Too Small to Save

I've written about what's happening in my hometown in previous posts here and here. Long story short, after losing 9K jobs in a town that has 14K people, my town has become the milk-carton metaphor for the greatest economic downtown in generations.

Spirit lifting rhetoric has been plentiful, substantive action has not. A while back, governor Ted Strickland drummed up some blatantly ridiculous anti-trust talk. Then, Senator Sherrod Brown boldly "took up the DHL job fight" -- asking the company to "re-think" their proposal to pull out operations. This effort was met with exactly the amount of success you'd have guessed. Of course, the officials rode into town for all the nationally televised press conferences and scored the press hit. I'm not saying they don't care. I'm sure they do.

But, at the end of the day they sit around with their senior staffs and access the situation in a politically candid manner. And the situation is this: Boy, that sucks for them...but, really there's nothing we can do. We can't make DHL keep a business unit that's hemorrhaging money. The majority of laid off workers aren't unionized, and so don't have a national lobby, (due to a long and storied history of anti-unionization tactics), they're not in a swing voting district, and if you're a Democrat, you know you're not getting those votes no matter what happens. If you're a Republican, you are, and you're probably not predisposed toward any kind of government intervention to begin with. It's really important that Strickland/Brown Inc. do something though. Maybe try to secure a couple of million in aid, and work on an earmark or two. Get somebody to start beating the aforementioned anti-trust drum, which is a pipe dream at best, but will get them in all the papers and provide them with the appearance of being proactive.

Sherrod Brown even "devoted" a full-time staffer to the issue, though a review of his web site would suggest that perhaps that's no longer the case. I don't know what this person was supposed to do (working in a Senate office, and being familiar with the office structure, I'd wonder what kind of a staffer they were, and to what extent they were concentrating strictly on this issue). Full disclosure: when I was looking for an internship I wrote an email to Brown's office offering to assist this person in any capacity I could, whether or not the position was paid...an offer that still stands. As is often the case on the Hill, I never heard back. That's the tragedy of the Hill really. Getting a chance to do anything worthwhile is so difficult. There isn't a person in the world that would work harder and be a more effective advocate for Wilmington than I would. I really believe that. But, when no one in your family is a BFD (a Hill abbreviation for "Big F&*#ing Deal"), and you didn't go to Georgetown, getting that chance can be depressingly difficult. Staffs often consist of 25 people with 25 separate agendas, with political and office inertia sometimes precluding aggressive constituent advocacy instead of enabling it. Like a golfer with a lead going into the back nine, the beating pulse of politics far, far too often consists of a two word mantra: avoid mistakes -- not really a recipe for substantive change and bold action.

500 words into this post, and it's turned into a cartoon fire hose; just flinging me around as I futilely try to direct the flow. I'll try to meander into something resembling a point.

I went home for Thanksgiving. It was right after the job cuts were formally announced (they'd been all but certain for months). It would all be over on January 31. During the holiday weekend I spoke to quite a few DHL employees. Some at the bar over drinks, one or two at an annual day-after-Thanksgiving touch football game, one was a friend's parent. There wasn't a lot of complaining, just a bitter acknowledgment of an even more bitter reality. No severance packages to fall back on. Not much talk of where they'd find work when things closed up.

My girlfriend, in Wilmington for the first time, kept asking, "so what will they do", or "what happens after they (DHL) close"? What, indeed.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we both went to see my mother play in a multi-denominational bell choir, at the Quaker church -- my family's church. 60 Minutes had a camera crew at the church for a feature they were doing on Wilmington. They said they were there to cover the "day's biggest community event" which they thought, "captured the essence of the town". I guess. Though, as my girlfriend and I left the church we saw that part of an adjacent street had been blocked off for what must have been a better attended event (only a couple of dozen people, many of them family members, sat in the mostly empty pews of the Quaker church).

You can kind of see the story, right? Soon-to-be-economically-devastated small town, where the "town-folk" sparsely fill the pews on a Saturday, listening to a local bell choir, politely and quietly clapping after each song. Get some footage of the grim-but-determined laid off workers. Find another worker or family member that's so upset about their future prospects that they cry. The former being men, and the latter a woman. Not on purpose of course, that's just the footage they got. After all, small towns reinforce gender roles, they don't defy them. Nobody will be talking about bringing in new green-collar technology jobs. Nobody mentions approaching the federal government for bailout money. Hell, with any luck the weather will be overcast while the camera crew's in town. The last shot of the segment could be a series of late-model sedans and pick-ups pulling out of the DHL lot in the morning after third shift ends. No music or narration, just the sound of car engines and the thick exhaust, rolling out of tailpipes on a cold morning. All very rural and blue collar. Again, not on purpose, it just worked out that way. Can you see the story now? Two full segments I bet. Don't miss next week's exclusive interview with Katie Holmes.

After briefly speaking with the 60 Minutes crew and watching them interact with community members at the church, I couldn't get those pictures out of my mind. I felt pissed off, a feeling that hasn't abated in the intervening week.

I'm the consummate realist. I get it. I get why we don't get bailed out and Wall Street does. I get why we don't get bailed out but Detroit does. I get why 60 Minutes wants to do a feature on Wilmington. I get why we'll have 25% unemployment and become the face of the most difficult economic environment in generations. I get that it has to be somebody.

But, for the last week I just haven't been able to shake just how goddamn unfair it all is.

The citizens of Wilmington didn't make knowingly high risk gambles with other people's money, become obscenely rich in the bargain, and then demand trillions of dollars because they were "too big to fail". They didn't fight tooth and nail against regulations that might have made their products economically feasible or disingenuously and systematically deny mounds of scientific evidence because it was economically lucrative. They didn't send politicians whose job it is to advocate for them to demand 10's of billions of dollars to ensure the continued production of products that no one wants.

They just went to work everyday, with marginal benefits and almost no job protection. They busted their asses, sorting freight, loading planes, and working third shift for 20 years, and watched as that company was sold to a bigger German company. They watched as company executives made fortunes due to the acquisition, and were told that this move would ensure the company's long term survival and prosperity.

Now they've lost everything, they're informed that they get to bail out bankers who are still, unbelievably, unconscionably, receiving their year end bonuses and going on elaborate corporate junkets. They get to bail out Detroit executives that don't believe in global warming. They get to spend $1 trillion on Obama's stimulus program and the 2.5 million jobs he'd like to create (crossing their fingers and hoping that a couple of them make their way back to Clinton County). Flint bails out Malibu. The Spartans bail out the Persians. The hen bails out the fox.

Chuck Todd said the other day, "...And maybe it's because we also don't know anybody that works at GM...We don't know those families. But, we do know somebody at JPMorgan Chase." He's said that, or variations of that, on several occasions as the fools on MSNBC tried to figure out why GM's panhandling effort was less successful than Wall Street's.

The unfortunate truth is that Wilmington isn't even Detroit. Not by a long shot. If Chuck Todd and the gang don't know anybody that works for GM, Wilmington doesn't have a prayer. No bailout money for us. We wouldn't have even known who to shake our cup at. The verdict: Too small to save.

I'm a realist. If I pull back and take a deep breath I might understand why it has to be this way. But, cold rationalization is no substitute for rent or a heating bill. It's no substitute for help either, and even though I want to more than anything, I have no idea how.