Glass House Quotes

“Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions—or no unions at all—so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs. Having helped wreck small towns, some conservatives were now telling the people in them to pack up and leave. The reality of “Real America” had become a “negative asset.” The “vicious, selfish culture” didn’t come from small towns, or even from Hollywood or “the media.” It came from a thirty-five-year program of exploitation and value destruction in the service of “returns.” America had fetishized cash until it became synonymous with virtue.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“Monomoy sent what was left of Lancaster’s once-grand, 110-year-old employer into bankruptcy court while it made off with millions and the employees walked their wages and benefits backwards in time. Lancaster’s social contract had been smashed into mean little shards by the slow-motion terrorism of pirate capitalism.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“the standard private equity playbook: jawbone the unions, cut costs even at the price of damaging longer-term success, do a sale-leaseback of real property assets, take whatever public money you can get from communities eager to save their industries, and do an “add-on”—the Indiana Glass buy. And collect fees.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“A few people had always made lousy choices. But how had a preexisting human propensity for self-destructive behavior exploded into a plague? As Mark’s real, much more complete story—the one he didn’t tell Berens—proved, it wasn’t the increased availability of a drug like heroin, though that was gas on the flames. Lancaster’s drug problem predated heroin, OxyContin, Percs. The problem wasn’t caused by drugs at all, or government handouts, or single-parent families. While addiction could be as individual as people, common themes included alienation and disconnection. *”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“He’d concluded that “school’s not for smart kids,” a kernel of truth inside an excuse wrapped up as a brag: comfort for a refusenik.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“the idea was to make product,” he said. “Working for the community, for the United States, maybe for the world.” Then America decided none of that was so important. Jobs went overseas. The knowledge of craftsmen was lost, in order “to make a product for a little bit cheaper and not worry about what happens to the guy that used to make it for you.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“No matter how much money you had, your children attended the public schools or the small Catholic one and made friends across the economic spectrum.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“Americans wanted cheap stuff—and the harder they shopped for the cheapest stuff, the more they helped drive down the wages of people who made stuff. And the lower those wages dropped, the more a desire for cheap morphed into the self-fulfilling necessity of cheap.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“You know the way the world works?” Brian asked. It’s like that old Warner Bros. cartoon with Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog. All day long, Ralph tried to eat the sheep, and all day long, Sam beat the crap out of Ralph. The sheep were clueless. They just stood around, mindlessly eating grass. And then the work whistle blew, and Sam and Ralph punched out and walked off for a beer: best pals, two sides of the same system.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“As embarrassing as poor management may have been, though, it was a far better excuse than the alternative theory: EveryWare’s debt was so deep by design—allowing Monomoy to strip the company of cash—that EveryWare couldn’t move.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“They’d been trained to make a tangible thing, and to sell the thing for a little more than the thing cost to make, and then to use that profit to pay people, make better things, and slide a little dividend into the pockets of those who’d risked their money to invest in the creation. The idea was pretty simple. But America had come a long way—and had decided the idea was too simple. So,”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“People can become so frustrated, so discouraged, so mystified about what happened to the communities they love and about what they can do about them, they can’t help but cry. Even a cop.”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town

“The nation-state at best is based on the social contract that is also an emotional contract, stamped by the charisma of the past.” —SVETLANA BOYM, The Future of Nostalgia”
― Brian Alexander, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town