>Can Obama See the Grand Canyon?
>On Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe
>By Mike Davis
Here's a line from that article:
>In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but the machinery was
>still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on the
>dollar to China.
This is something Davis knows in his bones. He was born in Fontana, a former factory town about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. Fontana now is better known for a big speedway and big salvage yards. Below is a 1992 story from the New York Times about what happened to the Kaiser steel plant that used to employ tens of thousands of people in Fontana. I'm also sending a link to a page of photos of the remnants of the plant. In one you can see the speedway in the background:
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA3008/
November 4, 1992
COMPANY NEWS China to Buy Used Mill; A New Approach to Exporting Steel
AP
Part of the defunct Kaiser Steel Corporation's old mill that turned pig iron into ribbons of semifinished steel will be broken down and shipped to China for reassembly, 20-story building and all.
The deal was agreed to by California Steel Industries. The company bought Kaiser's finishing mill, but not the blast furnaces and other front-end operations, in 1984, after Kaiser shut down the Fontana, Calif., plant.
California Steel, which continues to produce finished steel, is selling the No. 2 Basic Oxygen Process and Caster operation to the Capital Iron and Steel Corporation of Beijing. The final paperwork is expected to be signed Wednesday.
The Bop-Caster operation, as it is known, was built in 1978 and shut down in 1982. Even before Kaiser Steel filed for bankruptcy in 1987, the Chinese had begun the series of negotiations that concluded with the sale, California Steel's corporate secretary and spokesman, Matthew C. MacFadden, said.
Kaiser spent $287 million building and equipping the factory. Nearly a decade ago, it quoted the Chinese a price of $60 million; the final sales price was less than $20 million, Mr. MacFadden said Monday.
The Chinese will spend far more transporting the factory and setting it up to handle pig iron from an existing blast-furnace operation. China's official New China News Agency said Monday that the project's full cost would be $400 million.
Capital Iron and Steel will send 300 workers to Fontana, about 45 miles east of Los Angeles, to dismantle the 10-acre plant.
"They're going to be labeling it all with Chinese symbols, cutting it into manageable pieces, and re-erecting it over in China," Mr. MacFadden said.
The 20-story building is made of -- what else? -- steel. The framework of huge structural steel beams is covered with sheet metal. Inside is everything from an air-treatment operation to computer control systems to 14 heavy-duty overhead cranes -- not to mention spare parts, blueprints, microfilms and technical documents.
The Kaiser plant was built far inland in San Bernardino County, out of the reach of Japanese naval guns, during World War II.
Aging, with management and labor at odds, Kaiser by the 1980's had fallen victim to low-cost Japanese and Korean steelmakers, who were accused of dumping steel at below their cost in the Western United States.
Kaiser was also burdened by tightening air-quality rules that have reduced Southern California's smog but have made the area unfriendly to smokestack industry.