EVERY so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico.
That is the opening paragraph of
this POWERFUL op ed in today's
New York Times by Paul Theroux, perhaps best known as a travel writer. I urge you to read the entire piece, whose title I have borrowed for this post.
As a writer Theroux has always had a sharp eye for the places he visits, and he is able to use his acuteness of vision and broad understanding of the world to paint a picture that provides a depth to our understanding of the economic conditions of a nation where some are becoming incredibly rich while most at best stagnate and whole communities are effectively abandoned.
He writes of the expansion of the economy in China, which has benefited many there (although perhaps too often at the destruction of elements of Chinese culture), then writes
The Chinese success, helped by American investment, is perhaps not astonishing after all; it has coincided with a large number of Americans’ being put out of work and plunged into poverty.
The locus of his focus is the American South, which for what it is worth is the heart of Republican political support, support which enables them to continue tax and other economic policies which exacerbate the impact, depth and effects of the poverty they have helped create.
Please keep reading.
Theroux writes about spending three years traveling the American South, and of the many things one sees there. There is a paragraph that gives a real sense of the South, which he follows with this:
But if there was one experience of the Deep South that stayed with me it was the sight of shutdown factories and towns with their hearts torn out of them, and few jobs. There are outsourcing stories all over America, but the effects are stark in the Deep South.
He then offers tale after tale, beginning with Hollandale MS, whose 3500 residents have to try to cope with a tax base now down to less than 300,000, or towns in AR where factories that used to manufacturer for Fruit of the Loom and Schwinn have packed up and moved oversees.
He follows with a paragraph that begins
I found towns in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas that looked like towns in Zimbabwe, just as overlooked and beleaguered.
Placing what is happening in the historical context of American business always looking for cheaper sources of labor - which is why they moved from the unionized Northeast to the South with its "right to work" laws in the first place - Theroux closes that paragraph with these words:
What had begun as domestic relocations went global, with such success that many C.E.O.s became self-conscious about their profits and their stupendous salaries.
Globalization - here I add something that Theroux does not address, which is the distortion of American education in the name of global economic competition, using distorted statistics, and resulting in a populace that will be unprepared for full participation in our political system, but will likely be a more compliant (meaning non-unionized and desperate enough to drive wages down further) workforce. Oh, and some of those CEOs who are benefiting from the current system get further involved in their attempts to "help" educatio -
pace Bill Gates.
Theroux notes the words of Apple CEO Tim Cook (who comes up several times in this piece) to give his fortune to charity, while at the same time observing that he did not praise Cook for that statement because when Cook said it
at that time I was traveling up and down Tim Cook’s home state of Alabama, and all I saw were desolate towns and hollowed-out economies, where jobs had been lost to outsourcing, and education had been defunded by shortsighted politicians.
I will offer one more quotation, pushing fair use. This is BEFORE what I just offered, but is as relevant as anything in the piece:
To me, globalization is the search for a new plantation, and cheaper labor; globalization means that, by outsourcing, it is possible to impoverish an American community to the point where it is indistinguishable from a hard-up town in the dusty heartland of a third world country.
I write these words from the mountains of Southwest Virginia, where I am again volunteering in a free medical and dental fair, this time in Grundy, in Buchanan County, the poorest in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As we move further away from coal as a source of energy, some of the money still left in these beautiful hills will further dry up.
People here could do very well providing services and manufacturing for wages that would be comparable in total cost to the outsourcing that has been done. But there are not enough jobs.
This is not the Deep South about which Theroux writes, but it is still Southern. I see Confederate flags in front of some homes and stickers of that symbol on bumpers.
If our economic policies do not address the needs of ALL Americans, we will cease to be a democracy.
We have an ever increasing percentage of Americans in poverty. In public schools the number now approaches one in four.
Theroux is right - the "generosity" of many of our wealthy is hypocrisy, because it is the actions they have done to earn that wealth that have created so much poverty and suffering in the first place.
I am angered.
It will eventually drive my political decisions.
For now, it means I spend a weekend in the poorest county in Virginia doing what I can to help, not from ill-gained wealth that impoverished those here, but from the fact that I retain some sense of common humanity.
Peace?