When the Steel Mill Gets Replaced by a GOP Megadonor’s Casino

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19023/steal

In 2009, six years after Bethlehem Steel pulled the final curtain and closed its Pennsylvania-based corporate headquarters, global casino impresario and multibillionaire GOP fundraiser Sheldon Adelson mounted a ceremonial stage to celebrate “the Steel’s” reincarnation as a Las Vegas Sands casino resort. Against an 1,800-acre backdrop of hulking detritus left behind by what was once the world’s second-largest steel company, he announced, “In Hebrew, Bethlehem means ‘the house of bread.’ And what do you need to make bread? Dough. That’s what we intend to make here.”

This play for laughs steamed some of the locals who took pride in having once made things of substance, from the steel beams that raised the Empire State Building to the armor plate, ordnance and ships that won World War II. It didn’t help, either, that Bethlehem steelworkers had not only been losing their jobs since 1995, but, with the company’s bankruptcy in 2001, they lost their pensions and health coverage, too. Making dough isn’t on quite the same moral plane as either producing steel or retirement security.

Or is it? In From Steel to Slots: Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City, historian Chloe E. Taft makes the case that the postindustrial city cannot be jammed into simple historical narratives of progress and decline. Rather, as a “place,” a city is a site of ongoing “social construction” rife with multiple meanings and stories that connect “local experiences and legacies to global contexts and transactions.” For Taft, it seems to matter little whether badly needed private investment comes in the form of casino gambling or, say, wind turbine manufacturing. Never mind that manufacturing yields useful products, where casino gambling—like its kindred scam, the neoliberal finance regime— conjures ill-begotten fortunes for the mega-rich. Taft is out to “challenge dichotomies that would distinguish production and service work” and “wellworn categories of ‘before’ and ‘after.’”