For people to look forward and have a vision, they have to make connections and to see that they have a right to make a difference in their community and can. We connect them with networks of their counterparts. They see people with the everyday problems they have, but they are working together and feel good about each other. This is the first step toward change. What globalization means to the rest of the world is what the better business climate that we've created in the Southeast has meant for this nation.
People talk about globalization as if developing countries are the ones most negatively impacted.
Yet for as long as we've had the Southeast in the United States, we've had an economy built on slave labor and the exploitation of cheap labor. That is our history. Over the last ten years companies from all over the North have come down South to exploit cheaper labor because of the history of no unionization and limited unionization in the South. The South is about five percent unionized. They come to the South where these constraints don't exist.