To the cleaners
Fifty degrees in May is worse than 10 below in January. Like many Midwesterners, I'm stuck inside today, and I can barely feel my fingers as I continue to mistype through today's entry. Please forgive any published typos or rude opinions that may have been stewed by such a foul mood.---
The Iowa Economic Development Board is weighing Governor Tom Vilsack's proposal to grant $10 million to the city of Newton to help lure a new large business to town and cushion the blow of 1,800 lost jobs with the closing of the Maytag plant on Thursday. What a marvelous illustration of the lack of foresight of all involved.
Newton is-- or was-- a company town (Maytag was by far its largest employer,) and, like so many other company towns across the U.S. the last two decades, has now been hung out to dry by the utter fallibility of our nation's corporate economic structure. Maytag washer/dryer's new parent company, Whirlpool, not surprisingly, felt no sense of obligation to the workers, families, and community that made Maytag what it was for a century. Twenty-seven hundred other jobs are being cut across the country, in Michigan, Illinois, and Arkansas, as Whirlpool shutters the entire Maytag division, and Whirlpool's Hoover and Dixie-Narco acquisitions/divisions probably soon to follow.
Meanwhile, the Republicrats in Des Moines, not to mention Washington, D.C., where global trade policy is actually written (by corporate lobbyists)-- continue to do what they do best-- brace for any short-term political fallout, having to add out-of-work factory employees and other disgruntled laborers to the list of people they need to bribe with taxpayer money to hold their power.
We can end the cancerous economic cycle in our state by, first, demolishing the corporatists' Iowa Values Fund, a staggering earmark of tax dollars to the bribery of companies with absentee ownership for relocation to a state once dominated by small family farms and businesses, and not coincidentally, thriving small communities as well-- communities that respected our land and our core principles, and who conspired to fund civic assets and public education. Give our money back to the people who actually live here, raise their families here, and who would be willing to, quite literally, sign up for a long-term financial commitment to the state, worker accountability, and for the community reinvestment of a portion of their profits. A policy of drastic tax incentives to real entrepreneurs and these civic champions-- the educated and the socially-conscious-- would be worth every red cent, and the Democrats and Republicans could stop shoveling good money after bad into the canyon of greed and waste they've conspired to create.
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When I get mad, I get empowered. And breathy.
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There hasn't been anything good in the movie theaters in three months.
And that's another industry that's been destroyed by the corporate mindset.
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I felt a warm sense of pride yesterday when I heard that my former employer, Qwest Communications, had refused to go along with the National Security Agency's program of warrantless wiretapping-- the only one of the four former Ma Bell telephone companies to do so. Former CEO Joseph Nacchio denied government requests when he determined that they weren't pursuing "any legal process" in their efforts. Still, I expect nothing less of a privately-held company given full financial control over a communications network built by and operated with public funds for roughly a century. And they should still throw the book at him for insider trading.
posted by CM @ 3:20 PM
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