May 1, 2013 · 10:00 am

Little Baghdad, California

by Arun Gupta
May 2013 issue
The Progressive

NABEEL USED TO WORK FOR the Americans in Iraq. He was a security team leader for the Research Triangle Institute, a U.S. contractor that was paid more than half-a-billion dollars to run “local governance programs” throughout the country. He survived three car-bombing attempts. “I was lucky,” he says nonchalantly.

But as GIs began to exit Iraq in 2011, he knew that his luck would not last. Nabeel says that some guys threatened him: “We will kill your son. We will get revenge when the Americans leave Iraq.” Nabeel didn’t need much more encouragement, given the collapse of public services that had made life arduous, so he applied for a special immigration visa for Iraqis employed on behalf of the U.S. government. With his family, he immigrated to El Cajon, California, in July 2011.

He expected a warm welcome and a decent standard of living for helping the war effort.

“When I came to the United States, I thought I would be better than the prime minister in Iraq,” recalls Nabeel. “Now, I am jealous of the street cleaner.”

Six friends of his nod in agreement. They are sitting in a sparsely furnished office in El Cajon, a city of 101,000 residents east of San Diego. The door says Babylon Design and Printing, but they jokingly call it the “Babylon coffee shop.” Outside, palm trees stand still in the damp night air. Inside hang oil paintings of Middle Eastern marketplaces and rural life.

All seven knew each other in Babil province, south of Baghdad. All worked for U.S. contractors. All escaped Iraq because of threats and the collapse of public services. Now, however, all are unhappy, most are jobless, and some wish they had never left Iraq despite the violence and chaos.

Also in the office are Ahmad Talib and Huda Al-Jabiri. They fled Iraq in the late ’90s, and spent five days walking without food to the Iranian border while Huda was eight months pregnant. The couple is employed as social workers resettling refugees. Ahmad says he is aware of five families who came to El Cajon recently and returned to Iraq.

“Many of the older generation want to go back,” Ahmad says. “This is not their culture. They have friends, families, memories in Iraq. One said, ‘If I am killed by a suicide bomber, I die once. Here in America, I die every day. I struggle with rent, I struggle with language, I struggle with work.’ ”

By one measure, the seven friends are fortunate. Out of a sea of four million Iraqis displaced since 2003, a relative trickle of 85,000 has been admitted to the United States. From 2003 to 2006, the United States accepted a mere 735 Iraqi refugees. Only after the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act became law in January 2008 did the United States start letting in a significant number of Iraqis.

While Michigan has a larger population of Iraqi descent, El Cajon is the top destination for this round of refugees partly because the State Department has discouraged refugees from settling in the economically depressed Detroit area. Professor John Weeks, a demographer at San Diego State University, estimates that the Iraqi population in San Diego County has swelled by an average of 400 a month since 2008, and El Cajon is now almost one-third Iraqi American.

But new refugees often encounter a rude awakening. The city’s poverty rate is 23 percent, and the unemployment rate at the end of 2012 was 11 percent. Moreover, El Cajon is still trying to live down its tag as the “meth capital of the world,” and it retains a hard-bitten feel evidenced by a robbery rate 50 percent above the national average.

Nonetheless, refugees say the warm, sunny weather is a welcome reminder of home, and for decades El Cajon has become a magnet for many of Iraq’s persecuted. Thousands of Kurds started arriving following a failed revolt in 1976. After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein crushed a Shi’a uprising encouraged by the senior Bush Administration, and some 1,500 Shi’a who escaped found their way to El Cajon. There are also Mandaeans, whose 2,000-year-old Gnostic culture is in danger of extinction, and Yezidis, practitioners of an ancient syncretic religion. But far and away, it’s the estimated 30,000 Chaldean Catholics in El Cajon who have enlivened the city with Iraqi culture, many having first settled there in the 1950s. Main Street is nicknamed “Little Baghdad” for the proliferation of Arab-language signs and Iraqi-owned restaurants, markets, jewelry stores, auto shops, and cultural centers.

Everyone who has contact with the community says the number one problem is the lack of jobs. Khattab Aljubori talks proudly of the $4,000 a month he earned in Iraq as an IT specialist. He fled in November 2010 because of threats to his family and now gets by on welfare and whatever computer work he can scrounge.

According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study on the health of Iraqi refugees who settled in the United States after 2009, 67 percent of adults are unemployed, including 85 percent of those over 45 years old.

Suhail Putras is one of those who has found a job in El Cajon. He works as a cook at Ali Baba restaurant, which is decorated like an Arabian tent, with plush blue and white fabric covering the walls and ceiling, and beaded entrances shaped like arches. As Suhail talks, waiters hustle silver platters heaped with yellow rice, chopped vegetables, pickled radishes, glistening kebabs, and fresh-baked flatbreads the size of hubcaps. He left in 2008, and makes no bones that he’s glad to be gone. “Iraq was the paradise, now it’s the hell,” he says. The Mahdi Army, a Shi’a militia, bombed his family’s liquor store in Baghdad. “I was shocked that people I’ve been living with thirty years came with a knife for my back,” he says. He says his future, and more important, that of his children, is in the United States. But he tears up when asked if he misses Baghdad. “I was born there, I was married there, I have happy and sad memories there,” he says.

Every refugee confronts these contradictory forces. Nabeel says he’s landed work as a security guard, but it’s not enough.

“This is not a better life for me, but for my family, yes,” he says. “We sacrifice for our family. I want a better future and education for my kids.”

Mohammed chimes in. A civil engineer who bolted from Iraq in October 2011 after two of his co-workers at the Cooperative Housing Foundation, a U.S.-based NGO, were gunned down in the street, he is frustrated at being unable to support his family.

“I worked with Americans in my country, but I have no experience to work in America,” he says. He has a simple solution: “So give us a job,” he says, referring to the government. “If they keep Saddam Hussein, we will never be here.”

Ahmad says some Iraqis in El Cajon believe they deserve welfare. They think, “This is our money, they took our oil.”

“These refugees are a direct consequence of our decision of having invaded Iraq,” adds Professor Weeks. “Some of these refugees, not all of them, come with the attitude that you ruined our country, you owe us.”

It’s not hard to understand why. Farah Muhsin, who came to San Rafael, California, in 2008 to study political science, says her family decamped to Syria in May 2003 after her mother, a journalist in Iraq, appeared on “death lists issued by the Badr Brigade and the Da’wa Party.”

“If you go to Iraq today, they say America has destroyed our country and allowed criminals and warlords to become politicians, take control of our government and imprison and torture thousands of people,” Muhsin says. “As harsh and cruel was life under Saddam Hussein, it was much better than today.”

Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed during the last decade range from 150,000 to one million. Trauma among Iraqi refugees in Syria, with 90 percent suffering from depression and 68 percent from post-traumatic stress disorder, far outstrips that suffered by civilians in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

The moment Iraqis land in the United States they face new struggles. First, Ahmad explains, they are usually in debt to the International Organization for Migration, which provides an interest-free loan for the airline fare to bring them over. “A family of five might owe $6,000, and they have to start making payments in three months,” he says.

Social workers say each refugee receives a “reception and placement” grant of $1,100 for rent, security deposit, furnishing, bedding, food, and other essentials. But for a childless couple that may not be enough to secure an apartment. “When you come here,” says Ahmad, “you get the worst apartment, the cheapest one they can find, and donated furniture.”

Salam Hassan, a thirty-seven-old-year computer engineer living in Berkeley, who served as a fixer in Baghdad for journalists like Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail, and Christian Parenti before escaping mortal danger in 2005, says single male refugees in the Bay Area wind up in West Oakland, “famous for its violent history, because it’s poor, and the rent is cheaper.” A number of refugees in Oakland have been robbed and assaulted, and Farah Muhsin says, “One Iraqi man was mugged and was shot five times, and is now permanently disabled.”

Hassan, who has taken so many refugees under his wing that his apartment was dubbed “the Iraqi Embassy,” says they are packed “three to four people per one-bedroom apartment. They get four months assistance, then are switched to a program that just covers their rent and $200 a month for food stamps.”

It’s an expensive and difficult process to make it to the United States—one refugee, a nuclear engineer, said it cost him $40,000—so adults tend to be professionals with advanced degrees in fields like medicine, engineering, and accounting. But the pressure to find jobs is relentless, and getting recertified is a laborious process. In the meantime, Ahmad says, “We find them jobs that no one else takes—fast food, housecleaning, parking-lot attendants.” Huda notices the change in their demeanor after they arrive: “You look at their faces. They are so proud of their degrees and their experience, and then they are told to clean sixteen hotel rooms a day.”

Ahmad is cynical as to why the United States lets in refugees: “They’re cheap labor.” But he’s quick to add, “They are survivors.” They confront obstacles at every corner—navigating a byzantine health care system, living in substandard conditions, learning how to use credit, taking crowded ESL classes with overwhelmed instructors. “But they will get up at 5 a.m., commute two hours, work a full day, get home at 7 or 8 p.m., and do it again the next day.”

Mark Lewis is mayor of El Cajon. Now sixty-four, he’s been in office since 1998 and grew up here. If he is any indication, cultural misunderstandings are abundant. He says single women have complained to him about not being served in Chaldean-owned establishments, and he’s warned them they must serve women. He says, “In our society the female is the same as the male. They haven’t got that through their heads yet.”

Lewis says some Chaldean schoolchildren who receive free lunches are “being picked up by Mercedes Benzes.” He adds: “First time, they come over here, it doesn’t take them too long to learn where all the freebies are at.” This, he says, causes “a lot of resentment in regard to veterans,” who ask, “Why can’t [the federal government] support veterans like they support minorities coming over here?” Lewis says this is creating “white flight.”

Advocates say that not enough is being done for Iraqi immigrants. “They need more educational programs,” Huda says, dismissing as laughable the four hours of cultural orientation some receive as their entire introduction to American society. Ahmad adds that adults need more activities “so they’re not just wandering the streets,” which is a common sight in El Cajon. Then there’s the issue of transportation, with many relying on a bus system that’s costly and inadequate. Most important, says Huda, “They need time for recovery and to learn the language and culture. Don’t put them to work right away.”

For many Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, the adjustment to the United States is just too much. “I’m a nation to myself,” Salam Hassan says, explaining that he doesn’t feel at ease in either America or Iraq.

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April 25, 2013 · 2:06 am

Let a Thousand Militias Bloom

The City University of New York recently announced it was appointing retired Gen. David Petraeus as a visiting professor. This 2005 report by Arun Gupta details the role Petraeus played in stoking Iraq’s still-ongoing sectarian war by establishing the Special Police Commandos as a ruthless force to fight the Sunni-based insurgency.

by A.K. Gupta
In trying to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, the Pentagon has turned to Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen. Under former Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, U.S. officials have installed many of the hated Baathists who tormented Iraq in high-level posts in the interior and defense ministries. But the new Iraqi government, overwhelmingly composed of Shiites and Kurds who suffered the most under Hussein, have announced that they are going to purge the ex-Baathists, putting them on a collision course with the United States.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made one of his surprise visits to Baghdad last week, warning the new government not to “come in and clean house” in the security forces. The official line is that the U.S. is worried about losing the “most competent” security forces. But there is a deeper concern that purging the security forces could feed into sectarian tensions and explode in civil war.

Much of that is due to a ruthless U.S. policy of using any tactic, no matter how unsavory, in trying to defeat the insurgency. According to a slew of reports, the U.S. military is encouraging tribal vendettas, freeing kidnappers to spy on insurgents, incorporating ethnic-based military units into the security forces, and encouraging the development of illegal militias that draw in part from Hussein-era security forces.

There is clear evidence that the tactics are having an effect. U.S. casualties have declined by 75 percent since their peak of 126 combat deaths in November 2004. Part of that is probably due to sweeping thousands of Sunni Arab males of the street-Iraqis imprisoned under U.S. control have more than doubled since last October to 10,500.

It is the more ruthless methods that may be having a greater effect on squeezing the insurgency. Yet the establishment of militias may backfire. U.S. military officials express concern that if the former Baathists who lead the militias are removed, they could take their forces with them.

A report by the Wall Street Journal from Feb. 16 revealed that numerous “pop-up militias” thousands strong are proliferating in Iraq. Not only are many of these shadowy militias linked to Iraqi politicians, but the Pentagon is arming, training and funding them for use in counter-insurgency operations.

Most disturbing, one militia in particular-the “special police commandos”-is being used extensively throughout Iraq and has been singled out by a U.S. general for conducting death squad strikes known as the “Salvador option.” The police commandos also appear to be a reconstituted Hussein security force operating under the same revived government body, the General Security Directorate, that suppressed internal dissent.

High-level White House officials are banking on the police commandos to defeat the insurgency. In hearings before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Feb. 16 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the commandos are among “forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgency.”

The police commandos were identified as one of at least six militias by Greg Jaffe, the Journal reporter. Last October it was said to have “several thousand soldiers” and lavishly armed with “rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, mortar tubes and lots of ammunition.” Yet these militias owe their allegiance not to the Iraqi people or government, but to their self-appointed leaders and associated politicians such as interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Even the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, admitted in testimony before Congress on March 1 that such militias are “destabilizing.”

Of these militias, at least three are linked to Allawi. Jaffe writes, “First came the Muthana Brigade, a unit formed by the order of. Allawi.” The second is the Defenders of Khadamiya, referring to a Shiite shrine on the outskirts of Baghdad, which appears to be “closely aligned with prominent Shiite cleric Hussein al Sadr.” Al Sadr ran on Allawi’s ticket in the January elections and proved himself loyal when he attacked the main Shiite ticket publicly for stating it was endorsed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (Al-Sadr also held the infamous press conference in Baghdad where several journalists in attendance were seen receiving $100 gifts from Allawi’s government.)

The special police commandos is led by Gen. Adnan Thabit, who participated in the disastrous 1996 coup against Saddam Hussein that Allawi coordinated. Thabit was jailed and subsequently released shortly before the 2003 U.S. invasion. He is also the uncle of Iraq’s interim minister of the interior, under which the commandos operate.

Thabit told the Armed Forces Press Service last October that the police commandos are drawn from “police who have previous experience fighting terrorism and also people who received special training under the former regime” of Saddam Hussein. The report from Oct. 20, 2004, also quotes U.S. Army Col. James H. Coffman Jr., who specifies that police commandos are “former special forces and (former Directorate of General Security) personnel.”

The Directorate of General Security was one of the main security services Hussein used to maintain an iron grip on Iraq. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies describes the service’s role as “detecting dissent among the Iraqi general public” by monitoring “the day-to-day lives of the population, creating a pervasive local presence.”

Col. Coffman reports to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the mammoth U.S. effort to create Iraq’s myriad security forces. Petraeus calls the police commandos “a horse to back” and has done so by providing it with “money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons.” In a satellite briefing to the press on Feb. 4, Petraeus repeatedly praised the special police commandos, calling the leadership “tremendously aggressive” in operations. Petraeus also revealed that the commandos, the Muthana Brigade and another militia called the Defenders of Baghdad were used to provide security on election day.

But a senior officer on Petraeus’s staff confided, “If you tried to replace Gen. [Thavit] he’d take his…brigades with him. He is a very powerful figure.”

Ousting wholesale the ex-Baathist security forces now in the government could push them to join the insurgency. And this precisely what Iraq’s new president, Jalal Talabini is suggesting. According to the BBC, Talabani argues “the insurgency could be ended immediately if the authorities made use of Kurdish, Shia Muslim and other militias. Jalal Talabani said this would be more effective than waiting for Iraqi forces to take over from the US-led coalition.”

The militias Talabani is referring to include the Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite units such as the Badr Brigades. But such a move would cement the conflict as a sectarian one.

Military analyst William Lind notes that “the rise and spread of Shiite militias devoted to fighting Sunni insurgents puts ever-greater pressure on Iraq’s Sunnis to cast their lot with the insurgency.” Add to this the use of Kurdish Peshmerga also against Sunni Arabs and civil war would likely result.

U.S. BETS ON BAATHISTS

Ironically, Allawi-with U.S. encouragement-has put a network of former Baathists in charge of various security services to fight what the U.S. claims are other Baathists who form the core of the insurgency. They include Thavit’s nephew, Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, who is the son of a prominent Baath official. The Minister of Defense is Hazem al-Shaalan, a former Baathist from al-Hillah, and. Brig. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, an old-time Ba’ath officer, is now head of the Iraqi secret police, according to author and analyst Milan Rai.

This policy of “re-baathification” is actively supported by Bush administration. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 11, 2003, that the CIA met with Allawi and another member of his Iraqi National Accord party to create “an Iraqi intelligence service to spy on groups and individuals inside Iraq that are targeting U.S. troops and civilians working to form a new government.” The plan was to “screen former government officials to find agents for the service and weed out those who are unreliable or unsavory.” Evidence of this role comes from Thabit who told the Armed Forces Press Service that former regime personnel in his force “were efficiently chosen according to information about their background.”

Even before he officially assumed the post of interim prime minister, Allawi announced a reorganization of security forces at his first press conference on June 20, 2004. According to a Human Rights Watch report on torture in Iraq, Allawi mentioned “Special police units would also be created to be deployed ‘in the frontlines’ of the battle against terrorism and sabotage, and a new directorate for national security established.” Human Rights Watch also noted that Al-Nahdhah, a Iraqi newspaper, reported on June 21 that the interior ministry “appointed a new security adviser to assist in the establishment of a new general security directorate modeled on the erstwhile General Security Directorate. one of the agencies of the Saddam Hussein government dissolved by the CPA in May 2003.” That security advisor was “Major General ‘Adnan Thabet al-Samarra’i.” (There are numerous variations on Thabet’s last name.)

Then on July 15, 2004, just two months before the police commandos became public, Allawi said the government would establish “internal intelligence units called General Security Directorate, GSD, that will annihilate. terrorist groups.” Jane’s Intelligence Digest commented at the time that the GSD, “will include former members of Saddam Hussein’s feared security services, collectively known as the Mukhabarat. These former Ba’athists and Saddam loyalists will be expected to hunt down their colleagues currently organizing the insurgency.”

Perhaps Allawi’s announcement was spurred by events in the city of Samarra. A July 15 report from Radio Free Europe noted that a Shiite website, www.ebaa.net , stated Islamic militants had blown up numerous sites in Samarra, including “the headquarters of the Iraqi National Movement Party led by Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, the City Council, the headquarters of the [Kurdish] peshmerga forces, and the home of Municipal Council Chairman Adnan Thabit.”

It seems then, former Baathist brutes may have gone from one security service under Hussein to the exact same one as under Allawi, another ex-Baathist. And the rougues apparently haven’t forgotten their old tactics.

‘GAY ORGIES’

The police commandos have been supplying suspects who confess their crimes on the TV show, “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice.” Described as the Iraqi government’s “slick new propaganda tool,” the program runs six nights a week on the Iraqiya network, which was set up by the Pentagon and is now run by Australian-based Harris Corp. (a major U.S. government contractor that gave 96 percent of its political funding, more than $260,000, to Republicans in 2004). According to the Boston Globe, camera crews are sent “wherever police commandos make a lot of arrests.”

The show features an unseen interrogator haranguing alleged insurgents for confessions. Virtually every press account notes that the suspects appear to have been beaten or tortured, their faces bruised and swollen. The London Guardian states “some have. robotic manners of those beaten and coached by police interrogators off-camera.” The Boston Globe observed, “The neat confessions of terrorist attacks at times fit together so seamlessly as to seem implausible.” And then there’s the nature of the confessions. Many suspects admit to “drunkeness, gay orgies and pornography,” according to the Guardian. The Financial Times reported that, “One long-bearded preacher known as Abu Tabarek recently confessed that guerrillas had usually held orgies in his mosques.” Another preacher giving a confession says he was fired for “having sex with men in the mosque,” the Globe account stated that suspects “frequently admit to rape and pedophilia.”

The show is said to be popular, particularly among many Shiites and Kurds, which causes concern that depicting Sunni Arab nationalists as “thieving scumbags” could deepen communal strife. Political and religious leaders from the Sunni Arabs have denounced the show, calling for it to be pulled off the air.

The police commandos’ penchant for tall tales caused them considerable embarrassment after they crowed about a major operation that killed more than 80 insurgents at a training camp along Lake Tharthar in Al Anbar on March 22. Within a day many discrepancies emerged-how many insurgents were killed, reports of more than 20 prisoners versus none, a number of different locations cited, many miles apart. The story fell apart after an AFP reporter visited the camp and still found 40 to 50 insurgents camped there.

But the police commandos are still receiving special treatment from the U.S. occupation. A State Department report to Congress from Jan. 5 noted that at the request of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, “billeting space” was provided for 1,500 police commandos in the Baghdad Public Safety Academy, postponing a basic training class of 2,000 scheduled to begin in November and limiting the number of students to 1,000 while the commandos received training “until the planned January 2005 elections.”

Overall, the militias are a tacit admission that the U.S. effort to create an Iraqi military force has been a colossal failure, costing at least $5 billion to date. During the most recent large-scale military campaign, “Operation River Blitz,” U.S. Marines raided towns West of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. The first order of business in many of these Sunni Arab towns, according to the Christian Science monitor, was to “round up and detain police officers”-the very ones who had been “trained” by the U.S. to fight the insurgency. In Tikrit in early March, the police went on strike after U.S. troops raided the provincial police headquarters there and arrested two high-ranking officers. (About the same time in Samarra, the mayor and city council resigned after the mayor’s office was raided and in protest of U.S. troops refusing to withdraw from the city as agreed.)

At the end of March, police brandishing Kalishnikovs staged a demonstration in Hit, one of the towns targeted, demanding their jobs back. An AP account of the protest dated March 29 noted that police forces have been dismissed across the province of Al Anbar, the heart of the insurgency, and “former local police officers have been protesting in several cities in recent weeks against a new plan to replace them with police from other Iraqi provinces.”

By introducing of militias and other units composed of Shiites and Kurds into the Sunni Arab regions, the U.S. may just turn the insurgency into a civil war.

10,000 STRONG

In terms of numbers, a column by David Ignatius in the Feb. 25 Washington Post notes that Thabit “commands a force of about 10,000 men,” which would make them larger than the British military, the second largest foreign force in Iraq. The commandos have been used extensively, first last October in the assault on Samara that was called a “model” for how to retake a city from insurgents (but which is stilled roiled by regular attacks). The commandos have also become a fixture in major cities such as Ramadi and Mosul. In Ramadi, The Stars and Stripes describes the commandos as “the Iraqi forces that might soon be responsible for security in the city.”

A report in Dec. 25 issue of The Advisor-a Pentagon publication with the tagline “Iraq’s Official Weekly Command Information Reporter”-stated that the “Special Police Commandos have been deployed all over Iraq to hunt down insurgents and to help provide security for the upcoming Jan. 30 elections.”

FEARS OF CIVIL WAR

Jaffe notes many of the pop-up militias come “from Shiite-dominated southern Iraq.” And they appear to be operating mainly in Sunni Arab areas. The police commandos in particular are taking the lead in operations in such Sunni Arab hotspots as Samarra, Ramadi, Mosul, Tikrit and Baghdad. Last October they were assigned to Haifa Street, which had been a resistance stronghold on the edge of the Green Zone, the heart of the U.S. occupation. It’s a district of 170,000 Sunnis and Shiites where insurgents find willing recruits among the Sunni neighborhoods. Two Iraqi battalions of more than 2,000 patrol the neighborhood, and the New York Times observes that one is lead by a Shiite general “commanding a unit composed mostly of Shiites.” (The units are the Iraqi 302nd and 303rd Battalion; it’s unclear if they are affiliated with the police commandos assigned there.)

Knight Ridder correspondent Tom Lasseter filed a report from Haifa on March 16, also noting that “Most of the Iraqi troops who patrol the area. are Shiite.” During the operations, Lasseter wrote, “When Iraqi and American soldiers detained a suspected Sunni insurgent in Haifa this week, a group of the Shiite troops crowded around him. A sergeant kicked him in the face. Another soldier grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into a wall. A third slapped him hard in the face.” The Americans’ Iraqi interpreter yelled at the detainee, “If you come with us, we will slaughter you.”

The ethnic-based militias are having a trickle-down effect on Iraqi society. With no functioning government, various communities are increasingly arming themselves. In another report, Lasseter spoke to a Shiite soldier who claimed that, “Shiite neighborhoods on the edges of Haifa have formed militias to enforce the sectarian boundary.” The soldier added, “”That militia is secretly funded by a sheik at a local Shiite mosque… what’s happening right now could be the beginning of civil war in Baghdad.” And in what remains of Fallujah, “Sunni residents say anger toward Shiite troops is reaching a boiling point.” Bush may be right after all that “freedom is on the march” in Iraq: the freedom to hate and kill.

As for the “hunt” for insurgents, it seems to include death squads. Retired Gen. Wayne Downing, the former head of all U.S. special operations forces, appeared on NBC’s Today show on Jan. 10 to discuss a Newsweek report about the Salvador option. The reference is to the extensive use of death squads by El Salvador’s military during its war against the left in the 1980s. Downing called it a “very valid tactic” that has been employed “since we started the war back in March of 2003.” In the account, brought to light by analyst Stephen Shalom, Downing adds, “We have special police commandos now of the Iraqi forces which conduct these kind of strike operations.”

And there is evidence for such operations. According to the March 12 London Times, the body of Qahtan Jouli was delivered to his family in Samarra by commandos from the interior ministry. He had appeared on “Terror in the Grip of Justice” and confessed to collaborating with insurgents in 10 killings. Qahtan’s father charged that “My son was killed after he was tortured by the Interior Ministry commandos. They killed him to cover up the lies they broadcast on the al-Iraqiya channel that my son killed many people, including Iraqi army officers.”

Despite the pressure, the insurgency is still capable of conducting large-scale attacks. It’s still mounting 50 to 60 strikes a day across Iraq. The difference is U.S. forces have become more effective at responding to the attacks-with more armor, more surveillance and electronic countermeasures. The insurgents have responded by shifting their targets to the Iraqi security forces and intensifying economic sabotage by crippling the electrical and petroleum infrastructure. They still have the upper hand there by showing the U.S. and its Iraqi allies are incapable of ruling the country.

The militias are central to many of these roundups. According to The Advisor, in Samarra, the special police commandos detained 200 suspected insurgents in the “short time [they] have been operational in the area.” In one week in the Mosul area, according to a Dec. 7 press release from U.S. Task Force Olympia, the commandos and Iraqi National Guardsmen, backed by U.S. troops, detained 232 people. A report from the Iraqi Ministry of Defense claimed that more than 400 suspects were seized in Baghdad in just one week in March with hundreds more taken from surrounding towns. Many of those arrested remain under Iraqi control-where many are tortured according to human rights groups as well as the U.S. State Department. Thus the actual prison population in Iraq is unknown, with many more thousands probably in custody above the U.S. total (which itself is unverified).

U.S. Marine units have taken the militia strategy to a new level: by creating their own. In a recent sweep through Al Anbar province, The 7th Marines Regiment brought with the Iraqi Freedom Guard, a 61-man unit set up by the Marines in January and paid $400 a month each, according to a Reuters report. During the same operation, Marines of the 23rd Regiment were accompanied by 20 members of a special forces unit called the Freedom Fighters. The Christian Science Monitor described them as Shiites from the southern city of Basra, with “little love between them and the Sunni Arab citizens of Anbar.”

In the greatest irony, U.S. forces have reached a pact with elements of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army to have them hunt down insurgents. This is the same militia that U.S. forces fought in lopsided battles last year that saw the Americans’ massive firepower devastate much of Sadr City in Baghdad and Najaf’s old city and kill thousands of Iraqis.

According to Agence France-Presse, U.S. forces are using a Shiite tribal leader to enforce vigilante justice in Baghdad’s Dura district. One U.S. officer calls the leader, Sayed Malik, “the godfather” and notes he’s received lots of public works contracts, enough to make him a millionaire. Another Sadr official states point blank that “people from Sadr organization are publicly hunting down the terrorists.” This apparently includes the kidnapping and disappearing of a Sunni cleric from a mosque in Dura.

The U.S. military is so obsessed with defeating the insurgents that it is “routinely freeing dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents,” according to The Independent. One senior Iraqi police officer charged that “The Americans are allowing the breakdown of Iraqi society.We are dealing with an epidemic of kidnapping, extortion and violent crime, but even though we know the Americans monitor calls on mobiles and satellite phones, which are often used in ransom negotiations, they will not pass on any criminal intelligence to us. They only want to use the information against insurgents.”

Despite the grab bag of ruthless and destabilizing tactics, the insurgency is far from over. One U.S. general recently noted that it takes on average nine years to defeat an insurgency. Additionally, it’s the violence of the U.S. occupation that gives the insurgency such force. Even if the rebellion is contained to “manageable” levels for the Pentagon, meaning a low rate of combat deaths, that does not mean the resistance will end. U.S. forces long ago lost the battle for hearts and minds.

And Iraq’s own “democracy” is already in trouble, leaving many Iraqis disillusioned. The winning parties have been unable to form a government almost three months after the election. They are still squabbling over who will control the most important portfolios-defense, interior and oil-which is where the real power lies. With a do-nothing government ensconced in bosom of the deadly U.S. occupation, the stage is now set for a further descent into rebellion and repression.

This article was originally published in the May 2005 issue of Z Magazine.

 

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April 22, 2013 · 10:00 am

Revolution Is a Warm Gun: Rethinking the Left’s Positions on Gun Control

Assault weapons on display at The Freedom Shoppe in New Milford, CT. (Photo: Wendy Carlson, The New York Times)

Assault weapons on display at The Freedom Shoppe in New Milford, CT. (Photo: Wendy Carlson, The New York Times)

by Arun Gupta
April 13, 2013
truth-out.org

Tony was the first gun-toting revolutionary I ever met. A Jewish African-American studies major, he quoted Frantz Fanon in the twilight of the Reagan era. When he popped by the school cafeteria, he was usually upset about something – the frat-boy student government, the state of Black America, a shop owner admonishing a customer, “Don’t Jew me.” Tony once vowed if a revolt suddenly “went down” in Baltimore, where we went to college, he would join in. “It would be premature,” he said, but he would nonetheless grab his assault rifle and give his life fighting alongside the rebelling urban underclass. I thought, “This guy has a death wish.”

I didn’t realize how right I was. One day in the cafeteria, someone said, “Did you hear about Tony? He killed himself. Gun to the head.” Rumor was his young wife and baby daughter were at home when he did it.

I’ve been thinking about Tony and what he represented in terms of the left’s relationship to guns. Namely, why is it that so many leftists – and by leftists, I’m referring to self-described radicals and revolutionaries, not liberals – are against gun control?

Despite the Aurora and Newtown massacres, it’s almost impossible to pass effective gun-control measures. It’s not enough to attribute lax gun laws to our founding mythology, a violent culture or the power of the gun lobby. After all, same-sex marriage has triumphed, and reproductive rights still exist, despite the same mix of power, money and culture in the opposition’s corner.

What’s missing from the pro-gun-control camp is a genuine grassroots campaign, and that’s where the left comes in. Pick an issue and the left is organizing around it – climate justice, labor, rape culture, immigrant rights. But why not gun control? Because, most leftists, myself included, agree with the principle Tony advocated, which is political violence – meaning collective self-defense – is a necessary though not sufficient means of securing freedom from a violent state.

Before you equate radical with bomb-thrower, realize Americans, with few exceptions, support state violence. Yet some support gun rights and some oppose it. Many leftists are in the former camp. To confirm this, I asked a couple thousand Facebook “friends” if they opposed gun control and their reasons why. The responses came pouring in:

“Is a state monopoly on arms in the best interests of the working class?”

“Gun laws, much like drug laws, are used to oppress the poor and people of color.”

“We can’t have a revolution without them.”

“Governments already have too much of a monopoly on violence and we will one day have to bring this one down.”

“I’ll be damned a cop can have a gun but I can’t.”

“Gun control laws … are another step down the incline to a full-fledged police state.”

“[I support] the right to bear arms – because I’m horrified that racist whites are heavily armed in areas of the country that oppose democratic rights.”

Judging from these comments, many leftists agree with the right that the biggest threat to society is not mentally ill shooters like Adam Lanza. It’s the state. The implication is that the solution to a society with too many guns is more guns. That’s why leftists tend to shrug off gun control. They see it as impinging on their freedom, or at least as something that doesn’t affect them.

But I’m rethinking this position and now conclude that a society awash in guns is more of a detriment to the left project of emancipation than a means to secure it.

This is not an abstract argument. Obama’s gun-control push is on the ropes after the bill banning semi-automatic pistols and weapons, as well as high-capacity magazines, died in the Senate. Remaining measures include providing resources for school “tip lines, surveillance equipment, secured entrances” – such as metal detectors and armed police – and enabling the use of National Guard troops to “ensure schools are safe.” That’s right. The response to guns in schools is to put soldiers cradling machine guns in schools.

Without bottom-up pressure, like the campaign that’s blocked the Keystone XL pipeline thus far, legislation is beholden to those with the most money and lobbyists, in this case the NRA and gun manufacturers. As liberals and gun-control NGOs play an inside game, they lack the skills, base and inclination to organize the kind of movement that can disrupt the balance of forces.

Loathe to grant the state more power, leftists have sat out the gun debate. However, every Aurora and Newtown convinces a terrified public to trade civil liberties for security, allowing the police, already equipped with tanks, armed helicopters and drones, to gain more weapons, more powers, more surveillance and less oversight. Ironically, much of the left’s energy is focused on reining in police powers, such as campaigns spearheaded by Cop Watch, Stolen Lives, INCITE!, and Critical Resistance, and extending to projects led by liberals and libertarians in the NAACP, ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Thus, the left should connect the dots by framing gun restrictions as part of the effort to limit police powers, abuses and surveillance. Unlike the right, the left does not believe the state of nature is a war of all against all. Central to the left project is demilitarizing society, and by using this as the umbrella, gun control can provide an opening to shackle the state instead of the people. But first, the left needs to rethink the role that violence plays in social change.

Let me explain. My journey was different than Tony’s (he was an ex-Marine), even though I arrived at the same conclusion, that violence from below is often legitimate. I began my political education devouring works by Gandhi, King and Gene Sharp, solidifying my belief that nonviolence alone would triumph. Reading the Managua Lectures by Noam Chomsky shattered my naiveté. In his signature style, Chomsky mined the official record to demonstrate how the US government greets peaceful change with violent terror. President John F. Kennedy admitted as much in 1962 when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” With shamefully few exceptions, conservatives and liberals, corporations and unions, pundits and intellectuals, supported the cold war.

Soon, I was marching in support of armed revolutionaries in El Salvador and South Africa. At the same time, I was being arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience, alongside storied Catholic pacifists like Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, to oppose US policies repressing these movements.

There is nothing contradictory about the two approaches. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the African National Congress in South Africa calibrated the mix of violent and nonviolent tactics that would best advance their struggles according to “the constellation of forces.” Movements turn to violence after nonviolence alone proves futile, as in Southern Africa, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iran, Palestine, Guatemala and Syria. Of course, popular violence is often defeated, and some violent tactics, like suicide bombings, are self-defeating. A New York Times article on nonviolent resistance in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh observes that Palestinians there “insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works.” As such, they viewed suicide bombings not as “a moral error so much as a strategic one.”

Nonviolence can work for limited campaigns or to change the political class, as the civil rights movement and Egypt’s democratic revolt did. But rarely, if ever, does nonviolence uproot the old order. Governments crush nonviolent movements all the time, as in Czechoslovakia and Mexico in 1968, Uzbekistan in 2005, and Bahrain in 2011. Nonviolent resistance alone is futile against the Pentagon, as proved by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As for the Indian independence struggle, it left relatively untouched caste divisions, the grip of rural landholders over the peasantry and the capitalist economy.

One has to dissect the social context: What are your vision and goals? Who is in your camp? Who is sitting on the fence? Who opposes you? Only then can a movement determine which tactics are likely to build support and power that can undermine their opponents while bringing their vision to fruition. This analytical process becomes evident in when and how leftists decide which armed resistance movements to support.

For example, when Israel, the US muscle in the Middle East, pummeled Lebanon in 2006, leading left-wing intellectuals, including Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Judith Butler, John Berger, Eduardo Galeano, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali and Ken Loach, published a “Statement in Solidarity with the Peoples of Lebanon and Palestine.” It decried “The deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon’s social infrastructure by the Israeli air force [as] a war crime, designed to reduce that country to the status of an Israeli-US protectorate,” and offered “our solidarity and support to the victims of this brutality and to those who mount a resistance against it.” On one level, it’s an unremarkable statement, as the right to resist illegal wars and occupations is enshrined in international law. But they were also boldly acknowledging that only Hezbollah’s trained army, not protests, tweets or petitions, could counter Israeli aggression.

The domestic situation is more complex. H. Rap Brown hit the bull’s-eye when he quipped, “Violence … is as American as cherry pie.” The mile markers of US history are colonization, genocide, slavery, the American Revolution, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, World Wars, cold war, Korea, Vietnam and globe-spanning coups, counter-revolutions, drug wars, proxy wars, secret wars, drone wars and the war on terror.

The public, liberals included, reflexively backs state violence. Only in America is a state headed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s bombed seven countries and asserts the right to globalized kidnapping, torture and secret kill lists not seen as the grotesque absurdity it is. On top of that, Americans gorge on violent movies, television, video games and sports, as they blindly support state violence – a mere 4 percent of the public “strongly opposes” drone strikes against terrorist “suspects” – but they will denounce “violent anarchists” if a scrawny black bloc protester smashes a Starbucks window. The left wants to overturn this order, but it knows the hammer will come down on it for anything but peaceful dissent. So the left has shunned violence for years. Some hapless youth might get ensnared in FBI terror plots, but left-wing leaders aren’t making threats about “Second Amendment remedies” or brandishing guns and placards invoking the warning, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Despite living in a deeply violent society, armed resistance is suicidal, as even Tony recognized. So I call myself a “strategic pacifist,” meaning violence is counterproductive under present conditions. Even property destruction has become self-defeating, as shown last year on the West Coast, where prosecutors jumped on incidents of window-breaking to repress Occupy Wall Street-related movements. At the same time, I argue that categorical pacifism – secular advocates of which are about as common as green penguins – is ahistorical and apolitical because it imposes a one-size-fits-all ideology, denying the specifics of history and the political constraints every movement faces. It’s so rare, in fact, that a few years ago, while talking with fellow activists at the War Resisters League, it dawned on us that not one was an absolute pacifist. Many people claim to be antiwar, but a little prodding will get them to admit World War II or the American Civil War was justified.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the left’s relation to guns. Despite its peaceful character, the left is unwilling to abandon the idea of violence. As Malcolm X put it: “By any means necessary.” Therefore, allowing the state to circumscribe gun rights means surrendering power.

There is a flaw in this formula, however. Popular violence is merely an instrument to bring about an ideal society free of violence. While violence against the US government is inevitable abroad, does it make sense here? One of the few public intellectuals to engage with popular violence is Slavoj Žižek, who writes: “every act of violence against the state on the part of the oppressed is ultimately ‘defensive.’ … for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy whether or not use violence against the enemy).”

That’s the rub. The main strategic concern for social movements is not to declare war on the state, but to create broad-based organizations that can first resist through every peaceful means possible. That involves maximizing public space in which to organize while minimizing state repression. Public space was essential to Occupy Wall Street’s success, and OWS still hasn’t recovered from the violent evictions. But it’s a fallacy to equate violence as a means to one day overthrow the state with violence as a means of protection for movements to claim public space.

This is why many leftists fetishize guns as Tony did. It’s easier to feel the power in the cold steel of a rifle barrel than to trust the arduous path of building a collective movement that may yield social power years down the road, if you’re lucky.

I got a taste of this false sense of power during ex-cop Chris Dorner’s war against the LAPD. The paranoia in Los Angeles was palpable, with the incessant thump of choppers, jumpy cops and locked-down schools. The police verified Dorner’s bitter manifesto by shooting up innocents and neighborhoods, and engaging in what appears to have been his pre-meditated murder. Dorner was lionized as a folk hero - with tens of thousands of people liking dozens of Facebook pages - and one commentator comparing him to a real-life Django Unchained. But Dorner’s rampage also bolstered support for the police, and you won’t build a movement by celebrating mass murder.

In this light, support for Dorner, as well as for gun rights, is a sign of social impotence. I think Tony gravitated to guns for that reason: weakness, not strength. They were his solution to a troubled society and his own troubled life. Likewise, the left looks for silver bullets to its predicament of powerlessness. Refusing to engage with the state doesn’t make it disappear; it just becomes a bigger threat. Trying to use the state apparatus to constrict the state is tricky, but many cherished freedoms – from habeas corpus to abortion rights to freedom of speech and assembly – involve precisely that. Otherwise, we sit back and watch as the state grows more powerful and society grows more violent.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

 

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February 8, 2013 · 10:00 am

Disaster Capitalism Hits New York

By 2080, New York City could be fortified with a belt of steel--or ringed with wetlands, as in this architect’s vision.

By 2080, New York City could be fortified with a belt of steel–or ringed with wetlands, as in this architect’s vision.

The City Will Adapt to Flooding — but at the Expense of the Poor?

By Arun Gupta     In These Times      January 28, 2013

For more than a decade before Hurricane Sandy, oceanography professor Malcolm Bowman, head of the Storm Surge Research Group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, warned that a superstorm would someday drown New York City. There were plenty of precedents, he noted, such as the 1992 nor’easter that crippled train lines and Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, which dumped a foot of rain in 24 hours and caused flash flooding.

“My middle name is Noah,” laughs Bowman, who looks the part of an old salt, with a tanned complexion and trimmed white beard. “The flood’s coming, you better build the ark, get everybody aboard.”

In 2008, Bowman was asked to join Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York City Panel on Climate Change, and he recommended that the city build surge barriers like those protecting London and the Netherlands. But his advice wasn’t heeded. According to Bowman, “the panel thought that it was too ambitious, too expensive, too futuristic.”

Now, in the aftermath of the most devastating storm New York has ever seen—one that claimed more than 100 lives in the region, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, and notched a record storm surge of 13.8 feet in Lower Manhattan—an idea that was once seen as implausible now seems inevitable. One poll found that 80 percent of the public favors fortifying the city with surge barriers. “Money shouldn’t be a problem,” declared the New York Times. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has thrown his weight behind barriers, as have the state’s top Congress members and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the frontrunner in this year’s mayoral contest.

Bowman and his Storm Surge Research Group have sketched out a plan that could cost an estimated $25 billion and centers on a five-mile-long “Outer Harbor Gateway” between Sandy Hook, New Jersey and the Rockaway peninsula. The barrier would be a belt of landfill, stone and reinforced concrete, possibly topped with a highway that would provide an alternate route from the mid-Atlantic to New England. Thirty-foot-high sand berms would be piled on Sandy Hook and the Rockaways to prevent flood waters from circumventing the gateway. Another gate, this one a mile long, would be built in the upper East River to stop surges coming in from the Long Island Sound to the north.

Proponents say the funding question could be solved by making the highway bypass a toll road. The next step is for Congress to authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a feasibility study, which experts say could take five years and cost more than $20 million.

Despite the costs, storm barriers seem more a question of when, not if, given that risks of more powerful storms barreling in on higher sea levels will increase exponentially as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt ever faster. Scientists say coastal cities should plan for sea levels to rise by seven feet by the year 2100. In Brooklyn and Queens alone, says Bowman, “you have to worry about the two to three million people who live less than six feet above high-tide level.” Since it would be virtually impossible for millions of people to abandon New York anytime soon, planners are trying to figure out the best way to hold the next hurricane at bay.

The ultimate gated community

To provide answers, the city tapped Jeroen Aerts, a professor of risk management and climate change at University of Amsterdam, to compile a cost-benefit analysis of flood-risk management strategies. Aerts says that, based on economic assets at risk, New York is the second most vulnerable port city in the world, after Miami. He cites an estimate that by 2080, the metropolitan area from New York to Newark, N.J. will contain about $2.15 trillion in assets that could be damaged by extreme storms. Compared to that—or even the $71 billion post-Sandy repair bill for New York and New Jersey—the $25 billion estimate for storm-surge protection looks like a bargain.

However, Aerts warns, “Don’t put everything on storm-surge barriers.” Because nothing is foolproof, he advocates “a multi-layered safety system.” This includes back-up measures such as updating zoning and building codes, strengthening insurance policies and committing more resources to evacuation if the barriers do fail, as they did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Nonetheless, flood barriers will be the front line of coastal defense. Aerts maintains that barriers are not just about safeguarding glittery skyscrapers. “Everyone benefits from storm-surge barriers because the whole city is protected, not only the developers.”

So far in the cost-benefit calculations, however, some people have been given less consideration than others. When asked if New York’s poor, who comprise 41 percent of the city’s population based on living-wage standards (21 percent by federal guidelines), had been considered in the initial discussions, Aerts says, “That’s a new issue. We didn’t discuss it, no.” He adds that the thinking has changed after Sandy as planners realize low-income groups “are the most vulnerable not just because of the structures they live in, but because of their coping capacity.”

This is precisely what worries critics. “Chances are, public policy is going to support only those developments that are high end, and are able to muster the most sophisticated and advanced flood protections,” says Tom Angotti, director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. “Everyone else, the one- and two-family homes, are not going to be able to make it, unless they’re mansion owners who have deep pockets.” Indeed, in early December, the city announced that it will “update its building code to require more stringent protection against floods,” such as by requiring all new and rebuilt homes to exceed federal guidelines on elevation, which will raise housing costs significantly.

This change will severely affect low-income people, Angotti says. “Many renters will find that there will be no more rental housing to afford because now it will be too expensive.” But it is public housing residents—79,000 of whom were trapped by Sandy in decrepit towers without electricity—who will be the big losers. Angotti says that because public housing is already on the road to privatization, “Sandy provides an opportunity for the closure of public housing in the Rockaways, Coney Island, possibly Red Hook, which would open up new opportunities for private real estate development.”

It’s all part of the “market mentality,” says Angotti. “Let the market handle it, and the market will exclude low-income people without them even having to say it. It will just be as if it were a natural thing.”

While everyone pays for flood works, individuals are left exposed to market forces, and big real estate developers reap the benefits. The invisible hand never pauses. After Sandy, one developer snatched up a publicly subsidized 1,093-apartment complex on the Rockaways and is counting on raising rents to profit from the investment—which means pushing out low-income tenants. Along the New York and New Jersey coast, speculators are preying on homeowners desperate to unload damaged houses for less than half their pre-storm value. Meanwhile, Arverne by the Sea, a billion-dollar luxury complex on the Rockaways, emerged virtually unscathed because it was designed to withstand hurricane forces.

Scientists say that by the time sea levels rise by one meter—which could take from 50 years to more than a century—barrier islands such as the Rockaways will have to be encircled by levees to survive. So until then, if left unchecked, wealthy homeowners and middle-income renters will continue to flock to these desirable waterfront regions.

Because adaptation focuses on protecting economic assets, and because coastal communities rely on the business, taxes and revenue that come with development, local building restrictions tend to crumble in the wake of storms like a sand castle at high tide. For example, after Hurricane Hugo pummeled South Carolina in 1989, regulations were eased to allow rebuilding on islands near Charleston such that “megastructures perched on fat pilings” have replaced small, modest homes, according to the Wall Street Journal. Despite the obvious dangers and devastation to barrier islands such as Fire Island, where Sandy caused 30 years’ worth of erosion overnight, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all vowed, “We’re rebuilding.”

Meanwhile, high oceanside rents will push low-income workers to less expensive locales either outside the city or in remote neighborhoods, where they lack support networks and face overcrowding, underfunded services and hours of commuting.

If the free market goes unfettered, that two-pronged dystopian scenario could play out on a broader scale across the U.S. coast. While storm barriers can guard New York City’s flanks, it’s impossible to seal the 3,700 miles of Atlantic and Gulf coastline with seawalls and levees. Unique coastal cultures such as the Cajun in Louisiana, Seminoles in Florida and the Gullah and Geechee of the Southeast will likely vanish if their lands disappear beneath the waves. By the latter part of the 21st century, the wealthy will probably cluster in those seaside cities and resorts that can afford flood barriers and hardened towers. Coasts not armored against rising seas will push inland, and their developed areas may shift to live-at-your-own-risk ramshackle dwellings for middle- and low-income groups seeking seaside relief from deadly heat waves brought on by global warming.

Soft Infrastructure

An alternative proposal for climate-change adaptation, more complementary than competing, inserts the social back into the debate. If barriers and berms are “hard infrastructure,” then “soft infrastructure” is the flip side. Adam Yarinsky, a principal of the New York-based Architecture Research Office and co-author of On the Water: Palisade Bay, which developed the concept of soft infrastructure, says the idea is to “emulate the way nature responds to storm events [by building] in planted natural systems of shallow water as opposed to a vertical seawall that tries to define an absolute line between water and land. It allows for a more fluid, dynamic tidal zone, which has the benefit of dampening wave force from a storm surge.”

Yarinsky and his colleagues acknowledge that soft infrastructure cannot replace surge barriers. Aerts, the risk-management expert, explains, “If you have oyster banks or marshlands it doesn’t matter, the surge is going over it. Wetlands help to reduce the strength of waves, but it doesn’t reduce the height of the waves.”

But soft infrastructure can be an important complement to surge barriers by allowing for controlled flooding that can replace seawalls in some areas, cleaning up blighted ecosystems and serving as a blueprint for viable, mixed-income, mixed-use communities. Proposals reimagining New York’s waterfront, grouped in a recent exhibit titled “Rising Currents” at the Museum of Modern Art, include a working waterfront of sustainable oyster beds, fish farms and algal biofuels; seeding the bay with flood-tempering barrier islands, wetlands and breakwaters; and redesigning flood-prone areas with sunken forests, porous streets and hanging buildings to allow water to enter in a controlled fashion.

Soft infrastructure has the potential to address the failings of public housing, which warehoused the poor away from services, from jobs and from the civic and cultural life of the city. Building a “new aqueous city” of flood-resilient housing on the water, fringing the urban edges with parks and wetlands, and creating a working waterfront would result in desirable housing, recreation and jobs that are denied to many New Yorkers. While this has the potential to turn into boutique urban living, Yarinsky’s co-authors, architects Guy Nordenson and Catherine Seavitt, argue in favor of creating “flexible and democratic zoning formulae for coastal development that … increase community welfare and resilience to natural disasters.”

It’s an exciting vision, but democratizing urban planning is a difficult task at best, and it runs counter to how developers manipulate government to generate private wealth. Angotti points out that the rampant waterfront development of the last decade under Bloomberg has the government’s fingerprints all over it. Rezoning jacked land values “10, 20, 40 times” overnight while the city funneled subsidies, loans and tax breaks to private developers building on those lands.

If it isn’t a problem to find money for surge barriers, as the New York Times asserts, then, given the political will, money can surely be found to develop soft infrastructure that benefits more than developers and million-dollar condo owners. Angotti suggests that instead of burdening the public with the costs, big developers should be made to pay for barriers designed to fortify their “luxury enclaves” and to fund protection for the city’s most vulnerable communities. Taxing the wealthy, high-end developments and corporate skyscrapers would generate money for both hard and soft infrastructure.

But political will does not develop out of thin air. To achieve this vision will require broad-based social mobilization by the people who really make the city run. They must assert their right to remake urban space around communal, democratic, liberatory and cultural experiences, rather than ones based on individualism, consumption, spectacle and accumulation.

One thing is certain: Rather than allow the political conversation to revolve around cold cost-benefit calculations, we must redefine the problem in social and ecological terms to make people’s needs and natural approaches central to the solution.

Of course, neither hard nor soft infrastructure can hold back rising seas forever. Retreat is inevitable. Even the Dutch, who are at the forefront of adapting to rising seas (as 26 percent of their country is below sea level), plan to eventually abandon 20 percent of their land, according to scientists.

In the United States, says Orrin H. Pilkey, professor emeritus of geology at Duke University, “Virtually every port city up and down the East Coast is talking about getting gates.” But some cities are doomed. “Miami, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale are sitting on top of very porous limestone” that is as much as 75 feet thick, Pilkey says. A levee is “not going to make the slightest difference. The sea level is going to come up right inside behind it.” A two-meter rise will mean “a thousand-plus miles of shoreline will have to be abandoned,” he adds. Bowman says New Orleans is in a similar boat. Caught between “subsidence”—sinking land—and rising sea levels, “its days are numbered.”

By the year 2300, sea levels could easily be 12 feet higher, and if Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets melt entirely, sea levels will rise by 200 feet, entombing virtually all coastal cities under the ocean. In the meantime, says Bowman, “We need to look beyond the next election cycle, the next quarterly bottom line of the corporation. Let’s give it our best shot for, say, 200 years. Then maybe we have to abandon it and the city as you know it dies.”

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November 29, 2012 · 10:00 am

Cleveland anarchist bomb plot aided and abetted by the FBI

Rather than target real risks of domestic terror, like neo-Nazis, the FBI entrapment machine demonises anarchists and Muslims
 

FBI mugshot of Connor Stevens, one of five men arrested earlier this year for plotting to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio. Photograph: FBI/AP

by Arun Gupta, The Guardian, November 28 2012

On 20 November, district court Judge David D Dowd Jr sentenced three anarchists with the Occupy Cleveland movement to prison terms ranging from 8 to 11.5 years for attempting to bomb a highway bridge last spring. US Attorney Steven Dettelbach trumpeted the successful prosecution:

“These defendants were found to have engaged in terrorist activities … These sentences should send a message that when individuals decide to endanger the safety of our community, they will be held to account.”

Dettelbach, however, was trying to spin the judge’s ruling that, in fact, rebuked the government. Dowd handed down far shorter sentences than the prosecutor sought, reportedly saying that the proposed prison terms were “grotesque” and “doesn’t make any sense whatsoever”. The prosecution had asked for sentences of 30, 25 and 19 years, respectively, for Douglas Wright, 27, Brandon Baxter, 20, and Connor Stevens, 20, in the failed plot to use plastic explosives to topple the Route 82 bridge spanning Ohio‘s Cuyahoga Valley National Park on 30 April 2012.

The prosecution was banking on decades-long sentences after negotiating a minimum of nearly 16 years for co-defendant Anthony Hayne, 35, in exchange for his testimony against his four associates.Hayne, who pled guilty 25 July on three charges, was told he would serve half the time of the other defendants. Dowd’s decision sent Hayne’s lawyer scrambling the same day to withdraw the guilty plea, with sentencing now set for 30 November. (The fifth man caught in the plot, Joshua Stafford, 23, is being evaluated for mental competency.)

After Hayne agreed to testify, Wright, Baxter and Stevens accepted guilty pleas 5 September, gambling that Dowd would reduce their sentences based on mitigating factors. But this nixed the defense plan to argue entrapment, detailing how Shaquille Azir, a paid FBI informant with a 20-year criminal record, facilitated every step in the plot.

Azir molded the five’s childish bravado and drunken fantasies into terrorism. He played father figure to the lost men, providing them with jobs, housing, beer and drugs. Every time the scheme threatened tocollapse into gutterpunk chaos, he kept it on track.

FBI tapes reveal Azir led the brainstorming of targets, showed them bridges to case out, pushed them to buy C-4 military-grade explosives, provided the contact for weapons, gave them money for the explosives and demanded they develop a plan because “we on the hook” for the weapons. At one point, Azir burst out in frustration at their ineptitude: “every time we meet, we leave saying, we’re doing some research. And then get back together and go back to square one.”

This case could have put on trial the post-September 11 strategy of“preventative prosecution”, in which the FBI dispatches provocateurs to infiltrate targeted religious and political groups to see what they can stir up. The targeting is not based on who are the main domestic terrorist threats, such as neo-Nazis preparing to start a race war, and violent anti-abortion fanatics. The threat assessment singles out the already-demonized, such as Muslims. Jeanne Theoharis, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and co-founder of Educators for Civil Liberties, says:

“There’s a tremendous amount of violent Christian religious speech in our airwaves and that’s considered protected. It sounds very different to the government if the speaker is a Muslim.”

Similarly, anarchists are inherently suspect. A recent FBI document calls anarchists “criminals seeking an ideology to justify their activities”, warning they were engaged in “experimentation with new tactics, weapons … leading up to 2012 conventions”. This tone pervades the government case against Wright, Baxter and Stevens. It claims the “brothers-in-arms” were united in “hatred of the government, and shared anarchist background” and had already decided “to carry out an attack that would, in their minds, lead to a larger civil war”.

Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior attorney specializing in national security at the Center for Constitutional Rights, claims standard operating procedure in terror cases “starts with surveillance and profiling on the basis of religion, politics and national origin”. She notes parallels between the Cleveland anarchists and the “Newburgh Four”, named for the upstate New York town in which the plot was hatched. The Guardian reported they were convicted in 2010 ”of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up Jewish synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles”, and described them as “beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues”. Kebriaei says the four men “are from the poorest community in New York, and the government was exploiting their needs”.

The Cleveland anarchists are cut from the same cloth. Lea Tolls, 47, a self-described “Occu-mom”, says, “Except for [Stevens] they were destitute. They are angry, some have mental illnesses, and there is alcoholism and abuse in their families.” The FBI dispatched Azir to an Occupy Cleveland event on 21 October 2011, “based on an initial report of potential criminal activity and threats involving anarchists”. Terry Gilbert, Stevens’ defense attorney, questions why the feds would send “a plant into a peaceful demonstration with a very ambiguous claim of criminal behavior. Once you get an informant in there, they have every motive to get a case. They are trying to make money or are working off a criminal case.”

This profile fits Azir to a T: he has filed nine bankruptcy petitions in 12 years and was indicted twice during the investigation for passing bad checks. It also fits the FBI plant in the Newburgh case, Shahed Hussain, a convicted fraudster who became an FBI asset in return for Etch-a-Sketching away his legal problems and for $100,000 in expenses and wages.

In a memo dated 14 November, Judge Dowd undercut the rationale for the investigation. The FBI’s first report from Azir stated that Doug Wright and a group of white males at the Occupy Cleveland event “were expressing displeasure at the crowd’s unwillingness to act violently”. In actuality, Dowd found that Baxter and Wright “joined the others in the nonviolent approach”.

Dowd also rejected the Bureau’s description of Wright as being in the“planning phase” to topple a bank sign from a 947-foot-tall skyscraper in downtown Cleveland, finding that he was merely expressing his “fascination with the idea of pulling pranks by using spray paint, stink bombs and smoke bombs which he heard about in the Anarchist’s Cookbook”. Dowd noted as well that Azir “facilitated the criminal conduct of the defendants”.

The Newburgh defense counsel, like the Cleveland attorneys, determined that entrapment offered the best chance of acquitting their clients. If they succeed, it will be the first time since 9/11 that entrapment has beaten a terror rap. Kebriaei says:

“Legally, entrapment is a very narrow and very difficult defense. It is very difficult for anyone to succeed in front of a jury if you’re accused of terrorism in this country.”

Entrapment turns on the question: were the accused predisposed toward violence? That’s why the government wants to equate Islam with terror and anarchism with anti-state violence: once the ideas are planted in the public’s mind, it can wave the red flags and prejudice the whole case. Theoharis says:

“Judges are not willing to challenge the government because if you take a bold stand that can mean you’re not going to move up.”

District court Judge Colleen McMahon blasted the government’s conduct in the Newburgh Four, saying:

“Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope.”

But, says Theoharis, the judge “wasn’t actually willing to do anything courageous”. Dowd didn’t go out on a limb either, applying terrorism enhancement charges in a pre-sentence hearing, though Gilbert says he interprets this as a tactical move. “Dowd wanted to craft a reasonable sentence that gave the government less opportunity to challenge it on appeal.”

The result, however is that the FBI continues to run rampant. To stop entrapment, says Kebriaei:

“The first step is more scrutiny of the process and how these convictions are coming about. Exposing these cases may effect prosecutorial and police practices in terms of targeting people.”

The Newburgh and Cleveland cases may eventually turn out to be a nail in the coffin of the FBI’s entrapment strategy. But it comes at the cost of nine men losing decades of their lives and nine devastated families. There are hundreds more cases like these ones, and no one knows how many still to come.

• For information on how to contact Brandon Baxter, Joshua Stafford, Connor Stevens and Douglas Wright, see cleveland4solidarity.org. For the Newburgh Four, see projectsalam.org

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November 23, 2012 · 10:00 am

Don’t Let Obama Cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security

The Progressive
November 15, 2012
by Arun Gupta

If you voted this election, whether for Barack Obama, Jill Stein or even Mitt Romney, you did not vote for austerity. But that’s of little consequence to Obama and the Republicans. The two parties are currently drafting measures that will undermine Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare as the economy approaches the “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year when more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will kick in absent a new budget deal.

They hope to strike a “grand bargain,” but are bickering over how much to increase taxes and cut spending. The spotlight has been on the Bush tax cuts, which Obama campaigned on repealing for the rich, but this issue is a sleight of hand that distracts the public from the bipartisan plotting against your retirement income and healthcare.

Surely, you say, Obama will thwart the Republicans’ scheme to dismantle social welfare. After all, it’s well known that retirement programs are healthy. Social Security is solvent through 2033 and Medicare is solvent through 2024. Both can be strengthened for decades to come with relative tweaking.

Trusting a Democratic president with protecting the general welfare is ill-advised when the last one gave us NAFTA, welfare “reform” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Not only has Obama been gunning for retirement programs since 2008 (I’ll explain), he’s so hell-bent on reducing deficits that he’s willing to damage the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates if the economy plunges over the cliff, recession will hit in 2013. Interestingly, the CBO calculates that if all the tax cuts are left in place and no spending cuts are enacted the economy will grow by 4.4 percent next year and add 2.3 million full-time equivalent jobs. This would be the highest rate of growth since the late 1990s.

Now, it’s a stone-cold fact that the Democrats are willing to gut social welfare. Listen to New York Times chief political correspondent Matt Bai: “Mr. Obama, during his ‘grand bargain’ negotiations with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, in the summer of 2011, had already signed off on painful cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.” Bai says there was “near unanimity” among Obama’s advisers and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi said “they would get behind it.” Paul Krugman’s assessment is harsher, saying Obama was “willing to sign on to … draconian cuts in key social programs.”

During the summer of 2011 the Obama White House and the Republican House played chicken over raising the federal debt ceiling. Bai says the two sides were haggling over the amount of cuts, not the question of bleeding retirement programs. Obama was willing to sacrifice $1 trillion in Medicare cuts over two decades, $110 billion in short-term Medicaid cuts, and acquiesced to “changing the Social Security formula so that benefits would grow at a slower rate.”

Mind you, the Budget Control Act Obama and Boehner eventually inked not only put the fiscal cliff in place, it cut spending for a second time in 2011. Over the next decade this will chop $900 billion in “non-defense discretionary spending.” This is wonk-speak for social programs, which will shrink to pre-1962 levels by 2021. Simply put, Washington already plans to roll back the Great Society – even before the fiscal cliff is reached.

But wasn’t Obama at the mercy of a Tea Party Congress threatening default unless he forked over $2 trillion in spending cuts? That’s what Bai argued last April: “Not only was [Obama] bent on avoiding a catastrophic debt default, but he needed to get out from under the debt issue, to demonstrate that he cared about reducing deficits before public concerns about government spending, stoked by rhetoric on the right, overwhelmed his presidency.”

There are more things wrong about this than a penguin in the desert. Allowing Republicans to use “economic blackmail” only emboldens them. The fiscal cliff is the third time the right is using mafia tactics – “Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” – as Krugman describes it. The only way to call the right’s bluff is to allow the economy to go wobbly so Wall Street, the GOP’s masters, will bring their attack dogs to heel.

Also, notice that Bai thinks allowing a default is unthinkable, but pilfering food, medicine and money from more than 100 million Americans is perfectly fine. As for Bai’s contention that “public concerns about government spending” stoked by the right would overwhelm Obama’s presidency, it’s utter bullshit.

Take a look at this site, which covers 25 polls on public priorities going back to June 2010. When pollsters list options, which skew responses, the economy and jobs poll close to 50 percent as the top priority, trouncing the deficit, which averages in the low twenties. The latter figure, incidentally, is similar to the percentage of voters in the 2010 mid-term elections who said they supported the Tea Party. In six polls, the response was open-ended, which better reflects what the public thinks. Economy and jobs still notched 49 percent on average. The deficit and national debt was barely a blip, averaging 4 percent.

No matter how the data is sliced then, the deficit is an inside-the-Beltway obsession that at most inflames right-wing firebrands who are never going to support the Democrats.

Nate Silver crunched the numbers on the debt deal in July 2011 – if there’s only one lesson from this election, it’s that Silver’s number-crunching is unparalleled – and found House Republicans to be “extremely conservative on fiscal matters and … significantly out of step with the public as a whole.” As for the mix of spending cuts and tax increases Obama put on the table, it was “quite close to, or perhaps even a little to the right of, what the average Republican voter wants, let alone the average American.”

So why didn’t Obama tune out the chattering classes and stare down the Tea Party? It would have strengthened his standing with the public going into the 2012 election. From this evidence, it’s impossible to claim Obama is hostage to the right. The truth that remains, even if it seems improbable, is that Obama is a right-wing politician who has had the welfare state in his sights from day one.

Don’t take my word for it. Obama said it on January 15, 2009, in a “wide-ranging” interview with the Washington Post five days before his inauguration. The article was headlined: “Obama Pledges Entitlement Reform; President-Elect Says He’ll Reshape Social Security, Medicare Programs.” Obama said this was part of his legacy, declaring that he was “willing to spend some political capital” so that the “the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.”

This was not idle chatter. Here is a sampling of what Obama said and did the next two years.

In February 2009 Obama held a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” at the White House, in which he issued dire warnings of future generations being “saddled with our debts.”

In his 2010 State of the Union Address he proclaimed, “Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t,” and called for a three-year spending freeze that fell heavily on social programs.

On February 18, 2010, Obama signed an executive order creating the “Simpson-Bowles Commission” tasked with making “recommendations that put the budget in primary balance.” In November 2010, right before the midterm elections, it proposed reducing corporate tax rates by 20 percent and on the wealthy by 30 percent while raising rates on middle incomes and the retirement age to 69. Remember, this was in the name of cutting the deficit.

This is before the Tea Party swept into Congress, so there was no pressure on Obama to appease the right. By adopting Tea Party talking points on spending and comparing government to a family – what family do you know that has 8,100 tons of gold reserves, a space program and embassies in some 200 countries? – Obama legitimized debt as a major concern going into the 2010 election.

A little more history. Obama ran in 2008 on repealing the Bush tax cuts. But he reneged on his promise just one month into his presidency even though he was gushing with political capital, the right was in disarray and the Democratic-controlled Congress was ready to pass it. (After campaigning in 2012 on abolishing tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000, Obama indicated he was willing to renege once more days after being re-elected.)

For his first term Obama followed the script penned by Larry Summers, his chief economic adviser in 2008 and the Clinton-era architect of the financial bubble that exploded four years ago. Writing on September 28, 2008 in the Financial Times, Summers outlined the Rosetta Stone for Obama’s presidency.

Summers’ article was published right after Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the financial Pearl Harbor that threatened the global economy. It was a classic case of The Shock Doctrine: using the meltdown to go after social welfare. He argued for a stimulus, while taking pains to mention, “We still must address issues of entitlements and fiscal sustainability.” He also said no “new entitlement programs or exploding tax measures,” which included “healthcare restructuring,” but not single-payer healthcare. Summers’ silences were notable: nothing about regulating finance, strengthening labor organizing or addressing the home foreclosure crisis.

Fiscal sustainability is simply a euphemism for cutting social spending to pay for deficit reduction. Economists like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have demolished every rationale for deficit reduction under present circumstances: with interest rates below the rate of inflation, bondholders are paying the U.S. government to hold their money; reducing the deficit would strangle growth; the best way to reduce the deficit is through growth and inflation; and the plan to hack away $4 trillion in a decade will not reduce the national debt meaningfully.

Even if the deficit does need to be reduced, then the reasonable course is to have the Pentagon and wealthy pay for the two unfunded wars, Bush tax cuts and Wall Street crash that blew up the national debt. Which is why Obama’s song and dance about “shared sacrifice” is so grating – and probably music to granny-starver Paul Ryan’s ears. Obama and Boehner are wrangling over whether or not the Gulfstream set has to part ways with a 4.6 percent nudge in income tax, but they agree that grandma must skimp on food, heat and her meds. “Hey, we’re all in this together.”

Whatever your politics, you’ve probably been savoring the humiliation of “the biggest loser” Karl Rove, cackling over Bill O’Reilly’s lament that “the white establishment is now the minority” and sharing “White People Mourning Romney.” 

Well it’s time to wipe the gloating off our faces and get to work stopping Obama from stealing our healthcare and retirement income, otherwise it will be Wall Street’s turn to gloat. Yet again.

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November 21, 2012 · 10:00 am

What Happened to the Green New Deal?

Truth-out.org

by Arun Gupta

Out of the ashes of Obama’s green-collar vision, a worker-run business may point the way to the economy of the future.

Last election, Obama had an economic plan and wasn’t afraid to embrace government as a primary creator of jobs. With markets melting down, almost half a million people being fired a month, and automakers and banks emitting a death rattle, Obama presented a sweeping vision of tackling health care, global warming, a rogue Wall Street and reshaping the decaying industrial economy with a green-collar one. Liberals dubbed it a Green New Deal and fantasized about the land blossoming with solar panels, electric cars and high-speed trains as new regulations cut corporations down to size.

Obama botched the plan, however. He inflated hopes in 2008 that his policies would create 5 million green-collar jobs in a decade. He then skimped by allocating only $90 billion in stimulus money for clean energy, producing a measly 225,000 jobs after 18 months by the White House’s own estimates.

Republicans blasted Obama’s green economy as failed central planning imported from Europe. They believe the government that’s best is the one that governs the least. Its purpose is to spur the private sector, but how it does so is mysterious. This was Romney’s position, but it seems to have become Obama’s, as well. During the election campaign, the two mouthed the same invisible-hand mumbo-jumbo, offering little chance of reviving an ailing economy.

In the real world, corporations clasp onto the public teat like squealing piglets. Big business would starve if deprived of state-organized central banking, transport, electricity, water, sewage, courts, zoning, police, environmental remediation, customs and labor regulation. Pick an industry and you’ll find tailored public aid. Banks and car makers get bailouts; energy and forestry companies mine, drill and log public lands; the health care industry thrives thanks to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Medicare and Medicaid; agribusiness soaks up crop insurance and subsidies; home construction is built on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve; and perhaps the largest part of the economy – the military-surveillance-police-and-prison sector – is assembled piece by piece by government.

Clearly, government policies create many millions of jobs. (That’s not counting 22 million government employees and an estimated 14 million other jobs created by government contracting and consumer spending by public-sector workers.) This is known as industrial policy. Every country does it, and the United States is no exception. We just tend to do it worse because it is heresy to question the god of the free market. If the public realized how much big business depended on public support, then there might be a loud clamor for more activist government.

The lesson is not that the Obama administration did too much to spur a green economy; it did too little. Answers to why the green-collar economy withered and where its future may lie can be found in the story of Serious Energy and workers from the former Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago.

A New Era

Obama’s green jobs plan had one missing element – labor. A healthy economy requires plenty of good-paying, stable jobs with benefits. However, the titans of Wall Street aren’t going to voluntarily give up profits so the proles can get better wages and social programs; the proles have to fight for it.

As if on cue, a glimmer of labor’s revival emerged after Obama’s election. On December 5, 2008, 240 workers at Republic Windows and Doors staged a sit-down strike after receiving notice that their factory would be mothballed. The workers, members of Local 1110 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, raised expectations that a wave of labor militancy could turn the tide against runaway corporate power.

Soon, all the elements came together. Serious Materials, a clean-technology firm, purchased the bankrupt Republic plant, which specialized in manufacturing high-energy-efficiency windows. Serious Materials (since renamed Serious Energy) billed itself as a green-economy pioneer ready to revolutionize manufacturing with green products. Obama’s stimulus would open up the market for its goods. And Serious was intent on showing profits, sustainability and social responsibility were compatible by keeping the unionized workforce in place.

Serious was one of many companies that hitched its wagon to Obama’s plans to green old markets and catalyze new ones. Despite shifting business models, Serious flailed along with the green economy. Now, Serious is no Solyndra, the solar-panel manufacturer that defaulted on a $535 million taxpayer-backed loan. The Republicans successfully saddled Obama with Solyndra’s bankruptcy, turning it into “a case study of what can go wrong when a rigid government bureaucracy tries to play venture capitalist and jump-start a nascent, fast-changing market,” as he Washington Post called it. Serious shows the private sector can be just as wrong. Ten venture capital firms poured more than $140 million into Serious and have little to show for it.

But rising out of the ashes are the Republic workers. They’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase machine tools and lease factory space to open the New Era Windows Cooperative. Modeling themselves on cooperatives in Argentina’s recovered factory movement and Spain’s Mondragon, the New Era workers will collectively decide how to manage the business, what products to manufacture and what to do with the profits. While they make green windows, they hope to inspire other self-managed enterprises across the United States and could provide an alternative to free-market capitalism.

Ironically, if New Era succeeds, it will do so with zero government support. One might have expected both presidential candidates to heap praise on the cooperative. Romney could have touted the workers’ entrepreneurial initiative, while Obama could have pointed to it as a new model for domestic green manufacturing.

In terms of Serious and Solyndra, their breakdowns are par for the course. The clean-tech sector is littered with so many casualties it looks like a Civil War battlefield. It is an unavoidable part of the process, and the Obama administration made a big mistake in shrinking away from failures.

Josh Whitford, a professor of sociology at Columbia University who studies industrial policy, says, “Novel technologies are areas in which the rewards are very uncertain and where a lot of things will not pan out. Venture capitalists deal with this by funding lots and lots of companies in the hopes of hitting a winner. They expect a lot of their investments to fail. In fact, if none failed, they’d think they were too far from the ‘possibilities frontier.’”

Government’s goal, says Whitford, “is not to hit a big financial winner, but to promote policies judged to be socially beneficial. He explains, “In the case of industrial policy, the purpose is often to push a technological direction,” such as cutting-edge clean energy that benefits society by curbing greenhouse gasses. Government is up against the same constraints as venture capitalists, however. Whitford says it does not know which projects will succeed. “So, government should, like venture capitalists, be spreading resources around and betting on multiple horses in the hopes that some do win. If the government has no failures, it’s being too conservative.”

Windows of Opportunity

The story of Serious and the Republic workers begins in 2007. Serious Material was planning to market EcoRock, which it touted as requiring only 10 percent of the energy used to make standard drywall. It raised $50 million to build factories in the United States that could crank out 400 million square feet of EcoRock a year. It’s the type of project that excites wonks: Serious Materials would reinvent the archaic drywall industry, which spews out more than 20 billion pounds of carbon dioxide annually, with a stateside 100-kilowatt solar-power plant that would create hundreds of good-paying manufacturing jobs while eliminating nearly all greenhouse gas emissions.

To make the product viable, Serious was counting on Obama enacting a cap-and-refund carbon tax. As small-batch production of EcoRock costs nearly twice as much as regular gypsum drywall, it needed a carbon tax to entice contractors to use it. But the carbon-tax bill died in Congress, so EcoRock was doomed to the green-building niche. This added to Serious’ woes because it jumped into the building market just as the economy collapsed in 2008. Furthermore, EcoRock may be great for the environment, but not for the bottom line. As one report noted, it “does not insulate or curb power consumption in buildings.” In 2010, CEO Kevin Surace explained to Greentech media that Serious “never pulled the trigger” on constructing a full-scale factory because “Gypsum (drywall) plants are 75 vacant.”

“New construction is down 80 percent from the peak,” said Surace.

Flush with cash to build factories, Serious Materials pivoted to plan B: manufacture windows that slash heating and cooling by 40 percent. Even though home building was in the dumps, Serious calculated that it would “ramp up production [in 2009] by tenfold” because of anticipated demand. It had been in the windows business for a few years, and in 2008, it purchased Alpen Windows in Colorado. In 2009, it added the defunct Kensington Windows factory in Pennsylvania, where 150 workers had been booted out of work the previous year.

The real prize was the Republic factory. The workers there won $1.75 million in wages and benefits after a six-day-long sit-down strike. They were unemployed, however, joining more than 600,000 workers who lost their jobs in December 2008. With 4,000 news articles published on their fight, Serious was paying attention. At Serious’ headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, CEO Suracewatched the drama unfold and pondered riding to the rescue of the beleaguered facility.

An engineer and entrepreneur, Surace first considered the downside. He told Inc. magazine: ”The workers were up in arms. The equipment had been pillaged. The computers were destroyed. The customers didn’t want to buy. The records weren’t accurate. There was no management team. No one but the craziest person on earth would take over that.”

At Serious Materials’ holiday party that December, co-founder Marc Porat pushed Surace to consider the upside: “Think what can happen! We’re creating green-collar jobs. We’re creating an energy-efficient product. We’re hitting climate change. And it’s Chicago!”

“It will come to the White House’s attention,” said Porat. “It’s a perfect expression of their policy.” According to a detailed account in Inc., which named Surace “Entrepreneur of the Year” for 2009, the board of Serious Materials approved the acquisition of the idle factory based on “owning one of the largest window-glass facilities in the country, with a seasoned work force and a fabulous location.”

Not lost on anyone was the “public relations potential” of aligning with the Obama administration’s plan for a green-collar economy. The stimulus included $5 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. Much of this was for tax credits for energy-efficient retrofits that included windows. Serious was eager to cash in because its windows exceeded Energy Star ratings by up to 400 percent.

Surace became a rock star in the clean tech field, hit the TED circuit and shared stages with politicians. He gave Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) a tour of Serious Energy’s Boulder facility, wielded scissors with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell for a “green ribbon-cutting ceremony” at the Kensington plant, and basked in the limelight with Joe Biden as the vice president heaped praise on the re-opened Chicago factory. Surace was on a mission to save the world from climate change with green windows and drywall that would generate serious greenbacks for Serious Materials’ investors.

Despite the grim economy, Serious hauled in $60 million from investors in 2009, one of the largest venture capital deals of the year, and its backers were salivating. In a newsletter from 2009, the Chicago-based Mesirow Financial, which pumped $15 million into Serious that year, wrote glowingly of how its “private equity investors” would benefit because $10.5 billion of stimulus money was in the pipeline “for home weatherization and federal building efficiency retrofits.”

Everything was going according to plan. As Serious collected factories, it boasted of “creating green collar jobs in plants across the country including … the President’s home town of Chicago,” wrote an Inc. editor. Inc. noted: “The Republic rescue has paid off handsomely in publicity … Aspiring vendors, curious dealers, and assorted well-wishers began stopping by the plant after its reopening. These days, salespeople rarely need to introduce Serious Materials to their prospects; the White House has already done that for them.” Revenue in 2009 reportedly increased by 50 percent; the company was employing more than 300 people, and in March 2010, Serious landed a coveted contract to upgrade the Empire State Building’s 6,514 windows.

Best-Laid Plans

Cracks were appearing in the façade, however. By the end of 2009, only 20 workers had been hired back at the old Republic plant, and Serious was spending $100,000 a week to keep the space open, which could hold 600 workers. Surace admitted the company had erred in thinking “we’d be hot and heavy into weatherization of thousands of homes in the Chicago area.”

Serious put its chips on weatherization, but the recession weakened its hand. The Department of Energy inspector general found that by December 2009, only 8 percent of the money had been spent “and few homes had actually been weatherized.” Because the $4.73 billion in the pipeline was divided into 58 spigots to cover every US state and territory, “State hiring freezes, problems with resolving significant local budget shortfalls, and state-wide planned furloughs delayed various aspects of the program.” On top of that, little money was being spent on windows like those built by Serious because weatherization also covered furnaces, insulation, water heaters, weather stripping, cooling systems and storm doors.

By the summer of 2010, Serious was back on the PowerPoint circuit, imploring funders for $56 million to become a player in the building management market. Its new model - the third in three years – was software “for monitoring and lowering energy consumption in commercial buildings.” Serious was acquiring more companies – software firms like Valence Energy and Agilewaves. It boasted of 60 customers in the wings and products that could deliver ”immediate energy savings of 10 to 15 percent with payback in one to two years.”

But Serious was trying to muscle in on the turf of heavyweights like Siemens, Honeywell and General Electric, so it was back to the drawing board. After changing its name, Serious Energy unveiled a new division and plan number four in November 2011. A spokesperson announced Serious Capital would finance energy efficiency retrofits of buildings for free: ”We install, at no cost to customers, energy conservation measures that will save energy,” they said, “and we become the agent for utility bill payments.” Serious Energy figured the revenue stream would allow it to pay the bills and lenders and leave enough for a tidy profit. For the third time, it was eyeing a government angle, committing to perform $100 million in retrofits as part of Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative.

The initiative is one of those so-called “public-private partnerships” that are economic quackery. The Better Building Initiative promises to cure every ill – “creating jobs, growing our industries, improving businesses’ bottom lines, reducing our energy bills and consumption, and preserving our planet for future generations” – with no pain in the form of taxpayer financing or altering business as usual. For Serious, the initiative made little difference. As Greentech Media pointed out, it was unclear how it was going to “get the backing to meet its stated goal of $2 billion in potential project financing.” Plus it would need to buy insurance as a hedge in case the savings did not materialize.

Once exalted as the poster child for exemplifying Obama’s vision of “green-collar jobs at the hands of a resurgence in American innovation,” Serious Energy shriveled into a new economy shell reminiscent of Enron, chucking aside manufacturing for software, finance and hedging. The venture capital taps were also running dry. Serious raised less than $20 million of its 2010 goal of $56 million, and less than $3 million of a $33 million round in 2011.

The free retrofit plan unraveled in weeks. In February 2012, Surace was canned, and Serious announced it was closing the Chicago factory. On February 23, it summoned the 38 remaining workers to “the offices of the notorious union-busting law firm Seyfarth and Shaw,” as Labor Notes put it. The workers were told they would get their 60 days pay under the law, but the factory would be cannibalized and the machines shipped to Serious’ plants in Pennsylvania and Colorado. Not given to taking things lying down, the workers sat down once more. Less than 12 hours later, they emerged victorious with a written agreement that the factory would operate for 90 days longer while Serious Energy looked for a buyer. As for Serious Energy, Porat says it is returning to its roots of producing soundproof drywall, a business he admits has very little to do with clean tech.

Working World

UE Local 1110 had no illusions that a white knight was in the wings, however. During a visit last May to the headquarters in Chicago, local President Armando Robles confided: “Nobody is going to buy the factory after two occupations. They don’t want troublemakers there.” Having shown themselves to be innovative risk-takers by winning two sit-down strikes that were technically illegal, the workers decided they would run the factory themselves. They joined forces with The Working World, which provides “investment capital and technical support for worker cooperatives,” and raised the money to buy the window-making equipment and establish the worker-run and -owned business.

The cooperative is still in the works. The big question is, can it blaze a path for labor to revive manufacturing? Small, worker-run cooperatives can’t replace an advanced industrial base, but they could democratize the US economy and employ millions in stable, living-wage jobs.

Networks of cooperatives could also provide a model to supplant the warmed-over Keynesianism beloved by liberals. Stimulating demand or creating public-works programs would still be effective today; Obama has done far too little of it. Trying to reshape the industrial base as happened under FDR (and that’s mainly because of World War II) is far more difficult because back then, US capital had limited options beyond the domestic market for consumers, factories and workers. That’s not the case in the globalized economy. The biggest US employer, Walmart, pays poverty-level wages to most of its 1.4 million workers. The most valuable corporation in the world, Apple, has only 13,000 US-based employees outside of its retail stores. And both source most of their goods from China.

The free-market solution is to subsidize corporations, a point upon which Romney and Obama agreed. For instance, states like Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi already gift $300 million or more to automakers opening plants they were planning to build. Imagine if instead of padding the profits of Fortune 500 companies, the public sector funded tens of thousands of worker-run cooperatives. Many would go bankrupt, but that’s the price of innovation. The upside would be successful worker-run cooperatives rooted in communities. Such enterprises would be unable to move operations to Mexico or Malaysia, while abuse of employees that is far too common here would be almost impossible in democratic workplaces.

A new economy demands new answers, not the failed free market or nostalgia for a past that no longer exists. The New Era Windows Cooperative might just provide some of those answers.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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