This article just popped up on my figure. These whites and others think they're so slick. They see that Black Americans who descended from enslaved American people have an indisputably legitimate claim to reparations for barbaric chattel slavery and how we our claim is gaining traction. And now these whites and non-Black groups are trying to make a case for themselves.
Look at this laughable BS. Expect to see more of crap. We have to call it out as soon as we see it.
Abandoned buildings in what used to be downtown Rankin, Illinois.
PHOTO BY HUM IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Editor’s Note: This Q&A first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled “Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes “Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside “has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions — many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline — are all around us.
We discuss the destabilizing effects of such uneven development, the parallels between rural and urban landscapes of decline, and the political choices that sacrificed rural prosperity to urban agglomeration, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: What are “sacrifice zones” and what are the institutions they lack?
Marc Edelman: The term isn’t used only one way. I think of it as referring to sites where capital came in, extracted wealth, and then left people worse off than they were before. This describes lots of places in the rural and small-town United States and in poor neighborhoods of big cities.
The more dramatic examples include communities where uranium tailings or other toxic waste surround abandoned mines, where fracking for gas contaminated drinking water, the “cancer alley” around the refineries and chemical plants of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, or the CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations — where ponds of hog or cattle manure cause horrendous rural air pollution and health problems. Years ago, I went to a forum in a church in New York to hear people from Appalachia affected by mountaintop removal. One middle-aged woman described living in a paradisiacal country environment of streams and meadows and then one day a coal company blasted the top off the mountain near her family’s home. “We got dusted out,” she said. Their water was polluted, their land ruined. There wasn’t much they could do about it apart from linking up and campaigning with other communities that suffered similar kinds of destruction.
"Today’s noxious political culture is in part the result of sacrificing rural people and communities on the altar of capital."
Less dramatic sacrifice zones are even more common. We might think of cities and towns where redlining and predatory lending destroyed or prevented people from accumulating housing equity or starting small businesses. Or those thousands of places where people, especially men, used to have factory jobs that paid adequate wages and provided defined-benefit pensions. When factories closed or moved elsewhere those men and their sons often became marginally employed small entrepreneurs, guys with a pickup and some tools. I’ve been living the past few years in a rural county in Pennsylvania. There are people in the area for whom hunting and having a basement freezer full of venison is how they get through the year.
This kind of shift intensified long-standing American ideas about self-reliance and hard work. It fueled resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites, who don’t work with their hands, don’t have “real” skills, and somehow seem to make money, nonetheless. It also vitiated any working-class consciousness that might have been there when people worked in factories and belonged to unions.
When communities go into decline, their tax bases suffer. Since public schools and so many services depend on local tax revenues, it becomes difficult to provide education, healthcare, elder care, recreation, and so on. The downward spiral affects people economically, emotionally, and politically. All the social and medical pathologies that people associate with inner cities — drugs, gun violence, domestic violence, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression, and suicide — are rampant in rural communities. Well-off urbanites rarely have any idea of how difficult things are in some rural areas and small towns.
DY: You write that current rural decline is rooted in the economic restructuring of the late 20th century, in which growth in the American economy shifted from blue- to white-collar sectors, and the influence of the finance industry expanded. By what mechanisms did these macro-level trends come to undermine the community institutions mentioned above?
ME: The so-called “free-market revolution” and the more cutthroat version of capitalism that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s have a lot to do with it. Trade and investment treaties, deregulation, privatization of public-sector services, and government retrenchment or downsizing are all key aspects. When the public sector is eviscerated, people stop believing that government can help them, because they see that it can’t or won’t. They then become easy targets for anti-government, anti-regulation, pro-business demagogues. Regulation is just law enforcement for corporations, but there’s this whole discourse that paints it as a drag on entrepreneurial energy and innovation. What’s really going on is that the government can’t manage capitalism anymore. It has been captured by forces that don’t want it to manage capitalism.
Look at this laughable BS. Expect to see more of crap. We have to call it out as soon as we see it.
The 40-Year Robbing of Rural America
Since the 1980s, says Professor Marc Edelman, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to seize assets from small towns and rural areas.
OLIVIA WEEKS OCTOBER 3, 2022
PHOTO BY HUM IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Editor’s Note: This Q&A first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled “Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes “Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside “has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions — many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline — are all around us.
We discuss the destabilizing effects of such uneven development, the parallels between rural and urban landscapes of decline, and the political choices that sacrificed rural prosperity to urban agglomeration, below.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: What are “sacrifice zones” and what are the institutions they lack?
Marc Edelman: The term isn’t used only one way. I think of it as referring to sites where capital came in, extracted wealth, and then left people worse off than they were before. This describes lots of places in the rural and small-town United States and in poor neighborhoods of big cities.
The more dramatic examples include communities where uranium tailings or other toxic waste surround abandoned mines, where fracking for gas contaminated drinking water, the “cancer alley” around the refineries and chemical plants of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, or the CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations — where ponds of hog or cattle manure cause horrendous rural air pollution and health problems. Years ago, I went to a forum in a church in New York to hear people from Appalachia affected by mountaintop removal. One middle-aged woman described living in a paradisiacal country environment of streams and meadows and then one day a coal company blasted the top off the mountain near her family’s home. “We got dusted out,” she said. Their water was polluted, their land ruined. There wasn’t much they could do about it apart from linking up and campaigning with other communities that suffered similar kinds of destruction.
"Today’s noxious political culture is in part the result of sacrificing rural people and communities on the altar of capital."
Less dramatic sacrifice zones are even more common. We might think of cities and towns where redlining and predatory lending destroyed or prevented people from accumulating housing equity or starting small businesses. Or those thousands of places where people, especially men, used to have factory jobs that paid adequate wages and provided defined-benefit pensions. When factories closed or moved elsewhere those men and their sons often became marginally employed small entrepreneurs, guys with a pickup and some tools. I’ve been living the past few years in a rural county in Pennsylvania. There are people in the area for whom hunting and having a basement freezer full of venison is how they get through the year.
This kind of shift intensified long-standing American ideas about self-reliance and hard work. It fueled resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites, who don’t work with their hands, don’t have “real” skills, and somehow seem to make money, nonetheless. It also vitiated any working-class consciousness that might have been there when people worked in factories and belonged to unions.
When communities go into decline, their tax bases suffer. Since public schools and so many services depend on local tax revenues, it becomes difficult to provide education, healthcare, elder care, recreation, and so on. The downward spiral affects people economically, emotionally, and politically. All the social and medical pathologies that people associate with inner cities — drugs, gun violence, domestic violence, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression, and suicide — are rampant in rural communities. Well-off urbanites rarely have any idea of how difficult things are in some rural areas and small towns.
DY: You write that current rural decline is rooted in the economic restructuring of the late 20th century, in which growth in the American economy shifted from blue- to white-collar sectors, and the influence of the finance industry expanded. By what mechanisms did these macro-level trends come to undermine the community institutions mentioned above?
ME: The so-called “free-market revolution” and the more cutthroat version of capitalism that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s have a lot to do with it. Trade and investment treaties, deregulation, privatization of public-sector services, and government retrenchment or downsizing are all key aspects. When the public sector is eviscerated, people stop believing that government can help them, because they see that it can’t or won’t. They then become easy targets for anti-government, anti-regulation, pro-business demagogues. Regulation is just law enforcement for corporations, but there’s this whole discourse that paints it as a drag on entrepreneurial energy and innovation. What’s really going on is that the government can’t manage capitalism anymore. It has been captured by forces that don’t want it to manage capitalism.
