Dead Capitalism

Only the jails are open

Camden, New Jersey, for example, had long been a robust, diversified small industrial city. By the early 1970s, however, its mayor Angelo Errichetti was described as looking  "....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."

From 1977 to 1987, Youngstown, Ohio lost 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries. Burglaries, robberies and assaults doubled after the steel plants closed. In two years, child abuse rose by 21 per cent, suicides by 70 per cent. 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 memorialised the city's plight in his song "Youngstown" . A journalist wrote of the closing of  the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube that "the dead steel mills stand as pathetic mausoleums"

In the small industrial city of Mansfield, Ohio, in "good times" or bad, it didn't matter,  it has shrank relentlessly.  Dominion Electric shut down 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 closed.  Its poverty rate is now at 28 per cent, 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.

Eastport, Maine, although the deepest port on the East Coast, has few ships but many abandoned sardine factories lining its shore. Its bars filled with the under- and unemployed.

In the 1980s, when Jack Welch, known as "Neutron Jack" for his ruthlessness, CEO of General Electric, set out to raise the company's stock price by gutting the workforce. Schenectady, New York, lost 22,000 jobs; Louisville, Kentucky,13,000 were laid off; 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 made redundant. Life in those one-company towns ground to a halt.

 Detroit, once, it had been a world-class city, the country's fourth largest, full of architectural gems. In the 1950s, Detroit had a population with the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership in urban America. Now, the "motor city" haunts the national imagination as a ghost town. Home to two million a quarter-century ago, its decrepit hulk is now "home" to 900,000. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the population haemorrhaged by 25 per cent, nearly a quarter of a million people. One-third of Detroit, an area the size of San Francisco, is now little more than empty houses, empty factories and fields gone feral. A whole industry of demolition, waste-disposal and scrap-metal companies arose to tear down what once had been. With a jobless rate of 29 per cent, some of its citizens are so poor they can't pay for funerals, so bodies pile up at mortuaries. Even the public zoo has been privatised. With staff and animals reduced to the barest of minimums and living wages endangered by its new owner, an associate curator working with elephants and rhinos went in search of another job. He found it with the city - chasing down feral dogs whose population had skyrocketed as the cityscape returned to wilderness. Plans are even afoot to just grass the city over.

Coast to coast, border to border, shuttered saw mills, abandoned mines, closed schools, rutted roads, ghost airports. Since 2000 alone, 3.5 million more manufacturing jobs have vanished and 42,000 manufacturing plants were closed down. Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the economy after the Second World War, dropped to just over 10 per cent by 2011.  Fifty thousand mortgage brokerages employed 400,000 brokers, more than the whole US textile industry. A hedge fund manager put it bluntly, "The money that's made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around".  It now depends on liquidating the assets of the old industries or shipping them abroad to reward speculation in "fictitious capital".

 Cities and towns around the country where essential public services - garbage collection, policing, fire protection, schools, street maintenance, healthcare - are wasting away. 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 fertilising 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.

Fewer people have been able to move up the income ladder. Now Americans in their 30s earn 12 per cent less on average than their parents' generation at the same age. The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers - those who earn less than two-thirds of the median wage - of any developed nation. Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Canadians, Swedes, Germans and the French now all enjoy higher rates of upward mobility than Americans. Remarkably, 42 per cent of American men raised in the bottom one-fifth income cohort remain there for life, as compared to 25 per cent in Denmark and 30 per cent in notoriously class-stratified Great Britain.

For the first time in American history, the life expectancy of white people, men and women, has actually dropped. Life spans for the least educated, in particular, have fallen by about four years since 1990. The steepest decline: white women lacking a high school diploma. They, on average, lost five years of life, while white men lacking a diploma lost three years. Between 1985 and 2010, American women fell from 14thto 41st place in the United Nation's ranking of international life expectancy. (Among developed countries, American women now rank last.)

Imagine  the time traveller from Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's utopian novel of 1888 waking up in present-day America. Instead of the prosperous land filled with technological wonders and egalitarian harmony Bellamy envisioned, his protagonist would find an unnervingly familiar world of decaying cities, people growing ever poorer and sicker, bridges and roads crumpling, sweatshops a commonplace, the largest prison population on the planet, workers afraid to stand up to their bosses, schools failing, debts growing more onerous and inequalities starker than ever.

Adapted from here