09.21.13
Lords and peasants
Here’s a good explanation (at Salon) of the divestment of manufacturing for cheap prices, a government decision supported by all the presidents we’ve had since Richard Nixon. The end of making stuff brought down the middle class.
The story makes the point, now made by many: You can’t have a country like the United States if you generate nothing but low-paying service jobs for the support of the lords. It’s simply a modern feudal system. The great things the country was known for in science and progress post-WWII won’t be sustainable.
The Silicon Valley will never save the world by a bubble of extreme wealth, iKit, big data and web applications surrounded by a land of have-nots.
Anyway, to curb inflation in the 80’s, Paul Volcker tightened up monetary policy, setting the lending rate so high people couldn’t afford loans for cars and houses. It slowed the economy and utterly destroyed the steel industry, something I saw firsthand, living in Bethlehem. I even wrote a hard rock tune about it.
So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down … And it’s hard for me to stifle a yawn as the American dream hits the ground.
The narrative of social and national decline extends through much American literature during the last 40 years. If you read Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger’s book on high school football in Odessa, Texas, a good deal of the background story is on the ruin of the middle class economy in the region, brought on by just this thing.
In the end the Salon writer returns to Flint, Michigan.
Made famous in 1989 by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, the first movie to show exactly what was being done to the country through what became an acclaimed documentary on the ruin of Flint as an auto-manufacturing center.
Flint never recovered, nobody did.
No American city has suffered more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978, Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs, and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world. Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with mean dogs.
Roger and Me: Beach Boys tune from Andrew Reznicek on Vimeo.