NBC Black: A Town With No Banks

Very excited to speak at #PoorPeoplesCampaign later today in DC! @liztheo @RevDrBarber @UniteThePoor. Abolishing poverty is decades overdue. Let’s make it happen in 2020. ???

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 17, 2019

This will also demand that the US devise a more concerted national plan for rolling out 5G. Hopefully this is forthcoming.

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 17, 2019

If we don’t have one by the time I take office I will make a National 5G rollout plan a top priority as President.

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) June 17, 2019

I’m confident that I am only blogger on the internet who is simultaneously interested in the likes of Bilbo, Vardaman, Pettus, Rankin, Davis and L.C.Q. Lamar II and Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign.

I have this weird perspective on politics because I am a historicist. I’m used to writing about politics and current events in the afternoon and brushing up on my other interests in history, economics and other subjects in the early morning and in the evening. I spend so much of my time exploring other centuries out of curiosity that it gives me some unique insights into the present.

NBC Black:

“ITTA BENA, Miss. — Shawn Robinson, 50, has a view from his front stoop that he often finds more interesting than what’s on TV. From the doorway of his building on the edge of Itta Bena’s town square, Robinson can see people come and go from this struggling Mississippi Delta town’s only no-fee or low-fee ATM.

Robinson has seen women stand in front of it and start to cry. On a few occasions he’s heard church folks use blue language or seen people smack the brick wall around the ATM. (The machine itself is too precious to ding.) The most frequent reaction: variations on a sigh.

In Itta Bena, population 1,828 and likely declining, the four other ATMs sit inside gas stations and charge $5.25 to $7.50 per transaction. So, the demand for the most basic financial services at an affordable rate is such that on one or sometimes two days a week, Hope’s ATM runs out of money. …

What Robinson is watching isn’t simply the most active spot at the center of a small, struggling town. Robinson has an unavoidable view of an economic problem so fundamental that even those experiencing its effects may not recognize its cause. He is standing in one of the 6,008 places where the nation’s banks have closed branches from 2008 to 2016.

Itta Bena is a banking desert, a place where traditional banks have completely disappeared. …”

Itta Bena, MS is 81.34% black.

It is one of these many towns in the Mississippi Delta which have been abandoned over the past 50 years. If you want to see what I am talking about, drive down U.S. 61 from Memphis to Vicksburg. It is a history lesson in American capitalism and the fallout of the Civil Rights Movement.

The cause of the crushing poverty in Itta Bena isn’t simply racial though. While it is true that the Whites began abandoning the Mississippi Delta as a result of the Brown decision and the Voting Rights Act, they have also abandoned the former mining communities in lily White Appalachia. The black exodus from the Mississippi Delta and the White exodus from Appalachia were both caused by technological change in extractive industries (coal mining in Central Appalachia, cotton sharecropping and tenant farming in the Mississippi Delta) that distributed wealth upward to a tiny elite.

According to the doctrine of free-market capitalism, the entrepreneur is supposed to respond to technological change that destroys millions of jobs and create new industries and new jobs that create more value, but the truth is that this simply didn’t happen in the Mississippi Delta and Central Appalachia. It didn’t happen where I live either in the Alabama Black Belt. As technological change accelerates, it is happening now in other large swathes of the country too. There is no solution for these people under the current economic paradigm except to get out and move.

As I thought about the issue, I began to see three forces interacting here: the first is technological change and automation (the “disruption” caused by the mechanical cotton picker in the Delta), the second is cognitive stratification of the workforce (there are fewer jobs for all working class people due to technological change and the current system is vacuuming up the smartest people in these areas who could create jobs) and the third is that neoclassical economics is nonsense because it is based on an abstract model when in reality the “individual” is born into a geographic region (Alabama Black Belt, Mississippi Delta, Central Appalachia) that has an economy that is embedded in time.

If you are born into a place like Greenwood, MS in the Delta, then you will be raised in a world that is beyond your control. This entire area was f***ed by a series of rash and unwise decisions that were made long before you were born. In reality, you will not have the same opportunities in life that people who are born elsewhere in the country do. It honestly isn’t your fault either. The abstract economic model and the assumptions of the liberalism that everyone is living under … are false.

It is not true that “all men are created equal.” We do not come into the world with a blank slate whether it is in our minds or in the places in which we are born. If you are born into the Mississippi Delta with a 75 IQ in the year 2019, you will be a cognitive and geographic disadvantage. You will be at a historical disadvantage too because the Mississippi Delta is the product of its history. It is not a blank slate, but the product of all the previous decisions made across its entire history. Slavery was destroyed, the economy collapsed in 1865 and everyone was told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Government intervention is needed in places like the Mississippi Delta. The dirty truth is that places like the Delta are multiplying too which is why we have this raging suicide and opioid epidemic now in White America. We’ve ignored the Delta for decades, but it is the future of most of the country outside of a few wealthy enclaves that the tech sector is creating. Once we realize what is going on, I am optimistic that we can discard the current collapsing paradigm and create a new one that works for everyone.

I live in a place like the Delta so I am sympathetic to what is going on there. The free market actually isn’t working for black people. It increasingly doesn’t work for us either.

Note: When everyone is inferior to AI in the future, we should be able to tell the truth about race and laugh about it. I would create an ethnostate for blacks in the Delta and an ethnostate for Whites in the Hill Country. Everyone would live off the slave labor of robots.