Politico

Does the White Working Class Really Vote Against Its Own Interests?

Trump’s first year in office revived an age-old debate about why some people choose race over class—and how far they will go to protect the system.

Illustration by Daniel Downey, Jr.

By Joshua Zeitz    December 31, 2017

As his first year in the White House draws to a close, Donald J. Trump remains in almost every respect a singular character. He exists well outside the boundaries of what most observers previously judged possible, let alone respectable, in American politics. To catalogue the norms he has violated, the traditions he has traduced or trampled, and the rules—written and unwritten—that he has either cunningly sidestepped or audaciously blown to smithereens would require volumes. Love him or loath him, Trump operates apart from history.

Yet if Trump defies history, paradoxically, he has also resurfaced questions that historians have long debated, including some that many considered settled for many years. In this sense, Trump hasn’t just defied history; he has changed it—and he has changed the way that we think about it, forcing us to look back on our past with a new lens.

This Politico Magazine series, to be published in three installments over the next few weeks, will look at three historical debates that simmered on low heat for years, until the historic presidential election of November 2016 brought them back to a boil. These debates are foundational. They concern race and identity. National character. The dark side of populism. They drive at the core meaning of American citizenship.

The first in this series, perhaps the most fundamental, centers around the white working class. Are working-class white voters shooting themselves in the foot by making common cause with a political movement that is fundamentally inimical to their economic self-interest? In exchange for policies like the new tax bill, which several nonpartisan analyses conclude will lower taxes on the wealthy and raise them for the working class, did they really just settle for a wall that will likely never be built, a rebel yell for Confederate monuments most of them will never visit, and the hollow validation of a disappearing world in which white was up and brown and black were down?

If they did accept that bargain, why? Or are we missing something? Might working-class whites in fact derive some tangible advantage from their bargain with Trump? Is it really so irrational to care more about, say, illegal immigration than marginal income tax rates?

These are good questions. They’re also not new ones. The historian W.E.B. Du Bois asked them more than 80 years ago in his seminal work on Reconstruction, when he posited that working-class Southern whites were complicit, or at least passive instruments, in their own political and economic disenfranchisement. They forfeited real power and material well-being, he argued, in return for the “psychological” wages associated with being white.

Since then, the issue has inspired a vibrant debate among historians. Until last year, most agreed with Du Bois that the answer to the question was not so simple as “yes” or “no”—that whiteness sometimes conferred benefits both imaginary and real.

In the age of Trump, we’re once again pressure-testing Du Bois’ framework. As one might expect, it’s complicated. White identity pays dividends you can easily bank, and some that you can’t.

In 1935 Du Bois published his most influential treatise, Black Reconstruction, a reconsideration of the period immediately following the Civil War. One of the historical quandaries that Du Bois addressed was the successful effort of white plantation owners in the 1870s and 1880s in building a political coalition with poor, often landless, white men to overthrow biracial Reconstruction governments throughout the South.

“The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to the exploitation of the capitalists,” wrote Du Bois, who trained at both the University of Berlin and Harvard, and whose grounding in Marxist political economy taught him to view politics through the lens of different but fixed stages in capitalist development. “This would throw white and black labor into one class,” he continued, “and precipitate a united fight for higher wages and better working conditions.”

That, of course, is not what happened. In most Southern states, poor whites and wealthy whites forged a coalition that overthrew biracial Reconstruction governments and passed a raft of laws that greatly benefited plantation and emerging industrial elites at the expense of small landowners, tenant farmers and factory workers. “It failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method,” Du Bois wrote, “which drove such a wedge between white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”

Du Bois famously posited that “the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.”

Decades before so many white working-class citizens of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin—to say nothing of Alabama, West Virginia and Mississippi—cast their lot with a party that endeavors to raise their taxes and gut their health care, Du Bois identified the problem: Some wages aren’t denominated in hard currency. They carry a psychological payoff—even a spiritual one.

The most obvious time and place to pressure-test Du Bois’ theory is the Jim Crow South. In the 60-odd years between the collapse of Reconstruction and World War II, the South—still reeling from the Civil War, in which it lost the present-day equivalent of approximately $5.5 trillion in real property and wealth—slipped into a semi-permanent state of economic crisis.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared the region “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” It was, as historian Gavin Wright famously observed, a “low-wage region in a high-wage country,” one where two-thirds of the population lived in small towns of fewer than 2,500 people, derived meager incomes from agriculture, mining or manufacturing, and even in the midst of a national depression, stood out for poor health, want of education and lack of opportunities for upward mobility.

The vast majority of farmers, black and white, were tenants or sharecroppers, and repressive poll taxes disenfranchised not just black men and women, but also poor white people. Designed by wealthy plantation owners and industrialists, the poll tax was expressly a class measure, meant to preserve the region’s prevailing low-tax, low-wage, low-service economy. It was more ingenious and insidious than many people today realize. In Mississippi and Virginia, it was cumulative for two years; if a tenant farmer or textile worker couldn’t pay in any given year, not only did he miss an election cycle, he had to pay a full two years’ tax to restore his voting rights. In Georgia, the poll tax was cumulative from the time a voter turned 21 years old—meaning, if one missed 10 years, he or she would have to pay a decade’s worth of back taxes before regaining the right to vote. In Texas, the tax was due on February 1, in the winter off-season, when farmers were habitually strapped for cash. It was, as one Southern liberal observed at the time, “like buying a ticket to a show nine months ahead of time, and before you know who’s playing, or really what the thing is all about.”

Little wonder that in 1936, three of four voting-age adults outside the South participated in the presidential election, but in the South, just one in four cast ballots. The system kept men like Eugene Cox, a conservative Democrat who held the powerful post of House Rules Committee chairman, in power. In 1938, Cox won re-election with 5,137 votes, though his district in southwest Georgia had a total population of 263,606 residents.

Yet when working-class Southern whites could participate in the political process, they often jettisoned their natural class interests in favor of racial solidarity. Historians have focused special attention on the rise and fall of the Readjuster movement, a biracial coalition that controlled the legislature, governor’s office and most federal posts in Virginia between 1879 and 1883. Forged in opposition to a conservative Democratic establishment that had shuttered schools, imposed regressive taxes, and favored creditors over debtors, the alliance passed a raft of measures that presaged much of the Populist movement’s agenda in coming years. For a time, it held. But in 1883 Democrats campaigned with intense focus on the issue of inter-marriage and miscegenation—a rare phenomenon that nevertheless struck a raw nerve with white workers and farmers. They warned that Readjuster rule would result in “mixed schools now and mixed marriages for the future.” It worked. Conservative “Bourbon” Democrats regained control of state government and reintroduced regressive, one-party rule that benefited a small minority of Virginians.

To reduce Jim Crow politics to a single trajectory is to oversimplify a complicated story. But the problem of white working-class Southerners bedeviled generations of liberal activists and the historians who studied them. When the union federation Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) launched Operation Dixie, a massive effort to unionize Southern workers in the mid-1940s, organizers ran into the same wall: Conservative politicians and their wealthy patrons successfully used race as a cudgel to turn white workers away from collective bargaining agreements that would have raised their wages. Even those Southern populists who ostensibly opposed Bourbon rule—from Georgia’s Tom Watson in the early 20th century to Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo in the 1930s—more often flipped the playbook and used race as a blunt instrument against their elite opponents.

Southern liberals in the 1930s and 1940s applied a sharp class focus and concluded that wealthy Democrats wanted, in historian Gavin Wright’s words, to keep labor “cheap and divided.” The white liberal writer Lillian E. Smith famously captured this thinking in her short story, “Two Men and a Bargain,” which began: “Once upon a time, down South, a rich white man made a bargain with a poor white … ‘You boss the nigger, and I’ll boss the money.’”

Critically, Du Bois never insisted that the psychological wages of whiteness were wholly devoid of tangible value. What they forfeited in material benefits, working-class whites also recouped in limited power and privilege. “They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools,” he wrote. “The police were drawn from their ranks. … The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, the Negro was subject to insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.” You couldn’t necessarily buy groceries with these benefits, but they were palpably meaningful.

David Roediger, a historian of class and race who writes with a Marxian lens, emphasized exactly this point in his classic volume, The Wages of Whiteness, published in 1991 (the title was a direct tribute to Du Bois). He encouraged a generation of scholars to consider that working-class whites may not have been unwitting dupes in their own economic subjugation; instead, they knowingly harvested certain real advantages of whiteness. While this pattern was most visible in the South, it also deeply influenced political culture in the North and West, where whiteness was no less central to popular conceptions of American citizenship. And Roediger’s focus was on Northern workers in antebellum cities—workers undergoing the jarring transition from pre-industrial forms of work and leisure to a more regimented existence as wage laborers.

The workers whom Roediger describes, and whom dozens more scholars would similarly study, understood that American citizenship was predicated on race and independence; Congress, after all, had opened citizenship to all “free white persons” in 1790. That law remained on the books into the 20th century. But what did it mean to be “white?” Congress never made that point clear. Indeed, there was no immediate consensus that certain new immigrants met the qualification. And what did it mean to be “free?” Their new status as wage earners—economically dependent on other men to earn a living—seemingly made many working men and women something less than free. Many non-black workers keenly understood that they might be left outside the boundaries of citizenship. They also resented new forms of industrial discipline that their employers foisted onto them. Many addressed these anxieties by drawing a sharp dichotomy between white and black—citizen and slave—and placing themselves on one side of that divide.

They became avid purveyors of blackface minstrelsy—a popular form of entertainment in which working-class whites reveled in watching other working-class whites apply burnt cork to their faces and act out what the historian George Rawick (writing more generally about early American racism) described as a “pornography of [their] former [lives].” The black characters they portrayed on stage were shiftless, sexually promiscuous and rowdy; they reveled in pre-industrial activities like hunting. They were coarse. In short, they deflected on black people, both slave and free, the very same social demerits that wealthier whites—who were trying to impose new discipline on the urban working class—ascribed to them.

Playbills commonly “paired pictures of the performers in blackface and without makeup—rough and respectable,” Roediger observed. The former were labeled, “Plantation Darkeys.” The latter, “Citizens.” By culturally differentiating themselves from black people, actors and audience members alike established themselves as “free white persons.”

While it’s easy to imagine that working-class whites embraced the new racial dichotomy in order to enjoy leverage in the new urban job market, in many cases, black and white workers weren’t even in competition with each other. Many of the most popular blackface actors were former artisans and mechanics—coach makers, typesetters and wood craftsmen who were now increasingly likely to fall into “wage slavery.” They were unlikely to vie for employment with free black men, who were normally consigned to unskilled jobs as dockworkers, day laborers, and (until Irish women displaced them) domestic servants.

One group that did sometimes compete for unskilled jobs with African Americans were Irish immigrants. Regarded as racially suspect—depicted in political cartoons as dark and ape-like, and patently unqualified for citizenship—Irish immigrants became some of the most avid and violent practitioners of white identity politics. Even when they weren’t in direct competition with back men for jobs—as when a group of Irish handloom weavers was displaced by white Protestant weavers in Philadelphia in 1844—they donned blackface and mobbed their black neighbors. The point wasn’t to get their jobs back.

Indeed, more was at stake than cash wages. To achieve standing as free white persons—and to enjoy the many benefits of citizenship that accrued from that definition—working-class men in the antebellum era consciously asserted their white identity and set it apart from blackness through language, performance, politics and violence. To imagine that they didn’t understand the full impact of their decisions is to deny them any modicum of intelligence or agency.

If working-class whites historically derived both psychological and citizenship wages by privileging race over class, is it possible that they sometimes enjoyed real wages as well? Beginning 25 years ago, a rising generation of political historians including Thomas Sugrue, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Lassiter, Robert Self and Craig Steven Wilder concluded that they did. Giving special focus to labor and housing markets, they found that many working-class white families benefited directly from government policies that placed African Americans at a disadvantage.

Take housing. Beginning in the 1930s, most mortgages were underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a federal agency that insured banks against losses from homeowners who defaulted on their loans. The FHA insured these mortgages in return for securing the banks’ pledge to provide home loans at low interest rates and to spread interest payments over at least 15 and as many as 30 years to pay back their loans. At minimal expense to the federal government and with only the pledge of default insurance, the FHA freed up unprecedented levels of capital and helped create a postwar social order in which 60 percent of American households owned and accumulated wealth in their own homes.

In deciding whether or not to insure mortgages, the FHA rated every census tract in the country. Assuming that houses lost value in neighborhoods that were racially mixed or primarily populated by African Americans and Latinos, the FHA assigned such areas lower scores or “redlined” them altogether, refusing to insure mortgages in these neighborhoods or insuring them on unfavorable terms. This meant that most black Americans could not secure mortgages, as their mere presence in a neighborhood would choke off affordable credit.

In a perverse twist, black residents in many Northern cities had little recourse but to rent cramped, sub-divided apartments in buildings whose white landlords often neglected repairs and upkeep, but the physical decay of their homes fed the white Americans’ suspicions that black residents chose to live in squalor.

It was not just a matter of housing. A powerful combination of private-sector discrimination and nepotism within trade unions had long excluded black workers from well-paid, blue-collar industries. As George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO crassly admitted, “When I was a plumber, it never [occurred] to me to have niggers in the union!” Even in liberal bastions like New York City, African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s comprised less than 5 percent of all dock workers, skilled machinists, electricians or unionized carpenters—the types of jobs that afforded non-college educated white men access to middle-class comfort and economic security in the post-war period. The black unemployment rate was double that of the city’s overall unemployment rate. And New York was better than most places. In Chicago, 17 percent of black adults in the early 1960s were unemployed. In Cleveland, 20 percent. In Detroit, 39 percent.

By the time federal and state officials got serious about enforcing fair employment laws in the 1970s, America’s manufacturing and extractive industries had already fallen into steady decline. In effect, two post-war forces most responsible for lifting millions of working-class families into middle-class comfort and privilege—the suburban housing boom and unionized blue-collar jobs—only became available en masse to black Americans just as the post-war boom drew to a close.

This wasn’t a simple case of discrimination or inequality. Working-class white families affirmatively enjoyed what the historian George Lipsitz termed a “possessive investment in whiteness.” They availed themselves of the G.I. Bill’s housing and education benefits, paid for in part by black people’s taxes, at a time when black veterans faced sharp limitations on where (or whether) they could draw the same benefits. They accumulated equity in their suburban homes and used it to send their children to college or to save for their retirement. They enjoyed access to public services—from public schools and public trash collection, to clean water and sewage—that were deficient in majority-minority neighborhoods. These advantages conferred second-order benefits, including better health and a higher average life expectancy.

In other words, whiteness did pay real wages. It delivered an inter-generational advantage to those who were in a position to claim it. And white working-class Americans seemed on some level to understand it. When in 1966 Lyndon Johnson attempted to ram through Congress a law banning racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing, white working-class voters revolted both in the streets and at the polls. (Ronald Reagan, a washed up former actor, unseated the otherwise popular incumbent governor of California, Pat Brown, largely by touting his opposition to the state’s open housing law.) That summer, when Martin Luther King Jr. led protests throughout the “bungalow belt” in Chicago’s working-class white neighborhoods and the nearby blue-collar suburb of Cicero, Polish, Italian, and Irish residents who had once been staunch Democratic voters now erupted in fury. They pelted protesters with rocks and beat them with clubs amid cries of “White Power!”; “Burn them like Jews”; “We want Martin Luther Coon!”; “Roses are red, violets are black, King would look good with a knife in his back.”

Just a few years later, when the federal government began requiring that government contractors and industrial unions that did business with them begin aking affirmative efforts to integrate their workforces, white voters gravitated to backlash politicians who promised to preserve their privilege in the job sector. Even as late as 1990, conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms was able to make openly racist appeals on such grounds and pay no price. On the contrary, it was a winning formula.

The same dynamic that Du Bois grappled with is on display today. In breaking for Donald Trump and the GOP, working-class white voters are manifestly undercutting their economic self-interest. To be sure, Trump didn’t campaign like an archetypal GOP plutocrat. He railed against free trade and immigration, policies that many white working-class citizens believe, with some justification, have hurt their communities. He promised to bring back manufacturing and coal mining jobs, eliminate generous tax loopholes for wealthy families like his own, and—like Andrew Jackson, after whom he has patterned his presidency—privilege the many over the few.

But Democrats and Never Trump Republicans shouted at the top of their lungs that Trump’s campaign promises either weren’t possible or that they wouldn’t help working-class voters as much as he pledged. And they appear to have been right. The president recently signed into law a tax bill whose benefits, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Congressional Budget Office, accrue principally to corporations and super-rich individuals; many middle-class and working-class families will ultimately face a tax hike. The administration and its congressional supporters have also taken steps to make health care less affordable or altogether inaccessible, destabilize retirement security for working-class families, and allow industrial polluters to despoil the air they breathe and the water they drink. Despite what Trump said on the campaign trail, his agenda does little to help and much to hurt struggling white families.

Of course, whiteness still delivers other dividends—as it always has. It makes one less likely to be killed by a police officer during a traffic stop. It enables white men to carry assault weapons (including long guns) in places of public accommodation, while a black man might be shot and killed by law enforcement officials merely for picking up a BB gun displayed on a sales rack at Walmart. It affords working-class white families the peace of mind that the government won’t invade homes or hospitals in pursuit of undocumented children or grandparents. Whiteness, in other words, continues to pay tangible benefits, and for right or wrong, it makes some sense that its primary beneficiaries are loathe to support candidates who expressly promise to disrupt this privileged status.

Yet Trump has also, arguably more than any other candidate for president in the last hundred years (excepting third-party outliers like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace), played to the purely psychological benefits of being white. From his racially-laden exhortations about black crime in Chicago and Latino gangs seemingly everywhere, to his attacks on an American-born federal judge of Mexican parentage and Muslim gold star parents, he has paid the white majority with redemption and revanchism. Trump might be increasing economic inequality, but at least the working-class whites feel like they belong in Trump’s America. He urged them to privilege race over class when they entered their polling stations.

And it didn’t just stop there. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, Trump swept almost every white demographic group, forging a “broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker.” It’s not just blue-collar white people who seem blithely willing to sacrifice economic rationality for racial solidarity. After all, it arguably took a special kind of stupid for upper-middle class suburbanites in high-tax states to support a party that just raised their taxes. (No, this wasn’t a bait-and-switch. The GOP leadership has talked openly about eliminating deductions for state and local taxes since 2014.) Unless, that is, you account for the wages of whiteness.

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, is the author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House, which will be released on January 30.

Democracy Now

From The Guardian

“Bussed Out”: How Cities Are Giving Thousands of Homeless People One-Way Bus Tickets to Leave Town

Story   December 28, 2017

“Bussed out: How America moves its homeless”

A major new investigation by The Guardian examined how cities are struggling to solve the problem of homelessness throughout the year, and found many have come to rely on an old solution: a one-way ticket out of town. Relocation programs that offer homeless people free bus tickets to move elsewhere have been around for at least three decades. But as the homeless population rises for the first time since the Great Recession, relocation programs are becoming more common and are expanding to more cities. We speak with The Guardian’s homelessness editor, Alastair Gee, about many people who were bused out, remained homeless and eventually returned to the city they had left.

Guest: Alastair Gee, Homelessness Editor for The Guardian

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: As much of the Midwest faces winter snowstorms and the East Coast faces freezing temperatures this week, many cities have issued Weather Emergency Alerts that allow them to place people who are homeless into emergency shelters. Well, today we talk about a new investigation by The Guardian that looks at how cities struggle to solve the problem of homelessness throughout the year, and found many have come to rely on an old solution: a one-way ticket out of town. Relocation programs that offer homeless people free bus tickets to move elsewhere have been around for at least three decades. But as the homeless population rises for the first time since the Great Recession, relocation programs are becoming more common and are expanding to more cities.

AMY GOODMAN: In its investigation, The Guardian closely examined these homeless relocation programs by compiling and analyzing a database of more than 34,000 bus trips or flights taken by homeless people out of their cities. They found the journey provided a route out of homelessness for some, but many eventually returned to the city they had left. This is 27-year-old Quinn Raber, who traveled nearly 2,300 miles over three days from San Francisco to Indianapolis by bus, only to return.

QUINN RABER: I wasn’t expecting to come back to San Francisco as soon as I did, but I knew I was going to end up coming back eventually. The roughest part about being homeless is the wear and tear from the concrete and the constant walking. And it’s hard to use the restroom, because a lot of businesses don’t want homeless people in their restrooms and messing them up. You know, it really breaks you down. I don’t know if I would ask Homeward Bound for a ticket again, just because I know that you’re not really supposed ask for more than one. But if they—you know, if they would be willing to help, I’d ask them. You know?

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in San Francisco by Alastair Gee, the homelessness editor for The Guardian, the new investigation by the Outside in America team headlined “Bussed out: How America moves its homeless.”

Alastair, welcome to Democracy Now! Just lay out what you found.

ALASTAIR GEE: Thank you so much for having me.

Well, we made dozens of public records requests. And our goal was to really understand what effect these bus programs were having on the homeless population in America. Cities, of course, would say that these programs are a really great way to offer people more stability. It’s a way to reconnect people with family or with friends in other locations and perhaps offer them a route out of homelessness. And we found that while in some cases that was certainly what happened, for some people it certainly was a way to greater stability, for others it wasn’t quite that simple. We found cases where people simply became homeless at their destination. In some instances, they even became homeless again in the city from which they had departed. So, the story really isn’t quite as simple, and it really isn’t quite as rosy a picture as cities would portray.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: According to a new federal study, the U.S. homeless population, as we said earlier, rose this year for the first time since the Great Recession. What do you know about why that is and what the impact of that has been?

ALASTAIR GEE: Right. That’s a really good point. Well, the rise has been driven, in particular, by the trends that we’re seeing on the West Coast, and that’s to do with a rental affordability crisis. Everywhere from Seattle down to Los Angeles and San Diego, it’s simply becoming impossible for people earning, certainly, minimum wage, but even wages above that, it’s just—it’s very, very difficult to afford somewhere to live. So that’s what’s really driving the trend. And I think the picture, though, is in the background here, and it’s been a constant element of the homelessness crisis in the U.S., is a long-term federal underinvestment in affordable housing, something that was really begun, these cuts, in the Reagan era and, in the opinion of advocates, has never really been properly redressed since then.

AMY GOODMAN: This is 62-year-old Willie Romines, who took a bus from Key West to Ocala, Florida. He told The Guardian, because he accepted a free bus ticket from the shelter he was living in, he was barred from returning.

WILLIE ROMINES: It’s like, “Close the door. Get out of here. We bought you a bus ticket. You can’t come back.” That put a hurting on me. I feel like I was swindled. Since I’ve been banned from the shelter, I’ve stayed on Smathers Beach, behind buildings, behind bushes, hedgerows. I’ve slept next to dumpsters and stuff like that. They tell you anything, because they want you out of here. They want all the homeless out of Key West.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is Rose Thompson, a 58-year-old woman who relocated from Florida to West Virginia. She told The Guardian she went back to Key West only three weeks after leaving.

ROSE THOMPSON: I had a seizure and my heart stopped at the soup kitchen. So I wanted to go back to West Virginia and stay with my daughter. They were staying, it’s like, in a three-bedroom trailer. And then her little boy slept on the couch, where I was sleeping, so they wanted me to go to a homeless shelter. And I didn’t want to stay in a homeless shelter in West Virginia, because I don’t know anybody up there anymore. And from the time I left here to the time I got back, it was exactly three weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about these people, Alastair Gee, and talk about, you know, what their circumstances were? And also, how much are taxpayers paying for all of that, simply for them to return?

ALASTAIR GEE: Well, Willie was a person that one of our reporters met in Key West. And as you mentioned earlier, the Key West scheme is really unusual. Of the 15 or so programs from which we received data, Key West was the only one that had this stipulation. They essentially made you sign a kind of contract. If you went to the program and requested a bus ticket, they would ask you to essentially declare that should you return to Key West, that you wouldn’t avail yourself of homeless services there on the island again. And so, what this means is that you have people like Rose, for instance, who are sleeping on beaches, sleeping outdoors, because, essentially, they have taken a ticket. It didn’t work out, where they came from, and they’ve just ended up back in Key West.

So, in the case of Rose, for instance, she wanted to travel back to West Virginia, where she’s from, to stay with her daughter. She got back there. It turns out that her daughter simply wasn’t able to offer her the kind of support that she needed to find her way out of homelessness. Rose would be living in an overcrowded trailer. She was sleeping on a couch. And eventually, her daughter had to take her to a homeless shelter in West Virginia. So Rose ended up coming back to Key West, and that’s where she is now. And so she simply has no shelter. She has nowhere to stay. And so, she, unfortunately, is sleeping outdoors there.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Alastair—

ALASTAIR GEE: And I think you also—oh, please, go ahead.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: No, please, go ahead.

ALASTAIR GEE: Could you remind me of your other question?

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, talking about, you know, the cost to taxpayers, since what we’re talking about now is people who take these journeys, whether bus or plane, some feeling coerced, and then they end up back in the city they’re in.

ALASTAIR GEE: Right, right. Well, we have figures from the city of New York, for instance, which budgets half a million dollars per year for its program. And cities around the country, while not quite—they don’t have programs that are quite as large as the one in New York, I think we can safely assume that over the course of years, that cities are spending millions of dollars on these kinds of things. And it’s interesting because the efficacy of these programs. While cities would say that these are a good way to help people get out of homelessness, there really isn’t very much long-term research that testifies to that.

So, for instance, we spoke to the city of San Francisco and requested data from them. And they provided many, many years’ data, going back to the 2000s. But, for instance, for a 5-year period, between 2010 and 2015, when the city offered thousands of people bus tickets and thousands of people left the city, the city could only provide us records showing that it had been able to follow up with only three of those people to find out if their situation at the other end had improved. And that was really—that was a similar situation across the board. While a few smaller cities did have some long-term follow-up data, mostly they did not, and the cities really had no idea what happened to the people who had taken tickets out of their cities.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Alastair, what did you find out about the percentage of people who opt to leave the cities they’re living in, the homeless people who opt to leave, and those who are, in some sense, coerced or forced to leave?

ALASTAIR GEE: Well, that’s a really good question. And I think it’s important to mention from the outset that the majority of people who are homeless in any given city are from that city. Whenever cities do their homeless population counts, they often do surveys, and they find this trend that’s replicated across the board. And so, it is actually a myth that—as is common in many cities in the West, that somebody is drawn there for the services or for the weather. Most people are actually from that city. But for the percentage, the small percentage, that aren’t from that city, these programs can be a good choice.

In terms of coercion, it wasn’t something that we found very often. These programs generally are voluntary. And the way it works is that someone would take themselves to a ticket office, and they would make a request for a ticket. And that’s how it would work. But in the case of one family in New York, the Ortiz family, we did find that they felt that they had been given no other choice than to take a ticket. Jose Ortiz, he told us that he had gone to the city’s homelessness department in the summer this year. His family, his young family, had been homeless in the city of New York, and he had requested some help, just in time, really, to help him get his family back on his feet. He says that the city determined that because he had, in their words, a better housing option on the island of Puerto Rico, that he wasn’t eligible for homeless services in the city of New York. And in his terms, as it was laid out to him, he was given only one choice, which was to take the plane ticket out of town.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what’s happening in San Francisco right now, which is experiencing a homeless crisis, looking at the impact that the number of people bused out of the city have? And also, right here in New York City, if you can talk about one of the first places to adopt this so-called relocation program?

ALASTAIR GEE: Yeah. So, to deal with the second point first, New York, as far as we could tell, was the first major city to launch a program. Its program came about in around 1987. And it hasn’t continued without pause since then. It was relaunched in its current form under Mayor Bloomberg. But it certainly has a lot of history there.

The program in San Francisco came about later, in around 2005. And officials in San Francisco told me that—in fact, a police commander told me that they were looking to the example of the city of Sacramento, and they thought, “Why can’t we have a program like that?”

And so, the effect, as you mentioned, on San Francisco’s homeless population has been quite dramatic. We looked at the homeless counts in San Francisco over many years, and we tried to calculate what the population in the city, the homeless population, would have been had this program not existed. And we did a very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation. And over the years, around 10-and-a-half thousand people have received bus tickets from San Francisco’s Homeward Bound program. And its homeless population today, on any one night, is around 7,000 to 8,000 people. And so, of course, our calculation doesn’t take into account people who might have come into San Francisco through other bus programs, for which we don’t have data, or people who have been—become homeless in San Francisco while living in San Francisco. But, very roughly, we estimated that the population of San Francisco could have been 18,000 homeless people on any one night, had this program not existed. So, that’s more than double the current population of around 7,000 to 8,000.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, let’s go to Key West, Florida. You spoke also to a former shelter official there in Key West who defended the policy of banning people who have been relocated from returning. This is Mike Tolbert.

MIKE TOLBERT: The reason for a one-way ticket, we don’t want a revolving-door travel agency. If you let them come back, they’re going to want another ticket. And then you got the people, everybody wanting a ticket, everybody wanting to come back. And it’s just not going to work. The program will not work. The folks who take the bus ticket and complain about it, they think we owe them something. We gave you all we can give you. There is nothing else we can give you. I’m good with it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Mike Tolbert in Key West, Florida. Alastair, can you say how representative his example is of other homeless people in Florida and even elsewhere?

ALASTAIR GEE: Well, the Key West program, they were certainly the most, I would say, forthright about that kind of thing. As I mentioned, the Key West program did seem, in some senses, to be an outlier, I would say, because other programs emphasize more that this was more of a humanitarian effort to assist people. And Key West came down quite squarely—I suppose they would say that it was both a humanitarian thing, but also they were doing a good thing by reducing the population and by giving these people one-way tickets out of town. And so, I wouldn’t say that that attitude is extremely representative, but it is very, very unusual. And that’s why we sent some reporters there to meet people like Willie and Rose and, certainly, to hear more about their stories.

AMY GOODMAN: And the story of the person who was flown from New York to Puerto Rico, explain that program, and particularly now, after Hurricane Maria.

ALASTAIR GEE: Right. Well, the Ortiz family, as I mentioned, they took a plane to get back in August. And as they felt, it was under duress. They really didn’t want to go. It was a man, his wife, their two young children. And our reporter noticed that the parents were doing their best to put a brave face on it when they were at JFK. The kids were very, very happy to be getting on a plane. But the parents, they were really trying to mask their feelings about it. And so, they traveled back to Puerto Rico in August. We were able to stay in touch with them a little bit over Facebook. When Jose Ortiz returned to Puerto Rico, he messaged us to say that he had a job interview as a security guard, and so he was feeling optimistic about that. But once the hurricane had been through, it became hard for us to get in touch with him. And we really, despite our efforts, haven’t been able to get back in touch with them since then, and so we don’t know now how—how that family is doing, unfortunately.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, taxes. That’s the big news of the Christmas and holiday weekends, as President Trump has just signed this and said that this helps poor and working people. What are your concerns about taxes and homelessness?

ALASTAIR GEE: Well, all the advocates that I spoke to were hoping, maybe vainly, I think they would say, that tax reform might be a boon for affordable housing, for the construction of homes that really the most impoverished Americans could afford. And there was particular focus on the mortgage interest deduction, which is this tax break that you can take. Essentially, it goes to the wealthiest Americans, who use it to help them buy more expensive homes. That’s the verdict of tax analysts, even though it’s intended as a kind of middle-class tax break. And so, experts were hoping that this would be reformed and that the revenues from that would be channeled into affordable housing construction.

As it stands, the government spends twice as much on that tax break for the wealthiest Americans than it does on rental assistance, the Section 8 program, for the poorest Americans. And so, in the reconciled version of the tax bill, as it appears now, there has been a little bit of reform of that deduction, but it doesn’t seem that that money—at least it hasn’t been stated it outright that that money is going to be channeled into affordable housing production, which is what advocates would really like. So, I think there’s a broad sense of disappointment that this was an opportunity here to really, potentially, transform the landscape, and that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

AMY GOODMAN: And the freezing weather?

ALASTAIR GEE: The freezing weather is—extreme elements are really the bane of a homeless person’s life. We reported back in the summer, the burning temperatures in Arizona during that heat wave was extremely difficult for homeless people, who couldn’t even walk on the asphalt because it was burning. And it’s the same with the cold weather today. Unfortunately, it’s very, very hard to make it on the streets if you’re trying to simply stay alive because of the elements. I’m sure in Washington, D.C., as is always the case and as has been the case for decades now, we’ll see people trying to warm themselves on grates, because that is, for many people, simply the only source of heat that there is. And so, I know that advocates across the West, in particular, are just looking out for that and watching for snowfall and trying to help people as best they can.

AMY GOODMAN: Absolutely astounding weather from International Falls, Minnesota, 37 degrees below zero. Erie, Pennsylvania, over five feet of snow has fallen there, and they expect more. Alastair Gee, thanks so much for being with us, homelessness editor for The Guardian. His team’s latest article, based on an 18-month investigation, is headlined “Bussed out: How America moves its homeless.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.

When we come back, we’ll be speaking with a journalist about her own memoir. It’s called Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind. Stay with us.

ThinkProgress

Trump decimates two national monuments in ‘historic action’

It’s the largest-ever reduction in U.S. history.

Natasha Geiling       December 4, 2017

(CREDIT: AP PHOTO/RICK BOWMER, FILE)

Speaking outside of the Utah State Capitol on Monday, President Donald Trump announced the largest-ever reduction of a national monument in the nation’s history, shrinking Bears Ears National Monument by some 1.1 million acres, or nearly 85 percent.

“I know all of you feel blessed to be living among some of the most glorious natural wonders anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. Guess what? They are wrong. The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best, and you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know how best to conserve this land for many generations to come.”

Trump also announced that he would be reducing Grand Staircase-Escalante, another national monument in Utah, to nearly half its original size. He called the move “a very historic action” and criticized previous administrations for abusing the Antiquities Act, which allows presidents to designate areas of federal land as national monuments in order to protect natural, cultural, or scientific features. In total, Trump’s actions on Tuesday will result in the loss of some 2 million acres of national monuments designation.

“Our precious natural treasures must be protected, and they, from now on, will be protected,” Trump said. “Under my administration we will advance that protection through a truly representative process, one that listens to the local communities that know the land the best and cherishes [sic] the land the most.”

American public to President Trump: Leave our national monuments alone

The public comment period for Trump’s monument review has ended, and the response was overwhelming.

The two reductions come after a Department of Interior review, initiated in April, which looked at all national monuments created since 1996. Trump, at the time, said that the review would put an end to “egregious abuse of federal power” that has resulted in a “massive federal land grab.” During the signing ceremony, Trump singled out Bears Ears National Monument as an example of the federal government using its authority to undermine local control over public lands, saying that the monument was designated “over the profound objections of the citizens of Utah.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said that the purpose of the review was to ensure that all stakeholders had a chance to participate in the creation of a national monument. But the review was dogged by accusations of industry-favoritism and a lack of transparency, leading one Nevada representative to describe the process as a “sham” in an interview with ThinkProgress.

In August, Zinke released his recommendations following the review, which suggested that the administration should reduce or change the boundaries of six national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Bears Ears was designated by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, as one of his final major designations as president. Environmentalists and indigenous groups have fought for years to protect Bears Ears, arguing that the area holds numerous sites of historical, cultural, and ecological significance.

Trump’s order on national monuments decried as corporate ‘give-away’

Interior Department given narrow time frame to complete review of monuments.

But Bears Ears is also rich in uranium, and home to the nation’s last operating uranium mill. In his final designation, President Obama chose to leave much of the area’s uranium deposits outside of the monument’s boundaries, but banned new mining operations within the monument. Still, Utah lawmakers wrote to Secretary Zinke in June, arguing that the national monument could hinder the mill’s business and “permanently” eliminate the state’s uranium mining industry.

On Monday, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) thanked Trump for “giving a voice to the people of Utah who for too long have been overlooked in the debate about public lands.” Polling shows that Utah residents are almost evenly split on the issue, though Bears Ears tends to be more controversial than Grand Staircase-Escalate. An October poll commissioned by commissioned by The Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics found that 51 percent of Utahans polled in October favored shrinking Bears Ears, but 53 percent opposed breaking up Grand Staircase-Escalante.

During the public comment period for the Interior’s monuments review elicited more than 2.5 million responses, of which 98 percent were supportive of maintaining or expanding current protections for national monuments, according to a Center for Western Priorities analysis. Before Trump’s announcement on Monday, thousands of protesters gathered in Salt Lake City to oppose reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Trump’s decision was immediately met with harsh criticism from environmental and conservation groups, which painted the move as an assault on necessary protections for America’s most sensitive lands.

“The gutting of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante is a violent act, an assault on America’s public lands,” Terry Tempest Williams, a Center for Biological Diversity board member and Utah native, said in a press statement. “With Senator Orrin Hatch by his side, Trump’s is an act of conscious aggression waged against the health and protection of our communities, both human and wild. In a word: criminal.”

The decision will now head to the courts, which will have to decide whether the Antiquities Act gives the president authority to reduce — as well as designate — national monuments. The Navajo Nation has already said that it will challenge Trump’s directive, as have a handful of Democratic attorneys general. Presidents have, in the past, reduced the size of national monuments, though those changes have never been challenged in court.

“President Trump’s attempt to dismember two of America’s most remarkable National Monuments is a blatant attack on the integrity of one of our nation’s oldest and most important conservation laws,” David J. Hayes, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at NYU School of Law and former Interior deputy secretary during both the Obama and Clinton administrations, said in a press statement. “Progressive state attorneys general are on record: the President does not have the authority under the Antiquities Act to override previous Presidents’ decisions to protect special public lands for the benefit of future generations through national monument designations. Only the Congress can do that.”

EcoWatch – By DeSmog      

U.S. Bank Quietly Joins $4 Billion Deal With Dakota Access Owner Declaring End to Oil and Gas Pipeline Loans

U.S. Bank building in downtown Bismark, North Dakota. Randy Hoffman / Flicker

By Sharon Kelly            December 21, 2027

At a shareholder meeting this past spring, U.S. Bank announced it would be the first large American bank to completely stop issuing loans for oil and gas pipeline construction projects.

Environmental groups, indigenous activists and divestment advocates hailed U.S. Bank’s announcement as a triumph.

Yet that triumph—and the bank’s commitment—seems less sure with the news that U.S. Bank has entered into a new $4 billion loan deal with the company behind the contentious Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL).

Divestment Success?

For months, the bank had been under fire for financing the Dakota Access pipeline by providing over a quarter billion dollars worth of funding to its builder, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). Environmentalists famously dropped a banner calling on U.S. Bank to divest from DAPL at the New Years 2017 Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears football game.

The language of the bank’s new policy seemed blunt.

“The company does not provide project financing for the construction of oil or natural gas pipelines,” U.S. Bancorp, parent company of U.S. Bank, wrote in its April 2017 Environmental Responsibility Policy.

Divestment advocates cheered. “We applaud this progressive decision from U.S. Bank,” an Honor the Earth representative said in a statement, as the bank’s new policy made headlines.

Some advocates remained skeptical, however, pointing out that the line of credit extended to Energy Transfer Partners wouldn’t be covered by that language, because it could be considered a loan for the company as a whole, not the more specific “project financing.” And U.S. Bank’s CEO told shareholders that his bank wouldn’t end its existing Energy Transfer Partners deal, saying that instead it would “fulfill that contract and commitment.”

“We know there are always loopholes through which banks will try to pass off responsibility,” Rachel Heaton of Mazaska Talks and a Muckleshoot Tribe member told Yes Magazine, “but we will continue to resist until these banks completely divest from all pipeline and fossil fuel corporations and incorporate the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of Indigenous peoples into their corporate lending structures.”

Even if that specific contract wasn’t going to be torn up, environmental groups hoped that in the future, the bank would limit its funding of fossil fuel projects.

CEO Andy Cecere “strongly implied that the bank would pull back from pipelines and ETP in particular—aside from its obligations under its ‘contract with ETP’ (i.e. its existing credit facility),” Brant Olson, Program Director at ClimateTruth.org, told DeSmog.

U.S. Bank’s new environmental policy added that any new deals the bank did with companies in the oil and gas pipeline industry would have to undergo additional scrutiny, including a look at their environmental record.

“We want to confirm that a firm’s policies and processes are sound and effective as they relate to the environment and the community in which it operates,” the policy adds. “In accordance with our environmental responsibility commitment, we prohibit relationships with customers who participate in any illegal activities.”

Transferring More Money to Energy Transfer Partners

That’s why it was so striking when Energy Transfer Partners quietly announced in a Dec. 1 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that U.S. Bank was part of ETP’s new $4 billion credit deal.

ETP’s projects include numerous controversial fossil fuel pipelines nationwide, including not only Dakota Access, but also Mariner East 2, Rover, Bayou Bridge, and the Energy Transfer Crude Oil pipeline.

Asked whether Energy Transfer Partners had passed muster during the additional due diligence in U.S. Bank’s much-lauded environmental review policy, U.S. Bank’s spokesperson Cheryl Leamon declined to comment. “As a matter of policy, we do not discuss customer relationships,” she told DeSmog in an email.

Environmentalists hoped that this was a chance for U.S. Bank to end its dealings with ETP. StopETP.org, a coalition of national and local environmental and indigenous rights groups, wrote a letter to the bank in November, urging it to use the chance to cut ties with ETP, which was seeking to renew its $4 billion credit line in a deal involving numerous major banks.

But U.S. Bank has apparently refused, said Food and Water Watch senior researcher Dr. Hugh MacMillan, “after having scored praise back in May for its new pipeline finance policy.”

U.S. Bank did not respond when asked about the types of law-breaking that might cross the line and cause a borrower to fail the bank’s new due diligence requirements.

Illegal Activities

The bank’s professed wariness of fossil fuel companies had drawn an angry response from the Energy Equipment and Infrastructure Alliance, which had fired off a letter to U.S. Bank protesting the new policy. “This creates the presumption that firms and people involved in these areas, including those providing construction, equipment, materials, services or other support to these operations, are more likely than all others to be ‘bad actors’,” the trade group wrote, “thus requiring a higher level of scrutiny.”

That additional environmental record review was widely expected to be particularly bad news for Energy Transfer Partners, which has an environmental record that includes more than 300 pipeline incidents in the past decade, causing over $67 million dollars in property damage, according to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

“From January 2010 through June 2017, ETP spilled hazardous liquids near water crossings more than twice as frequently as any other pipeline company in the United States this decade [and w]as responsible for almost 20 percent of all hazardous liquid spills near water crossings,” a recently published report by the Waterkeeper Alliance noted.

In November, one of Energy Transfer Partners’ pipeline projects was was sued by Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency over 13 violations of the state’s environmental laws, including spewing millions of gallons of drilling fluid into the state’s wetlands.

“Among other things, ETP has caused seven industrial spills during the construction of the $4.2 billion natural gas pipeline through Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan,” Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. and Maria Cantwell, ranking members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and Energy and Natural Resources, respectively, wrote in a July 27, 2017 letter to federal regulators decrying ETP’s track record on complying with environmental laws.

The company’s spill record has even drawn concern from investors, with The Street reporting, “‘Energy Transfer seems to have an approach where they stick to the minimum requirements instead of exceeding them,’ Genscape natural gas analyst Colette Breshears said.”

Sunoco Logistics, which merged into ETP last year, had the worst oil spill record of any company in the industry, a 2016 Reuters investigative report found.

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