Stone Cupid Real

    By Louis Uchitelle
    The New York Times

    Sunday 26 August 2007

    Newton, Iowa - The last of the Maytag factories that lifted so many people into the middle class here will close on Oct. 26. Guy Winchell and his wife, Lisa, will lose their jobs that day. Their combined income of $43 an hour will disappear and, soon after, so will their health insurance. Most of the pensions they would have received will also be gone.

    The Winchells are still in their 40s. They can retrain or start a business, choices promoted by city leaders in a campaign to "reinvent" Newton without its biggest employer. But as they ponder their futures, the Winchells are uncertain about how to deal with a lower standard of living. "I'm not wanting to go waitress," said Mrs. Winchell, who, at 41, drives a forklift and earns $19 an hour, "but I can do what I have to to make money."

    Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn't looked. "Lisa is always on me because I'm so angry," he said. "She says, 'What would your mom have said?' My mom would have said, 'Worrying is not going to help.'"

    Newton's last day as a manufacturing mecca comes a century after Fred L. Maytag built his first mechanical washing machine here. Over time he also located his headquarters, research center and most production in Newton, changing it from a rural county seat into a prosperous city of 16,000. Absent Maytag's high pay, overall hourly earnings last year for other workers in the county would have been $3 an hour less, according to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency.

    And then the Whirlpool Corporation bought Maytag in the spring of 2006 and began shutting down its operations here, eliminating jobs and depressing wages. Those caught in this process around the country are gradually swelling what Katherine S. Newman, a Princeton sociologist, describes as "The Missing Class," the title of a soon-to-be-published book (Beacon Press), of which she is co-author.

    Ms. Newman calculates that 54 million adults and children occupy a "nether region" of family incomes well above the poverty line - but well short of the middle class. Either they fall out of the middle class, as the Winchells are in danger of doing, or they have never earned enough at one job to get a family of four into the middle class.

    "We are caught in a never-ending cycle of de-industrialization in which the best jobs disappear," Ms. Newman said. "It is amazing to me how much we have come to accept that there is nothing to be done about this loss of income."

    Here in Newton, Maytag's fortress-like headquarters building, its beige-colored bulk looming over the downtown, has been emptied of 1,200 white-collar workers. Of nearly 900 unionized blue-collar workers still left last December in the sprawling factory, 400 were laid off and the rest got a reprieve, including the Winchells.

    But theirs is a dead-end task: keeping retailers supplied until Whirlpool can start production of redesigned Maytag models built on the chassis of Whirlpool machines at the company's existing factories in Monterrey, Mexico, and Clyde, Ohio. In Clyde, top pay for nearly all of the 3,700 non-union blue-collar workers is $17 an hour, several dollars less than Maytag paid in Newton. But as Bill Townsend, the plant manager, put it, "whenever we advertise for employment, it is not difficult finding folks."

    Nor is it difficult to recruit workers in Newton anymore. Absent Maytag, a good wage in central Iowa is $12 or $13 an hour. The trick is to get that much as well as health insurance - and if not the wage, then at least the health insurance, even if that means commuting 40 to 50 miles, as more than a few ex-Maytag workers are now doing.

    The downshift is reflected in the Labor Department's national data. Median family income has risen at an average annual rate of only six-tenths of a percent, adjusted for inflation, since the mid-1970s - in sharp contrast to the 2.8 percent growth rate in the preceding 26 years.

    Hardship, however, is initially postponed in Newton. Local 997 of the United Automobile Workers, representing Maytag's blue-collar staff, negotiated a severance package with Whirlpool last fall that extends each departing worker's health insurance for five or six months and pays at least $850 for each year worked, up to 30 years.

    For the Winchells, who have five children, all but one from previous marriages - their smiling faces on display in oval-shaped photographs grouped together on a living-room wall - the severance packages translate into more than 20 weeks of pay for the couple. The delayed impact helps to explain, as Mr. Winchell put it, why he and his wife won't be forced until early next spring to face the inevitable distress of shrunken incomes and uncertain health care.

    "I'll find work," he declared, "but I really don't know what I am going to do. I've thought about applying to hospitals because they have health insurance. One of us will have to take a job with health insurance."

    Whatever the damage to living standards, from Whirlpool's point of view, its strategy in acquiring Maytag was impeccable. Make the same number of washing machines in two plants - Clyde and Monterrey - instead of three, achieving economies of scale. Add 1,000 workers in Clyde to accommodate the increased output, but non-union workers earning less, with fewer benefits, than the unionized work force in Newton.

    The State of Iowa offered numerous incentives to Whirlpool to stay in Newton. Gov. Tom Vilsack suggested publicly that he would build for Whirlpool "the most energy-efficient plant in the world." As a lure, the city said it would give full college scholarships to children who went through the public schools. "It was part of a retention strategy; here's the benefit we can provide if you stay," said Kim Didier, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation.

    But for Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool's chairman, leaving Newton was, in the end, a no-brainer. Staying, he said in an interview, was "not economically viable." He explained: "It was two companies doing the same thing that you needed one company doing very well."

    Given such realities, Steve Schober, an industrial designer at Maytag for 25 years, with a fistful of patents to his credit, applied to Whirlpool's research department in Benton Harbor, Mich., and was turned down, partly because he acknowledged in a job interview that he was unhappy about moving his family from Newton.

    So, at 52, with six months of severance as a cushion, he went out on his own last year, starting Schober Design and working from his home - a large, handsome Tudor-style with a sloping front lawn in an elegant neighborhood, a few blocks from the brick mansion where Fred Maytag once lived. As a freelancer, however, Mr. Schober's annual income plunged in the first year from the low six figures he had earned at Maytag to $25,000.

    Half now goes to pay for health insurance for himself and his children, Katie, 18, and Ben, 16. His wife, Sarah, 51, a special education teacher earning $30,000 a year, has coverage for herself from the public school system. Adding the family would cost $800 a month, slightly less than Mr. Schober now pays, so the couple will probably drop his coverage for hers.

Read more... 

    Bush Gets Away With Lies, Lies and More Lies in History-Illiterate America
    By Larry Beinhart
    AlterNet

    Monday 27 August 2007

George Bush and other Iraq War supporters have argued that if we withdraw from Iraq the result will be like the killing fields of Cambodia - an odd comparison considering that the US has direct responsibility for that holocaust.

George Bush - and other Iraq War supporters - have argued that if we withdraw from Iraq the result will be like the slaughters - the killing fields - in Cambodia.

    Here are the facts:

• The killing fields were real. The genocide against their own people was committed by the Khmer Rouge.
• The Vietnamese - the Communist Vietnamese - were the people who went in and put a stop to it.
• The United States then supported the Khmer Rouge.

    Here's how that came to happen.

    The United States got involved in the war in Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam from going communist. Which it would have if nationwide elections had been held as promised.

    Cambodia is next to Vietnam. It was ruled by Prince Sihanouk. He attempted to be neutral. Both sides abused that neutrality.

    The North Vietnamese send arms, support and men through Cambodia on the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" to go around South Vietnamese and American forces. They also used Cambodian ports.

    The United States, which was not at war with Cambodia, officially or unofficially, secretly sent armed forces into Cambodia to interrupt North Vietnamese use of that route. In 1969, Nixon began a campaign of carpet bombing sections of Cambodia. Ultimately about 750,000 Cambodians were killed by the bombings (though the numbers are hard to verify.)

    In 1970, while Sihanouk was out of the country, visiting Europe, the USSR and China, Lon Nol took over the country in a right wing coup.

    There are two stories about American involvement. The first is that we supported the coup, the second (in Tom Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA) is that it took the CIA and the United States by surprise. Recently declassified documents support Weiner's view.

    In either case, once Lon Nol took power, the US supported him. In return, Lon Nol ended the neutrality, closed the ports to the communists and demanded that the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese leave the country, and let US forces openly, though secretly, operate in Cambodia.

    There was resistance to Lon Nol. Some of it was certainly a spontaneous matter of national sentiment. Some of it was certainly fomented by various communist interests.

    Sihanouk, in China, then allied himself with the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia communists, which conferred new legitimacy on them.

    Civil War broke out. Lon Nol was both corrupt and inept. In spite of American financial and military support, he lost.

    America left Vietnam in 1973.

    The Khmer Rouge took the capital of Cambodia in 1975. They were one of the most horrendous regimes in history. They practiced a kind of class genocide, "re-educating" and murdering anyone who educated or Westernized, as well as minority groups.

    In 1978, Vietnam, by then fully Communist, invaded Cambodia to put a stop to the Khmer Rouge and drive them out. They installed a more moderate and sane regime.

    The United States, the UK, and China then supported the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. With their help the conflict continued for another ten years.

    When George Bush, or anyone else, uses the Cambodian holocaust as a warning of what might happen if America withdraws from Iraq, remember the facts.

    1. Part of the holocaust in Cambodia is directly attributable to American bombing. The 750,000 dead. (Comparable to the number of Iraqis killed by American forces in this war.)

    2. The civil war that led to the victory of the Khmer Rouge came about, at least in part, because of America's support of Lon Nol.

    3. The "enemy," the Vietnamese Communists, were the ones who put a stop to the Khmer Rouge.

    4. The United States supported the Khmer Rouge - after their murders, after the genocide. That support helped a civil war continue for another decade. More death, more destruction.

    --------

    Larry Beinhart is the author of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. His novels include Wag the Dog, on which the film was based, and The Librarian which Rolling Stone described as "John Grisham meets Jon Stewart."

 Read a couple good articles on why Bush's Vietnam Pullout analogy is bunk. Thanks,  truthout.