Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Drivers caught the event on their cell phones and posted pictures and videos of the clouded sky on YouTube and Facebook. Twenty-seven people—most of them drivers caught on the 1-10 freeway—were treated in local emergency rooms for trouble breathing. The freeway was closed for three hours, and a "Shelter in Place" command was ordered for the nearby population. But the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality reported that its detection equipment showed N.D.—"non-detect." Citizens were left to reconcile the fact that their i Phones and computer screens were saying, "plain, obvious, terrible," and the state was saying, "Didn't see it. Can't tell."

  The General is turning his truck around and we are returning back up River Road, along Cancer Alley to Baton Rouge. I ask him to respond to a question I often heard, "If companies want to avoid accidents themselves, why do we need the government?" He answered, "Less regulated industries have more accidents and more regulated industries have fewer; regulation works." Then with a wry smile, he continues, "But here we have 'self-regulation.' The federal EPA passes the buck to the state Department of Environmental Quality. The state passes the buck to the oil companies. They regulate themselves. It's like me driving this truck 100 miles an hour down River Road. I call up the Highway Patrol and say, 'Officer, excuse me. I'm speeding right now.'"

  In all the talk at the gatherings for Congressmen Boustany and Landry and around the table at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about'freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution. General Honoré was no nervous nelly, but he was mindful of the vulnerable communities around the "self-regulated" plants. "Part of the psychological program is that people think they're free when they're not," he said. "A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren't free to swim."

  How did the psychological program work? Maybe I was missing the most obvious answer: jobs. Oil brought jobs. Jobs brought money. Money brought a better life—school, home, health, a piece of the American Dream. Maybe it was not so much that the people sitting with me in the audiences of the campaign rallies hated the federal government but that they loved the private sector, especially the queen of it in Louisiana: oil. Maybe I'd been so busy listening to the "unsung tune" about cleaning up pollution that I wasn't hearing the loud and clear song about jobs. After all, Jeff Landry had held up a sign in Congress during a speech by President Obama: "Oil = Jobs." And maybe government regulations were killing them.

  General Honoré had told me that talk was of jobs, jobs, jobs, and there was "just enough in it" that people believed it. He'd told me that the "psychological program" involved the belief that there was a terrible choice between jobs and clean water or air. But how many jobs depended on oil? And was it either-or? Before I understood government, maybe I had to understand the private sector. Maybe there were tough choices I didn't see.

  5

  The "Least Resistant Personality"

  Before me is Dr. Paul Templet, a PhD in chemical physics, recently retired from teaching at Louisiana State University, and for four years head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, during which time pollution of all kinds dropped in half. Templet knows jobs, environment, and trade-offs, and we're seated around a table with coffee and cake to talk about this in a friend's home in Baton Rouge. His manner is friendly, energetic, purposeful. He wears a mustache, goatee, and dark-tinted glasses and doesn't look his seventy-three years. He is wearing a rust-colored T-shirt and khaki pants and lifts his coffee cup to his mouth in a thoughtful manner, as if respecting the importance of the topic at hand more than the coffee. A Cajun born in Port Allen, Louisiana, as a teenager he had unloaded sandbags from railroad cars at Dow Chemical.

  In the speeches of Congressmen Boustany, Landry, and Vitter, and of Governor Jindal, a certain logic unfolded. These were leaders my Tea Party friends gladly voted into office, and so I wanted to understand this logic, see if it made any sense to me, and figure out why it made sense to them.

  The logic was this. The more oil, the more jobs. The more jobs, the more prosperity, and the less need for government aid. And the less the people depend on government —local, state, or federal—the better off they will be. So to attract more oil jobs, the state has to offer financial "incentives" to oil companies to get them to come. That incentive money will have to be drawn from the state budget, which may lead to the firing of public sector workers, which, painful as it might seem, reduces reliance on government and lowers taxes. It is a red state logic. But the paradox is that it goes with being a poor state with a lot of problems.

  So to begin with, I ask Paul, "How many Louisiana jobs are in oil and petrochemical plants?" "Today, less than 10 percent," he answers. I am shocked. For all the talk of jobs, this seems below the level that would justify General Honoré's remark that there was "just enough to" all the talk about jobs, that people felt threatened by the word "environmental" and gave an exasperated sigh at "regulation." But later when I check his figures I discover that the highest estimate—offered by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association—was 15 percent of all jobs in the state. The lowest—from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—was 3.3 percent. (This included all jobs in oil and gas extraction, support activities for mining, petroleum, and coal products manufacturing, and pipeline transportation in 2014.)

  After all the talk by Congressmen Boustany and Landry and others, why so few? The industry is highly automated. To build a petrochemical plant, you need many construction workers for a temporary period, and then their job is over. To run a petrochemical plant, you need a small number of highly trained engineers, chemists, and operators to keep watch over panels of gauges and to know what to do when there's trouble. Then you need a few repairmen such as Lee Sherman.

  But a fracking boom was on, and maybe that meant more jobs coming in. According to the 2014 Sasol-sponsored Southwest Louisiana Regional Impact Study, some 18,000 jobs, a small proportion of them permanent, would open up by 2018. But seven out of ten of these jobs would be filled, the report said, by workers from outside southwest Louisiana. Many companies would recruit professionals from around the world. Construction workers building the "man camps"—barracks within enclosed encampments—were Mexican, people said. The man camps would house 5,000 pipefitters, an undisclosed number of them Filipinos on temporary visas. Filipino workers have worked for over a decade on oil platforms in the Gulf.

  Meanwhile, most permanent jobs in the state—85 percent of them— involved doing something else, such as teaching children, nursing the ill, building mobile homes, playground equipment, and yachts, repairing aircraft, being stagehands for films being made in what some were calling the "Hollywood of the South," conducting tours through plantation manor homes, catching fish, and farming.

  Perhaps oil jobs took priority, in official thinking, because oil brought in more state revenue. But severance taxes—fees paid when oil or gas is taken out of the ground—from oil contributed only 14 percent of the state's budget revenue, down from 42 percent in 1982. It was the largest single source of revenue, though, and this was the rationale behind Governor Bobby Jindal's plan to lure more oil and petrochemical business to Louisiana. (Oil companies also gave him a million dollars in campaign money, as my Tea Party interviewees were well aware. Critics also argued that the oil companies would come anyway since the oil, the pipe lines, the petrochemical plants, the port, the whole setup was already there.)

  To offer an "incentive," Jindal lowered corporate income taxes so that state revenue from such companies fell from $703 million in 2008 to $290 million in 2012. He lowered oil severance taxes so that the state received over $1 billion in 2008 but less than $886 million in 2012. It also lost another $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2014 because some oil companies were exempted from oil severance taxes altogether. (New bu
sinesses pay no taxes for the first ten years and can, by changing their name, qualify for another tax exemption for the next ten.) Indeed, according to the Louisiana Economic Development and Tax Foundation, Louisiana offers "the lowest business taxes in the entire country for new manufacturing projects." And for three years it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies paid anything at all to the state since the job of auditing oil company payments was handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties with the industry and which, between 2010 and 2013, performed no audits at all. So apart from providing 15 percent of jobs in Louisiana, oil was providing less and less financial benefit to the state. Oil was costing more to lure to the state and, once there, giving less to it. Meanwhile, to pay for this, public workers were fired and the state debt—$83 billion in 2012, much of it in unfunded public pension liabilities—remained.

  Dr. Templet and I are on a second round of coffee and a second layer of revelations. "Oil brought in some jobs," Templet says, "but it causes other jobs to disappear or simply inhibits other sectors—such as the seafood industry and tourism—from growing." Oil rig explosions such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout severely hurt the seafood and tourism industries—oyster fishermen, deep sea fisherman, wholesalers, restaurateurs, and hotel workers were impacted. No one wants to eat oil-tainted shrimp or vacation on beaches strewn with tar balls. Despite the implication of the annual Morgan City Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, oil and seafood do not go well together. Oil cut jobs in another way too. The "incentive" money Jindal gave oil went hand in hand with the cuts to 30,000 public sector jobs— nurses, medical technicians, teachers.

  One defense of oil jobs was that they were highly paid, and that salaries would "trickle down" through consumption that increased jobs and wages of other workers. But did it? "Not much," Templet says. That's because oil wages don't trickle down; they leak out. As he explained, "Most of the plants are owned by foreign companies. Sasol is based in Johannesburg. Royal Dutch Shell is based in The Hague. BP is based in London. Citgo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela. Magnolia LNG is based in Perth, Australia. Phillips 66, spun off from ConocoPhillips in 2012, is based in the United States but not in Lake Charles. So most top executives in these companies are not building luxury homes and swimming pools in Lake Charles, Sulphur, or Westlake. Stockholders aren't spending their dollars there either, but rather where they live, in Greenwich, Connecticut, say, or Mill Valley, California."

  The income of temporary Filipino pipefitters and Mexican green-card holders doesn't "trickle down" either, since most dutifully send money back to needy families abroad. Indeed, some local citizens complained that imported Filipino workers don't spend their money in local stores. Summing it up, Templet calculates that Louisiana "leaks" about a third of the gross state product, the sum of the value of all goods and services produced by the state.

  Thinking again of the Great Paradox, I ask Templet whether the appearance of oil in Louisiana reduces the state's poverty. "No," he answers, "Louisiana was poor before oil came, and we're poor today—the second poorest in the U.S." In 1979, 19 percent of Louisianans lived below the poverty line; in 2014, it was 18 percent. In addition, ill-schooled poor people of any race find it hard to get the kind of highly skilled permanent jobs oil brings in. And oil hadn't improved the schools—they are financed by local property taxes, which are higher in rich areas and lower in poor ones.

  Still, 15 percent of the people did get good jobs. Two-thirds of their salaries didn't leak out. This was good news. But what was the whole picture? Perhaps oil in Louisiana represented a strategy for economic growth conservatives pulled for—what sociologists Caroline Hanley and Michael T. Douglass call a "low road" strategy. Union bans, lower wages, corporate tax rebates, and loose implementation of environmental regulations are used as lures to get industry that exists somewhere else to move to one's own state. Fifty years ago, such a strategy brought the New England textile industry to the South, and these days it is bringing Mercedes from New Jersey to Georgia, Toyota from California to Texas, and Nissan from California to Tennessee. Louisiana brought jobs into the state, not by nurturing new business in the state, but by poaching jobs in another state. The "high road" strategy, as the researchers describe it, is to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector, as California did in Silicon Valley and Washington State did in Seattle. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the first strategy for economic development was backed by one party (the Tea Party, Louisiana model), and the second strategy by another party (the Democratic, California model).

  Templet and I are on our third round of coffee and cake, and I want to return to a central idea in General Honoré's "psychological program"—one that taps into understandable right-wing anxiety about good jobs—that in America, you must choose between jobs or a clean environment. Many Louisianans I spoke with told me that, either by intent or in effect, environmental regulations kill jobs. This was the idea behind talk of "environmental wackos." But Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy. A 2016 survey of the world's major economies also found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness in the international market. If this was the growing consensus among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economists, I wondered why my Tea Party friends weren't hearing about it.

  Perhaps because of two final parts of Templet's picture: a growing dominance of oil and its show of generous company largesse. As companies squeeze favors out of the state, he argued, the more urgent its citizens' needs for good schools and hospitals, the less the poor are able to use what opportunities exist, and the more atrophied become other sectors of the economy—which further concentrates power in the hands of oil.

  Ironically, companies often privately give back to the community in gestures of goodwill. To do this they use the incentive money the cash-strapped state government has given them to lure them into the state in the first place. Dow Chemical gives to the Audubon Nature Institute. Shell Oil Company supports the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Pittsburgh Plate Glass pays for a "Naturelab-Classroom in the Woods" near Lake Charles. Sasol funds a project to record the history of Mossville, a black community its expansion displaced. The Louisiana Chemical Association gives to the Louisiana Tumor Registry. The people of Louisiana are now grateful—here Templet pauses for a moment of sad irony—"not just for jobs, but for gifts."

  The Red and Blue of Pollution

  On my drive back to Lake Charles, I considered a discouraging idea. Maybe Louisiana was an oddball oil state, atypical of other red states across the nation. Maybe it just told a story of oil. Was it leading me away from the heart of the right? I had imagined the South to be the center of the right, and Louisiana a center of the South. But was Louisiana an outlier, or was it an example of a nationwide story?

  When I got home, I discovered an answer—a startling 2012 study by sociologist Arthur O'Connor that showed that residents of red states suffer higher rates of industrial pollution than do residents of blue states. Voters in the twenty-two states that voted Republican in the five presidential elections between 1992 and 2008—and who generally call for less government regulation of business—lived in more polluted environments. Residents in the twenty-two Democratic states that generally favor stricter regulation, he found, live in cleaner environments. This would be discouraging news for my Tea Party friends.

  My Berkeley-based research assistant, Rebecca Elliott, and I asked one further question: was it just red states that were correlated to higher rates of pollution, or the counties of red-leaning individuals within any given state? We looked at the relationship between political views and pollution. For one we went to publicly availab
le data on the EPA website. There we found scores for each county in the nation reflecting risk of exposure to pollution (Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators, or RSEI scores). These measure the amount of chemical release, the degree of its toxicity, and the size of the exposed population. It is the best measure we have of citizen exposure to pollution. This we linked with a second source of information—individual opinions recorded in the well-established General Social Survey. We were studying the link between what people believed about the environment and politics, and their actual risk of exposure to pollution linked to the county they lived in.

  If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans "worry too much" about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing "more than enough" about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican. There it was again, the Great Paradox, only now it applied to my keyhole issue: environmental pollution across the entire nation. Far from being an oddball state, Louisiana told a nationwide story. (See Appendix B.)

  The "Least Resistant Personality"

  I thought back to the Areno home on Bayou d'Inde. Why did PPG and other companies decide to build there and not somewhere else? Proximity to oil certainly came first. But were there other factors too? The poorer the state, research found, the less regulated it was likely to be. So were poor people in poor states less likely to worry about out-of-state profit "leakage" or state handouts to industry? Or were they understandably just hoping for a job and preparing to endure?

  Certainly no Louisianan I talked to liked pollution. But what if some people are more prepared than others to put up with things they didn't like? After I'd returned home from my visit to Baton Rouge, 1 discovered an illuminating report on how industries deal with the fact that people don't want them to move in next door. It was written by J. Stephen Powell of the Los Angeles—based consulting firm Cerrell Associates, Inc., and was entitled "Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting." The fifty-seven-page report was proprietary and eventually leaked—by whom, I couldn't find out. It was produced in a different time (1984) and place (Los Angeles) but is as relevant today as it was then. The California Waste Management Board paid Cerrell Associates $500,000 to define communities that would not resist "locally undesirable land use" (LULU). "Undesirable" is what the Arenos felt about Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Bayou d'Inde.