any capacity I could, whether or not the position was paid...an offer that still stands. As is often the case on the Hill, I never heard back. That's the tragedy of the Hill really. Getting a chance to do anything worthwhile is so difficult. There isn't a person in the world that would work harder and be a more effective advocate for Wilmington than I would. I really believe that. But, when no one in your family is a BFD (a Hill abbreviation for "Big F&*#ing Deal"), and you didn't go to Georgetown, getting that chance can be depressingly difficult. Staffs often consist of 25 people with 25 separate agendas, with political and office inertia sometimes precluding aggressive constituent advocacy instead of enabling it. Like a golfer with a lead going into the back nine, the beating pulse of politics far, far too often consists of a two word mantra: avoid mistakes -- not really a recipe for substantive change and bold action.
500 words into this post, and it's turned into a cartoon fire hose; just flinging me around as I futilely try to direct the flow. I'll try to meander into something resembling a point.
I went home for Thanksgiving. It was right after the job cuts were formally announced (they'd been all but certain for months). It would all be over on January 31. During the holiday weekend I spoke to quite a few DHL employees. Some at the bar over drinks, one or two at an annual day-after-Thanksgiving touch football game, one was a friend's parent. There wasn't a lot of complaining, just a bitter acknowledgment of an even more bitter reality. No severance packages to fall back on. Not much talk of where they'd find work when things closed up.
My girlfriend, in Wilmington for the first time, kept asking, "so what will they do", or "what happens after they (DHL) close"? What, indeed.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we both went to see my mother play in a multi-denominational bell choir, at the Quaker church -- my family's church. 60 Minutes had a camera crew at the church for a feature they were doing on Wilmington. They said they were there to cover the "day's biggest community event" which they thought, "captured the essence of the town". I guess. Though, as my girlfriend and I left the church we saw that part of an adjacent street had been blocked off for what must have been a better attended event (only a couple of dozen people, many of them family members, sat in the mostly empty pews of the Quaker church).
You can kind of see the story, right? Soon-to-be-economically-devastated small town, where the "town-folk" sparsely fill the pews on a Saturday, listening to a local bell choir, politely and quietly clapping after each song. Get some footage of the grim-but-determined laid off workers. Find another worker or family member that's so upset about their future prospects that they cry. The former being men, and the latter a woman. Not on purpose of course, that's just the footage they got. After all, small towns reinforce gender roles, they don't defy them. Nobody will be talking about bringing in new green-collar technology jobs. Nobody mentions approaching the federal government for bailout money. Hell, with any luck the weather will be overcast while the camera crew's in town. The last shot of the segment could be a series of late-model sedans and pick-ups pulling out of the DHL lot in the morning after third shift ends. No music or narration, just the sound of car engines and the thick exhaust, rolling out of tailpipes on a cold morning. All very rural and blue collar. Again, not on purpose, it just worked out that way. Can you see the story now? Two full segments I bet. Don't miss next week's exclusive interview with Katie Holmes.
After briefly speaking with the 60 Minutes crew and watching them interact with community members at the church, I couldn't get those pictures out of my mind. I felt pissed off, a feeling that hasn't abated in the intervening week.
I'm the consummate realist. I get it. I get why we don't get bailed out and Wall Street does. I get why we don't get bailed out but Detroit does. I get why 60 Minutes wants to do a feature on Wilmington. I get why we'll have 25% unemployment and become the face of the most difficult economic environment in generations. I get that it has to be somebody.
But, for the last week I just haven't been able to shake just how goddamn unfair it all is.
The citizens of Wilmington didn't make knowingly high risk gambles with other people's money, become obscenely rich in the bargain, and then demand trillions of dollars because they were "too big to fail". They didn't fight tooth and nail against regulations that might have made their products economically feasible or disingenuously and systematically deny mounds of scientific evidence because it was economically lucrative. They didn't send politicians whose job it is to advocate for them to demand 10's of billions of dollars to ensure the continued production of products that no one wants.
They just went to work everyday, with marginal benefits and almost no job protection. They busted their asses, sorting freight, loading planes, and working third shift for 20 years, and watched as that company was sold to a bigger German company. They watched as company executives made fortunes due to the acquisition, and were told that this move would ensure the company's long term survival and prosperity.
Now they've lost everything, they're informed that they get to bail out bankers who are still, unbelievably, unconscionably, receiving their year end bonuses and going on elaborate corporate junkets. They get to bail out Detroit executives that don't believe in global warming. They get to spend $1 trillion on Obama's stimulus program and the 2.5 million jobs he'd like to create (crossing their fingers and hoping that a couple of them make their way back to Clinton County). Flint bails out Malibu. The Spartans bail out the Persians. The hen bails out the fox.
Chuck Todd said the other day, "...And maybe it's because we also don't know anybody that works at GM...We don't know those families. But, we do know somebody at JPMorgan Chase." He's said that, or variations of that, on several occasions as the fools on MSNBC tried to figure out why GM's panhandling effort was less successful than Wall Street's.
The unfortunate truth is that Wilmington isn't even Detroit. Not by a long shot. If Chuck Todd and the gang don't know anybody that works for GM, Wilmington doesn't have a prayer. No bailout money for us. We wouldn't have even known who to shake our cup at. The verdict: Too small to save.
I'm a realist. If I pull back and take a deep breath I might understand why it has to be this way. But, cold rationalization is no substitute for rent or a heating bill. It's no substitute for help either, and even though I want to more than anything, I have no idea how.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
If an Axe Falls in a Small Town Does it Make a Noise?
So, what became apparent months ago today becomes a reality. I saw the live reports from my hometown on CNN today at work, and then this story featured on their front page. Look ma, we're famous.
People had been worried about the air park closing since I was a little kid. Guess they don't need to worry anymore. Not about that anyway.
Any chance we could apply for some of that wallstreet bailout money that all the K street lobbying firms are being hired to jockey for? Wilmington doesn't have a lobbyist you say? How about some of that big-auto money? No, I mean the new big-auto money. Still no? Maybe there's none left over after you give so much cash to GM's Bob Lutz, who ran the biggest auto maker in the world directly into the ground before calling global warming a "total crock of shit". But, hey, forgiveness is divine.
Really though, hear me out. If big auto could spare just one half of one percent of that $75 billion you're going to give them (with no actual equity stake in the auto industry), it would make all the difference in the world. We're not an "integral American industry" you say? Shit, we're not even a swing county?
That's cool. Don't sweat it. Mount Saint Helens and Flint probably kick ass by now anyway, so at least there's a blueprint. Everybody goes through the occasional period of 30% unemployment, right? I'm sure it's good for the soul.
People had been worried about the air park closing since I was a little kid. Guess they don't need to worry anymore. Not about that anyway.
Any chance we could apply for some of that wallstreet bailout money that all the K street lobbying firms are being hired to jockey for? Wilmington doesn't have a lobbyist you say? How about some of that big-auto money? No, I mean the new big-auto money. Still no? Maybe there's none left over after you give so much cash to GM's Bob Lutz, who ran the biggest auto maker in the world directly into the ground before calling global warming a "total crock of shit". But, hey, forgiveness is divine.
Really though, hear me out. If big auto could spare just one half of one percent of that $75 billion you're going to give them (with no actual equity stake in the auto industry), it would make all the difference in the world. We're not an "integral American industry" you say? Shit, we're not even a swing county?
That's cool. Don't sweat it. Mount Saint Helens and Flint probably kick ass by now anyway, so at least there's a blueprint. Everybody goes through the occasional period of 30% unemployment, right? I'm sure it's good for the soul.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The Smell of Authenticity
Being as I'm originally from Wilmington, Ohio, I felt like I had to link to this post from Steve Benen over at the Carpetbagger Report, which stemmed from an article the Cleveland Plain Dealer did on a recent McCain visit to my hometown.
Wilmington's been in the news a lot lately after it was announced that our biggest employer (by a factor of 10), DHL would be pulling out, and transferring their business over to UPS, costing us some 8,000 jobs. There are about 15,000 people in my hometown, though in fairness people come from all around to work at DHL.
DHL actually bought the biggest company in my hometown, Airborne Express in 2003, as they were trying to expand the air shipping aspect of their business. What McCain apparently forgot to mention while he was courting votes, according to the CPD story, is that his campaign staff, and McCain himself, were pretty involved in the process that allowed DHL (a company based in Germany) to buy Airborne.
I'll be curious how this gets played in my hometown (my parents and most of my family still live there), as it's one of the most reliably Republican counties in the state (electing Bush by a three or four to one margin in 2004). I can't imagine Obama picking up the county, or even the city, but I guess we'll see.
I will say that the massive layoffs caused by DHL's decision, and the despondent tone of news and emails I receive from back home were part of the reason I decided to come to DC and find work in a field where I might have (however small) a role in public policies that effect people's lives. God knows my town could use the help of somebody on the inside in the years to come.
Wilmington's been in the news a lot lately after it was announced that our biggest employer (by a factor of 10), DHL would be pulling out, and transferring their business over to UPS, costing us some 8,000 jobs. There are about 15,000 people in my hometown, though in fairness people come from all around to work at DHL.
DHL actually bought the biggest company in my hometown, Airborne Express in 2003, as they were trying to expand the air shipping aspect of their business. What McCain apparently forgot to mention while he was courting votes, according to the CPD story, is that his campaign staff, and McCain himself, were pretty involved in the process that allowed DHL (a company based in Germany) to buy Airborne.
I'll be curious how this gets played in my hometown (my parents and most of my family still live there), as it's one of the most reliably Republican counties in the state (electing Bush by a three or four to one margin in 2004). I can't imagine Obama picking up the county, or even the city, but I guess we'll see.
I will say that the massive layoffs caused by DHL's decision, and the despondent tone of news and emails I receive from back home were part of the reason I decided to come to DC and find work in a field where I might have (however small) a role in public policies that effect people's lives. God knows my town could use the help of somebody on the inside in the years to come.
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