The Selling Out of the Middle Class is No Accident: Interview transcript part 1, with Donald Bartlett and James Steele

 

Rob Kall: It seems like one of the things that you do routinely in your writing, in your book, is you weave together statistics and the kind of facts that you get from government reporting agencies and polls, and then tie that in with anecdotal interviews with real people.

 

Donald Barlett: Exactly.

 

James Steele:   We've always tried to do this. I mean some stories haven't leant themselves to that, but most of them about the economy always do, because this is the life people are leading and what's happening to them just goes to the heart of all of these broad topics. And it also makes the story real in the way that nothing in our own language can make so real. So we always strive for that, and a big part of the work and everything we've done, is finding the people. For every name you see in a book, there's probably about ten others that have been interviewed, and for various reasons weren't in there. But that's also"

 

 

 

Rob Kall: How do you find them?   

 

James Steele:   Random ways.

 

Donald Barlett: There's no single way.   

 

James Steele:   No. We found some peoples' names, we found some names in bankruptcy court claims. People whose health care had been taken away. And a lot of the people, the names for this book, showed up in Labor Department filings. They'd lost their jobs because of imports or various trade issues. It's a very cumbersome process to get those petitions, and they're called "trade adjustment assistance petition'. And we've gotten many of those over the years. That's when other litigation, here and there, shows up beyond. And then one thing helped us this time, because of the collaboration with American University, the workshop down there. When we posted these things online, we urged people to contact us, and we heard from a lot of people that way. People who turned out to be very good interviews in some cases. So it's just like Don said, it's a range of things and it's quite often very hard to find folks. But they're the heart of every one of these stories.

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