At a White House economics conference ..., Obama gave center stage to the (Master Lock) manufacturer as "a source of optimism and enormous potential for the future of America" after it shifted 100 jobs from China back to its flagship factory in Milwaukee. ... But when Obama visits Milwaukee on Wednesday to once again tout the company's successes - assuming he peers out his limousine windows as his motorcade ap proaches the factory - he would see a vastly different global-age phenomenon.

Master Lock amounts to an oasis of employment and competitiveness in the heart of one of the nation's poorest inner cities.

While the plant hums with automation and metal presses, what lies outside is an industrial graveyard. Master Lock is the sole survivor in a west side industrial corridor that's been ravaged by global competition, unrelenting deindustrialization and the deepest recession since the Depression. Nearly all other factories around it are dark and stretch for miles in a canyon of concrete and barbed wire.

"It's the epicenter of Milwaukee's economic decline over the past generation," said Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
http://www.jsonline.com/business/master-lock-succeeds-as-surrounding-area-fails-u446e26-139266023.html