We've been busying ourselves out of the house today as the duct cleaning people have been making a cloud of dust and a dreadful racket. We noticed a truck with an immense high sided trailer a block down the street. Household goods were coming out and we assumed it was a move …
But then we saw stuff being thrown haphazardly to the top of the increasingly high pile in the trailer. No move, this, it was a foreclosure clean up crew and the residents had disappeared, leaving their belongings behind.
I resisted the urge to look at what was being tossed, but when the big gas grill went to the very top of the pile we were overcome with desire for back yard cooking ...
Beth walked down and asked the clean up crew, who said that the grill was in good shape, but that they wouldn't get it down for us. The duct guy, quite sick of the epic filth in our HVAC system, volunteered to help, so down the street we went.
They'd managed to break the handle to the lid, but it otherwise appears to be a decent enough propane grill. I'll fix the handle and rationalize buying a drill to do so. There is a heat shield for the propane burner that needs replacing, but I can make one with a tin snips, the drill, and a few bolts. We'll end up spending the price of a small new unit to repair a large, sturdy one, and I'll end up with tools I can use for other things.
I wonder what happened to the humans who resided in that house. I see a twin bed and the hand painted basketball court. Losing a home is hard on adults, but children should not experience such chaos in their lives.
The root cause behind this? Job loss. We're a few hundred miles from Detroit and that's easily within the blast radius of the 50% decrease in auto sales. This town is about 13,000 and we've lost 2,000 jobs. A third of those were auto manufacturing related, a third were fixtures manufacturing for the commercial and residential markets, and a third were lower wage jobs at the local pork plant.
So we raided the remains of someone else's household, but we were positioned to do so by a generation long raid on the U.S. Middle class. This began with Reagan's breaking the Air Traffic Controllers Union and it culminated with the Bush era housing bubble.
The housing bubble was a stroke of brilliance; average people who would have worked and saved were sucked into the speculative behavior that had previously been the province of the wealthy. Well, at least for a year or two, but an underlying assessment shows that this vacuumed wealth out of the hands of the middle class with much the same dynamics as one sees in the regimes of countries with economies fueled by extractive industries. Nigerian with its oil and Congo with its minerals are two classic examples of this.
We're going to have another sort of House raiding in a few months if the right wing prattle that passes for news is any indication; the Republicans will take back the lower chamber of Congress and stymie Barack Obama's socialist communist fascist Islamist agenda … or something incoherent like that. I think it's utter bunk myself, but in the meantime I'm arising each day and proceeding under the assumption that we're in the fight of our lives.
One of the exciting things that has come together in the way of defending our House majority is EnergizeUS … and it's going to do that by defending the common man's means of staying in his house - job creation. This coalition of candidates and incumbents from federal senate down to state house see things the same; local renewable energy production jobs can't be offshored and they're the foundation upon which we can begin rebuilding our shattered middle class. David Cozad first voiced this concept and Beth Becker worked like a galley slave, rowing the whole boat herself until candidates and incumbents, most notably Raul Grijalva, saw the value of the organizing being done and put their collective weight behind it.
This is simple. It will not be easy. We know what's going to happen with energy prices, with climate, with our financial system. We need to demand good policy. This is the problem I've taken up in recent months, starting with a little position paper from Darcy Burner, and building out a partisan Progressive news operation. First it'll collect and filter information for the Congressional staff, then a minute after that's running it'll start being an output channel to the blogosphere, the twitterverse, and Facebook. @RL_Miller drives environment and @Unenergy has taken up the energy topic. Economy has gone begging thus far, but I think @dmiller23 and @1whoknu might team up to make sense of that. These, coupled with Labor are the key areas that need attention to repair our economy.
So, you can help. Comment here, join the buzz on Twitter, and if you're a Facebook wrangler we'd love to hear from you.
You can really help by contributing via ActBlue to one or more of the candidates who are involved in EnergizeUS. A $10 donation will pay for one day of a Facebook campaign, which is one of the best uses of money in social media. $25 can buy a radio ad in a rural district. $50 would cover the cost of a candidate's membership in the coalition and right now those funds would benefit Kossack Sandi Behrns, the source of the EnergizeUS web presence.