The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Once Again, Labor Battles in Michigan

If you're going to kick someone when he's down, it's a good idea to make sure he'll stay down.

Over the howls of organized labor, the Republican majority in the Michigan legislature this week will pass right-to-work legislation. Until now, unions in unionized companies could require that all workers pay union dues as a condition of employment, to prevent them from getting a free ride on gains won by the unions. Right-to-work laws eliminate that requirement, leaving employees free to pay dues or not.

Business groups say right-to-work laws are a blow for worker freedom. Union supporters say they just weaken unions and should be known as right-to-work-for-less laws. The unions have a point: average wages in right-to-work states are usually lower than in states without these laws. 

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.

More Good Books from Iowa

I like to keep an eye on the literature of my native Iowa, from the baseball fantasias of W.P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy) to the heart-breaking explorations of small-town life by Marilynne Robinson (Home, Gilead.) Recently, I wrote here about the short stories of J. Harley McIlrath, who does for farms what Marilynne Robinson does for the small farming towns.

Two new books are out, one deeply felt, the other riotously over the top. Both deserve a mention and, for Midwestern readers, a place on the shelf.

Mary Swander is the poet laureate of Iowa and an Iowa State professor. In 2007, she dispatched a class around the state of Iowa to interview residents, mostly about environmental issues. As time passed, the focus on the environment developed into a panorama on farming and how it's changing. They interviewed successful farmers and unsuccessful farmers, farmers who had lost the farm, organic farmers, workers in the state's meatpacking plants, townies, a winery owner. All were part of the changing rural landscape.

After The Vote

Some post-election thoughts:

The solid Midwest abides, mostly. Nobody expected Indiana to stay in the Democratic column, where it landed in the Obama landslide four years ago, or Missouri to swing Democratic. But the other six Upper Midwest states voted again Tuesday for Barack Obama and three of them -- the swing states of Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin -- helped put the president over the top.

The four Great Plains states -- the two Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas -- remained solidly Republican, as expected.

The election provided a graphic demonstration of the basic split, economic and political, between the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest. Take a map and draw a vertical line from the Canadian border down through Minnesota and Iowa, passing somewhere to the west of the Twin Cities and Des Moines. Most of the region to the east is industrial, urban, more unionized and more likely to vote Democratic. Most of the region to the west is agricultural, rural, with a drier climate, more sparsely populated, more religious and more likely to vote Republican. 

In this split, we're seeing the decline of the west. The votes were close but Iowa and Minnesota, like most of the other Upper Midwest states, voted Democratic. Only Indiana, perhaps the least Midwestern of the Midwestern states, bucked the trend.

Pop Goes the Bubble

Yogi Berra has reminded us that "it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." With all respect for the Sage of St. Louis, I'm going to make a prediction that is sure to pan out. Here it is:

There is a big and growing bubble in farm land prices across the Midwest, and this bubble will pop, sooner or later. The result will be a rash of failed farms and rural misery.

We know this will happen because it's happened before, most recently thirty years ago. In the 1970s, a variety of factors -- mostly high grain prices -- sent farm land prices to record heights as farmers borrowed heavily to buy as much land as they could. Then, in the early 1980s, other factors -- mostly falling grain prices -- left many indebted farmers unable to pay their debts.

The result: thousands of Midwestern farms failed. Banks foreclosed. Many small rural banks, holding too many bad loans, also failed. Newspapers reported farmer suicides, even the murder of bankers by distraught farmers. Farm foreclosure sales became common social events. Most big farmers weathered the storm, but medium-sized farmers, whose debt soared by 250 percent in the 1970s, collapsed. Usually, they were bought by bigger farmers next door, accelerating the consolidation of Midwestern farming and the decline in rural population.

Managing Decline

(This is the last in a series of posts on globalization and social/economic decline in America.)

Great nations decline badly.

Through history, empires and mighty nations have declined messily from their peaks, often destroying themselves and their neighbors as they fall. China, once the world's most powerful nation, endured 300 years of poverty, war and humiliation, culminating in the madness of the Great Cultural Revolution, before entering its recent revival. The Arab world, which invented mathematics and much of medicine, remains sunk in centuries of ignorance and superstition. The European empires disappeared in two ruinous 20th century wars. Most recently, the Soviet empire has withered into a bitter, corrupt and still dangerous kernel.

Now it's America's turn.

Previous posts in this series have reported the decline in this nation's capacity to support its people economically and in its ability to project power abroad: this decline has been the subject of articles and books by other writers and is increasingly accepted as fact. But we went further in stating that this decline is irreversible, mostly because the global economy has enabled the great corporations and their leaders -- traditionally the drivers of America's economy -- to escape not only American law and regulations but any responsibility for the nation, its people and its future. Operating globally, they have stopped being American. The nation will carry on without them but it will be weakened, in decline.

The Cost of Decline

(This is the third in a series of posts on globalization and American decline.)

American decline, increasingly obvious across the nation's landscape, remains controversial. Is the United States declining absolutely, as the Roman Empire did? Is it only declining relatively -- that is, it's strong but other countries are catching up? Is this decline only temporary, something that will disappear when the recession ends and we get our mojo back?

These are important questions. The recession certainly will end. No country can remain the sole superpower forever. So will everything be OK, so long as we keep America strong and vital?

The truth is that American decline is neither temporary nor relative. It doesn't have anything to do with the recession and not much to do with China. Yes, the recession will end and China could collapse, as some pundits predict. Neither will affect the reality of American decline.

This decline can be measured in two basic ways. Both are happening now. There is no sign that either will be reversed.

The Face of Decline

(This is the second in a series of posts on American decline.)

American decline is the topic du jour, the subject of hundreds of op-eds and a shelf of books, as the evidence piles up of stagnant incomes, third-world inequalities, fleeing jobs and slipping standards in everything from education to pensions. 

Some pundits dispute the very notion of decline: after all, how shabby can a nation be that still has Silicon Valley and Wall Street, that remains the global powerhouse in arms and finance, that still draws foreign students to its universities and entrepreneurs to its cities? And besides, if we're lagging a bit right now, well hey folks, this is America. We can recoup. We can beat this challenge, just as we beat other challenges in the past. The sub-title of Thomas L. Friedman's latest book perfectly sums up this can-do spirit: "How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back."  

Maybe not. Not this time. This time is different. Our previous post explained why -- that the corporations and corporate leaders who must lead this comeback have gone global, and have abandoned any real interest in the condition of American society.

The Roots of Decline

(This is the first of several posts on the link between globalization and social and economic decline in the United States.)

The presidential election, now a month away, may or may not produce solutions to the immediate problems, such as the deficit, that ail us. But no matter which candidate wins, he won't be able to deal with the deeper problems -- the collapse of the American middle class, the vast inequalities between the rich and the rest, and the decline in this nation's ability to support its people.

The reason is globalization. The American economy, once mostly national, used to respond not only to national laws and regulations but to American ideas of economic decency -- the belief that the one true purpose of an economy is the well-being of the people who live within it. Now it has gone global. Neither old American regulations nor old American beliefs still apply.