The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Farmer's Tale: Political Folly and the Fed

I once spent a long, agonizing evening in a decaying farmhouse in eastern Iowa, watching a young farmer's life fall apart.

I still think of that farmer, nearly 30 years later, whenever I hear presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Ron Paul condemn the Federal Reserve Bank as the root of all evil and its policies as unconstitutional. Maybe they don't know they're playing with fire. Maybe they do, and don't care.

Can British-Style Rioting Happen Here?

In this tumultuous year, the whole world seems to have taken to the streets, most recently in the seemingly mindless rioting that seized London and other British cities this month. This outpouring of wrath raises the obvious question: can it happen here, in America, or more specifically, in the stricken cities of the Midwest?

We would seem to be ripe for violence, or at least protest. The connecting key to the British demonstrations seems to be a feeling of hopelessness or despair among young people, badly educated and unemployed, who see no future at all in post-industrial cities like London. All older Midwestern cities, even relatively successful ones like Chicago, contain ghettoes of people, both black and white, for whom globalization and its glitter are rumors at best, obscene jokes at worst.

So the tinder is there. Whether it ignites is less certain. It may be worth our time to compare rioting in England and the conditions that sparked it with the economic and social conditions here.

Straws in the Wisconsin Wind

Wisconsin has voted, and the results are not good news for President Obama.

If Obama hopes for a surge of anger to swing vital Midwestern states back to him in the 2012 elections, Wisconsin made it clear that he has an uphill battle.  

In Tuesday's recall election, Democrats worked hard to mobilize voters' anger -- against Gov. Scott Walker, against budget cuts, against joblessness, against the Tea Party -- to unseat six of Walker's Republican supporters in the state Senate. If they couldn't recall all six, they at least had high hopes of getting rid of three of the Republicans and replacing them with Democrats. This would have given the Democrats control of the Senate, enabling them to block Walker's "radical Republican" agenda, as they put it.

It didn't work. The Democrats won two seats which, considering the stakes, is a moral victory at best. Republicans held on to four seats and, hence, the Senate.

Wisconsin voters are angry, no question. But in the election's aftermath, it's not clear who they're angry at.

Our Summer of Extreme Discontent

I have an op-ed article in the Chicago Tribune today, commenting on the turmoil in our politics, as shown in the recent debt ceiling debate and tying this dysfunction to our inability to understand or cope with growing globalization and the country’s relative decline. Click here to read the article.