camden new jersey and corruption exploitation

Camden, New Jersey is a city that symbolizes racial segregation and embodies the worst of American capitalism. In Camden, "poverty is a business," (Hedges and Sacco 88). George Norcross, aka "King George" -- is the de facto big man of Camden. Only, Norcross does not live in Camden, has no official elected position, and is white -- unlike the vast majority of Camden residents. Camden is not the typical white flight story, either.

The history of Camden reveals potent trends in American urban geography, particularly the theme of how intersections between race, class, gender, and power entrench corruption in American society. One research question that can be elucidated through a deeper analysis of Chapter 2 in Hedges and Sacco's Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt would be how the people can reclaim their cities from the wanton destruction, alienation, and exploitation symbolized by the likes of King George.

King George and his cronies in Trenton -- and even in Washington -- have been grafting money designated for Camden's urban development and economic recovery. By taking what Hedges and Sacco claim is more than 95% of federal and state recovery packages, Norcross funds his pet projects -- usually large scale construction and real estate development (93). "Less than five percent of the $175 million recovery package was spent addressing the most pressing concerns of the city -- crime, schools, job training, and municipal service," (93).

As a result, Camden is like a war zone, its citizens turning against each other, powerless to fight for their constitutional rights because every element of the city's legislative and justice systems are in the Norcross/Christie pocketbooks. The result is a systematically and deliberately segregated urban geography.

Within the segregated urban space of South Jersey, Camden is the zone of the poor, primarily African-American but also home to the rejects from other parts of the state -- the drug addicts and prostitutes whose disease-ridden bodies make them off limits even for the police. On the contrary, Cherry Hill is where Norcross runs his slum empire from: a wealthy and predominantly white zone.

Because the state of New Jersey has enabled a corrupt bureaucracy to replace democratically elected officials, preventing the Mayor of Camden to have any political power, there is little that benevolent community organizers and leaders can do other than to have faith -- and faith is indeed what holds together many of Camden's residents.

The authors describe the ways African-Americans have created solidarity through either Christianity or Islam, either way using religion as a means of generating collective resources to rally against corruption and also as a means of remaining as psychologically and socially healthy as humanly possible within their devastating surrounds. One of the key elements related to wanton destruction, alienation, and exploitation is how the urban landscape of Camden has changed over the years.

What was once a fairly wealthy town due to the presence of Campbell's soup and thriving shipyards now runs on two of shadiest businesses imaginable: illicit drugs (controlled by gangs) and the scrap metal industry. Strain theory shows how residents of Camden will view both of these businesses as the only means to put food on the table -- because essentially they are. All the people that the authors interview in Camden assert that now that Camden is a wasteland, there are absolutely no jobs.

Young people, more than fifty percent of whom drop out of high school because the education system is so terrible, turn to whatever work they can find. It happens that the work is either in the illicit drug trade or in scrap metal. Scrap metal seems less harmful than street drug trafficking but it is not -- to fuel the industry, hustlers will strip any and all buildings of their interior piping for anything that can be sold for scrap.

The city has been "cannibalized" by scrap metal, a vivid image of how the geographic space has changed due to the systematic exploitation of the poor and disenfranchised (99). When the buildings have been stripped of their pipes, they are rendered totally useless -- left flooded and steeped in sewage and with owners who cannot afford renovations. There are two layers of urban geography Hedges and Sacco explore in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

Those two layers are the sociological, referring to the exploitation of African-Americans in an overtly racist system, and the environmental, referring to the way that urban spaces have been left bereft of resources that the community can capitalize on for self-improvement. It is not that the residents of Camden do not want to rebuild their own city from scratch so much as they physically cannot given the fact that the land beside the Delaware River has become nothing but an embankment built of scrap metal, and.