rollingstone | Camden is just across the Delaware River from the brick and polished
cobblestone streets of downtown Philadelphia, where oblivious tourists
pour in every year, gobbling cheese steaks and gazing at the Liberty
Bell, having no idea that they're a short walk over the Ben Franklin
Bridge from a full-blown sovereignty crisis – an un-Fantasy Island of
extreme poverty and violence where the police just a few years ago
essentially surrendered a city of 77,000.
All over America, communities are failing. Once-mighty Rust Belt
capitals that made steel or cars are now wastelands. Elsewhere,
struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and
embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit
the default button and start the whole national experiment all over
again.
But in Camden, chaos is already here. In September, its last
supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by
the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted
from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today. Thirty
percent of the remaining population is under 18, an astonishing number
that's 10 to 15 percent higher than any other "very challenged" city, to
use the police euphemism. Their home is a city with thousands of
abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks
full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats.
It's a major metropolitan area run by armed teenagers with no access
to jobs or healthy food, and not long ago, while the rest of America was
ranting about debt ceilings and Obamacares, Camden quietly got pushed
off the map. That was three years ago, when new governor and presumptive
future presidential candidate Chris Christie abruptly cut back on the
state subsidies that kept Camden on life support. The move left the city
almost completely ungoverned – a graphic preview of what might lie
ahead for communities that don't generate enough of their own tax
revenue to keep their lights on. Over three years, fires raged, violent
crime spiked and the murder rate soared so high that on a per-capita
basis, it "put us somewhere between Honduras and Somalia," says Police
Chief J. Scott Thomson.
"They let us run amok," says a tat-covered ex-con and addict named
Gigi. "It was like fires, and rain, and babies crying, and dogs barking.
It was like Armageddon."
The interesting video would be Matt Taibbi on Imus in the Morning but it's behind the Fox Business pay wall.
