When cotton was king
Topics: cotton, cotton gin, bakersfield, china calcot, Kern County, Wal-Mart, CNN
Posted by citizenjournalist Fri Jan 16, 2009 17:53:35 PST
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"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" ... until it comes back to bite you.
Digressing to the 1970s and 80s, cotton marketing co-op CALCOT and the Kern County Farm Bureau — perceived as players in an emerging free-trade ideology — welcome foreign tour groups into local agriculture. Eager, well-dressed men — mostly Chinese — are armed with cameras and notebooks.
In an altruistic wave of "show and tell," big hearts take time to give them all they need to know about the science and technology to grown and gin quality cotton — Kern County's white gold — on a mass scale. Likewise across the nation they glean knowledge through the southern cotton beltway and its textile mills ... all in all, hard-won advancements spanning a century since our nation's Industrial Revolution.
Today cotton prices have tanked due to overseas dirt-cheap-labor competition and market flooding. Our surviving cotton gins are few. Many have become gutted shells (or scrapped), eerily silenced, except for the haunting echo of squatter pigeons. U.S. textile mills have virtually collapsed or converted to museums, offices and retail boutique complexes. nationwide, cotton acreage, as reported by AgDay, "has fallen to a 140-year low; nearly to that of the Civil War era." Jobs have given way to imported goods and mob-oriented Wal-Mart is the beneficiary. CNN News reports that today, thanks to the Internet, China's online espionage systematically preys on our aerospace technology.
United State of America ... where innovation, not imitation should remain as our founding credo. Politics aside, let's stop giving it away. Let's plug the leaks and look on the bright side.
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