Two great newspaper series on poverty: WIlmington, DE and Fayetteville, NC

I think I mentioned the series in the Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal on the West Center City neighborhood in Wilmington, a neighborhood not unlike Sandtown-Overton in Baltimore, where poverty has remained entrenched.

-- "West Center City struggles as violence continues"
-- "Decades of revitalization plans haven't diminished violence"
-- "Semi-automatics key factor in Wilmington violence"
-- "Community groups could be West Center City's salvation"

This article preceded the series, but is related:

-- "Violence chases day care from Wilmington neighborhood"

Also in December, the Fayetteville Observer published a great series on the subject as well.

-- Special Report: Poverty's Price

There are eleven articles in the series, which is impressive.  I still have to work through the pieces, but the fact that the newspaper dedicated the resources to producing them is remarkable.

Fred Siegel--I like his writing especially The Future Once Happened Here and his discussion of what he calls the entitlement economy ("3 ways big cities go bad," Arizona Republic--wrote a piece in the City Journal decrying the return of what he called "the riot ideology" in the TFOHH.  A shorter version, "New riot ideology: Results through coercion," was published in the Orange County Register).

I am not sure I agree with his current argument, because I believe that the Black Lives Matter movement has a legitimate argument about what for three decades I've called "the coercive power of the state," especially in how poor African-Americans are spatially segregated, subjugated generally, and killed by police with impunity, even if I believe, at least at this point in the movement, they are a bit too apologetic about crime and criminals ("Black Lives Matter should also take on 'black-on-black crime," Washington Post).

(At a meal with Suzanne's parents and some of their friends, I got into an argument about the validity and importance of the Black Live Matters protest, and how yes, people like Jefferson Davis and Woodrow Wilson were deliberate actors who furthered or attempted to further segregation and white dominance and they shouldn't necessarily be venerated with streets and schools named after them. I got the "state rights" argument in return. I merely said, we still haven't stopped fighting the Civil War.)

I was reading through Professor G. William Domhoff's companion website to his seminal work Power in America, now in its 7th edition.  Mostly I was reading his articles related to power at the local level, and was pleased to see he strongly favors the Growth Machine/Growth Coalition thesis. His writing though is pretty brutal about the conflict between the liberal-labor coalition and capital.

Anyway, I will have to read much more deeply into his ouevre.  I've known about his work for a long time but haven't really read it, much to my chagrin especially now.