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Tag Archives: urban poverty

Im-Politic: The Elite Media Bash the White Working Class Again

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Uncategorized

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Appalachia, black working class, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Klein, Mainstream Media, offshoring, Primary Colors, TIME, Trade, urban poverty, white working class, William Julius Wilson

Recent Gallup findings show that the news media’s approval ratings with the American people lag those of every other national institution except for Congress and big business. That is, the public says it has more confidence in the nation’s schools and banks, among others, than in “newspapers” and “television news.” Moreover, Americans’ opinions of the press keep getting worse all the time.

After reading Joe Klein’s new Time magazine column on the mounting woes of America’s white working class, I can only wonder why the media’s numbers are even this good.

Klein shot to media superstar status by exploiting his chummy ties with the Clinton political team to write an adoringly leering anonymous novel about the 1992 presidential campaign. Primary Colors was packed with so much inside information that the national chattering class echo chamber was abuzz for years trying to decide whether it was written by a Clinton staffer. (President Clinton’s own musings on the matter didn’t exactly hurt.) Klein lied repeatedly to fellow journalists about his authorship, but on the verge of being outed, finally confessed in mid-1996 – several months after the best-seller was published.

Since journalism says it values honesty and independence from power, you’d think that Klein would have been disgraced and ostracized. Instead, not only did Primary Colors fly off the shelves and win a movie deal for the author. But his career thrived outside Hollywood, too as he “became a columnist at the New Yorker magazine, then edited by [celebrity-worshiping] Tina Brown, the wife of Harold Evans, the head of Random House, which published Primary Colors” before landing his current gig at Time.

So after literally decades of cruising in the chattering class’ most glamorous circles, you’d think that Klein might be a little hesitant about commenting on the state of working class whites in Flyover America – and that whatever he wrote might express at least a little sympathy. But you’d be wrong.

According to Klein, the recently spotlighted spread of “sexual profligacy, drug dependency, violence, indigence and a free-range sense of helplessness that leads to irresponsibility” in regions like (but not restricted to) Appalachia have little to do with economic trends like “the departure of manufacturing jobs.” Instead, as with the presence of these pathologies in the African-American community – which he claims is also mistakenly attributed to (and excused by) job and wage loss in the liberal canon – the real problem is “a bottom-up crisis of individual responsibility.” Even more conveniently from lofty perches like Klein’s, this malady is “largely beyond the reach of public policy.”

Apparently it’s beyond Klein’s ken nowadays that “habits of indolence–the inability to show up to work on time, the refusal to follow orders on the job, the preference to hang out at a home often subsidized by the federal government” might have something to do with the reality that after entire careers of meeting all these standards of responsibility, tens of millions of working class Americans of all races have been rewarded by entire industries being offshored with Washington’s active assistance, or destroyed by predatory foreign competition as American leaders looked the other way. P.S.: The vast majority of Mainstream Media journalists were loudly applauding the entire time.

It’s also clear that Klein is completely unfamiliar with the findings of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who has painstakingly shown how the loss of good industrial jobs in urban America has fueled much of the social breakdown experienced by black families and communities. I presented Wilson’s key conclusion in a May, 2015 post and it’s worth considering again today:

“The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

Wilson’s analysis – which of course is as relevant to the white working class as to the black – undoubtedly sounds obvious to anyone who has depended on employment day in and out at a factory or similar facility that generated family-wage jobs. For jet-set journalists like Klein, who at most drop in occasionally on this world – usually for a little local election-year color – and who not so coincidentally benefit handsomely from cheap imported goods, not to mention cheap legal and illegal immigrant labor, it’s much easier to blame the victim.

Im-Politic: Race-Mongering Enters the Trade Debate

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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African Americans, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Congressional Black Caucus, conservatives, Democrats, Employment, fast track, Gregory Meeks, Im-Politic, Labor Department, liberals, manufacturing jobs, Obama, politics, race relations, racism, Republicans, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, urban poverty

It seems that New York City Democratic House Member Greg Meeks doesn’t think relations between blacks and whites in America lately have been strained enough by the series of dubious police shootings and the reactions they’ve ignited over the last year. And that there’s not enough bad blood in American politics overall lately. And that the heated debate in Congress and the nation over trade policy hasn’t been muddied with enough phony arguments. So he decided to inject a little race-mongering into the policy fight over President Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement and a bill to grant the president fast track trade negotiating authority.

Meeks didn’t exactly come out and say that right-of-center opponents of the president’s trade agenda are racist. But his claims, made to members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and then to reporters, fail to qualify only if cynical Clintonian parsing is now the norm in American politics. According to Meeks, as reported by Politico, “[Mr. Obama] has endured things that no other president has,” and that “in his own discussions with colleagues he’s linked opposition to the president’s trade agenda to the hounding of Obama for his birth certificate and never-quite-ending questions about his religion. ‘Some folks don’t want to give him a vote because they don’t want to give him the authority every other president has had.’”

The New York Democrat therefore was too smart to smear anti-TPP and fast track Democrats and other liberals generally with the racism charge. After all, even most of the non-blacks among them have consistently supported the president’s other programs. But what about backing for the president’s trade agenda by Republicans and conservatives that neither Mr. Obama nor African-Americans (rightly or wrongly) have ever viewed as allies? And what of those on the Right who have essentially nudged and winked as more their radical fellows have cast the aspersions on the president’s background Meeks specifies? How does the Congressman’s racial paradigm explain their often pro-fast track and TPP positions?

Even worse, when it comes to substance, Meeks is ignoring (or doesn’t know about) the powerful evidence that the kinds of trade deals he’s long supported have devastated blacks’ economic prospects. How? By destroying jobs they’ve held in the relatively high-paying manufacturing sector. Not coincidentally, that’s the sector that has long dominated American trade flows. According to an analysis of government data by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in 1979, African-Americans made up 23.9 percent of the nation’s manufacturing workers, who numbered about 19.4 million. That comes out to more than 4.6 million jobs that paid what are now called family wages.

As of 2013 – the Labor Department’s last comprehensive look at the situation – blacks comprised 8.8 percent of the nation’s 10.3 million manufacturing jobs. That’s only a little over 906,000 manufacturing positions. The employment massacre revealed here updates findings from eminent scholars such as Harvard’s William Julius Wilson that the disappearance of good jobs in African-American communities since the 1970s explains much of the poverty and related social problems they’ve suffered.

Not that there hasn’t been a silver-lining, though, to Meeks’ race-baiting. In using such mud-slinging to rally support for fast track and the TPP, he’s implicitly confessing to his CBC colleagues that they shouldn’t pay much attention to the economic case made for Mr. Obama’s trade agenda. In the process, of course, he’s telling the rest of us that we shouldn’t, either.

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Guest Posts

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  • Golden Oldies
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  • In the News
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  • Our So-Called Foreign Policy
  • The Snide World of Sports
  • Those Stubborn Facts
  • Uncategorized

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Current Thoughts on Trade

Terence P. Stewart

Protecting U.S. Workers

Marc to Market

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Alastair Winter

Chief Economist at Daniel Stewart & Co - Trying to make sense of Global Markets, Macroeconomics & Politics

Smaulgld

Real Estate + Economics + Gold + Silver

Reclaim the American Dream

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Mickey Kaus

Kausfiles

David Stockman's Contra Corner

Washington Decoded

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Upon Closer inspection

Keep America At Work

Sober Look

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Credit Writedowns

Finance, Economics and Markets

GubbmintCheese

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Michael Pettis' CHINA FINANCIAL MARKETS

New Economic Populist

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

George Magnus

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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