Two Americas
11-20-2009, 12:30 PM
Digging around at Bageant's site this morning. This is a great find.
First, this article about the global assault on farmers by the investor class:
The New Farm Owners
Corporate Investors Lead the Rush for Control over Overseas Farmland
by GRAIN
With all the talk about "food security," and distorted media statements like "South Korea leases half of Madagascar's land,"1 it may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today's global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations. So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies are the ones getting control of the land. And their interests are simply not the same as those of governments.
[div class="excerpt"]"This is going to be a private initiative."
- Amin Abaza, Egypt's Minister of Agriculture, explaining Egyptian farmland acquisitions in other African nations, on World Food Day 2009 [/quote]
Take one example. In August 2009, the government of Mauritius, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, got a long-term lease for 20,000 ha of good farmland in Mozambique to produce rice for the Mauritian market. This is outsourced food production, no question. But it is not the government of Mauritius, on behalf of the Mauritian people, that is going to farm that land and ship the rice back home. Instead, the Mauritian Minister of Agro Industry immediately sub-leased the land to two corporations, one from Singapore (which is anxious to develop the market for its proprietary hybrid rice seeds in Africa) and one from Swaziland (which specialises in cattle production, but is also involved in biofuels in southern Africa).2 This is typical. And it means that we should not be blinded by the involvement of states. Because at the end of the day, what the corporations want will be decisive. And they have a war chest of legal, financial and political tools to assist them.
[div class="excerpt"] "What started as a government drive to secure cheap food resource has now become a viable business model and many Gulf companies are venturing into agricultural investments to diversify their portfolios."
- Sarmad Khan, "Farmland investment fund is seeking more than Dh1bn", The National, Dubai, 12 September 2009[/quote]
Moreover, there's a tendency to assume that private-sector involvement in the global land grab amounts to traditional agribusiness or plantation companies, like Unilever or Dole, simply expanding the contract farming model of yesterday. In fact, the high-power finance industry, with little to no experience in farming, has emerged as a crucial corporate player. So much so that the very phrase "investing in agriculture", today's mantra of development bureaucrats, should not be understood as automatically meaning public funds. It is more and more becoming the business of ... big business.
The role of finance capital
GRAIN has tried to look more closely at who the private sector investors currently taking over farmlands around the world for offshore food production really are. From what we have gathered, the role of finance capital -- investment funds and companies -- is truly significant. We have therefore constructed a table to share this picture. The table outlines over 120 investment structures, most of them newly created, which are busy acquiring farmland overseas in the aftermath of the financial crisis.3 Their engagement, whether materialised or targeted, rises into the tens of billions of dollars. The table is not exhaustive, however. It provides only a sample of the kinds of firms or instruments involved, and the levels of investment they are aiming for.
Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors' perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.
[div class="excerpt"]"We are not farmers. We are a large company that uses state-of-the-art technology to produce high-quality soybean. The same way you have shoemakers and computer manufacturers, we produce agricultural commodities." Laurence Beltrão Gomes of SLC Agrícola, the largest farm company in Brazil [/quote]
But it's not just about land, it's about production. Investors are convinced that they can go into Africa, Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc to consolidate holdings, inject a mix of technology, capital and management skills, lay down the infrastructures and transform below-potential farms into large-scale agribusiness operations. In many cases, the goal is to generate revenue streams both from the harvests and from the land itself, whose value they expect to go up. It is a totally corporate version of the Green Revolution, and their ambitions are big. "My boss wants to create the first Exxon Mobil of the farming sector," said Joseph Carvin of Altima Partners' One World Agriculture Fund to a gathering of global farmland investors in New York in June 2009. No wonder, then, that governments, the World Bank and the UN want to be associated with this. But it is not their show.
From rich to richer
[div class="excerpt"]"I'm convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time. Eventually, of course, food prices will get high enough that the market probably will be flooded with supply through development of new land or technology or both, and the bull market will end. But that's a long ways away yet."
- George Soros, June 2009[/quote]
Today's emerging new farm owners are private equity fund managers, specialised farmland fund operators, hedge funds, pension funds, big banks and the like. The pace and extent of their appetite is remarkable - but unsurprising, given the scramble to recover from the financial crisis. Consolidated data are lacking, but we can see that billions of dollars are going into farmland acquisitions for a growing number of "get rich quick" schemes. And some of those dollars are hard-earned retirement savings of teachers, civil servants and factory workers from countries such as the US or the UK. This means that a lot of ordinary citizens have a financial stake in this trend, too, whether they are aware of it or not.
It also means that a new, powerful lobby of corporate interests is coming together, which wants favourable conditions to facilitate and protect their farmland investments. They want to tear down burdensome land laws that prevent foreign ownership, remove host-country restrictions on food exports and get around any regulations on genetically modified organisms. For this, we can be sure that they will be working with their home governments, and various development banks, to push their agendas around the globe through free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and donor conditionalities.
[div class="excerpt"] "When asked whether a transfer of foreign, 'superior', agricultural technology would be welcome compensation for the acquisition of Philippine lands, the farmers from Negros Occidental responded with a general weariness and unequivocal retort that they were satisfied with their own knowledge and practices of sustainable, diverse and subsistence-based farming. Their experience of high-yielding variety crops, and the chemical-intensive technologies heralded by the Green Revolution, led them to the conclusion that they were better off converting to diverse, organic farming, with the support of farmer-scientist or member organisations such as MASIPAG and PDG Inc."
- Theodora Tsentas, "Foreign state-led land acquisitions and neocolonialism: A qualitative case study of foreign agricultural development in the Philippines", September 2009[/quote]
Indeed, the global land grab is happening within the larger context of governments, both in the North and the South, anxiously supporting the expansion of their own transnational food and agribusiness corporations as the primary answer to the food crisis. The deals and programmes being promoted today all point to a restructuring and expansion of the industrial food system, based on capital-intensive large-scale monocultures for export markets. While that may sound "old hat", several things are new and different. For one, the infrastructure needs for this model will be dealt with. (The Green Revolution never did that.) New forms of financing, as our table makes plain, are also at the base of it. Thirdly, the growing protagonism of corporations and tycoons from the South is also becoming more important. US and European transnationals like Cargill, Tyson, Danone and Nestlé, which once ruled the roost, are now being flanked by emerging conglomerates such as COFCO, Olam, Savola, Almarai and JBS.4 A recent report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development pointed out that a solid 40% of all mergers and acquisitions in the field of agricultural production last year were South-South.5 To put it bluntly, tomorrow's food industry in Africa will be largely driven by Brazilian, ethnic Chinese and Arab Gulf capital.
Exporting food insecurity
Given the heavy role of the private sector in today's land grabs, it is clear that these firms are not interested in the kind of agriculture that will bring us food sovereignty. And with hunger rising faster than population growth, it will not likely do much for food security, either. One farmers' leader from Synérgie Paysanne in Benin sees these land grabs as fundamentally "exporting food insecurity". For they are about answering some people's needs - for maize or money - by taking food production resources away from others. He is right, of course. In most cases, these investors are themselves not very experienced in running farms. And they are bound, as the Coordinator of MASIPAG in the Philippines sees it, to come in, deplete the soils of biological life and nutrients through intensive farming, pull out after a number of years and leave the local communities with "a desert".
[div class="excerpt"] "Entire communities have been dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of foreign investors. (...) Land must remain a community heritage in Africa."
- N'Diogou Fall, ROPPA (West African Network of Producers and Peasant Organisations), June 2009[/quote]
The talk about channelling this sudden surge of dollars and dirhams into an agenda for resolving the global food crisis could be seen as quirky if it were not downright dangerous. From the United Nations headquarters in New York to the corridors of European capitals, everyone is talking about making these deals "win-win". All we need to do, the thinking goes, is agree on a few parameters to moralise and discipline these land grab deals, so that they actually serve local communities, without scaring investors off. The World Bank even wants to create a global certification scheme and audit bureau for what could become "sustainable land grabbing", along the lines of what's been tried with oil palm, forestry or other extractive industries.
Before jumping on the bandwagon of "win-win", it would be wise to ask "With whom? Who are the investors? What are their interests?" It is hard to believe that, with so much money on the line, with so much accumulated social experience in dealing with mass land concessions and conversions in the past, whether from mining or plantations, and given the central role of the finance and agribusiness industries here, these investors would suddenly play fair. Just as hard to believe is that governments or international agencies would suddenly be able to hold them to account.
[div class="excerpt"] "Some companies are interested in buying agricultural land for sugar cane and then selling it on the international markets. It's business, nothing more"
Sharad Pawar, India's Minister of Agriculture, rejecting claims that his government is supporting a new colonisation of African farmland, 28 June 2009[/quote]
Making these investments work is simply not the right starting point. Supporting small farmers efforts for real food sovereignty is. Those are two highly polarised agendas and it would be mistaken to pass off one for the other. It is crucial to look more closely at who the investors are and what they really want. But it is even more important to put the search for solutions to the food crisis on its proper footing.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/15-5
This exchange between Joe and a reader is talking about when that was happening right here. It also gives a lot of insight into why poor and rural whites are are so susceptible to the pitch from Limbaugh and Hannity and Palin and Bush, why they yearn for "the good old days," and why they are angry and blame liberals for everything.
American literature has abandoned poor whites
Dear Joe,
First of all, please, I apologize my poor English. I'm writing to you from Spain where we have a very deficient education system and a natural tendency to fail on learning foreign languages.
Now, after being intentionally modest, I have to say that I'm an avid reader of your work and that your Deer Hunting with Jesus has been an inspiration for my end of graduate essay, a kind of a small thesis. The subject of my essay is the relation between literature (and also popular culture in general) and America's white underclass. The main idea is to see which image of the white low classes is being exported from the US and how, for example, Europeans like me receive it.
On literature I found out that during the first half of the Twentieth Century, American authors used to talk about the poor whites, especially the most representative novelist of that era (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Caldwell). So, there was a quite general interest on portraying that reality from the canonic literature. But, after the forties, this interest seems to vanish (at least as a major theme.
As I said before, this is about the foreign reception of American literature). So, my essay took a new turn and now I'm trying to find the reasons of the loss of interest in the poor whites. Is it because is something that is wanted to be ignored? What happened that make the Joads from “Grapes of Wrath" (being an epic image of endurance in front of social injustice) turn into Clethus from "The Simpsons" (a mere caricature, the image of a "loser")?
Well, I just thought that maybe you can give some clues or just your opinion about that, from your inner view as an American and as a journalist. (I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong, this is all bullshit and I have to rewrite my whole essay.) Anyway, thanks a lot for just reading this e-mail and please, keep writing on your blog, we're following it from far away.
Yours sincerely,
Pol
------
Pol,
I have wondered about that very thing myself since the middle 1970s. As far as I can tell, there are any number of factors at work. Here are some thoughts, a sort of chronology:.
-- The Dust Bowl made the plight of displaced and poor rural whites unavoidable. They rose in the public consciousness during the Great Depression, thanks to sensitive writers, artists, etc. and in no small part due to the Roosevelt administrations' funding of writers and artists to document American society and the times. Making work for the arts benefited us all. Back then, everything that made it into the media, be it print or other, did not have to turn a corporate profit to be produced or published.
-- World War II created boom times for urban America. Some of the white rural poor moved toward the cities and the jobs.
-- After the war 22 million rural Americans were pushed off farms by government and corporate planning so they could work in industry. They did not rush happily toward The New American lifestyle, as portrayed in the official national storyline. Nearly all white rural soldiers surveyed in 1945 said they wanted to return to their family farms or rural homes. Neither corporate America nor the administration wanted to see the wartime prosperity (profits) end. The best way to accomplish that was to put rural Americans into the industrial work force. Once they were migrated to the cities and towns and working in industrial production, they provided two things. Cheap labor and a market for industrial products. Before the war 45% of Americans lived on small farms. Ten years after the war less than 10% lived on farms.
-- However, rural Americans were poorly educated.The U.S. government census considered a fourth grade education to be literate at the time. More than a quarter of the rural migrants did not even meet that standard. They suffered from poor education because the oligarchies at the local, regional and state level did not want to pay taxes for schools, particularly in the south. The cities had long ago embraced public education.
-- These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass. Their children and grandchildren have added to the numbers of this underclass, probably in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 million people now. They outnumber all other poor and working poor groups, black, Hispanics, immigrants.
-- Because they are not concentrated in given neighborhoods, etc., they are pretty much invisible as a group in America. But because they are nevertheless encountered individually in society, we get representations of them as the hillbilly or white trash next door. Or the redneck stereotype as the butt of humor -- the people whose social skills do not resemble what is supposed to be the white Anglo norm. And in truth, they do not conform to the middle class behavior models presented by the media and the Corporate States of America as examples for approved societal behavior. They are not obsessed with their credit scores, they are always in the informal mode, they are rule breakers, and in short, they do not behave like property of the state. So they are useful as a bad example. Usually they are portrayed as having a southern accent, which for good reason is associated with a lack of education and sophistication.
-- However, because they cannot be encountered in aggregated numbers, they cannot be seen by the rest of America as a distinct culture. Only as nonconforming individuals as an object of ridicule. And in a sense, fear. Because what is left of the middle class is afraid of falling into that white underclass.
Which brings us back to the subject of the poor white underclass not being represented in America literature.
What literature? All I see these days is shallow crap. Real literature help us understand the world and the human condition. Obviously, that is no longer America's cup of tea.
I could write much more on the topic, but it's complex. So this is the best distillation I can do in an email.
In art and labor,
Joe
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/09/american-literature-has-abandoned-poor-whites.html
First, this article about the global assault on farmers by the investor class:
The New Farm Owners
Corporate Investors Lead the Rush for Control over Overseas Farmland
by GRAIN
With all the talk about "food security," and distorted media statements like "South Korea leases half of Madagascar's land,"1 it may not be evident to a lot of people that the lead actors in today's global land grab for overseas food production are not countries or governments but corporations. So much attention has been focused on the involvement of states, like Saudi Arabia, China or South Korea. But the reality is that while governments are facilitating the deals, private companies are the ones getting control of the land. And their interests are simply not the same as those of governments.
[div class="excerpt"]"This is going to be a private initiative."
- Amin Abaza, Egypt's Minister of Agriculture, explaining Egyptian farmland acquisitions in other African nations, on World Food Day 2009 [/quote]
Take one example. In August 2009, the government of Mauritius, through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, got a long-term lease for 20,000 ha of good farmland in Mozambique to produce rice for the Mauritian market. This is outsourced food production, no question. But it is not the government of Mauritius, on behalf of the Mauritian people, that is going to farm that land and ship the rice back home. Instead, the Mauritian Minister of Agro Industry immediately sub-leased the land to two corporations, one from Singapore (which is anxious to develop the market for its proprietary hybrid rice seeds in Africa) and one from Swaziland (which specialises in cattle production, but is also involved in biofuels in southern Africa).2 This is typical. And it means that we should not be blinded by the involvement of states. Because at the end of the day, what the corporations want will be decisive. And they have a war chest of legal, financial and political tools to assist them.
[div class="excerpt"] "What started as a government drive to secure cheap food resource has now become a viable business model and many Gulf companies are venturing into agricultural investments to diversify their portfolios."
- Sarmad Khan, "Farmland investment fund is seeking more than Dh1bn", The National, Dubai, 12 September 2009[/quote]
Moreover, there's a tendency to assume that private-sector involvement in the global land grab amounts to traditional agribusiness or plantation companies, like Unilever or Dole, simply expanding the contract farming model of yesterday. In fact, the high-power finance industry, with little to no experience in farming, has emerged as a crucial corporate player. So much so that the very phrase "investing in agriculture", today's mantra of development bureaucrats, should not be understood as automatically meaning public funds. It is more and more becoming the business of ... big business.
The role of finance capital
GRAIN has tried to look more closely at who the private sector investors currently taking over farmlands around the world for offshore food production really are. From what we have gathered, the role of finance capital -- investment funds and companies -- is truly significant. We have therefore constructed a table to share this picture. The table outlines over 120 investment structures, most of them newly created, which are busy acquiring farmland overseas in the aftermath of the financial crisis.3 Their engagement, whether materialised or targeted, rises into the tens of billions of dollars. The table is not exhaustive, however. It provides only a sample of the kinds of firms or instruments involved, and the levels of investment they are aiming for.
Private investors are not turning to agriculture to solve world hunger or eliminate rural poverty. They want profit, pure and simple. And the world has changed in ways that now make it possible to make big money from farmland. From the investors' perspective, global food needs are guaranteed to grow, keeping food prices up and providing a solid basis for returns on investment for those who control the necessary resource base. And that resource base, particularly land and water, is under stress as never before. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, so-called alternative investments, such as infrastructure or farmland, are all the rage. Farmland itself is touted as providing a hedge against inflation. And because its value doesn't go up and down in sync with other assets like gold or currencies, it allows investors to successfully diversify their portfolios.
[div class="excerpt"]"We are not farmers. We are a large company that uses state-of-the-art technology to produce high-quality soybean. The same way you have shoemakers and computer manufacturers, we produce agricultural commodities." Laurence Beltrão Gomes of SLC Agrícola, the largest farm company in Brazil [/quote]
But it's not just about land, it's about production. Investors are convinced that they can go into Africa, Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet bloc to consolidate holdings, inject a mix of technology, capital and management skills, lay down the infrastructures and transform below-potential farms into large-scale agribusiness operations. In many cases, the goal is to generate revenue streams both from the harvests and from the land itself, whose value they expect to go up. It is a totally corporate version of the Green Revolution, and their ambitions are big. "My boss wants to create the first Exxon Mobil of the farming sector," said Joseph Carvin of Altima Partners' One World Agriculture Fund to a gathering of global farmland investors in New York in June 2009. No wonder, then, that governments, the World Bank and the UN want to be associated with this. But it is not their show.
From rich to richer
[div class="excerpt"]"I'm convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time. Eventually, of course, food prices will get high enough that the market probably will be flooded with supply through development of new land or technology or both, and the bull market will end. But that's a long ways away yet."
- George Soros, June 2009[/quote]
Today's emerging new farm owners are private equity fund managers, specialised farmland fund operators, hedge funds, pension funds, big banks and the like. The pace and extent of their appetite is remarkable - but unsurprising, given the scramble to recover from the financial crisis. Consolidated data are lacking, but we can see that billions of dollars are going into farmland acquisitions for a growing number of "get rich quick" schemes. And some of those dollars are hard-earned retirement savings of teachers, civil servants and factory workers from countries such as the US or the UK. This means that a lot of ordinary citizens have a financial stake in this trend, too, whether they are aware of it or not.
It also means that a new, powerful lobby of corporate interests is coming together, which wants favourable conditions to facilitate and protect their farmland investments. They want to tear down burdensome land laws that prevent foreign ownership, remove host-country restrictions on food exports and get around any regulations on genetically modified organisms. For this, we can be sure that they will be working with their home governments, and various development banks, to push their agendas around the globe through free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and donor conditionalities.
[div class="excerpt"] "When asked whether a transfer of foreign, 'superior', agricultural technology would be welcome compensation for the acquisition of Philippine lands, the farmers from Negros Occidental responded with a general weariness and unequivocal retort that they were satisfied with their own knowledge and practices of sustainable, diverse and subsistence-based farming. Their experience of high-yielding variety crops, and the chemical-intensive technologies heralded by the Green Revolution, led them to the conclusion that they were better off converting to diverse, organic farming, with the support of farmer-scientist or member organisations such as MASIPAG and PDG Inc."
- Theodora Tsentas, "Foreign state-led land acquisitions and neocolonialism: A qualitative case study of foreign agricultural development in the Philippines", September 2009[/quote]
Indeed, the global land grab is happening within the larger context of governments, both in the North and the South, anxiously supporting the expansion of their own transnational food and agribusiness corporations as the primary answer to the food crisis. The deals and programmes being promoted today all point to a restructuring and expansion of the industrial food system, based on capital-intensive large-scale monocultures for export markets. While that may sound "old hat", several things are new and different. For one, the infrastructure needs for this model will be dealt with. (The Green Revolution never did that.) New forms of financing, as our table makes plain, are also at the base of it. Thirdly, the growing protagonism of corporations and tycoons from the South is also becoming more important. US and European transnationals like Cargill, Tyson, Danone and Nestlé, which once ruled the roost, are now being flanked by emerging conglomerates such as COFCO, Olam, Savola, Almarai and JBS.4 A recent report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development pointed out that a solid 40% of all mergers and acquisitions in the field of agricultural production last year were South-South.5 To put it bluntly, tomorrow's food industry in Africa will be largely driven by Brazilian, ethnic Chinese and Arab Gulf capital.
Exporting food insecurity
Given the heavy role of the private sector in today's land grabs, it is clear that these firms are not interested in the kind of agriculture that will bring us food sovereignty. And with hunger rising faster than population growth, it will not likely do much for food security, either. One farmers' leader from Synérgie Paysanne in Benin sees these land grabs as fundamentally "exporting food insecurity". For they are about answering some people's needs - for maize or money - by taking food production resources away from others. He is right, of course. In most cases, these investors are themselves not very experienced in running farms. And they are bound, as the Coordinator of MASIPAG in the Philippines sees it, to come in, deplete the soils of biological life and nutrients through intensive farming, pull out after a number of years and leave the local communities with "a desert".
[div class="excerpt"] "Entire communities have been dispossessed of their lands for the benefit of foreign investors. (...) Land must remain a community heritage in Africa."
- N'Diogou Fall, ROPPA (West African Network of Producers and Peasant Organisations), June 2009[/quote]
The talk about channelling this sudden surge of dollars and dirhams into an agenda for resolving the global food crisis could be seen as quirky if it were not downright dangerous. From the United Nations headquarters in New York to the corridors of European capitals, everyone is talking about making these deals "win-win". All we need to do, the thinking goes, is agree on a few parameters to moralise and discipline these land grab deals, so that they actually serve local communities, without scaring investors off. The World Bank even wants to create a global certification scheme and audit bureau for what could become "sustainable land grabbing", along the lines of what's been tried with oil palm, forestry or other extractive industries.
Before jumping on the bandwagon of "win-win", it would be wise to ask "With whom? Who are the investors? What are their interests?" It is hard to believe that, with so much money on the line, with so much accumulated social experience in dealing with mass land concessions and conversions in the past, whether from mining or plantations, and given the central role of the finance and agribusiness industries here, these investors would suddenly play fair. Just as hard to believe is that governments or international agencies would suddenly be able to hold them to account.
[div class="excerpt"] "Some companies are interested in buying agricultural land for sugar cane and then selling it on the international markets. It's business, nothing more"
Sharad Pawar, India's Minister of Agriculture, rejecting claims that his government is supporting a new colonisation of African farmland, 28 June 2009[/quote]
Making these investments work is simply not the right starting point. Supporting small farmers efforts for real food sovereignty is. Those are two highly polarised agendas and it would be mistaken to pass off one for the other. It is crucial to look more closely at who the investors are and what they really want. But it is even more important to put the search for solutions to the food crisis on its proper footing.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/15-5
This exchange between Joe and a reader is talking about when that was happening right here. It also gives a lot of insight into why poor and rural whites are are so susceptible to the pitch from Limbaugh and Hannity and Palin and Bush, why they yearn for "the good old days," and why they are angry and blame liberals for everything.
American literature has abandoned poor whites
Dear Joe,
First of all, please, I apologize my poor English. I'm writing to you from Spain where we have a very deficient education system and a natural tendency to fail on learning foreign languages.
Now, after being intentionally modest, I have to say that I'm an avid reader of your work and that your Deer Hunting with Jesus has been an inspiration for my end of graduate essay, a kind of a small thesis. The subject of my essay is the relation between literature (and also popular culture in general) and America's white underclass. The main idea is to see which image of the white low classes is being exported from the US and how, for example, Europeans like me receive it.
On literature I found out that during the first half of the Twentieth Century, American authors used to talk about the poor whites, especially the most representative novelist of that era (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Caldwell). So, there was a quite general interest on portraying that reality from the canonic literature. But, after the forties, this interest seems to vanish (at least as a major theme.
As I said before, this is about the foreign reception of American literature). So, my essay took a new turn and now I'm trying to find the reasons of the loss of interest in the poor whites. Is it because is something that is wanted to be ignored? What happened that make the Joads from “Grapes of Wrath" (being an epic image of endurance in front of social injustice) turn into Clethus from "The Simpsons" (a mere caricature, the image of a "loser")?
Well, I just thought that maybe you can give some clues or just your opinion about that, from your inner view as an American and as a journalist. (I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong, this is all bullshit and I have to rewrite my whole essay.) Anyway, thanks a lot for just reading this e-mail and please, keep writing on your blog, we're following it from far away.
Yours sincerely,
Pol
------
Pol,
I have wondered about that very thing myself since the middle 1970s. As far as I can tell, there are any number of factors at work. Here are some thoughts, a sort of chronology:.
-- The Dust Bowl made the plight of displaced and poor rural whites unavoidable. They rose in the public consciousness during the Great Depression, thanks to sensitive writers, artists, etc. and in no small part due to the Roosevelt administrations' funding of writers and artists to document American society and the times. Making work for the arts benefited us all. Back then, everything that made it into the media, be it print or other, did not have to turn a corporate profit to be produced or published.
-- World War II created boom times for urban America. Some of the white rural poor moved toward the cities and the jobs.
-- After the war 22 million rural Americans were pushed off farms by government and corporate planning so they could work in industry. They did not rush happily toward The New American lifestyle, as portrayed in the official national storyline. Nearly all white rural soldiers surveyed in 1945 said they wanted to return to their family farms or rural homes. Neither corporate America nor the administration wanted to see the wartime prosperity (profits) end. The best way to accomplish that was to put rural Americans into the industrial work force. Once they were migrated to the cities and towns and working in industrial production, they provided two things. Cheap labor and a market for industrial products. Before the war 45% of Americans lived on small farms. Ten years after the war less than 10% lived on farms.
-- However, rural Americans were poorly educated.The U.S. government census considered a fourth grade education to be literate at the time. More than a quarter of the rural migrants did not even meet that standard. They suffered from poor education because the oligarchies at the local, regional and state level did not want to pay taxes for schools, particularly in the south. The cities had long ago embraced public education.
-- These uneducated rural whites became the foundation of our permanent white underclass. Their children and grandchildren have added to the numbers of this underclass, probably in the neighborhood of 50 or 60 million people now. They outnumber all other poor and working poor groups, black, Hispanics, immigrants.
-- Because they are not concentrated in given neighborhoods, etc., they are pretty much invisible as a group in America. But because they are nevertheless encountered individually in society, we get representations of them as the hillbilly or white trash next door. Or the redneck stereotype as the butt of humor -- the people whose social skills do not resemble what is supposed to be the white Anglo norm. And in truth, they do not conform to the middle class behavior models presented by the media and the Corporate States of America as examples for approved societal behavior. They are not obsessed with their credit scores, they are always in the informal mode, they are rule breakers, and in short, they do not behave like property of the state. So they are useful as a bad example. Usually they are portrayed as having a southern accent, which for good reason is associated with a lack of education and sophistication.
-- However, because they cannot be encountered in aggregated numbers, they cannot be seen by the rest of America as a distinct culture. Only as nonconforming individuals as an object of ridicule. And in a sense, fear. Because what is left of the middle class is afraid of falling into that white underclass.
Which brings us back to the subject of the poor white underclass not being represented in America literature.
What literature? All I see these days is shallow crap. Real literature help us understand the world and the human condition. Obviously, that is no longer America's cup of tea.
I could write much more on the topic, but it's complex. So this is the best distillation I can do in an email.
In art and labor,
Joe
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/09/american-literature-has-abandoned-poor-whites.html