Charlotte, Four Years Later

It’s called a press junket. It is a known format: an inviting power — political, economic or otherwise — puts together a program to which it invites journalists. Their motive is always to promote a message that they wish to control as much as possible. Therefore the benefits, in successful cases, are very advantageous, compared to official press releases or advertisements. The “positive” message sent back is disguised as news.

Yes the format is attractive. For example, it allows meetings with numerous personalities that are normally difficult to access; journalists also think they gain from it. And if the trip proves to be disappointing, they can always go look elsewhere.

Yours truly was thus invited, 10 days ago, to Charlotte, N.C., for meetings organized by a public relations agency. Their clients were the municipality of Charlotte and the Chamber of Commerce. With them in the background was the Democratic National Committee, which, at the beginning of September 2012, will ordain Barack Obama as its candidate for president. This was the main motive for our acceptance. The other reason: Having already carried out an investigation in Charlotte four years ago, comparing the same place before and after the financial crisis presented a real interest.

The first sign, from the beginning: Out of the seven journalists of this group, six of us were strangers, and four Chinese. Since hearing talk of the economy in today’s America, the Chinese media, in particular, are searching for information. Then came the most shocking part: the program.

The hosts, Democratic mayor Anthony Foxx, a 40-year-old African-American in a city that was a center of southern segregation, and Ronnie Bryant, president of the Chamber of Commerce,* held meetings with the leaders of a recent Sino-French start-up in the chemical industry, then Siemens, Areva and Duke Energy, with the heads of the airport, the boss of an advanced cancer care research unit, another from a laboratory specializing in muscular dystrophy, one of the many local car companies participating in the American NASCAR championship (comparable to Formula One), and a university unit renowned for metrology (the science of measurement), etc.

The great surprise: There was no sign of any meetings with bankers. Four years ago, no interlocutor forgot to point out to us this fairly misread fact that city councilors drew upon with immense pride: Charlotte formed the United States’ second financial center. The country’s second and fourth deposit banks, Bank of America and Wachovia have their head offices here. Their activity wreaked havoc in a city that ceased to grow, and gained notoriety, as we constantly explained to you. Weary.

Since then, Wachovia, bludgeoned by its activities on subprime stock, has been taken over by Wells Fargo, just after the Lehman Brothers’ collapse, and the buyer moved his headquarters to California. With regard to Bank of America, it has never recovered since its acquisition of Countrywide, the biggest holder of “rotten” real-estate stock, from its takeover of the commercial bank Merrill Lynch and its enormous debts. With a terribly tarnished image, it is today the most discredited bank in the country (although to be fair: there is debate over whether itself or Citigroup holds this not-so-enviable status).

One understands better why Charlotte’s mayor and economic leaders, from now on, no longer have any appetite to celebrate a sector whose foundering has made it lose hundreds of millions of the city’s annual revenues, which has played a leading role in unemployment in the four surrounding counties, from 5 percent in 2007, to 10.5 percent today (27,000 jobs were lost in 2008-2009, and only 4,000 have opened up since).

Scorning finance, the key word of local leaders, is, henceforth, “diversification.” And there you go, this is why it was necessary to show that the energy giants, advanced health care research services and high-tech industries were there, and Charlotte sneaks that message up on you on every occasion. It has the country’s fourth biggest airport in terms of traffic volume even though it is only the 20th largest city by population. They also wanted to showcase the business friendly atmosphere and fine cosmopolitanism (for example, out of the owners of the medical laboratories we visited, one is Australian, the other of Chinese origin) accompanying its development, and that foreign companies are already investing there, in the hope of making it well-known and attracting others.

“We wish to diversify ourselves, accelerate our access to the global market, multiply synergies between our SMEs and exterior investors, and reduce our CO2 emissions by 20 percent in five years,” boasts the mayor. Leave it at that, the “message” seems to us sufficiently explicit and significant.

In fact, Charlotte is a nice city with open spaces. Sunshine and pure air are abundant there, and the prices are much lower compared to the big metropolises.

*Editor’s note: Ronnie Bryant is the CEO of the Charlotte Regional Partnership, not the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.