Conor Lynch writes in Salon that the rightwing media is having fun blaming liberals and liberal social policies for the unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray.
He quotes commentators from Fox News who see the civil disorders and riots as the fault of the protestors.
What Lynch points out, however, is that Baltimore (like Detroit) was once a thriving industrial city. As globalization and technological change produced deindustrialization, jobs dried up, especially for those striving to rise from poverty to the working class. The war on drugs, he writes, led to mass incarceration of black men, even though whites use drugs as often as blacks. And then there is the historic residential segregation in Baltimore, enforced by federal, state, and local policies.
Back in the mid-20th century, Baltimore was a booming manufacturing hub, as were many other cities that today have become shadows of their former selves, such as Detroit. In 1916, Bethlehem Steel bought a steel plant in Baltimore, and by the Second World War, more than a quarter of a million people were employed in the city’s manufacturing industry. This was the so-called Golden Age of American capitalism, where manufacturing accounted for 50 percent of corporate profits and 30 percent of American employment. Today, by contrast, industry profits have dropped to about 20 percent, and employment has dropped to less than 10 percent. This is not a phenomenon unique to Baltimore — the process of deindustrialization has occurred throughout America, turning formerly thriving cities into impoverished ghost towns.
There are various reasons for why America’s manufacturing industry has fallen from grace, but the two major ones are globalization and technological innovation. Globalization, which really began to take off in the ’70s and ’80s, has made capital much more flexible, and today many companies choose to produce in developing countries where labor costs are significantly lower, owing in large part to scant protection for workers, who make a fraction of what it would take to live a decent middle-class lifestyle. Technology has been even worse for America’s middle class; it has been reported that the great advancements in computer and robotic technology over the past few decades have hollowed out the middle class and destroyed jobs faster than it created them.
Baltimore was hit hard by deindustrialization – in the latter half of the 20th century its industrial workforce was depleted by 75 percent. And as manufacturing jobs left, so did the middle class and white Baltimoreans. Since the death of manufacturing in the city, the economy became a service-based one, and the incomes have dropped significantly.
This is not the story you will hear on Fox News. But it is the context you need to know.
Diane Ravitch's blog 