Letters to the Editor
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Bravo
This is the story of much of the country but especially the Midwest.
The culture is based on making things and trades and agriculture. It's not based on figuring out how to crack open a company and get the money out. It's not based on short term business plans. It's not based on business school logic that reduces "human" to "resources" like depreciable items.
What we do and make is no longer of value in our disposable "global" society.
Globalization has devalued who we are.
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Thanks, calcareous
from another Ohio expat, from another toilet capital of the state (Mansfield). The jobs went south when I was a kid, and now they are much, much farther away, in places workers can't move to except through the career that has replaced manufacturing in Ohio: the military. Now all those people are forced to work at places like Wal-Mart, and/or buy the shoddy, disposable, dollar-store products made by the people who took their jobs. I spent my childhood listening to my hanging-on-by-their-fingernails parents tell me how Nixon was no worse than any other politician, how wonderful Reagan was, how lazy black people were (except for the few who were actually, you know, our FRIENDS), and, my very favorite, the converse of trickle-down economics: what a bad idea it was to raise the minimum wage, because it just meant higher prices for everyone! My mother spent years voting against the abortion bugaboo, while my father has a hard-core libertarian streak and trusted the Republicans to be actual conservatives. I think the Republicans have finally worn out their welcome with my native family and almost everyone like them.
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What we need are Tariffs ...
Damned if you do, really damned if you don't.
Let's be clear, if the US continues to have a 6% trade deficit the dollar will continue to fall causing ever more inflation.These trade deficits are structural not incidental, that is, we are not importing goods to produce exports or make us more efficient, we are importing goods to consume.
It is no secret that every other country practices protectionism of one sort or another whether it be currency manipulation, product dumping or subsidies.
Without tariffs to protect and expand manufacturing here in the US we will be devastated by inflation anyway. So, take your pick, higher prices with jobs for American made products or ever higher prices for products with fewer and fewer American jobs.
Let the tariffs begin !
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Well said, Calcareous
From yet another Ohio expat, from Youngstown, in my case. Besides the supermax prison and the like in the 90s, the ossified urban core of Youngstown has never recovered, is like a place lost to time. The last time I went through town, I saw only rats, rust, police cruisers, and prostitutes in the desolate landscape along Market Street, and the hulking shadow of the prisons, and the old, dead mills near the Mahoning River.
From an arguable high point in its WWII heyday as being on the Nazis' top five "to bomb" lists, Youngstown's done a slow death spiral that accelerated since 1977, costing it tens of thousands of jobs, many hundreds of associated businesses, hundreds of millions of dollars in income, bleeding population (today it's got less than half its population apogee in 1930), and the gutting of school revenues. I remember smelling the sulfur from the mills when I was a kid growing up, and had many relatives in the steel industry and also in the Lordstown GM factory, on the fringes of the area.
When GM's massive Lordstown plant finally leaves (where my dad worked for 40 years), that'll be it -- Youngstown will become an ex-city. It never diversified enough to survive a post-steel economy. When Clinton was speaking from there the other week, I thought it was the perfect venue for her, a telling showing of her prospects. Youngstown just experienced the crash-and-burn early; it's being replicated in so many cities in the Rust Belt.
I know the young Mayor Williams has shown imagination in trying to build a new Youngstown as a kind of bedroom community between Pittsburgh and Cleveland (Cleveland itself has been hurting; Pittsburgh seems somewhat better-situated), and I applaud his imagination, even as he's come out and said that they're no longer going to try to build back the city to what it once was, it's because that's the only thing he can do.
Economists can definitely suck their teeth and chide communities for having undiversified economies, but most of the Rust Belt cities suffering the most today hail from the early 1800s, and they're really just ghosts of old economics. The problem is that living people have to deal with those dead and dying economies, and politicians either don't have the boldness to deal with it (Democrats) or else seek scapegoats and diversions (Republicans) for people's anger. Coming from Youngstown, though, I see the same dynamic increasingly playing out far beyond the Mahoning Valley. Youngstown may have gotten there early, relative to many American cities, but it's happening all over the country.
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Corning, NY used to make glass too
Now they make most of the world's fiber optic cable. Adapt.
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Not Just Factory Jobs
I have two good friends from Ohio, who left the state after massive layoffs at their company. The difference? They weren't factory workers, they were scientists with advanced degrees. But their jobs were sent to China just as surely as the factory jobs. Technical skills, advanced degrees, "job training" - they don't mean much, since those jobs can be outsourced almost as easily as factory jobs.
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Let's hear from people who actually have lost jobs
It's not just "my uncle." We are the people. Tell us, please. Andrew Leonard of Salon is very cool, but he is not directly plugged into real America.
Will anybody who actually lost a job post here?
My wife actually lost a good job to American capitalists, not a factory job. She got another job eventually, and I hope she, eventually, will have revenge on the creeps who let her go.
But please give us your own real American testimony here. The blogging classes imagine that the factories have clsoed recently. Did you lose your job in 1989? That counts.
How have you coped? That is important.