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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA 'Debtpocalypse' and hollow
society By Steve Fraser
"Debtpocalypse" looms. Depending on who
wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either
free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a
terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom. Grim as
these scenarios might seem, there is something
confected about the mise-en-scene, like an un-fun
Playland. After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or
at least there was none - until the two parties
built it.
And yet the pit exists. It goes
by the name of "austerity". However, it didn’t
just appear in time for the last election season
or the lame-duck session of congress to follow. It
was dug more
than a generation ago, and has been
getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of
people have long made it their home.
"Debtpocalypse" is merely the latest installment
in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the
dispossession of American working people.
Think of it as the archeology of decline,
or a tale of two worlds. As a long generation of
austerity politics hollowed out the heartland, the
quants and traders and financial wizards of Wall
Street gobbled up ever more of the nation's
resources. It was another Great Migration -
instead of people, though, trillions of dollars
were being sucked out of industrial America and
turned into "financial instruments" and new,
exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans
were the particular victims here, then high
finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to
consume the rest of us.
Scenes from the
museum In the mid-1970s, Hugh Carey, then
governor of New York, was already noting the
hollowing out of his part of America. New York
City, after all, was threatening to go bankrupt.
Plenty of other cities and states across what was
then known as the "Frost Belt" were in similar
shape. Yankeedom, in Carey’s words, was turning
into "a great national museum" where tourists
could visit "the great railroad stations where the
trains used to run".
As it happened, the
tourists weren’t interested. Abandoned railroad
stations might be fetching in an eerie sort of
way, but the rest of the museum was filled with
artifacts of recent ruination that were too
depressing to be entertaining. True, a century
earlier, during the first Gilded Age, the upper
crust used to amuse itself by taking guided tours
of the urban demi-monde, thrilling to sites of
exotic depravity or ethnic strangeness. They
traipsed around "rag-pickers alley" on New York’s
Lower East Side or the opium dens of Chinatown, or
ghoulishly watched poor children salivate over
toys in store window displays they could never
hope to touch.
Times have changed. The
preference now is to entirely remove the
unsightly. Nonetheless, the national museum of
industrial homicide has, city by city, decade by
decade, grown more grotesque.
Camden, New
Jersey, for example, had long been a robust,
diversified small industrial city. By the early
1970s, however, its reformist mayor Angelo
Errichetti was describing it this way: "It looked
like the Vietcong had bombed us to get even. The
pride of Camden ... was now a rat-infested
skeleton of yesterday, a visible obscenity of
urban decay. The years of neglect, slumlord
exploitation, tenant abuse, government bungling,
indecisive and short-sighted policy had
transformed the city’s housing, business, and
industrial stock into a ravaged, rat-infested
cancer on a sick, old industrial city."
That was 40 years ago and yet, today, news
stories are still being written about Camden’s
never-ending decline into some bottomless abyss.
Consider that a measure of how long it takes to
shut down a way of life.
Once upon a time,
Youngstown, Ohio, was a typical smokestack city,
part of the steel belt running through
Pennsylvania and Ohio. As with Camden, things
there started turning south in the 1970s. From
1977 to 1987, the city lost 50,000 jobs in steel
and related industries. By the late 1980s, the
years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency when it was
"morning again in America," it was midnight in
Youngstown: foreclosures, an epidemic of business
bankruptcies, and everywhere collapsing community
institutions including churches, unions, families,
and the municipal government itself.
Burglaries, robberies, and assaults
doubled after the steel plants closed. In two
years, child abuse rose by 21%, suicides by 70%.
One-eighth of Mahoning County went on welfare.
Streets were filled with dead storefronts and the
detritus of abandoned homes: scrap metal and wood
shingles, shattered glass, stripped-away home
siding, canning jars, and rusted swing sets. Each
week, 1,500 people visited the Salvation Army’s
soup line.
The Wall Street Journal called
Youngstown "a necropolis," noting miles of
"silent, empty steel mills" and a pervasive sense
of fear and loss. Bruce Springsteen would soon
memorialize that loss in The Ghost of Tom
Joad.
If you were unfortunate enough
to live in the small industrial city of Mansfield,
Ohio, for the last 40 years, you would have
witnessed in microcosm the dystopia of destruction
unfolding in similar places everywhere. For a
century, workshops there had made a kaleidoscope
of goods: stoves, tires, steel, machinery,
refrigerators, and cars. Then Mansfield’s rust
belt started narrowing as one plant after another
went shut down: Dominion Electric in 1971,
Mansfield Tire and Rubber in 1978, Hoover Plastics
in 1980, National Seating in 1985, Tappan Stoves
in 1986, a Westinghouse plant and Ohio Brass in
1990, Wickes Lumber in 1997, Crane Plumbing in
2003, Neer Manufacturing in 2007, and
Smurfit-Stone Container in 2009. In 2010, General
Motors closed its largest, most modern US stamping
factory, and thanks to the Great Recession,
Con-way Freight, Value City, and Card Camera also
shut down.
"Good times" or bad, it didn’t
matter. Mansfield shrank relentlessly, becoming
the urban equivalent of skin and bones. Its
poverty rate is now at 28%, its median income
$11,000 below the national average of $41,994.
What manufacturing remains is non-union and $10 an
hour is considered a good wage.
Midway
through this industrial auto-da-f้, a journalist
watching the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet
and Tube go dark, mused that "the dead steel mills
stand as pathetic mausoleums to the decline of
American industrial might that was once the envy
of the world." This dismal record is particularly
impressive because it encompasses the "boom times"
presided over by Presidents Reagan and Clinton.
The 'pit' deepens In 1988, in
the iciest part of the Frost Belt, a Wall Street
Journal reporter noted, "There are two Americas
now, and they grow further apart each day." He was
referring to Eastport, Maine. Although the deepest
port on the East Coast, it hosted few ships,
abandoned sardine factories lined its shore, and
its bars were filled with the under- and
unemployed. The reporter pointed out that he had
seen similar scenes from a collapsing rural
economy "coast to coast, border to border":
shuttered saw mills, abandoned mines, closed
schools, rutted roads, ghost airports.
Closing up, shutting down, going out of
business: last one to leave please turn out the
lights!
Such was the case in cities and
towns around the country. Essential public
services - garbage collection, policing, fire
protection, schools, street maintenance,
health-care - were atrophying. So were the people
who lived in those places. High blood pressure,
cardiac and digestive problems, and mortality
rates were generally rising, as was doubt,
self-blame, guilt, anxiety, and depression. The
drying up of social supports, even among those who
once had been friends and workmates, haunted the
inhabitants of these places as much as the
industrial skeletons around them.
In the
1980s, when Jack Welch, soon to be known as
"Neutron Jack" for his ruthlessness, became CEO of
General Electric, he set out to raise the
company’s stock price by gutting the workforce. It
only took him six years, but imagine what it was
like in Schenectady, New York, which lost 22,000
jobs; Louisville, Kentucky, where 13,000 fewer
people made appliances; Evendale, Ohio, where
12,000 no longer made lights and light fixtures;
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where 8,000 plastics
makers lost their jobs; and Erie, Pennsylvania,
where 6,000 locomotive workers got green slips.
Life as it had been lived in GE’s or other
one-company towns ground to a halt. Two travelling
observers, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson,
making their way through the wasteland of middle
America in 1984 spoke of "medieval cities of
rusting iron" and a largely invisible landscape
filling up with an army of transients, moving from
place to place at any hint of work. They were
camped out under bridges, riding freight cars,
living in makeshift tents in fetid swamps, often
armed, trusting no one, selling their blood,
eating out of dumpsters.
Nor was the
calamity limited to the northern Rust Belt. The
South and Southwest did not prove immune from this
wasting disease either. Empty textile mills, often
originally runaways from the North, dotted the
Carolinas, Georgia, and elsewhere. Half the jobs
lost due to plant closings or relocations occurred
in the Sunbelt.
In 2008, in the sunbelt
town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one-third of
the city’s street lights were extinguished, police
helicopters were sold, watering and fertilizing in
the parks was eliminated from the budget, and
surrounding suburbs closed down the public bus
system. During the recent Great Recession
one-industry towns like Dalton, Georgia ("the
carpet capital of the world"), or Blakely, Georgia
("the peanut capital of the world"), or Elkhart,
Indiana ("the RV capital of the world") were
closing libraries, firing police chiefs, and
taking other desperate measures to survive.
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