This article is from The New York Times Magazine. This are some excellent photographs in the article which you can see online at nytimes.com.
The bold face has been added to ensure you don't miss the facts here.
Empire of the In-Between
By ADAM DAVIDSON
As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the
trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and
digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the
windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like
moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s
Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia,
block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the
boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” —
all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its
booming capital city.
The weirdness of this juxtaposition is hardly acknowledged anymore,
because we’ve all had a few decades to get used to it. But for most of
the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this
journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines
of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in
Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants,
Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material
was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent
wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after
generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along
the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall
Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into
industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as
America’s driving force.
This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central
drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation’s economy.Now, on its
route between them, the train passes directly through or near 8 of the
10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is
concentrated near the endpointsof the journey: Manhattan’s satellites in
northern New Jersey and the towns where lobbyists and government
contractors live in suburban Virginia and Maryland. This is a geographic
representation of a telling contradiction. For the past 30-plus years,
through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much
lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over.
Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas
surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where
government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses
discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the
private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative. A few remarkable books
by professors at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business argue that a primary
source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 to 20 years could be
what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation
rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the
economy.
But how do we make sense of what has become of the in-between? That was
the challenge we posed to the South African photojournalist Pieter Hugo.
This fall, Hugo spent two weeks documenting life along the corridor,
focusing his gaze on what can be found roughly within sight of the train
tracks. That was our animating idea and organizing principle: to stop
and look carefully at what can be glimpsed only fleetingly from a
passing train.
Though industrial decline can have a perversely romantic appeal, we
weren’t especially interested in rehashing the sad state of old
factories. Instead, Hugo sought out the everyday life that dwells in
these fissures of the American economy: the retired factory worker still
making his home in a neighborhood that has decayed around him, the kids
playing on blown-out streets, the store that sells used tools.
This is an economy changing too fast for the residents to keep up. For
many who live along the corridor, the central theme is the decline
that’s all too visible. The old brick factory buildings with huge
windows that gave workers light and air in a pre-air-conditioned world
are boarded up, crumbling or, in a few of the luckier spots, being
converted into condos. There’s also another, somewhat more hopeful story
on display, though you have to look a little harder to see it. These
are the decidedly unromantic houses of modern production: short, vast
complexes, built without any nod to aesthetics. There are few windows in
these buildings, because precision machinery operates best without the
fluctuations in heat and humidity caused by exposure to the sun. They
are one story high, because it’s too costly to build a second or third
floor capable of withstanding the weight and pounding of massive
machinery. There are some workers inside — there to make sure the
machines keep running — but not many. These jobs, which go to people
with advanced, post-high-school training, typically offer a good-enough
wage to afford a house in the suburbs, far from the industrial zones
that hug the rail line. The people who do make their lives right next to
these factories — in Elizabeth, N.J., or Chester, Pa., say — generally
can’t afford the technical schooling that would qualify them for jobs
inside.
The atrophying of the country’s ability to “make real things” has been
much lamented, but the truth is that U.S. manufacturing has never been
stronger. While there are no universally accepted numbers, the United
Nations Statistics Division calculates that the dollar value of goods
made in America is at an all-time high of $1.9 trillion, just about even
with China. The catch is that the number of American workers needed to
create all that value has dropped steadily. In the mid-1940s, more than
half of the New Jersey work force was in factories; today around 7
percent do. There are the same number of manufacturing jobs nationwide as
there were in 1941, when the country was just more than one-third its
current population. For much of the 20th century — and especially in the
boom decades of the ’50s and ’60s, when U.S. factories had little
global competition — manufacturing provided something that simply
doesn’t exist anymore: a job for anyone willing to put in a hard day’s
work. The Boeing plant making Chinook helicopters outside Philly, the
Johnson & Johnson campus in New Brunswick, N.J., the Merck plants in
Rahway, N.J., and Fort Washington, Pa., and the acres of chemical and
natural gas refineries throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware —
they all tell the same story: a handful of highly trained workers
guiding machines that return huge value to shareholders while all the
time finding ways to produce more goods with fewer workers.
That doesn’t stop both presidential candidates from constantly invoking
the magnificent working-class economy we once had and can have again, if
only we give them our vote. Manufacturing nostalgia is as powerful as
ever. But one more look out the Amtrak window reveals something else:
the shiny new buildings that are actually filled with workers
have nothing to do with manufacturing. They’re in the broad service
sector, in the anonymous office centers that bloomed out of nowhere —
near Metropark Station in New Jersey and in Claymont, Del., and
Aberdeen, Md. — to hold law firms and engineering companies and I.T.
firms.
For people with advanced training, the service sector means an
above-average wage, a below-average risk of unemployment and days
sitting at a desk. For those with only a high-school degree or no degree
at all, far fewer jobs are available, and the ones that are pay poorly
and disappear quickly. Calling for a return to the days when everybody
who was willing to put in a hard day’s work could make a good living at
the factory is a fantasy, maybe a lie and certainly an implicit
acknowledgment that nobody has any idea what to do with the
underemployed in the slums of Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and
Southeast D.C. It’s safer to talk about Pakistan.
The contradictions along the line converge near the center, in the city
that is arguably the most representative of our new and confusing
economy. Wilmington, Del., has become wildly successful as the place
where Wall Street and D.C. meet. In 1981, Gov. Pierre S. du Pont, who
got to office, in part, because of his family’sold-economy wealth,
pushed through the Financial Center Development Act, which led to the
state’s new economic engine: regulatory arbitrage. For large financial
firms, the state offers uniquely compliant rules (European politicians
and economists talk, with horror, of the Delaware effect, which will
inevitably lead toward ever-looser regulation). The state’s Web site
claims that 63 percent of Fortune 500 companies and half of all publicly
traded companies are legally incorporated in Delaware — “because we
provide a complete package of incorporation services including modern
and flexible corporate laws . . . [and] a business-friendly state
government” — and yet only two have their headquarters there: DuPont
and, notably, Sallie Mae, technically a private firm but one that owes
its existence and profit to government guarantees.
The rest of the
buildings house tens of thousands of highly paid lawyers, accountants
and other specialists engaged in the arcane work of taking advantage of
flexible, business-friendly corporate laws.
After all those workers return to the wealthy suburbs at the end of the
day, what’s left behind is one of the most dangerous cities in America,
its unemployment stuck stubbornly two points above the national average.
For those who live there, the future is grim. As DuPont’s C.E.O., John
Challenger, who might as well have been speaking at any point in the
past 30 years, said the week before last, the recent announcement of
1,500 layoffs “may be a harbinger of things to come.”
Now ask yourself which sector of the economy have we made the deepest cuts in budgets and employment??
If you said "Education", you understand the truth, the problem, and you ARE part of the problem because you are letting the future of the USA disintegrate before your eyes!!
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