I am so worried about our country on many levels...

...especially what will happen to poor people and elderly people.

The proposals that Donald Trump unveiled are so upsetting to me:

 

 

And I'm cutting and pasting this from the New York Times today.  True , Trump calls them his enemy, and "fake news"  but I believe them:

 

 

"We have now passed the 50-day mark of the Donald Trump administration and one thing is clear: There is no new Trump.

There is only the same old Trump: Dangerous and unpredictable, gauche and greedy, temperamentally unsuited and emotionally unsound.

If you were trying to create in a lab a person with character traits more unbecoming in a president, it would be hard to outdo the one we have.

He continues to have explosive Twitter episodes — presumably in response to some news he finds unflattering or some conspiracy floated by fringe outlets — that make him look not only foolish, but unhinged.

 

"And when he’s not making explosive charges, he’s taking destructive actions.

He has signed a slew of executive actions to demonstrate his power and signal his administrative direction.

 

As Business Insider pointed out, as of March 6, “The 45th president has signed 34 executive actions so far, with far-reaching effects on Americans’ lives.” These included “16 executive orders in 45 days.”

In addition, federal agencies and the Republican-controlled Congress have “delayed, suspended or reversed” more than 90 regulations in the short time since President Trump took office, according to a tally by The New York Times.

 

The Times’s report continued: “The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, described late last month as ‘the deconstruction of the administrative state.’”

 

"Now, Trump and congressional Republicans have locked arms in an effort to ram through a disastrous Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan — attempting to cast doubt on the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in the process — that promises to be a boon to insurers and the rich and a bane to the poor and the elderly.

 

Trumpcare would likely not only be more expensive and cover fewer people, but some people currently in need of care to extend their lives would no longer get it.

 

Put quite simply: This plan is not only bad, it could be deadly.

Add to these destructive policies the fact that this president and his family are burning through taxpayer funds like it’s Monopoly money.

 

"As The Hill reported on Saturday, “President Trump paid a visit to one of his golf courses again Saturday, marking apparently his ninth visit to a golf course in the seven weeks since he took office.” The site pointed out, “Trump has made several weekend trips to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., as well, calling the property the ‘Winter White House.’ ”

In February, numerous media outlets pointed out that Trump was spending on travel in a month nearly as much as what the Obamas spent in a year. This doesn’t even include the travel and security costs of Trump’s children or the cost of Trump’s wife and son remaining in Trump Tower in New York, at least for now, which is estimated to cost taxpayers hundreds of thousand of dollars a day.

 

This was particularly jarring because Trump had been a chief critic of the amount of money the Obamas spent on vacations. Indeed, Trump tweeted in 2012: “President @BarackObama’s vacation is costing taxpayers millions of dollars — Unbelievable!”

No, what is unbelievable is the staggering nature of the hypocrisy of Trump and his current spending and the near silence of Obama’s conservative critics.

 

Trump appears to view the Treasury as a personal piggy bank and the presidency as a part-time job.

I think any who have been holding out hope that Trump will eventually change into someone more polished, professional and amenable than the man we have come to know must simply abandon that hope."

These words come from Charles M. Blow in the March 13 New York Times.

 

 

One of my biggest fears, though, is that the crazy man running North Korea is going to provoke a nuclear war, and that will be the end for all of us.

 

 

 

March Snowstorm

I am worried about several of the plants in the courtyard.  I planted them last summer:  a Gentian,

 

eight Phlox plants that should look like this when they are fully blooming:

 

 

and also, two Hydrangeas and an Oriental Poppy.

 

They were tricked by several 70 degree days we had in late February, and they've sprouted their vulnerable green leaves.

 

They don't stand much of a chance with 19 degree temperatures, which we've been having for a number of nights.

 

I have been covering them up with burlap and blankets, and now they are blanketed by a foot of snow.

 

I hope they make it.

Mid March

We've had terrible weather swings. Some of the summer-looming perennials have begun to emerge, and then the temperature plummets again.  This morning, it is 19 degrees.  I'm covering the most tender ones up overnight, hoping they survive.

Here's a sprightly poem by Richard Kenney:



March     
                                  

 

Sky a shook poncho.

Roof   wrung. Mind a luna moth

Caught in a banjo.

This weather’s witty

Peek-a-boo. A study in

Insincerity.

Blues! Blooms! The yodel

Of   the chimney in night wind.

That flat daffodil.

With absurd hauteur

New tulips dab their shadows

In water-mutter.

Boys are such oxen.

Girls! — sepal-shudder, shadow-

Waver. Equinox.

Plums on the Quad did

Blossom all at once, taking

Down the power grid.

 

 

 

 

 

My college closed in 1973.

As Emily Dickinson said, "My life closed twice before it closed"

Sometimes I look across to the college

 

I can see the brick buildings and the five turrets – the Chapel, Brute, Verdier, Burlando…

In the mild March evening at 6Pm before dark, I imagine that over there, across the lawn,

The college is going on with its life as it did fifty years ago. 

  My young self and my friends are there, leaving the dining hall and walking back to the dorms, laughing and talking.  The next day’s classes, the papers due, the ideas that rose from that day’s lectures… the boyfriends…

What did we talk about?

I see them as ghosts, and a lump rises in my throat… the days that are no more, but that weirdly, live within us.

 

 

 

 

 

One more thing I never thought about until today

 

How many years do parents have to teach their children table manners?  It’s a process that must take years.

I couldn’t remember myself or my parents doing this, but they must have.

 

 

 

I never thought about this until today, when my college classmate brought her 8 year old grand-daughter up to visit me.

 

We went out to lunch.

She is a beautiful child. She’s very shy, and very well-mannered.  But she is still 8 years old.  My friend had to correct her and encourage her at the table on how to manage a fairly complicated croissant grilled ham and cheese  sandwich:  pick it up and eat it, don’t tear it into little pieces with your fingers . The little girl did very well with it, but I was also awed by my friend, the grandmother: capable, gracious, but direct and directive. It worked.

Then I thought:  my friend is one of seven children. She and her husband had three children, and now she has seven grandchildren.  She is used to eating with children, and helping them learn to use their knives, forks, spoons, and napkins correctly.  What long love and patience has been involved !

 

I came home and googled "teaching children table manners" and read a great lot of interesting information from many mothers.

I never thought about any of this!   Me -  the only child of older parents, eating at the table with my mom and dad all my childhood.

No older or younger siblings to distract me, or to distract them from me.

And then, away to college – I only recall one time when I noticed the table manners of myself or my classmates, and it was a very funny one.

 

Then, after college, for seven years, eating many meals alone, and on the run.

Then, the following thirty-nine years of my adult life, eating always with other adults.  Today is one of the few times I have eaten with an 8 year old!

What I have missed!  What I didn’t even know I had missed!  One of those rituals of adult life that people don’t even notice when they are performing it.

 

 

 

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

"Girl, Roof, Moon"  by  Natasha Villone


I have long loved the song by that name, sung years ago by Judy Collins.

Here's a cut and paste from "Brain Pickings Weekly" Anna Popova' wonderful weekly gathering of insights:


“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer,” wrote the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard as he contemplated our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s just as Einstein, Gödel, and the rise of relativity had begun revolutionizing our understanding of time. “Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges proclaimed a generation later in his exquisite 1944 refutation of time. “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

If Borges’s words sound like a song lyric, it is because there is something singularly musical about our perception of time — we speak of our daily rhythms, abide by the metronomic ticking of the clock, and feel the flow of time like one feels the flow of a melody. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the elusive and indomitable nature of time preoccupied not only the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers, scientists, and writers, but also one of its greatest musicians: Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003).

 

On October 26, 1969, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City, Simone performed a version of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” written by the English folk-rock singer-songwriter Sandy Denny and popularized by Judy Collins. The version was released a year later on her live album Black Gold and was later included in The Essential Nina Simone.

Simone, who was at least as devoted to civil rights as she was to music, considered this “a reflective tune” that “goes past all racial conflict and all kinds of conflicts,” for it deals with the supreme unifying force of all human existence: the shared experience of time’s inescapable flow. She introduced her cover with a beautiful, simple, profound prefatory meditation on time —

Sometime in your life, you will have occasion to say, “What is this thing called time?” What is that, the clock? You go to work by the clock, you get your martini in the afternoon by the clock and your coffee by the clock, and you have to get on the plane at a certain time, and arrive at a certain time. It goes on and on and on and on.

And time is a dictator, as we know it. Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive? Is it a thing that we cannot touch and is it alive? And then, one day, you look in the mirror — you’re old — and you say, “Where does the time go?”

 

WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES

Across the morning sky, all the birds are leaving
How can they know that it’s time to go?
Before the winter fire, I’ll still be dreaming
I do not count the time

Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know that it’s time for them to go
But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving
For I do not count the time

Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

But I am not alone as long as my love is near me
And I know it will be so till it’s time to go
All through the winter, until the birds return in spring again
I do not fear the time

Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

 

 

 

My Wandering Eye

( eyes in 1970)


Or, I should say, my permanently wandered eye.    In 2003,  I went to the eye doctor for a checkup, and found that I had a Macular Hole in my left eye.  Not the same as Macular Degeneration.  Some injury ( and I thought of two falls on my face that I had sustained the previous three years)  some injury had left scar tissue on the Macula of the Retina of that eye, which had now torn a hole in the retina.

After four unsuccessful surgeries, I was left with no central vision in that eye.  Since the right eye was ok, I could still read and drive, etc.  And I had about 80% of the vision in the left eye... but it was all peripheral vision.

I didn't notice until 2014, when I saw a photo of myself, but that left eye had compensated all by itself by moving the iris over to the side, so it was using the peripheral vision to see, and to help out the good eye.

  Amazing. 

Consequently, I look cockeyed.   Since then, I hate to have photos taken of myself.

eyes in 1979

 

eyes in 2002

 

eyes in 2007

 

eyes in 2014

In addition to all the facial scars,  this wandered eye makes me look like a veteran of many wars.

I was thinking of a poem by Theodore Roethke, called "Meditations of an Old Woman"

Here's an excerpt from the first part:

How can I rest in the days of my slowness?
I've become a strange piece of flesh,
Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,
With a cheek soft as a hound's ear.
What's left is light as a seed;
I need an old crone's knowing.

 

Often I think of myself as riding
Alone, on a bus through western country.
I sit above the back wheels, where the jolts are hardest,
And we bounce and sway along toward the midnight,
The lights tilting up, skyward, as we come over a little rise,
Then down, as we roll like a boat from a wave-crest.
All journeys, I think, are the same:
The movement is forward, after a few wavers,
And for a while we are all alone,
Busy, obvious with ourselves,
The drunken soldier, the old lady with her peppermints;
And we ride, we ride, taking the curves
Somewhat closer, the trucks coming
Down from behind the last ranges,
Their black shapes breaking past;
And the air claps between us,
Blasting the frosted windows,
And I seem to go backward,
Backward in time:

 

Two song sparrows, one within a greenhouse,
Shuttling its throat while perched on a wind-vent,
And another, outside, in the bright day,
With a wind from the west and the trees all in motion.
One sang, then the other,
The songs tumbling over and under the glass,
And the men beneath them wheeling in dirt to the cement benches,
The laden wheelbarrows creaking and swaying,
And the up-spring of the plank when a foot left the runway.

 

Meet the Press

Lately I have taken to watching "Meet the Press," which airs at 10AM on Sundays. I guess it's been several weeks, certainly since the Inauguration.  I wanted to see the characters in this ongoing drama, and to hear what they had to say.  More on some of them another time.

Yesterday morning, two of the persons interviewed were Schumer, the Democratic Senate Minority leader, and Rubio, the Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Also interviewed was James Clapper, the head of Intelligence under Obama, now retired:

 

The topic was Trump's tweets accusing Obama of having his ( Trump's) building/offices/residence  in New York  bugged in the weeks before the Inauguration.

The Obama spokesman has denied it, and Mr. Clapper, a veteran intelligence officer, denied it .

 

I want to cut and paste part of the discussion among the members of the press about this issue.

 

This is part of the transcript of the show.  I zeroed in on the remarks of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. I have been reading his essays and articles for many years and think he is very insightful.

 

 

Here it goes:

Chuck Todd:

Welcome back. Panelists here: Democrat pollster Cornell Belcher, he's author of the book A Black Man in the White House, Kim Strassel, columnist and member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, Danielle Pletka of The American Enterprise Institute, and Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times. At some point, I don't know where to begin here, but Tom Friedman, it is, it was jarring, President Trump accusing President Obama. And obviously, I guess it was an attempt to distract? But I don't see how this distracts from the Russia story.

 

Thomas Friedman:

Well, it was beyond jarring, really, when you think about it, Chuck. This is such a serious charge. Under normal circumstances, it would be a six-column headline in my paper and I think every other paper. And a serious person, before he made such a charge, would have brought together the Congressional leaders, briefed them on it, brought together the intelligence community, and given the public evidence.

The fact that he just lobbed this out there on Twitter at six in the morning is shocking. I think we have to keep one thing in mind, though, the big picture. The big picture, Chuck, is Russia is not our friend. Vladimir Putin is not our friend. He has some very specific goals. He wants to fracture N.A.T.O.. He wants to fracture the European Union, fracture N.A.T.O. so it will not be a military threat, fracture the European Union so it won't be a counter-example for Russians. And he wants to destroy the ability of the United States to lead a Western Alliance. Right now in Moscow, they must be clinking vodka glasses. Because for less than the cost of a MiG-29, they have thrown the West into complete disarray.

A little later in this first segment:

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

--some of us in the press. But my point here, what worries me, Chuck, is this. Government moves at the speed of trust. And right now, there is, like, so little trust. We have a completely polarized environment. And somehow we have got to restore that. Because I don't see how the president's going to be able to solve any of these big issues: Immigration, debt, health care, at the level of polarization we have right now.

CHUCK TODD:

It is-- I think we've exemplified it here a little bit. We're going to pause the conversation and pick it up, I have a feeling, on the other side of the half hour. But coming up is a man who may know more than anyone about Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. It's the former Director of National Intelligence, Jim Clapper. He joins me next.

 

Then Jim Clapper came on.

Then, in the next segment:

 

CHUCK TODD:

Back now with the panel, and we have been going over the Jim Clapper interview just now. And here's the specific transcript for everybody here on the FISA court order. I asked him, at this point can you confirm or deny if this FISA court order exists. He says I can deny it. "There is no FISA court order?" I follow up. Clapper: "Not to my knowledge." "Of anything at Trump Tower?" "No." How big of a deal?

DANIELLE PLETKA:

Well, I think him denying that there was a FISA order is a big deal. But why are we talking about this? We're talking about this because Donald Trump tweeted it out, in pretty much the same breath that he tweeted about Arnold Schwarzenegger.

 CHUCK TODD:

Which by the way-- I know, I know. Say no more.

DANIELLE PLETKA:

Don't let us get distracted by that as well. But I have to ask myself, would we be talking about this at all if he hadn't tweeted that out?

CHUCK TODD:

Well we'd be talking about the Russia angle itself.

DANIELLE PLETKA:Wouldn't we be talking about Sessions?

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL:

Right. But he actually, he made two pieces of news I think here this morning. Not just he said that there was no court order, and assuming he just wasn't being careful with his words, it sounded fairly categorical to me. But the other one was that there is simply no evidence of collusion, at least while he was there, which was until very recently between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

You know, Chuck--

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL:

 

So what have we been talking about for the last three weeks?

 

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

This is -- waking up at 6 AM in the morning, tweeting out one of the most damning accusations one president could make after another, and then, as Dany said, then talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, that is not—

CHUCK TODD:

And he did 18 holes.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

--non-presidential behavior. That is not adult behavior. That is juvenile behavior. And the fact that we have a president who engages in that is, to me, deeply disturbing. Because think about this. Now he's going to have to go to Europe very soon and interact with other European leaders, other world leaders. What would you think if you're a world leader going into a meeting with the-- "What do I say to this guy? What might he say about this meeting?"

He is everywhere we look. And we talked about this before. I quoted my friend, Dov Seidman, who makes the point there's a big difference between formal authority and moral authority. This president has formal authority. But every day you see him eroding his moral authority. And in the end, that is really going to hurt us.

 

 

So... Friedman voices what I have been disturbed by and worried about.

 

What is going to happen next?

 

I know that Trump's  "base" of followers don't believe any of this; they believe everything he says.

 

Will that ever change?

 

 

 

 

Slow TV

TED  stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design.

I was listening to NPR this morning and heard an excerpt from this TED talk from a Norwegian photographer/ producer who aired many hours of fishing... unedited, with no commercial breaks.  Millions of Norwegians watched it!

This fascinated me.  All I could think of was our colloquial expression that something was so boring it was like watching grass grow.

This is part of his TED talk about making slow TV, and the reaction to it:  TH is Thomas Hellum.

So we were allowed to be part of people's living room with this strange TV program, with music, nature, people. And Slow TV was now a buzzword, and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about. So we could either take something long and make it a topic, like with the railway and the Hurtigruten, or we could take a topic and make it long. This is the last project. It's the peep show. It's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen, actually 87 days on the web. We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing. It actually took three hours before we got the first fish, and that's quite slow. We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal, and we have made another train ride with the northern railway, and because this we couldn't do live, we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way.

14:08 So our next project got us some attention outside Norway. This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

14:15 (Video) Stephen Colbert: I've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called "National Firewood Night," which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods, and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. (Laughter) It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like "So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry" and "The Amazing Glacier Race." And get this, almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in, 20 percent.

 

 

TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting, why not knitting? So on our next project, we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater, and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show, he liked that.

15:02 (Music)

15:09 (Video) Jimmy Kimmel: Even the people on the show are falling asleep, and after all that, the knitters actually failed to break the world record. They did not succeed, but remember the old Norwegian saying, it's not whether you win or lose that counts. In fact, nothing counts, and death is coming for us all. (Laughter)

 

15:26 TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out? This is so completely different to other TV programming. We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time, and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there, actually being on the train, on the boat, and knitting together with others, and the reason I think why they're doing that is because we don't edit the timeline. It's important that we don't edit the timeline, and it's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to, that the viewer can relate to, and that somehow has a root in our culture. This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks. And of course this is a lot of planning, this is a lot of logistics. So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer, but more important is what you don't plan. You don't plan what's going to happen. You have to just take your cameras with you. It's like a sports event. You rig them and you see what's happening. So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten, 134 hours, just written on one page. We didn't know anything more when we left Bergen.

 

 

I know I could watch hours of birdwatching on TV, though I'd rather be outside doing it myself.   This "slow TV" is a fascinating idea.  It could never happen in the USA, where speed and distraction rule.

 

 

 

A poem for Ash Wednesday

Here's a poem by Wislawa Szymborska:

In Praise of Self-Deprecation

  

by Wislawa Szymborska

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.

Scruples are alien to the black panther.

Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.

The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.

The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly

live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos

but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like

than a clear conscience

on the third planet of the Sun.

  

Blessings of the Growing Light

This is the view from my bedroom window just now.



It's 4:58 PM on a Saturday afternoon. We've had some severe thunderstorms, and now the air is colder and so fresh.  And it is still light out!

Here's an Imbolc blessing that I love.  I think it applies to today:

Blessings of the growing light
Blessings of the quickening earth
Blessings of the morning chorus
Blessings of the first shy flowers
Blessings of Nature waking
Blessings of Maiden singing
Briganti’s fire light your path
Briganti’s blessings on your hearth

 

 

Imbolc is an old Celtic/pagan feast. This year it's celebrated Feb.1.  It also connects with the Christian feast of Candlemas. "Briganti" is Brigid, our Saint Brigid.  She was the daughter of a Druid priest before she and her mother became Christians.  So the pagans still honor her, too.

 

A Controversial Article

This photo was taken in 2011!  Caption: "Opponents of Senate Bill 5 celebrate in Columbus, Ohio, after the bill, restricting the collective-bargaining abilities of public-employee unions, was defeated on Tuesday, November 8, 2011." (AP Photo / Tony Dejak)

I read this article and it gave me much to think about in regard to our country and the election of Donald Trump.  I realize that I cannot exempt the "corporate  Democrats " from blame for our present situation. It's a situation that has been brewing for a long time, and it's the fault of both parties.


The following are excerpts from a much longer article in The Nation  by Kirk Noder  entitled "Why Do White Working-Class  People Vote Against Their Interests? They Don't"

( I think this article shouldn't be limited to whites.  All American Working-Class People, especially those who live and work away from the coasts, are suffering) 

"...The first step was the collapse of the industrial heartland. This hit white working-class people incredibly hard—and it remains a phenomenon that is not understood on the East and West Coasts. It is painted as a natural evolution of our economy and as if the onus is on people to adapt to it. This fails to capture how many families and communities were dependent on the industrial economy. Many Ohioans are now staring at a future where they themselves and their kids have less opportunity than their parents. In a place like Youngstown, that means not only an inability to get a well-paying job at the steel mill; it also means owning a house that has failed to appreciate in value for 20 to 30 years, in a city that continues to lose double-digit percentages of its population every 10 years. It is not just a stripping out of economic opportunity but a stripping away of identity for these communities. It is the sense of abandonment and perpetual decline that people feel mired in. Resources, jobs, decent housing, quality neighborhoods and schools are all in decline. It creates a “scarcity mentality” for white working-class people and others who live in the heartland.

Two narratives emerged about the collapse of the industrial heartland in America. The one from the far right has three parts: First, that industry left this country because unions destroyed productivity and made labor costs too high, thereby making us uncompetitive. Second, corporations were the victims of over-regulation and a bloated government that overtaxed them to pay for socialist welfare systems. Third, illegal immigration has resulted in the stealing of American jobs, increased competition for white workers, and depressed wages. Together these three factors led to the collapse of manufacturing in America. This, sadly, is a story that many Americans believe. The second narrative, promoted by corporate Democrats, is that the global economy shifted and the country is now in transition from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. This story tacitly accepts the economic restructuring of the heartland as inevitable once China and other markets opened up.

The most accurate narrative is one we never hear—and that I think is illustrated well in the collapse of Youngstown’s steel mills. When the corporations who operated the mills shut them down, the community organized en masse. Key religious and community leaders stood up against “the severe consequences when corporations decide not to modernize older facilities, view relocation of industry as a logical result of corporate opportunities for profit, or shift capital altogether to other investment opportunities.”

A coalition organized to reopen the mills as cooperatives owned by the workers, community members, and private investors. After a feasibility study showed that reopening the mills was economically viable, the coalition appealed to the federal government for loans to purchase and modernize the plant. Despite an initial commitment, the Carter administration backed off. Apparently, Jimmy Carter worried that supporting the project would jeopardize his reelection bid and bowed to lobbying by steel corporations who saw it as a threat, which was countered by only tepid support from the national Steelworkers Union leadership, who worried worker ownership might undermine the union.           

  ... The collapse of the industrial heartland resulted from a choice about whether we would reshape our economic models to serve workers and communities over profits—or continue to serve corporate interests that painted the global movement of capital as inevitable. The right blamed unions and regulation. The Democrats tried to explain the collapse as a weather phenomenon that we all needed to adjust to. Efforts to reshape the economy were marginalized and defeated by both parties; business and organized labor each supported the collapse of the city of Youngstown.

...The issue of race is intertwined with the phenomenon of
decreased opportunity for white people, scarcity of resources, and the clash of two Americas—weak market and strong market. Immigrants, by and large, are not moving to places like Ohio. In fact, a study a few years ago showed that out of the four US metro areas with the lowest immigration levels, two were in Ohio: Youngstown and Dayton. Immigrants are moving to places that have opportunity, strong local economies. White working-class people in Ohio don’t understand how those economies work, and see immigrants having more opportunity than they do. There is truth to this, in that weak-market cities offer far less opportunity than strong-market cities.

This is toxic mix for white people—little to no engagement with immigrants and people of color (Youngstown is also highly segregated), increased pressures on their family, and no one offering a clear vision forward. It is easy to see why the right-wing narrative is so compelling—it offers formidable enemies (government and unions) and an economic vision that corporations will create new jobs if those enemies are defeated. In that narrative, white working-class people will have opportunity again. The left offers no such clear enemy—and we’ve been immersed in identity politics that have further alienated white working-class people.               Imagine how different the world could be now if Democrats and unions hadn’t sold out steel workers in Youngstown.