Clad in a worn, tan work jacket a man in his late-forties stands hatless along the off-ramp of a state highway outside Bloomington, Indiana. He squints as bitter February winds chafe and redden his hands and ears. Motorists speed past and pay little attention to the man who holds a roughly hewn cardboard sign that reads the cliché, "Homeless, hungry, please help."
I call the man to my car from the roadside and yell over the din of traffic, "What happened?"
Approaching the car with humble solemnity, he confides, "More than I could say right now."
Pressing him further, he explains that he has been laid off from the saw mill in Odon, Indiana, a town about 50 miles southwest of where he stands now. His family, recently evicted, is at a shelter waiting for him to return with money, food, or the possibility of work.
As he spoke, he wrung his thick, callused hands, which testified to decades of hard labor. Without the opportunity to provide for his family, he had made a pilgrimage to Bloomington, Indiana -- home to Indiana University and a town of 69,000 residents when school is in session -- to find opportunities unavailable in his tiny hometown of Odon.
Before I could learn his name, the light changed from red to green, and I was swept away with the traffic stream into Bloomington's west side retail corridor. Determined to remember this man, I returned to my office at Ivy Tech, a nearby community college, and quickly scrawled the words "Odon Indiana" on a blue Post-It that I affixed to the bottom edge of my computer monitor.
At the end of April, I took a faculty release day and traveled to the town of Odon in hopes of finding this man or learning more about the town and the saw mill for which he had worked. Although I expected to find a town devastated by unemployment, I instead found signs that an economic recovery was slowly taking root in south central Indiana.
Odon, is located in Daviess County. A town of approximately 1400 residents, it is situated only about ten miles from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, the third largest naval installation in the world. Odon, originally named Clarksburg, was founded in 1835 and is home to one of the largest Amish and conservative Mennonite populations in the Midwest.
The town is visible from a distance, marked by an old water tower with the word "Odon" painted on it in the plainest of sans-serif fonts. It is gray and rust-free.
Unlike other small Indiana towns, Odon lacks a discernible town square. Instead, its northern edge features an optometrist and a Casey's General Store, a convenience store and gas station common throughout rural Indiana. Downtown has Main Street on which you will find the only grocery store, the public library, and one of only a few banks in town.
But like so many rural Indiana towns, Odon does exhibit one common trait: income inequality.
Pristinely manicured and landscaped houses sit adjacent to decaying frame houses from the 1920s. Moss clings in clumps to the roof of one house. Its walls tilt inward from decay and the force of vegetation slowly devouring it. Bare boards peek from behind the cracked paint that has long ago peeled and fallen away. But this house is not abandoned: the absence of broken windows and its makeshift drapery--a bed sheet slung across the bay window--let passersby know that this is someone's home. A few houses away, new cars gleam in the sunlight in front of all-brick, ranch-style homes.
This is an American town. Signs of patriotism are evident throughout. A wooden pallet leans against an ancient oak tree with its slats painted to mimic an American flag. Another house has an old out building painted with the American flag on all sides.
On the streets, people work. Two muscular young men shovel a pile of crusher run onto a driveway. The Jay-C grocery store bustles with customers and a horse drawn carriage is tethered to a length of pipe near the outskirts of the parking lot.
Outside the auto repair shop, a man in overalls leans against a wooden partition while two friends, eyes trained on cars, converse from folding chairs. One removes his hat and wipes his forehead dry with his shirtsleeve.
On the east side of the town sit ramshackle barns with cars from the early 50s in various states of rust. They sit parked half-tarped under ad hoc shelters made from loose timber and corrugated aluminum.
The south edge of the town is lined by immaculately kept Amish farms. Men in black pants and suspenders with white shirts guide plows through the earth by the power of four dark grey Percheron horses. Women in blue dresses and bonnets struggle against the wind to pin shirts, pants, and long-underwear to seemingly endless clotheslines. Passing in front of this scene, a tiny twelve year old boy steers a small carriage propelled by four massive horses which all but obscure him from sight.
Down the lumpy and uneven Gum Street, I find the Odon Saw Mill situated alongside railroad tracks dating from the nineteenth century. My car bounces clunkily over the tracks and along the western edge of the mill. Trucks piled high with cut logs from standing timber have pulled in and wait to be unloaded.
At the heart of the mill stands a large beige, sheet metal pole barn with a milling conveyor jutting out one side. Saw dust spews into the air and scrap lumber falls to the side as the most valuable cleanly milled wood is caught at the top by a worker. The gaunt worker wears a denim shirt and is smoking a cigarette that protrudes from a thick, dirty beard. His long hair is covered by a sweaty, blue baseball cap.
The saw mill, though largely devoid of people is bustling with activity. A small wooden shack with a carved wooden placard labeled "office" is surrounded by neatly stacked and bound pallets of sapwood. A robust man is his early twenties situates another pallet of this wood carefully into place with a forklift. His name is Gabe Swartzentruber, and he pauses briefly to speak with me.
Gabe has worked at the saw mill since he "was big enough to walk." The mill has been in his family for decades, or as he tells me, "I hate to say how many years."
I ask him about the man who I saw in Bloomington a few months before, but he explains that so many people were let go that it would be difficult to figure out who this person was.
"'Bout all I can tell you is at that time the Odon Saw Mill was pretty well shut down. I mean, yea, it was slow. The recession put the hurtin' on the lumber industry as far as that goes. That's why we laid some guys off."
Before the recession, the mill employed between 15 and 20 full-time employees. But Gabe explains that he was forced to eliminate all of these positions over the winter. But recently, things are starting to look up.
"Now, as far as now, it's picked up a little bit, but it still ain't near where it should be."
He explains that, "a lot of our lumber goes North, to Northern Indiana. A lot of it does. We sell cross ties for the railroads, and pallet boards--for like pallets, [people] use pallets to stack everything on."
The increasing demand for pallet boards suggests that businesses are moving more freight, one sign that the economy is on the mend.
Increasing orders have enabled him to bring five full-time workers back on. However, some of these workers are members of his immediate family, a brother and cousin.
"Basically all that's here right now is family."
Surprised to find the saw mill reopened and recovering from the recession, I headed downtown where I saw more signs of a recovery. The local newspaper, the Odon Journal, featured an advertisement for a job fair at Berry Plastics Corporation, a company with a manufacturing facility near Odon. Berry Plastics is an Indiana company that was founded in Evansville in 1967. They manufacture a variety of plastic products such as the plastic wrap used to wrap crackers, as well as, other products like painter's plastic and trash bags.
Arriving just before 1:00pm, the scheduled start time of the job fair, parking is difficult. Driving down an access road, I pull into the grass and walk with 30 other people who stream from pickup trucks and late-90s American made cars into the plant. The applicants I interview are largely underemployed rather than unemployed.
The personnel manager from Berry Plastics, Wayne Smith, speaks with me briefly. He evades questions about exactly how many workers he is planning to add in the near future, but is willing to tell me that he is "building his bench" in anticipation of increasing business.
I return to Bloomington with an anemic optimism about the future of the American economy. Back in the college classroom, many of my students are displaced workers from the surrounding communities.
A few days later, GM announces plans to invest $111 million dollars in the GM Powertrain manufacturing facility in Bedford, Indiana, another small Indiana town that has been hit hard by the recession. This new investment is expected to almost double the workforce at the facility. GM expects to create 245 additional jobs at the Bedford plant which currently employs around 350 workers.
This announcement is greeted with jubilation in the local press, but leaves me somewhat uneasy. After all, this GM facility in Bedford, at its peak, employed almost 10,000 workers. Today, it employs only three percent of that amount, and even after its announced investment, this number will only increase to five percent by 2013. Furthermore, given GM's track record, this announcement could have just as easily been a plant closing rather than an expansion. Whether GM, GE, or Wal-Mart, communities across America know that the fealty they offer transnational corporations is often not reciprocated.
A full recovery may come, but Odon teaches us that a sustainable recovery is more likely to occur when corporations re-learn the value of taking root in the communities in which they operate.
At the saw mill, Gabe explained that local farm and carpentry work has kept many afloat during the recession. The saw mill his family operates is a foundational institution enmeshed in Odon's past and present. When times are hard, they shut down temporarily, but they have never left Odon. Likewise, Berry Plastics is an Indiana company that continues to invest locally and support the Indiana economy.
Can America return to an indigenous economy?
International trade needs to be managed so as to enhance living standards in developing countries while not sacrificing living standards domestically. Our current disgracefully corrupt government, however, has zero interest in managing anything to the benefit of the average American. It has been bought by profiteers who are making billions off of cheap offshore labor at the expense of the rest of us.
How do you expect others to understand when you don't. Our current disgracefully corrupt government, you say. Were you as aware of this trend back during the 80s as you are now? Not to brag, but I was, I saw it begin when Reagan took over and all of a sudden Businesses were closing just so that they could kill a union. They had fixed the law so that if a Unionized Business closed and sold to someone else, then the new owner was by law not required to keep the union or allow a new one to form. It started with killing unions and then evolved to the frequent buying and selling of Businesses so as to consolidate them into monopolies. Hostile takeovers became the rage. Men like T. Boone Pickens were part of this. Eventually they moved their plants out of the Country under the Nafta that Clinton put into effect. Then they rid themselves of Glass-Steagall and we were essentially sunk as a people. Betrayed by the Corporations, who as the writer said, expected our fealty but gave us none in return. We never should have traded our self sufficiency for convenience, but we did and now we are paying for it.
The article mentions the Amish. What are they doing right that the rest of us are not?
Small self-sufficient communities is my guess. Perhaps we can learn something from them.
I am, however, struck by the potential of globalism. Within the last 50 years or so, we've been able to get a visceral sense of Earth as a fragile little marble spinning in space. During the same time, a global economic order--unjust and unbalanced though it be--has made Earth's people gain a glimmer of what it could mean to be a trans-national global species.
We know that Earth is one seamless mass, but we remained mired in nationalist thinking that prevents appropriate cooperation and coordination of Earth's people, land and sea to mitigate and reduce environmental and social horrors--oil spill, tribal wars, inequity, global warming., species extinction, loss of forests, etc, etc. So how can we be more locally rooted while being more globally minded? Surely, these represent two sides of single coin.
Seamless in terms of climate, surely. Also, ecological niches merge into each other in ways quite independent of national borders. One of the ways in which humans destroy the environment is by inserting geopolitical barriers where they destroy the lives of other species.
Will it? Who knows -- maybe eventually after everything collapses.
As consumerism grows in these emerging markets the US and it's citizens hold less appeal to the corporate world. As American's ability to consume wanes, they are no longer considered as valuble as the emerging growth markets. Corporations have no ties to a country or it's communities. Their sole reason for being is to increase their profit for their shareholders.
I do agree with supporting and buying local goods and service suppliers and do so when considering every thing we need to purchase. I am willing to pay more and I do, but to think we can bring back the jobs and liveable wages is not realistic. It will take new industries producing high value products that require highly skilled workers to re-establish a dynamic and growing economy in the US. Germany which exports more $ than the US would be good example.
I think that it is very ironic that you chose Berry Plastics as an example of Indigenous Economy. This Company is actually controlled by a consortium led by Apollo Management (a private equity shop controlled by Leon Black originally from Drexel Burnham)....
Prior owner was Goldman Sachs merchant banking division (it looks like they still maintain a small stake). I believe Apollo bought them out of bankruptcy thus saving the Company, and Indiana jobs.
However, my point is that Berry has not chosen (up to this point) to close and relocate these facilities to another location. In fact, they work closely with the economic development commission of Daviess County and are heavily invested in both local communities. Additionally, their products are featured prominently at area retailers which give residents the opportunity to purchase locally manufactured goods.
To this point, they have demonstrated the type of corporate responsibility (at least the Berry Division in Southern Indiana) that has helped Daviess County have the lowest unemployment rate in Indiana.
Unfortunately, we are all hooked on technology, which we buy with credit, which was the smartest thing the oligarchs did to make middle-class America beholden to them for all time. The America that I grew up in is gone for good, and the wage-slaves are too busy trying to keep their heads above water to try and do anything about it.
Peace
so, while your may think that it is an 'on its face lie' ( i know, not as cool as the latin), the truth is far simpler, protect american, let the rest of the world wither. for some reason the rest of the world over populates their resources and we are responsible to include them in sharing the wealth.
super cool, right ?
Yes we can but not if we buy our stuff from multinational giants. We must re-learn to buy from the local economy around us. If you can't find what you are looking for continue looking outward in ever increasing concentric circles. I bet you you will find what you are looking for long before you buy something made in China.
Prepare to pay slightly more for something made by your neighbor in comparison to something made by slave labor abroad. Your money will circulate around your area instead of disappearing into the coffers of Wall Street banksters and absentee capital owners in faraway locations where you are not a human being but a numeric abstraction with which they can deal with as much care as Nazis dealt with those targeted for extermination.
The only solution for our problems is a vibrant local economy. The problem is that scarcity of money controlled by the thieving Fed will always prevent a local economy from emerging. That is why we need to invent our own local currencies which will act as the medium of exchange for our real local economic activity.
I know of an attempt, around five years ago, to do this in the Palo Alto area , but never followed up to see the results. My sense of it is that it failed. I didn't believe at the time that it would succeed, but am a little more of the appropriate mindset now. If it ever gets off the ground, it's got to be in sync with a community's mindset and lifestyle. As an abstract, even if sensible, concept, I fear it won't go over.
Of course we can,... the better question is,.. When will America smarten up, stop putting up with businesses that outsource good paying jobs to other countries so their CEOs can get a bigger bonus this year, and chose to return to an indigenous economy?
1. I decided to buy a Ford and a Chevy
2. Move my money to a small community bank.
3. Shop more in the community.
4. Help my community by doing more projects
5. Stop buying ARCO gas
6. Turn the lights off when ever I can
7. Replace my garden with cactus
8. Teach my kids the values we seemed to have lost
9. Spend more time outside instead of the movies
Although that does at least partially fit into your point #3.