Bryant Simon

This is the story of cheap. Cheap politicians, cheap jobs, cheap paychecks, cheap food, cheap country. It all adds up to our becoming a th1rd w0rld SH1TH0L3 c0untry.
I have taken out excerpts that spoke the most to me. They serve better than any words that I could say, To show what happened at the Hamlet, North Carolina fire in the Imperial chicken processing plant, where 25 lives were lost, In 1991.
2017, Hardcover, The New Press
P.4-5:
"Fire and insurance investigators would later learn that on the morning of the fire, John gagnon and the Imperial maintenance crew decided to cut the hydraulic hose that was dragging on the ground. As they made the changes, they shut off the hydraulic system but left the burners under the fryer on. They used a hacksaw to cut and shorten the hose before they reconnected it to the machine box. No one remembered if gagnon pulled on the connection this time but the maintenance man must have trusted that the parts would hold just like they had in the past. Maybe they cut end of the hose didn't fit snugly enough, or maybe it was slightly smaller than the fitting, or maybe in a rush to keep things moving they didn't tighten the coupling quite enough. Whatever the exact reason, only seconds after the mechanics turned the hydraulic line back on to at least 800 pounds per square inch (p.s.i.) though it sometimes surged to 1500 p.s.i. -- the hose came loose and launched into a wild dance, spewing flammable oil-based Chevron 32 hydraulic fluid in every direction. The liquid hit the concrete floor with enough force that droplets formed and bounced up and down all over the place. Some landed under the gas plumes rising up under the fryer. The heat from the gas vaporized the splashing oil and created the horrible hissing sound that Goodwin mistook for a missile.
From that point, the fire intensified, greedily feeding on the chicken grease on the floors and the walls and the oils from the fire and the hydraulic line.

P.15:
"This book... argues that the Hamlet fire broke out because the nation, not just this place or these people, had essentially given up on protecting its most vulnerable and precarious citizens. It shows that in the years leading up to the blaze the United States had become a more callous and divided, less patient and generous land. Above all, america, and specially the spaces on its margins, became dominated by the idea -- the system, really -- of cheap. Cheap's Central notion was that the combination of less pay, less regulation, and less attention to the economic and racial inequities of the past was the best way to solve the nation's most pressing problems. By 1991, this idea had seeped into every part of the country, every political discussion, every debate about civil rights, and every workplace and government agency until it reached the factory floor and the dinner table. Again and again, those with power valued cheap food, cheap government, and cheap lives over quality ingredients, investment in human capital, and strong oversight and regulation."

Jim Hunt, NC's governor,
P.54:
"... Told them about the state's 'pro-business climate,' it's right-to-work law, and the fact that North Carolina maintained the second lowest rate of unionization in the country. He told them that the state didn't have a whistleblower protection law on the books, that it had its own state-run OSHA department, and that it was one of only nine states where insurance companies could assign a doctor to examine an injured laborer in a workman's compensation case. When a deal needed closing, Hunt or one of his professional industry seekers would sweeten the bid by offering free access roads and sewer lines and breaks on industrial training, taxes, and salaries."

P.85:
"The new miracle breeds of broilers, with names like Vantress and Cyprus C, that Imperial bought from Cagle's to make its tenders, fillets and nuggets got bigger, faster, while consuming less feed. When these puffed-up creatures tried to walk, they could barely go more than a step or two without wobbling and toppling over. To get them to this size, The growers turned the overhead fluorescent lights in the chicken houses on for 20 to 22 hours a day because they wanted their chickens to eat like pigs, and they knew that these birds were biologically hardwired not to eat in the dark. So the animals lived in artificial light and ate almost around the clock, even if it made them sick. Many became so agitated in these bright, closed quarters that they attacked the birds next to them and sometimes tried to Peck themselves to death. Protecting their investments and pushed by The contractors, growers would de-beaj the broilers, sometimes with an instrument that resembled a blowtorch and usually without administering any anesthesia. The system wouldn't allow for any unnecessary expenses. The growers did, though, turn to a pharmacy of other drugs for other reasons -- all economic. Anxious birds didn't eat. When they didn't eat, they didn't grow to their full weight in a flash of time. Jumpy birds also tended to yield tougher meat. By the 1980s, in response, some growers started to lace their chicken feed with Benadryl to settle the nerves of the cooped-up birds and keep them on the fast-growing track. Others dropped traces of caffeine into the feeding machine so the birds would stay awake and keep eating. Perdue apparently added xanthophyll to its feed mix, a die found in alfalfa and Marigold pedals that turned the skin of broilers an artificial shade of golden yellow. Birds living so close together easily passed germs and diseases to one another, so farmers put penicillin, tetracycline, chlortetracycline, and oxytetracycline in their foods. Over time, as a result, broilers inevitably became resistant to some of these antibiotics, starting another round of chemical Solutions and producing a range of possibly dangerous foodborne illnesses for chicken eaters."

P.105-6:
"Shortly after purchasing the Haverpride facility, Roe shook hands on a multi-year deal worth as much as $20 million to supply generic nuggets to Lyle farms, inc. The roswell, Georgia-based food brokerage planned to sell Roe's further-processed microwavable chicken products to supermarket chains and other outlets under the Big Top, Shur-Fine, and Jewell labels. Almost as soon as the nuggets hit the freezer aisles and gas station warming trays, Lysle officials claimed that they started to receive complaints. 'Where's the chicken?' customers Supposedly asked. Lyle accused Roe's company of using rancid meat and of cutting costs and corners by concocting nuggets full of more than the usual amounts of filler, breading and water. Perhaps this was the only way Emmett Roe, the firm's Chief decision maker, could service his mounting debts or deal with the razor-thin margins in big food. Or perhaps Lyle was flexing its muscles and shaking down a smaller player in the pecking order of poultry capitalism.
By March 1990, Lyle had allegedly reneged on its deal with Roe's company. Yet it kept, according to one inside source, as much as a million dollars worth of unpaid-for chicken products. This was money that Roe didn't have. By then, the only contract the hulking Haverpride plant still had left was to supply nuggets to an Alabama school district for lunches. This deal was set to expire when classes ended late that spring. That didn't give Haverpride enough cash to cover its bills and keep the factory running. And there was no extra money from any of the other parts of Roe's shaky chicken empire to bail out the Alabama branch. By this point, Roe hadn't paid in full the finance corporation he relied on for debt relief or his chicken suppliers in months. His companies in Georgia and North Carolina owed thousands in back taxes, and the Alabama outlet fell so far behind on its electric bill that the power company turned off the lights. even before Haverpride went dark, Roe reportedly stopped paying his share of his employees' health care coverage, though he apparently continued to draw deductions for this expense out of their paychecks, using the funds, it seems, to cover the other costs and keep the plant open and their jobs still going. Haverpride operatives only found out about the owner's moves when they went to the doctor's office and discovered that they had no insurance."

P143-4:
"... By the early 1980s, policy discussions in the United States had changed and changed dramatically. The ideas of cheap Rose to the fore, influencing ideas about government and its role in the economy and every daily life, including School food policies, which quickly seemed as emblematic of their era as the Humphrey - Hawkins act was of an earlier moment in time. Reduced tax revenues due to business losses and jumps in unemployment led to government cuts at the federal and state levels, which in turn reduced support for school nutrition and exercise programs. Faced with persistent shortfalls and narrow choices between an extra science or reading class and physical education or home economics, educational administrators often chose biology and English over gym and cooking courses. To cover up the growing holes in their budgets, they cut down on visits from nurses and slashed funding for teacher's aids. Often these were the people who oversaw non-academic activities, like going outside to play and taking time for lunch. according to a 2001 study by the clearingHouse on early adult education and parenting, almost 40% of the nation's School districts had cut or eliminated recess because of a lack of funding. With money in short supply, more and more new school buildings went up in cities and towns without costly playgrounds or gyms. Some school districts cut back on their sports programs while others entered into dubious privatization deals. They let Coke and Pepsi line their halls with vending machines stuffed with high-calorie foods and drinks in exchange for money for new scoreboards for the baseball field and helmets for the football team.
The Reagan administration, looking for more money with which to pay for the Contras and several colossal new aircraft carriers, cut support for the school lunch and food stamp programs. Famously, officials in Washington tried to reclassify ketchup as a vegetable on school lunch trays to save money as well. Distrustful of the decision making of the poor and the not thin, some lawmakers proposed limiting what recipients could purchase with federal and state funds. while the nation's growing legions of the working poor were told they couldn't buy wine or beer or some prepared foods with government-issued food stamps, they could still use them to purchase cookies, chips, and soda. Big food and big agriculture celebrated choice as well, it seems. When a number of lawmakers suggested restrictions on sugary drinks and salty snacks, industry Representatives rolled out the flag and complained that any limits on consumer choice amounted to an alarming loss of cherished freedoms. Few Congressional representatives wanted to vote against American rights or forgo campaign contributions from Big donors, so it remained okay to buy chips and soda with government funds."

P.151:
"Really, the article in the Richmond county daily journal and most of the other reports on obesity in the 1980s and 1990s missed the key issue behind the timing of the tipping of the nation's scales. More than supersize meals, more than subsidies for corn and soft drinks, more than government cuts and support for recess and healthy school lunches, more than chicken pieces loaded with fat, salt, and sugar, the jump in obesity in poor communities turned on income. In fact, across the country, bodies got bigger as pay envelopes shrunk. This represented a massive, almost schizophrenic, historic shift. For more time than anyone could possibly count, poor people starved. They starved during the Roman empire and the renaissance, and during Charles dickens, George orwell, and Upton Sinclair's days. Novelists and commentators read their thin, gaunt, and emaciated bodies as sure signs of poverty, just as they read girth, plumpness, and softness as indicators of wealth. All of a sudden, the cultural codes reversed themselves. 'Thinness' became a sign of righteousness and success; 'fatness' an emblem of poverty and failure. the American diet was filled with danger long before the spike in obesity in the 1970s. Coke machines appeared at bus stations and crossroads gas stations after world war ii. At the same time, boxes of sugary Betty crocker cake mixes begin to line supermarket aisles...."

P.215-6:
"By August 1992, Emmett Roe ended up in bankruptcy court, though he showed up in the Greensboro Chambers without a lawyer, acting confused and befuddled. 'I don't know where I am,' he whispered to judge James wolfe. 'I have no assets.' Claiming that Banks removed $600,000 from his accounts the day after the fire to pay back the money he owed them, Roe declared, 'I'm broke.' In a court filing, he said he had no cash, no savings, no furs or jewelry, and no auto, video, or computer equipment of any value. Over the next year or so, creditors, court officers, and forensic accountants found out that Emmett roe wasn't lying, though some of the victims still believed he was hiding money and other assets."

Author Bryant Simon did an excellent job researching and compiling information that he shares with his readers in an unbiased formula that only needs eyes and critical thinking to see where to point the finger for the lives lost in this tragedy and the the end of the American experiment.… (meer)

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives by Bryant Simon uses a fire which occurred in a chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, as a case study of the effects of government labor policy in society today. A fire swept through the Imperial Food Products plant on September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, killing 25 people: 24 employees and a delivery man. These people included 18 women, 12 of whom were black. The plant was a safety hazard which was never inspected: the plant owner made extensive renovations without hiring any architect or securing any work permit; the employees worked in a plant with locked doors, slippery floors, no fire drills, doing repetitive work resulting in injuries under a white supervisor (the owner's son) who yelled at them and timed bathroom breaks. However, the employees were earning a dollar more than minimum wage, and had little access to better jobs. This is primarily a book about economics and society. Mr. Simon is most effective when he is telling the stories about the individual employees as in the last chapter, "Endings" and the Epilogue. Some of the middle chapters, especially the one on deregulation, dealing with economics tends to get bogged down. However, the whole book vividly displays the cost of cheapness in our society today. This cheapness includes the cheap food -- sugary, salty, and fatty food -- the only food the poor can afford to buy and its impact on obesity. It is also a study of race relations in the area around Hamlet. Many black employees felt racial discrimination. For example, although a fire department staffed by blacks was the one of the nearest fire departments, it was ordered to be a back-up, and stay away even though it offered several times to help; the blacks used this in their argument about discrimination. The cheap lives are those of the employees in plants such as this one.

Especially since the author emphasizes the human cost, I'm disappointed he did not include a list of the names and a bit of biographical information about each victim.… (meer)

I remember the tragedy at the heart of The Hamlet Fire. It was all over the news for a short while, shocking the nation with the callous employer who ordered factory doors locked, killing twenty-five people out of greed. It was reminiscent of the Triangle Fire that shifted American attitudes toward labor and employers’ obligations to their workers. There was no such shift after The Hamlet Fire and much of that is explained by the book’s subtitle: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives.

Author Bryan Simon organized the book into seven chapters that look at the trajectory toward tragedy through different lenses: Hamlet, the history of the town through boom, bust, and desperation for development; Silence, the history of Imperial Foods and Emmet Roe’s search for cheap labor and unregulated mastery of his empire; Chicken, following the industry from family farms to factory serfdom; Labor, the rise and fall of American labor and the South’s particular hostility to workers’ rights; Bodies, the changing American diet from natural to processed foods, from wholesome to cheap and fattening; Deregulation, the dismantling of oversight and the turning away from the idea of Commonweal; and Endings, the aftermath, the trauma that continues to this day. Through this, Simon shows that this is not a singular tragedy, but an inevitable result of trends that continue to this day.

The New Deal fostered higher wages, economic growth of American workers, with the understanding that by building from the bottom up, Americans could afford to buy the things we manufactured and grow the economy. With Reaganomics taking us back to Hoover’s Trickle Down, that covenant between government and its citizens was broken in favor of the promise of cheaper prices. Break the air traffic controllers union and get cheaper air fare, dismantle American industry and import from low-wage countries for cheaper cars, clothes, and electronics. Raising the minimum wage might make your burger cost more. No matter that WalMart workers rely on Medicaid, SNAP, and other taxpayer-funded benefits, the average family saves $3,000 a year by shopping at WalMart. In essence, we have traded well-paying jobs for cheap chicken nuggets.

Bryant Simon makes a convincing case that the ideology of cheap is degrading our society, increasing inequality, and making us work longer and harder for less. Many of his arguments I already believed but he pulls them together into a new focus, a focus on how much we value cheap and how that devalues us.

When people speak nostalgically about “the good old days” I usually wonder what was so good about Jim Crow and pre-Civil Rights Act America for women and people of color. However, this book makes me think that perhaps some of that nostalgia is for the old understanding of the commonweal, an understanding that excluded minoritized people, but that rested on the idea that government served the people, not the hedge fund managers. Perhaps that is what we really hunger for, not for Father Knows Best, but for the time when we thought of each other as citizens instead of consumers.

This is a heartbreaking book. It is also an important book that deserves a wider audience than it will get. I think it is being marketed to academics, not the general public if the dull cover is anything to go by. That’s unfortunate. Simon did not write this book in academic language. It’s journalistic, with a passionate call for justice. It also ties together many developments that lead inexorably toward an increasingly dismal future, not just here, but around the world. After all, when we outsourced manufacturing, we outsourced the tragedies as well, so now we have chicken factory fires in China that we won’t see widely covered on the nightly news. We will have our cheap.

The Hamlet Fire will be released September 5th. I received an e-galley from the publisher through Edelweiss.

The Hamlet Fire at The New Press
Bryant Simon faculty page

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/08/24/9781620972380/… (meer)

The author of Everything But the Coffee loved coffee shops and was fascinated by what he thought he saw in people using them as the new type of public space. What he found out was that Starbucks is first and foremost a money making machine and does not do anything to jeopardize that main mission. He came to the conclusion that Starbucks is a place where people go to be alone in public and are willing to pay extra for the coffee because it makes them appear cool and hip. How he came to that conclusion is very interesting reading.

There is a chapter on the bathrooms in the Starbucks book. Also about the fact that women business sales people often use it as a portable office because it has clean bathrooms and is safe. They come in - use the restroom, order coffee, sit for around using their phones and computers for about an hour, then leave. They do this at Starbucks in urban, suburban, and transportation hubs like airports. The book was a very interesting look at modern culture, and while it is about how we use space and brands in the U. S.

Everything But the Coffee, is a book about the rise of Starbucks and why Americans, and people all over the world, flock to a Starbucks store. I found it very enlightening. The author starts out to try to figure out why American's will pay 4 to 5 dollars for an overly sweet milky latte. About half-way through the book he is still convinced that the reason is because American's want to see without being seen and people are relatively anonymous when they are inside a Starbucks, but as his research progress he changes his mind and says that it is all about status. Buying an expensive cup of coffee from Starbucks says that the buyer is cool and hip. For this we are willing to pay a premium. It is a very enlightening look at American enterprise and the consumer.… (meer)