columnist Jesse Jackson
Ohio, a proud and prosperous manufacturing and farming center of America, is being ravaged by a trifecta of devastation. Its families are struggling with our global crisis, our housing crisis and with entrenched structural poverty. They are looking for help.
Ohio is the center of the catastrophic trade policies that are laying off workers, shipping good jobs abroad and driving down wages and benefits at home. Ohio has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since George Bush took office; the nation has lost about one in five manufacturing jobs. These are good jobs with family wages, health care, pensions and paid vacations.
When the plant closes and the jobs are taken offshore, workers take a hit. Jobs with similar pay and benefits aren’t being created. Families suddenly watch their dreams crushed. Communities are devastated as their tax base evaporates. Across Ohio, voters want to know: How do we get out of this hole?
Ohio is also the epicenter of the housing bust. Some 150,000 homes went into foreclosure last year. Across the country, one in 10 homes are “under water” – worth less than their mortgages. That ratio is much worse in Ohio. In Cleveland, there are so many foreclosures that HUD is selling homes for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. You can pay for your tall latte at Starbucks with a $5 bill and use the change to pick up a house from HUD.
Responsible homeowners have lost the savings they built in their homes. Communities once more find their tax base decimated. Then starts a vicious cycle of cuts in police and schools; vandals sack empty homes; and prices continue to plummet.
In the Appalachian areas of southern Ohio and in its inner cities, families struggle with a structural poverty that is getting worse. A coal miner dies from black lung disease every six hours. Young people face what’s called a “back door draft.” If they want to get to college or to advanced training, they have little choice but to join the military.
In a country where poverty is up, homelessness is up, malnutrition and obesity are up and more children go without health care, these voters are looking for a way out.
Clinton and Obama are quarreling about who is more opposed to NAFTA. No more NAFTAs is a step, not a strategy for the future. Let’s probe who has a plan to change our global strategy and get good jobs back into Ohio.
Who has the best plan on the housing mess? Who has a plan for Appalachia, or for the children at risk in Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods?
Ohio’s traumas are real and present. People there don’t have the luxury of politics as a spectator sport. They are looking for answers.