Daniel Denvir

“Ending welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans did in 1996, is one thing. “Ending Medicare,” Republicans were last year reminded, is something else altogether. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” declared a 2009 Tea Party town hall attendee who today might very well be an ardent supporter of Gingrich’s assault on food stamps. It is a political lesson that free-market fundamentalists have to relearn with some frequency. It was only 2005,  after all, when President George W. Bush launched his ill-fated proposal to privatize Social Security — a setback he later called his greatest failure.

Yet as more government programs of any sort are framed as pernicious, laissez-faire ideologues are again emboldened to get rid of everything.

As recently as November 2009, the New York Times reported that stigma around food stamps had faded; the program received strong bipartisan support as millions of newly impoverished Americans reached out for food assistance. But temporarily cautious politicians had only stashed the old playbook on the top shelf, and the revival of welfare queen demagoguery made for quick political results. Nationwide, state legislatures are moving to impose drug testing of welfare, and even unemployment insurance, recipients.

“If you go apply for a job today, you are generally going to be drug-tested,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in October 2010. “The people that are working are paying the taxes for people on welfare. Shouldn’t the welfare people be held to the same standard?”

And and then came the push for cuts. Few noticed in April  2011 when House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed cutting $127 billion from the food stamp program. The same went for the proposed dismantling of Medicaid, the healthcare entitlement for the nation’s poorest, which would be transformed into a block grant to the states with no coverage requirements.  Everyone was focused on Ryan’s audacious proposal to privatize Medicare, and conservative pundits were eager to sink the popular entitlement under the banner of pragmatic fiscal seriousness. “The Ryan budget,” David Brooks wrote at the time, “will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.”

Republicans quickly backtracked. But the effort to dismantle the “poor black people” entitlements continues unabated. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett this month announced that people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets — cars and homes generally excluded, savings very much included — will be barred from receiving food stamps. The move elicited widespread criticism from anti-hunger advocates but little concerted political resistance. Corbett’s administration also cut 88,000 Pennsylvania children from Medicaid.

But politicians have more trouble getting away with criticism of less stigmatized benefits. Corbett suggested on the campaign trail that “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Democrats pounced and he rushed to issue a clarification, though a  conservative think tank eagerly backed up his original position.

Unemployment benefits, however, are on the political cusp: Once somewhat invincible like Social Security and Medicare, some states have made cuts amid the campaign of stigmatization.  In South Carolina, state-funded jobless benefits were reduced from 26 to 20 weeks. Republican state Sen. Kevin Bryant blogged, “I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching [off] the system.” Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan and Florida have also reduced benefits. Yet it was just two months ago that Republicans suffered their greatest embarrassment of 2011 after nearly blocking the extension of unemployment benefits.

Welfare was “reformed” in 1996 because politicians, and many white Americans, were convinced  the program’s beneficiaries weren’t meritorious. Indeed, the entire history of  the American safety net is one of programs losing popularity as they are associated with poor black people. Initially blacks were largely excluded from New Deal welfare. It was when the War on Poverty broke down racial barriers that white public opinion turned against it. “Increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile,” writes Northwestern School of Law’s Dorothy Roberts, “it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels.”

The same was true for public housing, which once received broad-based support. But in the 1950s, whites moved to segregated suburbs and blacks were left behind, and the projects became unpopular and underfunded. Housing benefits for upper-income Americans, like the mortgage interest rate deduction, are not, to be sure, subject to such negative stereotypes, and neither are the billions in federal and state dollars that have been spent on highways and federally subsidized mortgages for disproportionately white homeowners.

Or take public schools. If all of our children, black and white, rich and poor, were in one big system, that system would get ample support. But since many poorer students of color are segregated into separate, unequal and low-performing districts, policy solutions like charters and an obsession over standardized testing that would never pass muster in a wealthy district are advocated as pragmatic solutions.

Count yourself lucky that rich people still (for the meantime) breathe the same air as everyone else.

Rick Santorum has declared, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” (He now says that he said “blah” people.) On Social Security, Santorum is making what appears to be a safe argument for reform: cutting rich people out of the program. Right now, Social Security belongs to everyone. Cutting rich people out is the first step to making it a program for the poor. Making something a program for the poor — see food stamps, Medicaid and welfare — is the first step toward eliminating it. While crazy Newt Gingrich talks about black people and food stamps, Mitt Romney (whom Brooks, of course, calls “serious”) resurrects a big idea: privatize  Medicare. That, of course, is why conservatives so fear single-payer universal healthcare: They know that once we got it, we would never let them take it away.

If some whites reap some cold comfort from Gingrich’s performance, the racial hostility on display comes at a much higher cost to the American people as a whole. We have long since traded the possibility of a decent society for fear and resentment. So watch out for the next attack on “the food stamp president.” The entitlement they end might be your own.

Gingrich’s comment is an example of surviving remnant of dog-whistle politics that demonize urban residents; recent examples include new state laws to drug-test those on public assistance and the ongoing effort to cut food stamps (and Gingrich did call Obama the “food stamp president”). The specter of the black ghetto still scripts urban dwellers as villains (often as thieves robbing the citizen either directly, or as in this Rick Santorum comment, indirectly: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money”). But unlike the era of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, today cities are more ignored than attacked. And this goes well beyond Iowa.

“The core of the Republican constituency in metropolitan America are the growing, racially and economically exclusive ‘outer suburbs’ whose privileged status Republicans seek to protect at all costs,” says former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk, now a consultant. He cited New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as an exemplar of the trend.

Today’s Republican candidates are rarely city-dwellers.

Gingrich owns a Northern Virginia cul-de-sac mansionette that “tends toward the ornate” and includes a master bath entirely covered in mirrors, according to a recent New York Times article on candidate homes. Rick Perry moved into a high-end gated community in exurban Austin, Texas, while the governor’s mansion was under construction. Michele Bachmann lives in a McMansion with a builder’s description that “reads like a synonym finder for nouveau suburban glory, touting the home’s arched stone entry, hand-scraped walnut plank flooring, and a fully paneled library with see-through fireplace.”

Romney rose to the pinnacle of Massachusetts politics from the leafy and high-end Boston suburb of Belmont, where he had a bathroom with “vaulted ceilings and a soaking tub some might mistake for a lap pool,” a residence “heavy on cream-colored upholstery crowded with pillows. The curtains are pleated so precisely you might think they were styled by Mr. Romney’s barber.” The house, until recently one of four owned by Romney, has now been sold.

While Romney’s father, George Romney, served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in President Nixon’s administration, the candidate has said nothing in particular about cities. As with so many other things, Romney once had a different opinion. According to the New Republic, he was a devotee of smart growth during his years in the governor’s mansion — transit-oriented development and anti-sprawl measures included. “We don’t want to become like Houston,” said Romney. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Texas.”

The neglect of the cities can be traced back a half-century to the apogee of mid-20th-century American liberalism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the captains of municipal state, flush with federal funds and armed with great confidence in modern planning and architecture, bulldozed miles of “blighted” neighborhoods (often non-white) and rammed highways through the centers of many American cities. The feverish remaking of the cities was a desperate attempt to compete against the suburbs and woo back the middle class, which had departed thanks to the federal dollars propping up millions of (whites only) mortgages and miles of highways. Tragically, it was the liberal federal government’s funding of suburban homes and highways, and bulldozer-heavy urban renewal programs, that paved the way for Nixon and Reagan’s abandonment. Black people and the left were suspicious, the rising conservative tide was contemptuous, and politicians changed the subject. So, then, went the neighborhood.

It was from these very suburbs that modern conservatism arose, then proceeded to wage war on the city. In 1964, Orange County suburbanites reaping the benefits of government-financed defense jobs mobilized against fair housing legislation, and for their Sun Belt champion, Barry Goldwater. Nixon’s more successful 1968 silent majority was a suburban one, legitimating the postwar success “earned” by white elites. He promised protection against school busing, and promised that they were not, like George Wallace’s rural poor disciples, bigots. Just because suburban conservatives had backed off from de jure segregation doesn’t mean they wouldn’t attack urban blacks: take, again, Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.” Save for Buffalo congressman, H.W. Bush HUD secretary, and 1996 vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp, cities would get little Republican attention. In the two decades since the Los Angeles riots, urban issues are more often ignored. Concerns and paranoias now seem more abstract or diffuse: Shariah law, or the Mexican day laborer in the parking lot of your local Home Depot.

On the policy level, Reagan’s 1980s cutbacks were followed by modest and private-sector-focused initiatives under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The programs, dubbed “enterprise zones” under Bush and “empowerment zones” under Clinton, were a clear repudiation of the direct government intervention that characterized Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Whether prompted by resignation or opportunism, urban policy now caters to business-minded solutions: tax abatements and special service districts to encourage downtown development, and a fervent belief that young “creative class” professionals (think Portland, Ore., as national role model) and tourism (think Baltimore’s Inner Harbor) could serve as the foundation for a new urban economy.

“Republicans saw little gain by reaching out to minority voters (the quixotic efforts of GOP maverick Jack Kemp excepted) and Democrats feared that if they put too much effort into solving urban problems,” says University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, “they would reinforce their image as the party of ‘special interests.’”

President Obama has encouraged smart growth and regional cooperation between cities and suburbs, but the efforts have been fiscally and politically modest, and far from high-profile. One promising initiative has HUD, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency participating in a tri-agency Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which Rusk calls “an important initiative in re-orienting federal ‘urban policy’” toward metro-wide solutions. But he criticizes the Obama administration for being “much too cautious in setting their requirements” and called the $100-50 million in annual funding “a pittance compared with the $145 billion that the three federal agencies give out in annual grants-in-aid to state and local governments.”

One reason that cities don’t figure in today’s campaigns is simply because fewer people live in them: America is now a primarily suburban nation. But America’s suburban majority, which has also diminished urban clout in Congress and statehouses, distracts from something bigger and more important. As older suburbs decline and lose population to further sprawl, the line between urban and suburban issues blurs. The American electoral system obscures the shared conditions facing cities and older post-World War II suburbs.

“If the U.S. had a popular vote election, candidates would focus on saturating the major metropolitan media markets, a race to collect 51 percent of the votes by adding up the biggest population centers,” says George Washington University historian Christopher Klemek, author of “The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal.” “We wouldn’t be talking about swing states; in fact, we wouldn’t be talking about states at all. Cities — or at least the broad, decentralized (sometimes tri-state) metropolitan urbanized regions that most Americans now inhabit — would be at the center of the campaigns.”

Yet the political debate is dominated by the exurbs, the pell-mell ribbons of home and office development that snake along the nation’s highways. While the original postwar suburbs were built for well-to-do commuters to the city, today’s exurbanites commute from gated home to office park.

The folksy country patter of politicians is of course about the aberrational power that we have bestowed on the microstates of Iowa and New Hampshire. But the affectations continue well through the general election. It is not so much about the countryside at all, but rather an appeal to the constantly fleeing, new-home-buying, SUV-driving denizen of the exurb, the newest home of a deeply held, though deeply hypocritical, American pastoralism. While the suburban dream was anti-urban, the exurban mind-set is simply non-urban. At least, that is, in mind-set. The frontier spirit masks a deep interdependence.

“Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of our economy,” says Robert Puentes, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metro Program. “The top 100 metropolitan areas alone claim only 12 percent of our land mass but harbor more than 65 percent of our population, 74 percent of our most educated citizens, 77 percent of our knowledge economy jobs, and 84 percent of our most recent immigrants. They also generate 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.”

Rick Perry, for all of his thickly lacquered rural charm, in reality rules over one of the nation’s largest metropolitan conglomerates. “Growth in Texas,” Ryan Avent notes in “The Atlantic Cities,” “has really been about growth in its biggest cities,” Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. Texas is the most urbanized state per capita.

Those cities have labor forces that are powered by immigrants. But on the campaign trail, the perception that cities are harboring Mexicans is a great liability. Gingrich has declared that he will block federal funding to any “sanctuary city.” Romney has gone after bleeding-heart municipalities since 2007 when he ran ads criticizing Rudy Giuliani’s tenure in New York. In response, Giuliani noted that Cambridge, Mass., Somerville, Mass., and Orleans, Mass., had declared themselves sanctuaries. Cities, by virtue of progressive leadership or brown skin, still have the power to attract conservative opprobrium. Think about what Republicans mean to convey when they say “San Francisco.”

American cities also receive attention when a candidate visits New York to raise money or eat bad pizza with Donald Trump. Yet much of Manhattan — like San Francisco — is thoroughly gentrified, and the deepening and unresolved problems of urban poverty and violence are kept well out of sight. The same goes for Washington, D.C., where a rapid influx of young and party-going policymakers has demographically transformed neighborhoods where shootings once dubbed my home city “Murder Capital of the World” and prompted our NBA team, the Washington Bullets, to change its name to the deflating “Wizards.” The emergence of the city as playground for the young and well-to-do masks the fact that for poor and working class city-dwellers, nothing much has changed. This is just as true now that many live in the suburbs. But you won’t hear it from any Republican presidential candidate.

Protesters charge the mayor with orchestrating a media campaign against them in coordination with a nationwide movement to evict Occupy encampments, and say he is attempting to divide the movement between mainstream activists and “radicals.” On Wednesday night, protesters gathered at a general assembly to discuss a situation that seemed to be rapidly spinning out of control.

“It has been an intentional buildup since Saturday,” says Amanda Geraci, a 29-year-old protester. “And it shows the real face of Nutter and the city, because this came right after the election. Our legal collective has been trying repeatedly to communicate and work with the city.”

Media reports and some protesters have framed the conflict around the planned reconstruction of Dilworth Plaza, ancient concrete plaza and subway hub. The federally funded $50 million project is intended to beautify the area and make it accessible to the disabled. Some protesters charge that the project is an urban renewal scheme for the rich, calling a planned ice-skating rink a decadent luxury in a time of crisis. But most protesters have said they have no plans to block the project, which would create many union construction jobs.

Last night, Patrick B. Gillespie of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council sent letter a letter to Occupy Philly, asking that they relocate.

“As you know, we have been suffering with unemployment numbers between 30-40% over the past two years. Our members are desperate for these jobs.  I know anything you can do to help in changing the venue of the consciousness raising events that have been taking place on the Plaza would be appreciated by our members who will get the job opportunities.”

At last night’s general assembly, members of the legal collective reported back from a meeting with Philadelphia AFL-CIO president Pat Eiding, who said that unions had pledged solidarity with the movement but that protesters needed to relocate to maintain that support. The legal collective also reported back on meetings with staffers for City Councilwomen Maria Quinones-Sanchez and Jannie Blackwell, who said they were prepared to assist protesters.

“They were interested in helping us facilitate a meeting with the mayor or deputy mayor,” says Penelope Waige, a member of the legal collective, “to discuss the questions that the G.A. had that he never got answered in terms of what alternate sites would be available if we moved, and what sort of access we would have to water and electricity if we moved.”

The vote of the general assembly on Friday to remain at Dilworth, says Geraci, resulted from a lack of communication on the city’s part, not protester stubbornness. She says the legal collective sent the mayor a request for information about water and electricity at possible relocation sites on Nov. 7, and received no response.

Managing director Richard Negrin has called the protesters’ claims “laughable,” saying that the administration has given Occupy “unprecedented access to senior officials … the mayor left his office with myself and chief of staff Everett Gilison, and walked over to the Friends Center to meet with them under their own terms and conditions. We showed up with half the cabinet, on their terms.”

The protesters also accuse the mayor of taking part in a coordinated nationwide effort to evict protesters. After initially denying it, the mayor’s spokesperson conceded that Nutter had discussed Occupy protests on a conference call with other city leaders.

Mayor Nutter also cited an alleged rape this past Saturday in which a suspect was arrested and released; no charges have been filed. The media, following the city’s lead, has focused on fights and unsanitary conditions created by the many homeless people who have set up camp. Philadelphia occupiers, as in encampments nationwide, have struggled to deal with the flood of homeless people who have sought out free food, healthcare and the relative safety of group housing. Indeed, the protesters have been proud to offer services that a fractured welfare state does not.

Nonetheless, Occupy Philly has lost control of a clear narrative — jobs and justice for the 99 percent — that buoyed them early on.  And the tone of once friendly local media coverage has flipped quickly. Wednesday’s cover of the Philadelphia Daily News, a left-of-center tabloid that ran numerous stories and editorials in support of the encampment, read “Stain on the City: How the homeless hijacked Occupy Philly.”

The general assembly is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. Thursday to decide whether Occupy Philadelphia will move or not.

The Examiner story, however, cites just one unnamed Justice Department source — one or two sources short of non-attributed journalistic certainty. And it appeared in the Examiner: a content-aggregating website that posts “3,000 new stories per day written by more than 55,000 ‘Examiners,’ or paid local contributors.”

Citing the Examiner is the journalistic equivalent of saying, “my friend Bob told me.” And for what it’s worth, DHS rejects the accusation.

DHS has not been coordinating evictions with local law enforcement agencies, DHS spokesman Matt Chandler told Salon. The only exception, he said, was Portland, Ore., where the Federal Protective Service arrested protesters in federally owned Terry Schrunk Plaza.

“Any decisions on how to handle specifics situations are dealt with by local authorities in that location,” Chandler said. “If a protest area is located on federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the General Services Administration or city officials, and they make a decision to evacuate participants, the Federal Protective Service will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security and safety of everyone involved.”

This chaotic week of Occupy evictions has created fertile ground for rumors. And though both stories appear to be unsubstantiated, both have now gone viral: 11,000 Facebook shares of the Wonkette article, nearly 8,000 for the Examiner. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman repeated the rumor on Truthdig, as did libertarian Reason magazine. And so did the progressive In These Times.

What has been documented over the past few days, but received little mainstream media attention, is clear coordination between big city mayors in working to evict Occupy protesters. Mayor Jean Quan let it slip that mayors had been discussing how to deal with Occupy protests on nationwide conference calls. On Tuesday, after initially disputing the account, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter acknowledged that such a call had taken place.

“On Sunday, the mayor was asked at the press conference about whether there was some kind of coordinated thing going on,” Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald told City Paper. “He pointed out that he is the vice chairman of the U.S. Conference of Mayors: he talks with mayors and groups of mayors all the time. They do that on a regular basis. And surely the subject of the Occupy phenomena has come up, and they compare notes. And apparently, on one of these recent calls, toward the end, someone came onto one of these calls and identified herself as Jean Quan. I did not know that, so I’m correcting that for the record.”

The Police Executive Research Forum, according to the Associated Press, has also coordinated inter-city phone calls between police officials to discuss confronting the Occupy movement.

“The results are disturbing because they point to a system that is funneling people towards deportation without due process,” said Aarti Kohli, director of immigration policy at Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and lead author of the report.

The study found that ICE has arrested 3,600 U.S. citizens through Secure Communities.

“The person is released from serving whatever criminal proceeding, and instead of being free, ICE picks them up,” Kohli told Salon in a phone interview. “ICE says, ‘We have the right to investigate the claims of foreign-born people that they are U.S. citizens.’ But what we’re concerned about is that they are making the arrests before they investigate.”

An ICE spokesman described the report as “misleading and inaccurate,” stating:

 If there is a question about an individual’s status, ICE conducts appropriate follow-up. If the individual is a US citizen, ICE takes no additional action. In exercising its civil immigration functions, ICE does not detain US citizens.

Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, disputed ICE’s claim.

Our members have seen too many instances of ‘driving while brown’ police stops that result in ‘foreign seeming’ citizens being picked up.  As citizens are not required to carry documentation, they often don’t have the documents of their citizenship with them, and thus get funneled into the system.

The Obama administration has sought to placate anti-immigration reform sentiment in Congress, by ramping up the deportation of undocumented immigrants and strengthening increasing ties between local law enforcement and ICE. At the same time the administration has assured immigrant communities that they are focusing on the most dangerous criminal aliens. On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that it had deported 396,906 people in 2010, a record number.

Earlier studies have found that Secure Communities primarily deports people who have committed low-level crimes or no crime at all. Those arrested are disproportionately Latino, according to the U.C. Berkeley report. While Latinos constitute 77 percent of undocumented immigrants nationwide, the study found 93 percent of individuals arrested under Secure Communities are Latino. Kohli says this may be a result of Secure Communities allowing police to racially profile people who “look like” undocumented immigrants.

“I think there may be a perception among the public, and maybe even among local law enforcement, that Latinos are illegal,” Kohli said. “If you are a local sheriff or a police officer who is interested in enforcing immigration law, then Secure Communities is a tool for you — particularly if you have a bias — to focus your arrests on a specific population.”

In addition, the report found that 88,000 U.S. citizens have had a family member detained under the program. Obama is scrambling to win over the Latino community in advance of the 2012 elections, and this summer pledged to exercise prosecutorial discretion and spare more “worthy” undocumented immigrants from deportation. But advocates remain unconvinced.

“I’m not aware of anything that’s been implemented that will really change the way ICE is doing things,” says Kohli.

“It’s clear that this program is eroding everyone’s rights,” says Sarahi Uribe of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, “U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike. You’d think that with something this embarrassing for our democracy, that the administration would stand up and terminate this once and for all.”

Supporters say Secure Communities is a big improvement and deserves to continue.

“Critics need to remember the situation before Secure Communities, where illegal aliens who committed crimes would be arrested and processed and incarcerated and released over and over again,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. “ICE had no way of learning who they are, where they were, and what havoc they were causing in their communities.”

Yet some local and state officials have objected to the program, and were angered and confused over whether their participation is mandatory. Initially, ICE said the program was voluntary, and only later declared that it was mandatory as local elected officials and law enforcement became more vocal in their criticism. The governors of New York, Massachusetts and Illinois have all declared this year that they will pull out, but it’s not clear if they can. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has led congressional opposition to Secure Communities, has accused the Department of Homeland Security of making “false and misleading statements to local governments, the public, and members of Congress.”

In June, ICE acknowledged that the program was not performing as advertised, telling the Guardian that “DHS is committed to working with all partners to address questions about the program.”

Ice is conducting a top-to-bottom review of Secure Communities to ensure that the program is meeting our priorities and is operating efficiently and effectively. They are also conducting an analysis of data to identify any irregularities that could indicate misconduct in particular jurisdictions, so that we can immediately initiate corrective actions. At the same time, we are exploring ways to address concerns with the program, so that it continues to focus on individuals who have broken criminal laws.

The new study proposes two corrective actions.  Finding that immigrants detained through Secure Communities are far less likely to be represented by a lawyer and far more likely to be imprisoned than other detained immigrants, the study concludes that Secure Communities exacerbates one of the immigration system’s worst features: the lack of due process rights. The authors call for Secure Communities to be suspended until due process rights are assured, and safeguards against the arrest of U.S. citizens and racial profiling of Latinos established.