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Economic Storm Batters Ohio Town
60 Minutes' Scott Pelley Reports From An American Town In The Path Of An Economic Storm
(CBS) When President Obama spoke of "the winter of our hardship" in his inaugural address, no one in America understood that better than the folks 60 Minutes met in Wilmington, Ohio. They're people in the grip of a brutal series of layoffs at DHL, the shipping company. Their experience was part of the news this past week that new claims for unemployment benefits are the highest in 26 years.
Since the economic crash of 2008, taxpayers have committed to more than $1 trillion in various bailouts of Wall Street. But not much of that is reaching families in crisis. On kitchen tables, headlines from Washington and New York lie beside unpaid tuition bills and foreclosure notices. After all the speeches and parties of Inauguration Day, what were the families in Wilmington asking?
"Are we going to lose our home? Are we going to be able to pay our property taxes? What are we gonna do for insurance? What are we gonna do for food? You know, and these are questions that you'd never think that we'd ask yourself. And now they're discussions in the home," says Mike O'Machearley, who is losing the job that helped support four children and a grandson.
"They always say that God closes a door, he opens another one. And we have faith that he will," he adds.
Faith is what sustains Wilmington now. Settled by Quakers 200 years ago, it's a community with such an all-American look that it seems like a movie set. About 12,000 people live there. And many, like O'Machearley, work in the last industry you'd expect in a laid back town.
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