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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

by Arun Gupta

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

It’s a given that elections are about stagecraft – the management of image and perception. Public policy plays a subservient role, crafted for electoral advantage. This maneuvering impelled Obama to suddenly adopt positions less than six months before the election that he had avoided for three years, such as “deferred action” for unauthorized immigrant youth, his flip-flop on gay marriage and the anti-offshoring “Bring Jobs Home Act.”

What’s not a given is the permanent electoral state. The day after Obama was re-elected, wags were joking about 2016 front runners and potential candidates like Sen. Marc Rubio were booking tickets to Iowa. The never-ending election cycle means the most the public can hope for is policies that are designed for solidifying partisan advantage might trickle down to help them.

Take immigration, which will be high on Obama’s second term-agenda, after he punted it during the first. Democrats are salivating at the thought of locking in Latinos for generations to come and Republicans are panicking after realizing their days are numbered as a party of angry white guys. So there will be action, but nothing as sweeping as Reagan’s 1986 immigration amnesty that legalized 2.9 million unauthorized immigrants. For one there are 12 million undocumented immigrants meaning the right could still stoke a racial backlash when the voting public is 72 percent white and African-Americans are as opposed to a “path for citizenship” as white Democrats. More important, big business wants an army of labor in the shadows. Legalizing all immigrants would bestow workplace rights now denied to them, make them fertile ground for union organizing and “raise the ‘wage floor’ for … the benefit of both immigrant and native-born workers,” according to the Center for American Progress. Obama will likely use the bureaucratic healthcare reform as a model, opting for a tightly regulated “guest worker” program combined with a narrow path to citizenship along the lines of the Dream Act.

But there is more to policy than stagecraft. There is the stage on which elections, the theater of the absurd, are acted out. That stage is neoliberalism, but it cannot be named. While the public gets a two-year-long and $6 billion song and dance, the real policy happens after the show ends. Think about what the 2012 election will be remembered for. It won’t be serious debates about poverty or unemployment or Wall Street regulation, but Big Bird,“binders full of women” and medieval comments on rape.

Yet following the election attention turned to the crisis of the “fiscal cliff,” while it was studiously ignored during the incessant campaign coverage. It’s a phony crisis, however. The battle now over the future of social welfare is the legacy of Obama’s first term.

One caveat, policy is deliberately complicated so as to hide the true agenda. Healthcare reform was not designed to provide universal coverage or end medical bankruptcies. The real purpose is to ensure new lines of revenue for insurance, drug and medical corporations in the form of millions of captive patients, which is why the healthcare industry backed it. The same is true for the looming fiscal cliff (known as sequestration). It’s hard to understand because the real agenda – Obama’s agenda since 2008 – is to chop up Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare the way Bill Clinton gutted welfare. Let me explain.

Obama’s first public comments after his re-election were about the fiscal cliff created by the Budget Control Act that he rubber-stamped in July 2011. As president, Obama has been in the head of Washington’s austerity class. On the eve of his January 2009 inauguration, Obama called for entitlement reform, meaning cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Then three weeks into his first term he supported a deficit-reduction commission. In his 2010 State of the Union Address he backed a three-year freeze spending freeze mainly on social spending. During his 2008 campaign and afterwards he surrounded himself with advisers hawking economic quackery.

The budget deal from the summer of 2011 mandates $900 billion in “non-defense discretionary spending” cuts. This is wonk for social programs, which will shrivel to 1962 levels of the GDP by 2021. Thus, Obama has completed rolling back the Great Society – a process started under Reagan and accelerated under Clinton. The cuts will deepen if there is no deal by the end of the year. Then the economy will head over the fiscal cliff in 2013 and $700 billion in annual tax increases and cuts will kick in.

The fiscal cliff will be used as excuse to try to roll back the New Deal.

This is how it will work. The cliff can be avoided by bringing in more revenue. In post-victory remarks on Nov. 9, Obama called for $4 trillion in “balanced” deficit reduction in which the wealthy share the pain with “students and seniors and middle-class families.” What he didn’t say is that $3 trillion of that amount is slated for spending cuts – and that the only way to achieve that order of cuts with military spending off limits is to carve up Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

But even on his signature campaign plank – raising taxes on the wealthy by a measly 4.6 percent – Obama is backtracking. True to form of surrendering when he holds the high ground, Obama said the next day in his weekly address, “we have to combine spending cuts with revenue.” Revenue is the Republican position. They are steadfast in demanding the wealthy be spared piddling tax increases but are willing to consider closing “loopholes” such as mortgage interest payments and charitable deductions. In exchange, says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), the GOP demands “entitlement reform” because “that’s where the big money is at.”

As Jon Stewart would say, this rolled straight off “Bullshit Mountain.” Economists like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman have demolished every rationale for deficit reduction under present circumstances: interest rates are so low, below the rate of inflation, that bondholders are paying the U.S. to hold their money; reducing the deficit would strangle growth; the best way to reduce the deficit is through growth and inflation; and in any case the plan to hack away $4 trillion in a decade is not going to reduce the national debt meaningfully.

Even more noxious is Obama’s talk of shared sacrifice, which could be granny-starver Paul Ryan’s position. Apparently it needs to be reiterated that Wall Street caused the crash in 2008. The banks profited off the criminal subprime bubble. They profited off $4.8 trillion in government bailouts for the financial industry. Now as “too bigger to fail” banks, they profit off implied guarantees. But to pay for the multi-trillion-dollar meltdown, the elderly will have to sacrifice Social Security, the poor healthcare and students education.

A little history is in order. Obama ran in 2008 on repealing the Bush tax cuts. But he betrayed 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. On Jan. 16, 2009, five days before his inauguration, he told the Washington Post, that he was prepared to “spend some political capital” on the“very difficult choices” of cutting entitlements.

Obama was following the script penned by Larry Summers, his chief economic adviser during his first campaign and the Clinton-era architect of the financial bubble that exploded four years ago. In the Financial Times in September 2008, Summers presented the Rosetta Stone for Obama’s presidency. The Financial Times is where the capitalist class speaks openly to each other. The piece was published two weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, which set off the financial Pearl Harbor that threatened the global economy.

It is a classic example of the “Shock Doctrine”: using the crisis to push for a wholesale economic restructuring. Summers laid out the argument for a fiscal stimulus. But he took pains to mention, “We still must address issues of entitlements and fiscal sustainability.” To that he added no “new entitlement programs or exploding tax measures,” which includes “healthcare restructuring,” but no single payer or universal healthcare. Summers’ silence was just as notable. He sidestepped the issues of financial re-regulation, giving labor more room to organize and the home mortgage foreclosure crisis that remains the black heart of the rotting economy.

Summers saw that the meltdown was a chance to drive a stake through the welfare state. The corporate media plays a supporting role by falsely portraying Social Security as going bankrupt, which Martha Raddatz claimed to be the case during the vice presidential debate, when that is by definition impossible in a pay-as-you-go system. In fact, Social Security is solvent through 2033, and it can be strengthened at any time simply by lifting the payroll tax cap. Medicare is likewise solvent through 2024 at which point the payroll tax will cover 87 percent of projected costs. But Obama – cheered on by liberals – has placed a time bomb in Social Security with his payroll tax cut, which could result in a shortfall in barely a decade.

Hacking with these non-discretionary programs creates the precedent to divert the revenue streams to pay off the debt accumulated by Wall Street.

From a political perspective many liberals are as mesmerized by the dog-and-pony show as Tea Partiers. Both inhabit separate but similar reality-free bubbles. Liberals can’t reconcile their devotion to Obama the messianic liberal with his record of cutting social welfare, coddling investment banks, waging seven separate wars, ordering the extrajudicial assassination of U.S. citizens, attacking teachers unions, letting the foreclosure crisis fester and sabotaging climate change accords.

Glenn Greenwald calls it the “the standard pattern of self-disempowerment used by American liberals to render themselves impotent and powerless in Washington.” He detailed a six-step process of how liberals capitulate based on pragmatism, threats and “Extremely Important Election coming.”

Such is the state of American politics in which the work of dismantling the welfare state and reinforcing the warfare state takes place before our eyes but our minds are so absorbed by the spectacle of the permanent election that we are unable to see the stage beneath.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC’s Politics Nation, led a rally in support of Sensata workers in Freeport, Illinois on Saturday, October 20, 2012. Standing next to him is 16-year-old Karri Penniston, who was arrested in October protesting the offshoring of the Sensata factory to China by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, which will cost 170 workers their jobs, including Penniston’s mother.

Freeport’s small-town feel is not all by choice. Its timelessness stems from being a backwater in the global economy. Locals say more than 90 commercial buildings and many more houses lie abandoned. An avenue downtown has been closed since September as the city struggles to find $100,000 to repair a crumbling bridge. Hip retailers have forsaken the town, and the chains sprinkled on the edges, Dollar General, Payless Shoes, McDonald’s and Walmart, specialize in squeezing profit from threadbare households. With a shrinking population and an unemployment rate near 12 percent, Freeport’s economy is so depressed that discount retailer Kmart plans to close its doors in January 2013 after 20 years in the town, throwing 45 employees out of work.

Right before Kmart goes dark Sensata Technologies will finish moving its production line from Freeport to China, leaving 170 more workers without jobs. The offshoring of the factory, which makes electronic sensors and controls for automobiles, would not raise eyebrows. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, millions of U.S. jobs have fled to countries with low wages and lax regulatory environments.

Sensata is different, however. It’s become an election lightning rod because it was created in 2006 by Bain Capital, the company founded by the GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In October 2010 workers learned their factory and three others owned by Honeywell had been sold to Sensata. Newspapers quoted assurances from Honeywell that “all of the affected employees in Freeport … will be offered jobs with Sensata when the deal is closed.”

Cheryl Randecker, who’s worked at the Honeywell plant for 33 years, says in January 2011 the workers were ushered into a room where “a big spread of food” was laid out. Within three minutes, she says, “We were told, ‘Welcome to Sensata. We’re closing the plant and outsourcing to Malaysia, Mexico and China.’ ” The workers were resigned to getting the short end of the stick until a chance encounter in June with Chicago-based labor organizers galvanized them to make a stand against shipping jobs overseas.

After local protests and dogging Romney at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, workers built the “Bainport” encampment on the Stephenson County Fairgrounds across from Plant. No. 4 on Sept. 12 and have occupied it for more than 50 days. Liberals and labor have flocked to the camp, which has featured rallies and protests led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, and hosted live broadcasts by Democracy Now! and “The Ed Show.”

While grateful for the support, the Sensata workers and unions backing them are at a loss for how to stop offshoring that leaves part-time, low-wage jobs in its wake. They want American workers to “wake up,” but pin their hopes on the Democrats who encourage job flight abroad and McJobs at home as much as the Republicans. A few unions have taken up the challenge of organizing the Walmart economy, but the projects are in their infancy. So the Sensata workers and unions have retreated to a fortress of conservatism – mourning the lost “American Dream” appealing to national interest, and excoriating “Communist China.”

“IT’S DEMEANING”

The Bainport protesters have two goals. Tom Gaulrapp, a 33-year-long employee at the plant, says at first they “hoped for a miracle that we would get our jobs saved. Now we’re trying to be an example. Maybe some other businesses planning to outsource will take a look and say we don’t want that publicity.”

The second goal is to get their full severance, which was cut from one year to six months for many longtime employees two years ago.

Adding insult to injury, workers were told they had to train their replacements if they wanted any severance. Dot Turner, who’s worked at the plant since 1969, says “it’s demeaning” to train the workers from other countries. “Normally a plant can just move an operation and train them over there. It tells you the jobs are highly skilled.” She says until the protests began, “They used to have 40 to 50 workers from Mexico and China at one time.” Now they’re all gone.

With cameras trained on their camp, the protesters also want to ignite a bigger movement. On a crisp Saturday afternoon, Turner told a rally of a few hundred people, “If we did this all over the country we could stop … the outsourcing to Communist China. We’re fighting the rich. The wealthy are trying to stamp out the middle class.”

Their defiance is matched by fear. Worry clouds Randecker’s face as she says, “I don’t know what the future holds. It’s lose-lose around here. There aren’t opportunities to make this kind of money.” A single mother, Randecker says her 20-year-old daughter moved back home from an out-of-state college to save money and now struggles as she works work part time and continues her nursing studies full time at a community college. Randecker says a friend started at Kmart the same week the store announced its closing.

Gaulrapp asks, “Who’s going to hire me?” Turner sums it up bluntly, “Most of the employees have concluded they’re going to be without jobs in a town without jobs.”

They’re aging workers in a dilapidated city that begins each day a little poorer and a little less relevant to the markets. Randecker, Gaulrapp and Turner decry greed, a community left devastated, and the lost ideal of secure jobs in exchange for hard work and loyalty. They pine for a time when products were “made in America,” manufacturing jobs were plentiful, and paychecks could support a family and their dreams.

Reflecting on 43 years of work at the factory, Turner says, “You know it’s got to be a nice place to work. The pay is good. My husband and I put three children through college. All three have master’s degrees.” When Turner started work there as a newly married 18 year old, she says, “I thought I died and went to heaven the conditions were so nice.” She had left a job at Structo, a long-gone local manufacturer of toys and barbecue supplies. Decades later Turner still winces at the memory of hoisting grills to overhead hooks all day. At Honeywell, Turner says, “You could take bathroom breaks, smoking breaks, as long as you made your productivity.”

“WE BUILT IT BETTER”

The Sensata workers’ perspective is echoed by workers from as far away as Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin who’ve made the pilgrimage to Bainport. On a Friday night, as Ed Schultz prepared to broadcast, there were machinists, teamsters, autoworkers, electricians, government employees, aerospace workers and hundreds of steelworkers, who unsuccessfully tried to organize Sensata decades ago.

Jeff Scanlan, an organizer with the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, says, “I’ve watched the steady decline of manufacturing in this area for the last 30 years. We built it better over here.” The 55-year-old Scanlan adds, “I had a good career in the trades. I was able to send my two girls to college. But I’m scared to death they’re going to do worse than I did.”

Scanlan and others rattle off manufacturers that once thrived in Freeport: Structo, Burgess Battery, and the W.T. Rawleigh Company, which sold household and nutritional products, are gone. Honeywell, Newell Rubbermaid and Kelly Tire (now Titan Tire), remain but factories have been padlocked shut and workforces have been chopped by 50 percent or more.

As for how to bring back good-paying jobs, Scanlan says, “Put tariffs on everything coming in from overseas. … We used to manufacture it, now we just install it.” When asked what about slapping tariffs on the thousands of goods found on Walmart shelves, he reiterates, “Everything.”

Just as Freeport exemplifies a conservative ideal, so does organized labor at Bainport. They accept the language of the market, returning value, increasing productivity, keeping labor flexible, prizing the home-owning nuclear family as the social building block. They proclaim, “The American worker can work as hard as anyone.” In return they only ask for stable jobs that pay “fair wages.” Few oppose, much less question, the dominance of corporations.

The darker times seem, the harder labor clings to the fading memory of the social compact, oblivious to the fact that Wall Street’s agenda transcends party labels. When I mention Clinton bulldozed Congress to ratify NAFTA, the usual reply is, “He now admits it was a mistake.” So what about Obama pushing the Trans Pacific Partnership, described as NAFTA on steroids? Silence. Though Jeff Scanlan confides, “It’s tough out there. I don’t have the answers.”

PARTISAN FOG

Solidarity does cross borders at times. Randecker says Chinese engineers asked her about an anti-outsourcing sticker on her shirt. “We explained it to them. We said it’s not your fault. It’s our government, your government and the corporations’ fault.” But with few opportunities to build international linkages among workers, the path of least resistance is appealing to patriotic capital and flirting with China-bashing, just as labor in the 1980s blamed its woes on Japan.

Programs like “The Ed Show” reinforce this tendency by obscuring the issue in partisan fog. Schultz described Freeport as “the belly of the beast of Mitt Romney`s economy.” The show was devoted to blaming Republicans for decades of job loss. The mantra was: The problem isn’t capitalism; it’s unpatriotic businessmen cutting deals with Communist Chinese. The entire political system isn’t responsible; it’s Republicans.

The solution is voting for Democrats, who tried to pass the “Bring the Jobs Home Act” that Senate Republicans killed last summer. What does this bill do? It gives a tax break to companies “relocating” jobs in the United States. Never mind that such tax breaks are ripe for abuse by corporations and there’s little evidence they create new jobs.

Turning Sensata into a partisan bludgeon will not help the workers. On Sensata’s website are two lists of plants: one from December 2008, and the other dated October 2012. The factories in Brazil, the Netherlands and Japan have vanished, but new ones have popped up in the Dominican Republic, Bulgaria and Shanghai. It’s a worldwide race to the bottom, and trying to plug the holes in the porous homeland with scraps of legislation is futile.

Take the Freeport plant. Randecker claims GM directed Sensata to shift the line manufacturing automotive sensors and controls to an experienced factory in Changzhou. Of course this is the same GM saved by the auto bailout that will likely win Obama re-election by putting Ohio in his column because of support from autoworkers whose jobs were saved. Then again, GM is doing what it has to in the kill-or-be-killed coliseum of the globalized car industry.

In the meantime lights will disappear by Nov. 7 and a few weeks later so will the last jobs. Labor organizers vow to nurture the storm brewing in the heartland. If it joins with others it could reshape the landscape, but if it gets sucked into Washington’s dead zone, then it will dissipate.

As for the workers, Randecker says, “There are a lot of people floating around here.” Freeport will be one step closer to a ghost town, haunted by one more specter of manufacturing past.

SIDNEY, OHIO—At the Shelby county fairgrounds in Sidney, Ohio, on Oct. 10, a jumbotron showed a bus approaching. Image became reality as Mitt Romney’s bulbous white chariot glided into the rally of thousands. It was an impressive entrance, for those who are impressed by RVs.

Bounding up to a podium, Romney was ready to proselytize. Thousands of faces turned toward him in the chilly evening air. Word was that Romney’s conquest of Obama in the first debate had infused his robotic demeanor with passion. It was hard to see much evidence of that.

To polite applause, Romney blandly declared, “That’s an Ohio welcome. Thank you guys.” He tried to rouse the audience with a counter to Obama campaign chants of “Four more years,” and the crowd hesitantly recited “Four more weeks,” their tone as flat as the surrounding farmland.

No matter. Romney dove into his stump speech. It was the gospel of lower taxes, freer trade, stronger military, and drill, baby, drill, and the audience was receptive. He hit all the buttons, “jobs,” “small business,” “compete,” and “opportunities.” Some specifics drew hearty cheers: “Get rid of the death tax,” “get that pipeline in from Canada,” and “our military must be second to none.”

The crowd responded favorably because the ideas are presented simply and clearly. People are hurting, and Romney says he’ll create more jobs and put more money in your pocket. His message is he won’t do it through welfare, like Obama, but by encouraging American values like entrepreneurialism, strength, and self-sufficiency.

Author Thomas Frank calls this brand of politics “Pity the Billionaire … a revival crusade preaching the old-time religion of the free market.” Frank argues the post-Obama resurgence of the right is not about racism or culture wars, but a populist politics of resentment. The right, he explains, has effectively defined the economic crisis as “a conspiracy of the big guys against the little,” and their solution is “to work even more energetically for the laissez-faire utopia.”

It’s not either-or as Frank contends, however. The right is invoking “producerism,” telling Americans bruised by the downturn that your pain is due to social factors, which are presented as coded racial categories.

Political Research Associates, a group of scholars who study right-wing movements, defines producerism as a call to “rally the virtuous ‘producing classes’ against evil ‘parasites’ at both the top and bottom of society.” The concept stretches back to the Andrew Jackson era, and weaves “together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class whites’ double-edged resentments.” Today, the parasites at the top are liberals, bureaucrats, bankers, and union “bosses”; the ones below are “welfare queens,” teachers, Muslims, and “illegal aliens.” They are all taking money from the hard-working Americans in the middle.

By historical standards Romney should be a Walter Mondale, a candidate who has lost even before the race begins. But he is effectively utilizing the politics of white resentment because of Obama’s dismal economic record. Tens of millions of low-wage workers feel their world is coming apart and they don’t know whom to blame. To them, change may mean lower wages, fewer hours, no health care, or a lost home. Romney plays on fear by linking it to Obama. In Sidney he said, “The president seems to be changing America in ways we don’t recognize,” which elicited chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

It’s not that the United States is inherently right wing, as many commentators claim. In Ohio, autoworkers say there is almost universal support among their co-workers for Obama because the auto bailout saved their jobs. But the bailout affected less than 1 percent of all U.S. jobs. In a recent poll the president has the support of only 35 percent of white working-class voters compared to Romney’s 48 percent.

The Romney rally was stunningly white. Among the estimated 9,000 people, it was hard to find more than a handful who looked to be Black, Latino or Asian. Attendees complained about welfare and high taxes destroying the country. Romney fed the resentment by claiming Obama was going to “raise the tax on savings,” “put in place a more expensive death tax,” and raise taxes on “a million” small businesses.

Democrats dismiss Romney as a snake-oil salesman. Joe Biden pointed out in the debate against Paul Ryan that the GOP counts billion-dollar hedge funds as small businesses. That’s true, but it doesn’t account for the popularity of their ideas. You see, the Republicans have turned small business into a catch-all group the way “working class” once served that function for the left.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the number of self-employed and employer firms – those with employees other than the owner – numbered 15.7 million in 2009. It’s likely that most are kitchen table, garage or laptop operations, but that’s beside the point. Republicans are courting millions of Americans whose livelihood depends on unswerving faith in the market.

Of the five people we talked to who told us their profession, four said they were a small-business owner. They did not seem to think of themselves as workers, but as frustrated entrepreneurs. When Romney says he’s going to help small business expand and stop Obama from increasing taxes on small businesses they think he’s speaking to them. They hope Romney will return the nation to its natural free-market state – free from regulations, bureaucrats and welfare – in which hard-working Americans like them achieve the success they deserve.

Why shouldn’t they believe this rhetoric? The Democrats mimic the right even when they control all of Washington. Obama says he will make business more competitive, cut taxes, sign trade deals, bomb the world into democracy and drill, frack and mine for energy. The Democrats’ dilemma is they are in the pocket of Wall Street, but need votes from groups that want the economic pie to be sliced more evenly. The result is liberals worship the same free-market god as conservatives, but have no conviction about it.

Absent an alternative, many voters veer right because they are reaching for the only lifeline they see. “Energy independence” and “a military second to none” are not just catch phrases. They provide millions of decent-paying jobs for the white working class.

This is not to say Romney voters always understand what they are voting for. Talking to some was like walking Through the Looking Glass, where backwards is forwards. Supporters repeatedly ascribed to Romney positions that are the exact opposite of what he advocates. Or they swallow lies about Obama that contradict their own experience. This suggests that racial identity often outweighs rational self-interest. Romney again made this a direct appeal, capping his speech by saying, “We’re taking back America.”

Ron Elmore, a small businessman who sells education supplies, preferred Romney because he would “get America going in the right direction again.” Elmore said he was struggling to get by and believed Romney would help his business by increasing education funding.

Two 16-year-olds, Jennifer Poling and Caitie Johnson, called themselves Romney backers. Johnson said, “There’s too many people today who depend on the government.” Poling said her mother is a “hardcore Obama” supporter because Romney is against women’s rights. Poling, though, shrugged off the right’s explicit anti-abortion politics, saying, “I don’t think they [Congress] will let Romney pass any laws against abortion.”

Jeff Doresch, who owns a small business detailing cars, was angry. “Obama is shutting us all down. He’s destroying us with tax increases.” When asked how his taxes had fared under Obama, Doresch responded, “They’ve stayed the same.”

Eighteen-year-old Andy Egbert and 16-year-old cousin Troy Kloeppel’s family owns 5,000 head of beef cattle. Egbert said, “Romney is going to make more jobs for the middle class instead of sending them overseas to China.” Kloeppel supported Romney because he was opposed to welfare fraud: “It’s a great system if it’s not abused.” Egbert chimed in, “A lot of people are lazy and are paid to do nothing.”

Jason, a local soybean farmer, said, “I like everything about Romney.” Why didn’t he like about Obama? “No Obamacare,” he said before quickly departing.

A businessman worth a couple hundred million dollars was telling a white audience that a president who is changing the country “in ways we don’t recognize” was stealing their money for job-killing programs like Obamacare. In a warm-up talk, Ohio Gov. John Kasich railed against “bureaucrats” and “California rules.”

The audience knew what they meant. “We” – white America – are besieged by liberals using our tax dollars on undeserving poor, dark people. This attitude is often expressed as a crude or violent desire to eliminate the other, such as with the spate of “chair lynchings.” At the rally one vendor hawked toilet paper with Obama’s face on each sheet. Another sold buttons that read, “Forget your cats and dogs, spay and neuter your liberal.” Jeff Doresch said, “With Obama, if there’s another four years, it will be like when Hitler was here.” A few hours west of Sidney, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, a highway billboard showed a picture of armed commandos with text that read, “The Navy SEALs removed one threat to America … The voters must remove the other.”

But it’s not just about aggression. In his one effective moment, Romney painted a vision of a beloved, exclusionist community. He told a story about an American flag that went up in the Challenger, which was recovered intact after the shuttle exploded and that “was like electricity … running through my arms” when he touched it. He turned the secular symbol into a holy one that embodies “who we are.” Romney said, “We’re a people given to great causes. We live our lives for things bigger than ourselves.” That “who,” was people in the military, “a single mom,” “a dad taking on multiple jobs.” Finally, he said, “We’re taking America back.”

There’s little doubt that Romney will double down on decades of bipartisan policies that benefit plutocrats. But that’s not what the audience in Sidney heard. Romney offered an easy-to-grasp explanation that spoke to their years of suffering, their unease with the present state of affairs and their anxiety about the future.

An election or two down the road the appeal to white tribalism may no longer work due to shifting demographics, but it could triumph this November.