In
Dissent, Max Fraser took a look recently at
Muncie, an eastern-Indiana city made famous ever since it was named "Middletown" by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd in 1929. Blue-collar workers there once made a middle-class life for themselves with good-paying, mostly union jobs working for the auto industry, its suppliers and other such jobs. Not any longer:
WHICH ARE the Middletowns of our new era of precarious living? Is it Muncie, whose denuded industrial landscape tells a familiar story of Rust Belt decline? Or is it the new industrial landscapes of Smyrna and Spring Hill, Tennessee, where jobs that look a lot like those the residents of Muncie once had have become posts for a downwardly mobile working class? Or is it Sun Belt boom-cities like Nashville, where the promise of postindustrial transcendence has created its own reserve army of low-wage service employment, condemning many to lives of permanent poverty and vulnerability? Or is it some byzantine conurbation of them all, a commons of the American Nightmare—a Middletown of the 99 percent?
That's just it, today's "Middletowns" can be found all over. And their inhabitants are definitely on the precipice in a time of "precarious living."
The AFL-CIO, which was an unhyphenated duo when the Lynds wrote their assessment eight decades ago, has some ideas, not all of them new and some of them needing tweaks, but all of them steering us on the right course for fixing an economy that has gone so sour for Muncie and our other Middletowns:
The deindustrialization of America and the substitution of speculation for productive investment were not accidents, they were not inevitable, and they were not the outcome of natural forces. They were the predictable results of mistaken policy choices made by politicians of both parties for more than a generation. These policy choices had victims with first and last names: millions of displaced workers, shuttered factories and hollowed-out communities across the country hobbled by shrinking tax bases that no longer could support vital public services. [...]
What we need now is an economic program as serious and far-reaching as the problem President Obama has correctly diagnosed.
So what's on the AFL-CIO's list?
• Become competitive with Germany and China by investing trillions of public dollars to provide affordable education and apprenticeship programs for young people, investments in infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, transportation, skills training and new technologies.
• Pass a financial speculation tax, let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, tax capital gains at the same rate as wage income. Set a minimum effective tax rate of 30 percent for those earning more than $1 million.
• Deal with wage stagnation and economic inequality. Reform labor laws to allow all workers to form unions and bargain collectively. Make full employment the highest priority of U.S. economic policy. Increase and index the minimum wage. Shrink the trade deficit. Eliminate incentives for off-shoring jobs.
• Bring the U.S. trade deficit under control by "ending the overvaluation of the U.S. dollar and combating currency manipulation by our trading partners." Enhance Buy America safeguards. Aggressively enforce trade laws and end tax and trade agreement incentives for off-shoring jobs. All this can help boost domestic manufacturing.
• "Shrink our bloated financial sector and make it serve the real economy once again." Reregulate Wall Street. Eliminate tax advantages for leveraged buyouts.
• Support a global New Deal that sets minimum standards, "prevents a race to the bottom, creates vibrant consumer markets in the global South and in the process creates new markets for advanced U.S. manufacturing."
• Reduce mortgage principal to stop foreclosures. Until housing recovers, the rest of the economy won't.
That's in no way everything needed to "fix" the economy. Among other things that should be on that list is a U.S. industrial plan, a federal infrastructure bank and chartered cooperatives operating with the same force in law as shareholder corporations.
But implementing the AFL-CIO's proposals would be a very good start because they deal with both acute and chronic economic problems. While the economy is very slowly digging out of the deep hole the Great Recession dumped it into, there are serious problems—stagnant wages among them—that predate the downturn. Just getting back to where we were in 2007 or 1999 is not good enough.
That's in part because right-wingers have chosen not to, in the words of Rahm Emanuel, "waste a crisis." They've worked harder than before to break unions and break the spirit of public-sector workers with layoffs, furloughs, pay freezes and benefit cuts, all part of a long-term plan to worsen inequality and crush any resistance to those efforts. While Americans' confidence in the economy is improving, there's a shadow overhanging Muncie and other Middletowns: an insecurity about tomorrow that wasn't there before:
“Your gaze on life changes,” Tom says. “Instead of spending a lot of time and effort seeing the big picture for your kids and family … you’re focusing on the immediate all the time. And I’m not just talking about us as teachers: it’s a cloud that hovers all over the Midwest—well, probably over the whole country now. It’s just a cloud that hovers.”
It will take a lot more than tinkering around the edges to clear that cloud. The fixes proposed by the AFL-CIO would get us well beyond that.