Their [the Tea Party]stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term,” Freeman noted. “What underlines that? ‘Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we can to get this black man outta here.”‘ Piers Morgan
In case you missed the news, the recession ended in 2009. Some members on a panel of economists are now disputing that fact, to the surprise from politicians and mainstream media who long ago declared the greatest economic crisis of our time dead and gone, and are merely bickering over precisely when it dropped off the twig: Was it in mid-2009? Before then? After?
Of course, some people just refuse to get with the program, insisting that with a national unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent , the recession isn’t really over. And that for older people dependent on deep-sixed 401ks, it most likely will never be over. People who are unemployed and on food stamps don’t think it’s over. People underemployed and still looking for more work are not receiving any trickledown. And for those lucky enough to have been receiving unemployment insurance, who now find it running out and still can’t find a job, things don’t seem to have materially improved.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Washington,D.C.-based think tank with a liberal bent, recently released a report that offers a different slant on this subject:
The long-term unemployment rate — the percentage of people in the work force who have been out of work for over half a year and are still looking for a job — reached an unprecedented 4.3 percent of the labor force in March (see the chart). Yet Congress has allowed the Recovery Act measures that provide additional weeks of unemployment benefits and subsidized COBRA health insurance coverage for unemployed workers to lapse. Opponents’ arguments that these measures should not be extended unless they are paid for with cuts in other spending do not withstand scrutiny. Meanwhile, delay imposes unnecessary hardship on the long-term unemployed and weakens the economic recovery.
Although there are growing signs that the economy is in the early stages of a recovery, unemployment remains very high, and the economy is not running on all cylinders. Demand for goods and services remains far below what the economy is capable of producing, and the rate of job creation anticipated over the next several months will represent only a small start toward restoring the 8.2 million jobs lost since the recession started. (That loss essentially erased all of the jobs created between 2003 and 2007 in the economic recovery that followed the previous recession.)
Sam Smith over at prorev.com calls attention to another factor reported by Air Force Times:
Disturbing new statistics from the Labor Department show that one in three veterans under age 24 is unemployed – and that the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has jumped to 14.7 percent, half again as high as the national employment rate of 9.7 percent.The March unemployment rate of 30.2 percent for veterans aged 18 to 24 is a big jump from February’s figure of 21.7 percent, although it may be partly the result of a small sample used by the Labor Department in determining unemployment, said Justin Brown, a labor expert for Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Then, there’s this from Black Agenda Report:
Official labor statistics show Black unemployment rose to 16.5 percent in March, up from 15.8 percent the month before, while white joblessness remained steady at 8.8 percent. At least a score of major Black population centers now register official unemployment levels nearing 25 percent, comparable to the depths of the Great Depression – and it took World War Two to pull the economy out of that pit.
With 5.5 job seekers for every actual job opening, according to the latest data, employers can discriminate in favor of whites to their hearts’ content, while continuing to lower wages and working conditions. It’s easy to casually fire Black people and even easier not to hire them. We will soon find out if a statistical “point of no return” in unemployment levels exists, from which communities cannot recover absent extraordinary assistance by a caring government.
Posted in Congress, economy, financial crisis / recession, jobs / employment / unemployment, Obama Administration, poverty, race / racism
Tagged Air Force Times, Black Agenda Report, black unemployment, CBPP, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, COBRA, long term unemployed, Sam Smith, unemployment insurance, veterans unemployment
The London Independent has a story today about 85-year-old musician and Holocaust survivor Esther Bejarano, who is collaborating with a multiethnic hip-hop band with an anti-racist message. Their first album, Per La Vita, was released last year, and a documentary about the band is being shown in German schools.
Esther Bejarano says music helped to keep her alive as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. Now, 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp, she has teamed up with a German hip-hop band to get her anti-racism message to today’s youth.
“It’s a clash of everything: age, culture, style,” Ms Bejarano admitted in an interview to mark Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday. “But we all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against racism and discrimination.”…
The daughter of a Jewish cantor from Saarbrücken in western Germany, Ms Bejarano studied piano at home until the Nazis came to power and tore her family apart. She was deported to Auschwitz, where she became a member of the girls’ orchestra, playing the accordian every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived at the death camp.
“We played with tears in our eyes,” Ms Bejarano remembered. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.” Although she survived, her parents and sister, Ruth, were killed.
For 20 years, Ms Bejarano has played music from the past – Yiddish melodies, tunes from the ghetto and Jewish resistance songs – with her children Edna and Yoram in a Hamburg-based band called Coincidence.
About two years ago, Kutlu Yurtseven, a Turkish rapper from Microphone Mafia, asked her about a collaboration to combat the growing racism and anti-Semitism in Germany. The octogenarian thought hip-hop “was really a bit too loud” but saw it as a way to reach Germany’s youth.
“We want to keep the memories of the Holocaust alive, but at the same time look into the future and encourage young people to take a stand against new Nazis,” she said. “I know what racism can lead to and the members of Microphone Mafia are immigrants and have experienced their share of discrimination as well.”…
Their audiences range from teenage immigrants at urban youth centres to an older crowd that might be expected to favour a more classical approach. “They love it,” Ms Bejarano said. “Even some of the older guests climb on the chairs and dance.” She said it can be exhausting to perform with young people, but she chuckled: “I’ve educated the boys. We’ve lowered the volume and I told them to stop jumping around all the time.”
Mr Yurtseven said: “I asked Esther how she can make music after Auschwitz, and she said if they had taken the music from her, she would have died.”
Jimmy Carter yesterday plainly said what everyone ought to know already. As the BBC reported it:
Former US President Jimmy Carter says much of the vitriol against President Barack Obama’s health reforms and spending plans is “based on racism”.
Mr Carter told a public meeting there was “an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president”.
Any journalist who covered the Democratic presidential primary between Obama and Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania could not possibly have missed the naked hatred of the man based on the fact he is black. Comments such as “Oh I’ll vote for the nigger” were actually emanating from Obama supporters, so you can imagine what his opponents were saying. These same kind of comments were in the air in western Maryland during a recent town meeting on health care. The area has a history of being not just right wing territory, but Klan territory.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Younger people might have illusions of a “post-racial” society, but the unsilent generation knows racism when it sees it. America has not crossed any divide on this subject. The Republicans, especially the Republican South, reborn under Nixon, now based on young white men, can be easily ignited on this subject. This is a region of the nation where black men were not so long ago addressed as “boy”–and are still sometimes referred to that way when no one who would object is listening.
You can bet this is the kind of atmosphere Joe Wilson is familiar enough, and you can bet that’s part of what emboldened him to call the President of the United States a liar from the floor of the U.S. Congress. As I wrote on Mother Jones last week:
Joe Wilson isn’t just some mean-spirited buffoon. As a South Carolina legislator, he was one of only 7 state senators who fought to keep the confederate battle flag flying over the state capital. South Carolina, of course, was the first state to leave the Union after Lincoln was elected. Flying the confederate battle flag was a big deal in the south, which was once—and in some cases is still—inhabited by the KuKluxKlan and its successors…
The decision to fly the Confederate battle flag was made by an all-white legislature in 1962 as the civil rights movement was picking up steam. The bill passed in 2000 didn’t even remove the flag entirely—it called for a different version of flag to be flown in front of the state house instead of on top of it.
The continued presence of a Confederate flag at the state house has caused the controversy to continue. In July 2009, the Atlantic Coast Conference—after discussions with the NAACP—decided to move three future college baseball tournaments out of South Carolina.
Jimmy Carter, who knows this world well also, called Wilson’s outburst “a dastardly thing to do”–which implies, as many others have, that it was a calculated move and not a spontaneous outburst. Responding to the personal attacks on Obama at town hall meetings and similar venues, Carter said: “Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on healthcare.”
Likewise, the attacks won’t end with health care reform. They’ll just roll on into other issues on the President’s agenda. Leaders of the Republican Right, whether or not they are deeply racist themselves, are determined to bring Obama down–and if the racism of their constituents does the job, so be it.
During the campaign Obama pledged to make the Gulf Coast recovery a paramount goal. In February, 2008, he declared, “The broken promises did not start when a storm hit, and they did not end there … I promise you that when I’m in the White House I will commit myself every day to keeping up Washington’s end of this trust. This will be a priority of my presidency.”
But a new study by the Institute for Southern Studies reports that 50 community leaders from areas affected by the hurricane ranked Obama only slightly better than Bush in reconstruction. In a range of different categories, Obama came out with a D+ to Bush’s D.
According to the report, “A diverse group of more than 50 community leaders were asked in August 2009 to grade the Obama administration’s efforts for Gulf Coast recovery in eight key areas. The respondents came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and represented a wide range of constituencies, including faith, community and environmental organizations.”
The demographics assembled by the Institute in themselves reflect how little has been done to restore life along the coast. Here are a few excerpts:
Estimated number of U.S. residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina: 1 million
Rank of Katrina’s among all diasporas in U.S. history: 1
Estimated number of people displaced by Katrina still living in Houston today: 100,000
Percent of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina addresses that are actively receiving mail today: 76.4
Percent receiving mail in the largely African-American and working-class Lower 9th Ward: Less than 49
Percent of households with children in New Orleans before Katrina: 30
Percent shortly after the storm: 18
Percent two years later: 20
Percent of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population that was African-American: 67
Percent three years later: 61
Number of abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans today: 65,888
Proportion of all residential addresses in the city that number represents: 1/3
Rank of New Orleans among all U.S. cities for the rate of abandoned residences: 1
Number of 2010 federal census questionnaires slated to be hand-delivered to homes in south Louisiana in an effort to ensure an accurate count: 300,000
Average amount of federal funds states receive over a decade for each person counted in the census: $12,000
Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren’t too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely “natural” disaster. The dominant narratives that have emerged, in the four years since the storm, are of a gross human tragedy, compounded by social inequities and government ineptitude—a crisis subsequently exploited in every way possible for political and financial gain.
But there’s an even harsher truth, one some New Orleans residents learned in the very first days but which is only beginning to become clear to the rest of us: What took place in this devastated American city was no less than a war, in which victims whose only crimes were poverty and blackness were treated as enemies of the state
—Photo by flickr user tidewater muse used under a Creative Commons license.
It started immediately after the storm and flood hit, when civilian aid was scarce—but private security forces already had boots on the ground. Some, like Blackwater (which has since redubbed itself Xe), were under federal contract, while a host of others answered to wealthy residents and businessmen who had departed well before Katrina and needed help protecting their property from the suffering masses left behind. According Jeremy Scahill’s reporting in The Nation, Blackwater set up an HQ in downtown New Orleans. Armed as they would be in Iraq, with automatic rifles, guns strapped to legs, and pockets overflowing with ammo, Blackwater contractors drove around in SUVs and unmarked cars with no license plates.
“When asked what authority they were operating under,” Scahill reported, “one guy said, ‘We’re on contract with the Department of Homeland Security.’ Then, pointing to one of his comrades, he said, ‘He was even deputized by the governor of the state of Louisiana. We can make arrests and use lethal force if we deem it necessary.’ The man then held up the gold Louisiana law enforcement badge he wore around his neck.”
The Blackwater operators described their mission in New Orleans as “securing neighborhoods,” as if they were talking about Sadr City. When National Guard troops descended on the city, the Army Times described their role as fighting “the insurgency in the city.” Brigadier Gen. Gary Jones, who commanded the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the paper, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
Ten days after the storm, the New York Times reported that although the city was calm with no signs of looting (though it acknowledged this had taken place previously), “New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.” The local police superintendent ordered all weapons, including legally registered firearms, confiscated from civilians. But as the Times noted, that order didn’t “apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property…[who] openly carry M-16′s and other assault rifles.” Scahill spoke to Michael Montgomery, the chief of security for one wealthy businessman who said his men came under fire from “black gangbangers” near the Ninth Ward. Armed with AR-15s and Glocks, Montgomery and his men “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters on the overpass. ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said.’”
Malik Rahim, a Vietnam veteran and longtime community activist, was one of the organizers of the Common Ground Collective, which quickly began dispensing basic aid and medical care in the first days after the hurricane. But far from aiding the relief workers, Rahim told me this week, the police and troops who began patrolling the streets treated them as criminals or “insurgents.” African American men caught outside also ran the risk of crossing paths with roving vigilante patrols who shot at will, he says. In this dangerous environment, Common Ground began to rely on white volunteers to move through a city that had simply become too perilous for blacks.
In July, the local television station WDSU released a home video, taken shortly after the storm hit, of a local man, Paul Gleason, who bragged to two police officers about shooting looters in the Algiers section of New Orleans.
“Did you have any problems with looters,” asked an officer.
“Not anymore,” said Gleason.
“Not anymore?”
“They’re all dead,” said Gleason.
The officer asked, “What happened?”
“We shot them,” said Gleason.
“How many did you shoot?
“Thirty-eight.”
“Thirty-eight people? What did you do with the bodies?”
“We gave them to the Coast Guard,” said Gleason.
Gleason told his story with a cup of red wine in one hand and riding a tractor from Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World.
Although the government’s aid efforts were in chaos, those involved in the self-generated community rescue and relief efforts were often seen as a threat. Even so, Common Ground, founded in the days after Katrina hit, eventually managed to serve more than half a million people, operating feeding stations, opening free health and legal clinics, and later rebuilding homes and planting trees. But they “never got a dime” from the federal government, says Rahim. The FBI did, however, recruit one of Common Ground’s founders, Brandon Darby, as an informant, later using him to infiltrate groups planning actions at the 2008 Republican National Convention.
And while the government couldn’t seem to keep people from dying on rooftops or abandoned highways, it wasted no time building a temporary jail in New Orleans.
Burl Cain, the warden of the notorious Angola Prison, a former slave plantation that’s now home to 5,000 inmates, was rushed down to the city to oversee “Camp Greyhound” in the city’s bus terminal. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the jail “was constructed by inmates from Angola and Dixon state prisons and was outfitted with everything a stranded law enforcer could want, including top-of-the-line recreational vehicles to live in and electrical power, courtesy of a yellow Amtrak locomotive. There are computers to check suspects’ backgrounds and a mug shot station—complete with heights marked in black on the wall that serves as the backdrop.”
In the virtual martial law imposed in New Orleans after Katrina, the war on the poor sometimes even spilled over into the war on terror. In his latest book Zeitoun, published in July, Dave Eggers tells the story of a local Syrian immigrant who stayed in New Orleans to protect his properties and ended up organizing makeshift relief efforts and rescuing people in a canoe. He continued right up until he was arrested by a group of unidentified, heavily armed men in uniform, thrown into Camp Greyhound, and questioned as a suspected terrorist. In an interview with Salon, Eggers said:
Zeitoun was among thousands of people who were doing “Katrina time” after the storm. There was a complete suspension of all legal processes and there were no hearings, no courts for months and months and not enough folks in the judicial system really seemed all that concerned about it. Some human-rights activists and some attorneys, but otherwise it seemed to be the cost of doing business. It really could have only happened at that time; 2005 was just the exact meeting place of the Bush-era philosophy towards law enforcement and incarceration, their philosophy toward habeas corpus and their neglect and indifference to the plight of New Orleanians.
Through all the time that the federal and local governments, in concert with wealthy New Orleanians, were pitching their battle, there was virtually no one fighting on the other side. Reviewing the “available evidence” a month after Katrina, the New York Times concluded that “the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations.” The reports of residents firing at National Guard helicopters, of tourists being robbed and raped on Bourbon Street, and of murderous rampages in the Superdome—all turned out to be false.
But the truth of what happened in New Orleans—vigilantism and racially tinged violence, a military response that supplanted a humanitarian one—is equally sinister.
Across the nation this summer, unknown numbers of people are hunkering down and arming up for what they believe is an imminent battle for the soul of America. Town halls and tea parties provide just a small glimpse of the rage, fear, and paranoia fomenting on front porches and in Internet chat rooms, in the conservative heartland and beyond. While the details may vary, the visions in such forums share a common theme: In one way or another, a fight to the death is coming, and coming soon.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user theonetruebix used under a Creative Commons license.
These deep-seated fears explain at least some of the vitriol, the violent scuffles, and death threats bubbling up in town hall protests against health care reform. It’s all too easy for certain right-wing activists to accept that the president’s plan will create death panels or mandate taxpayer-funded abortions. Because some of these people don’t just believe that Obama wants to destroy capitalism and kill their granny and their unborn child—they believe he wants to kill them, too.
At a town hall meeting with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin in Hagerstown, Maryland, on August 12, one attendee carried a sign that read “Death to Obama,” and “Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.” Another sign at the same event compared Obama to Hitler. At least some of the Obama-Hitler iconography originates from followers of perennial whack-job Lyndon LaRouche, but the comparison has been disseminated by Rush Limbaugh to a wider audience of hardline conservatives.
That’s not the only insidious comparison making the rounds: One protester who attended a raucous town hall with Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter told a Village Voice reporter that Obama was a “21st-century Marxist” who would adopt the same methods Hugo Chavez used to take power in Venezuela: “infiltration of the education system, political correctness, class warfare ideology, voter fraud, brainwashing through the mainstream media.”
As the town halls have become more heated, the hints of violence have become increasingly overt. One man showed up outside the president’s town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a hand gun strapped to his thigh; on August 17, another brought an assault rifle to a demonstration at the site of Obama’s speech to veterans in Phoenix. It emerged that the latter’s presence at the meeting had been coordinated with a former member of the Viper Militia, whose adherents were convicted of weapons and conspiracy charges in the 1990s and were accused of plotting to blow up federal buildings.
Clearly, this is about far more than health care policy. Instead, it’s just one sign out of many heralding a resurgence of the extreme right wing. It’s been widely reported that extremist groups are growing, in numbers and membership, since Obama launched his presidential campaign. As in the past, some of the ideas espoused by these groups are working their way further toward the political core with the help of right-wing politicians and media figures.
For instance, take Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-Minn.) claim that expanding AmeriCorps would result in liberal “re-education camps.” This statement has now morphed into rumors that the young community service volunteers are being armed to take over the country—possibly with some help from the New Black Panther Party.
Similarly, Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, is predicting an October surprise from Obama in the form of “a hyped-up outbreak of the swine flu, which they’ll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for health care reform.”
The assertion may sound ludicrous, but it dovetails nicely with a view among conspiracy theorists that a sweeping and deadly plot lurks behind the swine flu pandemic. Influenced by the work of a whacked-out Austrian “journalist” named Jane Bürgermeister, some on the far right believe the virus was manufactured by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the rest of the black helicopter crowd’s usual suspects, as “part of a long-term plan by the syndicate, who have built large numbers of FEMA concentration camps with incinerators and prepared mass graves in states such as Indiana and in New York to quarantine people and dispose of the bodies of the people who are killed by the bioweapons attack.” This “depopulation” scheme has in turn been linked by conspiracy theorists to the Obama administration’s plans for a “global planetary regime to enforce forced abortion” and sterilizing the population through the water supply.
Among liberals, the dominant take on all of this seems to be ridicule and derision, or else impotent hand-wringing about the demise of “civil discourse.” It’s as if they’d forgotten that many of these so-called loonies just happen to own guns—and while liberals go on chattering, these folks are stocking up on ammunition. And right-wing radicals have an advantage when it comes to ideological fervor. Obama and the Democrats in Congress quickly frittered away any populist energy that might have come out of the recession, the fiasco of the Bush years, or the 2008 election. All that’s left are the compromises on top of compromises that they call policymaking, for which no one can muster much enthusiasm. Right-wing zealots, on the other hand, think they are fighting for their lives by standing fast against communism, or the anti-Christ, or both; they’re not only doing God’s work, but also fulfilling their destiny as true American patriots.
Indeed, the right-wing revival is infused with the words and imagery of the American Revolution. The gun-toting protestor at Obama’s New Hampshire health care town hall was also carrying a sign that read, “It Is Time To Water The Tree Of Liberty”—a clear reference to a quote from Thomas Jefferson that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (Because he had a permit and wasn’t in shooting range of the tyrant, the patriot was allowed to keep his gun.) On a website also called The Tree of Liberty, members exchange Obama insults and apocalyptic visions in a forum called Committees of Correspondence, named for assemblies in colonial America that protested tyrannical British policies.
The denizens of these gatherings and websites, the tea parties and the raucous town halls, represent a long-standing force in the country’s political culture: American nativism. This oft-ignored strain draws its central impulse from an opposition to anything that challenges the vision of America as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation. Nativists have taken aim at Catholics, Jews, freed slaves, and successive waves of immigrants, beginning with the Irish fleeing the potato famine in the 1840s and continuing through to present-day immigrants from Latin America. They call for a closing of US borders and support strict adherence to the Constitution in its most literal sense, shorn of equivocating amendments, as a remedy for unwanted social change. And they have been inextricably linked to racist right-wing movements, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Militias to the Minutemen who now “guard” the border. (In the current debate over health care reform, one of the most powerful myths is that it will extend free coverage to illegal immigrants at the expense of “real” Americans.)
Many followers of modern extremist right-wing groups also adhere to the doctrine of Christian Identity, which teaches that white men are the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, who traced their lineage back to Adam and Eve. The black and yellow people, they believe, are of lesser stature, likened by some to a bad first copy made by God in his fashioning of the Garden of Eden. They are not real people, the thinking goes, and should be cast down as “mud people.” The American Founding Fathers were among the true sovereigns, and the white patriots of today are their descendants. Even before Obama’s election, many believed that the nation’s political and economic systems had been taken over by the Zionist Occupied Government. Jews, according to them, are not true white people, and are bent upon world domination, with the aid of their henchmen, the racial minorities.
That’s why the election of Barack Obama adds even more fuel to nativist rage: The president is a black man, child of an interracial union, the son of a foreigner who bears a foreign name. According to some, he is not even an American citizen. “[T]he face of the federal government—the enemy that almost all parts of the extreme right see as the primary threat to freedom—is now black,” says a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups. “And the fact that the president is an African American has injected a strong racial element into even those parts of the radical right, like the militias, that in the past were not primarily motivated by race hate.”
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Posted in Cold War, Congress, Congressional Democrats, Congressional Republicans, financial crisis / recession, health care, immigration, jobs / employment / unemployment, media, Obama Administration, race / racism, right wing
Tagged 666, anti-Christ, anti-Semitism, beast, black helicopters, Christian Identity, conspiracy theories, Dick Armey, extremist groups, far right, Glenn Beck, health care reform, James Van Brunn, Ku Klux Klan, lone gunman, Lyndon LaRouche, Michele Bachmann, Militia Movement, nativism, Obama-Hitler, Obama-Satan, Phineas Priest, Posse Comitatus, racism, Rush Limbaugh, Scott Roeder, tea parties, town hall meetings, white supremacists
The health care “debate” has been transformed into a confusing screaming match fueled by wild nativist fears. As Senator Chuck Grassley has found out at town meetings in Iowa, health care really is not the issue that’s on the minds of many. Instead, it’s all about the nation’s economic turmoil: People are hurting, and don’t see the stimulus plan helping them. From there, its a short leap to attacking the Federal Reserve, and what many perceive as a threatening, directionless federal government that is bent on controlling their daily lives. And Grassley appears to be ready to capitalize on the anger:
Not everyone is coming to the town hall meetings because of health care. It’s kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Grassley said. “They’re seeing the stimulus not working. They’re seeing the Federal Reserve shoving money out of the airplane not working. They’re seeing big increases in the deficit coming. Then they see a trillion-dollar health-care bill, and they think it’s not good for the country.”
The anger and paranoia directed at the government in general, and Obama in particular, that can be glimpsed at the tea parties and town hall meetings are ugly and often racist, depicting the president as everything from a socialist granny-killer to the anti-Christ himself. They’re also downright frightening, considering the fact that so many of these people own guns. But they are based on genuine fear, and sometimes on real suffering.
These fears remind me of the fears that ran through the Midwest more than 20 years ago, during the 1984 presidential election. Back then Walter Mondale was vainly fighting Ronald Reagan, against a backdrop of farm foreclosures,bank crackdowns, penny auctions, and fight back by rural people in the heartland. Then as now, people showed up in angry knots–not unlike today’s town meetings–at foreclosure s to shout down the auctioneers, trying to save a farm. The gun of choice at that time was the semi-automatic mini 14, which was held by some in the same esteem as the Colt 45 did back in the day. Some turned to the Bible, watched the skies for Soviet bombers, dug themselves into bunkers.
All in all, then as now, what we faced was an outpouring of nativism–fears of the unknown, of the foreigner coming across our borders, of a sinister hegemonic government, of things going out of control. This was the desperate response of people who had lost farms that had been in their families for generations, had lost their way of life, and were scared and angry and looking for someone or something to blame–and who found no viable populist alternative on the left.
If you can’t remember those days, rent Country starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard and written in part by Shepard, who knows this world well. It was shot in Iowa in 1984, and showed a couple struggling to save their family farm, against greedy banks and government policies that paved the way for a takeover by large agribusinesses. At that time Reagan said the film “was a blatant propaganda message against our agri programs.” The film’s tag line was “In this country, when the land is your life…you fight for your life.”
Progressives then waited anxiously for the movie’s release, hoping it could channel the nativist far right politics into a constructive force. Things didn’t quite work out that way: Folks in the heartland stuck, literally, to their guns. They aren’t likely to work out any better now.
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