April 24, 2012 |
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Ron Fournier, the editor in chief of the National Journal, and reporter Sophie Quinton
have a story on hard times in Muncie, Ind., as a microcosm of the failure of American institutions as a whole.
It’s a good piece. It’s even an “important” piece, in the sense that
the cloistered elites who run the country could learn something of the
reality of life out in the country at large if this piece makes it to
their desks. D.C.-based news organizations should report from “the rest
of America” more often, because in Washington mass foreclosures and
double-digit unemployment are usually seen as abstract problems slightly
less pressing than the fact that Social Security will, decades from
now, pay out slightly more than it takes in. (Joe Klein, who is
basically a buffoon, returned from his stunt “2010 road trip” sounding
suddenly much less buffoonish. Getting outside the bubble is often
instructive.)
The piece is bookended by the story of Johnny Whitmire, a guy who was
unceremoniously dropped from the rolls of the middle class by the Very
Serious People In Charge of Things. His wife lost her state job. They
fell behind on their mortgage. He applied for the Obama administration’s
mortgage modification program. His modification was canceled, Citi
billed him for back payments, and his home was foreclosed on. Then he
got a bill for not cutting the grass at the home his bank seized,
because banks keep foreclosed homes in the names of their former owners
to avoid liability issues.
So, Whitmire is angry. And he has every right to be.
Whitmire is an angry man. He is among a group of voters most
skeptical of President Obama: noncollege-educated white males. He feels
betrayed — not just by Obama, who won his vote in 2008, but by the
institutions that were supposed to protect him: his state, which laid
off his wife; his government in Washington, which couldn’t rescue
homeowners who had played by the rules; his bank, which failed to walk
him through the correct paperwork or warn him about a potential mortgage
hike; his city, which penalized him for somebody else’s error; and even
his employer, a construction company he likes even though he got laid
off. “I was middle class for 10 years, but it’s done,” Whitmire says.
“I’ve lost my home. I live in a trailer now because of a mortgage
company and an incompetent government.”
Whitmire’s life was ruined by a few specific “institutions”: Mitch
Daniels and the Indiana Republican Party, the finance industry as
represented by the bank that decided to screw up his paperwork and seize
his home, and the Obama administration, which failed spectacularly on
mortgage modification efforts for a variety of reasons.
The piece as a whole lays blame for the sorry state of affairs in
Muncie at the crumbling of institutions — church, school, government —
but Whitmire is actually a victim of elites. It’s elite consensus that
loan modifications have to be limited and difficult for homeowners in
order to preclude “moral hazard” and save banks from having to overexert
themselves. Mitch Daniels, a leading GOP presidential contender among
George Will-style Republicans, slashed state payrolls, in the name of
fiscal responsibility. The sorts of people who pay for National Journal
subscriptions are actually responsible for this guy’s life going to
hell.
Fournier and Quinton’s piece goes on to describe the decline in
various Muncie institutions: the mainline Protestant church dying as a
corporate-inspired Megachurch thrives outside of town, some local
government scandal involving improperly cast absentee ballots and an
arrogant one-term mayor. The schools are apparently awful, in part
because of elite-mandated testing regimes, more Daniels budget cuts,
and, of course, because many of their most motivated students have been
redirected to private-run and publicly funded charter schools. (Though
as usual the awfulness of the public schools is simply stated — there’s
no data or anything.)
But if we want to talk about how things got so bad for formerly
middle-class people like Whitmire, the culprit is basically the
financialization of our entire system of capitalism and the crippling of
the labor movement; the slow death of the Mainline Protestant tradition
doesn’t really enter into it. Whitmire was screwed by a venal bank and
betrayed by an administration that gave venal banks way too much leeway
to screw people.
The National Journal
advertises that their piece on “the solution” will run next, but I’m not entirely convinced they’ve nailed down “the problem.”
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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