Big Deal On South Jefferson Street

No U.S. President has ever visited my mother's hometown of Orange, New Jersey, although George W. Bush, our Supreme Court-appointed anti-President, did so yesterday. Bush toured a pasta factory on South Jefferson Street to tout his tax cuts for the rich, citing how the Italian-American family who runs this business can invest in new equipment and hire twenty extra workers. Twenty new employees, eh? Yeah, and about a thousand people will apply for them because the job market is so bad. Anyway, we don't need a dozen-odd more shell stuffers. We need more garment workers (preferably paid a living wage!) and more furniture makers, and a few steel mills and VCR and DVD factories would be nice. Orange, a blue-collar town outside Newark, once had a much more vibrant manufacturing economy until all those good jobs got moved to the Sunbelt and to Mexico and China.

Oh yes, while Dub the Shrub was riding through Orange in his limousine, he was said to be struck by the city's diversity. This really means that he was surprised to see so many black people around. Once a racially and economically integrated town, Orange is now 70% black, and many of these residents are poor. Orange used to be a quite livable place, until federal housing policies encouraged white flight to the ticky-tack suburbs while whole neighborhoods in Orange (including my mother's) got redlined, federal transportation policies forced the ramming of an ugly freeway through the heart of downtown, and a combination of Democratic "urban renewal" projects and Republican supply-side economics turned it into what my mom calls a "war zone." Today Orange is a hotbed of crime and drugs (the victims of which are all black), hardcore hip-hop, urban squalor, and, thanks to its proximity to Newark, a breeding ground for the virulently racist and anti-Semitic Five Percent Nation.

Orange may have a strong Italian-American heritage, and Bush was clearly trying to appeal to voters in New Jersey's Italian community, but the Orange Bush saw largely hasn't existed since the early 1960s. The city's current residents wouldn't be caught dead voting for him. And too many people there are caught dying needlessly every day.

Inner city blues . . . make me wanna holler . . ..