“The Murder of the Mon Valley” by the editors over at Insurgent Notes. Found this article while researching some writing projects I’m putting together about the region. It’s written from a pro-union/pro-labor perspective (i.e., blog’s subhead reads: “Journal of Communist Theory and Practice”), and gives a detailed historical look at the rise of steel manufacturing in the Mon Valley, and the chew-them-up/spit-them-out treatment of mill workers: Capital embedded itself along the virgin banks of the Monongahela.  It carved up the land in search of coal to fuel its expansion, releasing acid drainage into the water and air.  It crammed in factory after factory, filling the sky with so much smoke and soot that author James Parton described Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off.” It brought in millions to make it all go. And when it was done, it moved on to greener pastures, leaving only industrial waste and fractured remnants behind. It reappears here and there, whenever it sees an opportunity; but never offers any solutions. This is not a special case or isolated phenomenon. The only thing separating many of the Mon Valley’s young nomads setting out in search of work elsewhere from Japan’s growing number of “pension parasites” resorting to hikikomori—locking  themselves in their rooms and refusing to talk to anyone, including their mothers, who deliver their every meal—is the ability of their parents to take care of them. One can imagine what will come of the so-called pension parasites themselves when their source of support no longer exists. [via matthewnewton; photo by Ross Mantle, In The Wake]
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“The Murder of the Mon Valley” by the editors over at Insurgent Notes. Found this article while researching some writing projects I’m putting together about the region. It’s written from a pro-union/pro-labor perspective (i.e., blog’s subhead reads: “Journal of Communist Theory and Practice”), and gives a detailed historical look at the rise of steel manufacturing in the Mon Valley, and the chew-them-up/spit-them-out treatment of mill workers:

Capital embedded itself along the virgin banks of the Monongahela.  It carved up the land in search of coal to fuel its expansion, releasing acid drainage into the water and air.  It crammed in factory after factory, filling the sky with so much smoke and soot that author James Parton described Pittsburgh as “hell with the lid off.” It brought in millions to make it all go. And when it was done, it moved on to greener pastures, leaving only industrial waste and fractured remnants behind. It reappears here and there, whenever it sees an opportunity; but never offers any solutions.

This is not a special case or isolated phenomenon. The only thing separating many of the Mon Valley’s young nomads setting out in search of work elsewhere from Japan’s growing number of “pension parasites” resorting to hikikomori—locking  themselves in their rooms and refusing to talk to anyone, including their mothers, who deliver their every meal—is the ability of their parents to take care of them. One can imagine what will come of the so-called pension parasites themselves when their source of support no longer exists.

[via matthewnewton; photo by Ross Mantle, In The Wake]

The Long Tail of Violence, Crack Cocaine in North Braddock Last night 26-year-old Rontez Durham was shot and killed in North Braddock. Reading about Durham’s killing reminded me of the longstanding problems that North Braddock, an area I frequently drive through, has faced for the last 30 years or so. In researching the neighborhood’s recent history of violence, I came across an interesting post that was allegedly written by a former gang member and crack cocaine dealer. It provides an anonymous look at what prompted this individual, a woman, to enter the drug trade, and was published around the time Braddock started receiving national attention for Mayor John Fetterman’s revitalization efforts: I am a 44 year old woman who has lived in the “hood” all my life. My hood is a place called North Braddock outside of Pittsburgh, PA.  My neighborhood is a combination of POOR African Americans and POOR Whites.  Everyone in my neighborhood is affected by the same problems and the poor whites have the same chances of leaving the hood as the African Americans do.  They are as likely as African Americans to join the Street gangs that inhabit our neighborhoods and they are as likely to sell crack cocaine as the African Americans. The problems are not a black problem or a brown problem but a hood problem. I was 22 years old when crack and the Crips first arrived in my neighborhood.  I was a young street wise woman who made her money hustling and selling drugs. During that time I sold marijuana.  I started talking to this man from LA who told me he was a Crip.  He then explained to me what a Crip was.  I was jumped into the gang three weeks later.  What made me a mother of four young children join a street gang and start selling a new drug called “Crack”?  It was the lure of money more money then I ever saw in my lifetime.  Finally, I had enough money to buy my kids designer clothes and I could also wear the latest outfits.  I had no clue as to the effect that drug would have on my community. I began to realize that selling crack cocaine was slowly stealing my soul. I was selling poison to my own people.  People who lived in the neighborhood.  I remember refusing to sell that to “Whites” because unless they lived in the neighborhood the Government would arrest me for that. That is what the law did. They didn’t care about you selling this poison to your own people but they sure didn’t want you to sell it to “Whites”. [via matthewnewton; photo from The New York Times]
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The Long Tail of Violence, Crack Cocaine in North Braddock

Last night 26-year-old Rontez Durham was shot and killed in North Braddock. Reading about Durham’s killing reminded me of the longstanding problems that North Braddock, an area I frequently drive through, has faced for the last 30 years or so. In researching the neighborhood’s recent history of violence, I came across an interesting post that was allegedly written by a former gang member and crack cocaine dealer. It provides an anonymous look at what prompted this individual, a woman, to enter the drug trade, and was published around the time Braddock started receiving national attention for Mayor John Fetterman’s revitalization efforts:

I am a 44 year old woman who has lived in the “hood” all my life. My hood is a place called North Braddock outside of Pittsburgh, PA.  My neighborhood is a combination of POOR African Americans and POOR Whites.  Everyone in my neighborhood is affected by the same problems and the poor whites have the same chances of leaving the hood as the African Americans do.  They are as likely as African Americans to join the Street gangs that inhabit our neighborhoods and they are as likely to sell crack cocaine as the African Americans. The problems are not a black problem or a brown problem but a hood problem.

I was 22 years old when crack and the Crips first arrived in my neighborhood.  I was a young street wise woman who made her money hustling and selling drugs. During that time I sold marijuana.  I started talking to this man from LA who told me he was a Crip.  He then explained to me what a Crip was.  I was jumped into the gang three weeks later.  What made me a mother of four young children join a street gang and start selling a new drug called “Crack”?  It was the lure of money more money then I ever saw in my lifetime.  Finally, I had enough money to buy my kids designer clothes and I could also wear the latest outfits.  I had no clue as to the effect that drug would have on my community.

I began to realize that selling crack cocaine was slowly stealing my soul. I was selling poison to my own people.  People who lived in the neighborhood.  I remember refusing to sell that to “Whites” because unless they lived in the neighborhood the Government would arrest me for that. That is what the law did. They didn’t care about you selling this poison to your own people but they sure didn’t want you to sell it to “Whites”.

[via matthewnewton; photo from The New York Times]

If these stories aren’t told, then these people don’t count and these places don’t exist. They don’t. I’m from the old neighborhood, as it were, of Dorchester in the Boston area, and I know a little bit about being outside of society. Frankly, the awful things that happened in our neighborhood were the things that really impacted our lives. A homicide in Bed-Stuy says volumes to the people who actually live there. It tells them about the gang problems, the gun problems.
Kerry Burke, New York Daily News crime reporter in an interview with The Awl.

Source: The Awl

Back in November 2010, Austin Hargrave wrote about his experience photographing the homeless who live in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas. His photographs appeared in Matthew O’Brien’s book, Beneath the Neon, which documents the people who live (for a variety of reasons) in the drainage tunnels beneath the city. With homelessness numbers in Las Vegas tripling since 2009, it makes you wonder if the tunnels have seen an influx of residents in the last year. We spent a couple of hours down in the tunnels in pitch black, meeting the residents of the tunnels and hearing their stories. One of the last couples, who lived about 30 minutes deep in the tunnels, was Steven and Kathryn. They had set up a large camp with a queen bed, a shelf, and a kitchen and shower area. Rather than flash everything and make life easy, I decided to light just with a small LED torch with the camera on a tripod. I moved around the scene lighting different parts with my back to the camera hiding the torch from the camera, and keeping the shutter open with the help of a pocket wizard. After a couple of hours we stumbled back out into  blinding light and sweltering heat of a Las Vegas Summer day, and had seen another side to Las Vegas. [via Annals of Americus; photo: Austin Hargrave]
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Back in November 2010, Austin Hargrave wrote about his experience photographing the homeless who live in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas. His photographs appeared in Matthew O’Brien’s book, Beneath the Neon, which documents the people who live (for a variety of reasons) in the drainage tunnels beneath the city. With homelessness numbers in Las Vegas tripling since 2009, it makes you wonder if the tunnels have seen an influx of residents in the last year.

We spent a couple of hours down in the tunnels in pitch black, meeting the residents of the tunnels and hearing their stories. One of the last couples, who lived about 30 minutes deep in the tunnels, was Steven and Kathryn. They had set up a large camp with a queen bed, a shelf, and a kitchen and shower area.

Rather than flash everything and make life easy, I decided to light just with a small LED torch with the camera on a tripod. I moved around the scene lighting different parts with my back to the camera hiding the torch from the camera, and keeping the shutter open with the help of a pocket wizard.

After a couple of hours we stumbled back out into  blinding light and sweltering heat of a Las Vegas Summer day, and had seen another side to Las Vegas.

[via Annals of Americus; photo: Austin Hargrave]

Source: annalsofamericus.com

Lose your job when the unemployment rate is below 6 percent and you’ll lose a year and a half of your Social Security earnings accumulated prior to job loss, at least that’s what this National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper claims. Get pink slipped when unemployment exceeds 8 percent and the number jumps to two and a half years of lost Social Security earnings. Of course, it should be noted that this research only applies to men. What about women? That’s unclear, but it’s not too wild to assume the data would be less forgiving. Included below is an excerpt from the NBER working paper authored by economists Steve Davis and Till von Wachter: Drawing on Social Security records for U.S. workers over the period 1974 to 2008, Steve Davis and Till von Wachter find that men lose an average of 1.4 years of their pre-displacement earnings if they are laid off at a time when the national unemployment rate is below 6 percent. However, they lose 2.8 years worth of earnings if they lose their jobs when the unemployment rate exceeds 8 percent. Earlier estimates by other researchers of the present-value earnings losses associated with job displacement are only one-fourth as large as these observed losses, and they vary little with aggregate conditions at the time of displacement, unlike the pattern in this data. Abstract from “Recession and the Cost of Job Loss,” a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper. [Photo: Lee Jeffries]
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Lose your job when the unemployment rate is below 6 percent and you’ll lose a year and a half of your Social Security earnings accumulated prior to job loss, at least that’s what this National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper claims. Get pink slipped when unemployment exceeds 8 percent and the number jumps to two and a half years of lost Social Security earnings. Of course, it should be noted that this research only applies to men. What about women? That’s unclear, but it’s not too wild to assume the data would be less forgiving. Included below is an excerpt from the NBER working paper authored by economists Steve Davis and Till von Wachter:

Drawing on Social Security records for U.S. workers over the period 1974 to 2008, Steve Davis and Till von Wachter find that men lose an average of 1.4 years of their pre-displacement earnings if they are laid off at a time when the national unemployment rate is below 6 percent. However, they lose 2.8 years worth of earnings if they lose their jobs when the unemployment rate exceeds 8 percent. Earlier estimates by other researchers of the present-value earnings losses associated with job displacement are only one-fourth as large as these observed losses, and they vary little with aggregate conditions at the time of displacement, unlike the pattern in this data.

Abstract from “Recession and the Cost of Job Loss,” a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper.

[Photo: Lee Jeffries]

Source: nber.org