by Paul Mason
‘I could go get a job, but the kind of jobs I could get right away are not going to pay me as much as I get on welfare: eight dollars an hour.’
Where would you start to put things right? He stares over my shoulder, searching for a way to put this nicely. ‘Needs to start with President Obama.’ What does he need to do? ‘Help! Start helping, and he is helping—but people gotta help too—stop playing games.’ He is bitter about the war spending:
‘They say they’re spending too much Federal money, but on what? Too much money on that war they got over there. Sure, they created jobs, but …’—and Maurice heaves another deep sigh—‘if you’re not the first layer to get there, you’re not getting the job.’
Hostility to war spending and bitter disillusion with President Obama run through this dormitory like a grassfire, and there is more. A man crawls over to me across two mattresses crowded with his own large contingent of children:
I’m a Native American, we’re Navajo. What I want you to report is: where is all the money going from the casinos? Our nation has a casino but they keep all the money. It’s the same everywhere. Why don’t they use the money to help their own people?
In the morning Reynalds takes me to a street corner, right by the Interstate, where the poorest motels are clustered. Outside one stands a drunken woman in tears: her sister is about to be evicted, together with her sister’s boyfriend, who’s in a wheelchair. ‘He’s disabled, but they don’ even have a shower.’ Reynalds and his co-worker go into the Evangelical spiel that will soon bring three more people to sit around the table and hear Bible stories, repent and put their heads down on a clean mattress.
He tells me: ‘The motels fill up at the beginning of every month, when the social security checks get paid; and then about two weeks later they migrate over to Joy Junction, as the money runs out.’
He’s not against these cheap motels, because, while they will sometimes ask the unemployed to work in return for their keep, they extend unofficial credit, and if they didn’t exist there’d be thousands more on the streets. There are at least fifteen motels like this in Albuquerque, he says, and, of course, ‘It’s like this at the edge of every American city.’
This is what the automobile stupor and the bluegrass music and the Glenn Beck monologues numb you to as you speed along America’s highways. Those vintage motel signs, which summon up the era of Elvis and full employment, are in reality flagstaffs for the hidden homeless. They are right next to you, on every highway in America.
And, just like in the 1930s, there is a president in the White House elected on a platform of hope, radicalism and concern for the working poor. And like in the 1930s, Congress is determined to stop him—insofar as he has not stopped himself.
As I leave Albuquerque the landscape becomes drier. The spectacular red canyon walls of the Mogollón Rim dwarf the mobile homes of the Pueblo nation, whose land this once was. There are no Native American shacks in Steinbeck, and no red canyons; no giant cacti, no endless days of blue sky, no vast gulches and ravines. That’s because Steinbeck himself never made the whole journey. The Grapes of Wrath gives little sense of the vastness, the emptiness, the distances of the south-west. To real-life Okies, this land must have seemed like a different planet.
But Steinbeck’s book isn’t really about the journey. It is about the conflict and injustice that the Joads find at their journey’s end: the strikes, vigilante squads, roadblocks and anti-migrant prejudices that greeted them in California. Today, you don’t have to get to the end of the journey to find all that.
They call you Alien
They were hungry, they were fierce, and they had hoped to find a home. And they found only hatred.
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a world of pink and green: the tent awnings are olive drab army-issue, ‘from the Korean War’, says the prison guard proudly. Pink is the colour of the inmates’ socks, towels, pillowcases and underpants: it’s been chosen to humiliate them. Their overalls are, of course, striped black and white. Their skin, in the ICE wing, is usually a shade of brown.
This is Arizona’s notorious Tent City jail. The ICE wing is where those arrested for migration crimes are segregated: about 100 men out of 500 in the jail. They live in the tents twenty-four hours a day, the side-awnings open to the elements. As they crunch across the gravel in the harsh sunlight to fetch water, they sling their towels around their necks: the guard yells at them if they try to cover their heads. On the day I was there the temperature reached 114 degrees Fahrenheit, but it’s been known to hit 122.
In heat like this you mostly sleep; numerous young men are stretched out on the close-packed bunk beds. Others read: there is a high level of literacy in Tent City, and a low level of menace and craziness compared to other jails. That is because most of these men are not hardened criminals: their crime is being Mexican.
In May 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law called SB 1070. This required migrants to present proof of their legal status on demand: if stopped for speeding, if questioned at work, if questioned as a witness to a grocery-store heist, if noticed existing by a bored cop. It’s a crime if you cannot prove you are American.
That’s a problem: officially there are 11 million undocumented migrants in America. Unofficially, it could be as high as 20 million. In any case, around a million live in Phoenix, Arizona. You can see them hanging out for work on the corners of the car parks at big hardware stores; their hands wash the linen at hotels and make the burritos and the tacos in fast-food joints.
Migrant children already had poverty, dislocation and the language issue to contend with (Arizona declared itself an English-language-only state in 1986). Now they have something else: the skin-crawling fear that if your mother goes to the corner store she will not come back. Leticia Ramírez, mother of three and an activist in the migrant group Puente, tells me:
We are living in a state of fear. We can’t even go to the store—can’t even go out to the park, the zoo, the mall—because the kids fear the police might stop their parents. So we just stay home. They say: ‘If you go out, you may not come back.’ One family bought three months of groceries so they don’t have to leave the home.
To enforce SB 1070 and the other laws that criminalize Hispanic migrants, Phoenix has Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And Sheriff Joe has Tent City, and boy, is Joe keen for the media to see Tent City.
My guide, John, a prison guard, is dressed in Iraq-style combat gear and carries a Taser on his belt. As we pass the row of blue telephones, positioned in full sunshine on an outside wall, John tells me proudly:
‘The phone calls are at a premium price; we make ’em pay over, to help fund the cost of their own detention.’
In fact, much of Sheriff Joe’s operation here is designed to keep costs down. The tents themselves are sixty years old; there are only two meals a day, ‘to minimize catering costs’; the guards drink out-of-date Gatorade. There are no heating expenses in winter (on the coldest desert nights the inmates steal plastic refuse sacks to stuff between the sheets); and the a/c in the prisoners’ mess room comes cheap—as one prisoner says, sotto voce: ‘They only turned the a/c on for you.’
The average sentence they’re serving is twenty-six days, the maximum a year. After that they’ll be processed by ICE, the Federal deportation service.
Fernando López’s mistake was to drive without a licence: he couldn’t get one because he has no documents to prove he is a legal migrant, and that’s because—though he does not say the words to me himself—he did not come here legally. In June 2011 he got stopped for speeding.
They took me to Fourth Avenue Jail, Arpaio’s jail. They questioned me for four days. I won’t lie to you—in the first twelve hours they must have had me in eight to ten different cells. It’s a psychological game, the way they talk to you, even look at you. You don’t see the sun; you don’t know what time it is. And they’re always telling you: sign this and you’ll be deported immediately. But it’s not true. I
refused to answer questions and didn’t sign, so they made my process even longer. They took me to the ICE department—eight hours; then Florence, a Federal clearing jail, for three days; then detention. I was there for a month—for a traffic violation. When you’re there you don’t have a name: you’re just a number—and they call you Alien, like you’re from another planet.
López is slight and soft spoken: he leans forward to explain in a semi-whisper the effect of Arizona’s ‘attrition’ law: ‘They cannot deport eleven million people, so they play this game. They are trying to scare them, so they don’t have any other option than to leave—they are going to make us self-deport.’
When I ask if the strategy is working, he answers with a question: ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard about NAFTA?’ He says the trade deal between the USA and Mexico, together with other bilateral deals, is making poverty south of the border worse:
When I was in jail I met guys from El Salvador, Ecuador, Honduras—conditions are really hard—they cannot live there; they got no option but to go to other countries. It’s not that they want to be here, but they just don’t have any other option. SB 1070 won’t stop them coming. Arpaio made videos of prisoners in the chain gang under the sun: people see this, but they still come.
Latino migrants work, but for precious little: it is a certainty that the impact of illegal immigration is to reduce wages for people like Maurice and Larry in New Mexico, who are US citizens. Fernando tells me that some of his friends are working a 100-hour week, for below the minimum wage: housekeeping, landscaping, kitchen work.
‘They should be creating jobs instead of jails, building schools instead of jails.’
But as Fernando and I sit there in the sweltering heat of the migrant centre, beneath posters with the slogan ‘We Are Human’ and a grimly humorous bumper sticker saying ‘I’m Mexican, Pull Me Over’—President Obama is getting ready to sign away two trillion dollars’ worth of money for building schools and creating jobs. His only beef with the majority in the House is whether it should go to $2.5 trillion.
‘I don’t trust him,’ López says, pointing out that Obama also promised a law to offer illegal migrants ‘earned amnesty’. But that did not happen.
In fact, by the summer of 2011 Obama was in trouble: healthcare reform got whittled down to a minimum and was now gridlocked at state level; a law to lift obstacles to trade union organization never got to first base; the promised pullout from Afghanistan turned into a surge of troops; and the Dodd–Frank Act, aimed at curtailing the power of Wall Street, had become a toothless object of derision on Wall Street.
But Obama was so determined to stick at two trillion dollars’ worth of cuts for the needy—instead of $2.5 trillion—that, at one point, he walked out of negotiations with the Republicans. ‘I’d rather see my presidency destroyed than give in on this,’ he’s reported to have said. And this rancour, this left—right stand-off, is now buzzing and twanging on every radio station as I head out of Phoenix, west, for California.
A museum of the twentieth century
As I leave Phoenix the radio sings out adverts for repossessed ranches in the desert: ‘You can hunt there, ride—anything you want: it’s your ranch!’ urges the disc jockey. It’s a reminder of the basic problem: America had a house-price boom that is now bust—and twenty years of credit-fuelled growth are over, so even the mild recovery in 2010–11 is failing to create jobs. Meanwhile, the money that fuelled the recovery has pushed America into deep and unsustainable debt.
The gas stations are far apart and the Mojave desert is wide, so I’ve timed my refills rigorously against the distances on the GPS. But the GPS does not agree with the Grand Marquis’s fuel gauge, so I glide into the desert truck-stop at Cedar Hills, in neutral gear, having coasted eight miles downhill on empty.
The store in the gas station is full of stuff that’s by now emblematic of the Interstate’s economy: the stimulant drinks in yellow bottles that keep truck drivers going all night, the Confederate-flag-themed bandannas to wear, defiantly, instead of a helmet as you cruise along on your Harley. Plus those Route 66 stickers, baseball caps and t-shirts. As with so much of today’s American culture, the subtext—if you dare admit it—is ‘We were great once’.
I cross the Mojave Desert in the dark and get to Bakersfield, California at midnight: this is the town where the Joads planned to find work in the orange groves. The bar at the hotel is full of oilmen and military guys: the economy of Kern County is no longer dominated by agriculture. The main employers are the Air Force, a naval weaponry base, big oil and private healthcare. Despite that there is still 15 per cent unemployment here—17 per cent at the height of the crisis.
The town is, like so many in the southern USA, a boomtown suburb that’s been busted. Its population grew 25 per cent in the 2000s decade, but since the bust, one in seventy homes is in repossession.
But, like I say, the bar is heaving with clean-shaven, loud young guys with lantern jaws: their ladies are kitted out in that regulation designer bling you see wherever easy money flows. This is Obama’s fiscal and monetary stimulus in action: it has engorged the military and—by boosting the global price of everything—made the oilman’s life sweet too.
But the parking valet, a Mexican who casts a disgusted eye over the Red Bull cans and trail mix strewn all over the car, tells the other side of the story:
‘You can’t get work here anymore: $8 an hour for picking fruit. Why bother? A lot of the farmers sold their fields to build homes on. My family, my Mom picked fruit here for thirty years but, well …’ He lets his hands drop to his sides and looks shamefacedly at his uniform.
In the morning I go in search of the spot where Steinbeck must have seen this: ‘They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them and then suddenly they saw the great valley below them …’
In the John Ford film there’s a great top shot of the San Joaquin valley, but the Interstate highway obliterates the old road now. I drive into a vineyard to find the view that must have greeted the real-life Okies as they crossed the mountains. It’s still beautiful. But like the rest of America, hidden from your gaze by the mainstream media, it’s a story of poverty for some, work for others; and widespread denial of where much of the work comes from, and what averted the disaster back in 2008: the state.
Steinbeck, who had lived most of his life in California, was among the first to publicize conditions for the Dust Bowl migrants, and to pillory the near-racist attitudes of those who hounded them. Though he faced resistance from the cheap-labour bosses and the police, by the time he wrote the novel Steinbeck was cutting with the grain in terms of Federal policy. For the book is not just about a journey: it is about the search for a new economic model based on state intervention to guarantee full employment, and about a new social model based on solidarity and tolerance.
This was Roosevelt’s New Deal, which would, between 1933 and 1937, create twelve million jobs, power America out of double-dip recession and—in the teeth of opposition from corporations—redistribute wealth. Roosevelt would, within days of taking office, abolish speculation in the finance system. Within two years he would pass pro-union legislation, which led to the biggest one-time uplift in wages and conditions in US history. He would raise taxes on the rich and spend Federal money, unashamedly, not just on social programmes but in creating art and theatre for the people: 40,000 actors and directors and scene painters were employed in the first year.
The Joads, then, had Roosevelt. People like Larry Antista and Fernando López have Barack Obama. And on Sunday night, 31 July 2011, those tuning into the radio on Interstate 40 would hear the news: President Obama had agreed to make $2.5 trillion in spending cuts, mostly on infrastructure and welfare payments to the poor. ‘An about-face’, as the New York Times described it, ‘in the federal government’s role from outsize spending in the immediate aftermath of recession to outsize cuts in the future.’
The boss of Pimco, one of America’s biggest
investment firms, summarized the impact of the debt-ceiling deal: ‘Unemployment will be higher than it would have been otherwise. Growth will be lower than it would be otherwise. And inequality will be worse than it would be otherwise.’2
That summer, key indicators of US economic growth began to flatten off. The Federal Reserve responded with a third tweak to its money-printing operation, and Obama published a job creation plan. But the US recovery was, by now, intertwined with the fate of the global economy, and this—because of the euro crisis—was looking grim.
My trip from Oklahoma to LA was conceived as a snapshot of America struggling with the depths of its jobs and housing drought. If we are very unlucky, the depths may lie ahead of us.
9
1848 Redux: What We Can Learn from the Last Global Wave
Paris, December 1847. One winter morning Frédéric Moreau, the archetypal ‘graduate with no future’, left his student hovel on the Parisian Left Bank, his mind, as always, on his forlorn romance. But history intervened:
Youths in groups of anything from five to twelve were strolling around arm in arm, occasionally going up to larger groups which were standing here and there; at the far end of the square, against the iron railings, men in smocks were holding forth … policemen were walking up and down … Everybody wore a mysterious, anxious expression; clearly there was something in the air, and on each person’s lips there was an unspoken question.1
This is how Moreau, the hero of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, collided with the revolution of 1848, and like his romance it did not end well.
On 22 February 1848 the ‘men in smocks’—the Parisian workers—overthrew the monarchy and forced the middle class to declare a republic. It was a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat.
In 1848 a wave of revolutions swept Europe: by March, Austria, Hungary, Poland and many states of the future Germany were facing insurrections, often led by students and the radicalized middle class, with the small, mainly craft-based, working class in support. Elsewhere—as in Jordan and Morocco in 2011—riots and demonstrations forced beleaguered monarchs into constitutional reform.