Th Poor Have the Ear of Neither Party
by Gary Younge Guardian UK
By the Banks of Lake Tunk
The fog rolls in so quickly off the Atlantic that it can smother the town of Lubec, in the state of Maine, in seconds. One moment brilliant sunshine glistens off the shore; the next you can barely see to the end of the road. But directions to the easternmost town in the US are simple – head north on route 189 and if you hit the ocean or Canada, you’ve gone too far. In this close-knit community (population 1,652) everybody fits in to one of three categories: locals, whose families have often been here for generations; “summer people” with holiday homes; and those “from away”, meaning from anywhere else.
In his stump speech, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, John Edwards, says there are two Americas: “One America – middle-class America – whose needs Washington has long forgotten; another America – narrow-interest America – whose every wish is Washington’s command.” Lubec’s locals do not fit into either. Living in Washington County, one of the poorest in the US, they are certainly doing the work, but they are not middle class. Take Daniel Fitzsimmons. He used to employ around 50 people in a business making Christmas wreaths. When the North American Free Trade Agreement came in he went out of business, undercut by cheaper wreaths from Canada. “It’s free trade to some people, but it ain’t free to us because we’re losing everything we had,” he says.
Fitzsimmons, 41, turned to digging for clams, scallops and urchins until he found himself short of breath one day and fell to the ground. With no health insurance, he had to make himself bankrupt before he could get financial assistance for the bypass surgery he needed. “The bills were enough to give you a heart attack if you didn’t have one before,” he says. Now he’s back, digging in the bay early every morning to catch whatever the season washes in. “If you’re making a life fishing then you eat chicken one day and chicken feathers the next,” he says. “You take the good with the bad.”
As the convention season kicks off this week, there will be little mention of people like Fitzsimmons. The Republicans would rather forget he exists; the Democrats might talk about him, but they won’t be talking talk to him. Both will certainly discuss the issues that matter most to him – jobs and health – but they won’t address them in a way that will make a substantive difference to his daily life. Still, Fitzsimmons is backing Democratic hopeful John Kerry, enthusiastically but with no illusions. He doesn’t believe the Democrats will propose a socialised healthcare system that would cater adequately for him and his family, a fair-trade policy that would protect his livelihood from cheaper labour or an economic policy that would offer him more stable employment.
…But on a national level the issues facing those who live here are by no means marginal. One in eight Americans lives below the poverty line and one in 10 has no health insurance. Add to that the one in eight black men in their 20s in prison, and you have a nation where being impoverished, incarcerated or in need of medical coverage is a mainstream way of life to which mainstream politics has no adequate response.