Turn out the Lights
Will the last employer to leave Madison please turn out the lights?
Yeah, you’re right; it’s NOT funny — especially if you’re one of those who has just become unemployed. IKE project put on hold; 740 to 780 jobs gone. Armor Metal shutting down; 90 more jobs gone. Goody’s Clothing’s parent company going out of business; about 18 commercial jobs eliminated. Rotary Lift lays off 33 employees. 
Welcme to hard times.
The recession that has hit Madison like the freight trains we don’t have going through here may delay King’s Daughters’ Hospital’s determination to build a whole new facility on East SR 62, abandoning its downtown campus. That’s probably the only positive result of this situation, in my opinion. But talk to employees of the hospital, and they’ll tell you of an annual raise they didn’t get in December, of overtime trimmed to only the essential, of an institution that’s having to tighten its belt. So that’s obviously not good for those employees. But at least they still have jobs. That’s more than an increasing number of Madisonians can say.
Will we come out of this? Yes, eventually. How will we do that? I don’t know. That’s what Mayor Armstrong, the City Council, and the unelected community boosters get paid to figure out. I don’t envy them. They’ve got a hard sell to any prospective industries, with no interstate connector, and no usable railroad connection.
Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama will be taking his oath of office in about 10 days. If our mayor thinks he’s got headaches right now, he ought to be in Obama’s shoes.
I made it clear before the election that I didn’t support Obama and wouldn’t vote for him. We won’t go there again and plow over old ground. But I’ll have to say, now that he’s been elected and is about to take office, I wish him much luck. He’ll need it. He’s facing as much of a “perfect storm” as Franklin D. Roosevelt was in 1933. Worse, actually. At least Roosevelt didn’t have to deal with two wars, on top of an economic meltdown.
Obama gives much evidence of being a very intelligent man. He appears to be deliberately trying to lower expectations in that he’s spoken in the past week of a severe economic crisis, of trillion-dollar deficits which may last for years, and of a stimulus package that Congress must pass with all dispatch, lest our situation become even more dire than it already is. This way, if things prove to be NOT quite as bad as he says, he’ll get the credit for working a miracle of statesmanship. If they DO prove to be as bad as he says, he can keep reminding people of how he “inherited” the situation (which is true enough).
It goes without saying that I hope Mayor Armstrong is able to lead our city out of this wilderness of economic decline. This community has been my home for 60 years, since I was four years old, and I don’t want to see it go past the point of no return. We deserve better than that.
By the same token, I hope that President-elect Obama does very well as our leader. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if he turned out to be the best president we’ve ever had. Because I think it’s going to take that caliber of leader to bring this country back.
If he succeeds in that, heck, I might even vote for him in 2012.
Old Corporal <corporalko@yahoo.com>
Hard times, – Saturday, January 10, 2009 at 19:27:16 (EST)
