At one time, Union City, Pennsylvania, boasted three large chair factories, lumber and planing and grist mills, a powdered milk plant, and several furniture factories. But now the furniture factories are gone – boarded up and featuring flea markets instead. The mill that processed local lumber into hammer and shovel and pickaxe handles is long gone. Helen’s Pizza Villa and Lupton’s Bakery and the Union City Dinor are deserted, windows covered with plywood. The second story walkup apartments on South Main Street are woefully neglected and ratty.
This once vibrant village of over 4,000 souls, a farmer’s marketplace, railhead, and manufacturing center, has gone dead. You could buy a house there for under $50,000 but probably wouldn’t want to. Over 20% of her residents live below the poverty line. Unemployment is high, and the only decent jobs, for those lucky few, are in the employ of the government.
But the Federal stimulus program has bypassed Union City. Why, you might ask? Certainly deserving of economic assistance, Union City has but one fatal flaw – 97% of its inhabitants are citizens of pallor.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and current economic advisor to Barack Obama, has been famously quoted as decrying the expenditure of stimulus funds on white folk.
“And if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most — women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed — will be shut out.”
Reich, a highly educated product and denizen of liberal universities, is quite disconnected from reality. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that economic need is color blind. Blacks and Hispanics, and, yes, whites, are all hurting in this economic climate. Stimulus funds should be distributed solely by need, not skin color. Martin Luther King would approve.
