Paris to Columbus, A Journey Back to Chronic Problems, Fuzzy Future

Road to Recovery for Ohio Long, Winding and Uphill

ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau

COLUMBUS, OHIO: Returning from Paris recently, the economic news in Ohio, more grim than great, is about the fever rising from the announcement by two large companies, one a package handler and the other an auto manufacturer, to eliminate thousands of precious jobs that Gov. Strickland and legislative leaders can ill afford to sustain at the very time they are ready to role the dice on a five-year, multi-faceted $1.57 billion job creation plan that will have to produce twice as much just to keep current jobs here and whose expectation of generating a net plus of jobs is both a leap of faith and a calculated jump that must be taken before economic conditions sour to the point of no return.

A Quinnipiac University Poll revealed that the dour mood of Ohioans on the state of their state is worrisome to the point that the fuzzy future they see ahead may prompt them to head for greener pastures elsewhere. Ohio voters give Strickland above average approval ratings but a majority of respondents say the state economy has deteriorated under his stewardship and are very pessimistic about the future. 

JOBS ON THE RUN (AGAIN)

On Tuesday General Motors announced plans to close a Dayton-based sport utility vehicle plant that could result in the loss of 2,500 jobs by 2010 or sooner if rising gas prices continue to slow down consumer purchases of the GMC Envoy, Chevrolet Trailblazer, Saab 9-7X and the Isuzu Ascender, according to GM Chief Executive and President Rich Wagoner, who the Associated Press reported saying “these higher gasoline prices are changing consumer behavior and rapidly,” a trend he said “is by and large permanent.”

A second grim report on Ohio jobs going elsewhere was delivered by DHL, a large package-handling shipper that operates a large air freight hub at Wilmington in southwest Ohio. DHL wants to hire its competitor, United Parcel Service, to fly DHL’s U.S. cargo, a decision that could endanger upwards of 6,000 Ohio jobs and that Strickland wants to determine is not a violation of antitrust laws. Strickland, reports have it, is expected to meet with DHL officials as soon as tomorrow to sort through their decision and to remind the company that it will still be responsible for repaying $270 million in port authority bonds sold to fund the expansion and upgrading of the Wilmington hub. The bonds, to be repaid over 40 years, commit DHL to find a new use for the one-million-square-foot facility and airport if jobs are lost there and revenues going forward are not enough to keep current with payments to bond holders, according to the Dayton-Montgomery County Port Authority, as reported by the Dayton Daily News.

OHIO UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE PROGRAM INSOLVENT, POVERTY RISING

In a third story that shows how on the edge of economic heartache Ohio is, Stateline.org reports today that Ohio is one of four states with unemployment insurance fund reserves deemed to be not solvent, as measured by a state’s capacity to fund unemployment insurance benefit payments for at least one year without collecting any addition revenue, which could entail raising payroll taxes.

In addition to the specter of these jobs disappearing in the coming months and years is the reality that thousands more jobs are and will be disappearing in an industry that finally succumbed to the desire of Strickland and legislative leaders capitulating to newspaper editorials and advocates for the downtrodden who have called for the dismembering of the so-called payday lending industry, which offers short-term loans to borrowers who cannot borrow small amounts from banks or credit unions. The bill passed recently that Strickland just signed and that caps interest lending rates at 28 percent, an amount industry officials said didn't make it worth their while to engage in the costs of brick and mortar storefronts and personnel to manage the loans, has already resulted in more jobs disappearing. One key Republican legislator said some jobs are good and some jobs are bad, and that jobs in the payday lending industry, which he said were bad jobs because they preyed on unsuspecting borrowers, causing them harm, would be replaced with the kind of good jobs that help people. Bill opponents said many of the 6,000 or so payday lending jobs would result in those people applying for unemployment insurance benefits, which as was noted above for Ohio is nearing insolvency.

Another harbinger of trying times was Strickland's announcement last week that poverty among Ohioans has risen to levels that prompted him to convene a task force on what to do about it. As this article from The (Toledo) Blade points out, a new report has found a larger proportion of Ohio's population is living in poverty than at any time since the 1960s "War on Poverty." It reported that in 2006, nearly 1.5 million Ohioans, or 13.3 percent of the state's 11.5 million residents, are living in poverty. This figure, the report said, is up from about 1.2 million in 1999, or 10.6 percent of the population then. The poverty rate was 10 percent in 1969 and rose as high as 12.5 percent in 1989.
IS JOBS CREATION BILL FIRST BOOK OF STRICKLAND's ECONOMIC BIBLE?

With these three stories as backdrop, Strickland and the Republican-led General Assembly reached agreement last week on a $1.57 multi-tiered billion job-creation program the first Democratic governor in 16 years said was critical to creating nearly 60,000 jobs in the next five years. The program, which Strickland used as the center piece of his State of the State address in early February, relies on a combination of redirecting existing funds and new borrowing state leaders will direct to targeted industries such as advanced energy and biomedical research among other areas of interest such as local infrastructure projects, farmland and green space concerns, historic preservation and creating student internships and cop-ops with Ohio businesses.

One big pot hole on the road Strickland and lawmakers hoped would be smooth has been dug by the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation, which is objecting to state leaders siphoning off its money – which came from the large settlement states won from tobacco manufacturers in the late 1990s – and putting it out of business. At stake is $230 million in the foundation’s fund which go to anti-smoking programs. As recently as today, the foundation argued in court to keep state officials from ransacking its money to fill a gap in their job-creation funding scheme.

Over a barrel to seek jobs to replace the approximately 280, 000 jobs, many of which were high-paying manufacturing jobs that have gone south of the border or overseas to even lower-wage Pacific-rim countries including China, that have been lost since 2001, Ohio finds itself in the un-envious position a having to give companies, like DHL, what they ask for while not knowing when that same company will pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, as DHL and other companies who have fed at the state trough of incentives are doing.

The methodist minister from Duck Run in southern Ohio can point to his jobs creation bill as the Genesis of his economic bible on Ohio's salvation from the valley of the shadow of job loss. If his plan to create jobs in the image of those that have been lost doesn't live up to the sales effort that created it in the first place, Ohioans may wonder what is in store for them in Strickland's Book of Revelations and whether the end will come with fire or ice or just in the form of more tax incentives going to companies who will have learned the art of playing one desperate state against another, promising the world but delivering only when it suits them to.

BACK TO THE GENE POOL

Born and raised as a native Buckeye to immigrant parents who left Italy as children at the start of the 20^th Century to find a better life in America, the view of home from the splendor and grandeur of Paris makes me wonder if coming back to Ohio, which appears to be fighting an uphill battle to affect changes on various economic, fiscal and social topics that have been stewing for decades is worth it or whether moving to a city and a country that have already made the kind of moral, economic and social decisions that respect human integrity, worker’s rights and concern for society at large that seem unlikely to happen in Ohio in my lifetime is the best course of action?

Basking in the splendor and grandeur of Paris for the fourth time since the launch of the new century, I find it comforting and attractive that Francophiles have decided that brotherhood and social equality are as important to them as individual liberty seems to be to Americans.

In Ohio, where current problems of joblessness, increasing poverty and open hostility to differing cultures and lifestyles are apparent and tolerated and seemingly encouraged, it’s deplorable that on one hand the state is desperate to encourage the world to cross its borders to live and work but on the other hand tells those who live a certain way or speak a different language are not welcome.

This matrix of intolerances and wrongheaded public policy seem less of a concern the further away I am from them. Put more succinctly, what happens in Columbus stays in Columbus. The level of concern I have with Ohio and its problems while in Ohio diminishes rapidly with the distance I travel away from the core of those concerns, especially when I’m in such an exciting, energizing city like Paris where the problems now plaguing a once mighty titan of industry seem inversely proportional in importance to the distance from them.

On my fourth visit to Paris, I’m starting to swivel my attention away from the problems of my home state to the attractions found in the City of Light and France.

What seems apparent to me now, as I enter my sixth decade, is that it may make more sense to live in a city and a country that has a distinctly different and more attractive attitude toward life, culture and the role of government than to return to my Heartland state, which seems content with its riptide culture of intolerance that has resulted from a go-it-alone attitude that differs distinctly from the shared values of a population that realizes its strength comes from everyone pulling together for the good of all than some individuals benefiting mightily at the expense of all.

The problems Ohio is facing will not go away with the stroke of the governor’s pen on a bill to create jobs that may never live up to its billing nor will they go away any time soon, given decisions at the federal level that have devalued the dollar, lead to massive home foreclosures, engaged the nation in a war with no end and taken us from a budget surplus to a $9-trillion (at last count) deficit that Americans will tolerate because their aversion to self-taxation is so ingrained after decades of believing government is the problem and not the solution that any real hope that the marketplace will do anything other than create more blood in the streets seems distant at best.