End of the Road

I am a proud member of Generation Y, and as someone who also grew up in Detroit, I can say that I experienced first-hand the high water mark of American labor. In other words, I experienced first-hand what good, fair wages and benefits could mean for American families. Not only did wages earned by factory workers from the late '40s through the late '70s allow families to raise their brood in homes that they would come to own, free and clear of debt, manufacturing jobs allowed families to put money away for the future and even for vacations and family outings. As quiet as it is kept, life in Detroit in the time period of my youth was good. I say this without qualification.

Ben Austen's article, "End of the Road: After Detroit: the Wreck of an American Dream" is an important one. Austen isn't just lamenting the decline of the American middle class and its short-lived standard, he gently uncovers the manner by which it happened. For me, his was a short article; it could have been a book. And there are books that do the job that Austen does not do here: Thomas Sugrue's The Origin of the Urban Crisis (1996) and Steve Babson's Working Detroit (1986). Austen deals gently with this subject I think because he knows his audience cannot understand the message of decline in any other way. As he points out, Georgetown, Kentucky was happy to get the Toyota plant; citizens of this city were undoubtedly both ecstatic that jobs were coming to their town and that they had beat out all of the other cities that had competed for this prize. After all, the late twentieth century was a time of such competition, Southerners, yes, turning their noses up at Northerners. I have a girlfriend, who lives in
Alabama, who saw the American economic landscape of the time this way: "it's our turn now." She was right, of course. It was the South's turn, just like ten years later it would be Mexico's and China's turn. But, what she didn't understand was that it was not the same turn. Labor conditions, American economy, and American culture had changed.

The same towns that, in Austen's words, bloomed Camrys where they had once grown tobacco, also grew Walmarts and Targets, Starbucks and Applebees and more shopping outlets than one could ever imagine Americans needed. Former cotton plantations became subdivisions that were supposed to set apart the bourgeoise, who, looking at the new landscape, was supposed to believe that life too had started fresh. It was in fact the feeling of newness that was intoxicating. Americans suffered from a fogginess that was caused by a combination of "new thinking" (forgetting about the past, about those cotton fields) and the off-gassing of the cheap new furniture they insisted go inside of the vinyl-sided, wood-composition, brick facade homes that were going up overnight. Forgetting about those cotton plantations and the fact that they had represented a class system in which very few could ever imagine making it to the top, American workers welcomed the coming of a new class identity that felt rich if it wasn't as stable as it appeared. Perhaps companies like Toyota would be able to employ a critical mass and have enough of us driving their vehicles to believe that the American Dream had not died. What was the magic number? And the rest of Americans could dream that someone in their families could one day land a factory job, while the rest of our family members could work two jobs, one at Walmart, and maybe another elsewhere. In the meantime, second and third-shifters comforted themselves in the developing consumer economy and its offerings--an explosion of animated films, which made the line between the real and the fantastical harder and harder to distinguish, and the line between childhood and adulthood difficult to grasp as well.

The late twentieth century into the twenty-first was a feel-good era in which hardly anyone could imagine that Japanese car companies did not have the best interests of Americans at heart. American workers needed not be in union with each other for fair wages, fair working conditions, etc. Citizens of cities who won the new plants learned to be in union with the company. But as Austen writes, the honeymoon would be short-lived.

Two and a half years after publication of Austen's piece, GM supposedly is back on top. Toyota has had record losses, yet this should not be heard as good news. If GM was the twentieth-century symbol of the "old corporate model," in which workers could bargain for fairness, Toyota and Walmart, the twenty-first century symbols of cooperative relationships between management and labor are not I think going to be unseated, for how will we ever return, in a global economy, to the kind of wages that the UAW achieved? As Austen explains, what Americans should love about GM, about the UAW, and, yes, about Detroit is that the wages and rights that unionism won for auto workers set a standard for all American labor. So much for Southerners turning up their noses at the North or for people incessantly placing Detroit at the butt end of their jokes. American laborers in the late twentieth century screwed themselves though one can hardly blame them for having done so given the options.

And what are the options now? Well, Austen doesn't answer this question directly. He certainly does suggest that American workers will never have it as good as they had it during the height of Detroit, and he hints at something in his somewhat cynical look at kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, which better translated is to be understood as not wasting time or money, i.e. getting as much out of as few workers as possible. How far and wide has that concept spread. Just ask anyone in America. All of us have seen staffs cut, the handing over of multiple tasks to fewer and fewer employees, and workdays that do not end at 5:00.

Georgetown, Kentucky can thank Toyota twice. Thank the company for giving jobs to adults and then for attempting to indoctrinate young people into the virtues of systematization and efficiency. Georgetown schools unfortunately are not the only ones in the nation that have learned to value saving money, saving time, and saving what appear to be unnecessary steps in education and in life. Sleeping may soon come to be seen as an unnecessary step and, then, maybe eating as well. But thank God at least some of the kids did not conform so easily.

Birthing Pangs from Accepting the Cataclysm

I delivered three babies in two pregnancies. The first pregnancy I gladly accepted an epidural, which resulted in my having a difficult time pushing out my twin sons. After that trauma, I decided, before the delivery of my third child, I would not again accept an epidural. However, when the pain came on in that third delivery, I quickly lost my resolve. It is surely human to seek to escape pain.

A birth analogy seems appropriate to a discussion about an America on the cusp of a new economy, especially in an age when the nation has at its fingertips any number of pain-avoiding serums or epidurals. Plain old denial is an epidural. Isn't this the option of politicians who pretend we can bring jobs back home, that we can stop the speeding train of globalism? How do you return Americans to the hourly wages of manufacturing workers of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties? American audiences welcome such promises because they are hardly ready to accept that the decline of our standard of living may be permanent. And who can blame them when such decline ironically is swaddled in a continuing proliferation of consumer goods? The machine of the consumer economy has not stopped, has it? Smart phones, I-Pads, even Kindles and Nooks are the opiate of the people, aren't they even as they are manufactured far beyond America's shores?

Last week, I watched MSNBC's "Morning Joe." The guest at the table was political theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in very plain language delivered this key message: the 21st century America cannot be the 20th century America because the 21st century world is not the 20th century world. America will not necessarily have to take a back seat in world politics, but it will not be able to police the rest of the world nor should it. He in fact suggested that in this millennium there will be no superpowers. Yet, Brzezinski commented that domestic gridlock, and the kind of talk that goes along with it, that is, an out-and-out refusal for some politicians to admit that America is going to have to step back, is keeping American leaders from arriving at this new reality. Joe Scarborough and company sat with their mouths agape at this news, and I wasn't sure if their unusual silence was because they were just being kind to an old man or if there was a grand canyon between Brzezinski's consciousness and theirs. Of course. The very existence of the talking heads, employed by a hybrid television cable station and Internet entity, MSNBC, depends on the idea that more is more (Americans need 900 digital channels to choose from), and that the machine will keep churning out products, each with a very short shelf-life no matter how many more of similar vein get produced.

Which brings me more closely to the matter at hand--American housing. In his essay, "Stop Payment, a Homeowner's Revolt against the Banks," (Harper's, January 2012) Christopher Ketcham discusses what drove the housing machine, or part of what drove it. The engine was the gambling mindset we hear critiques of the housing boom (post bubble) talk about. The engine was packaged loans that became securities that people and other entities, mostly the latter, invested in. Most of us understand why the bubble burst--because Americans couldn't afford the mortgages from which the securities originated. What Americans haven't maybe known, most Americans anyway, is that in order to create the housing machine and the "Avatar (read fake) economy" that was born of it for the first time ever the two documents that throughout the country's real estate history have served as proof of mortgage ownership--deed of trust and primissory note--were separated. These items, once held by local courthouses (chanceries) , landed in very many cases with MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) in Virginia. MERS has served as intermediary, the theoretical holder of one's mortgage while it is in the process of being sold, a practice that most American homeowners recognize as all too common. Who knew? Good question. Lots of people knew, yet I guess too few people questioned the practice. According to Ketcham, the consequence of the separation of documents is that today those entities who claim to hold one's mortgage is not likely able to prove it. Ketcham shares in his report stories of several individuals who had MERS cases and in at least one the homeowner, even after being foreclosed upon, retrieved his home through the courts after arguing that the bank that had foreclosed could not prove it actually had owned his loan. In theory, the reality that was shown in this case is true of literally hundreds of thousands of other mortgages, which is why at the end of the essay Ketcham leaves the reader hanging. Another homeowner, whose case is still in the process of being litigated, may also get his home back. The attorney for the other side--the bank--has offered but one argument: the implications of the homeowner winning the case are too big to allow. The judgment, which would set a precedent, is unacceptable. Awarding hundreds of thousands of homeowners their homes free and clear of debt, even after illegitimate foreclosure, would cause a cataclysm--a failure of banks that would be so much larger than the last forestalled failure. America would have to begin again from, well, nothing. The question Ketcham leaves us with is the same one that some were asking before the bank bailout of 2008: should we not just let it (failure) happen? Is that not the purest form of capitalism?

The problem with the epidural is that one cannot feel anything down there and, yet, one does feel--I did anyway--guilt. I knew that birth pangs were actually part of what it takes to bring new life into the world. And yet this progress in medicine allowed me and many other women to avoid the natural pain. In defense of the treatment, anaesthesiolgists do implore women not to request an epidural when birth is imminent; it should only be given early in the delivery process. The question for America is how long we have been in that early delusional stage and what we will do now that the pain is on the horizon.

From Where I Sit Big Government is Great

Last week, I viewed Tavis Smiley's "Reawakening America" forum with such personalities as Cornel West, Suze Orman, Michael Moore, and a man with whom I had not been familiar before the broadcast--Roger Clay of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Clay stood out to me from the crowd. About a third of the way through the forum, he stated that America needs a new system, and at the moment he uttered that thought I felt he had separated himself from the rest of the group. Clay was speaking outside of the box, and I believe outside of capitalism, and I couldn't help but to think that everyone else on the panel was thinking within it.

Despite Clay somewhat isolating himself philosophically, it was interesting that others seemed intrigued by his thinking--especially West, who at times has claimed to be a socialist. Near the end of the forum, it cetainly seemed very important to West to align himself with Clay. He in fact asked the man if the two of them were on the same page. It's interesting to think about why such philosophical alignment was so important to West. One of the things that has always bothered me about him is that he talks a certain talk and I think walks a different walk. Some years ago, West was interviewed by Charlie Rose, who in a seemingly innocent manner, reminded West that he had made a lot of money. I guess Rose assumed that all of the books had paid off for the philosopher, the speaking engagements, etc. As I recall, West nodded in agreement. I think the philosopher-king was taken a little by surprise, but not much, by the statement. In his usual form, West came back with a sense of victimization, claiming that he had had to pay a heavy price for his pubic life and of course for his politics. He said that he regularly receives death threats. I'm sure I believe West. Everyone on the "Reawakening America" panel has probably received death threats. It goes with the territory of public life. However, what bothered me about West's response to Rose's pointing out a possible contradiction between West's public politics and his material gain from them was that what Rose was really questioning, it seemed to me anyway, was whether a proclaimed socialist should look to "get paid." I think Rose wanted to know if West's soul was bothered by having made so much money that he had risen high above the masses for whom he claimed to fight. West could have and should have answered in that vein, but instead he skirted the issue by painting himself in the image of a victim rather than that of a wealthy man who had been making a mint off of the role of thinking for the public. Rose probably wasn't the first person to accuse West of a profit motive, and, years later, I think that the kind of money that American public intellectuals were able to make during the years of America's huge economic bubble makes their politics as questionable as anyone else's, maybe more since, at least West, is still claiming to be "down with the poor." Really? Again, I'd at least like to know if he feels on his worst days a bit of a hypocrite. In a previous Smiley forum, Julia Hare warned the audience to beware of "leading blacks" (which she distinguished from black leaders), for they often "get paid" while those they claim to lead "get played." As I recall, West slapped his leg at the jab and guffawed ridiculously. I see this earlier show as a similar reaction to that made in response to Clay. West seemed to be saying he was in agreement with Hare, but how could he have been when, without a doubt, he is one who has gotten paid?

For me, there is a larger issue that goes beyond West to African Americans in general who refuse to call money out, that is, to question whether capitalism achieves a fair society, or, less critically, if every way of making money is morally acceptable. And why aren't there more African American socialists? I don't mean among the degreed thinkers but among the masses? Do we fall for the same anti-socialist rhetoric as everyone else? How could we when we've always caught more hell than anyone else? How on earth do you trust capitalism when it had its origin in slavery? It doesn't make sense, does it? And if we overwhelmingly support a party that can still be said to be more for government than the other party, then why don't more of us regularly question the capitalist system itself that is both parties' religion, an economic system which inherently leads to inequality rather than parity? Have we not noticed this? Clay stated, "most people think they are going to be rich. For that reason, they protect the rich." Is this too the mindset of working class African Americans? Do we protect the rich not only by not pointing to their participation in an inherently corrupt system but also by secretly or not-so-secretly worshiping them? Do we admire capitalism that much? Why on earth? The answer to these questions certainly seems to be yes whenever anyone goes to criticize Oprah or Tyler Perry. Have they risen to the ranks of capitalists? People defend Oprah because she gives so much back. She does, and she should give more, much more, for she possesses nothing that the system we fail to criticize hasn't allowed her. In other words, she is rich because we live in a system that makes a few people so. She is not a genius but a benefactor of an unfair system that the rest of us patronize. Have we any righteous indignation that the capitalists, who have gotten filthy rich again, are not creating jobs for us? Not a handful of jobs or new cars for all in the Harpo Studios audience, but millions of jobs for the masses? Have we silenced ourselves because we have failed to articulate an alternative politics and relied instead on the likes of West and Smiley, who are so well housed within the sytem, to speak for us?

I know that plenty of African Americans are part of The Occupy Movement, and I am not, but I do wonder if some blacks who are a part of that movement just want things to return to the way they were during the bubble or whether they want revolution--in Clay's words, "a whole new system."

One of the underlying thoughts in Thomas Frank's piece "More Government, Please" (Harper's, Dec. 2011) is that many Americans--The Tea Party especially--defend "the job creators" in their refusal to create jobs. As Frank sees it, the rich have been escalated to a position in which they are not held accountable or responsible to society; The Tea Party lets them off the hook; they are, with their Republican friends, mad about anticipated taxation and regulation. The obvious question is why masses of barely middle class people would align themselves with big money rather than with big government. But together, these friends hate big government. What Frank doesn't say is that plenty of other Americans seem to give the rich a pass as well, not the relatively few blacks who have taken to the streets or those who have gone to Washington to fight for jobs but the masses of us who just sit by waiting for either the Democrats or the Republicans to win the philosophical and political battle. How have we come to be so lethargic? Why is there no workers movement on the level of the civil rights movement? Why don't we in fact see labor rights as a civil right? My guess is that it is because we too are recovering from the excesses of the bubble, false affluence that many of us in our own ways participated (and may still be participating in some way) in. We were as mesmerized by the appearance of growth as everyone else. I think it is ironic that many of the Occupiers were not railing about poverty during the golden days when the McMansions that Frank says need to be deconstructed now were first being built. We were in awe, and some of us thought those times would last forever. Some of us may believe also that those times will come back just as soon as someone makes the case well enough that outsourced jobs must return. I do not believe. The job creators are not on strike, but, as Frank concludes, they are unwilling to compromise and accept a greater tax burden and regulation of runaway capitalism. Their refusual is tantamount to saying the good old days of the middle class are gone, gone if its revitalization depends on workers making $20 an hour to start and having affordable health benefits and a pension. The job creators are waiting for us to accept a new standard--$13 an hour tops, unaffordable heath care, and definitely no pension.

Like Clay, I want a new system altogether. I love big government. Whenever I hear it being rejected, I think of all of the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) workers, mere teenagers among them, who donned their red t-shirts in the summer in my city and held their free bus tickets as they walked to the end of the block to join gangs of young people employed by money from the federal government; they had government jobs that took them all over the city to work. That sea of government-supported jobs was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. I'm not old enough to have benefitted directly from WPA or CWA jobs, but CETA had the same or similar philosophical underpinning. The '70s was not so long ago. I suppose such a government-sponsored jobs program might in the end, if we don't overthrow the whole sytem, be only a temporary fix, but I know that in my city it forestalled the economy that replaced it--the drug economy.

Visible Man?

Singer gives us so much food for thought. I want to jump in with something unexpected. I'd like to chat about his title: Visible Man. This is of course a reversal of the so often used title and concept of invisibility (Invisible Man). Still, I wonder if this generic phrase, generic in the sense that it's supposed to represent men's and women's visbility, can actually cover (pun intended I guess) both. Are the lives of men and women, now and in the past, equally visible? Is privacy enjoyed equally, or are the lives of one group more open?

Also, we might ask a similar question about adults vs. children. The use of photography in the article is interesting, the blurring of the faces. Was this done to suggest privacy even while the piece is about loss of privacy? I'd like to give a great deal of thought to just how unprivate the lives of youth have become in the age of Facebook. What do youth gain from disclosing so much, especially images of themselves, and what do they lose?

Doesn't Facebook, in its very conception and in its naming, encourage an explosion of shared visual images? I wonder if the plastering of celebrities across our computer screens and even the near nudity of pregnant women (I think Demi Moore was the first) on magazine covers make it seem, as Singer said, that the more people give up privacy the less risky it will become. Are we fools to believe this?

Getting Started

Okay, we're off. Let's make this meaningful, okay? First up: "Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets" by Peter Seger, (Harper's, August 2011). What say you all?