MB Civic

Hedges in The Nation ..

Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant … It was the home to major industries, from RCA Victor to the New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell’s Soup … [now] there are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets .. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses .. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax. Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated

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