Jenny

“We talk about systemic racism, misogyny, and LGBTQ rights, but we don’t talk enough about how, for fifty years now, this strange evangelical-slash-Catholic movement has been trying to infiltrate the government and turn our country into a religious nation,” Mason said. “We’ve never faced it in any kind of organized way or even said out loud that it exists!”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“NAFTA took nearly a million jobs away, and the trade agreements that followed it were responsible for the loss of a staggering four million more jobs, most of them in manufacturing. The Great Recession slashed another two million jobs and twenty-five thousand businesses.[11] The average laid-off factory worker suffered a 19.2 percent fall in their standard of living, with Chinese imports reducing roughly a third of all Americans’ incomes, delivering a disproportionate blow to rural areas and small towns.[12] The international conglomerate Honeywell Aerospace would end up owning Grimes Manufacturing. “I don’t even know where it’s based,” said Rich Ebert, the county’s director of economic development.[13] (Honeywell’s corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina.) There is no Old Man Honeywell who has at least some of Urbana’s interests at heart. Cheaper furniture and blue jeans notwithstanding, displaced American workers are still waiting on Clinton’s win-win to land. In the transition to a “twenty-first-century economy,” hollowed-out communities and even whole regions were largely treated as collateral damage.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When I left for college in 1982, the Pell Grant paid the entirety of my tuition, my room and board, and even my textbooks—an investment in my future that I have paid back through taxes many times over. When you consider that the government recoups the money spent on a typical Pell grantee, through taxes on their increased earnings, in just ten years,[10] the gutting of Pell’s purchasing power is extremely shortsighted. But the plundering of this federal program, birthed in the last gasp of America’s War on Poverty, is also rarely discussed.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America