This week, NIMBY [“not in my back yard”] became LIMBY [“literally in my back yard”] when bucket trucks, backhoes, stump grinders, wood chippers and men in hard hats wielding chainsaws converged on the utility easement behind my house in suburban St. Louis. All week, I’ve been watching them clear-cut what has been, for nearly 40 years, the natural buffer that screened my house from my neighbors—and them from me. The work starts at 8 am, and the noise, accompanied by an intermittent snowfall of sawdust, continues until 4 pm. They’re turning the eastern boundary of my once park-like yard into a bare-earth wasteland.

So, why am I smiling?

What they’re doing is one small part of a giant [$1 billion, I’m told] stormwater/sanitary sewer remediation project. All of the cutting and clearing is prep work for replacing the sanitary sewer line that runs through a creek just inside my property line. Over the years, upstream development and its accompanying impermeable surfaces have sent an increasing volume of water rushing through the creek, transforming the flow from a trickle to a tsunami. The stream bed has transformed from something my kids could jump over on their walk to school into a dangerous, 20-foot-wide gulley.

So—full disclosure—I have a selfish motive to like this project. I’ve hoped for—and lobbied for—enclosing the stormwater creek for years, mostly as a way of correcting the growing safety hazard that the creek has become. But there’s more to my tolerance of the noise, the mess, and the destruction of greenery.

It’s infrastructure.

The project in my back yard is just one small example of a priority that is too often ignored. It’s a lot more fun to use tax money to fund a new sports stadium, while ignoring the hundred-year-old power grid that keeps the lights on during football games. We’d rather give tax credits to a Wal-Mart than fix the aging sewer pipes and water mains running under it. We blithely drive huge, expensive SUV’s over bridges awaiting funding for repairs that never come.

Okay, I admit it: I’m a nerd for infrastructure. As a kid, I didn’t play with trucks or obsess over construction projects. But as an adult, I’ve learned that what lies beneath is just as important as the superficial, cosmetic projects that dominate the physical and political landscape of 21st Century America.

Some people contend that America’s “job creators” are the corporate executives who sit behind desks monitoring the value of their stock options. I disagree. There are thousands of jobs waiting to be created—not in corporate boardrooms, but under our streets, on our bridges and in places like my back yard.

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American workers are afraid of losing their jobs.  That’s obvious.  I have a step-granddaughter who worked part time at a gas station/convenience store in west St. Louis County while she was working on a two-year degree in early childhood education.  Fortunately, she was able to leave the gas station and the owner’s blatantly illegal demands on his employees when she nabbed a job working with 3 and 4 year old kids.

She and the other workers at the gas station were allowed NO breaks except to go to the bathroom.  In fact, that was the only time she got to sit down because there wasn’t even a stool behind the counter.  They had to eat behind the counter when there were no customers in the store.  Sometimes a shift would go past the 8 hour day, and, of course there was no overtime pay.  There was supposed to be a policy that no one had to stay alone in the store after 10 p.m., but somehow there never were enough employees to fill that time slot.

This goes on all over the country every day and every night.  Democrats have been asking for years why people vote against their own economic interests and keep electing the politicians who vote to screw them over.  Robert Reich says it’s because they are afraid of losing their jobs.  Fear works.  That’s disgustingly and sadly obvious in West Virginia.  Even the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is in the pocket of the coal industry.  He said recently that we shouldn’t criticize Big Coal because we wouldn’t have the country we have without it.  He was right in more ways than one.  We wouldn’t have the pollution, global warming and disastrous changes in our weather patterns caused by climate change.

For decades, Republicans used their holier-than-thou righteous megaphone to convince voters that to be “pro-life” was the way they could save themselves from eternal damnation.  Abortion, contraception, pushing back all the advances women have made since the 1960’s – this worked for a long time.  Now the anti-abortion bills in state legislatures are getting so ridiculous that the Republicans can’t rely on that anymore.

But they don’t have to because over the past few decades – yes, since Reagan fired the air traffic controllers – there has been a steady erosion of workers’ rights and the power of unions to protect their members.

The level of unemployment in our country is still a national disgrace despite some new jobs being created and a few companies calling back workers who were laid off during the Great Recession.  The Republicans are doing everything they can to hurt the poor, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders.  Sound too harsh?   Maybe.  But it’s true.  And why do the Republicans want to hurt the poor?  So they won’t have the courage to object to terrible, unsafe working conditions and wages that force even someone working 40 hours a week to live on the streets.

As long as megacorporations can keep us scared to death of an even worse fate, they have us by the short hairs.  They can abuse workers who speak up like Wal-Mart did to some who protested on Black Friday.  Supposedly Wal-Mart is being taken to court because those protests were perfectly legal, but what do you think the chances are that their employees will have the courage to do that again?

Desperate people do desperate things.  Fear is a powerful motivator. I’m sure there is a connection between this fear of losing what little we own in the rush to buy more and more guns and ammo.  This seige mentality works to keep us in our selfish little enclaves and closing our eyes to the violence and destruction in our communities.

Who knows where all this fear mongering will lead?  It might make millions of Americans so angry that they finally rise up and throw off the yoke of desperation.   Or we may continue losing strength in numbers and look more and more like workers in those countries where the factory owner has to put netting around a building to keep trapped workers from committing suicide.

A social movement needs charismatic leaders and courageous followers.
I hope I live long enough to be part of the next Progressive Era.

This post was written in response to an article by Bill Moyers.

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Mitt Romney’s campaign has come under fire for a number of gaffes recently, but one action by the company he cofounded, Bain Capital, is following a long-standing Romney tactic. Mitt Romney has a long history of exporting jobs overseas, according to Forbes magazine (hardly a liberal bastion). Vanity Fair has revealed that, while with Bain Capital before 1999 (the earliest date Romney claims having left Bain), Romney did indeed make sizable profits from sending American jobs to China, jobs that are unlikely to return. Although Mr. Romney is no longer in direct control of Bain Capital, he still makes $440,000 a week from his investments in the company.

On the same day that Americans go to the polls to vote for either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama as President, Sensata will lay off the last workers at the plant in Freeport IL. Sensata is now owned by Bain Capital. Sensata is moving 165 jobs to China and closing down the plant in Freeport, after having required American workers to train their overseas replacements. Romney will share in any profits gained by these actions.

Workers in Freeport IL have responded to the imminent loss of their jobs by protesting at a site they call “Bainport.” The protesters are asking that Romney save their jobs by demanding that the plant remain open. An alternative demand is that Romney debate Obama in Freeport, which was the site of one of the famous Lincoln and Douglas debates. So far, there has been no response from the Romney campaign, with claims that they are unaware of the situation.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” spoke with Dot Turner, who has worked at the company’s Freeport site since 1969. Turner described having been able to make a decent living at her job and having few if any prospects once the plant closes. Cheryl Randecker gave an account of being sent to China to train her replacements, who did not immediately seem to understand what was required to run the technical machinery. Workers at the plant believe that their jobs are being sent overseas simply to save money, with China providing the facilities for free, and workers paid at a much lower rate than their counterparts. Protesters first attempted to confront Mitt Romney at the RNC Convention, but were turned away.

Final layoffs from the plant closure are scheduled to take place on Election Day, with workers planning to vote, and immediately afterwards file for unemployment benefits.

Efforts to save the jobs in Freeport have included local Republican congressmen Don Manzullo, R-Ill., and Bobby Schilling, R-Ill writing to Sensata. The company response indicated that while the company sympathizes, they plan to shut down the plant just the same. Sensata employees have also heard from IL Governor Pat Quinn and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill who are pushing a bill that stops tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. The Bring Jobs Home Act is currently dead, thanks to a failure to get enough votes for cloture, a necessary move to get past a threatened GOP filibuster.

Meanwhile, the protesters of “Bainport” are gathering signatures on a petition asking Mitt Romney to address the situation.

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