I try to steer clear of The New York Times’ Op-Ed stuff these days — mostly just fluff and hung-over columnists spouting off the jokes that made people in NYC’s elite bars laugh the night before — but it’s hard to miss a headline on the Week in Review cover page that shouts “The Myth of Main Street.” It is an amazingly biased and flip-the-finger-at-mainstream-America account of how we should just all bend over and let the “efficient” globalists rule everything. A few snippets from the op-ed piece and comments on Louis Hyman’s hit-and-run opinion-making:
Throughout the Rust Belt and much of rural America, the image of Main Street is one of empty storefronts and abandoned buildings interspersed with fast-food franchises, only a short drive from a Walmart.
“Image?” Dude, its a fact, and not just in rural places. There’s hardly a town or city in America that doesn’t bleed local capital to corporatist, globalist enterprises that suck the lifeblood out of our communities. And that’s just on the retail side. Dare to ask for a reasonable wage or some nominal benefits, and the corporatists head for the hills to churn out the cheapest garbage possible for a world that is running out of places to put garbage — and burning up because we’ve become so addicted to consumer garbage. C’mon, what you just described there, Louis, is a global phenomenon. The globalists are out to supersize the world, while the polar ice caps melt.
The rage that arose in the 1880s, as rural incomes fell and farm mortgages defaulted while city bankers got rich, does not feel so distant today.
Uh, yeah, Louis, the height of the robber-baron era really isn’t so different from today. The globalizing corporatist technology back then was called “railroads.” Were it not for the populist pushback of the early 20th century, things would have gotten even more grim.
For a few decades in the 19th century, Main Street store owners were a viable engine of American economic growth, selling to local residents and people in surrounding rural areas. But that hasn’t been the case ever since. In the 1920s, a new and more efficient kind of retail emerged, the chain store, which sealed Main Street’s decline. Main Street retailers had been under assault for decades from national mail-order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck, but it was the chain store, typified by A. & P. and Woolworth’s, that vanquished small-town commerce.
Holy crow, did this guy ever live in the America of these times? Woolworth’s sold cheap stuff, shoved in between all sorts of great local stores. If you had a Woolworth’s downtown, it was because of the downtown’s vibrancy, not because Woolworth’s was there. What killed downtown was not these sorts of outlets, which actually added to downtown vibrancy, but the doggone shopping malls, synthetic downtowns on private property financed with gobs of big-bank cash. Then came Wal-Mart, to finish off what was left of downtowns. The “efficiency” that you talk about is the cold calculus that filled Nazi death camps. The bean-counters decided that small towns had to go. Sorry, them’s the breaks, have some Oxycontin and think it over.
But this world was unsustainable. It unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s, as fair trade laws were repealed, manufacturers discovered overseas suppliers and unions came undone.
Wow, talk about a bizarre alternate reality. Manufacturers didn’t “discover” overseas suppliers: they worked actively to set up a supply chain that would crush U.S. manufacturing, local economies be damned, and lobbied Congress to facilitate it. “Unions came undone” sounds like they spontaneously combusted. Bub, the globalists worked actively to crush unions, and still do. Ah, must be that...Invisible Hand of the Marketplace! AKA, them’s with the gold make the rules.
Many rural Americans, sadly, don’t realize how valuable they already are or what opportunities presently exist for them. It’s true that the digital economy, centered in a few high-tech cities, has left Main Street America behind. But it does not need to be this way. Today, for the first time, thanks to the internet, small-town America can pull back money from Wall Street (and big cities more generally). Through global freelancing platforms like Upwork, for example, rural and small-town Americans can find jobs anywhere in world, using abilities and talents they already have. A receptionist can welcome office visitors in San Francisco from her home in New York’s Finger Lakes. Through an e-commerce website like Etsy, an Appalachian woodworker can create custom pieces and sell them anywhere in the world.
OK, great, let’s get that 50 year-old former factory worker humming along on Etsy with his or her artisan...whatever. Look, I used to sell this Kool-Aid, and it works for some people, but it’s basically boiling down to making souvenirs for rich tourists who don’t even bother to come to your town to sink some money into your downtown. And that’s assuming that they like them. This does nothing on a major scale to address the real issue — capital flight to major money center banks who don’t give a hoot about these folks. How is that artisan going to fund the tools to scale up their business? How ‘bout sending some capital their way? Or some marketing know-how? Or legislation that will support local agriculture and affordable housing? Ah, didn’t think so. You bright boys have all the answers — and won’t give up any of the money or power. Nothing new.
Main Street requires shoppers who don’t really care about low prices. The dream of Main Street may be populist, but the reality is elitist. “Keep it local” campaigns are possible only when people are willing and able to pay to do so.
“Low prices” is a predatory marketing practice, often, another way of saying, “we’ll price out competitive suppliers so that we can own the entire market.” Again, it’s as if “low prices” are an entity unto itself, something that just walked into town. “Low prices” walked into town because they were allowed to walk into town by a global web of capital and transportation that turned the whole world into a colonialist exploitation scheme for a handful of rich folk. Heaven forbid that the labor and raw materials suppliers decided that “low prices” wasn’t good for the person on the bottom end of their economic chain.
Also harmful, however, is the complacent and naïve expectation, often found among well-meaning liberals, that everyone, to have a good job, needs to go to college, preferably to learn computer programming (or some other skill in manipulating information) and ideally to move to New York City or San Francisco. If the answer to rural downward mobility is to turn everyone into software engineers, there is no hope.
Well, since you just laid out a plan for “success” which requires all of rural America to become Internet nerds, you pretty much have confirmed that a) there is no hope for rural America and b) you don’t care if there’s hope, because, after all, it’s their fault in the first place. Hmm, wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that corporatized farming was incentivized to push under the small farmers who kept many of those towns alive? Hyman offers absolutely nothing to address the flight of ownership and capital from local land and business owners to the globalists. Rural America is serfdom on a scale of misery that is now seen all over the globe.
Connecting Americans who live and work in small towns with these kinds of digital platforms is not simply a matter of giving them internet access, as with the new “Broadband for All” initiative of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York (though that is a step in the right direction). We also need programs to support that transition. Right now we are too fixated on “upskilling” coal miners into data miners. We should instead be showing people how to get work via digital platforms with their existing skills.
What the…? Do you really wonder why every county in West Virginia went for Trump? What the heck does a coal miner in West Virginia with nothing but coal mining skills do to get a job from a “digital platform” with their existing skills? What do they do, use a virtual pickaxe to send someone a lump of unmarketable coal via WhatsApp? Does Hyman have any idea what it is to be a person who works with their hands for a living? Or why they should be allowed a decent living? It’s economic and moral blindness like this that paved the way for Hitler to power, and it’s no surprise that similar blindness has led to the madness that is Trumpism.
If you want to know why this nation is doomed, it’s because elitist, know-nothing intelligentsia like Hyman spout off stuff like this to justify some white-ivory-tower job in some elite institution, never having to deal with the real lives and the real consequences for people and our planet, due to their insufferable amorality and insensitivity. As much as I detest Trump, people like Hyman deserve to have him lording it over them, because they have done squat to help the average person both in rural America and around the world to have a decent life, just because the mythic god “efficiency” wants to be fed yet again so some billionaire can brag about some more billions that could have helped average people to lead a decent life in their own, human, “inefficient” ways. M’gosh, Louis, why don’t we just robotize the whole thing and get it over with.