More, as the labor in the mines was increasingly mechanized rural Appalachian communities suffered massive unemployment hits. The story of rural whites is the story of how coal mining in the Appalachia mountains has destroyed forests, poisoned water supplies, and covered small towns in coal dust. With massive job loss middle and working class class communities like those in Camden were destroyed, creating ghost towns where libraries and schools were boarded up. That is until cheap manufacturing labor was found oversees, breaking unions, shuttering factories, and creating chronic unemployment in many local communities. The story of inner city blacks is the story of Camden, NJ, once a thriving multiethnic working class community. The effects of this profit-driven genocide are still being felt on Indian reservations which have some of the high addiction and suicide rates in the nation. Guns and government in the service of capitalism. Corporate greed then set the genocidal wheels of the American government and its military in motion. That is until silver was found in the hills. The Black Hills were given to the Native Americans in official US treaties, ratified by Congress, to be theirs forever.

The story of the Native Americans is a story about land and mining rights, how the Native Americans were pushed off their lands and quarantined on reservations so that corporate American had access to silver and other mining rights in places like the Black Hills, a place sacred to the Native Americans like Jerusalem is to the Jews or Mecca to Muslims. These are four the poorest places in America today and they tell the story of four different ethnic groups and how each has been exploited and sacrificed for corporate profit: the Native Americans, inner city blacks, rural whites, and Mexican immigrants. The four sacrifice zones described in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt are the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota Camden, New Jersey Welch, West Virgina, and Immokalee, Florida. Media attention rarely, if ever, dwells upon these sacrifice zones, thus the vast majority of Americans are wholly unaware of the costs of capitalistic greed and the rise of the market state, what we might call capitalistic imperialism, where markets and corporate profit are seen the highest goods in a given society. Sacrifice zones are places and populations that have been locally exploited-sacrificed-for capitalistic growth and corporate greed elsewhere. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt combines Hedges' investigative exposé with Sacco's graphic novel skills to tell the stories of four 'sacrifice zones' of late-modern capitalism. Hedges is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and Sacco an award-winning cartoonist. For those of you interested in criticisms of capitalism and the rise of corporate imperialism let me point you to Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.

Joe sacco days of destruction