Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s. Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. Since the turn of the millennium alone, 3.5 million more manufacturing jobs have vanished and 42,000 manufacturing plants were shuttered.
Members of the U.S. Army Charlie Company pass a secondary explosion en route to Baghdad, Iraq, April 2003. Christopher Morris/VII
Ropes from the hangman’s gallows are seen in Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad, Iraq, where political and criminal prisoners from the war were held, April 19, 2003. Ron Haviv/VII
A mosaic of Saddam Hussein lies in ruins on the road to Basra, southern Iraq, March 28, 2003. Antonin Kratochvil/VII
“Debtpocalypse” looms. Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom. Grim as these scenarios might seem, there is something confected about the mise-en-scène, like an un-fun Playland. After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or at least there was none — until the two parties built it.
And yet the pit exists. It goes by the name of “austerity.” However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of Congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of people have long made it their home. “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.
Camden, New Jersey… had long been a robust, diversified small industrial city. By the early 1970s, however, its reform mayor Angelo Errichetti was describing it this way: “It looked like the Vietcong had bombed us to get even. The pride of Camden… was now a rat-infested skeleton of yesterday, a visible obscenity of urban decay. The years of neglect, slumlord exploitation, tenant abuse, government bungling, indecisive and short-sighted policy had transformed the city’s housing, business, and industrial stock into a ravaged, rat-infested cancer on a sick, old industrial city.”
That was 40 years ago and yet, today, news stories are still being written about Camden’s never-ending decline into some bottomless abyss. Consider that a measure of how long it takes to shut down a way of life.
Iraqi civilians killed by inappropriate use of force by U.S. Marines during the battle for Diyala bridge are seen in Baghdad, Iraq. April 8, 2003. Gary Knight/VII
The body of a dead Iraqi fighter lies outside the Technical School Compound in Basra, southern Iraq, during a weeks-long battle between British forces and Iraqi fighters over control of the city, April 3, 2003. Antonin Kratochvil/VII
The burial of Fedayn, who was killed during a U.S. air strike, is held at the Baratha cemetery in Baghdad, Iraq, on April 1, 2003. Franco Pagetti/VII
I had a ‘water job’ done on me,” one former American prisoner told a military investigator, according to a 1969 Army report. “I was handcuffed and taken to the shower… They held my head under the shower for about two minutes and when I’d pull back to breath, they beat me on the chest and stomach. This lasted for about 10 minutes, during which I was knocked to the floor twice. When I begged for them to stop, they did.
