Guest Post by
He had made the drive enough times to already suspect what he might find. Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food. Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled.
“These jobs aren’t the solution so much as they’re part of the problem,” Lewandowski said, and now the result of so much churn was becoming evident all across Indiana and lately in Huntington, too. Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Poverty was up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up. Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her three-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.
“Despair is our business, and business is booming,” Lewandowski said…
“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”
“It’s pure greed.”
“They wanted to add another 6 feet to their yachts.”
“We’re becoming like a third-world country. We’re going to have nothing left but fast food.”
“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”
– From the Washington Post article: From Belief to Outrage: The Decline of the Middle Class Reaches the Next American Town
I write a lot about the middle class. It’s been one of the core themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception, yet my posts tend to be filled with statistics and sarcasm, and often lack the crucial element of heart. In order to truly connect with the public and shift their sentiments from apathy to action, it’s imperative to create a deep emotional connection. I admittedly have not done a great job in this regard. Fortunately for all of us, Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has done just that.
I read a lot of articles, and I can’t remember anything that hit me as hard as what he published this past weekend. It tells the tale of the spirit-crushing decimation of the American middle class through the lens of eternal optimist, Chris Setser. Chris is a man who always went above and beyond in order to provide a good life for himself and his family. Working the graveyard shift at an Indiana United Technologies plant so that he could be home when his kids came home from school, Mr. Setser lived his entire life living by the mantra: “Things have a way of working in the end.” Until they didn’t.
Chris’ transformation from an optimistic Democrat, to a pissed off, jaded Trump supporter, is a microcosm for what’s happening all across the country. Through his eyes, you witness a justified desperation, and a painful recognition that working hard and staying positive simply aren’t good enough in America’s current hollowed out, oligarch-owned, shell company of an economy.
Below, I provide some excerpts from the article, but these select passages don’t do it justice. I think this piece is so important, it’s imperative you read it in full and share it with everyone you know. The future of America rests upon reversing this pernicious trend.
From the Washington Post:
HUNTINGTON, Ind. —Chris Setser worked a 12-hour graveyard shift while his children slept, cleaned the house while they were at school and then went outside to wait for the bus bringing them home. He stood on the porch as he often did and surveyed the life he had built. The lawn was trimmed. The stairs were swept. The weekly family schedule was printed on a chalkboard. A sign near the door read, “A Stable Home Is A Happy Home,” and now a school bus came rolling down a street lined by wide sidewalks and American flags toward a five-bedroom house on the corner lot.
“Right on time,” Setser called out to the driver, waving to his children as they came off the bus.
In came 14-year-old Ashley, holding a payment notice for a school field trip. “Are we going to become one of those families with a voucher?” she asked.
“Don’t worry,” he said, handing her $20 from his wallet.
All around him an ideological crisis was spreading across Middle America as it continued its long fall into dependency: median wages down across the country, average income down, total wealth down in the past decade by 28 percent. For the first time ever, the vaunted middle class was not the country’s base but a disenfranchised minority, down from 61 percent of the population in the 1970s to just 49 percent as of last year. As a result of that decline, confusion was turning into fear. Fear was giving way to resentment. Resentment was hardening into a sense of outrage that was unhinging the country’s politics and upending a presidential election.
Setser had heard rumors earlier in the day that the company had decided to move its operations to Mexico, but he found them hard to believe. While dozens of other manufactures had left Northeast Indiana, his factory, United Technologies Electronic Controls, or UTEC, was still taking back contracts from China and winning president’s awards for performance. It was the area’s largest employer and also a rare place where America’s fraying social contract had remained mostly intact: Employees helped the factory’s parent corporation earn more than $6 billion in annual profit. In return they got a decent hourly salary with good overtime, bonuses for completing work-training programs, a turkey to take home on Thanksgiving and a ham on Christmas. “Successful businesses improve the human condition,” read one sign posted on the factory wall.
But on that night in February, another announcement had come over the factory speakers, instructing all UTEC employees to report to the cafeteria. The factory manager was standing at the front of the room, holding a piece of paper and reading into a microphone.
“A difficult decision,” he said.
“Relocation is best,” he said.
“Northern Mexico,” he said.
“No questions,” he said, and then he told employees they would have an hour-long break in the cafeteria to process the news before returning to their lines.
Together between his overtime and Bowers’s small salary at another manufacturer in Fort Wayne, they had remained firmly in the middle class by finding ways to make their money stretch. When they wanted to drive to Florida for their first overnight vacation in a decade, Setser could volunteer for more overtime to save up the cash. When they wanted a new TV, he could spend the 10 percent premium he earned for working third shift. He had cashed out part of his 401(k) account to pay for his daughter’s braces, purchased some of their basic household items with credit cards and taken out a no-money-down loan on their $95,000 house.
He had made the drive enough times to already suspect what he might find. Stride Rite had left Huntington for Mexico at the tail end of the recession; Breyers Ice Cream had closed its doors after 100 years. In the weeks after each factory closing in his part of Indiana, Lewandowski had listened to politicians make promises about jobs — high-tech jobs, right-to-work jobs, clean-energy jobs — but instead Indiana had lost 60,000 middle-class jobs in the past decade and replaced them with a surge of low-paying work in health care, hospitality and fast food. Wages of male high school graduates had dropped 19 percent in the past two decades, and the wealth divide between the middle class and the upper class had quadrupled.
“These jobs aren’t the solution so much as they’re part of the problem,” Lewandowski said, and now the result of so much churn was becoming evident all across Indiana and lately in Huntington, too. Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Poverty was up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up. Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her three-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.
“Despair is our business, and business is booming,” Lewandowski said. “Workers have lost all agency in their lives. They’ve based their lives on believing in something that turned out to be a lie. They work when they can, for what they can, for as long as they can until it ends.”
As second shift finished in Huntington, several of those UTEC workers gathered at an Applebee’s that displayed construction hats on the wall. Earlier in the day, an employee had been suspended for taping a “Run for the Border” bumper sticker to one of the company’s roving robots — the biggest act of rebellion yet. A few employees had been trying to popularize a boycott of United Technologies products, and others had started using their regular 10-minute breaks to campaign for Trump in a traditionally Democratic factory. But for the most part their work was continuing unchanged, with attendance steady and factory production on the rise. They couldn’t risk losing their jobs or their UTEC severance packages, so the only way to vent was to come here, where the discussion on this night was of a country in decline.
“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”“It’s pure greed.”
“They wanted to add another 6 feet to their yachts.”
“We’re becoming like a third-world country. We’re going to have nothing left but fast food.”
“Fast food and hedge funds. That’s where we’re going.”
“We’re getting to the point where there aren’t really any good options left,” he said. “The system is broken. Maybe its time to blow it up and start from scratch, like Trump’s been saying.”
Krystal rolled her eyes at him. “Come on. You’re a Democrat.”
“I was. But that was before we started turning into a weak country,” he said. “Pretty soon there won’t be anything left. We’ll all be flipping burgers.”
“Fine, but so what?” she said. “We just turn everything over to the guy who yells the loudest?”
“You said it always evens out,” she told him.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said, but now his voice was quiet.
“You said things just have a way of working.”
“Maybe not,” he said, because with each passing day he was seeing it more clearly. The town was losing its best employer, and all around him stability was giving way to uncertainty, to resentment, to anger, to fear.
Haunting and heartbreaking. What’s worse, it’s not just in the manufacturing heartland where the middle class is getting pummeled. In fact, the middle class is getting squeezed so badly, many cities now see a need to roll out public housing projects targeting this formerly independent and relatively prosperous demographic.
Although I previously reported on this as it pertained to the extremely affluent city of Palo Alto in the post, The New “Middle Class” – Making $250,000 a Year in Palo Alto Qualifies for Housing Subsidies, it appears this may be more of a trend than an anomaly.
As the Wall Street Journal reports in the piece, Rising U.S. Rents Squeeze the Middle Class:
Rising rents in cities across the nation are hurting the poorest residents, but those who are higher on the income ladder might be bearing the brunt of the pain.
A study set to be released on Monday shows that a far bigger proportion of middle-class renters in New York were squeezed by rising rents than were the lowest-income renters.
The study by New York University’s Furman Center examined rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods such as Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section and Harlem, where rents jumped 80% and 53%, respectively, between 1990 and 2014. While the share of the poorest families struggling to afford rent in those sections increased by 7.6 percentage points from 2000 to 2014, the share of middle-income households struggling to afford rent jumped 18 percentage points.
In Boston, median asking rents have increased at an annual rate of 13.2% since 2010, far outstripping the 2.4% average annual increase in income. Mayor Marty Walsh has pledged to build 20,000 units of middle-income housing through a mix of initiatives such as rezoning neighborhoods further from the city center and offering tax breaks to developers who build more moderately priced housing.
“We really do spend the vast majority of our resources on low-income families but we know we need to serve the middle income,” said Sheila Dillon, Boston’s chief of housing.
Even in Atlanta, historically one of the most affordable cities for middle-class families, a rapid rise in rents has taken its toll on those families. The city last week passed a new ordinance requiring developers who receive tax breaks to set aside a portion of units aimed at lower-income earners. It is also considering requiring developers to include units targeted at slightly more affluent families, such as teachers and police officers.
New York City has pledged to build or preserve 44,000 units for middle-income families over the next decade. Low-income households “have been straining to pay their rents in these neighborhoods for years, and, as rents continue to rise, households in higher-income tiers are having the same experience,” said a spokeswoman for New York City’s Housing Preservation and Development Department.
I don’t know about you, but this isn’t the kind of country I want to live in.
For more on the soul crushing plight of the American middle class, see:
Pew Research Study – The American Middle Class Declined in 90% of Metro Areas From 2000-2014
U.S. Suicide Rate Soars in 21st Century – Up 80% For Middle Aged White Women
The Status Quo Plan – Convince the American Public to Accept Serfdom
As the Middle Class Evaporates, Global Oligarchs Plan Their Escape from the Impoverished Pleb Masses
“Three Lost Decades” – How the American Middle Class is 20% Poorer Now vs. 1984
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
“This is how it feels to be sold out by your country.”
People insist on mistaking the government for the country. The country is the land, the people and their cultures united by societal norms. The government is a gang of thieves with their boots on the neck of the country, loudly proclaiming that they are the country.
Fuck ’em and feed ’em fish heads.
I’ll be the one to say it — they wanted this, they voted for it, they dreamed of it.
“And I, I am the man who granted them their wish.” — John Galt in Atlas Shrugged
Every time they voted for people who would sell them out, they wanted this. Every time they thought it wise to elect con men who would rob someone else to share the spoils with them for voting the ‘right’ way, they wanted this.
They never thought it would be THEM who got plundered. They are learning differently now, aren’t they?
Not that the repubs are any better, but it kills me that these folks keep voting for democrats, especially after that giant sucking sound that was NAFTA, and the latest job killer, obamacare, never mind all the taxes and regulations. Even before vastly increasing my knowledge of economics, I understood that things like that were job killers.
All the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas…all the Pelosis and Reids, the Feinsteins and McCains…they are all united in their seething hatred of you and me. They collected big paydays by cutting deals to rot away the base of this country. But they always thought that there would be ‘someone’ there to make good on their ‘pay checks’ — what if they aren’t?
5 bedroom house. Why?
Work more overtime to pay for a vacation. Why?
Why not work more overtime all the time?
New TV? Why?
Mortgage the house? Why why why why why?
Cash in the 401k? Fuck me why?
Vote democrat? Why why why the fuck why?
Seriously, why would a “high school graduate” think they could be irresponsible with their money and future? Stupid actions get bad results.
I was involved in closing down a 2000 person plant in Indiana. Why? Because the fucking union demanded $25 an hour in 1988, and rejected the $17 that would keep it alive. The entire town collapsed.
Why?
Because people are idiots by and large, without the sense God gave an ant to set aside for the future instead of consuming more than they can afford today.
Gotta have vacations, TVs, five bedroom houses.
Let it burn. Fire will cleanse it. Fourth turnings are a bitch. And this one will be a doozy.
Llpoh keeping it real.
Spot on SpecOpsAlpha!
So the Boston Mayor offers a solution of increased lower cost housing units instead of looking into why the costs are rising. This is akin to driving your car faster while it is overheating to get more air across the block instead of checking the coolant. What a fucking parasite moron. But hey, the idiots voted him in.
This society has spent billions or trillions on welfare and all it did was create a breeding ground for the stupidest among us. They breed with reckless abandon which creates an even greater hoard of stupid people. This huge hoard has aligned to vote for more free shit along with the willfully ignorant, like the factory worker in the article.
This ignorance and stupidity has destroyed us and the only way out is to destroy the ignorant and stupid. Of course this cannot be done but it will happen through starvation, disease, and their proclivity for violence once this collapse accelerates.
I have to believe this willful ignorance is a product of the belief in the fairy tale of “American exceptionalism”. The only thing exceptional was the constitution and with it gone all else will go.
With the gold standard removed, we have been riding on a defacto petro-dollar for just over 40 years and that is what kept up the illusion of wealth and the belief of exceptionalism. With the constitution and the petro-dollar gone, the reality of the con job will finally be realized.
Very sad, and depressing. How will these people survive
when their saving are gone and their cc are maxed out?
I am thinking back on my own voting history. I know I voted
against the “bad guys” but they took office anyway.
For the life of me I cannot understand why career pols even
exist. Nancy P. and Diane F. come to mind. Disgusting.
I think we are getting double-crossed and elections are rigged.
Or the people are too lazy to vote, don’t know. Probably both.
Llpoh, people just don”t think the way you do. When i was in college i worked in an office that always had a horrible time trying to drag in staff on the holidays. My buddy Vince and i saw great opportunity. We were lowly part timers. We approached management with an offer, pay us double time for the entire holiday, for instance thanksgiving, thursday through sunday, and we would cover every day. They hemmed and hawed, but eventually agreed to our terms. It was a gold mine for us at that time. Vince is CEO of USA mobility now, (they changed the name, it’s called something else now), and pulls down several million bucks a year. That thinking starts early
$17 bucks an hour …. with four kids …. how is that even “middle class” ….. even in Huntington, IN.
I worked in Huntington, IN … Wabash Magnetics …. fuel injectors, ABS sensors.
Going from the front office (I was in sales) onto the factory floor was like entering another world. You generally won’t find thinkers and planners there, as Llpoh suggests Chris Setser should be. (Mr. Setser’s fiancee is a real piece of work …. still demanding a $1,000 photographer for her wedding … because she deserves the best. Special snowflake, that one.) Making enough money to pay the bills, with some left over to drink beer and fix up the pickup truck was more than fulfilling. Living paycheck to paycheck was never a thing to fear because there would ALWAYS be work … guaran-damn-teed.
Oops!
The factory folks pretty much despised the front office/white color workers. Our average pay was probably in the $70k/yr range (in the late 90’s), a few made substantially more, while the floor people (mostly women) made $10-$15/hr … doing the same motherfucking boring tedious work (i.e., winding wire on bobbin, removing a piece of plastic from an injection machine, etc.) over and over and over, standing on your feet all day, sweating like pig in the summer, and not being able to pee until your appointed 10 minute break. I didn’t know whether to pity them, or admire them.
Mr. Setser is probably fucked this time. Things may work out … as they always have, according to him … but, I doubt it. Unlike previous economic downturns in Indiana, this time there is nowhere else to go . Sounds like most of the town’s manufacturers have left. And he’s pissing up a rope if he thinks he can get a job at the big GM plant on Route 69 about 20 miles away. I’m betting that place gets a thousand applications per week.
Hopefully, Mr. Setser can hold out until Donald Trump gets elected. Mr. Trump will tell all those companies to come back to America … OR, ELSE! He’s also going to tell those companies to pay employees very very well … OR, ELSE! Donald is going to make America great again.
Sooooo …. hang in there Mr. Setser. Your redemption draweth nigh.
Stucky, that fiance is a piece of work. That man is doomed. Here are my favorites. Jim posted this a couple of years ago. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/26/distressed-family-swamped-by-an-underwater-home/
I was working at the ITT automotive parts plant in Cairo, Ga in 1984 (way before the late 1990s Stucky) for about $8 per hour (great pay for then and there) when Chicago Management SOBs had everything moved to Mexico. I think it was because Blue Bellies hate Rebs especially if they are about to hit 20 years at the plant.
Please encourage the younger folks around you, after they burn down the whole rotten structure, to have: (1) an iron clad balanced budget amendment, (2) term limits on all elected officials. I personally would also add in that anyone proposing fiat money or deficit spending be hung…but that’s just me.
I noticed Rand Paul is running for another term. I guess the only way to clean up Washington is with a lot of ropes. Trump will hit the wall when he finds himself surrounded by these idiots that never leave.
Get ready for the coming collapse.
The problem is that these people do not have public sector jobs. If so the nirvana. Example a small city of 24,000 in upstate New York. Largest private employer a nuclear power plant is shutting down soon, layoffs to follow. Tax base crashes. School system cuts some teaching positions, cancels some sports, superintendent takes a ballyhooed pay cut. One administrative position added and tax rate increased 2.6 percent and wailing, beginning and conniving for more state/federal aid. Well organized city employees. In 2015 one fireman paid $136,000with overtime. He runs series of private enterprises, one of which just contracted with city for $25,000 to spread agent orange in city playgrounds so lawn mowing is obviated. Another fireman uses city credit card to make personal purchases including a handgun. He gets probation and keeps his job.A larger border patrol facility 100 miles from the border and an area too poor for illegal to bother with.One half the birth announcements and baby pictures only name the mother. Slum lords bring in tenants from NYC to gain HUD grant. Few 16 to 21 year males not in school have jobs and many don’t want them. But to them Hitlrey is a godsend and Trump is a buffoon who talks mean about foreign countries and immigrants. Plus he has no military experience so how can he handle department of defense. I don’t-live there anymore, only visit. The moral: get on the public tit and don’t ever let go. BTW Bernie is big among the younger set.
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Ye ungrateful serfs! With our easy money we gave thee jobs for a long time and the good life. It led you to think you’re shit. Well, you ain’t shit!! We can now make mo’ bling elsewhere. We shall send thine jobs overseas… Ha ha, thou shall become Mexicans! Welcome to the Third World.
Star/Stuck – nice comments.
No, people do not think like I, or we, do. Hard-work, , education, thrift, saving, delayed gratification are foreign concepts.
The awakening will be brutal.
Seriously, where the hell did the idea that you can “graduate from HS (with a fifth grade education no doubt) and walk into a middle class lifestyle come from? No skills, barely able to read or write in many cases, and no experience = a middle class lifestyle?
What a joke.
Llpoh, one of our bigger disagreements over the past few years has been over this middle class lifestyle thing. I my dense little mind, i think of how jim describes his upbringing, and his current life, or how i was raised, as varients of middle class. I am dumbfounded at what people think is middle class now. 3500 square foot house, his and hers BMW’s, take the family on a cruise every year. That ain’t middle class where i come from. I don’t know what it is. But i do totally agree with you, it’s a fantasy. You push my buttons when you call it middle class, because i think of middle class as salt of the earth. But you are right. That fantasy class is heading for a cliff, it never was real.
Llpoh, u sure I heard right, factory workers wanted 25$/hr in 1988? The wage for a skilled tradesman in a private garage then was 350$/wk after tax.
Hershel, i’ve written several times about having a front row seat when the mechanics union took down Eastern Airlines. I was the gink that shuttled the proposals back and forth from the board to the union and back. The mechanics were making 25-35 dollars an hour and this was like 1982, and they didn’t think it was enough. And Florida isn’t a union state. They absolutely refused to believe that deregulation and the advent of no frills carriers had changed the economics of the industry. So they bankrupted the company. Fools
oh no someone must have given grandpa chocolate again!
I wonder if Mr. Setser ever heard of normalcy bias? Typical union drone. I read the article at WP and only recall him having three kids. WTF does he need a five bdrm house for? Good luck selling that in a town with no jobs.
Truth is, he’s just like most people I know. Every time a friend (acquaintance really) gets a raise, bonus or a better job they’ve basically got the money spent before it even lands in their hand. They never use it to increase their savings. If they were getting by before the extra $$ came in then why not continue to get by on that same amount and bank the increase? There’s no pain in that at all unlike being forced to make cuts to an already thin income. As admins data always points out, most people don’t have enough money saved to replace their roof or furnace if needed. Most cant even buy a new fridge without resorting to plastic.
Mr. Setser needs to kick that “I need a $1000 photographer” fiancee of his to the curb as her mentality is an ominous sign of many bad things to come. He won’t EVER be able to keep that one happy! Here’s a thought for her……go get a second job so YOU can pay for your fancy photographer! If she’s not willing to do that then hire a neighborhood kid and give him a dozen disposable cameras to take pictures.
Edward Bernay’s would be so proud of most ‘Muricans today!
Hershel – they were on $25 plus bennies. We offered to keep the plant alive at $17 plus reduced but still good bennies. Union said we were bluffing.
Do the math: 2000 employees by 2200 hrs per year by about $10 per hour = a savings of $40+ million a year. New moved the plant to NC at $12 an hour and no bennies, saved $100 million a year, plus better, more efficient new plant.
Starfucker, what you thought of as middle class was really just upper lower class or entry level middle class. I was the same way. If I judge myself based on the so-called middle class today in their McMansions and his & hers beemers, I’m still in that upper lower class/entry level middle class. The difference is that I could buy the McMansion and beemers in an all cash deal tomorrow but they are sweating whether they will make their next mortgage payment.
I had to laugh the other day because I drive an old beat up model POS, 1986 Toyota 4Runner as my daily driver. It’s literally been rolled twice, bondoed twice and is so rusted I can see the road through the passenger side panels. Anyway, I rolled into Costco to fill up and popped the fuel door latch but never heard the familiar thump as it released. When I got out I saw that the entire fuel door was gone. The hinges has rusted completely through. I laughed out loud looking at the new cars all around me knowing that their car payments are probably higher than my mortgage payments. I bought my POS used in July of 99 for $1500 and paid myself a $600/month car payment to my savings ever since. As a result I can buy 5 or 6 brand new cars tomorrow but the last thing I want is a new car.
Lipoh:
Could you do that today? Move from Union state to “right to work state”. Isn’t that what Boeing tried to do,
move some production to SC from Washington only to have NLRB foil the move? Better to move out of country. Actually many wing and body components for 787 are made in Nagoya, Japan.