Rich vs. poor in Peyton Place

Income disparity in the U.S, or the growing gap between haves and have-nots, is obvious to anyone who cares to look at the numbers and various reports that detail this phenomenon that should be on the radar of every policymaker, journalist and community organizer, as well as anyone interested in the health of local hamlets.

In a brand new study released by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, the issue is brought close to home, for those of us in New England, as the region has experienced the biggest increase in income disparity among eight regions, nationwide, from 1989 to 2004. At both ends of the socio-economic spectrum, New England outpaced the rest of the country, as the wealthiest residents of the six state region saw their incomes growing faster than the rest of the country, while the poorest New Englanders experienced the greatest income losses.

Connecticut topped the New England states, with their $60,528 median household income placing them number two nationally, trailing only New Jersey. New Hampshire, which had been ranked #1 in 2003, fell to the sixth position. The region scored very well and is considered the wealthiest region in the country, surpassing the west (California, Colorado, Washington, Alaska, etc.) in median income levels.

It was interesting, in light of this report, to spend my Saturday afternoon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the epicenter of wealth in New Hampshire’s well-heeled Seacoast. I was meeting my son, who recently moved to Boston. Since Portsmouth is a good halfway meeting point, we decided to grab an early afternoon lunch and talk over some editing work that he’s doing for me for RiverVision Press’s next publishing project. The conspicuous wealth on display was very apparent to me, as I rarely miss an opportunity to observe class differences on display. Just the parking garage where I domiciled my own 10-year-old car was filled with high end sedans, including an abundance of Porsche’s, which you almost see north of the Piscataqua.

Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont now are ranked in the top five nationally, when it comes to income disparity. These bastions of political liberalism now have some of the nation’s largest income gaps. Included in Carsey’s data is a listing of six New England metro areas that placed in the top 20 nationally, for growth in disparity between the rich and each community’s poor. Nashua, New Hampshire, joined New Bedford, Massachusetts and four Connecticut metro areas (Danbury, Waterbury, Stamford-Norwalk and Bridgeport) as areas of growing income disparity, as the region has moved from one of relative income egalitarianism, to one that is divided economically.

From the report, it’s clear to see that “the change in household income distribution in New England and the nation goes beyond simply the 'rich getting richer' and reflects a fundamental shift in the national economy and differences in implications by region. The shift from 'traditional' commodity-based manufacturing to technology and knowledge-based businesses has created a new economic context and structure for New England.”

Once again, another report shows a clear direction for Maine and the region, while at the same time, any efforts to increase R & D and investment in growing the skills of low-end workers is stifled by short-sighted calls by groups with Heritage Foundation affiliations for “slash and burn” policies regarding taxes. In fact, the Carsey’s data shows that finding ways to develop ways to tax the haves is the only hope we have of raising all boats in the region. Also, our sorry attempts at development, ala big-box stores and policies devoted to sprawl-promotion are failing. Unless, of course, your future vision for New England is for our region to become an apocalyptic land of gated communities, with low-wage security guards, manning gatehouses on the edge of growing camps of poverty, the only hedge against rampaging rogues, seeking to acquire the means of survival, through any means possible.

Wal-Mart: Planting flags where the sun don't shine

There are very few companies that mine the vein of pro-American, red-white-and-blue flag-waving patriotism, like Wal-Mart. Walk into any one of its thousands of stores and the pro-American, love-it-or-leave it ambience is readily apparent, right on down to the piped in redneck country tunes playing on the sound system.

Watch any local television station and your bound to have the privilege of viewing one of Wal-Mart’s hokey ads, equating their corporate theft with small town values and extolling the chain’s supposed commitment to community causes—like low-wage jobs, environmental damage and sprawl are values I desire for my little corner of the world!

What bothers me the most and is most ironic, is that the people who have the most to lose by supporting Wal-Mart, merrily drop their hard-earned money on counters in community, after community, all over the country. These duped consumers are the very people that Sam Walton’s heirs keep pitching their disingenuous marketing drivel to.

It reminds me of Thomas Frank’s book, What’s The Matter With Kansas, which came out in 2005. Frank wonders how his fellow Midwesterners—descended from free-soil, abolitionist progressives and prairie socialists—could back a candidate with an agenda like George Bush, who shows little, or no concern for the issues that ought to make these members of the working class deplore this midget of a man? Frank goes on at length about the place that historian Walter Prescott Webb called a “hotbed of persistent radicalism,” the seedbed of Social Security and agrarian reform, yet, it sided with the bosses and backed an ideology that promises the destruction of the liberal state's social-welfare safety net.

Just like Frank, I shake my head and wonder, whenever I drive by a Wal-Mart store and see the human vestiges of 20 plus years of class war, driving their run-down heaps of metal, all being drawn to Wal-Mart's smiley face like flies to shit.

On top of all the obvious reasons why consumers ought to march to their local spawn of Sam Walton and burn it to the ground, the multi-national retailer, whose motto ought to be, “profits, over people, all the time” is currently fighting legislation, which would tighten security at our ports and close some of the gaping holes in security that currently exist. Like always, Wal-Mart’s motive is profit, as if they couldn’t sacrifice a million, or two, to make sure that storage containers were properly scanned.

Since 9-11, Wal-Mart, along with its lobbying group, the Retail Industry Leaders Association, have systematically undercut security by working diligently to defeat proposals and undermine current laws that are designed to make our ports more, not less, secure. These slick lobbyists, with their expensive suits, probably with a flag pin affixed to their lapels, have been working overtime to sway Washington politicians to their position of making sure that Wal-Mart and some of their other clients—large retailers like Sears, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy—don’t have to have their foreign containers properly inspected. The primary reason—profits, at the risk of security for Americans.

Most recently, Wal-Mart, along with the RILA has been lobbying hard to ensure that their containers won’t be required to fall under recent legislation that calls for 100 percent scanning of all containers entering U.S. ports, which was part of a new U.S. House bill. Wal-Mart is claiming that it would needlessly impede the speed of imports potentially hurting Wal-Mart’s profits.

As Jerry once sang, “Wave that flag, wave it wide and high.” Wal-Mart is a master at that practice, while the cameras run—when the whir of the cameras stop, however and the lights go down, good ole’ Wal-Mart takes that very flag and sticks it up America’s hind orifice, while laughing all the way to the bank, with their loot.

Is Rush Limbaugh irrelevant?

For all of President Bush’s first term and during the euphoria accompanying his reelection and the start of his second term in office, Republicans have presented a united front. They’ve rallied around their party leader and funded the “war on terrah,” billionaire tax cuts and supported just about everything else that this century’s Warren Harding has wanted to do.

As support for the war has turned sour and the majority of Americans now in opposition and wanting our troops back home, more and more Republicans, eager to distance themselves from the wake of the Bush presidency, have begun speaking out against policies of this administration.

For more than a decade, every day at noon, Republicans, particularly Republicans of the conservative stripe, could turn on their radios at noon and receive their right-wing marching orders. For all intents and purposes, Rush Limbaugh was the voice of the conservative movement. Love him, or hate him, Limbaugh symbolized the brazen, in-your-face arrogance that has characterized American conservatism since the Republican “revolution” touted by Newt Gingrich back in the early 90s.

While Republicans aren’t exactly beating a hasty retreat from their exalted perch, happily spending their political capital, they’ve fallen upon a difficult patch and conservatives no longer speak in a monolithic voice, with talking points emanating from Limbaugh’s golden microphone.

On Tuesday, California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in an interview on NBC’s "Today Show," when asked about how he felt about certain Republicans, like Limbaugh, called America’s conservative voice, “irrelevant.” Schwarzenegger, while demonized by some as a shallow former actor, is actually quite politically shrewd and has actually been a much better governor than I ever expected him to be. Not content to merely “paint by the numbers” politically and carry water for the conservative agenda pushed down most Republican’s throats by the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage and O’Reilly, Schwarzenegger has actually tried to represent his constituents in California and forge his own political identity. An example of Schwarzenegger’s independence from the right-wing establishment came earlier in the year, when the governor proposed a $12 billion health care plan, which requires doctors, hospitals and some small employers to pay into a state fund for the uninsured. This angered many conservatives, for whom anything smacking of universal coverage is an anathema.

Characteristically, Limbaugh spent much of his show referring to Schwarzenegger as a “Total Sellout,” which was a reference to his former Hollywood days and the movie, Total Recall. After being the darling of conservatives for so long, it must hurt when someone like Schwarzenegger calls you irrelevant, particularly when you’ve occupied the epicenter of attention.

Despite Schwarzenegger’s slam and the disaster we know as the Bush presidency, Limbaugh and other conservative hosts still command the attention of a large segment of "Kool-Aid drinkers." These followers still march in lock step, following their own pied piper, ready to plunge off a cliff, if necessary, rather than face the facts and examine the realities of how far down the road to nowhere the conservative agenda has taken us as a nation.

Big-box bait and switch, Part III (Can we get there from here?)

This will be my final installment in my brief look at big-box blight, as it spreads across Maine (as well as many other similar areas of the country), felling trees, paving over fields and creating asphalt wastelands where fowl and fauna once roamed. My intention isn’t to be too overly dramatic. For me, however, the Wal-Mart issue is one that really pushes buttons and hits close to home.

I love Maine. Anyone who has read my book, or reads my posts about the Pine Tree State has figured that out by now. I know there is always a danger in standing against what some call progress. It’s easy to be labeled a crank, overly nostalgic, or even, a Luddite. There are times that I wear those badges, with a certain amount of pride. On this issue, however, I know I have company that makes this something more than just my own personal hobby-horse.

We can start with the Brookings Institute Report, Charting Maine's Future: An Action Plan for Promoting Sustainable Prosperity and Quality Places that has garnered statewide support and praise. With the exception of a handful of the usual naysayers and negative types, the response has been primarily positive. What makes this even more impressive is the bipartisan nature of the support, with most of the state’s leaders and legislative contingent endorsing its findings.

For the people who have been paying attention and in particular, those of us that have lived here over the past 20 years, the explosion in low-density development that characterizes sprawl is quite evident. This is an area that Maine will have to address. Jobs are important, particularly well-paying jobs that pay a living wage for Maine’s workers. Not only Maine, but many other rural areas of the U.S. are finding that their local economies are being strangled by the influx of big-box retailers that exploit the local labor market and inject little or nothing into these communities in the way of social capital.

The Economic Policy Institute has a helpful calculator that offers the ability to find out where the starting point should be in wage structure. If you want to talk economic development and real job creation, I think this is a good starting point. Instead, as is most often the case, local officials are hailed when they create a couple of hundred entry level jobs, paying $8 or $9 an hour. This type of job creation just contributes to the ongoing demise of the middle class and kills any substantive economic growth that benefits people in the long run.

If you haven’t already read Stacy Mitchell’s book, I suggest taking some time this spring to plow through it. It is amazingly readable, given Mitchell’s thorough research and density of material that she packs into the book. In my opinion, it is one of the more important books to read for anyone who desires sustainable local economies and communities where people, rather than profits, are given priority. I also suggest the organization that Mitchell is affiliated with, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

In addition to the EPI’s calculator, their site has a lot of pertinent material that will help you to better understand the dangers inherent in big-box development. Information is power and sites like this one will help you acquire the information that you’ll need to speak intelligently to your friends, neighbors and family members about why you have issues with Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and other similar corporate retailers.

All of us can be agents for positive change in our communities—in fact, we should be striving to be people who are willing to fight for local and regional values, preserving our unique landscape, one which befits the area of the country where we live. We don’t have to succumb to the homogenization that has overtaken so much of the U.S. By banding together with other folks who value their local bookstore, farmer’s market and neighborhood grocery store, or coffee shop, we can be like the two mothers, Eleanor Kinney and Jenny Mayher, in Damariscotta, who cared enough about their small community and its unique character to organize a group of other like-minded residents and as a result, Wal-Mart wasn’t allowed into that area of Midcoast Maine.

I’ll end by saying that there are locally-owned businesses that aren’t much better than the Wal-Marts of this world. In fact, there are businesses owned by Mainers that stock an ample supply of merchandise manufactured in third-world countries and that rely on exploitation of labor in those parts of the world. There are other businesses, while considerably smaller than Wal-Mart that still engage in tactics and seek their own success, at the expense of other smaller businesses. That’s one of the major drawbacks with capitalism’s model. There are always going to be winners and losers.

Given the choice we have, however, I still think we can do better than bowing down before the big-box deities of the retail kingdom. By preserving our local economies, we’re maintaining control over an important area of our daily lives, in a world where control and autonomy is rapidly disappearing.

Big-box Bait and Switch, Part II (the myth of lower prices)

If you ask big-box shoppers why they shop at Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and any other similar store, the most common reason given is lower prices. Because these large retailers have an advantage due to economies of scale and buying clout, it would seem logical, then that they would in fact offer lower prices on most items and goods. On closer inspection however, “always lower prices” may not be the reality.

Wal-Mart, more than any of the other big-box retailers lives by the perception that their prices are lower than anyone else’s. From the smiley faces in their incessant ads to their famous slogan, this mega-retailer has convinced shoppers that they're getting the best deal at Wal-Mart, whether that’s true, or not.

In some instances, Wal-Mart will lower prices in order to drive the competition’s prices down, or worse, put them out of business. After that occurs, stores have then been known to up their so-called “everyday low prices.” Also, Wal-Mart’s prices are cheaper on some items simply because they are of inferior quality. There is no comparison between a shovel whose handle bends and breaks when shoveling heavy snow and one made by Rugg Mfg., or some other high quality U.S. manufacturer.

According to Kenneth Stone, an economist at Iowa State University, all big-box stores utilize what’s called a pricing strategy known as “signposts” and “blinds.” Signposts are items that most consumers know the price of and blinds are those items that most customers have less knowledge of. By keeping the prices lower than the competition on bananas, diapers, four-packs of light bulbs and other items in prominent places, consumers assume that all items (these signposts) have lower prices.

In 2005, Consumer Reports found that on items such as ranges, refrigerators, vacuums and other large appliances, independent retailers out priced all the big-box retailers they surveyed. Also, the magazine also found that consumers rated the independent stores highest in customer service and selection. So why do shoppers continue to flock to the big-box stores at the peril of losing local control, putting U.S. manufacturers out of business and cutting their own economic throats? It’s really baffling and without any clear rational explanation.

Despite clear evidence that Wal-Mart and other big-box chains eliminate competition, destroy manufacturing jobs paying above average wages (with benefits) and on top of that, with evidence indicating that their prices may not always be lower and their selection on many items isn’t up to snuff with independent retailers, it’s tempting to argue that many Americans have become just too damn stupid to know any better.

One area I’m particularly concerned about when it comes to big-box stores and mega-retailers, is bookselling. While perceptions of most consumers is that the local Barnes & Noble, or other chain has a greater selection than the independent bookseller, in fact, chain stores’ merchandising policies tend to focus their attention and dollars on the big-name authors. As a result, new novelists and non-fiction titles get relegated to the back of the store. Midlist authors and their books, if they have succeeded, almost always attribute their success to the independent bookstores.

In our local area, independent stores like Longfellow Books in Portland (an independent in every sense of the word, primarily because of its wonderfully feisty owner, Chris Bowe), Bookland in Brunswick and even smaller stores like BookMarcs in Bangor, have staff picks and highlight titles other than Stephen King’s, or J.K. Rowling’s latest runaway bestseller. Taking nothing away from these authors, there are thousands of other wonderful books, many of them by first-time authors, who would end up selling poorly and ending up out-of-print if not for the bibliophiles that more often than not run the independent stores.

Wal-Mart also tries to act as moral arbiter of a community when it refuses to stock music CDs that have parental guidance stickers, or deal with themes that it deems inappropriate. This kind of censorship isn’t limited to Wal-Mart, either. Blockbuster requires movie makers produce “sanitized” versions of movies that they consider objectionable.

The resulting homogeneity that comes as a result of this shrinking of retail choices doesn’t bode well for innovation, or just plain diversity of products, not to mention how it portends the demise of artistic risk-taking by musicians, writers, and other creative types.

So, if Wal-Mart and the other chain stores are so destructive to our communities, then what can, or should we do to keep them out of our communities? And if they have already set up shop, what are our options as consumers?

I’ll be back with at least one more post to answer these questions and focus some of my own thoughts on what our roles and responsibilities are in these matters.