Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges

  “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs responded, according to another dinner guest.9

  In 2011, Apple earned more than $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, or Google, the Times pointed out. It has more cash in its vault than the U.S. Treasury.10 It employs forty-three thousand people in the United States and twenty thousand overseas, “a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s.”11 But these numbers do not include the seven hundred thousand people who work for Apple contractors to engineer, build, and assemble iPads, iPhones, and Apple’s other products. Almost none of them work in the United States. Working conditions for these Apple workers typify the misery endured by the corporate global labor force—low wages; excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week and up to twelve hours a day; squalor and overcrowding in worker dormitories; swelling in the legs and difficulty walking because of so many hours on their feet; underage workers; improperly disposed-of hazardous waste; falsified records; a callous disregard for workers’ health; lax or unenforced labor and safety laws; and union busting.12

  On the street in Camden.

  Whole sections of U.S. cities, because of the ability to export manufacturing overseas, are industrial ghost towns. The human cost of this relentless search for greater profit is never factored into the balance sheets of corporations. If prison labor or subsistence labor in China or India or Vietnam makes them more money, if it is possible to hire workers in Bangladesh sweatshops for 22 cents an hour, corporations follow the awful logic to its conclusion. The requiem for Camden is the requiem for us all.

  Camden is a dead city. It makes and produces nothing. It is the poorest city in the United States and is usually ranked as one of the most, and often the most, dangerous.13 In early 2011 nearly half of the city’s police force, one hundred and sixty-eight officers, were laid off because of a $26 million budget shortfall. By the end of 2011, although more than one hundred officers had been rehired, homicides had climbed by thirty percent and burglaries by more than forty percent from the previous year. Mayor Dana Redd, an African American, responded to the upsurge in crime in December 2011 by calling for a county takeover of the city’s police force, a call the police union said was designed primarily to break the union to hire cheaper, nonunionized officers. Camden City Council President Frank Moran proposed that the state send in the National Guard or increase the numbers of state troopers assigned to the city.14

  Camden is beset with the corruption and brutal police repression reminiscent of the despotic regimes I covered in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The per capita income in the city is $11,967. Nearly forty percent of the city lives below the poverty line.15 Large swaths of the city are abandoned. There are more than fifteen hundred derelict, gutted row houses. The empty shells of windowless brick factories, warehouses, and abandoned gas stations surround the city. There are overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires and rusted appliances. There are neglected, weed-filled cemeteries, and boarded-up storefronts. There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs such as the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos, MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha. Knots of young Hispanic or African American men in black leather jackets, occasionally flipping through wads of cash, sell weed, dope, and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs, in brazen defiance of the law. The drug trade is the city’s only thriving business. A weapon is never more than a few feet away from the drug dealers, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass, or on a porch. Camden is awash in guns, which are easily purchased across the river in Philadelphia, where Pennsylvania gun laws are notoriously lax.16 Guns are kept for protection from rival gangs that send out groups to prey on drug dealers, stealing their drugs and cash. Nonviolence is a luxury few on the streets can afford.

  While Joe and I are in the city, a federal grand jury charges a Camden police officer whose nickname is “Fat Face,” along with some of his colleagues, with planting drugs on suspects, bribing prostitutes with drugs for information, lying on police reports, beating up suspects, and conducting searches without warrants. Three of the city’s mayors have gone to prison for corruption in the last couple decades. The school system and the police department have been taken over by the state.17 The deeper the descent, the more the criminal class and the city authorities become indistinguishable, in a microcosm of corporate infiltration of the national power structure.

  Camden was once as full of industrial promise as the nation itself. It began as a modest riverfront town in 1828 in the shadow of Philadelphia. The arrival of the railroad to Perth Amboy made Camden. The ferries out of Camden transferred goods across the Delaware to Philadelphia or north to New York City. Because of its strategic location, Camden swiftly became a manufacturing giant. New York Shipbuilding Corporation, which opened its first yard in Camden in 1900, was one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the United States. The Campbell Soup Company was born in Camden in 1869 with a small canning operation by Joseph Campbell, a fruit merchant, and Abraham Anderson, an icebox manufacturer.18 They produced canned tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, soups, condiments, and minced meats. The Victor Talking Machine Company—which later became RCA—built recording studios and production facilities in Camden.19 The greatest tenors in the world, from the Italian Enrico Caruso to the Irish John Count McCormack, traveled to Camden to record.20 Camden employed some thirty-six thousand workers in its shipyards during World War II and built some of the nation’s largest warships, including the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Savannah.21 The city was for several decades a destination for Italian, German, Polish, and Irish immigrants, as well as African Americans from the South, who could find, in the middle of the last century, decent-paying factory jobs that required little English or education.

  Abandoned factory, Camden, New Jersey.

  And then, little by little, the city, like the nation, was strangled and slain. Manufacturers left to find cheaper labor in the South and then overseas. Hurley’s Department Store, the Stanley Theater, the Towers Theater, and the Camden Courier-Post closed or moved by the 1960s. Neighborhoods began to decay. Community cohesion broke down. White flight from Camden became a stampede following riots that erupted in August 1971 after city police beat a Puerto Rican motorist to death.22 Swaths of the city were looted and burned. Less than five percent of the city today is Caucasian, and the city’s population has declined by thirty-six percent since 1950.23,24 Camden, which once had eighteen movie theaters, numerous churches and synagogues, and the grand, eight-story Walt Whitman Hotel with its two hundred guest rooms, ballroom, and banquet halls, fell into a death spiral. The hotel, the crown jewel of the city, named for the poet, who spent the last nineteen years of his life in Camden and is buried here, was demolished in the 1980s. It was replaced by a parking lot. The movie theaters are boarded up or gone. There are no longer any hotels or motels. There are no more factories. There are used car lots, but no new vehicle dealerships. The only supermarket is on the outskirts of the city, isolated from the street crime. Camden, like many poor pockets in the United States, is a food desert. Camden is dominated by Church’s Chicken—where nearly everything on the menu, from Jalapeño Cheese Bombers to the Double Chicken N Cheese, is fried—and doughnut shops. Grease and sugar. Decay and crime. Despair and poverty. Cities and manufacturing hubs across the country suffered similar assaults, but in Camden the breakdown was total, and the city, at least as a self-sustaining community, was obliterated.

  “When I came to Camden forty-one years ago, the parish St. Josephs, where I was in East Camden, that year was 1968, there were twenty-five families a month leaving,” remembers Father Michael Doyle, who is the priest at Camden’s Sacred Heart Church:

  And African American people were moving north, and white people were in flight. There’s nothing unusual about that. It’s the same story in a lot of cities. And they start moving out to suburbia. The New Jersey Turn
pike changed a lot of things. Exit 4 was opened. Mount Laurel was there. It was where poor African Americans for two hundred years had their chicken farms. They were driven out. If you go to Chicago or Philadelphia or any of these places, you’re going to find areas that are poor and dilapidated and areas that are deteriorated and housing and all of that, but Camden, the whole thing went. It all went. There’s no saying, ‘This area survived and that didn’t.’ None of it survived.

  The development of Mount Laurel was part of a classic two-pronged attack against the working class and poor African Americans. Many freedmen or escaped slaves had lived on farms in places like Mount Laurel since the seventeenth century. They now were pushed off their properties by developers. Mount Laurel Township, using the weapon of code enforcement, began in the 1960s to remove black residents, claiming they resided in substandard, dilapidated housing, including converted chicken coops. Properties of black farmers were condemned. The township ordered the occupants to leave. The black community, led by Ethel R. Lawrence, a day-care teacher, wife, mother of nine, and church leader, organized in 1969 to fight back. Through her efforts, Lawrence obtained some affordable housing,25 but the damage was done. Economic segregation is the new, acceptable form of segregation. And it turned New Jersey into one of the most segregated states in the nation. Mount Laurel, seized by developers, became a haven for whites fleeing urban decay. Its original inhabitants could no longer afford to live there. The blacks were driven from their land, forced into squalid internal colonies such as Camden.

  “Camden, I would say, is a casualty of capitalism,” Father Doyle said as we sat one afternoon in his rectory. “It’s what falls off the truck, and can’t get back on the truck.”

  There is a fifty-four percent high-school graduation rate in Camden. Less than twelve percent of Camden High’s students manage to pass the state’s proficiency exams in math and barely thirty-seven percent in language arts.26 The city spends seventy-five percent of its budget on the police and fire departments,27 a harbinger of the corporate state where only the security apparatus is maintained. The main branch of the city’s library has been shut down due to lack of funds.

  And once Camden died, its carcass became a dumping ground. The county took over forty acres of land on the city’s waterfront and built a sewage treatment plant that receives fifty-eight million gallons of wastewater a day.28 The stench of sewage wafts through the city streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant on the waterfront, which releases noxious clouds. There is also a prison, a massive cement plant, mountains of scrap metal, a giant shredder, and a planned methadone clinic. Camden is the poster child for postindustrial America. It is a window into the dead end that will come to more and more Americans as corporations “harvest” what is left of the nation for short-term profit and leave behind wreckage and environmental disaster.

  In Camden the world is divided between the prey and the predators. And the weaker you are, the less money and legal status you have, the more the predators hover like vultures. “Home invasions,” where armed gunmen climb or crash through windows into dilapidated row houses, are rife, especially in the Latino neighborhoods, where most undocumented workers, who do not have bank accounts, hide their cash at home.

  Miguel Benito runs a small photo store and videotapes weddings and quinceañeras, or fifteenth birthday celebrations, an important milestone for teenage girls in Mexico. He drove home one night after closing his store, Universal Foto Estudio on 2411 Federal Street. His three brothers, wife, and three children gathered in the living room at about 11:00 P.M. to watch the movie Transformers that his five-year-old son wanted to see.

  Benito’s small house has five rooms. Two of the rooms are rented out, one to a couple and the other to the couple’s father. Benito heard noises on the stairs after the movie started but assumed it was one of his renters. It turned out to be an African American man in a black ski mask. The robber walked up to him with a pistol, put the barrel to his head and said, “Give me all your fucking money.” The intruder had climbed through an upper-story window that had no lock. Benito and his brothers handed over their wallets and cell phones. The gunman, who let in two accomplices from the street, then went back upstairs to search the bedrooms and rob the renters.

  “He came down again and had filled his pockets,” Benito says in Spanish. “I told him to take the computer. He put the pistol to my head and said, ‘Shut up!’ He asked for the car keys. I gave him the keys to my 2002 Impala. Then he and the others left. None of us moved. We did not know if there were other gunmen upstairs. We sat there until one of the renters came down. They had been robbed and the rooms had been ransacked. Then we called the police.

  “But a lot of the Mexicans who get robbed never call the police,” he says. “They don’t speak English and they don’t have documents.”

  He stops and seems lost in his thoughts.

  “I think the people who robbed my house were the same people who robbed me on December on the street in front of Crown Fried Chicken,” he adds.

  We go to the port to see Joe Balzano, seventy-six, one of the handful of white residents who never left the city. And it is with him as a guide that we try to recreate the Camden that was lost.

  The city, bankrupt and plagued by mismanagement and corruption, was turned over to the state in 2002 in the biggest municipal takeover in American history and given $175 million in bonds and loans to stay afloat.29 Under the Municipal Rehabilitation and Economic Recovery Act, the state appointed a chief operating officer to run the government and gave the governor control of the school board. The takeover was promoted as a way to create jobs, improve the quality of life, and reduce crime. The state promised to tear down thousands of abandoned buildings, bring in new businesses, and repair the city’s infrastructure, including sewers that leak raw sewage into home basements, requiring a truck to pump it out.30

  When the act was signed, then-Mayor Gwendolyn Faison burst into song at the ceremony with the words “Good things are happening,” reported Dwight Ott of the Philadelphia Inquirer.31 Camden clergy on hand shouted, “Amen.” State Senator Wayne R. Bryant, who helped formulate the recovery, and who was later sent to prison for corruption, called the act a “liberation.”32

  But the infusion of money did nothing to alleviate the poverty in Camden. Its residents remained just as poor, just as unemployed, just as likely to be victims of assault and homicides, and just as poorly served by city institutions, from schools to the police, as they had been before. The money was simply a vehicle for other predators, this time white predators who did not live in Camden, to swell their bank accounts.

  Poverty is a business. And those who profit most from Camden’s poverty are the state’s Democratic Party leaders, and New Jersey’s most powerful political boss, George E. Norcross III, although he holds no elective office and does not live in Camden. The majority of the state bailout funds appropriated to Camden—nearly $100 million of the $170 million spent—were funneled to firms and construction companies that are invariably large contributors to the Democratic Party, Matt Katz of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.33 Norcross runs Conner Strong & Buckelew, one of the country’s largest insurance brokerages. He has collected tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in governmental work across the state for his insurance firms. His insurance brokerage serves a majority of New Jersey’s municipalities.34

  Norcross, nicknamed “King George,” lives in the upscale suburban community of Cherry Hill. He is a college dropout. He decides, according to several Camden politicians, who runs for office and who does not, who gets contracts and what projects receive state funds. Norcross influences the language of every state budget and can block or pass legislation. Little is done in South Jersey without his approval. And when the money came into Camden, nearly all of it went to his pet construction projects.

  Norcross’s methods of control were captured on tape. John Gural, a town councilman from Palmyra, N.J., a municipality with 7,091 people, went to authorities in 2001 wi
th allegations that his employer, JCA Associates of Moorestown, threatened to fire him unless he voted against the rehiring of Palmyra Borough Solicitor Ted Rosenberg.35 Rosenberg was on Norcross’s black list for opposing his leadership. Gural was wired during a series of conversations with Norcross by then-Attorney General John Farmer, a Republican. The investigation, however, went nowhere. Three hundred hours of tape remained locked in an evidence vault in the state Division of Criminal Justice’s office in Cherry Hill.36 Three tapes made their way into the hands of Lou Gallagher, the former chairman of the Burlington County Democratic Party. One was acquired by Alice Furia, the party’s vice chair.37 The recordings, although representing only ninety minutes of the many hours of conversations, capture the internal political mechanisms of New Jersey and much of national politics. It sounds like the recordings released from Enron’s trading floor.

  Norcross is heard on the tape, which surfaced in 2005, telling Gural to fire Rosenberg, who had criticized Norcross’s stranglehold over South Jersey politics: “I want you to fire that fuck. [Y]ou need to get this fuck Rosenberg for me and teach this jerk-off a lesson. He has to be punished.”38

  “A lot of people don’t like John Harrington,” Norcross is heard saying of an attorney then being considered for a judgeship. “The best thing you do . . . Make him a fucking judge and get rid of him . . . Harrington disappears . . . whatever the case. We move on.”

  Norcross later explains how he handled a member of the New Jersey legislature: “I sat him [the legislator] down and said . . . ‘Don’t fuck with me on this one . . . Don’t make nice with Joe Doria [a Norcross enemy and Assemblyman] . . . if you ever do that and I catch you one more time doing it, you’re gonna get your fucking balls cut off.’ He got the message.”