tricknologist
04-25-2009, 11:05 PM
America’s broken heartland (http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4624.shtml)
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Last Sunday one of my readers wrote to me after reading In the woods with Obama. That he liked and agreed with it was almost less important almost than his following description of a recent personal trip.
He wrote, “I just returned from a 2 day drive up I-75 to Toledo, Ohio, for the North American Modern Engineering Expo (talk about a bunch of old geeks and gomers!. . . . Moi was one of them, I guess . . . ) and watched the country as we rode along to and from . . .
“The once industrial heartland of this great country is nearly dead . . . Vast factories are empty and idle, huge retail and merchandise areas are empty, the City of Toledo was laying off 150 employees (cops and firemen) and cutting the rest to a 32 hour week . . . And, so it goes!
“I am convinced that our New Messiah, in spite of the continuing adulation by all the O’Cultists, is but a continuation of what we have had in power throughout my lifetime . . . There was never a prayer of real change with election of either of the mainstream candidates (nor ever will be). Very sad.
“Anyway, keep up the fight! In Peace and Hope . . .”
For privacy’s sake, I omit his name. But this tone of sadness from heartland American got to me. Somehow it’s not that different than what we’re experiencing in New York with huge city and state deficits, huge job losses on Wall Street, in the retail sector, every sector.
It is obvious to me that the East Coast and “heartland” experience and the West Coast experience and the southland state of mind are very similar, are one. For a minute, I considered calling this piece, “America’s broken heart.” I described it in an email to my reader this way . . .
“We are in a period of psychological as well as economic depression. And the best way out of both is to fight back. The ruling class really doesn’t give a hoot whether we survive in our present numbers. Only about how little they can pay all to work harder for less and how much they can profit from that and tax-cuts. Time to send them a message, including Obama.”
I also wrote, “Moreover, our arterio-political system that’s supposed to help the blood flow through the heartland seems clogged with corruption. And I agree with you completely about Obama. It’s change for the same . . .
“I think the only way we can change what’s going is at some point to take to the streets as Americans did in the Chicago Haymarket incident: they fought back, shot back, for a 40-hour work week. So that the labor movement that grew out of it brought change not just words or empty slogans. The Civil Rights movement brought change the same way. As did the Vietnam anti-war movement.” What they had in common were people in the street protesting, willing to fight.
In fact, I had been reminded of the Haymarket incident by David Simon, the creator of the noted HBO series, The Wire, which is about the ongoing chronic drug addiction in Simon’s native city of Baltimore, where he was a crime reporter for local newspapers for 12 years. This was on Bill Moyers Journal, last Friday night.
More specifically, The Wire is centered in the black ghetto of Baltimore, the projects, where the major equal opportunity employer for the young is selling drugs to their brothers and sisters who will buy them. The police cope with it by the number of arrests they make, real or imagined, to take the heat off and to show the public something is being done about the problem. In fact nothing is really being done. The larger society, the government, has written off this segment of the population. It is a sustainable loss by those in power. Not unlike the decisions Bush and Clinton probably made about the massive offshoring of jobs and NAFTA-CAFTA-ing whole American industries. It is a sustainable loss to them.
After all, the multinational corporations would continue to fatten their bottom lines while American workers would keep tightening their belts, in Ohio, Michigan, now New York, and in any direction you turn. The process of unemployment like the institutionalized drug problem of Baltimore’s black ghetto has become the product of a systemic dysfunction, for which “Just Say No” is a paltry answer.
When Bill Moyers asked David Simon, “What is it about the crime scene that gives you a keyhole, the best keyhole perhaps, into how American society really works,” Simon answered, “You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn’t make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because The Wire is not a story about the America, it’s about the America that got left behind.”
I found Simon’s answer a brilliant distillation of what’s happening not only in Baltimore, the “the America that got left behind,” and in more and more places in the America. In Baltimore it is drug addiction for a consciously disenfranchised black population. In Toledo, Ohio, or Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan, and heartlands everywhere, it is the conscious destruction of industrial manufacturing infrastructure for union workers of all colors to save labor, pension and health costs. Yet, what went around for the auto industry has come around full circle to bite the failing giants in the butt.
In his introduction of Simon, Moyers said, “Remember, you heard it here -- what Edward Gibbon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dickens to the smoky mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.”
If that’s true (and I think it is), the American preoccupation with being an Empire creates these ongoing patches of systemic dysfunction, which become the overall systemic dysfunction. In fact, based on a documentary Moyers had made of the South Bronx, he added that he learned early on that its “drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.”
This also indicates the class conflict of the haves preying on the have-nots and the have-somethings that will soon have nothing. David Simon added “And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that . . . mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.” He calls this (as the police do) “juking the stats.”
So at the root of it all, of our system, whether the figures represent crime, education, finance, manufacturing, they can be manipulated so that someone, some group, some class makes a profit at the expense of another. As Moyers points out, “Over the past 20 years, the elite one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent. But their tax burden shrank by about one-third.” He adds, “Now those facts tell us something very important. That the rich got richer as their tax rates shrunk. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing, you know?” Especially since those stats aren’t juked.
Which brings us back to our central problem with American’s broken heartland. It’s both the American dream and reality that is broken. That saps the strength from the everyday people, whose sons go to the wars, who pay their taxes, who have lost their jobs or pensions or health care, or live in fear of losing Social Security or having it severely cut. At the bottom of it all, when really will people’s blood start rushing and where and when will the next Haymarket event take place?
As Wiki reports, “On Saturday, May 1, 1886, rallies were held throughout the United States. There were an estimated 10,000 demonstrators in New York and 11,000 in Detroit. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 10,000 workers turned out. The movement’s center was in Chicago, where an estimated 40,000 workers went on strike. Albert Parsons was an anarchist and founder of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA). Parsons, with his wife Lucy and their children, led a march of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. Another 10,000 men employed in the lumberyards held a separate march in Chicago. Estimates of the total number of striking American workers range from 300,000 to half a million.”
I’m happy that the paragraph is thoroughly footnoted to prove its claims. Striking American workers ranged to half a million people, and that is without any mass communication, ther than the newspaper, back in May 1886 when the riots occurred. Today’s police perhaps are more intimidating with their sophisticated weapons, from Tasers to automatic rifles, sprays, nets, mass holding pens. Yet, this only qualifies us as a police state. The right to assemble and protest is granted to us in the Constitution. What does it take to rip us away from the TV sets and make our feelings known?
For these repressed feelings are at the root of the psychological and spiritual depression. Feelings of individual powerlessness. Feelings of hopelessness, which Obama parenthetically was going to abolish. In the so-called attempts at alleviating the financial crisis, a whole new crisis has developed. What is really being done with the giveaways besides enriching the people who caused the problems in the first place? Systemic failure. A result of systemic deregulation, i.e., Congress and the executive branch.
And so one asks the question are we citizens or are we slaves of this culture? How do the G20 leaders tell us it’s been decided that the International Monetary Fund is going to issue $250 billion of its own currency, when our own dollars, so avidly worked for by hundreds of millions of Americans, are losing their value? Are we faced again with a systemic disinterest with the little guy? Are we all gradually becoming the “dispossessed,” the written-off people for that 1 percent of the elites and their mammoth profit-making machinery? Are we going to let that happen? Sit quietly at our own funerals?
If we want to pick up and put together the broken pieces of the American heartland, of the American dream, of America, how and when are we going to do it? There’s no more time for equivocation? Especially with the rulers of America treating us to their plans for One World Government as they fail miserably to run this one American government that used to be the world’s economic engine. At least let it be functional for America. And if it’s China turn to turn the world wheel, let them have it. Perhaps it’s time we cultivate our own gardens, literally and figuratively.
Can we do it as we did in past eras? Can we do it without creating internal bloodshed? Can we be heard without having to break down the barricades? Can we not be bowed time and time again by the Invisible Hand of the free market, or have our pickets picked by it, or someone sell dope with it or subprime mortgages, or sell out our steel mills, our auto plants, or sell us a bill of goods for change and deliver the same old crap? Just remember, all the pieces are connected that make us, that make the heartland and that make the heart of a living America. And they have to work together like that miracle machine in the upper left side of our own body.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Last Sunday one of my readers wrote to me after reading In the woods with Obama. That he liked and agreed with it was almost less important almost than his following description of a recent personal trip.
He wrote, “I just returned from a 2 day drive up I-75 to Toledo, Ohio, for the North American Modern Engineering Expo (talk about a bunch of old geeks and gomers!. . . . Moi was one of them, I guess . . . ) and watched the country as we rode along to and from . . .
“The once industrial heartland of this great country is nearly dead . . . Vast factories are empty and idle, huge retail and merchandise areas are empty, the City of Toledo was laying off 150 employees (cops and firemen) and cutting the rest to a 32 hour week . . . And, so it goes!
“I am convinced that our New Messiah, in spite of the continuing adulation by all the O’Cultists, is but a continuation of what we have had in power throughout my lifetime . . . There was never a prayer of real change with election of either of the mainstream candidates (nor ever will be). Very sad.
“Anyway, keep up the fight! In Peace and Hope . . .”
For privacy’s sake, I omit his name. But this tone of sadness from heartland American got to me. Somehow it’s not that different than what we’re experiencing in New York with huge city and state deficits, huge job losses on Wall Street, in the retail sector, every sector.
It is obvious to me that the East Coast and “heartland” experience and the West Coast experience and the southland state of mind are very similar, are one. For a minute, I considered calling this piece, “America’s broken heart.” I described it in an email to my reader this way . . .
“We are in a period of psychological as well as economic depression. And the best way out of both is to fight back. The ruling class really doesn’t give a hoot whether we survive in our present numbers. Only about how little they can pay all to work harder for less and how much they can profit from that and tax-cuts. Time to send them a message, including Obama.”
I also wrote, “Moreover, our arterio-political system that’s supposed to help the blood flow through the heartland seems clogged with corruption. And I agree with you completely about Obama. It’s change for the same . . .
“I think the only way we can change what’s going is at some point to take to the streets as Americans did in the Chicago Haymarket incident: they fought back, shot back, for a 40-hour work week. So that the labor movement that grew out of it brought change not just words or empty slogans. The Civil Rights movement brought change the same way. As did the Vietnam anti-war movement.” What they had in common were people in the street protesting, willing to fight.
In fact, I had been reminded of the Haymarket incident by David Simon, the creator of the noted HBO series, The Wire, which is about the ongoing chronic drug addiction in Simon’s native city of Baltimore, where he was a crime reporter for local newspapers for 12 years. This was on Bill Moyers Journal, last Friday night.
More specifically, The Wire is centered in the black ghetto of Baltimore, the projects, where the major equal opportunity employer for the young is selling drugs to their brothers and sisters who will buy them. The police cope with it by the number of arrests they make, real or imagined, to take the heat off and to show the public something is being done about the problem. In fact nothing is really being done. The larger society, the government, has written off this segment of the population. It is a sustainable loss by those in power. Not unlike the decisions Bush and Clinton probably made about the massive offshoring of jobs and NAFTA-CAFTA-ing whole American industries. It is a sustainable loss to them.
After all, the multinational corporations would continue to fatten their bottom lines while American workers would keep tightening their belts, in Ohio, Michigan, now New York, and in any direction you turn. The process of unemployment like the institutionalized drug problem of Baltimore’s black ghetto has become the product of a systemic dysfunction, for which “Just Say No” is a paltry answer.
When Bill Moyers asked David Simon, “What is it about the crime scene that gives you a keyhole, the best keyhole perhaps, into how American society really works,” Simon answered, “You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn’t make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because The Wire is not a story about the America, it’s about the America that got left behind.”
I found Simon’s answer a brilliant distillation of what’s happening not only in Baltimore, the “the America that got left behind,” and in more and more places in the America. In Baltimore it is drug addiction for a consciously disenfranchised black population. In Toledo, Ohio, or Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan, and heartlands everywhere, it is the conscious destruction of industrial manufacturing infrastructure for union workers of all colors to save labor, pension and health costs. Yet, what went around for the auto industry has come around full circle to bite the failing giants in the butt.
In his introduction of Simon, Moyers said, “Remember, you heard it here -- what Edward Gibbon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dickens to the smoky mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.”
If that’s true (and I think it is), the American preoccupation with being an Empire creates these ongoing patches of systemic dysfunction, which become the overall systemic dysfunction. In fact, based on a documentary Moyers had made of the South Bronx, he added that he learned early on that its “drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.”
This also indicates the class conflict of the haves preying on the have-nots and the have-somethings that will soon have nothing. David Simon added “And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that . . . mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.” He calls this (as the police do) “juking the stats.”
So at the root of it all, of our system, whether the figures represent crime, education, finance, manufacturing, they can be manipulated so that someone, some group, some class makes a profit at the expense of another. As Moyers points out, “Over the past 20 years, the elite one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s income double, from 11.3 percent to 22.1 percent. But their tax burden shrank by about one-third.” He adds, “Now those facts tell us something very important. That the rich got richer as their tax rates shrunk. But it doesn’t seem to start people’s blood rushing, you know?” Especially since those stats aren’t juked.
Which brings us back to our central problem with American’s broken heartland. It’s both the American dream and reality that is broken. That saps the strength from the everyday people, whose sons go to the wars, who pay their taxes, who have lost their jobs or pensions or health care, or live in fear of losing Social Security or having it severely cut. At the bottom of it all, when really will people’s blood start rushing and where and when will the next Haymarket event take place?
As Wiki reports, “On Saturday, May 1, 1886, rallies were held throughout the United States. There were an estimated 10,000 demonstrators in New York and 11,000 in Detroit. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 10,000 workers turned out. The movement’s center was in Chicago, where an estimated 40,000 workers went on strike. Albert Parsons was an anarchist and founder of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA). Parsons, with his wife Lucy and their children, led a march of 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue. Another 10,000 men employed in the lumberyards held a separate march in Chicago. Estimates of the total number of striking American workers range from 300,000 to half a million.”
I’m happy that the paragraph is thoroughly footnoted to prove its claims. Striking American workers ranged to half a million people, and that is without any mass communication, ther than the newspaper, back in May 1886 when the riots occurred. Today’s police perhaps are more intimidating with their sophisticated weapons, from Tasers to automatic rifles, sprays, nets, mass holding pens. Yet, this only qualifies us as a police state. The right to assemble and protest is granted to us in the Constitution. What does it take to rip us away from the TV sets and make our feelings known?
For these repressed feelings are at the root of the psychological and spiritual depression. Feelings of individual powerlessness. Feelings of hopelessness, which Obama parenthetically was going to abolish. In the so-called attempts at alleviating the financial crisis, a whole new crisis has developed. What is really being done with the giveaways besides enriching the people who caused the problems in the first place? Systemic failure. A result of systemic deregulation, i.e., Congress and the executive branch.
And so one asks the question are we citizens or are we slaves of this culture? How do the G20 leaders tell us it’s been decided that the International Monetary Fund is going to issue $250 billion of its own currency, when our own dollars, so avidly worked for by hundreds of millions of Americans, are losing their value? Are we faced again with a systemic disinterest with the little guy? Are we all gradually becoming the “dispossessed,” the written-off people for that 1 percent of the elites and their mammoth profit-making machinery? Are we going to let that happen? Sit quietly at our own funerals?
If we want to pick up and put together the broken pieces of the American heartland, of the American dream, of America, how and when are we going to do it? There’s no more time for equivocation? Especially with the rulers of America treating us to their plans for One World Government as they fail miserably to run this one American government that used to be the world’s economic engine. At least let it be functional for America. And if it’s China turn to turn the world wheel, let them have it. Perhaps it’s time we cultivate our own gardens, literally and figuratively.
Can we do it as we did in past eras? Can we do it without creating internal bloodshed? Can we be heard without having to break down the barricades? Can we not be bowed time and time again by the Invisible Hand of the free market, or have our pickets picked by it, or someone sell dope with it or subprime mortgages, or sell out our steel mills, our auto plants, or sell us a bill of goods for change and deliver the same old crap? Just remember, all the pieces are connected that make us, that make the heartland and that make the heart of a living America. And they have to work together like that miracle machine in the upper left side of our own body.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.