A journey into Ohioans’ economic lives with bracing implications for American politics.

As Ohio Goes will be published in May 2016.

For some, the Great Recession that began in 2007 was a traumatic setback; for others, it was just another dip in a long descent from comfort and security. America is changing in profound ways, but we rarely hear the voices of regular people living the transformation.

As Ohio Goes is a journey through cities, suburbs, and remote rural towns in this quintessential American state. Sitting together at dining room tables, walking through rows of planted fields, and swinging back beers at pubs, you’ll meet individuals you won’t soon forget. People like Bill, whose handicap did not push him to take disability payments until his layoff, and Rhonda, a working mother embarrassed to feed her son using food stamps. There are the young soldier who shows us his scars from deployment to Iraq but who remains in the Army to make ends meet, and the Amish man whose business loss during the downturn induced him to leave his family and the church.

Together their stories personify today’s timeliest issues, which Rana B. Khoury navigates in informative and accessible terms. From student debt and health care costs to female breadwinners and hydraulic fracturing, As Ohio Goes situates each story in a context that relates it to wider trends in Ohio and across the United States. Where economic experts deal in the abstract, Khoury pumps life into otherwise cold facts and figures, putting a human face on economic issues.

If the old adage “as Ohio goes, so goes the nation” is right, then these stories should tell us where the nation is headed. Although Ohio is a swing state, Khoury insists that blue and red do not capture the character of the place she calls home. Another reality demands attention: economic inequality has reached historic levels, and there is no indication that the trend will slow or reverse. The growing income gap threatens democratic representation, equal opportunity, and even the American Dream itself. The people in this book display remarkable adaptability, resilience, and love, despite their predicaments, yet the country’s course is the sum of individual fates. Where are Ohio and the nation going?

This story came to me from Lee Ballinger, a former steelworker in Ohio’s Warren-Youngstown area. In the early twentieth century, the Youngstown area boasted the largest concentration of steel-making facilities per capita, and per square mile, in the world. In time, the city’s fate turned. Between 1977 and 1982 alone, five major steel mills closed—thereafter, 50,000 jobs vanished.[1] Lee’s was one of them.

I know what it’s like to depend upon coal to feed a family. Many years ago I worked at a steel mill in Ohio. My job was at the coke plant where West Virginia coal was turned into coking coal for the blast furnace. The top of the coke ovens was an area the size of a football field where monstrous machines funneled coal into the ovens. It was my job to put the heavy oven lids back on nice and tight.  It was literally as hot as hell up there. It felt like walking barefoot on hot coals. The air we breathed was truly foul but to us it was the sweet smell of something like success. We called it the smell of money because it paid the bills.  Continue reading →

My two cents – through two stories of young black people in Cleveland – on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, now up on HuffPost.

This week we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. knew that true equality included civil rights but also economic justice. In fact, his later writings and speeches on economic inequality and the free market are conveniently ignored by our media and education systems. He dreamt about America, after all, and criticisms of capitalism do not coincide well with the American Dream. But poverty and inequality remain the greatest demarcations of race in America today. In that vain, I am offering a snapshot of two black youths in Cleveland who embody the challenges facing blacks and lower income Americans off all colors. Read the rest at The Huffington Post!

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this.          – Henry David Thoreau

I have been working on my stories about farmers and the agricultural industry in Ohio. The farming experiences of the men I spoke to are quite distinct from one other; they included a medium scale corn and soybean producer, a community-supported berry and vegetable farmer, and a chestnut farmer who made a small fortune from the shale oil boom (but who would take chestnuts over oil any day). One common feature of the interviews was the gorgeous bucolic views I was treated to in the course of our conversations. I want to share some pictures of the landscapes, and of the men whose labor livens the land. I attempt to describe them in writing, of course. But my iPhone camera might be more capable of capturing the beauty.

Mark Binelli, Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, Metropolitan Books: 2012.

Ten days ago, I finished reading Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be. Five days ago, Detroit declared bankruptcy. I would hardly call the series of events auspicious, but I have to admit to a sense of relief. Because of Binelli’s book, I understood.  Continue reading →

George Packer. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2013.

It evades definition, this unwinding. Through the course of 430 pages, Packer never attempts to describe it. He doesn’t use data, or even introductions and conclusions. Instead, he offers you stories meant to take you to it, guide you around its contours, nudge you down its path (because yes, it is on a decline), and drop you at its ending, where you are left with the discomfiting sense that it isn’t over yet.  Continue reading →