Brian Alexander (1)Recensioni

Brian Alexander’s provocative book, “Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town” takes the measure of capital as a malevolent force in American society. He draws a line from the Wall Street raiders of the 1970’s to the decay and decline of the American industrial heartland.

Alexander’s book should be read along side Arlie Russell Hochschield’s “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger on the American Right.” Hochschield aims her sharpest arrows at the American chemical industry for their willful disregard of the ecology of the Deep South, their despoliation of the bayou, the swamps, and the wetlands adjoining their chemical plants and depots.

In “Glass House” we have an Ohio town that struck it rich in the early 1900’s when landowners discovered a rich and cheap reservoir of natural gas and parlayed it into a strong glass industry. They built their plants, they hired their workers, and things seemed to be going along tickety-boo until Carl Icahn arrived with a plan to blast open their companies to “unlock shareholder value” trapped in the aging corporations.

After a series of mismanaged takeovers, plant closures, and bankruptcies, the workers are left with worse wages, few benefits, and no security. Their municipality having given huge tax concessions to the new shareholders are facing bankruptcy as well. And community services consist largely of jailing drug abusers and drug dealers. There is little opportunity for the residents, so they either drift into crime and they drift to nearby Columbus.

Then business turns south, the outsiders blame government taxes, greedy unions, foreign competition, and lazy workers for their misfortunes.

Alexander has a good point. There is a connection between business and the communities they serve. I emphasize the communities they SERVE. The community isn’t just another asset to squeeze.

But is this the whole story?

Just before reading this book I also read “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American innovation,” by Jon Gertner. Long before AT&T was broken up by fiat of Congress, the telephone monopoly’s research subsidiary, Bell Labs, assembled the most extraordinary group of engineers, physicists, and chemists to tackle the thorniest problems the telephone company faced.

Bell’s scientists discovered the transistor, found ways to pump information through fibre optic cables, pioneered satellite communications, and developed the first cellphone network. While an employee of Bell Labs, Claude Shannon first put down his Information Theory and opened people’s eyes on how to convert all information into zero’s and ones, one of the foundations of today’s computer industry.

In the American context, capital has helped create some of the greatest wonders of the 20th and now the 21st century. Not always malevolent, you say.

The “All American town” of Alexander’s story, Lancaster, Ohio, is not so squeaky clean. It has a history of race baiting and social exclusion. Alexander starts the story long after the plains have been cleared of Amerindians, after Europeans stole the land for their own farmers.

The ugly side of America is also part of its heritage. Winner take all is as sacred as the Second Amendment. Are we so surprised it has spawned a predatory culture that feeds upon itself?

4.5 stars. Powerful, devastating, and depressing

There is nothing surprising about any of what the author writes or concludes--I think that's the main reason I give this study of American healthcare a four star. Otherwise, this work does an excellent job of highlighting the system's failings by illustrating the lives of those on the frontline. A good one for anyone that cares about the healthcare problems in the US.

Many moments of excellence. but the detailed explanations of corporate activities were sometimes tedious. Still, the book is a great expanation of why the country is in the state it's in. I wish politicians would read this.½

في محاولة لفهم كيفية انتقال مدينة من صخب النمو والرفاهية إلى الانحدار الوحشي والزوال وتأثير ذلك على عقلية السكان وعلى المستقبل السياسي لدولة بأكملها، يأخذ الكاتب مدينة لانكاستر بولاية أوهايو كمثال. فبعد أن كانت شركة الزجاج منبع نجاح المدينة، هبطت في أيدي الشركات الجشعة، حيث بدأ المزيج السام من الإدارة السيئة وتمويل الأسهم الخاصة بتدمير حياة العمال والسكان، إلى أن حل الخراب بكامل المدينة.
يشير الناس غالباً باصبع الاتهام إلى الطبقة العاملة البيضاء من سكان مدن الغرب الأوسط ألأمريكي مثل لانكاستر لتحميلهم مسئولية وصول شخص مثل دونالد ترامب لمنصب الرئاسة. قد يصحّ هذا جزئياً، لكن فقط من خلال النظر إلى تطور وانهيار المدن الصغيرة ودور الشركات الكبرى وفساد المسئولين في القضاء على آمال سكانها، نبدأ في فهم السبب ورؤية الصورة الكبيرة للأمور.

Like too many books lately, I hesitated on how best to review this book. This is not a big book, but it powerfully captures the complexity of a subject that far too many Americans have no clue how complex it is, namely, America's healthcare system. Need proof? The U.S. elected a president who famously asked, who knew how complicated it was? Who indeed? Pretty much anybody paying close attention. Something I've been doing for decades, arguably starting 50 years ago when I was working in the Orthopedic clinic for a major regional research hospital with world-class physicians. There are other healthcare related books I would recommend, but this book gives, I believe, the average reader of whatever political persuasion, the best grasp of where they stand in our system's maelstrom. What the author did to get the intimate access to a host of "characters" is really stunning journalism. I have only one gripe, and that really is perhaps not fully the author's fault. After such good investigative journalism, two things happen in the community he is covering. One is an action taken by the hospital and the other is a pandemic. Frankly, it seems to me, the author sort of loses it, as everything falls apart, and his narrative shifts gear rather dramatically. One might call it a rant. Maybe, but it is still a very accurate rant. It just isn't in keeping with the rest of the reporting. Perhaps I'm asking too much, for a slightly smaller book, and a follow-up magazine piece, to keep the two parts separate. It's not as if the author is wrong. He's painfully, depressingly accurate. I feel a little badly at knocking off a point on my rating. It really is very well worth reading.

Everything Wrong with American Healthcare

As the Covid pandemic has clearly demonstrated, a large segment of the American population lives in a delusional world completely divorced from reality. Here, in The Hospital, Brian Alexander lays bare one of the great delusions. It’s not that America has a good healthcare system that with a few tweaks and enhancements could serve the majority of the population. No, the delusion is that America has anything that can be called a real healthcare system.

At the root, as his time spent in a small American town shows, are two deadly ideas: that all Americans not only are personally responsible for their own healthcare, but that the sickest among us bear full responsibility for their bad health and early death due to some defect in their character. And that America’s obsession with raw, unfettered capitalism must encompass all aspects of American life, including healthcare. These ideas, shared by the well-off, the poorest, and everybody in-between, deliver to Americans a hodgepodge collection of medical services that only those with the deepest pockets can afford, a system that not even the commercial medical insurance available to those employed can afford, as evidenced by some of the sorry stories in this book.

This is not to say that those involved in the healthcare industry, and make no mistake it is an industry that happens to have as its end product the delivery of healing services; it’s not to say these people don’t care and want to do their best. It’s that they operate in a system that prevents them from delivering the best care and treatment to all but the well-off. Alexander gained access to the boardroom discussions in Bryan, Ohio’s small, independent hospital. As readers will see firsthand, CEO Phil Ennen and his team spent a good deal of their time devising strategies for fending off the large hospital systems from Fort Wayne, Toledo, and as distant as Pittsburgh, who wished to take them over as part of their consolidation efforts. The struggle never seems to cease: how to attract medical talent and hold onto it; how to add the most profitable speciality services; how to generate the surplus income that constitutes profits and fuels independence, salaries, and the like. Make no mistake as the annual reports of nonprofit hospitals show, nonprofits can be very profitable, as a perusal of your large regional nonprofit hospitals will clearly show.

Probably the most enlightening chapter is Chapter 6: What Free Market? The Myth of Free-Market Medicine. Here you’ll learn about profit and loss, about regional consolidation and the building of medical oligarchies, about pricing; generally about the economics of hospitals and medical practice in a system fiercely devoted to capitalism in every aspect of American life. If you read nothing else in this book, spend some time with this chapter.

Some reviewers have accused Alexander of sounding angry on the page. Some say this is an exercise in support of socialized medicine. Well, if he’s angry about a so-called system that eats up nearly twenty percent of American GDP, more than twice as much as any developed country, and delivers abysmal results for the majority of Americans, and especially for those most in need, well, he, and more importantly you, should be angry. And as for socialism, nonsense. How about an orderly system that delivers the best possible care to the most people at reasonable cost? Can’t do it? We already do it, but only for a segment of the population. We call it Medicare and Medicaid.

Please read The Hospital with an open mind and then demand something better for your sake and that of your family, and for your fellow Americans who may not be as well off as you.

Everything Wrong with American Healthcare

As the Covid pandemic has clearly demonstrated, a large segment of the American population lives in a delusional world completely divorced from reality. Here, in The Hospital, Brian Alexander lays bare one of the great delusions. It’s not that America has a good healthcare system that with a few tweaks and enhancements could serve the majority of the population. No, the delusion is that America has anything that can be called a real healthcare system.

At the root, as his time spent in a small American town shows, are two deadly ideas: that all Americans not only are personally responsible for their own healthcare, but that the sickest among us bear full responsibility for their bad health and early death due to some defect in their character. And that America’s obsession with raw, unfettered capitalism must encompass all aspects of American life, including healthcare. These ideas, shared by the well-off, the poorest, and everybody in-between, deliver to Americans a hodgepodge collection of medical services that only those with the deepest pockets can afford, a system that not even the commercial medical insurance available to those employed can afford, as evidenced by some of the sorry stories in this book.

This is not to say that those involved in the healthcare industry, and make no mistake it is an industry that happens to have as its end product the delivery of healing services; it’s not to say these people don’t care and want to do their best. It’s that they operate in a system that prevents them from delivering the best care and treatment to all but the well-off. Alexander gained access to the boardroom discussions in Bryan, Ohio’s small, independent hospital. As readers will see firsthand, CEO Phil Ennen and his team spent a good deal of their time devising strategies for fending off the large hospital systems from Fort Wayne, Toledo, and as distant as Pittsburgh, who wished to take them over as part of their consolidation efforts. The struggle never seems to cease: how to attract medical talent and hold onto it; how to add the most profitable speciality services; how to generate the surplus income that constitutes profits and fuels independence, salaries, and the like. Make no mistake as the annual reports of nonprofit hospitals show, nonprofits can be very profitable, as a perusal of your large regional nonprofit hospitals will clearly show.

Probably the most enlightening chapter is Chapter 6: What Free Market? The Myth of Free-Market Medicine. Here you’ll learn about profit and loss, about regional consolidation and the building of medical oligarchies, about pricing; generally about the economics of hospitals and medical practice in a system fiercely devoted to capitalism in every aspect of American life. If you read nothing else in this book, spend some time with this chapter.

Some reviewers have accused Alexander of sounding angry on the page. Some say this is an exercise in support of socialized medicine. Well, if he’s angry about a so-called system that eats up nearly twenty percent of American GDP, more than twice as much as any developed country, and delivers abysmal results for the majority of Americans, and especially for those most in need, well, he, and more importantly you, should be angry. And as for socialism, nonsense. How about an orderly system that delivers the best possible care to the most people at reasonable cost? Can’t do it? We already do it, but only for a segment of the population. We call it Medicare and Medicaid.

Please read The Hospital with an open mind and then demand something better for your sake and that of your family, and for your fellow Americans who may not be as well off as you.

This has to be one of the most important books of our time. Alexander explains the history of health care in the U.S. and then focuses on one small Ohio hospital and the people who staff it. Every person in this country should read “The Hospital” in order to understand fully the sorry shape of a system that affects each and every one of us. The ending of the book talks about the covid crisis and how this broken health care system collapsed even more, largely due to the incompetence of a president who was encouraging people to ingest disinfectant and put bright lights inside your body. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how that may be possible. In the early months of 2020 this country was a perfect storm for infectious disease disaster. Add to that a megalomaniac whose only goal was to be reelected to a second term even if it meant he’d have to stage a coup, and the results were disastrous. Brian Alexander provides a public service of the highest order by researching and writing “The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town.” We are in his debt.

Journalist Brian Alexander was given unprecedented access to the inner workings of a small town Ohio hospital. He had multiple interviews with staff, including the CEO over an extended period of time, ending after the first summer of covid. Stories of multiple patients are also covered. The book focuses on the crisis in healthcare--Obama Care has helped a lot, but has by no means ended the crisis. But Alexander also uses the hospital as a lens to focus on some of the larger problems in our society, primarily poverty, the loss of good jobs, and income inequality, which, not surprisingly have a huge impact on many ongoing health issues. One phrase in particular stood out to me: "new capitalism is killing people." Studies have shown that the decline in the health and longevity of Americans has been abetted by deliberate government policies: "People in states that passed labor, wage, environmental and health laws that were often opposed by ALEC (funded by the Koch Brothers et al) and business interests lived longer than people in states who adopted ALEC-like policies."
But this is not a dry polemical. It is a fascinating look into the ongoing crises in health care, with lots of stories about interesting and dedicated people.

Highly recommended.

4 stars

Impeccably reported.

Very in depth study and story of a small town hospital trying to stay alive and accessible and financially viable in this day of corporate consolidations and capitalistic medical interventions and playbooks. When the shareholders are all that matter, then the stakeholders are severely abused for all they are worth in a winner take all economic system.
There is a balance to be achieved between good health and the medical system viablity. This book shows both the ugly and the kindnesses that are available if there is political will and quality of life supported by good governance.

A deep dive into America's deeply dysfunctional health care system, a monstrous tangle of interconnected and interdependent interests that all too often fails in it's main mission of protecting people's health. No sane person would design this crazy-quilt of a system, where each element is so invested in its own survival that it loses sight of its purpose, but we seem to be stuck with it. The focus here is on a small independent hospital in a small rural community, but the insights are very much applicable across the entire nation, and reflect problems far beyond healthcare. I live in a small town very much like the community profiled here, but I could have sworn many times that they were examining and explaining my town; the situations, though different in details, are exactly the same in the larger sense. I have never felt so seen.

This is not a "fun" read. It is profoundly depressing, disturbing, and maddening. But this is an important book, if you want to understand where we are and how we got here.

Alexander gives a rare perspective on America's health-care crisis, that of a local hospital's CEO. Of courses this introduces some bias and one has to read between the lines, but the story is well worth reading. Alexander supplements the narrative with stories from EMTs and patients, and with historical explanations of how the system developed in this way. Particularly at the end, he also dives into the politics. This was all reasonable, if not especially novel. The job and economics of running a hospital was for me the main attraction.

American healthcare was an absurdist game of Jenga.
~From The Hospital by Brian Alexander

The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander is the portrait of a Byran, Ohio hospital between 2018 and 2020. Alexander followed management, staff, and patients, investigating the complexities of healthcare in America in one small town. The news headlines we have all seen is presented in a personalized narrative that is deeply affecting; you want to rant, or cry. Likely both.

What America did have was a jumble of ill-fitting building blocks: the doctoring industry, the hospital industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the device industry. ~from The Hospital by Brian Alexander
Alexander follows the Bryan hospital's struggles to keep in the black when other small hospitals were being consolidated or put out of business by larger hospitals. And he shows how medical care has become a profit-making business.

I was surprised to learn that deductibles were not always a part of health insurance. The rationale was that people would not abuse insurance if they had to pay a portion out of pocket. Affordable insurance comes with a high deductible, and people think twice before using it. Consequently, people go without preventative care and medications and treatment for illnesses.

It could have been my family when we had to forward paid bills to the health care provider for reimbursement--after we met the deductible. Our baby suffered from continual ear and sinus infections and we often met the deductible by the end of January, which meant a huge decrease in available income for other bills and necessities at the start of every year.

The patients in the book exemplify the danger of skipping care. Those who can't afford medications pay a higher personal and economic cost when disease or illness progresses. Some pay with their lives, some become disabled and permanently lose jobs and income, and many are hopelessly mired in debt.

Alexander writes that America has struggled with the crisis in medical care costs for a hundred years. Citizens resisted health insurance a hundred years ago the way they resisted the Affordable Care Act later. Health insurance was, an is, considered unAmerican and socialist by some--even those who benefit from Medicare and other governmental programs.

"Health...is a commodity which can be purchased," Alexander quotes the president of a utility company, and major employer, in 1929. "The difficulty now is its cost is beyond the reach of a great majority of people."

Almost a hundred years later, it remains true.

In 1963, my dad sold the business his father had built in Tonawanda, NY, and came to Detroit to look for work in the auto industry. Mom had an autoimmune disease. They needed health insurance. My folks were very lucky. They went from struggling to a nice home, two cars, health insurance to treat mom's crippling rheumatoid arthritis and, later, dad's non-Hodgkins lymphoma, plus my folks paid for my first two years of college.

Today, my son has to purchase his own health insurance. He has to invest his own money in a retirement account. Of course, he has school loans, too.

We have gone backwards.

Alexander touched on Michigan hospitals, like William Beaumont Hospital, the Royal Oak, Michigan based hospital where my parents and grandparents were treated. A few years back they tore down an the aging shopping center of my youth and built a new one. It did seem strange to me that a hospital was in real estate. When Covid-19 hit and Michigan went into lockdown, hospitals lost elective surgery patients. Like my husband, who was considering shoulder replacement surgery a year ago. Beaumont laid off thousands and eliminated 450 jobs. During a pandemic.

The book brought back a lot of memories of our seven years living along the Michigan-Ohio border. I had been to the towns Brian Alexander writes about.

After fifteen years living in Philadelphia, we moved back to Michigan our son could grow up knowing his extended family. Neither of us had lived in a small town before. There were under 9,000 people in Hillsdale, and about 40,000 in the entire county. There was a turnover of doctors; our first family doctor, one of the few who delivered babies, left family practice, demoralized after lawsuits. We did have a small hospital at the end of our street. When our son was three, he came down with pneumonia and we were glad the hospital was so close.

Small town life was an adjustment. We left a racially eclectic city neighborhood for a county with five African Americans; one was my ob/gyn, one his nurse wife, and one his daughter who was in my son's class in grade school. I was surprised by rural poverty. Our son told us that half his kindergarten class did not have a phone and most had no books in their homes. We took took day trips antiquing in small Ohio towns like Pioneer and I took my Bernina sewing machine for cleaning in Bryan, OH.

I am pleased that the publisher offered me a free egalley in exchange for a fair review. I found this to be an immersive, thought-provoking book.

This book took me a long time to read; partially because it's been sitting in the bathroom for a few months, and partially because it is the story of a town, and has a huge cast of characters to keep track of, especially if you are reading it piecemeal in the bathroom.

I picked it up because it's set in Lancaster, OH -- not too far away from my current location of Columbus, but really, it could be any number of rural towns that used to be a hub of manufacturing and now are quietly (or spectacularly) succumbing to the opiate epidemic and the scrutiny of academics hoping to find the answer to Trump.

Most of the narrative is kept in order chronologically, but jumps between many different perspectives, including the executive boardroom, the consultant brought in to turn around the company, the factory workers, kids growing up in the town, cops, drug addicts, people who have left and people who have come back.

It's definitely more dense than the obvious comparison, "Hillbilly Elegy," and focuses more on the overall impact of the loss of manufacturing on many people throughout a rural setting, where "Elegy" focuses more on one personal narrative in the setting.

This book will haunt me for a while. Glass House is a book about the economic collapse of my hometown of Lancaster, Ohio, like so many other small industrial towns across America. As the author recounted local history I somehow just knew as a kid, as well as some less savory bits I did not, and took the reader on a tour of local landmarks I felt a wild mix of nostalgia, sadness, and rage, knowing the devastation to come. My immediate family left before the worst came to Lancaster — the Carl Ichans and the private equity marauders and the easy heroin and the moralists who blame desperate people for just trying to get by the only way they can — but it's still my town and I take it personally that anyone would hurt the people there.

I'm gonna call this a "gems of a book because who knew a book about anchor hocking could be so interesting?!?! Highly recommend

I was drawn to this book because I teach in Lancaster, Ohio, the book's namesake. I don't live there, but I have noticed how this town is different than where I live. The author of the book is a hometown boy and interviewed literally hundreds of residents and executives to get his story. It's not much different than I surmised.

In the 1940's Forbes Magazine listed Lancaster, Ohio, as an up and coming industrial town; a bedroom community about 30 miles south of Columbus, Ohio. There were some major industrial players at that time, such as Anchor-Hocking, maker of all types of glassware from beer bottles to wine goblets, to dinner plates. Local schools were good, a hospital was built, and people were generally happy. However in the 1980's venture (vulture) capitalism hit Lancaster and several businesses closed and Anchor Hocking was sold to venture capitalists. That will happen about 11 times in the next 30 years. Each group of "investors" would only have one thing on their mind: how to extract capital from the company to pay off shareholders. There were two ways to do this: step up production or demand union concessions. The equipment at the plant was so old that production could not be stepped up. Also, cheap glass from China was available to Anchor customers. Concessions were to come from the unions. In 1980, the average glassworker made $16.00 per hour with health and retirement paid for by the company. Today, the average worker makes $9.45 per hour with no retirement and healthcare which costs the employee $300 per month; which most can't afford. Before 1980 there were 1500+ employees, today there are less than 500, and some of them temps.

Along with the devastating financial losses, comes the usual 80's crimes of the poor and unemployed: drugs, guns, children who can't perform in school. This could be the story of any American town who has been crippled by vulture capitalists. Those equity firms that controlled Anchor Hocking were brutal. For example, the advised the executives NOT to live in Lancaster, to live 30 miles away in Columbus and commute. The reason: so they would not be asked to attend and contribute to community functions.

"Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs." 320 pages, 4 stars.

The business of business is to make money. That's the basic premise of an economic theory advocated by the late Milton Friedman and embraced by politicians from Reagan to Trump. Investors entrust companies and corporations with money with the expectation of receiving even more money. Investor value is therefor the primary concern of businesses. It's not about producing goods and services, at least not primarily. Those are simply a means for making money. It's certainly not about creating good-paying jobs. Employees are human resources to be used as needed and discarded when not, just like any other resource. An efficient business creates as much product as it can sell while employing as few people as possible, paying them only what it must. Anything beyond that cuts into profits that could otherwise be returned to investors. Generating more money at less cost makes a business efficient. It makes it successful. It increases its value and attractiveness for even more investment. It raises the price investors can get when they want to sell their shares. It's a fairly simple idea. Investors provide capital to fund businesses in which workers create wealth, and then the investors extract the wealth beyond that necessary to maintain the business. It's a great mechanism for making money, and somehow, through the magic of the invisible hand of free market capitalism, it brings prosperity to all. Or so the theory goes.

Glass House provides a case study of how the theory has worked for Lancaster, Ohio. It's a compelling account of the Anchor-Hocking glass company, once a major U.S. producer of glassware and the lifeblood of this small city. The company has generated a lot of wealth for investors over the last half century, but there has been a cost. This is the story of those who paid it.

Will do a full review for my trade organization. Excellent piece of journalism that tells the tale of the mismanagement and decline of Anchor Hocking and the effect it had on the entire town.

So, financialization destroyed the American economy while convincing (white) Americans that the problem was liberal government and its handouts. Alexander traces the collapse of one town, Lancaster, Ohio, which used to have a lot of manufacturing including a huge glass factory. Lancaster was a decent deal if you were white, especially if you were Protestant; a white man could work hard and have a decent, though not lavish, life, and his wife could stay home and raise the kids while being involved in the community. Some of the story follows heroin addicts, mostly young, who may have come from middle-class families but see no future, and no reason to leave either. Longtime residents decided that these troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells were outsiders who’d come in to get free food and welfare, but really they were from longtime Lancaster families—they just didn’t have any belief in anything bigger or better.

The rest traces the fate of the Anchor Hocking glass factory, from paternalistic employer whose executives lived in the town and felt responsibility for it to asset bought up by various “investors” (corporate raiders, S&Ls that collapsed in scandal, venture capital/private equity geniuses) whose short-term desire for profits led them to load it up with debt, merge it with other companies, fire lots of people, delay maintenance until things fell apart, charge it tens of millions of dollars in management fees, and then repeat the cycle all over again, weakening the company each time in ways that the people of the town couldn’t even understand. Management shorted contributions to the pension funds that workers had bargained for years ago, destroying their retirements. The jobs didn’t just disappear; they were destroyed, and destroying them made a small number of people a whole lot wealthier. The union made concessions and people took nominal, not just real, pay cuts, and still they kept losing jobs, even as the consultants and lawyers made hundreds of dollars an hour.

But none of these machinations were visible, though Alexander doesn’t really ever explain why that made “Obama” or “government” the scapegoat instead. As Alexander points out, “Whether because of the conservative small-government tide ushered in by Reagan, or because many internalized its diminished status and lost confidence in the future—any any willingness to invest in it—or both, Lancaster stopped spending on itself.” The schools deteriorated; streets and fire protection deteriorated; civic life deteriorated, including the rise of scandals of government mismanagement. To keep Anchor Hocking in town, the city took money from schools and gave it 100% tax abatements—then lost the jobs anyway. People with money liked Republicans; union and working-class people often didn’t vote and saw gay and transgender rights “as an attempt to impose an exotic order”; Alexander discusses one man who “leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.” Locals blamed the government for encouraging idleness and baby-having. At the same time, the town owed many of its remaining jobs to government: Medicaid and Medicare supplied 60% of the hospital’s income, and the hospital was the town’s biggest employer while the public schools came second and Anchor Hocking only third. Many blamed corruption and drugs on “a breakdown of old restirctions and codes,” “[a]n aversion to hard work,” but attributed those things to “the media” or liberalism, “not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.” People who had good jobs no longer involved themselves in the town, commuting elsewhere to work and focusing on their own concerns—in part because they were so busy working.

Racism flutters in around the edges, as with the slurs that Lancaster’s drug-buying whites used to describe their black and Latino connections. Confederate flags became more popular in the wake of Dylann Roof’s mass murder. “They denied the racist and traitorous interpretations of the flag in favor of disobedience. Just as with guns, it didn’t matter that they hadn’t been interested in flying the Confederate flag thirty years before.” Lower-class whites felt screwed, and they thought, correctly, that somebody must be screwing them—they just didn’t figure out who. They liked Trump’s attack on Obamacare and his anti-Mexican immigrant stance.

The diagnosis is grim. Politicians who enabled deregulation and financialization have not suffered; the social contract has fractured and taken trust and the feeling of being part of something bigger with it. Alexander has no solutions, only a record of decline.

A pretty good read, although the George Packer book The Unwinding is better, I think. This book looks at the town of Lancaster, Ohio, and the Anchor Hocking Glass Company, over many years. There is nothing that one can do about this,
because life goes on and the people who screwed up this company and its town would have happened anyway.
I spent 35 years on Wall Street, and one of my good friends recommended Newell, and another person that I worked with said that the strong dollar eliminated a lot of stupid capacity, among them Anchor Hocking, Fair;ly well written, although not as good as Packer. If I had not worked on. the Street and followed investment banks, I would have had a hard time following the ins and outs of private equity (LBOs), They certainly make their money the old fashioned way- they steal it.

The sociology of sex in America. The author writes a sex column for MSNBC, and based on letters he receives, sets off across the country to explore what he calls the mainstreaming of what in the past would have been thought of as deviant behavior. He sets up a dichotomy between the rise of the religious right vs. the opening of the American mind vis a vis sexuality. Interesting at first, the point gets belabored beyond belief. By the end, I'm bored as he discusses visiting a fetish convention. Yawn.

Alexander's goal with this book was to explore current fringe sexual practices in the US with an open, journalistic mind. I think he failed to remain objective, and his disdain and superiority color his reportage in a fashion I found to be smarmy. The author's tone was so annoying it was a real challenge for me to finish this book. He was raised Catholic and felt compelled to mention this many, many times- usually in the context of "we never heard of this sort of thing in my church, growing up". He also gave little asides which communicated his supercilious attitude all too clearly. There was one entire chapter which consisted of moaning transcribed in all caps- pages and pages of "AAAAHHHHH OOOOHHH" and so on- excruciating. Give it a miss.