November 19, 2012 · 6:36 pm

Meet the New Obama, More Dangerous Than the Old Obama


The G C Advocate
November 17, 2012
By Arun Gupta

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.

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November 3, 2012 · 10:00 am

Freeport Is Not a Democrat vs. Republican Issue

By Arun Gupta, November 2, 2012, The Progressive

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, Illinois—The central business district in this city of 25,000 is lined with century-old brick buildings housing mom-and-pop shops – Edith’s Bridal, Christina’s Bakery, Mort’s Bar & Grill, Heinrich Accounting and Kunz Brothers Auto Parts. At Nine East Coffee, a block away from Classic Cinemas, the staff greets customers by name. The Stephenson County Farm Bureau office downtown attests to the thousands of acres of corn, wheat, soy, and hog and cattle farms that envelope this Northern plains city.

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.

 

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October 17, 2012 · 10:32 am

Romney Appeals to White Tribalism in Ohio

By Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett, The Progressive, October 15, 2012

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.

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October 12, 2012 · 10:00 am

Real Steel: Striking a Chord for the Lost American Dream

Wednesday, 10 October 2012 10:59

By Arun Gupta, Truthout | News Analysis

Caught between an unyielding corporation and crumbling solidarity, striking steelworkers in Ohio find history is both their ally and enemy as they ponder the uncertain future of organized labor.

Niles, Ohio – My childhood was made of steel.

In 1969 my family moved to Baltimore, where my father designed ships at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point Shipyard – what one historian notes “was once the largest steelworks in the world.”

It was a place of forbidding grandiosity: miles of clanking mills, blackened smokestacks and hellish furnaces, armies of grimy workers and supertankers in dry dock that blotted out the sky. I took pride in the millions of tons of steel forged annually, lived in a stable (if racist) working-class neighborhood near the plant and spent summers frolicking in the Olympic-size pool at the Sparrows Point Country Club.

Sparrows Point shut down its blast furnaces this past June, perhaps for the last time. A workforce that numbered 26,500 when we arrived in the United States had wasted away to 1,975 employees when its latest owner threw in the towel. The story is the same for much of the country. The golden era of industry is gone, but it weighs on workers who lament the passing of the American Dream, while anxiously confronting a future that seems to be one of perpetual decline.

The ripples of history surface in areas like Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, known as the “Ruhr Valley of America,” for the 28 mills that once lined the region. This year, 2012, is the 75th anniversary of the “Little Steel Strike” that turned the valley into a battlefield as steelmakers violently quashed unionization efforts. It’s also the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Steelworkers of America (USW) and the 35th anniversary of “Black Monday,” when more than 5,000 workers lost their jobs after the demise of Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Campbell Works in 1977.

It’s local lore that people would point to soot from steel mills dusting fresh snow and say, “That’s gold,” meaning that’s what paid the bills. That’s no more. The gigantic blast furnaces have long been demolished save for a few modern plants like V&M Star, which casts pipes for natural-gas fracking (and which was aided by $20 million in federal stimulus money). Steelmaking in the valley is otherwise limited to warehouse operations employing dozens of workers in jobs such as cutting metal parts.

One such facility is Phillips Manufacturing in the town of Niles, which straddles the Mahoning River. Workers there produce drywall and steel corner beads and studs used in building construction. Except Phillips is now using “replacement workers” to fill orders. On Sept. 13, 44 members of USW Local 4564-02 shut off their machines before noon. Instead of breaking for lunch, they walked out and struck over wage, benefits and seniority issues.

The dispute pits an emboldened corporation extracting ever-greater concessions from an ever shrinking-union. More significant, the history that shaped this area is in play as both sides try to turn it to their advantage. Organized labor often accepted racism in organizing, which enabled industrialists to divide workers along the color line.

In the Mahoning Valley, steel mill owners would employ blacks to cross the picket line. Today, Phillips is doing the same by bringing in African-American strikebreakers. As for the workers, who proclaim they are born and bred union, they have their own advantage: The city of Niles has dusted off a 1960s-era anti-scab law and invoked it against Phillips.

The stakes are higher for the steelworkers than the company. They must win this fight not only to retain decent-paying jobs with benefits, but to keep the local alive – one of the few institutions that can nurture a new generation of unionists.

Workers say since Phillips purchased the facility 14 years ago it has demanded concessions in every contract. David Hanshaw, a self-described “passionate Italian” and 30-year employee at the facility, is still angry about the givebacks Phillips extracted in 1998. “They took away our pensions, a weeks’ vacation and we had a pay freeze for five years.”

The current contract expired Aug. 9, and steelworkers walked out after management refused to budge on its demands despite 15 negotiating sessions. Local 4564-02 Vice President Tony Beltz says Phillips wants to hike workers’ payment for the family health care plan by 21 percent to nearly $3,900 a year. The company also wants workers to pay for short-term disability insurance and it wants to terminate seniority rights for those who are out for more than six months, a serious concern for a workforce mainly in their 50′s and 60′s.

Beltz explains during contract talks management tried to split the union by offering skilled workers more pay while cutting wages for production workers. He says that gambit didn’t work because “we’re united.”

When the union asked for a wage increase to lighten the burden, the company offered some production workers 3 cents an hour, or $62 annually. As for his situation, the 55-year-old Beltz says, “They want me to take a pay cut of 12 cents an hour, despite the fact I make only $15.71 an hour after 32 years at the plant. It’s insulting.”

The steelworkers understand that swirling around the wage and benefits dispute are the punishing currents of history. Hanshaw thunders that the strike “is about America. I want it back. We’re sinking into a moral abyss.”

Beltz sees a generational divide hampering the labor movement. He comments that younger strikers have not been on the picket line as much as the older crew. “Half of these kids don’t know what a union is. They bitch about dues. But now they get it.”

One factor in why younger workers may be less fired-up is their paltry wages. Beltz says new hires start at $9.90 an hour, about what a Starbucks barista earns. Hanshaw explains that because of low wages, “I’ve got two guys who ride bicycles to work. One guy can’t even come out to the picket line because he can’t afford gas.”

Paul Dierkes, who at age 56 has put in 27 years at the plant, says “We just want to do our job, get a paycheck and spend time with our family.”

But that’s not possible because strikers are caught between an unyielding company and weakening solidarity. Dierkes says on Oct. 8, during the fourth week of the strike, the company brought in four vans full of scabs. “These kids are in a rude awakening if they think things are going to get better. We told them, ‘Please don’t cross the picket line.’ But they don’t listen. If these kids keep crossing the picket line, they’re gonna eventually pay them nothing. You gotta keep the union alive and make sure people get paid fair.”

Some wonder if that’s the company’s goal – to smash the union. Mary Smith, a stout African-American who hails from Tennessee, has worked at the Niles plant for 32 years. Inside the warehouse the size of three football fields, she drives a tow motor, hauling doughnut-shaped coils of steel weighing up to 18,000 pounds, which are cut into building materials.

Smith says, “I think they’re trying to break the union. This strike is more negative than previous ones. They are playing hardball. They’re taking scabs right over us.” Smith says, “The scabs made sexually derogatory remarks to me, ‘Pull your pants down. I want to see your cookie.’ I tell them, if your mother were out here would you say the same thing?”

Smith is not one to back down, however. She arrives at Phillips at 4:30 a.m. every workday and stays up to 15 hours on the picket line. When asked about her devotion to the strike, Smith, a 62-year-old grandmother, says, “I’m fighting for my job and everyone’s job.”

Smith is referring to union jobs, not the category of “jobs” that has become an incantation. In the media, to speak of jobs is to invoke a mystical force that salves all social ills, but the ultimate source of which is unknown.

If there is a single reason why Obama is likely to be re-elected, it’s jobs. Specifically it’s because the bailout his administration enacted saved Ohio’s auto industry. The steel industry is too decimated to bail out, but the USW claims the auto rescue saved the jobs of 350,000 of its members – from glass workers who construct windshields to rubber workers who make car tires to chemical workers who manufacture paint brighteners.

It’s hard to deny that the bailout worked. By June 2009 the unemployment rate in the region that includes Niles had shot up to 13.5 percent. In August, it touched 7.9 percent, below the national average.

But the reason why Obama has not clinched the race is due to widespread anxiety among workers. The bailout saved thousands of union jobs in Ohio at the cost of forcing wages down, which impacts all workers. Average wages in Northeastern Ohio have dropped by nearly 9 percent since 2010. For many college graduates, a good job is working in a call center. One auto worker says for high-school graduates who can’t land a spot on the production line, Walmart is a good option.

While these jobs are non-unionized, workers say they are treated better because of the spillover effect of organized labor. Local 4564-02 President Bill Irons stopped by the picket line one day with a crock pot of barbeque pork. A mountain of a man, Irons’ bolt-like fingers are riven with cracks, as if the skin is straining to contain flesh and bone. Irons argues, “Unions keep companies honest. All the non-union guys benefit from safety improvements and higher wages that unions win.”

Yet his local is in critical condition. Today it has 135 members at six plants. Twenty years ago, says Irons, the local had 800 members. A generation before that, it probably numbered in the thousands.

For companies like Phillips, and corporate America in general, even a handful of unionized workers is too many. After I finished talking with Irons, strikers pointed out that Phillips’ president and CEO George Kubat was exiting the plant. I caught up with him at the gate and inquired about the status of negotiations.

Looking tense, Kubat said it was in the hands of a “federal negotiator.” I asked three times if he foresaw the situation being settled anytime soon. After deflecting my question twice – “Email me” – he shook his head no.(I emailed Kubat as he requested, but received no response to multiple inquiries.)

Phillips is a privately held company based in Omaha. Workers fear it will shift production to its non-union facility there. Phillips doesn’t publicize its vitals, but it seems to be thriving. Tony Beltz says, “There’s been an increase in business.” He says after four years with “zero overtime,” workers regularly logged 60-hour work-weeks this year. Further evidence of the company’s good health was Phillips’ announcement in June that it had acquired the assets of Steel Drum Industries in Tampa, allowing it to grow its business in the Southeast.

When I mentioned to workers that Kubat did not seem inclined to settle the strike, no one was surprised, given management’s intransigence during negotiations. Bob, a 67-year-old lathe operator, became distraught when talking about the strike. “It’s disheartening as hell to be treated like this. They’re telling the guys in there, ‘We’re going to starve them out.’”

Even though strike-breaking has been all but legalized, the steelworkers have home-field advantage. Union sentiment is still strong in Niles. Phillips workers mention their families have been union for generations and recall as children their fathers going out on strike. People driving by regularly honk and wave at the strikers. Two men in a pickup truck leaned on the horn and yelled, “Local 396, plumbers and pipefitters. Yeah, go boys!” The pro-union mood has also been boosted by a referendum last year that resoundingly repealed an Ohio law eliminating collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers.

The strikers’ ace in the hole is the anti-scab law. According to local reports, on Sept. 28 the Niles city prosecutor “filed a criminal complaint against Phillips Manufacturing for breaking a city ordinance that prohibits the hiring of professional strike-breakers in place of employees who are involved in a labor dispute.” Apparently the prosecutor did not know about the 1960s-era law. Niles City Councilman Dan Wilkerson, who has been a regular at the strike, drew the city’s attention to it. Violating the law carries a minimum fine of $500 and a jail term of up to six months.

If unionism is part of Niles’ legacy, then so is racism. And Phillips appears to be counting on it. At the end of one work day a van with half a dozen men, all of whom appeared to be African-American, pulled out of the lot as strikers yelled “scab” and “don’t come back.” Paul Dierkes says that the day four vanloads of strike-breakers came into Phillips, all but a couple looked African-American.

Thomas Sabatini, a professor of US History at Youngstown State University, says Niles used to be a “sundown town,” which was the norm in the North. Historian James Loewen writes that many sundown towns “formerly sported at their corporate limits signs that usually read, ‘Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in ____.’”

The racial divide pains Mary Smith. The only African-American in the workforce, she says, “Phillips hasn’t hired any in the last seven or eight years. So to see them bring these African-Americans in there in the vans makes me angry.” Not that she has sympathy for the scabs. Smith says, “They can’t get jobs by doing the right thing, only by doing the wrong thing. I shouldn’t be saying this but they all look like thugs. They rub their fingers at us, ‘We’re taking your money.’ They’re cold-hearted in there, both the owners and the scabs.”

A hearing on the anti-scab law is set for Oct. 11. In the meantime workers spend their days sitting under canopy tents across the street from the main gate because an injunction has limited them to five pickets per entrance. They talk about the difficulty of staying out on strike because they live from one paycheck to the next. Smith says, “I’ve had to sacrifice a lot over the years, missing vacations with my children and grandchildren because I had to be at work.”

Smith says she was planning to retire next year, but is unsure now because the strike might drag on. For Bob, enjoying his golden years is not an option. “I can’t afford to retire because of my wife’s medical care,” he says. “Some of her arthritis prescriptions cost nearly $1,000 to refill.”

One day they will all be retired. The question is who will replace them: a new generation of strike-breakers, or a new generation of organized labor? One that understands the fight is not only for jobs with living wages, but to bridge the racial and economic divides affecting all workers.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

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October 3, 2012 · 5:36 pm

We are back on the road for our fourth cross-country reporting tour!

After celebrating the first anniversary of the Occupy movement in New York City, we are back on the road for our fourth cross-country Occupy tour!

It’s been exactly one year since we went on the road.  Visiting the Occupy movement while it was blossoming around the country last fall was like traveling from peak to peak.  Now we are picking our way through the valleys, in the shadow of the elections.

But the stories of the 99% are more important ever. The grave conditions that drove thousands of Americans from every walk of life into the streets this past year will persist as political leaders have shown no interest in addressing the roots of the economic crisis.

The mainstream media doesn’t care.  Independent media doesn’t have the funding.  We are some of the few independent journalists out there who are finding the issues that concern Americans from all walks of life and telling them to millions in outlets such as Truthout, The Progressive, The Guardian, The Nation, Alternet, Salon and Z.

We are also working on a book and film about the movement this winter, and are continuing to help other independent journalists and filmmakers by assisting a dozen occupied newspapers around the country and promoting the work of artists through events such as Occupy the Film Festival.

But we can’t do it without your help.  We are not backed by corporate dollars. In order to continue our work, we are seeking to raise $8,000 on our WePay site.  We are nearly halfway to our fundraising goal.  Won’t you help us with a contribution today?

The Occupy movement is delving deep into campaigns around student debt, financial regulation and getting money out of politics; immigrant rights and labor organizing; the building of worker collectives and collective farms; and the socially destructive process of home foreclosures and the ecologically destructive practice of oil, coal and natural gas extraction. It is more important than ever that independent media tell the stories of the powerful currents reshaping America and how people across the country are actively building a more just, democratic and sustainable future from the bottom up against tremendous odds.

Please donate today at https://www.wepay.com/occupyusatoday.  Anything helps: $5 or $50, every penny goes to help us complete our work on the Occupy movement and the issues of the 99% this historic year.

We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

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September 25, 2012 · 10:00 am

Arun Gupta on Bill Moyers

September 19, 2012

Laura Flanders talks to Arun Gupta and Marina Sitrin about Occupy’s impact and future role in American life and politics at the first anniversary of the movement on Bill Moyers.com.

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September 18, 2012 · 10:45 am

Occupy Wall Street: How We Surprised Ourselves

By Arun Gupta, September 17, 2012, The Progressive

At the top of the list of what the Occupy movement accomplished is, “We surprised ourselves.”

By “we,” I mean anyone residing on the left. To be on the left is to be intimate with defeat. Sometimes defeat is heroic, as with the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes it’s betrayal, as with the fate of the Russian Revolution. Defeat can be bewildering, as in, “What happened to that moment of Feb. 15, 2003?” Often it’s just depressing, like the delirious 60s that gave way to the tortuous 80s.

Occupy, in contrast, was a rocket ship of giddiness for nearly two months. Liberals squirmed, reluctant to criticize or embrace it. Conservatives yelled from rocking chairs that the dirty hippies needed a job. Every police attack gave Occupy strength. A bewildered media tried to grasp how a leaderless movement could shake the halls of power.

It helped that there were no expectations for success. There were no pollsters tut-tutting that the 99% versus 1% was divisive. No professional organizers corralling the herd into a single message. No revolutionaries hectoring that only the scientific terms proletariat and bourgeoisie would do. No Democrats demanding that lofty aspirations be pulverized into middle-of-the-road mush.

Occupy rejected all the rules and injected its own style of class politics into the body politic. Much of the center clambered aboard the 99% train. They got the idea because they had been getting the shaft.

Soon it was Occupy everything – the banks, the homes, the hood, the workplace, universities, cinema, food, healthcare, gender, music, philosophy. Nothing, even abstractions, seemed out of our reach to recreate after checking centuries of capitalist baggage at the door. Iconic images and deeds piled up: Shamar Thomas facing down a phalanx of cops, armed with nothing but fatigues and lungs; a pepper-sprayed but defiant Dorli Rainey; the silhouette of occupiers triumphant at the shut-down Port of Oakland.

The small things made the biggest difference. Occupy changed how we felt. We were the motor of history, not just its victims. The mic check gave us a participatory society, not just one of spectacle. We could have communities where food, shelter and care were available to all comers. We had a platform to share individual grievances and hopes and find unity. The homeless had names and stories. Lost souls found a purpose. The dispossessed were abundant in human kindness and connections.

Now, we know how the story developed. As much as the police repression smashed occupations and the mainstream media returned to snarky indifference, the Occupy movement fell into bad habits. Occupy made us want to be better selves, but pettiness, paranoia and selfishness stewed beneath. Donated money and equipment was stolen. Fights broke out over control of Facebook and Twitter accounts. Shady outsiders set up a national convention unaccountable to the movement. One power-hungry individual tried to grab all the money flooding into the Occupied Wall Street Journal by seizing control of the Kickstarter campaign. One labor organizer in Los Angeles attempted but failed to hijack the entire movement there by setting up a rival occupation. Liberals succeeded in co-opting Occupy through their branded “99% movement.”

At this point, many wistfully recall the heady days of Occupy’s youth, while wrestling with the cynicism of a premature old age. We comfort ourselves with taxonomic analyses, naming every social movement that has evolved from Occupy: a changed national debate; a move-your-money campaign from banks to credit unions; a slew of new and old media projects; a robust home-foreclosure defense movement; a grassroots uprising against coal, natural gas and oil extraction; labor solidarity from coast to coast; a debt strike. Or we describe the anatomy of the movement: the slogan of “We are the 99%” that gave us a voice; the target of Wall Street that gave us a reason to be; the tactic of mic check that gave us a body; the strategy of occupation that gave us the people.

But none of this captures the heart and soul of Occupy. The sensation of surprising ourselves. That we could overcome juvenile bickering. That we could master history. That we could speak to, and not just of, the people. That we could let secret fantasies tumble from minds to mouths to a circle of people that breathed life into them and gave us a glimpse of a future we thought we would never see.

It would be easy to let acid disappointments etch away memories of dreams made real. But they were real if fleeting. And holding fast to the importance of that experience can propel us to new heights still.

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