Slabby Logic

July 6, 2003

NUREMBERG, Germany – It doesn’t take long at an event like Stone+tec 2003 to realize, in the words of the famous financier Hyman Roth, that the United States can be seen as small potatoes in the worldwide market.
Mr. Roth, the nemesis of mobster Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II, was speaking of a powerful New York gangster in the large scheme of things. It’s still an accurate characterization, though, when it comes to the U.S. role in stone; we’re big here, but what about everywhere else?
The thought kept occurring as I walked the aisles and aisles of Stone+tec, with exhibitors from Germany and the rest of the world pushing stone and machinery. The total number of vendors at the show: more than 1,100. And, the number of U.S.-based companies with booth space: three.
I also kept coming back to a bit of news from early April that pulled a day’s worth of fame on the creeper line at cable news outlets. In the midst of the Iraq combat, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) decried the purchase of national-cemetery tombstones from a subsidiary of IMERYS, a French conglomerate. “We find this situation particularly disturbing,” Rep. McInnis wrote to Anthony Principi, secretary of the Veterans’ Affairs Department, “particularly in light of the deeply offensive actions that the French have taken to undermine our Armed Forces.”
Now, let’s get this straight: I didn’t like the French government’s attitude, either. I thought it particularly inane that, given Saddam Hussein’s track record, anyone could expect Iraq’s government to fully comply with disarmament. Bringing the United Nations to gridlock by giving Hussein more time wasn’t stellar diplomacy by the French government, although I don’t quite put it in the category that Rep. McInnis does of “doing everything in their power to undermine the very troops whose sacrifice from which they now stand to profit.”
Looking around the halls at Stone+tec, I realized that swinging the bat at foreign companies about Iraq – or countless other issues – is the wrong attitude. The U.S. market isn’t in the driver’s seat here. We may be in the back of a very long stretch limo, fully stocked with wet bar and a portable hot tub, but we’re still passengers. And, the drivers up front are equal partners in this industry.
The U.S. market consumes stone in massive quantities. Look up the export charts for any country with major assets in stone, and the United States will consistently appear in the top five recipients. To be sure, plenty of good stone comes from quarries in Vermont, Georgia, New York, Colorado and other states; on the big tally sheet, however, foreign imports account for 80 cents of every dollar spent on stone.
Tools and technology for the stone trade fall into the same category. A shop can go all-American from its hand tools up to a CNC machine and be equipped with the best – but they have the same standards of excellence with equipment from around the globe, whether it’s from Italy, Germany, Spain, South America, the Pacific Rim or, yes, even France.
In the past 75 years or so, freedom seems to be tied up with economics, with capitalism vs. fascism vs. socialism and, the last time I looked, free-market capitalism is winning handily. Buying from a firm that’s based in a country doesn’t mean that every nickel is going to support the government and some wayward policy; countries like that are few (and with Hussein’s fall, got fewer).
Talking with French and German companies in Nuremberg didn’t fall under aiding and abetting the enemy. They didn’t see the United States as a bunch of bloodthirsty cowboys bent on imperialism; they see it as a good market and want to develop stronger partnerships. I may not like their governments from time to time when it comes to foreign policy, but I’m not buying from governments exploiting their citizens. I’m working with people for a stronger industry, and it’s working.
Instead, we now have to deal with the residue of dumb publicity stunts, such as the renaming of side dishes and trashing of foreign wine and companies. The Freedom Fries served at Capitol Hill cafeterias got a quick headline for a day; however, more than 80 years after World War I, I don’t see anyone calling a hamburger a Liberty Steak and a dachshund a Liberty Pup.
There are other issues of foreign ownership that could take up the time of the federal government. Take the national debt, for instance. In early 1995 – when Rep. McInnis took office – foreign investors held 13.8 percent of the $4.8 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. Now, those non-U.S holdings are 19.8 percent of the $6.4 trillion in Treasury securities; since $3.4 trillion of that debt is actually owned by the U.S. government, foreign investors (including, most likely, some people and banks in France) own close to 41 percent of U.S. IOUs traded in the open market.
One other point: Rep. McInnis’ letter of complaint didn’t actually name the subsidiary of IMERYS supplying the stone. It’s Georgia Marble Co. in Tate, Ga., which began operations in 1884 and proudly supplied monuments for thousands of U.S. veterans. IMERYS bought the operations in 1995, but U.S. workers continued to supply American marble to honor U.S. servicemen.
Well, not any more, as Georgia Marble Co. recently called it quits on providing those monuments. Rep. McInnis won’t need to worry about those French-tainted tombstones sullying national cemeteries anymore. Perhaps the congressman can write another letter – actually, more than 100 of them – as a reference for good ol’ U.S. stone workers now out of a job.