A Bronx Tale- Development Without Gentrification
Mark Naison
Fordham University
During the last twenty years, the Bronx, New York’s most multicultural borough- 85% Black and Latino according to the 2000 Census- has undergone a remarkable process of economic and cultural revitalization . While much of the nation still thinks “the Bronx is Burning” ( the title of a popular book and ESPN miniseries about the Yankees) the vacant, rubble filled lots that once attracted presidents and visitors from all over the world are now filled with shopping centers, town houses, apartment buildings and one and two family homes. If you go to the corner of Charlotte Street and Boston Road ( three blocks from 174th street stop of the #5 train), where Jimmy Carter came to view the devastation in 1977, you will not see a single abandoned building or piece of land in any direction. Moreover, Crotona Park, three blocks to the north of Charlotte Street, which in the 70’s had no working street lights and was rarely used by local residents ,has been transformed into an urban oasis with a pool, 20 professional level tennis courts, excellent baseball and soccer fields, a nature center, and summer concerts featuring the Bronx’s greatest doo wop singers and old school Hip Hop DJ’s.
But what makes this transformation remarkable is that is has occurred, at least thus far, without significant displacement of the Bronx's immigrant and working class residents. Whereas Harlem and East Harlem, the Lower East Side, Williamsbugh and Park Slope have seen neighborhoods once plagued by abandonment and decay attract wealthy professionals and massive private investment, new housing in the Bronx , most of it built by non profit organizations, has almost entirely been purchased or rented by neighborhood residents or new immigrants from Africa, the Dominican Republic and the Anglophone Carribbean . If you walk through the South Bronx neighborhoods that have been most dramatically transformed, Morrisania, Melrose, Hunts Point, and Morris Heights, you will see bodegas, hair braiding salons, travel agencies, African groceries, Caribbean bakeries and numerous evangelical churches, but no sushi bars, Starbucks or outdoor cafes. While there has been some movement of artists and professionals into neighborhoods south of Yankee Stadium, the biggest new migration into the Bronx has come from immigrant and working class families displaced from Harlem, Washington Heights, the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn. Rents in the South and West Bronx are the lowest in the city, but still present a challenge for working class families because wages in the city's service economy are so low. Many Bronx apartments and private dwellings contain multiple families and the major Bronx shopping districts, the Hub ( at the intersection of 149th Street and 3rd Avenue), Tremont Avenue, and Fordham Road are packed with people during daylight hours seven days a week. The days of abandoned storefronts in the Bronx are long gone.
The story of the Bronx's revival begins with churches and community organizations, who in the worst years of the arson and abandonment cycle, created non profit development corporations to rehabilitate buildings that could be salvaged, and build new units on abandoned lots. Organizations like South Bronx Churches, the Mid Bronx Desperadoes, Nos Quedamos, Banana Kelly Improvement Association, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Women's Housing and Economic Development Corporation, all of whom made affordability the major criteria for new housing they constructed, are the real heroes of the Bronx's revival. But the Bronx, has also benefited from improved political leadership, especially in the Borough Presidents office, whose last two occupants, Fernando Ferrer and Adolfo Carrion, have worked closely with community organizations to attract new housing and businesses without changing the demographic profile of Bronx neighborhoods. Area universities have also played a role in the Bronx's revival, both by sponsoring cultural programs open to community residents, and by investing in affordable housing. There is not one university in the Bronx which pursued development plans which have displaced low income residents, a record which universities in other parts of the city, and other parts of the nation, would do well to imitate
The Bronx has a rich cultural life which is accessible to residents and visitors. Hostos College, at the intersection of the Grand Concourse and 149th Street, has an excellent art gallery and wonderful musical programs that highlight the Bronx's Latin heritage ( www.hostos.cuny.edu). The Bronx Museum of the Arts, at 165th Street and the Grand Concourse, has wonderful collections featuring Bronx history and third world cultures, and excellent film series and musical programs ( www.bronxmuseum.org). The Bronx County Historical Society, on 209th Street and Bainbridge Avenue, has an excellent archive and a museum which features permanent and special exhibits ( www bronxhistoricalsociety.org). The Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, at the intersection of Bedford Park Road and Jerome Avenue, has world class entertainment at affordable prices (www.lehmancenter.org). And the Paradise Theater, one of the largest art deco theaters in the world, at 188th Street and Grand Concourse, has recently been reopened for concerts and sporting events (www.theparadisetheater.com) featuring artists ranging from Patti Labelle to Grandmaster Flash.
The major visitor attractions in the Bronx are also worth visiting- Yankee Stadium, The Bronx Zoo, the Bronx Botanical Gardens. So are the Bronx's two great restaurant districts, Arthur Avenue, which features excellent Italian food, and City Island , which has many good seafood restaurants.
But if you want to get off the beaten path and see one of America's most inspiring urban success stories, take the #5 train to the Bronx, get off at the 174th Street stop, and stroll south on Boston Road to Charlotte Street. After you've walked around and seen where whole new neighborhoods have been created in a place which was once a worldwide symbol of urban decay, then walk down Boston Road to 169th street to McKinley Square, once the cultural and commercial center of the Bronx's African American Community, and treat yourself to some West Indian beef, chicken or vegetable patties (you have a choice of two places). What you see, and you experience, will show you that neighborhood development need not displace working class people. It can empower them, and build on their cultures and aspirations
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The Crisis of Black and Latino Male Youth: A Bronx Perspective
The Crisis of African American and Latino Male Youth: A Bronx Perspective
This essay was presented at the CUNY Black Male Initiative Inaugural Conference
Dr. Mark Naison, Fordham University
It’s would be a daunting task to give a historical overview of the position of black men in American society. Even if I were John Hope Franklin, I don’t think I could summarize the impact of slavery, Jim Crow, deindustrialization and the rise of the prison industrial complex.
Instead, this essay will focus on my own research on African American communities in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 1950’s and analyze how the position of black men in those communities offers insights and possible lessons for trying to reengage young black men with the educational system and the mainstream economy.
The two communities I have been studying have been Morrisania, which emerged as the Bronx’s largest African American neighborhood as a result of a massive migration from Harlem in the 1940’s, and the Patterson Houses, the Bronx’s first low income public housing development, which opened in 1950. In the last 3 ½ years, with the help of a team of community researchers, I have done over 150 oral history interviews with people who moved to, or grew up in those two communities, in the 1940’s and 1950’s and collected photos and documents which bring the stories told in those interviews to life.
The image which emerges with overwhelming force, both from interviews and documents, is of strong, cohesive neighborhoods where working class black and Latino residents looked out for one another, shared their cultures, raised one another’s children, and looked to the future with considerable optimism. In 1951, an African American magazine called Our World described Morrisania in terms that almost no one today would apply to Black or Latino neighborhoods in the Bronx
“Right now, most of the Bronx’s 75,000 Negroes live between 160th
Street and Crotona Park South. To them, the Bronx is a borough of hope, a place of unlimited possibilities.”
African-American men played a central role in creating this atmosphere of security and hope. The majority of adult men in these communities were in families and in the labor force and black men played key roles as mentors to local youth in churches, community centers and after school and night centers in the public schools. Most of the people I interviewed have spoken of the influence of ministers, teachers, community center directors and their own fathers in guiding them through the sometimes perilous pathway to adulthood. Figures like Reverend Edler Hawkins of St Augustine’s Presbyterian Church, Floyd Lane of the PS 18 night center, Vincent Tibbs of the PS 99 night center, Eddie Bonnamere, a music teacher at Clark Junior High School, and Hilton White, who ran a community basketball program at 163rd Street and Caldwell Avenue, are mentioned in interview after interview as people who saved lives and inspired people to achieve more than they ever dreamed possible. In these working class black and Latino neighborhoods, which were not without problems- they had gangs, alcoholism and heavily tracked schools – adult black men were a powerful presence in families, voluntary institutions, and public funded recreation programs and they passed on a legacy of strength, optimism and community responsibility to young men in the next generation, some of whom went on to careers in civil service, teaching, social work, health professions, the media, politics and business.
However, even in these relatively optimistic times, racism in the city’s labor and housing markets were chipping away at the stability of these neighborhoods and undermining the ability of black and Latino families to accumulate social capital and transfer it successfully to the next generation. With few exceptions, the portraits of black fathers that emerge from my interviews is of men who worked two or three jobs in the most fragile sectors of the secondary labor market- they drove cabs, loaded trucks, worked in factories and cleaning establishments, operated elevators, cleaned buildings, and worked as cooks and porters on trains. Although there was a small component of government workers – especially postal workers and people who worked for the New York City Transit- and a few people who owned small businesses, what is strikingly absent- especially in comparison to what you would find in Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods at the time- is skilled unionized workers in the construction trades, printing or the garment trades. In the 1950’s and even into the 1960’s, New York, had tens of thousands of high paying, unionized, blue jobs that could be passed on from father to son and elevate a family into the middle class and black men had virtually none of them!. The worst example of this was the construction trades. Even though many black men came from the South, and the West Indies, with construction skills, they could not get jobs as electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, or sheet metal workers on major construction projects even when they were located in black neighborhoods. The following is a quote from Oliver Leeds, a leader of Brooklyn CORE who led massive sit-ins during the construction of Downstate Medical Center in 1963 ( this is courtesy of my colleague Brian Purnell who is writing a dissertation on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Brooklyn):
“I went in the Army and I tried to join the Tank Corps. When I got to Louisiana, I found I was in the Corps of Engineers. And you know what we do? We worked to win the war. We built anything that could be built: bridges, tunnels, houses, officers quarters, mess quarter, roads airstrips. We loaded and unloaded ships. We did anything in the way that involved work, construction work. You know when I got back to the United States, after the war, I couldn’t get a job in construction and there was no union that would let me in. And there was damn little that I couldn’t do in the way of construction work. They’ll take you and turn you into construction workers in the army, in a segregated army, and then when you get back into civilian life, you can’t get a construction job.”
The corrosive effect of this discrimination is visible in several ways. 1) Most black men had to work two or three secondary labor market jobs to make the salary of a single unionized construction worker, making the task of supporting their families far more stressful than for their Irish, Italian or Jewish counterparts 2) Black men had no marketable craft skills, or union connections, to pass on to their children 3).The blue collar jobs that black men did have were, unlike construction, vulnerable to elimination as the city shifted from an industrial to a finance, information based economy.
This had devastating consequences for black families and communities. Basically, from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period when the city’s economy was losing hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs, African Americans, unlike their Jewish, Irish or Italian counterparts, could not attain upward mobility within the working class, or achieve middle class incomes through blue collar occupations. Indeed, black male youth who did not graduate from college actually faced worse employment prospects than their fathers because many of the jobs their father worked at were being eliminated.
This helped trigger a fragmentation of the social structure of working class black and Latino communities like Morrisania or the Patterson Houses. As college educated and upwardly mobile families from these communities moved to the North and East Bronx, Queens, Westchester or New Jersey, men who remained, who for the most part had high schools educations or less, faced an economy that offered them lower wages, and even more humiliating conditions of work than their fathers had experienced. For many, the underground economy was their only realistic option, but this was not the relatively benign, non violent, underground economy of their father’s day, which was organized around the numbers business. This was the fierce high stakes heroin trade of Nicky Barnes and Guy Fisher, which left corpses, broken lives and shattered communities in its wake. In this fierce and frightening atmosphere, being a husband, father and a family man was an overwhelming strain on even the best intentioned young men and many cracked under the strain and many young men weren’t up to it., a tragedy presented with great power in the Hughes brothers brilliant movie “Dead Presidents.”
To make matters worse, as the job crunch on young working class black men intensified, and the violence of their daily lives became more overwhelming, New York City underwent a fiscal crisis and with the help of the Emergency Financial Control Board, decided that youth mentoring and recreation was expendable. All the after school and night centers in New York public schools were shut down, recreation supervisors were removed from the parks, and the great music programs in the city’s junior high schools were eliminated. So at a time when young men needed them the most, the Floyd Lanes, Vincent Tibbs, Eddie Bonnamere’s, and Hilton Whites were removed as forces in Bronx neighborhoods and other places like them around the city.
By the beginning of the 1980s, the idea of a cohesive, safe working class black and Latino communities in the South Bronx with a strong male presence in families and the legal labor force had become unimaginable to people growing up in those neighborhoods. They faced a world of mean streets, shattered families and a legal labor market that offered them little but stagnant wages and a humiliating work culture. And that was before crack!
The world we live in now, one where young black men feel so alienated and marginalized, has been shaped by many historical forces, some of them going back to slavery, but many of the problems have roots in labor market discrimination in the relatively recent past and short sighted and pernicious government policies implemented less than thirty years ago.
Fifty years ago, black men were a central part of every formal and informal institution
South Bronx neighborhoods and were an integral of the leadership structure that made these communities safe and cohesive. If we change government priorities, challenge racial hierarchies in the labor market, and make mentoring programs in schools and neighborhoods part of the daily life of children and adolscents, there is no reason why they cannot play that role again.
This essay was presented at the CUNY Black Male Initiative Inaugural Conference
Dr. Mark Naison, Fordham University
It’s would be a daunting task to give a historical overview of the position of black men in American society. Even if I were John Hope Franklin, I don’t think I could summarize the impact of slavery, Jim Crow, deindustrialization and the rise of the prison industrial complex.
Instead, this essay will focus on my own research on African American communities in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 1950’s and analyze how the position of black men in those communities offers insights and possible lessons for trying to reengage young black men with the educational system and the mainstream economy.
The two communities I have been studying have been Morrisania, which emerged as the Bronx’s largest African American neighborhood as a result of a massive migration from Harlem in the 1940’s, and the Patterson Houses, the Bronx’s first low income public housing development, which opened in 1950. In the last 3 ½ years, with the help of a team of community researchers, I have done over 150 oral history interviews with people who moved to, or grew up in those two communities, in the 1940’s and 1950’s and collected photos and documents which bring the stories told in those interviews to life.
The image which emerges with overwhelming force, both from interviews and documents, is of strong, cohesive neighborhoods where working class black and Latino residents looked out for one another, shared their cultures, raised one another’s children, and looked to the future with considerable optimism. In 1951, an African American magazine called Our World described Morrisania in terms that almost no one today would apply to Black or Latino neighborhoods in the Bronx
“Right now, most of the Bronx’s 75,000 Negroes live between 160th
Street and Crotona Park South. To them, the Bronx is a borough of hope, a place of unlimited possibilities.”
African-American men played a central role in creating this atmosphere of security and hope. The majority of adult men in these communities were in families and in the labor force and black men played key roles as mentors to local youth in churches, community centers and after school and night centers in the public schools. Most of the people I interviewed have spoken of the influence of ministers, teachers, community center directors and their own fathers in guiding them through the sometimes perilous pathway to adulthood. Figures like Reverend Edler Hawkins of St Augustine’s Presbyterian Church, Floyd Lane of the PS 18 night center, Vincent Tibbs of the PS 99 night center, Eddie Bonnamere, a music teacher at Clark Junior High School, and Hilton White, who ran a community basketball program at 163rd Street and Caldwell Avenue, are mentioned in interview after interview as people who saved lives and inspired people to achieve more than they ever dreamed possible. In these working class black and Latino neighborhoods, which were not without problems- they had gangs, alcoholism and heavily tracked schools – adult black men were a powerful presence in families, voluntary institutions, and public funded recreation programs and they passed on a legacy of strength, optimism and community responsibility to young men in the next generation, some of whom went on to careers in civil service, teaching, social work, health professions, the media, politics and business.
However, even in these relatively optimistic times, racism in the city’s labor and housing markets were chipping away at the stability of these neighborhoods and undermining the ability of black and Latino families to accumulate social capital and transfer it successfully to the next generation. With few exceptions, the portraits of black fathers that emerge from my interviews is of men who worked two or three jobs in the most fragile sectors of the secondary labor market- they drove cabs, loaded trucks, worked in factories and cleaning establishments, operated elevators, cleaned buildings, and worked as cooks and porters on trains. Although there was a small component of government workers – especially postal workers and people who worked for the New York City Transit- and a few people who owned small businesses, what is strikingly absent- especially in comparison to what you would find in Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods at the time- is skilled unionized workers in the construction trades, printing or the garment trades. In the 1950’s and even into the 1960’s, New York, had tens of thousands of high paying, unionized, blue jobs that could be passed on from father to son and elevate a family into the middle class and black men had virtually none of them!. The worst example of this was the construction trades. Even though many black men came from the South, and the West Indies, with construction skills, they could not get jobs as electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, or sheet metal workers on major construction projects even when they were located in black neighborhoods. The following is a quote from Oliver Leeds, a leader of Brooklyn CORE who led massive sit-ins during the construction of Downstate Medical Center in 1963 ( this is courtesy of my colleague Brian Purnell who is writing a dissertation on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Brooklyn):
“I went in the Army and I tried to join the Tank Corps. When I got to Louisiana, I found I was in the Corps of Engineers. And you know what we do? We worked to win the war. We built anything that could be built: bridges, tunnels, houses, officers quarters, mess quarter, roads airstrips. We loaded and unloaded ships. We did anything in the way that involved work, construction work. You know when I got back to the United States, after the war, I couldn’t get a job in construction and there was no union that would let me in. And there was damn little that I couldn’t do in the way of construction work. They’ll take you and turn you into construction workers in the army, in a segregated army, and then when you get back into civilian life, you can’t get a construction job.”
The corrosive effect of this discrimination is visible in several ways. 1) Most black men had to work two or three secondary labor market jobs to make the salary of a single unionized construction worker, making the task of supporting their families far more stressful than for their Irish, Italian or Jewish counterparts 2) Black men had no marketable craft skills, or union connections, to pass on to their children 3).The blue collar jobs that black men did have were, unlike construction, vulnerable to elimination as the city shifted from an industrial to a finance, information based economy.
This had devastating consequences for black families and communities. Basically, from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period when the city’s economy was losing hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs, African Americans, unlike their Jewish, Irish or Italian counterparts, could not attain upward mobility within the working class, or achieve middle class incomes through blue collar occupations. Indeed, black male youth who did not graduate from college actually faced worse employment prospects than their fathers because many of the jobs their father worked at were being eliminated.
This helped trigger a fragmentation of the social structure of working class black and Latino communities like Morrisania or the Patterson Houses. As college educated and upwardly mobile families from these communities moved to the North and East Bronx, Queens, Westchester or New Jersey, men who remained, who for the most part had high schools educations or less, faced an economy that offered them lower wages, and even more humiliating conditions of work than their fathers had experienced. For many, the underground economy was their only realistic option, but this was not the relatively benign, non violent, underground economy of their father’s day, which was organized around the numbers business. This was the fierce high stakes heroin trade of Nicky Barnes and Guy Fisher, which left corpses, broken lives and shattered communities in its wake. In this fierce and frightening atmosphere, being a husband, father and a family man was an overwhelming strain on even the best intentioned young men and many cracked under the strain and many young men weren’t up to it., a tragedy presented with great power in the Hughes brothers brilliant movie “Dead Presidents.”
To make matters worse, as the job crunch on young working class black men intensified, and the violence of their daily lives became more overwhelming, New York City underwent a fiscal crisis and with the help of the Emergency Financial Control Board, decided that youth mentoring and recreation was expendable. All the after school and night centers in New York public schools were shut down, recreation supervisors were removed from the parks, and the great music programs in the city’s junior high schools were eliminated. So at a time when young men needed them the most, the Floyd Lanes, Vincent Tibbs, Eddie Bonnamere’s, and Hilton Whites were removed as forces in Bronx neighborhoods and other places like them around the city.
By the beginning of the 1980s, the idea of a cohesive, safe working class black and Latino communities in the South Bronx with a strong male presence in families and the legal labor force had become unimaginable to people growing up in those neighborhoods. They faced a world of mean streets, shattered families and a legal labor market that offered them little but stagnant wages and a humiliating work culture. And that was before crack!
The world we live in now, one where young black men feel so alienated and marginalized, has been shaped by many historical forces, some of them going back to slavery, but many of the problems have roots in labor market discrimination in the relatively recent past and short sighted and pernicious government policies implemented less than thirty years ago.
Fifty years ago, black men were a central part of every formal and informal institution
South Bronx neighborhoods and were an integral of the leadership structure that made these communities safe and cohesive. If we change government priorities, challenge racial hierarchies in the labor market, and make mentoring programs in schools and neighborhoods part of the daily life of children and adolscents, there is no reason why they cannot play that role again.
The Streets Are Still Part of Bronx Hip Hop
Speech for Conference on Hip Hop and Street Culture in Barcelona, Spain, June 2, 2008
Mark Naison, Fordham University
“He knows the code. It’s not about a salary
It’s about reality and making some noise”
Fort Minor, “Remember the Name”
Last October, when I was taking a group of people on a tour of the Bronx’s historic Black neighborhood, Morrisania, I noticed a group of twenty teenagers standing in a circle on the corner of 168th Street and Prospect Avenue, clapping their hands in rhythm, while one by one, people entered the circle and began dancing energetically and acrobatically I watched for a minute in my car and then drove off to my next destination, thinking that the street dance tradition that began in the Bronx in the 1970’s, which people called “b-boying,” of breakdancing, seemed to have gotten a new lease on life. My curiosity piqued, I kept a close eye peeled for street dancing on all my drives through Bronx neighborhoods and saw the same kind of circular gathering on Bronx street corners at least three more times. I also noticed, during my visits to Bronx schools, where I regularly give lectures that every single musical performance or talent show that I saw featured dance moves that seemed a cross between those being done in contemporary Hip Hop videos and routines from 1980’s break dance films.
The vitality of street dance traditions in Bronx neighborhoods impressed me so much that I mentioned it during a lecture to teachers at a public university in the Bronx last month, only to be told that the dance phenomenon that I saw actually had a name- “Getting Lite:” and that it was being done by informal dance crews all over the Bronx who were posting their performances on Youtube! When I got home, I decided to explore this phenomenon through Google and found an incredibly array of “Getting Lite” videos in settings that varied from school cafeterias, to street corners, to apartment living rooms, to the insides of McDonalds and Burger Kings and stores which sold Fried Chicken. The dancers were Black and Latino, male and female and were in their early to middle teens, with the average age being 13 or 14. The moves they were doing involved very rapid and graceful foot movements, occasionally accompanied by dips and spins, but the dances lacked the aggressive upper body component of early break dancing and “krumping”- a contemporary dance craze that started on the West Coast- and seemed easier to do a confined space. They were also less gender exclusive- a good number of the dancers in “Getting Lite” videos were young women. The videos themselves were relatively primitive, probably taken on cell phones, but the participants still managed to post them on the internet where some of them registered thousands of hits! Here was electronic democracy at work; giving young people the opportunity to showcase their skills to thousands of people instantly with minimal expense.
As someone who has been studying the cultural and musical traditions of the Bronx, the emergence of a new dance style in some of the very neighborhoods where break dancing originated thirty years ago fascinated me. Like Hip Hop itself during its early
Years, roughly 1973- 1976, “Getting Lite” began as a grass roots youth movement in Bronx neighborhoods without any encouragement from commercial media. While amateur “Getting Lite” videos are all over the internet, the dance has not yet been acknowledged or publicized on the major music television networks- MTV and BET- and has not been incorporated into a commercially distributed hip hop video.
The fact that a cultural movement can still start “from the bottom up” in Bronx neighborhoods raises interesting questions on the continuing salience of urban public spaces as centers of cultural and musical creativity. Is this something unique to the Bronx or does it exist wherever large number of marginalized people live in crowded conditions, and where immigration and internal migrations bring people with different cultural traditions in close proximity to one another?
The Bronx today, as it was sixty years ago, when rhythm and blues, jazz and Afro-Cuban music were the sounds heard on the streets, and as it was thirty years ago, when hip hop jams were capturing the imagination of young people in schoolyards, community centers and parks, is a multicultural urban space being rapidly transformed by people of different nationalities moving into the borough in search of affordable housing.. According to the University Neighborhood Housing Program, the Bronx, which has the lowest rents in the city, and the highest number of rent stabilized apartments, has become the borough of choice for “the poorest households who can no longer find an affordable apartment in other parts of the City.” Many of these households are composed of recent immigrants, particularly from West Africa, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, who are moving into private rental housing in the Southern and Western portions of the borough. Statistically, the Bronx has the highest rates of severe overcrowding in the city (4.5% compared to the citywide average of 3.7%), but those rates, based on government surveys which are notoriously unreliable when dealing with undocumented immigrants, seriously underestimate the extent of the problem. A South Bronx priest that I interviewed, Rev John Grange, pointed to the block of five story tenements across the street from his church and said that there was an entire Mexican family, often composed of six or seven people, living in every single room in those buildings. Anyone walking or driving along major Bronx thoroughfares like Fordham Road, the Grand Concourse, Tremont Avenue, or East 138th street, or trying to find a parking place on the street in many Bronx neighborhoods, is likely to trust Father Grange’s estimates more than those of the US Census. The Bronx below Fordham Road is packed with people, all of them Black and Brown, most of them working class and poor, representing a wide variety of nationalities, religions and cultural traditions. Every day, it seems a new mosque, Mexican restaurant or Dominican grocery or hair braiding store opens up and school classrooms are filled with children speaking a wide variety of languages and dialects, some of which, like Soninke, Malinke and Bambara, have never been spoken in the US and are only taught in a handful of Universities
What does this have to do with Hip Hop Culture and “Getting Lite.” In my opinion, quite a bit. For many young people growing up in the Bronx today, the streets may represent one of the freer and ironically, the safer social spaces they can congregate in. Crowded households, with people sleeping in shifts, with boarders renting space, and in the case of immigrants, with new family members moving in till they can find their own living quarters, are stress filled, noisy, and sometimes violent, hardly places young people would go to seek refuge from danger or find peace and quiet. In my own oral history interviews with Bronx residents, especially those growing up in working class neighborhoods in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s family violence was a recurring theme, as it was in Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s celebrated book, Random Family, which deals with Bronx residents immersed in the drug business, and Ivan Sanchez’s recently published memoir Last Stop: Growing Up Wild Style in the Bronx.. Poverty, crowding, substance abuse, domestic violence, the cultural dissonance that can separate different generations in immigrant families are all factors which pushed generations of Bronx youngsters to seek refuge in the streets, and are still doing so today.
If you look at the “Getting Lite” videos, what comes across most strongly is the unalloyed joy that the dancers display in showing their skills. There are huge smiles on the faces of the kids entering the circle to dance, and those clapping while they perform. It makes me wonder. Do the people in those videos ever look that happy while they are in school, or when they are in their apartments? Is there anything else they do that makes them feel so free, and so alive? There is also considerable diversity in the young people participating. There are girls as well as boys, Latinos as well as Blacks, and, if I can read appearance and body language accurately, kids whose families come from Africa as well as the South and the West Indies. Family problems, language problems, money problems, test passing problems (stemming from schools obsessed with standardized test scores) all seem erased by joyous participation in spontaneous performances that young people create by themselves, for themselves, in spaces designed for other uses.
The exuberant atmosphere of the Getting Lite circles, who participants perform for “street credibility” and neighborhood fame rather than financial gain, mirrors that of the outdoor jams that helped create Hip Hop culture in the Bronx in the 1970s’. To quote David Toop
( from James Spady’ s book Street Conscious Rap):
“In those early days, each DJ was strong in his own district and was supported by local followers. Few had access to the big club so the venues were block parties and schools, or in the summer, the parks. A party in the park would entail wining the sound system to a lamp post or going to the house nearest the park, paying the owner and running a cable to their electricity. Then the party would go on till the police broke it up.”
A more detailed portrait of one of the most popular outdoor venues for Bronx hip hop, “63 Park”, a schoolyard at the intersection of Boston Road and 169th Street- only 6 blocks from where I first saw dances “Getting Lite”- is provided by Shelly Shel in a novel about her own experiences in Bronx Hip Hop called Mercedes Ladies:
“Boston Road was the place to be, especially during the summer months, because you always had different DJ crews playing music on the corner. The block was always rocking. Come on, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Grand Wizard Theodore and the L Brothers, Kool Herc and the Herculords . . . Boston Road in the Bronx was one of the original home bases for hip hop. We’d just be rockin’ on the street corners or in ’63 Park, which was actually a concrete schoolyard down the block. Wherever the music was playing, everybody would be out there. The streets used to be packed, especially during the summer months. Speakers were big as hell with amps to match. They’d be plugged into the street lamppost, or the electric cord extension would be coming from somebody’s house through the window. People danced in the streets or simply stood around posting while the music blasted . . . . If you’re a real hip hop head, you can imagine the electricity that was in the atmosphere. This went on until either the power went out or you heard gunshots from somewhere. Then the cops would come shut shit down. All this action fell under the heading of street jams; they were like a free concert without any promoters or salaries involved, held purely for street rep and fun. It was always a carefree atmosphere.”
Though some of the terms Shelly Shel used to describe the jams as “63 Park”- “carefree atmosphere” “purely for street rep and fun”- could be applied to “Getting Lite “ circles today, the social conditions in Bronx neighborhoods in the 70’s were, at least on the surface, far more dismal. Huge portions of the housing stock of the South Bronx were burning in those years, leaving a landscape filled with rubble filled lots, burned out cars and vacant apartment buildings with broken windows. Hip hop jams, held in community centers, schoolyards, and the open areas of public housing projects, provided temporary escape from the surrounding chaos. A verse from Grandmaster Flash’s“ The Message”- “can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise, got no money to move out, you know I’ve got no choice”-spoke for a generation of young people in the Bronx who attended early hip hop’s events. During an oral history interview, Joe Conzo Jr,, hip hop’s first photographer, described sitting by his window in a public housing project and watching the tenements across the street, on Caldwell Avenue north of 156th, burn to the ground. Matthew Swain, a computer programmer today, described his relief at moving from Andrews Avenue in the West Bronx, where many of the buildings were burning, to the Mill Brook Houses, a public housing project in South Bronx, where dj’s spun records in the park every summer and where fires were no longer a threat. Hip hop, in those difficult years, was a gesture of defiance and affirmation by young people living in communities that had been abandoned by private capital and government and had been written off as dead by most of the outside world.
But if the physical landscape of the Bronx is very different today than it was in the 70’s- most of the burned out sections have been cleaned out and filled with townhouses, apartment buildings and strip malls- young people living in the borough are still coping with extreme stress. Living in crowded neighborhoods filled with recent immigrants and people pushed out of Brooklyn and Manhattan, young people growing up in the Bronx today are as poor, and as hyper segregated, as their counterparts were thirty years ago. While public services, especially police and fire protection have improved, and levels of public violence are considerably lower, recreation services for youth have lagged far beyond new housing construction, and young people, once they reach adolescence, have few opportunities for creative activity once school hours are over. In this setting, the streets still beckon and hip hop culture, which provides a non-violent, celebratory outlet for youthful artistry and rebelliousness, offers a powerful reminder of the potential and resilient spirit of Bronx’s young people who have found their own way to resist the many forces trying to render them invisible. So get on your internet server, type in “Getting Lite in the Bronx” and prepare yourself for a treat! Like their counterparts thirty years ago, the kids “Getting Lite,” with the help of new technologies, may have found created something that will spark a response among young people in similar circumstances all around the world
NOTE:
At the end of the Speech, Please Show the Video
“Request Line” by Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic Three and the Following Videos
“Getting Lite At Fordham Plaza” “Getting Lite At a Bronx Train Station” “Getting Lite in Kennedy Fried Chicken” “Team Heavy Getting Lite” “Getting Lite in McDonalds”
Mark Naison, Fordham University
“He knows the code. It’s not about a salary
It’s about reality and making some noise”
Fort Minor, “Remember the Name”
Last October, when I was taking a group of people on a tour of the Bronx’s historic Black neighborhood, Morrisania, I noticed a group of twenty teenagers standing in a circle on the corner of 168th Street and Prospect Avenue, clapping their hands in rhythm, while one by one, people entered the circle and began dancing energetically and acrobatically I watched for a minute in my car and then drove off to my next destination, thinking that the street dance tradition that began in the Bronx in the 1970’s, which people called “b-boying,” of breakdancing, seemed to have gotten a new lease on life. My curiosity piqued, I kept a close eye peeled for street dancing on all my drives through Bronx neighborhoods and saw the same kind of circular gathering on Bronx street corners at least three more times. I also noticed, during my visits to Bronx schools, where I regularly give lectures that every single musical performance or talent show that I saw featured dance moves that seemed a cross between those being done in contemporary Hip Hop videos and routines from 1980’s break dance films.
The vitality of street dance traditions in Bronx neighborhoods impressed me so much that I mentioned it during a lecture to teachers at a public university in the Bronx last month, only to be told that the dance phenomenon that I saw actually had a name- “Getting Lite:” and that it was being done by informal dance crews all over the Bronx who were posting their performances on Youtube! When I got home, I decided to explore this phenomenon through Google and found an incredibly array of “Getting Lite” videos in settings that varied from school cafeterias, to street corners, to apartment living rooms, to the insides of McDonalds and Burger Kings and stores which sold Fried Chicken. The dancers were Black and Latino, male and female and were in their early to middle teens, with the average age being 13 or 14. The moves they were doing involved very rapid and graceful foot movements, occasionally accompanied by dips and spins, but the dances lacked the aggressive upper body component of early break dancing and “krumping”- a contemporary dance craze that started on the West Coast- and seemed easier to do a confined space. They were also less gender exclusive- a good number of the dancers in “Getting Lite” videos were young women. The videos themselves were relatively primitive, probably taken on cell phones, but the participants still managed to post them on the internet where some of them registered thousands of hits! Here was electronic democracy at work; giving young people the opportunity to showcase their skills to thousands of people instantly with minimal expense.
As someone who has been studying the cultural and musical traditions of the Bronx, the emergence of a new dance style in some of the very neighborhoods where break dancing originated thirty years ago fascinated me. Like Hip Hop itself during its early
Years, roughly 1973- 1976, “Getting Lite” began as a grass roots youth movement in Bronx neighborhoods without any encouragement from commercial media. While amateur “Getting Lite” videos are all over the internet, the dance has not yet been acknowledged or publicized on the major music television networks- MTV and BET- and has not been incorporated into a commercially distributed hip hop video.
The fact that a cultural movement can still start “from the bottom up” in Bronx neighborhoods raises interesting questions on the continuing salience of urban public spaces as centers of cultural and musical creativity. Is this something unique to the Bronx or does it exist wherever large number of marginalized people live in crowded conditions, and where immigration and internal migrations bring people with different cultural traditions in close proximity to one another?
The Bronx today, as it was sixty years ago, when rhythm and blues, jazz and Afro-Cuban music were the sounds heard on the streets, and as it was thirty years ago, when hip hop jams were capturing the imagination of young people in schoolyards, community centers and parks, is a multicultural urban space being rapidly transformed by people of different nationalities moving into the borough in search of affordable housing.. According to the University Neighborhood Housing Program, the Bronx, which has the lowest rents in the city, and the highest number of rent stabilized apartments, has become the borough of choice for “the poorest households who can no longer find an affordable apartment in other parts of the City.” Many of these households are composed of recent immigrants, particularly from West Africa, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, who are moving into private rental housing in the Southern and Western portions of the borough. Statistically, the Bronx has the highest rates of severe overcrowding in the city (4.5% compared to the citywide average of 3.7%), but those rates, based on government surveys which are notoriously unreliable when dealing with undocumented immigrants, seriously underestimate the extent of the problem. A South Bronx priest that I interviewed, Rev John Grange, pointed to the block of five story tenements across the street from his church and said that there was an entire Mexican family, often composed of six or seven people, living in every single room in those buildings. Anyone walking or driving along major Bronx thoroughfares like Fordham Road, the Grand Concourse, Tremont Avenue, or East 138th street, or trying to find a parking place on the street in many Bronx neighborhoods, is likely to trust Father Grange’s estimates more than those of the US Census. The Bronx below Fordham Road is packed with people, all of them Black and Brown, most of them working class and poor, representing a wide variety of nationalities, religions and cultural traditions. Every day, it seems a new mosque, Mexican restaurant or Dominican grocery or hair braiding store opens up and school classrooms are filled with children speaking a wide variety of languages and dialects, some of which, like Soninke, Malinke and Bambara, have never been spoken in the US and are only taught in a handful of Universities
What does this have to do with Hip Hop Culture and “Getting Lite.” In my opinion, quite a bit. For many young people growing up in the Bronx today, the streets may represent one of the freer and ironically, the safer social spaces they can congregate in. Crowded households, with people sleeping in shifts, with boarders renting space, and in the case of immigrants, with new family members moving in till they can find their own living quarters, are stress filled, noisy, and sometimes violent, hardly places young people would go to seek refuge from danger or find peace and quiet. In my own oral history interviews with Bronx residents, especially those growing up in working class neighborhoods in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s family violence was a recurring theme, as it was in Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s celebrated book, Random Family, which deals with Bronx residents immersed in the drug business, and Ivan Sanchez’s recently published memoir Last Stop: Growing Up Wild Style in the Bronx.. Poverty, crowding, substance abuse, domestic violence, the cultural dissonance that can separate different generations in immigrant families are all factors which pushed generations of Bronx youngsters to seek refuge in the streets, and are still doing so today.
If you look at the “Getting Lite” videos, what comes across most strongly is the unalloyed joy that the dancers display in showing their skills. There are huge smiles on the faces of the kids entering the circle to dance, and those clapping while they perform. It makes me wonder. Do the people in those videos ever look that happy while they are in school, or when they are in their apartments? Is there anything else they do that makes them feel so free, and so alive? There is also considerable diversity in the young people participating. There are girls as well as boys, Latinos as well as Blacks, and, if I can read appearance and body language accurately, kids whose families come from Africa as well as the South and the West Indies. Family problems, language problems, money problems, test passing problems (stemming from schools obsessed with standardized test scores) all seem erased by joyous participation in spontaneous performances that young people create by themselves, for themselves, in spaces designed for other uses.
The exuberant atmosphere of the Getting Lite circles, who participants perform for “street credibility” and neighborhood fame rather than financial gain, mirrors that of the outdoor jams that helped create Hip Hop culture in the Bronx in the 1970s’. To quote David Toop
( from James Spady’ s book Street Conscious Rap):
“In those early days, each DJ was strong in his own district and was supported by local followers. Few had access to the big club so the venues were block parties and schools, or in the summer, the parks. A party in the park would entail wining the sound system to a lamp post or going to the house nearest the park, paying the owner and running a cable to their electricity. Then the party would go on till the police broke it up.”
A more detailed portrait of one of the most popular outdoor venues for Bronx hip hop, “63 Park”, a schoolyard at the intersection of Boston Road and 169th Street- only 6 blocks from where I first saw dances “Getting Lite”- is provided by Shelly Shel in a novel about her own experiences in Bronx Hip Hop called Mercedes Ladies:
“Boston Road was the place to be, especially during the summer months, because you always had different DJ crews playing music on the corner. The block was always rocking. Come on, with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Grand Wizard Theodore and the L Brothers, Kool Herc and the Herculords . . . Boston Road in the Bronx was one of the original home bases for hip hop. We’d just be rockin’ on the street corners or in ’63 Park, which was actually a concrete schoolyard down the block. Wherever the music was playing, everybody would be out there. The streets used to be packed, especially during the summer months. Speakers were big as hell with amps to match. They’d be plugged into the street lamppost, or the electric cord extension would be coming from somebody’s house through the window. People danced in the streets or simply stood around posting while the music blasted . . . . If you’re a real hip hop head, you can imagine the electricity that was in the atmosphere. This went on until either the power went out or you heard gunshots from somewhere. Then the cops would come shut shit down. All this action fell under the heading of street jams; they were like a free concert without any promoters or salaries involved, held purely for street rep and fun. It was always a carefree atmosphere.”
Though some of the terms Shelly Shel used to describe the jams as “63 Park”- “carefree atmosphere” “purely for street rep and fun”- could be applied to “Getting Lite “ circles today, the social conditions in Bronx neighborhoods in the 70’s were, at least on the surface, far more dismal. Huge portions of the housing stock of the South Bronx were burning in those years, leaving a landscape filled with rubble filled lots, burned out cars and vacant apartment buildings with broken windows. Hip hop jams, held in community centers, schoolyards, and the open areas of public housing projects, provided temporary escape from the surrounding chaos. A verse from Grandmaster Flash’s“ The Message”- “can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise, got no money to move out, you know I’ve got no choice”-spoke for a generation of young people in the Bronx who attended early hip hop’s events. During an oral history interview, Joe Conzo Jr,, hip hop’s first photographer, described sitting by his window in a public housing project and watching the tenements across the street, on Caldwell Avenue north of 156th, burn to the ground. Matthew Swain, a computer programmer today, described his relief at moving from Andrews Avenue in the West Bronx, where many of the buildings were burning, to the Mill Brook Houses, a public housing project in South Bronx, where dj’s spun records in the park every summer and where fires were no longer a threat. Hip hop, in those difficult years, was a gesture of defiance and affirmation by young people living in communities that had been abandoned by private capital and government and had been written off as dead by most of the outside world.
But if the physical landscape of the Bronx is very different today than it was in the 70’s- most of the burned out sections have been cleaned out and filled with townhouses, apartment buildings and strip malls- young people living in the borough are still coping with extreme stress. Living in crowded neighborhoods filled with recent immigrants and people pushed out of Brooklyn and Manhattan, young people growing up in the Bronx today are as poor, and as hyper segregated, as their counterparts were thirty years ago. While public services, especially police and fire protection have improved, and levels of public violence are considerably lower, recreation services for youth have lagged far beyond new housing construction, and young people, once they reach adolescence, have few opportunities for creative activity once school hours are over. In this setting, the streets still beckon and hip hop culture, which provides a non-violent, celebratory outlet for youthful artistry and rebelliousness, offers a powerful reminder of the potential and resilient spirit of Bronx’s young people who have found their own way to resist the many forces trying to render them invisible. So get on your internet server, type in “Getting Lite in the Bronx” and prepare yourself for a treat! Like their counterparts thirty years ago, the kids “Getting Lite,” with the help of new technologies, may have found created something that will spark a response among young people in similar circumstances all around the world
NOTE:
At the end of the Speech, Please Show the Video
“Request Line” by Rockmaster Scott and the Dynamic Three and the Following Videos
“Getting Lite At Fordham Plaza” “Getting Lite At a Bronx Train Station” “Getting Lite in Kennedy Fried Chicken” “Team Heavy Getting Lite” “Getting Lite in McDonalds”
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Solution to the Economic Crisis Requires Raising Wages and Redistributing Income
Any Long Term Solution to the Economic Crisis Requires Raising Wages and Redistributing Income
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
The roots of the current economic crisis in the United States are strikingly similar to those which provoked the Great Depression of the 1930's. In each instance, the economic collapse followed a long period of economic expansion in which profits far outpaced wages, leading to massive speculation in unregulated financial products and the stimulation of consumer demand by having wage earners to take on large amounts of personal debt. When the speculative bubble collapsed, as it did in 1929 and 2008, weakening or destroying major financial institutions, consumer demand could not keep the economy afloat once credit was no longer available. In 1929, this produced a three year economic contraction that led to a third of the nation's labor force being unemployed and the steel and auto industry operating at less than 30 percent of its capacity. In 2008, we are not at that point--- yet, But we are seeing a profliferation of store closings and bankruptcies among major American retailers, a wave of home foreclosures, and the impending collapse of the American automobile industry. With all of these leading to further job losses, and further drops in consumer demand, it is hard to see where the power to reverse the economic2 0free fall will come from
The current strategy, of both the Bush Administration and the incoming Obama administration, seems to be to inject funds into the collapsing banking system to make sure credit is available, and develop a stimulus package that will put income into consumers hands through a combination of job creation and transfer payments ( food stamps, unemployment insurance). All this is probably necessary to prevent the economy from shrinking at the rate it did in the early Depression
But because consumer credit will never again be so freely available through the major instruments used to promote it in the last 20 years- primarily credit card debt and second mortgages on homes- it is hard to see how American consumers can again become the engine of economic growth unless working class and middle class incomes start growing at the rates they did between 1945 and 1970. Some of this income growth can be encourage by lowering tax rates on middle class incomes and developing a program of national health insurance, but any long term solution requires a national wage policy to address income inequality and improve the bargaining power of American workers.
Even Lawrence Summers, President Obama's new economic advisor, recognizes that economic inequality is one of the major causes of the nation20's economic collapse Acdording to today's NY Times, Summers is now arguing that the lack of middle class income growth is "the definining issue of our time" and using the following parable to illustrate his point
" To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s," Summers argues, " every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago."
Since no such voluntary program in income distribution is ever going to take place, how do we assure that working class and middle class incomes rise sufficiently to be a source of consumer demand as well as provide a decent standard of living to most Americans
I have two policy suggestions which would encourage such an outcome:
First. that the federal government impose an income standard on any bank, insurance company or manufacturer that receives a federal subsidy requiring that its highest paid executives make no more than 10 times the salary of that company's lowest paid worker. Two highly successful companies, Ben and Jerry's and Costco, operate with such a standard, and there is no reason that it could not prevail throughout American industry. This would give company managers a strong personal incentive to raise wages throughout their enterprises and would prevent huge portions of corporate income from being directed into executive compensation
Secondly, the Congress and the incoming administration should revise labor law to make it much easier to organize unions, encouraging unionization drives in the lowest wage sections of the American economy, especially retail trades, food processing, agriculture and the hotel and restaurant industry ( including fast foods) Strong unions will assure that workers get a fair share of corporate profits and that low wage workers can become consumers without incurring huge amounts of debt.
Only policies such as these can create an economy where consumer demand rests on a firm enough foundation to promote economic growth without uncontrolled debt and speculation.
Promoting economic equality is not onlya strategy for national unity in times of hardship, it is the only way out of the mess we are in
Mark Naison
November 26, 2008
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
The roots of the current economic crisis in the United States are strikingly similar to those which provoked the Great Depression of the 1930's. In each instance, the economic collapse followed a long period of economic expansion in which profits far outpaced wages, leading to massive speculation in unregulated financial products and the stimulation of consumer demand by having wage earners to take on large amounts of personal debt. When the speculative bubble collapsed, as it did in 1929 and 2008, weakening or destroying major financial institutions, consumer demand could not keep the economy afloat once credit was no longer available. In 1929, this produced a three year economic contraction that led to a third of the nation's labor force being unemployed and the steel and auto industry operating at less than 30 percent of its capacity. In 2008, we are not at that point--- yet, But we are seeing a profliferation of store closings and bankruptcies among major American retailers, a wave of home foreclosures, and the impending collapse of the American automobile industry. With all of these leading to further job losses, and further drops in consumer demand, it is hard to see where the power to reverse the economic2 0free fall will come from
The current strategy, of both the Bush Administration and the incoming Obama administration, seems to be to inject funds into the collapsing banking system to make sure credit is available, and develop a stimulus package that will put income into consumers hands through a combination of job creation and transfer payments ( food stamps, unemployment insurance). All this is probably necessary to prevent the economy from shrinking at the rate it did in the early Depression
But because consumer credit will never again be so freely available through the major instruments used to promote it in the last 20 years- primarily credit card debt and second mortgages on homes- it is hard to see how American consumers can again become the engine of economic growth unless working class and middle class incomes start growing at the rates they did between 1945 and 1970. Some of this income growth can be encourage by lowering tax rates on middle class incomes and developing a program of national health insurance, but any long term solution requires a national wage policy to address income inequality and improve the bargaining power of American workers.
Even Lawrence Summers, President Obama's new economic advisor, recognizes that economic inequality is one of the major causes of the nation20's economic collapse Acdording to today's NY Times, Summers is now arguing that the lack of middle class income growth is "the definining issue of our time" and using the following parable to illustrate his point
" To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s," Summers argues, " every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago."
Since no such voluntary program in income distribution is ever going to take place, how do we assure that working class and middle class incomes rise sufficiently to be a source of consumer demand as well as provide a decent standard of living to most Americans
I have two policy suggestions which would encourage such an outcome:
First. that the federal government impose an income standard on any bank, insurance company or manufacturer that receives a federal subsidy requiring that its highest paid executives make no more than 10 times the salary of that company's lowest paid worker. Two highly successful companies, Ben and Jerry's and Costco, operate with such a standard, and there is no reason that it could not prevail throughout American industry. This would give company managers a strong personal incentive to raise wages throughout their enterprises and would prevent huge portions of corporate income from being directed into executive compensation
Secondly, the Congress and the incoming administration should revise labor law to make it much easier to organize unions, encouraging unionization drives in the lowest wage sections of the American economy, especially retail trades, food processing, agriculture and the hotel and restaurant industry ( including fast foods) Strong unions will assure that workers get a fair share of corporate profits and that low wage workers can become consumers without incurring huge amounts of debt.
Only policies such as these can create an economy where consumer demand rests on a firm enough foundation to promote economic growth without uncontrolled debt and speculation.
Promoting economic equality is not onlya strategy for national unity in times of hardship, it is the only way out of the mess we are in
Mark Naison
November 26, 2008
Its Time to Use the "D" Word: A Recession Doesn't Describe Where the Economy Is Heading
Time to Use the "D" Word: "Recession" Doesn't Begin to Describe Where The US Economy
Is Heading
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
For the last three months, as the American economy has gone into a free fall, economists and political leaders have parceled out the bad news in small, allegedly manageable proportions. Yesterday, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally confirmed what virtually every small business owner has known for some time- that the US economy is a recession, and that it has been in recession since the Fall of 2007!
But though everyone in political life now feels comfortable in using the word "recession," I have yet to see any economist or political leader say what all the economic indicators all suggest- that the US economy is headed into a Depression, with double digit unemployment figures that may persist for several years.
Despite the bank bailout initiated by the Bush Administration, and the stimulus package which the Obama administration will undoubtedly launch, the US economy faces a toxic mix unprecedented in post war US history- a brutal, and still escalating squeeze, on commercial and consumer credit, which, coupled with rising unemployment, is producing a dramatic shrinkage of consumer demand, the major engine of economic growth in the US and the world since World War II.
While economists will be debating the causes of the unprecedented collapse of the US banking system for some time, the consequences are only now beginning to be felt on the ground. The largest US Banks- Bank of America, Citicorp and JP Morgan Chase- and their smaller counterparts- are in such fragile condition that they becoming risk averse in their daily interactions with businesses and consumers. Not only are they making it much more difficult to lend money, they are sharply raising the interest rates on loans they do make, putting severe economic pressure on even long term customers. The restrictive, some would say extortionate conditions they are placing on lending, are having a powerfully depressing effect on economic activity
The following are the major ways the freezing of credit is forcing the economy into a depression
1. The denial of business loans, and the withdrawal of lines of credit, are crushing small and medium size businesses throughout the United States. Not only do businesses require credit to upgrade their facilities or launch new product lines, many of them require lines of credit to pay off suppliers or get through lean periods in the business cycle. Shutting off credit, or dramatically raising the cost of lending money, is driving many small and medium size businesses into bankruptcy, forcing them to shed jobs and add to the rapidly rising unemployment figures, further depressing consumer demand
2. Imposing much more rigid standards for home mortgages and car loans, while a necessary corrective to the loose lending practices of the last fifteen years, are making it much more difficult to purchase homes and cars, contributing to a huge glut of unsold homes, a devastating decline in new construction activity, and
a decline in new car sales so sharp that it has forced the three major US auto makers to the edge of bankruptcy. As construction companies shut down, car dealerships close, and auto manufacturers and parts companies fold, or engage in mass layoffs to stay afloat, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of workers with relatively good incomes will lose their jobs
3. As banks impose limits on credit card debt and ratchet up interest rates on credit card holders, which they are in the process of doing, consumer spending will take a huge hit, putting a large number of businesses from restaurants to big box stores, in grave economic difficulty. How consumer demand will
survive such a dramatic contraction of personal credit in a time of rapidly rising unemployment no economist has satisfactorily explained. Where will the money come from to support stores that sell anything but food and clothing? The entire landscape of American commerce that was built around consumer spending- particularly the shopping mall- may now be in jeopardy.
4. As banks restrict access to student loans, or raise interest rates in those loans, a whole generation of students will be forced to postpone graduate and professional education, transfer to, or attend, less expensive schools, or be forced out of college altogether. This will lead to freezes in university hiring and devastating losses in cultural capital as talented students become unable to afford the training they need to become economic innovators.
The consequences I have just described, and the economic statistics that accompany them- unemployment rates of 11-15 percent, millions of unsold homes, new construction and new car sales at a fraction of previous rates- may be a bit abstract for most readers so let me put where we are heading
in concrete physical terms
1. You are going to see boarded up stores, boarded up car dealerships, and boarded up shopping malls in every section of the nation. Just like the boarded up factory was the symbol of the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1970s' and 1980's, the boarded up shopping mall is going to be the symbol of the credit crisis and collapse of consumer demand.
2. You are going to see large number of abandoned homes, and unoccupied high rise apartment buildings in
many sections of the country because those units cannot be sold or rented at market rates. How people forced out of homes and jobs will respond to huge stretches of abandoned, or unoccupied commercial and
residential space is anybody's guess. Perhaps there will be "squatter movements" or government programs to allow people to occupy abandoned space for nominal rents.
3. Large numbers of people who had thought they would have private living space will be living communally. As people lose jobs, or retirement income, they will be forced to move in with relatives or take in boarders to afford their current living space. Perhaps they will have to become boarders themselves. As for young people getting out of college, they will either have to move back with their parents or form communal apartments with friends and share housing costs and food.
This, my friends, is the world we will be living in during the next five years. And it is time for our political leaders to be honest about what we are up against.
Times this hard require emergency measures- as Paul Krugman has argued, what ever stimulus package is being planned should be doubled in size-- but they also require patience and sacrifice from all of us, and a willingness to lend a helping hand to our neighbors and fellow citizens who are in worse shape than we are.
No matter what we do, a Depression is probably coming. Whether it last three years or ten years depends on how intelligently we plan and how aggressively we act
Mark Naison
December 2, 2008
Is Heading
Dr Mark Naison
Fordham University
For the last three months, as the American economy has gone into a free fall, economists and political leaders have parceled out the bad news in small, allegedly manageable proportions. Yesterday, the National Bureau of Economic Research finally confirmed what virtually every small business owner has known for some time- that the US economy is a recession, and that it has been in recession since the Fall of 2007!
But though everyone in political life now feels comfortable in using the word "recession," I have yet to see any economist or political leader say what all the economic indicators all suggest- that the US economy is headed into a Depression, with double digit unemployment figures that may persist for several years.
Despite the bank bailout initiated by the Bush Administration, and the stimulus package which the Obama administration will undoubtedly launch, the US economy faces a toxic mix unprecedented in post war US history- a brutal, and still escalating squeeze, on commercial and consumer credit, which, coupled with rising unemployment, is producing a dramatic shrinkage of consumer demand, the major engine of economic growth in the US and the world since World War II.
While economists will be debating the causes of the unprecedented collapse of the US banking system for some time, the consequences are only now beginning to be felt on the ground. The largest US Banks- Bank of America, Citicorp and JP Morgan Chase- and their smaller counterparts- are in such fragile condition that they becoming risk averse in their daily interactions with businesses and consumers. Not only are they making it much more difficult to lend money, they are sharply raising the interest rates on loans they do make, putting severe economic pressure on even long term customers. The restrictive, some would say extortionate conditions they are placing on lending, are having a powerfully depressing effect on economic activity
The following are the major ways the freezing of credit is forcing the economy into a depression
1. The denial of business loans, and the withdrawal of lines of credit, are crushing small and medium size businesses throughout the United States. Not only do businesses require credit to upgrade their facilities or launch new product lines, many of them require lines of credit to pay off suppliers or get through lean periods in the business cycle. Shutting off credit, or dramatically raising the cost of lending money, is driving many small and medium size businesses into bankruptcy, forcing them to shed jobs and add to the rapidly rising unemployment figures, further depressing consumer demand
2. Imposing much more rigid standards for home mortgages and car loans, while a necessary corrective to the loose lending practices of the last fifteen years, are making it much more difficult to purchase homes and cars, contributing to a huge glut of unsold homes, a devastating decline in new construction activity, and
a decline in new car sales so sharp that it has forced the three major US auto makers to the edge of bankruptcy. As construction companies shut down, car dealerships close, and auto manufacturers and parts companies fold, or engage in mass layoffs to stay afloat, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of workers with relatively good incomes will lose their jobs
3. As banks impose limits on credit card debt and ratchet up interest rates on credit card holders, which they are in the process of doing, consumer spending will take a huge hit, putting a large number of businesses from restaurants to big box stores, in grave economic difficulty. How consumer demand will
survive such a dramatic contraction of personal credit in a time of rapidly rising unemployment no economist has satisfactorily explained. Where will the money come from to support stores that sell anything but food and clothing? The entire landscape of American commerce that was built around consumer spending- particularly the shopping mall- may now be in jeopardy.
4. As banks restrict access to student loans, or raise interest rates in those loans, a whole generation of students will be forced to postpone graduate and professional education, transfer to, or attend, less expensive schools, or be forced out of college altogether. This will lead to freezes in university hiring and devastating losses in cultural capital as talented students become unable to afford the training they need to become economic innovators.
The consequences I have just described, and the economic statistics that accompany them- unemployment rates of 11-15 percent, millions of unsold homes, new construction and new car sales at a fraction of previous rates- may be a bit abstract for most readers so let me put where we are heading
in concrete physical terms
1. You are going to see boarded up stores, boarded up car dealerships, and boarded up shopping malls in every section of the nation. Just like the boarded up factory was the symbol of the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1970s' and 1980's, the boarded up shopping mall is going to be the symbol of the credit crisis and collapse of consumer demand.
2. You are going to see large number of abandoned homes, and unoccupied high rise apartment buildings in
many sections of the country because those units cannot be sold or rented at market rates. How people forced out of homes and jobs will respond to huge stretches of abandoned, or unoccupied commercial and
residential space is anybody's guess. Perhaps there will be "squatter movements" or government programs to allow people to occupy abandoned space for nominal rents.
3. Large numbers of people who had thought they would have private living space will be living communally. As people lose jobs, or retirement income, they will be forced to move in with relatives or take in boarders to afford their current living space. Perhaps they will have to become boarders themselves. As for young people getting out of college, they will either have to move back with their parents or form communal apartments with friends and share housing costs and food.
This, my friends, is the world we will be living in during the next five years. And it is time for our political leaders to be honest about what we are up against.
Times this hard require emergency measures- as Paul Krugman has argued, what ever stimulus package is being planned should be doubled in size-- but they also require patience and sacrifice from all of us, and a willingness to lend a helping hand to our neighbors and fellow citizens who are in worse shape than we are.
No matter what we do, a Depression is probably coming. Whether it last three years or ten years depends on how intelligently we plan and how aggressively we act
Mark Naison
December 2, 2008
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