UAW leader conflates rural(ish) and working class as declares class warfare

I was fascinated to hear over the weekend an audio clip by Shawn Fain, leader of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), that did something you hear more and more these days:  conflating the working class--here, specifically the striking UAW workers--with rural concepts like rednecks.  Here's what Fain said:  

They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana.  They look at you and see somebody they would never have over for dinner or let ride on their yacht or fly on their private jet.

* * * 

They think they know us, but us autoworkers know better. We may be foul mouthed, but we're strategic. We may get fired up, but we're disciplined. And we may get rowdy. But we're organized.

The NPR story continues: 

Fain was also eager to reassure UAW members that the union's unprecedented strike strategy is working. The union struck all three companies at once, but started with just a handful of plants.

While making these comments, Fain was wearing a t-shirt that said "Eat the Rich."

I very much appreciate what some would characterize as Fain's open class warfare.  I think it's necessary.  And I think it's honest.  And I believe he is accurate in stating that the corporate leadership of GM and the other automobile manufacturers would not, in fact, rub elbows with the UAW's rank and file.   

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

On realness in politics, and its links to geography

Paul Waldman writes in today's Washington Post under the headline, "I, too, am a hardscrabble American."  It's about Florida governor Ron DeSantis' effort to brand (or re-brand) himself as what is sometimes called a "real" American.  In any event, the "harsdcrabble" adjective caught my attention.  Here's an excerpt from Waldman's column:

Perhaps that’s why [DeSantis] has decided to search elsewhere for the salt-of-the-earth realness that Florida lacks. In his campaign book, he tells readers that despite a lifetime in Florida, he’s actually from Ohio, kind of:

I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.

Apparently, people in Florida do not work hard, fear God or love America — at least not the way they did in the redoubt of Rust Belt customs that was the DeSantis home.

Waldman's column takes up a silly dialogue that's been driving me crazy ever since Sarah Palin declared herself a real American who represented the Joe Six Packs (or was it Joe the Plumbers?) of Main Street, pitting herself and them against Barack Obama and Wall Street types.  I wrote about the recent iterations of who is a real American in my recent law review article on Rural Bashing (with Kaceylee Klein).  There I observe that Mary Peltola, recently elected Democratic congresswoman from Alaska, seems to get away with this sort of "real" people talk--that she's not been attacked from the Left as so many before her have--perhaps because she is a person of color.  

Another American Family Voices report tells Democrats how to win in 2024, with a focus on blue-collar workers in the Midwest

Katie Glueck reported for the New York Times a few weeks ago under the headline, "Democratic Report Explores Blue-Collar Struggles: ‘Our Brand Is Pretty Damaged.’"  Some excerpts from the story, about an American Family Voices study of how both Democrats and Republicans are seen in factory towns in the Midwest, follow: 

The data found that Democrats struggled with the perception that a Democratic economic plan “doesn’t exist or doesn’t help regular people’s own working families,” a claim that resonated with some base Democratic and independent voters.

Many voters studied in these “Factory Towns” are “deeply, profoundly cynical” about both political parties, the report found, with swing voters holding the impression that both Democrats and Republicans are “too extreme.”

The sharpest argument against Republicans, the polling found, was that “they are on the side of corporations and C.E.O.s and they work for the wealthy.”

Here is a quote from the report's executive summary: 

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years.

Back to the NYTimes coverage, Glueck queries whether laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and  investments in U.S. chip-making efforts.  The piece also helpfully addresses the issue of whether it's feasible to expect folks to know about such laws: 

“Most voters are not following national news or the details of the legislation, and many haven’t yet seen the impact on their lives,” the report said. “Working-class voters outside of the big metro areas are still leading pretty tough lives, so we have to balance the story of our success on policy with the recognition of those hard times.”

This reminds me of a favorite, revealing quote from one of the best stories ever written about the 2016 election cycle.  Alec MacGillis quotes Tracie St. Martin, an Ohio heavy equipment operator and blue-collar worker in his post-election story titled "Revenge of the Forgotten Class."  

[St. Martin] regretted that she did not have a deeper grasp of public affairs. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”

 Here's more from Glueck's story that touches on the importance of small businesses and rhetoric around them: 

The report also urged Democrats to combine traditional economic populist messaging and policies with strong emphasis on support for small businesses, as well as unions.

“Most working-class folks very much think of small-business owners as part of the working class,” the report said. It added, “Democrats and progressive issue advocates should always talk about how much they care about small businesses doing well, and should be specific about the ways they want to help the small-business community.”

A prior post on small business and regulation is here and this recent story about Congressperson Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) notes it is one of her priorities.  Prior posts about American Family Voices research are here and here. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

J.D. Vance pulls ahead in race for Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, prompting comparison to positions he took in Hillbilly Elegy

Thought it's been much in the news, I've refrained from posting about J.D. Vance's rise in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from which Rob Portman (R) is retiring, but with Vance garnering Trump's endorsement and pulling ahead in that race, I decided to feature a particularly interesting commentary about Vance and the race. 

Anyone following the race knows that, by the time Vance threw his hat in the ring last year, he had recanted his earlier criticism of Trump (something his opponents in the primary have used against him).  Since then, he's been lurching to the right on a wide array of issues, most notably immigration.  Earlier this month, he released a television ad that begins with, "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  And tonight on Twitter I saw a clip of him accusing Joe Biden of purposefully letting fentanyl into the country to kill Republican voters in places like Ohio.  In other words, Vance is trafficking in conspiracy theories.  So, things have gotten a little out of hand.  

That may help explain the New York Times decision to run this essay about Vance's candidacy--and his about face.  Christopher Caldwell's piece is titled "The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance."  More than any other piece I've read since Vance got in the race, Caldwell situates Vance's current rhetoric and positions against what he said in his best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy.  Here's a provocative excerpt: 

Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.

While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.

But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, 10 days before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”

Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately.

On the misled point, there is a funny video on Twitter right now showing a man walking up to Vance at one of his campaign events and asking for a refund on the book, $16.99 for the paperback, which he says he didn't care for.

Earlier in the New York Times piece, Caldwell offers another observation related to the book and how Vance has changed since its publication: 

Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly unstodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.

“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.

Then there is this: 

Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”

And that is a good segue to my own commentary on Hillbilly Elegy, published in Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, reviewed in the New York Times here.  My big criticism was that Vance threw working class whites under the proverbial bus.  Now, of course, he needs them to vote for him.  And I think that's one of Caldwell's primary points. 

Other recent commentary on the race, in which Josh Mandel is Vance's principal opponent, is here.  

Postscript:  This news item about J.D. Vance and the Ohio Senate primary appeared in the New York Times about 18 hours after this posted went up.  It's by Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Weisman.  "Once Soft-spoken, Ohio Conservatives Embrace the Bombast." The alternative headline is, "In Ohio, Republicans have gone from the Country Club to the MAGA Club." 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Poignant reflection on the working class in central Illinois

The last in a series of essays by Tom Morello (guitarist with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, among others). appeared in the New York Times a few days ago.  It's headlined "Class Struggle in My Family's Hometown."  This one is datelined Marseilles, Illinois, population 5,094, where Morello spent summers during his childhood.  The small city is on the Illinois River, and along with the good (e.g,  community events, Little League, bike riding) Morello highlights some negative aspects of its history (e.g., environmental degradation, high incidence of cancer).

Here's an excerpt about the recent "class warfare" there:  

Lately, Marseilles has seen some more hard times. The factories and the mines are long closed. Norman Rockwell streets once vied to see who could have the tidiest lawn. Recently, on our block, three abandoned houses had gone back to nature, roofs collapsed, trees growing through windows, raccoons taking up residence. There may still be a Little League, but when I spoke a few years ago with some teenagers with teardrop tattoos on their faces, they spoke of their limited prospects: Walmart, the Army, selling meth.

The town was once solidly union, voted Democrat and gave birth to America’s most militant leftist grandma, Mary Morello. Now Confederate flags dot some of the lawns. There’s a lot of good, hard-working people doing their best, but there’s a palpable feeling that they’ve been abandoned by Democratic and Republican administrations. It’s fertile ground for a demagogic grifter who attributes their problems to immigrants and Muslims, deflecting blame from a capitalist order that sees them as marks and cannon fodder. Where poverty meets disinformation, intolerance can bloom.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

"White Trash" in Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt, from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, is one of the best depictions I've read of "white trash," though it doesn't actually use that term.  Note the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places essentially indistinguishable from each other and associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

A role for the Black Lives Matter movement when police kill white people?

To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days.  To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.    

So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287.  The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice."  The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.'  Will a Rural Town Listen?"  And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context: 

People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.

Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle.  This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:  

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.  

The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows: 

Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):   

It’s like pulling teeth.

Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store.  The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun.  Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.  

This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post:  this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people. 

And so the story raises the question:  Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement?  Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement?  Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"?  What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them?  An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.  

We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people.  Here are some Tweets by  journalists that I captured just after his  comment:  

And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:

The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:  

Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.

Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.

“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.

“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”

Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.

Of course, what Trump said is technically true.  So were the clarifications by the media.  I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem.  Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data.  The media choose to highlight one or the other.  In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common:  both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct.  Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.  

I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other.  Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for?   Cross-racial coalition building, that is.  It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others:  Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse?  wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?  

It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference.  But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption?  Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?

On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.  

I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town.  That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.

The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts:  the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services.  Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says

the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources.  I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand.  One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources.  In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else:  hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.  

It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide.  Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:  

Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.

* * * 

Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.

The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election. 

And that takes me back to some Facebook comments by Sheriff Bond about the Sedalia protests.

Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?  Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?

The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left:  The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos."  Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:

But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Reminds me of similar concerns articulated by my mom about her community in nearby northwest Arkansas.  I wrote this about the "outside agitator" trope, and here's another piece about so-called "antifa busses," which are a hoax.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

The working class and coronavirus (Part III): Meatpacking

This is not actually a "rural" topic, nor is it one limited to the white working class, so I have avoided treating it as such and writing about it on these blogs.  But after weeks of following outbreaks of coronavirus in meatpacking plants, I've decided to collect many of those stories here, along with datelines, in no particular order.  Well, no particular order except that I have to start with this Washington Post coverage of comments by the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this week.  Justice Patience Roggensack, in the middle of an oral argument about the constitutionality of the governor's stay-at-home order, responded to data about the high rate of infection in Brown County (whose county seat is Green Bay):

These were due to the meatpacking, though. That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.

Many people on Twitter are calling this racist, though I've not seen any data on the racial make up of those who work at the JBS meatpacking plant in Brown County.   Others called Justice Roggensack's comments "elitist" and "classist," which they no doubt are.  My favorite comment on Twitter came from Prof. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas Law School who commented that the Chief Justice said "the quiet part out loud."  Ahem.

Here's a great overview of what is happening in this coronavirus era, with the meatpacking industry overall, from Adam Clark Estes for Vox/Recode, from May 8:

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.

Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.

Here's a Politico story about how Alex Azar, Secretary for Health and Human Services, blamed the high incidence of coronavirus in meatpacking plants on workers' "home and social" conditions.  An earlier Buzzfeed story reported similar blame-shifting by Smithfield re: the Sioux Falls outbreak.

A Smithfield pork processing facility, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, population 154,000, was one of the earliest meatpacking outbreaks reported.  Reports on the outbreak there are here, here and here.  Don't miss NYT's "The Daily" Podcast interviewing a woman, born in South Sudan, who worked at the plant and was diagnosed with coronavirus after she was quarantined following a co-worker's diagnosis.  But one poignant aspect:  when she was put on quarantine, she was told she would be paid for 40/hours a week during that period.  But she could not get by on just 40/hours week wages because she'd been working and earning an average of $500/week in overtime.

A Cargill pork and beef processing plant in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, population 25,340, is the subject of this Bloomberg story and this NYTimes story from a few days ago.

A Tyson plant in southwest Georgia was featured in this post from early April.

Meat and poultry processing plants in Nebraska (Grand Island), Colorado, and on the DelMarVa peninsula have also been closed temporarily.

Today, The Oregonian covered an outbreak of coronavirus at a seafood packing plant in Astoria, Oregon, population 9477.

There are no doubt many more outbreaks I've not picked up on or am not highlighting here, such as in Dodge City, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and "deep East" Texas.  As with nursing homes and jails/prisons, these packinghouse outbreaks show up as dense spikes on charts and tables tracking where the coronavirus hotspots are.  They look particularly "oversized," if you will, when they occur in areas with small populations.

Post-script:  Big New York Times feature May 10 out of Black Hawk County, Iowa, population 131,090, which includes Waterloo.  Here's the lede, which has the county sheriff playing a role I would not have expected, while Tyson Foods plays the villain part just as expected:

On April 10, Tony Thompson, the sheriff for Black Hawk County in Iowa, visited the giant Tyson Foods pork plant in Waterloo. What he saw, he said, “shook me to the core.”

Workers, many of them immigrants, were crowded elbow to elbow as they broke down hog carcasses zipping by on a conveyor belt. The few who had face coverings wore a motley assortment of bandannas, painters’ masks or even sleep masks stretched around their mouths. Some had masks hanging around their necks.

Sheriff Thompson and other local officials, including from the county health department, lobbied Tyson to close the plant, worried about a coronavirus outbreak. But Tyson was “less than cooperative,” said the sheriff, who supervises the county’s coronavirus response, and Iowa’s governor declined to shut the facility.

A week later, Tyson sent a text message to employees:

Waterloo Tyson is running.  Thank you team members! WE ARE PROUD OF YOU!

Please read for yourself the rest, reported by Ana Swanson, David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Postscript from ProPublica on June 12, by Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung.  The headline is "Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants."

Paul Krugman's "Senate America": does the white working class have an unfair political advantage?

Earlier this month, New York Times' Paul Krugman published what I would consider to be a somewhat controversial opinion titled Real America Versus Senate America. According to the Nobel Prize-winning economist, there should be a major distinction between largely metropolitan "real America" and primarily rural "Senate America."

I find it helpful to contrast the real America, the place we actually live, with what I think of as “Senate America,” the hypothetical nation implied by a simple average across states, which is what the Senate in effect represents.

As I said, real America [while it contains small towns] is mainly metropolitan; Senate America is still largely rural.

Real America is racially and culturally diverse; Senate America is still very white.

Real America includes large numbers of highly educated adults; Senate America, which underweights the dynamic metropolitan areas that attract highly educated workers, has a higher proportion of non-college people, and especially non-college whites.

Krugman points out that the Senate gives Wyoming—a state with 600,000 residents—the same representation as California—a state with 4 million residents—resulting in a drastic overweight of rural areas and underweight of metropolitan areas where most of us live. This underrepresentation of American reality is allegedly to blame for the Democrats' recent Senate losses—which disproportionately occurred in states Donald Trump won in 2016. According to Krugman, the Administration's nationalist message of hatred and fear towards darker people, anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism resonates with a minority of Americans. These Americans are, "of course white," and are likely to reside outside of large racially diverse metropolitan areas because:

Racial animosity and fear of immigration always seem to be strongest in places where there are few nonwhites and hardly any immigrants.

And according to Krugman's theory, it is precisely these places that have a disproportionate role in choosing senators.

Even though real (metropolitan) America contains large numbers of highly educated people and attracts dynamic industries such as Amazon with its existing "deep pool of talent," and (rural) Senate America attracts non-educated racist white nationalists, do not worry—Krugman clarifies that his assessment is not meant to offend white working-class voters!

None of this is meant to denigrate rural, non-college, white voters. We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny.

Yet, his brash approach appears to deepen the already existing divide between rural white voters and liberal Democrats (see here and here). So, does Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and distinguished professor, have a point? Well, his theory does explain why Trump lost the popular vote by an astounding 2.8 million votes but was nonetheless elected by the electoral college. It also explains why most media outlets, which cater to the majority of the population, speak unfavorably of (and are sometimes perplexed by) the white-working-class. But the reality is that this is the state of our democracy and short of changing the Constitution—not a small feat—will remain as such. I therefore question whether Krugman's tactics are proper, and so did other readers.

Chris Perkins from Bonne Terre, Missouri writes in a letter to the editor:

As a resident of “Senate America,” I shouldn’t be surprised by Mr. Krugman’s column. It’s simply more confirmation that when results don’t go the way the leftist elites want, they start talking about unconstitutional desires. The Senate was designed to prevent the very thing Mr. Krugman wants: large population centers (like New York, California and Illinois) being able to ignore the wishes of the rest of the nation. 

[...] 

My suggestion to liberal elites like Mr. Krugman would be this: Quit whining about how stupid the voters are and work harder to convince us in flyover country that your policy beliefs are the best way forward for our nation. I promise that I will work harder to convince you that your policy beliefs are wrong.

Similarly, Leonard Breslow from Chevy Chase, Maryland writes:

[U]ntil the Constitution is amended, [this] is the reality we have to live with. Rather than bemoaning the influence of rural America, Mr. Krugman might consider deploying his exemplary expertise as a Nobel Prize-winning economist to address the problems facing rural America. By treating rural Americans as fellow Americans, rather than as adversaries, Mr. Krugman might come to convince them of the wisdom of his political perspective.

Even Rob Merges, law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, comments how unlikely changing the Constitution is.

The very divisions necessitating amendments would surely show themselves, probably more fiercely, during the amendment process.

He suggests that instead, Democrats should become strong "states rights advocates" to win back the support of the white-working-class.

I like Professor Merges approach. Like he suggests, a change in policy

sure sounds like a better way to go than screaming at each other for the next 50 years.

See, a related post on More conflation of the rural-urban divide with the racial divide--and more divisive language about what constitutes the "real" America. 

Demographic trend of "natural decrease" among whites spreads quickly across Southwest, South, Northeast

The New York Times reported a few days ago on demographic changes in the United States.  The story, by Sabrina Tavernise, reports a natural decrease--more deaths than births--among whites in a majority of states.  Part of the story focuses on rural places:

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner. 

“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.

* * *

The aging of the white population began in rural counties long before it ever took hold in an entire state. Martin County, a bear-shaped patch of eastern North Carolina, first experienced it in the late 1970s. In recent years, deaths have exceed births among its black population, too. Hispanics make up less than 4 percent of the county’s population.

Other states subject to this trend include several won by Donald Trump in 2016: Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan ... as well as Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas.  Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas are exceptions among southern states.

Of interest elsewhere in the country is the fact that all of New England is experiencing more white deaths than births.  Indeed, among states in the northeast, only New York is an exception to this trend.  The Midwest--broadly defined--is the most persistently resistant to this trend.

The New York Times published this op-ed last month which analyzes the trend from a global perspective. The piece, by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun, also discusses the political correlations to this demographic trend, in countries from Italy to Japan.

In the past decade people in rural, remote places have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future. ... Against such a backdrop of general decline, populists’ promises to revive dead or dying local industries are understandably welcome. 

As youth have continued to migrate from rural areas to cities, their movement has widened not only the median age gap between rural places and cities, but also gaps in attitude, since the young, regardless of where they live, tend to associate more with urban outlooks.

* * *

Election data from the past two years plainly describe the consequences of these demographic dynamics: Most advanced industrialized countries are dominated by two competing political movements that either awkwardly inhabit the bodies of existing political parties or create new ones more to their liking. One movement extols the values that are a practical necessity in dense, interconnected cities: interdependence, internationalism and the embrace of “diversity” (defined along multiple dimensions). 

Another movement extols the equally necessary virtues of people in rural areas: self-reliance, autonomy and the embrace of immediate community and place.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

A shortage of workers across America, and immigration as part of the solution

I kicked off the "Working Class Whites and the Law" blog back in January with this post about the shortage of workers willing to do crappy work.  This shortage is obviously integrally linked to immigration and should inform our nation's immigration policy.  If native-born workers (of whatever color) are not available to do the work that needs to be done to keep our economy(ies) booming, then immigrant labor is a necessity if economies are to grow, or even tread water.  And growth seems to be the buzzword of the era, whether or not the growth is sustainable and whether or not such growth is good for the planet.

Never mind those concerns.   Two recent stories from two very different places--California and Missouri--illustrate the need for laborers.   

First, the California story:  well, could be any number of stories, but I'll settle on Darrell Steinberg's interview with NPR on Thursday morning, following Attorney General Jeff Sessions' speech to a group of law enforcement officers in Sacramento on Wednesday. Steinberg defended Sacramento's stance as a "sanctuary city" by noting that the municipality is standing up for immigrants who, among other things, contribute to the economy:

It's the people living in our communities that have lived here, by the way, for decades. These are people going to school, people going to college, people who are contributing to our tax base. And we have an obligation to stand up for those people. And that's exactly what we're going to do.

Here's another California story that links immigration with the economy, this one out of the town of Jacumba Hot Springs, population  561. 

The Missouri story is datelined Branson, Missouri, population 10,520, the self-proclaimed "live entertainment capital of the world." The headline for the Washington Post story is "Why a white town paid for a class called "Hispanics 101'," and it is fundamentally about a labor shortage in southwest Missouri, a region I've frequently written about, e.g., here, here, here, here and here.  (It's a place of great interest to me because I grew up a little more than an hour away, in northwest Arkansas).   This Branson story, though by a different WaPo journalist, is somewhat similar in theme to this January report on a turkey processing plant in South Dakota recruiting Puerto Ricans to meet their labor needs.  The angle on Danielle Paquette's story out of Branson is that employers there are having to develop cultural sensitivity in order to recruit and retain Latinx workers, with a recent focus on those from Puerto Rico.  Here's an excerpt that explains that the economy depends on the success of the undertaking: 

As tourism season kicks off this month, the remote getaway known for dinner theaters, country music concerts and a museum of dinosaur replicas has 2,050 vacancies — and a lack of locals applying. 

So, like other areas with tight labor markets, Branson finds itself getting creative to fill jobs — in this case by recruiting people from a part of the United States with much higher unemployment.

But the plan to bring 1,000 workers from the island to overwhelmingly white, conservative Branson over the next three years has sparked unease, with critics saying that the newcomers will steal work from residents or drag down wages or bump up crime.

Paquette goes on to describe how desperate managers from Branson-area hotels, hospitals, hardware stores and banks have paid $50 each for the "Hispanic 101" workshop led by Miguel Joey Aviles.  Hilariously, Aviles is teaching his students--among other things--how to dance the merengue. 

Aviles advises bosses to check in often, ask about their mothers and request that grocery stores in the area sell plantains and Goya coconut water. 

“It’s not enough to invite them to the party,” Aviles said, twisting his body to the beat. “Bring them to the dance floor.”

Paquette goes on to focus on Branson's whiteness, with these details: 

[O]fficials acknowledge that some in the area, which is 92.4 percent white, are clinging to the past. Confederate flags adorn shop windows. A billboard outside town advertises “White Pride Radio.”

“We get nasty comments all the time,” said Heather Hardinger, programs director at the Taney County Partnership, which is working with the chamber on what it calls the “talent attraction” plan. 

States and companies from across the United States are competing for Puerto Rican workers, which had a jobless rate of nearly 11% in 2017, the highest in the nation. 

All of this highlights for me the gulf in understanding--broadly speaking--between California and Missouri, when it comes to the value--even necessity--of immigrant labor.  I'm also wondering how to bridge that gulf.  And I'm wondering--as I asked in that post back in early January--what happened to the good ol' working class whites who used to do jobs in places like Branson?  Have they succumbed to the meth (or other drug) epidemic (or here)?  gone soft?  moved to the city?  I'd like to know. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.