The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

A College's Lesson for Midwestern Cities

All across the Midwest, virtually every town, city, county and state has its own economic development agency aimed at attracting investment, jobs and economic vitality. But most of these places aren’t getting the investment or jobs they need. The reason may be that their economic development agencies are dropping the ball.

Paying for the Great Lakes

The Great Lakes are literally the future of the upper Midwest. This is a region built on natural resources, on its fertile land and rich lodes of iron and coal. As the economic benefits of those resources dwindle, our future now relies on how we use our one remaining untapped resource. The Lakes are the greatest reservoir of fresh water on the planet, and reviving the Midwestern economy depends on whether we use them wisely and well.

Which is why a vote by an obscure subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representative threatened to pound a nail into the Midwestern coffin. Presumably driven by the budget-cutting madness in Washington, the House Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee voted to cut funds for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative by nearly 80 percent. It seems at least some will be restored, but we’ve been reminded that our economic future depends on the whims of Congressmen who wouldn’t know a Great Lakes if they fell in it.

New Leaders in Midwestern Cities

There’s a breeze of fresh air blowing through some of the Midwest’s most hard-hit old industrial towns. A new generation of leaders is taking over, bringing new thinking and new initiatives to cities that have had little but decline and despair in recent decades.

Some of these new leaders are mayors, bringing 21^st century attitudes to city halls dominated for years by party stalwarts or local businessmen and labor leaders who knew their towns but had no idea how to fit those towns into the new global economy. Others are bright young economic development officials, well-educated in their craft. Still others are hard-charging business people, like Detroit’s Dan Gilbert, single-handedly trying to turn their cities around.

Here Comes China, Bringing Money

China is sitting on $3.4 trillion (that’s trillion, with a T) in foreign exchange reserves, three times the stash of Japan, the only other global trillionaire. In the meantime, the U.S. economy badly needs more investment to put the recession behind it. And in the same meantime, American banks, which should be investing here, are keeping their money in the mattress, except to give top executives million-dollar bonuses.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to take money from where it is, which is China, and invest it where it’s needed, like the United States? Isn’t this the way the global economy is supposed to work? And wouldn’t we be grateful if it did?

Trapped Without a Haven in Tornado Alley

The American Gothic House still stands on the edge of the tiny town of Eldon, Iowa, just where it was in 1930 when  the artist Grant Wood made it the backdrop to his famous painting, American Gothic. When the Dibble family built the little house in 1881, they put a proper cellar beneath it. That’s what you did in those days, to store preserves and to have a place to hide when a tornado hit.

I thought of the American Gothic house while reading the news from Moore, Oklahoma, where a mile-wide tornado not only flattened the town but killed 20 people there. Ten of the victims were children, including seven students at a grade school named Plaza Towers. According to news reports, only 10 percent of the homes in Moore have a cellar or even an above-ground safe room. Plaza Towers Elementary had neither.

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.