Jenny

“the late 1990s, average tuition in the United States had more than doubled from when I went to school, while the value of the top Pell award dropped 25 percent. When President Bill Clinton touted his Hope Scholarship and related tuition tax credits as a doubling of federal funding for financial aid, it was a sleight of hand, catering solely to middle-class students who were already going to college. That same decade, Clinton oversaw the country’s catastrophic entry into NAFTA in 1994 and paved the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He predicted that offshoring would eventually prove to be a “win-win” for American workers. Our country still suffers the fallout of those disastrous decisions, which were cheered by business schools and Nobel Prize–winning economists, including several who have since recanted their pro-offshoring views.[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“It is easy to charm a person who talks too much: all you have to do is listen.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“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

“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