This column received many thoughtful comments from readers. Charles
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/opinion/21herbert.html November 21, 2009 OP-ED COLUMNIST An American Catastrophe By BOB HERBERT Detroit In many ways, it’s like a ghost town ( Boo ! -CB) . It’s eerily quiet. Driving around in the middle of the afternoon, in a city that once was among the most productive on the planet, you see very little traffic, minimal commercial activity, hardly any pedestrians. What you’ll see are endless acres of urban ruin, block after block and mile after mile of empty and rotting office buildings, storefronts, hotels, apartment buildings and private homes. It’s a scene of devastation and disintegration that stuns the mind, a major American city that still is home to 900,0000 people but which looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization. Detroit was the arsenal of democracy in World War II and the incubator of the American middle class. It was the city that taught mass production to the rest of the world. It was a place that made cars, trucks and other tangible products, not derivatives. And it was the architect of the quintessentially American idea of putting people to work and paying them a decent wage. It’s frightening to think seriously about what we’ve allowed to happen to this city and what is now happening to the middle class and the American economy as a whole. I was in Detroit with Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in labor issues. He grew up in Detroit and his love for the city and its people are palpable, as is his grief for the horrors the city has endured. The popular narrative of what happened to Detroit contains a great deal of truth but its focus is too narrow to account for the astonishing decline of this former industrial colossus. Yes, there were the riots of 1967, and white flight; and political leadership that was not just shortsighted but at times embarrassingly incompetent and corrupt. And, yes, the auto industry was a case study in self-destruction. But as Mr. Shaiken points out, Detroit was still viable enough for the Republican Party to hold its convention here in 1980, when it nominated Ronald Reagan. And it was not the riots, but the devastating recession of the early ’80s that really knocked the city senseless. “That’s when the place really cracked,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that was about aggressive globalization and the lack of an industrial policy, not the riots.” Detroit and its environs are suffering the agonies of the economic damned because of policies, crafted at the highest national and corporate levels, that resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America’s manufacturing base. Those decisions have had a profound effect on the fortunes not just of Detroit, or even Michigan, but the entire U.S. economy. “We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.” The idea that the fallout from the wrongheaded economic concepts of the past 30 or 40 years could be contained, with the damage limited to the increasingly troubled urban areas while sparing prosperous suburbia, has now proved as phony as Bernie Madoff’s fortune. Americans, whether they live in big cities, suburban towns or rural areas, need jobs, and when those jobs are eliminated (for whatever reasons — technological advances, globalization) without being replaced, the national economy is guaranteed at some point to hit a wall. Professor Shaiken and I drove past vast lots filled with rubble and garbage and weeds, past the old Michigan Central Terminal, which was once Detroit’s answer to New York’s Grand Central Terminal but which has long since been abandoned; past a onetime Cadillac manufacturing plant that is now an empty lot. We stopped at an old Ford plant and stood in a stiff, cold wind, reading a plaque put up by the Michigan Historical Commission: “Here at his Highland Park plant, Henry Ford began the mass production of automobiles on a moving assembly line. By 1915 Ford built a million Model T’s. In 1925 over 9,000 were assembled in a single day. Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th century living.” Professor Shaiken’s grandfather, Philip Chapman, took a job at the Highland Park plant in 1914, earning five dollars a day, and worked on production at Ford until his retirement in the mid-1950s. We’re at a period no less significant to the U.S. than Mr. Chapman’s early years at Ford. We need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades. If there is any sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders, I’ve missed it. Yes, it was a great old city. You might mention, too, that from the days of FDR to those of JFK the Dems always kicked off their every-four-year presidential campaigns on Labor Day, in the genteel heart of Detroit, Grand Circus Park. You might mention the great books on the city, from Harriet Arnow's "The Dollmaker" to Joyce Carol Oates' "them." And the poetry -- lots from Philip Levine on the factories -- my choice his on summer night swimming off Belle Isle, that jewel of an island in the Detroit River, when Levine himself was a high school kid. And, speaking of kids, there's wonderful little novel, oddly-named "Snakes," a glorious look at being a teenager and Black back in the late '40s and '50s when Detroit's neighborhoods were all ethnic, and all ethnicities had some pieces of the pie of prosperity -- or its tool-&-dyes. And Robert Hayden's great short poem about waking up -- a poor Black boy -- on "Those Winter Sundays"? And Motown. And Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum. The Diego Rivera murals at the art institute -- which volunteers protected with their bodies during all-night vigils when Father McCoughlan's right-wing goon squads threatened to destroy them -- in an era when they -- Rockefeller himself -- did actually destroy the similar murals he'd installed in the 1930s-new Manhattan center named for his family. And those Life and Look magazine double-page spreads every early September in the '50s, when we boys (and girls) could thrill to first views of the next model year's chrome, tail fins, and grilles. Yes to American energies -- or, do we say funereal post-mortem? Recommend Recommended by 222 Readers 2. Billl Watson Menlo Park, California November 21st, 2009 7:11 am Unfairness and inefficiency are the giant enemies destroying our country. A quick purge and giant house cleaning of all of the government regulations from top to bottom, White House to village court houses which would find and remove all regulations and policies which impede fairness and open competition would do wonders for job creation and economic recovery. Our country has become crippled by self inflicted wounds. We need to have a system to quickly discover what really occurred causing the destruction of our economy and what caused employers to eliminate so many jobs. When creating jobs punishes employers, as is the case now, no one in their right mind will create jobs. Health care is a huge example of how catastrophic damage is being inflicted upon our countries ability to produce jobs because of harmful government mandates. Forcing individuals and employers to purchase questionable insurance to pay for expensive services and then endure endless hassels, at the hands of the health care system that has failed so many of us, is not helpful to anyone and it will cause great harm to individuals, employers, taxpayers, and our economy. A pure public option, with government sales tax funding replacing insurance, along with distributing all government funded care free to everyone requesting it only through government owned and operated hospitals, staffed by government employed doctors and health care providers, using proven VA systems, is the most cost effective and morally correct way for fixing half of the health care problem. All government funded costs could be reduced drastically, while producing better patient outcomes, if distributed only through civilian government hospitals using the proven low cost VA systems. This solves the Medicare, Medicaid and all other government funded quality and cost control problems that no one will talk about. Seniors choosing public care would have all care and medications free. Everyone choosing public care regardless of age, financial circumstances, or pre existing conditions, could have it no restrictions, no insurance, no co pays, free period. Employers who select public care for their employees would not be required to pay for or have any further involvement with health care. A National Health Care System could also take over states and local government’s health care systems to assure operating standards and relieve local funding problems while providing total transferability for patients. Insurers, drug companies, and private health care providers have convinced the President that they can not compete with low cost government systems. Using these “unfair government advantages” as President Obama calls them, would save hundreds of billions of dollars annually while giving high quality low cost care. The second half of the health care reform solution is to have a pure private option of insurance and hospitals that would not be subjected to any government mandates. Private health care's roll in public/private reform should be to attract every client they can who would find their services so compelling that patients would pay good money to voluntarily purchase their services. Going back and forth between free public, and user purchased private care, would allow unlimited choices, ultimate freedom, and always free public care would be available. Today’s biggest profits are generated by operators dragging taxpayer dollars from government programs, or diminishing our savings, retirement, and investment money, through programs that financial firms manipulate to reward themselves. The horrific mistakes of repealing Glass-Steagel and enacting Grahm Leach Bliley in 1999 should be reversed at once and we should instantly break up and reorganize the banks and financial institutions that have a strangle hold on our economy and political institutions. Our legislators and regulators only responses are to talk about meaningless reform as they shovel more and more taxpayer money to these destructive enterprises. In a perfect world, a method for fact finding and cleanup would have been the first act, before the first bailout. The time for cleanup is now. Using a carrot and stick, by offering amnesty for cooperation or pursuing prosecutions for lawbreakers who try to hide, would save tons of money and years of time investigating, which did what, and how they did it, while creating our melt down. Bad policies, bad behavior and innocent mistakes need to be identified and corrected. For everyone who confesses everything, embarrassment could be the limit of punishment. Allowing cooperative insiders in business and government, who provide information so we could do a quick cleanup, to keep their jobs or ill-gotten gains would be a small price to pay if we could quickly get our country back. If building business becomes enjoyable and profitable job creation and our economy will take care of itself. Fairn Recommend Recommended by 135 Readers 3. Bob Sallamack New Jersey November 21st, 2009 7:11 am “We’ve been living with the illusion that manufacturing — making things — is so 20th century,” said Mr. Shaiken, “and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families.” Germany with the highest labor costs and highest taxes for public services is now the largest exporter of manufactured products in the world. The German government did not listen to the business plan of exporting factories because of high labor costs. Since 2002 the business plan of American companies has been to export every American job that entails sitting in an office and using a computer and telephone. This was the reason for the jobless recovery from the 2001 recession. It took almost 30 years to strip the manufacturing jobs from America but it has only taken 7 years to export over 2 million American jobs and leave us with an economy where only foreign jobs will follow any growth. The government will either stop this stripping of American jobs by American companies, or prepare for a nation with tens of millions of American unemployed and no jobs. The Detroit of today, may very well to turn out to be something to be looked back in nostalgia in a few year. Recommend Recommended by 550 Readers 4. walkman56 massachusetts November 21st, 2009 7:11 am Seeing the plight of Detroit is sickening. However,in my neck of the woods,(SE Mass)we face the similar plight,though on a smaller scale. We have long lost our textile industry with most mills looking like screen doors,being sparsely replaced with qusetionable businesses. It has taken on the better than nothing syndrome. As we desperately try to hang on to our fishing fleet,the government of know-nothings comes out with flawed study after flawed study about the availability of fish. It has caused numerous boats to fold with its' "quotas" on species and fishing days. Though my area will never revel the heyday of Detroit,unfortunately there are thousands of "Detroits" in the United States these days,some on a smaller scale. As Bob correctly points out,I know of no urgency anywhere by any out-of-touch politician on a state,local,or federal level delivering the bricks and moratr we so badly need. Sorry,I forgot,they do deliver during election season,only I wouldn't want to step in it. Recommend Recommended by 87 Readers _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
