"Sacrifice Zones" and corporate greed

In 2010, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Chris Hedges and comix artist/journalist Joe Sacco travelled through towns in America where real people's towns, homes, and lives are destroyed to benefit corporate bottom lines. The resulting book documenting these "sacrifice zones" is Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Hedges (and Sacco, briefly) recently appeared on the TV program Moyers & Company. You can watch the entire show online.

“These (sacrifice zones) are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill.

"It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

Moyers & Company: "Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’" (BillMoyers.com, thanks Marina Gorbis!)

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco (Amazon)

• [mobobo]

  I have, very unfortunately, worked for and known people (some even still have the gall to describe themselves as family) who are willing to destroy others in order to satisfy their greed. Unpleasant in the extreme and the justifications they espouse are on a par with Nazi justifications …to many with wealth all those without are not as “human” as they are, and as such simply not worthy of consideration.

• [Nick Woolridge]

  I have the greatest respect for Joe Sacco’s work, but I must admit that Chris Hedges gives me the creeps. He exhibits a terrible mix of sanctimony, superiority, and misanthropy. And he rails against non-belief in god-awful collections of foolishness like his book “I don’t believe in atheists”. Bleh; the linked book sounds great, but I don’t know if I could take the “hedges factor”…

  • [millie fink]

    I have read the linked book. It’s excellent, compelling, humane and ultimately inspiring reporting. Your ad hominem against Hedges strikes me as none of those.
    I’ll add that Sacco’s wonderful work adds greatly to the book’s effect.

• [J. Brad Hicks]

  “Sacrifice zones” is a terrifyingly literal name for it. The whole United States is a sacrifice zone. Back in the 1980s, we laid off half of our farmers, and left their land fallow, even though there still are hungry people – not many, not nearly as many as 100 years ago, but there are still hungry people, and there are still farmers who want to farm. Why don’t we let them? Because /we don’t want those people to have food./ We have roughly three times as many empty houses and apartments as we have homeless people. We could let those people sleep indoors for free, it would cost us nothing. Why don’t we let them? Becase /we don’t want those people to sleep indoors./ The hungry and the homeless have been designated as sacrifices. The true God of America is Moloch.

  • [bjohndook]

    Houses seized for eminent domain – 25 years later, it’s finally a vacant lot ready to be sold….

  • [Eve Birch]

    don’t stop that good bitchin’.
     a fan

• [Cyran0]

  “My murders will never come back to threaten me until the forest of Birnam gets up and moves, and I will be king for my entire natural life.”

  It seems tragedy springs eternal.

• [druidbros]

  I bought this book after seeing Chris Hedges on Bill Moyers Friday night. I had an hour before I had to be somewhere so I sat down in a chair and devoured 60+ pages. Its riveting with first person stories and Chris Hedges provides just the right overall perspective.

  • [millie fink]

    Seconded.

• [Scott McMillian]

  As a person who sees a “Sacrifice zone” every day in West Virginia, he is spot on. The struggle continues.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIVZT8epbpE

  • [Palomino]

    Washington D.C. too, it’s very poor. 

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    America’s even more fucked than I thought it was.

• [Vanwall Green]

  East St. Louis. 

  • [J. Brad Hicks]

    More than you know. East St. Louis was one of the earliest experiments. Do you know the story? Back when it was a real newspaper with real reporters, the Post-Dispatch wrote it up.

    Decades ago, the half dozen largest employers decided that they were paying too much in taxes. So they paid appallingly-cheap bribes to the legislature in Springfield to let each of them secede from the city, carving out tiny little pocket “cities” consisting entirely of the company, and a tiny handful of houses owned by the employer and only rented to loyal employees. When there are only six voters, there is no secret ballot; worst case, the employer simply evicts all six and brings in new voters. And so, year by year, they simply made their employee-voters repeal all taxes and all regulations.

    This left the vast majority of their employees and neighbors living in a city that had very nearly zero revenue for schools, libraries, cops, fire protection, roads, sewage treatment. And that’s why, decades later, East St. Louis looks like Mogadishu. Ironically, in the long run, this wasn’t even good for any of those companies, either. One of them is an unprofitable division of a surviving company. One is clinging to bare life off of its foreign subsidiaries. The others are all gone. But the resulting devastation is such that the city will probably never recover.

    That experiment was such a rousing success that Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats want to replicate it in every part of the country. These are people who look at St. Louis, and other experiment sites like eastern Kentucky and northeastern Louisiana, and at third world colony dictatorships like Nicaragua under the Somozas or Haiti under the Duvaliers or the Philippines under Marcos and say, “Why can’t we have anything nice like that?”, figure out that liberals are why they can’t have things “that nice,” and declare war on liberalism.

    I watched the video, and I wouldn’t have used the 1984 analogy, but Hedges is exactly right about the economy that the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats consider ideal: 1% of us comfortable, maybe 14% of us clinging to a fragile existence, and 85% of us in grinding poverty. The Sacrifice Zones are ALEC’s laboratory. If you think that they won’t do it to you if you let them get away with doing it to them, you are wrong.

    (Now queue up the responses from people who naively think that they’re guaranteed a spot in the 1%, or even the 14%, who think that the system is fine.)

• [Trey Roady]

  This is moving and eerie, even when taken with a grain of salt.

• [technogeekagain]

  “H0w’s that deregulation-creates-jobs thing working out for ya?”

• [thom johnson]

  Northeast Louisiana?  How so?

  • [J. Brad Hicks]

    Poverty in the upper Mississippi delta is legendary. (Or at least was, I may be out of date here.) Remember Clinton’s “poverty tour”? The three places he picked for most poverty, highest unemployment, worst health, worst education were East St. Louis, Hazard Kentucky, and some town (I forget the name) in rural Louisiana.

    • [Palomino]

      I was there in 1982, I was horrified. Shacks floating on oily bayous, no electricity, no phones amid a myriad of shiny chemical factories belching smoke.  My aunt was the head nurse at Carville Leprosarium (Hansen’s Research Center), I spent my entire summer there. 

      Me, my aunt Donna and her grandson R.J., my cousin. 

• [James Tascione]

  It appears that America is reaching the end of it’s first Dynasty  …

• [lilbear68]

  when a person aquired and hoards papers or other useless items we say they are sick, if a person adopts a huge number of cats/dogs we call them ‘the crazy cat/dog person and try to get them locked up. but when a person aquires and hoards money to the point that it impoverish all around him we call him a role model and put his picture on fortune magazine.
  anyone see the problem here?