Caught in the Middle
America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Midwest has always been the heart of America-both its economic bellwether and the repository of its national identity. Now, in a new, globalized age, the Midwest is challenged as never before. With an influx of immigrant workers and an outpouring of manufacturing jobs, the region that defines the American self-the Lake Wobegon image of solid, hardworking farmers and factory hands-is changing at breakneck speed. As factory farms and global forces displace old ways of life, the United States is being transformed literally from the inside out. In Caught in the Middle, longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Richard C. Longworth explores the new reality of life in today's heartland and reveals what these changes mean for the region-and the country. Ranging from the manufacturing collapse that has crippled the Midwest to the biofuels revolution that may save it, and from the school districts struggling with new migrants to the Iowa meatpacking town that can't survive without them, Longworth addresses what's right and what's wrong in the region, and offers a prescription for how it must change-politically as well as economically-if it is to survive and prosper.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ex Chicago Tribune correspondent Longworth (Global Squeeze) paints a bleak, evocative portrait of the Midwest's losing struggle with foreign competition and capitalist gigantism. It's a landscape of shuttered factories, desperate laid-off workers, family farms gobbled up by agribusiness, once great cities like Detroit and Cleveland now in ruins, small towns devolved into depopulated "rural slums" haunted by pensioners and meth-heads. But the harshest element of the book is Longworth's own pitiless ideology of globalism. In his telling, Midwesterners are sluggish, unskilled, risk-averse mediocrities, clinging to obsolete industrial-age dreams of job security, allergic to "change," indifferent to education and "totally unfit for the global age." They are doomed because global competition is unstoppable, says Longworth, who dismisses the idea of trade barriers as simplistic nonsense purveyed by conspiracy theorists. The silver linings Longworth floats biotechnology, proposals for regional cooperation are meager and iffy. The Midwest's real hope, he insists, lies in a massive influx of mostly low-wage immigrant workers and in enclaves of "the rich and brainy," like Chicago and Ann Arbor, where the "creative class" sells nebulous "information solutions" to "dropouts and Ph.D.s." It's not the Middle West that's under siege in Longworth's telling; it's the now apparently quaint notion of a middle class.
