The Great Recession, the Rust Bowl, and the New Okies - The Grapes of Wrath Redux [View all]

[arendt]

Today, eight years after the Crash of 2008, we are witnessing a somewhat less brutal echo of the desperate decade of the Great Depression. The echo is only "somewhat less brutal" due to the few bits of New Deal legislation that remain intact, not yet having been stripped from the books by the rabid government haters and profiteering privatizers.

The Okies

As the title indicates, I want to talk about the striking similarity of the economic inequality between then and now. I do not want to be distracted by arguments about which group today is in the most desperate economic straits. So I am going to use the "Okies" of the Great Depression to examine what is happening to all desperate unemployed people today.(Footnote 1) "Okie" started as an insult, like "mick", "kike", "wop", etc. The stereotypical Okie was an ignorant hillbilly who was lazy and liked to drink and fight. Sound familiar? Today we hear that millenials are lazy, stupid, expect too much. Bernie Bros are "violent". According to TPTB, expecting to find work to pay off your student loan is expecting too much.

Disparaging an Okie wasn't about race: Oakies were white. It wasn't about gender: they treated men, women, and children with equal cruelty. The sneering was about MONEY. The same kind of sneering directed at "losers" and "moochers" today by stone-hearted neoliberal ideologues.

Like most terms that disparage specific groups, it was applied by the dominant cultural group…what native Californians failed to realize at the time was that these Okie migrant farm workers had not always lived in the conditions that the Dust Bowl left them in. In fact, often these families had once owned their own farms and had been able to support themselves.

- Wikipedia Okie

The Dust Bowl was a natural/manmade (Footnote 2) disaster that happened in the midwest at the same time as the depression. To the Okies, it was like being hit by a car after your house burned down. After half a decade of families going broke, farms getting foreclosed, and health getting worse from breathing the dust that hung like a pall for literally years, people had enough. (Can you say "enough is enough"?) They were either already evicted, or they abandoned their worthless property. They packed their worldly possessions into their cars and trucks and struck out for California, which handbills touted as a land of opportunity and jobs. They wound up as migrant labor.

The Rust Bowl and the mirage of the sharing economy

In America today, the former Rust Belt has gotten even worse, as factories and jobs continue to be shipped overseas en masse, as entire states are bankrupted (and their infrastructure left to rot or be privatized) by radical rightwing economic theories, put in place by right wing gangsters like Scott Walker and Sam Brownback. Those people (young, old, of all races and genders) who have had enough of the thirty year long Rust Bowl - people whom I shall label the New Okies - have heard that the "gig economy", a.k.a. "the sharing economy" was a wondrous place where you could find jobs, and by sheer hard work become rich.

Of course, if you have a degree from Stanford and billions of free cash (see "unicorns") from the Venture Capital industry, these fairy tales might come true. But if you are trying to make a living as an Uber driver or renting your house via AirBnB, or cooking meals for EatWith - or any of the other illegal-on-their-face schemes to simply vaporize regulations and reimpose completely unregulated capitalist predation - you will find yourself working for chump change.

Meanwhile, as a customer of these unregulated businesses, you may be raped or robbed by an Uber driver, you may get bedbugs from your "hotel room", or the rentor may suffer vandalism, theft, or violence, or you may get food poisoning or hepatitis from a "take-out joint". If you try to sue Uber, they dump all the blame onto their "independent contractor", thereby dodging any legal liability. Such are the wonders of unregulated capitalism.

The conditions of the workers

The "sharing economy" is really a share-cropping economy - in the same league with the migrant camps that the Okies were forced into upon arrival in California. The gig workers are just another variation on migrant workers, waiting desperately at the collection point for some strawboss to pick them out of the lineup for a day's work.

Because of the minimal pay, these families were often forced to live on the outskirts of these farms in shanty houses they built themselves. These homes were normally set up in groups called Squatter Camps or Shanty Towns…Due to this lack of sanitation in these camps, disease ran rampant among the migrant workers and their families. Also contributing to disease was the fact that these Shanty Town homes that the Okie migrant workers lived in had no running water, and because of their minimal pay medical attention was out of the question.

- Wikipedia

In the "somewhat less brutal" Great Recession, the New Okies live in their parents' houses, try to piece together some dead-end jobs, try desperately to pay off non-dischargable student loans, and generally watch their lives slip through their fingers. They are forced to postpone starting families. Even with ACA, healthcare is precarious. The 2010s, in some ways, more cruel than the 1930s. Many of the New Oakies have college educations. They can look things up on the Internet. They did the things they were told should give them a shot at a good life. They know what they are missing. They know they have been robbed.

The Grapes of Wrath

The New Okie generation has yet to have a movie of the quality of "The Grapes of Wrath"(GoW) to describe the organized wretchedness imposed on an entire population for the benefit of a few landowners, and to appeal to the public for justice.

Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]."

The non-existence of such a movie is hardly surprising. Hollywood wouldn't make any money from such a movie, given the movie audience are 12-year old boys who like sex and violence. Besides, who can afford to go to the movies anymore?

The movie version of GoW itself was self-censored, leaving out some of Steinbeck's more devastating critiques:

the producers decided to tone down Steinbeck's political references, such as eliminating a monologue using a land owner's description of "reds" as anybody "that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five," to show that under the prevalent conditions that definition applies to every migrant worker looking for better wages.

"Steinbeck was attacked as a propagandist and a socialist from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The most fervent of these attacks came from the Associated Farmers of California; they were displeased with the book's depiction of California farmers' attitudes and conduct toward the migrants. They denounced the book as a 'pack of lies' and labeled it 'communist propaganda

The Grapes of Wrath

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

In the end, the Okies were rescued by war work in California factories. We could do the same thing with an alternative energy buildout plus a massive infrastructure restoration program. The problem is such work is not going to materialize under today's political leadership. Not under "pragmatic, incremental" Hillary. Not under lunatic Trump.

Understanding that that is reality is why there is a vast anti-elitist sentiment afoot in America today. It crosses all political boundaries. People know they have been robbed - robbed by Wall St. and the WH bailout, robbed by the constant outsourcing of jobs, robbed by Draconian drug laws and massive bills for jails, robbed by diverting half the budget to endless no-win wars that enrich the elite and starve the public infrastructure.

Just as in the 1930s, people are at their economic breaking points. Although right-wingers are willing to support demagogues like Trump and theocrats like Cruz, there are many left wing folks doing the equivalent of labor organizing. I say "the equivalent of" because organized labor has been absolutely shattered by forty years of union-busting laws, union-busting corporations, and union-busting neoliberal ideology. We have strikes without unions (Market Basket), job actions without unions (Fight for $15). We have guerilla pro-worker agitation as an asymmetric strategy against the overwhelming firepower of corporate law.

Where is this all going? I make no prediction about the future; but I see nothing but trouble if we, as is likely, stay on our present course. Just one final point:

The title (Grapes of Wrath) is a reference to lyrics from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

These lyrics refer, in turn, to the biblical passage Revelation 14:19–20, an apocalyptic appeal to divine justice and deliverance from oppression in the final judgment.

Whatever happens is going to be YUGE.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. Please, please. I am not disparaging the Okies themselves, or the current cohort of totally screwed over people whom I will call the New Okies. I respect the struggles of impoverished workers at all times and in all places. Okie is merely a label. Today, Okie is a badge of pride ("I'm an Okie from Muskogee.&quot Of course, someone could raise the dreaded flag of identity politics to reduce this entire thread to a food fight. I can't stop that; but I can say up front that it is nothing but ratfucking.

2. I say partially manmade because the Southern great plains were too arid for sustainable farming, which had only begun in about 1880 during a wet spell. Fifty years on, mother nature returned to the normal climate and stripped the soil off the parched fields.