The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A Global Revolt Against Globalization

Recent travels have taken me to two places that would seem to have almost nothing in common – southeastern Iowa and England. Southeastern Iowa is centered on Ottumwa, an old manufacturing and mining town that is struggling to make its way in the post-industrial world. England, of course, is centered on London, which may be the glitziest, most dynamic city anywhere.

But I found in both places a growing resentment, even a fear. It’s a fear of a new, complicated, globalizing world that many people don’t understand and don’t much like. Basically, I think, it’s a feeling that they are losing control of their lives.

Saving Detroit

A Detroit business man with immensely deep pockets and an equally deep love for his town, has taken it upon himself to rebuild the blighted heart of that tragic city. Dan Gilbert is putting his money where his heart is, but his project, called Opportunity Detroit, raises both hope and questions.

Does a city without a vibrant center have a future? But is a vibrant center enough to revive a virtually moribund city? What is the relation between the business-dominated core of a city and the largely working class people outside it? More to the point, can even Dan Gilbert save Detroit?

Electrolux Comes and Goes -- A Midwestern Story

This week’s posting calls attention to two good stories from NPR on manufacturing in America, where it’s going and how this affects the Midwest. Both focus on Electrolux, the global corporation based in Sweden which has had an outside impact on industrial life in the Midwest.

Both stories are by a reporter named Andrea Hsu. The first, which is good news, more or less, tells about the opening of an Electrolux factory in Memphis, Tennessee. It will create a lot of jobs, 1,200 of them, most of them shifted from a plant near Montreal, in Canada. The job descriptions which Electrolux has posted on the web don’t give salaries, but Hsu says they’ll be about one-third less on average than the $19 per hour it’s been paying workers in Montreal. 

Memphis and Tennessee offered Electrolux a package of $188 million in subsidies and incentives (also called bribes) to move to Memphis. That works out to about $156,000 per worker for each job created. That figure is about five times the average wage. In other words, Tennessee taxpayers have picked up the first five years of Electrolux’s payroll there.

An Overgrowth of Democracy

Spring is late coming to the Midwest this year, but democracy is blooming in Illinois. Most of the state is to hold township elections on April 9 to elect some of the most redundant and least useful public officials in American politics.

Personally, I could do with more tulips and fewer townships.

The Irish And Other Immigrants

Not all illegal immigrants into the U.S. are Mexican and there’s more to immigration law reform than getting the Hispanic vote.

I learned this at a program in Chicago sponsored by an organization called Ireland Network Chicago, or IN-Chicago, where the fervor for reform matched that at any gathering in the city’s Mexican neighborhoods.

There are some 50,000 undocumented Irish in the United States, according to the best estimates, most in New York, Chicago and other major cities. There may be as many as 70,000 undocumented Poles in Chicago alone. Altogether, the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country include no less than 650,000 European citizens.

Bringing the World to the Midwest

Chicago and the Midwest may be tired of being called the “flyover territory,” but it’s true. Legions of Europeans and Asians who vacation in the United States call regularly at New York, Washington, San Francisco, especially Orlando, but seem unaware that Chicago and its vast inland empire even exist.

Chicago, at long last, is showing signs of doing something about this. It’s time for the rest of the Midwest to do the same.

Saving Detroit

For years now, the question has been: What in the world do you do with Detroit? Or: Does Detroit have a future? Or put it another way: Should Detroit have a future, or should this poor, empty, echoing, poverty-stricken, job-bereft shell of a city simply be allowed to decay, to become one of history's cast-offs, of interest only to future archaeologists curious about the Midwestern industrial age and where it ended?

For Detroiters, this is no academic question, and so they've come up with an answer. It's called "Detroit Future City," a painstakingly compiled plan, 184 pages long, written by a planning team appointed by Mayor Dave Bing, laying out what Detroit should -- or must -- do if it's going to survive.

Now the fighting begins. The Detroit Works Long-Term Planning Team, which did the report, stresses that, so far, it's a set of recommendations, not diktats. It plans public programs and other fora aimed at persuading Detroiters -- both residents and politicians -- to buy into it. Given Detroit's dysfunctional politics, this is an uphill slog.

The New Paper Trail

Paper is in the Midwestern news these days -- specifically the paper grown, pulped and produced from forests and mills in states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. Most of this news, alas, isn't good, because it describes a once mighty industry under assault from digital technology and (like so many other Midwestern industries) China.

If there's a silver lining here, it's that some of this paper is going to put out newspapers like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Neither paper is immune to the financial problems plaguing the American press, but both still employ first-rate reporters and are willing to give them the time, money and space to do stories on the economic forces transforming the economies of their states.

The Skills Gap Explained

There is a mystery at the heart of Midwestern manufacturing. As the recession ebbs, manufacturing in the Midwest is growing. But the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen and stays low. There are a lot of manufacturing workers who want work. But manufacturing executives say they have empty jobs and can't find workers to fill them.

This is a mystery that has to be solved. It's called the "skills gap" -- the idea that there are good jobs available but few skilled workers. The future of manufacturing and education both depends on finding out whether manufacturing is going to be part of the Midwest economy, and how many people it will employ.

Going Blue in the Driftless Area

By now, everyone is familiar with those post-election maps of the United States, showing most of the nation a bright red, solidly Republican, speckled with some small blue dots, where Democrats dwell. It looks like an overwhelmingly Republican country, but Democrats dominate, as they did last week, because the blue dots are cities, where people live. The red vastnesses are more rural, with fewer voters and more empty space.

But there are some exceptions, splotches of blue in rural, less-populated areas, Democratic outposts where you wouldn't expect them, Obama bastions unexplained by cities or university towns. Some of these are in New England, naturally, but also a patch in northern Montana, a swath along the Mississippi River between Mississippi and Arkansas, a Democratic stronghold in the iron range north of Duluth, where Minnesota juts out over Lake Superior.

And then there's one true curiosity -- a cluster of mostly rural counties and small towns in southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois. This also happens to fit exactly with a region called the Driftless Area, a four-state region around the Mississippi River. It's called the Driftless Area because the glaciers that flattened most of the rest of the Midwest gave it a pass, leaving a lovely hilly area carved by rivers, home to small farms and little towns.