The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Frost on Global Markets

Across the farmlands of the Midwest, global warming just got mixed with globalization. The result shapes up as a strange and contentious year with a potential impact on food prices around the globe.

As every Midwesterner knows, we're living through a weird spring. A relatively dry winter was followed by temperatures which soared into the 70s in March and stayed there. In Chicago, trees that stay bare through April sprouted leaves in March. On fruit farms, apricot and other trees flowered three to four weeks ahead of schedule.

For many corn farmers, the balmy climate provided a temptation too strong to resist. Some played it safe, delaying planting until late April, to get past the frequent April frosts. But early planting can extend the growing season and produce a bigger crop later on, so many farmers were in the fields in March, a month ahead of schedule. By mid-April, fully 59 percent of the Illinois corn crop had already been planted, compared to only 10 percent last year and 17 percent in a normal year.

The Outsourcing of Santa Claus

Many Midwestern cities see their post-industrial future in a combination of health care, education and high-end manufacturing. They may be chasing an impossible dream.

This is a conclusion drawn from recent studies that argue that manufacturing -- high-end or not -- isn't coming back, at least as a major source of jobs, while growth in jobs in health care and education is going to slow down or stop, mostly because the governments that fund it are deeply in debt.

For many Midwestern cities, this is like telling them there's no Santa Claus.

A To-Do List for the G8 Summiteers

Here's a modest proposal for the leaders assembling in May at the G8 summit and, a month later, at the G20 summit in Mexico: rethink and reform the global economy.

Somebody has to do it. About 20 years ago, nations -- including the ones at the G8 summit -- controlled their own national economies and made them work for the people who lived within them. It wasn't perfect, but it was as fair as any economic system in history.

Then globalization enabled those economies to go global. The major players and forces -- financial markets, big corporations, trade flows -- escaped national boundaries and sailed off into a global economy, where no national government, nor its rules and regulations, could follow.

In this global economy, the laws that force corporations to be good citizens -- to pay taxes, bargain with employees, respect the environment, support their communities -- too often can no longer be enforced. Any company that wants to avoid these laws has a choice, which is to go somewhere else where these laws don't exist. As we've seen, that's exactly what they've been doing.

A Revival in Middletown

Muncie, Indiana, is an interesting place, for both historical and modern reasons. It became famous in the 1920s as the subject of Middletown, a classic sociological study of a typical American industrial city. Today, it's too often held up as the example of a typical industrial city when the industry goes away.

Now, Muncie is trying to face the future and change its luck. I was there recently to take part in programs centered on the Muncie Action Plan, a long (51 pages) and detailed (47 proposed actions) drawn up over the past two years by many (2,000 people) of Muncie's citizens, all aimed at revitalizing their town.

This is important, for symbolic and other reasons. Muncie really is typical of tattered old Midwestern industrial cities. It has 70,000 people. It's home to a big university, Ball State, that like too many Midwestern colleges and universities, has never played the role in town that it should. It gave birth to some major corporations -- Ball Glass and Borg-Warner, among others. It has lost these corporations, plus the civic leadership they provided, plus the jobs they supported, plus the prosperity they generated and, especially, plus a whole generation of young people who would have worked there and are either unemployed now or long gone to other places with jobs.

In other words, if Muncie can fight back from its post-industrial doldrums, this gives more hope to many other Midwestern cities that are trying to do the same.