The spurs and stars will be out on Sunday at the 46th annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas. Alongside the country music-loving Americans at the event, a number of Germans will also be in town for the awards show.

Every year, German tour companies run trips to the CMA. That’s because Germany is home to a dedicated country music audience. In Germany, country bands play to sold out arenas. Fans who want a dose of twang can visit honkytonk bars decorated with cattle horns and rodeo saddles.

The American Western Saloon in Berlin draws a big crowd for line dancing most nights. Duded-up men in cowboy hats and women in shiny boots shuffle across the floor to the sounds of Alan Jackson.

Marion Freier, who runs the saloon with her partner Frank Lange, said Germans are huge country music fans.

“In every little tiny village in every corner of Germany, there is either a saloon or a bar that offers country music live,” Freier said.

The German author Karl May is responsible for a lot of the interest in the American West. May wrote extremely popular books back at the turn of the 20th century about a fictional Apache chief named Winnetou and his German immigrant sidekick “Old Shatterhand.” These books fostered a yearning for a wild and untamed America, and for some, a love for country music.

Tall shots of Whiskey

A good place to get a taste of that is at the annual Country Music meeting in Berlin. For three nights, bands from the United States to Sweden play originals and covers of country music songs. Professional line dancers take to the floor and Jack Daniels, a sponsor, pours tall shots of whiskey.

“You can buy everything that has to do with country or America here at the country music meeting,” said Marion Freier, who helped coordinate the event that is part concert-part shopping mall.

Booths line the conference center. It’s a little bit of the good, the bad and the schlocky. There are hot pink cowboy boots, confederate flags, and rhinestone-studded shirts.

Sandwiched between all of this is the tourism table for Mississippi and Tennessee. Sonja Koellemann, who works for the Tennessee Tourism Board, hands out materials and runs through some of the highlights. She mentions Elvis Presley, Graceland, Nashville, and the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Andrea Muller leafs through a brochure. She’s already traveled to the south of the United States, to Tennessee and Mississippi, and she’s thinking about going again.

Where the west began

“It is the roots of the pioneers. It is where they all started,” Muller said. “It is where the west began. You have the music. You have the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

Andy and Matt Thompson, who live in Nashville, are here at the country music meeting, performing as “the Thompson Brothers.” Andy Thompson said he doesn’t think it’s that odd to show up in Berlin and see a bunch of Germans dressed like cowboys and cowgirls.

“It’s pretty fun,” Thompson said. “The line dancing is probably a little bigger here than it is in the US right now. But I guess it’s pretty similar.”

There is one big difference between playing in the US and Germany, he said: “I think the German beer makes you play different over here — maybe faster.”

Fast or slow, it’s a rhythm that makes German hearts beat a little faster, and it’s a sound they are willing to travel miles and spend money to chase after.

• US Uncut
• US Uncut Twitter page
• A Ten-Step Guide to Launching US Uncut

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Carl Gibson: My name is Carl Gibson. I’m the founder of US Uncut.

Lisa Mullins: That’s right, US Uncut, the British movement Laura Lynch just told us about, has already spawned an offshoot here in the States. US Uncut is based in Jackson, Mississippi.

Gibson: US Uncut is a very simple premise. It is stating before you fire one more teacher; before you cut one more benefit; before you freeze one more salary – I think our leaders have an obligation to the rest of us to make sure the richest of the rich pay their fair share in taxes, like everyone else.

Mullins: So what prompted you, just about a week ago?

Gibson: Well, I had heard about folks in the U.K. organizing in very small groups and deciding that they should do something about the austerity cuts that are cutting jobs and salaries. And I was inspired by the people who said, you know, before you take away my housing subsidy or raise my college tuition, how about you make Vodafone pay income taxes? The story especially about them blockading Vodafone and refusing Vodafone to earn income until they paid income taxes – that really rang true for me. And I think two-thirds of American corporations don’t pay taxes. So I wanted to do something like that in the United States.

Mullins: So what does you organization look like right now?

Gibson: Right now I’m helping coordinate protests in 12 states, from the West Coast to the East Coast. Each state chairman coordinates with me, and we’re all coordinating a day of protest on February 26th with UK Uncut. And we’re all going to protest the big banks together on that day.

Mullins: Where do you intend the protest to be?

Gibson: Right now it’s going to be at, probably a Bank of America branch here in Mississippi. I’m getting other folks to organize fund targets, like Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo – banks that have paid little to no income taxes in the last two years despite making billions in revenue. Those are our main targets right now.

Mullins: Two points on that: One is that in some cases tax avoidance can be legal. Are you making the distinction between those who are finding tax loopholes and doing things that are actually legal, and those who aren’t?

Gibson: Oh well see, yeah, that’s the whole source of the problem, is that these corporations are legally allowed to stash away income in offshore tax havens. And because of that the United States loses about a hundred billion dollars in tax revenue every year, according to the GAO. And while that’s legal, I would hope to see legislation introduced in Congress that makes offshore tax havens illegal, and makes these corporations pay income taxes to the United States if they earn income here.

Mullins: The GAO being the Government Accountability Office. I wonder if you could respond to the business leader who we heard in Laura’s piece, who said this is really a matter of concern right now because the whole emphasis is on job creation in this country (meaning, in England) over the next year or two, and it’s going to have to come from business investment. Are you concerned that this same thing could be said of the United States in terms of job creation?

Gibson: I absolutely sympathize with the business owner. I understand that a business has an obligation to their shareholders to lower their costs and make sure that their share is as valuable as possible. But I think at the same time corporations have an obligation to pay income taxes accordingly. A lot of these businesses don’t do that.

Mullins: All right. Thank you. Carl Gibson in Jackson, Mississippi, thanks again.

Gibson: Thank you.

Mullins: US Uncut is just getting off the ground now, but you can find a short documentary on UK Uncut on our website, which is theworld.org

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

President Obama has set a lofty goal: He wants to double U.S. exports within the next five years. It would go a long way to help get the U.S. out of the economic doldrums. But can it be done?

Exporting our way back to prosperity. Also on this podcast, will a weaker Euro help European exporters? Building a deepwater port in East Africa. And here come the catfish.

Prices for real estate are sky high in Tokyo, not just in life, but in death too. The price for a burial plot in Tokyo is far from cheap. But using modern technology and some Japanese robotics, multi-story urban burial buildings are rising in popularity.

It’s not just expensive to die in Japan, it’s expensive to be born. Japan has an aging population and the government is trying to push up the country’s low birth rate with some financial incentives. But it’s particularly hard to be a parent in Japan, financially speaking that is.

Also on the podcast, Russians, Indians, and Israelis have arrived in Mississippi. And they may no longer be going for Olympic gold in Australia.

At the entrance to Crawford, Mississippi, a large billboard welcomes visitors to the home of NFL Star Jerry Rice. Rice went on to fame and fortune, the greatest receiver in football history. But Rice’s childhood home is no tourist destination. Main Street is littered with crumbling, abandoned brick buildings. There are no restaurants in town. 45 percent of the people live below the poverty line. Just up the road, however, hope has arrived bearing a Russian flag.

Severstal International built a steel mill here that spans the size of 20 football fields. Each year, the mill processes enough steel to build 2 million cars. Most of the steel comes from recycled metal. Throughout the day, a massive crane drops shredded up washers, dryers, and old car parts into a furnace.

Severstal International steel mill

“It gets, we tap anywhere from 2950 degrees to 3000 degrees.”

That’s electrician Richard Thomas.

“I’ve been here since we opened the plant, so about three years now.”

Thomas says it’s a real good job. Starting salaries here average about $57,000. Thomas says he doesn’t mind working for a Russian boss.

“I don’t think that really matters as much. We’re in a global economy now, so you kind of have to do it.”

Besides two clocks on the wall, one on Moscow time, there’s nothing that feels Russian about the Severstal mill in Mississippi. That’s today’s multinational corporation: A largely invisible foreign owner puts up the capital. They take on the risk, but also reap the profits.

It’s largely a good deal for American workers though. And state development agencies have been competing intensely to lure foreign companies to their states for about a decade.

Canton, MS

Mississippi has had a hard time winning many contracts. Only 2.6 percent of people in the state work for foreign firms; the national average is almost double that. But executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority, Gray Swoope, says the state is finding its groove.

“We have probably the nation’s most sophisticated mini steel mill in the world, and its Russian owned, owned by Severstal. You have companies like Israeli Aerospace Industries that are doing business here. You have PSL North America, which is an Indian owned company.”

Swoope says Mississippi has been enticing foreign firms with its pro-business climate.

“And that’s everything from taxation to workforce training. I know I can attract the talent pool that I need. So I can get my talent, I can get it trained, and it is a good place that a company can make a profit.”

Another case in point, three years ago Toyota broke ground on a $1.3 billion dollar plant in Tupelo, The Birthplace Of Elvis. The opening of the plant has been delayed because of slowed auto sales and the weak economy. But a Nissan in Mississippi is operational. It’s been churning out cars for six years in the small town of Canton.

“It’s classic small town Mississippi, a town square, a bakery and coffee shop on the square.”

At the coffee shop on the square, I met with Jerry Lousteau. He broadcasts a local morning radio show. Lusteau brought me to the morning coffee club – a daily gathering of about 10 locals. The coffee club members say that Nissan’s arrival has been a mixed bag. The plant employs some 5,000 people. But the prediction was for 26,000 new jobs in the area through the multiplier effect, the creation of new jobs at local restaurants and stores. Lousteau says, that hasn’t happened.

Jerry Lousteau

“We have a few new hotels at the interstate we didn’t have before. We’re getting a new Waffle House. That’s hardly 26,000 jobs.”

Coffee club member and attorney Lloyd Spivey says he’s glad Nissan chose his town. But he agrees that it hasn’t been the gold rush they were promised.

“We paid a lot for it too. We spent a lot of money, gave away a lot of money to get the project here, you know. The state and the federal government and all the county connections it cost us an extremely large amount of money.”

Jerry Lousteau agrees. He says all those special deals for foreign companies come back to bite you.

“We have a struggling public school system in Canton, Mississippi and we now have a billion dollar industry in that school district that is allowed to pay roughly, maybe, 30 percent of what they should or could pay on property taxes to the school system.”

It’s a tricky game: States need to make themselves attractive to foreign companies, but they don’t want to give away too many tax breaks. Mississippi also doesn’t want to paint itself into a corner… relying too much on what some would say is one of its main selling points: low wages. State development director Gray Swoope bristles when he hears that.

Crawford, MS

“We cannot equate low wage, with low skill anymore.”

But foreign companies can pay lower, non-union wages in Mississippi. The state has the lowest per capita income in the nation. Brian Watkins, who teaches international business at Mississippi State University in Starkville, says the state faces a conundrum.

“You take a state like Mississippi, without trying to insult anybody’s origin, I myself am from Mississippi, but in some sense you have to look it a bit like developing country.”

“What does a state like Mississippi want to be when it grows up? Does it want to position itself as A or B? If it’s A, ie, high value-added intellectual capital type activities, how do you get there? How do you get there in an environment where state education budgets are being cut? If it’s going to be low-wage manufacturing, then you have to ask yourself the question, is there really a future in that?”

Brian Watkins

That debate is taking place throughout the country, not just in Mississippi. What’s best for the U.S. economy? Should America be re-investing more in manufacturing? Or does it make more economic sense to let developing nations take those jobs?

Right now in Mississippi, with the state unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, many people say keep factory jobs here.

And why not bring some foreign manufacturing to Mississippi as well.

For the World I’m Jason Margolis, Starkville, Mississippi.

photos: Jason Margolis

• Jason’s story on how America’s wars are reported locally in Mississippi
• Global economy podcast

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. U.S. exports took a big hit during the Recession. Things got really bad during the first three months of this year. Exports were down in 49 states. Only one state bucked that trend as the world’s Jason Margolis found out.

JASON MARGOLIS: I was in North Dakota recently working on some stories about international trade. While there, I sat down with Heather Rank.

HEATHER RANK: And you can keep these.  This thing is really interesting.

MARGOLIS: Rank is a self-professed statistics geek and a Trade Specialist with the U.S. Department of Commerce. She was looking at export data from the U.S. Census for the three months of 2009 when she accidentally uncovered this gem.

RANK: And exports are down in every U.S. state except for one state, Mississippi.

MARGOLIS: That’s right. Mississippi, the state often depicted as economically troubled. The state with the highest poverty rate in the country managed to out-do every other state when it came to exports. In the first quarter of this year, Mississippi exports were up 9%. That was more than 30% better than the national average. So just what was Mississippi’s secret? To find out, I called Heather Rank’s colleague in Jackson, Mississippi.

CAROL MOORE: Hi my name is Carol Moore. I am the Director the Mississippi Export Assistant Center, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

MARGOLIS: Carol, do you think there were any products that were pushing exports higher in Mississippi during the first three months, any specific exports?

MOORE: Yes, that would be energy products, vehicles, machinery, as well as poultry.

MARGOLIS: But Moore’s data couldn’t definitely tell her which one of those products may have accounted for the export spike or why, for that matter, Mississippi exports were surging while world trade was collapsing.

MOORE: I think that if you come down and I could take you to talk to some of our partners, it would give you a better, you know …  Let me see, understanding into why we had that increase.

MARGOLIS: So I went first to Mississippi’s State Capitol, Jackson where I met Gray Swope.  He’s Executive Director of the Mississippi Development Authority.  I asked Swope the same question, “Why did Mississippi succeed with exports when all others failed.”

GRAY SWOPE: I think that it reflects that Mississippi has kind of an international mindset. And our focus since 2004 has been how do we integrate trade, international companies including foreign direct investment?  How do we integrate those into our economy?

MARGOLIS: I pressed Swope for specifics. He didn’t offer any. At my next stop Brian Watkins said it’s tough to pinpoint what called that spike in Mississippi exports.

BRIAN WATKINS: You know, I’m virtually certain there’s going to be a lot. I don’t know but I’ll be happy to help.

MARGOLIS: Watkins teaches International Business 150 miles northwest of the capitol at Mississippi State University, but Watkins couldn’t say for sure what’s driving the State’s exports. He did say it should be fairly easy to figure out because Mississippi’s exports are relatively small.

WATKINS: The statistics can be skewed by one or two, you know, big contracts, particularly in a consolidate industry, which it would appear that we were beginning to have in a couple of agricultural areas here in Mississippi.

MARGOLIS: One sure fire way to find out which exports were up was to go to the place where exports leave the state, 280 miles due south on the Gulf of Mexico.  At the Port of Pascagoula men driving forklifts loaded utility poles bound for the Dominican Republic.  Rows and rows of container boards were stacked waiting to be shipped to places like Ecuador and Chile. A massive freezer was packed with frozen chicken headed for Russia.

MARK MC ANDREWS: My name is Mark Mc Andrews. I’m the Port Director in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

MARGOLIS: Mc Andrews surveyed all the exports and pointed at the chicken freezer. He said, “You want to know what’s driving Mississippi’s exports? There’s your answer.”

MC ANDREWS: Poultry exports are up about 21% over last year.

MARGOLIS: Do you have any sense why or do you just do the shipment?

MC ANDREWS: I really don’t. As a port, you’re not really in a position to create demand for your own services and facilities only to react to them.

MARGOLIS: To try and find out why chicken exports are surging, I got back in the car and headed 130 miles back up north to the small Town of Laurel, Mississippi.

JOE SANDERSON: My name is Joe Sanderson, Jr. and I’m Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sanderson Farms.

MARGOLIS: Sanderson Farms is the fourth largest poultry company in the United States.

SANDERSON: We process about a little over eight million birds per week.

MARGOLIS: About 1.2 million of those birds are shipped overseas. That can move export statistics in a small state like Mississippi. Sanderson said the end of last year was one of the low points in his company’s 62-year history. Americans weren’t going out to eat and his foreign buyers had no cash.

SANDERSON: The world credit crisis, actually exports collapsed and there were no exports, or a very minute amount of exports particularly to Eastern Europe and Russia.

MARGOLIS: But then, things started to turn around early this year when the wheels of international finance started working again. Credit markets unfroze and pent-up demand for frozen Mississippi chickens surged in Eastern Europe. So, riddle solved. Russians eating Mississippi chicken drove the state to export success.

WATKINS: The question arises as to how do you fit all of this together.

MARGOLIS: Again, Brian Watkins at Mississippi State. He says there are two possible interpretations. First, the surge in exports was a one-time thing, a statistical aberration. The second possibility is that those statistics show the beginning of a long-term trend, which Watkins says would be invaluable to state policymakers.

WATKINS: You may well conclude that it’s appropriate to play to your strengths. So if Mississippi is experiencing growth in a particular segment let’s say poultry, and there are policy decisions that can be made, there are things that can be taken by state development agencies to encourage industry, you may well want to pursue that.

MARGOLIS: Of course, Watkins says there are environmental concerns and questions over how many good jobs the poultry industry creates. That’s for Mississippi policymakers in Jackson to debate. But beyond chicken, Gray Swope with the States’ Development Authority said Mississippi’s recent export success does underscore the need to help local companies get their products overseas.

SWOPE: In Mississippi we’ve seen these … I call them assets. You know, they’re God-given assets in that, you know, deep water that’s on the southern end of our state or the Mississippi River or the Tintom [PH] Waterway, but it’s in how you take those assets and you use those to create economic wealth and jobs. And I think that we’ve done a good job in our state at looking at how do we take these resources of logistics and transportation and launch our products abroad?

MARGOLIS: That’s something that requires constant work, resources and money.  According to the latest export data broken down by state, Mississippi has fallen to the middle of the pack. But that unexpected spike in exports during the first three months of the year has some Mississippians thinking big about their state’s economic potential. For The World, I’m Jason Margolis, Jackson, Mississippi.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Brian Hawkins, editor, Starkville Daily News

Ronnie Agnew, executive editor, The Clarion Ledger

Jesse Bass and Meryl Dakin, editors, The Student Printz Newspaper of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg

• Starkville Daily News
• The Clarion Ledger
• Student Printz

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Newspaper coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has risen and fallen. Lately it’s fallen. For one thing stories about the wars which have lasted six and eight years respectively might be sounding a bit repetitive by now. For another, even newspaper giants like the New York Times face financial constraints on their foreign coverage. So you can imagine how difficult it might be for smaller papers to provide adequate reporting on the wars. The World’s Jason Margolis visited Mississippi and met with editors of three local papers.

JASON MARGOLIS: The Clarion Ledger is Mississippi’s largest newspaper. Its circulation is 85,000. Executive editor, Ronnie Agnew, says his goal is to not let the wars be forgotten.

RONNIE AGNEW: Mississippi has a very heavy presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And so initially yeah we start off being aggressive and trying to cover our folks, their families and such but as you know as time has gone on it’s become quite difficult.

MARGOLIS: That’s partly a matter of resources. The Clarion Ledger is a small paper with a shrinking budget. Also the wars just aren’t front page news in Mississippi.

AGNEW: When you’ve got soldiers being killed by roadside bombs almost on a daily basis those stories initially years ago made page one. Now they’re inside. So now it’s to the point now where if it’s involving a local unit or if it’s a major, major catastrophe – I hate to say that but that’s the reality of it. That’s when we know we have a big story.

MARGOLIS: All the editors I met with in Mississippi say they worry about reader fatigue. Nobody expressed this concern more strongly than Jessie Bass. He’s the editor and chief of The Students Prints, the University of Southern Mississippi’s Campus newspaper. He says he’d like to run more stories about Iraq and Afghanistan but he puts his head in his hands and says what’s the point?

JESSIE BASS: It’s kind of useless to run something that nobody’s going to read you know. I might as well write it on a piece of paper and put it in the ceiling.

MARGOLIS: That doesn’t mean the student editors have entirely given up. Co-editor Meryl Daken says The Student Prints does find some angles that hit home with students.

MERYL DAKEN: We do have a ROTC presence an ROTC presence on campus and we’ve run things about them in the past. Like we just did a story on their training camp they had at Camp Shelby. So that’s an angel that we like to look at is how the students are involved with it. And if you get politics involved that’s always something to look for. There’s political groups on campus that have their own take on it and we can go to those students and talk to them about it. And whenever we do interview a lot of students or have a lot of student interaction it’s more readable.

MARGOLIS: That’s the magic formula – localizing the conflicts. That also works well for a paper about 200 miles north of the University of Southern Mississippi. Brian Hawkings is the editor of the Starkville Daily News.

BRIAN HAWKINGS: We are a small town community newspaper. We have about 3500 subscribers and we cover the home town news. That’s what we’re here for.

MARGOLIS: Hawkings was speaking over breakfast at a local diner on Main Street where everybody seems to know everybody. One hundred and sixty five people from the Starkville unit of the Mississippi National Guard are deployed in Iraq. I asked Hawkings how often his readers think about the wars.

HAWKINGS: Heavily right now. When you have a unit that’s deployed it’s on everybody’s mind.

MARGOLIS: Hawkings says the national TV news has become jaded. He says war stories in his paper aren’t about faceless soldiers and statistics. For example, Starkville lost its second soldier in a suicide attack last year.

HAWKINGS: That brought it home again. I mean a lot of people thought the violence in Iraq had ended and then we have one of our own, the second soldier we’ve had in this community that was killed. You know so you know I think when it involves local people it tends to bring it home and remind people that it’s still happening.

MARGOLIS: Of course it’s easier to personalize stories in small communities. But that doesn’t excuse big city papers from covering the wars in a compelling way. Ronnie Agnew of Jackson’s Clarion Ledger says he tries but admits he doesn’t always succeed.

AGNEW: It’s kind of a failing on my part that we haven’t pushed that issue and that’s something I need to push because I think it’s important. I mean Mississippi’s presence is huge in these wars and there are a lot of families that are hurting. There are a lot of families here who have had multiple deployments and their finances are being wracked and their lives are being uprooted and they don’t see the end. And I think they’re looking for us and they’re looking to us to help them at least to understand the whys.

MARGOLIS: For The World I’m Jason Margolis, Jackson, Mississippi.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.