Moment of Truth

Moment of Truth

Text of Michael Deibert's address at Millersville University Literary Festival

2 November 2018

Good evening to all of you and thank you for coming. Thank you also to Millersville University and the Writing Center for inviting me to speak. As Bill mentioned I grew up in Lancaster and have spent much of my career as a journalist and author traveling the world and working in different countries, and that’s one of the ways I know it is particularly auspicious that I have been invited to give a talk on November 2nd which, in Haiti, is Gede, which celebrates the lwa or spirits of death and fertility, and in Mexico and in many places in Central American Dia de los Muertos, which marks los que se fueron, or those who have departed.

It’s interesting for a guy who grew up as a lower middle-class kid here in Lancaster to see what changes have taken place since I was young. The city seems to have really blossomed into a very vibrant, multicultural politically active place over the years and, of course, thanks to the advancements in communications, people really have the world at their fingertips if they choose to avail themselves of it these days.

Having been to something like 60 countries or thereabouts now, one of the messages I try to communicate to people here in the United States is that, despite the current political discourse of the day, you don’t have to be afraid of people who don’t look like you, speak like you, follow your religion or dress like you. There are predators in every country & every culture, but in general in my travels I’ve found people to be more or less ok.

There is something you should be frightened of, and I would like to talk to you about it tonight.

Americans are cocooned and cushioned by the reality many (though not Native Americans or African–Americans, to name but two groups) have shared since the country’s founding, decades of stable institutions and, in the national main, political fair play. They cannot imagine how quickly, and how violently, things can change.

I can.

In my 20 years as a journalist reporting on international affairs, I have come across the template we see being used in the United States before, employed by those whose political behavior is marked by, as Robert Paxton said in his 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism

(An) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

In Côte d’Ivoire I saw how Laurent Gbagbo’s promoting his ethno supremacist cult of Ivorité took one of Africa’s richest countries and toppled it over into civil war. In Haiti, I saw how Jean Bertrand Aristide took the rancour of the masses and stoked it into an attempt to create a kind of garish fiefdom modeled on those of Uganda’s Idi Amin and the Central African Republic’s Jean-Bédel Bokassa. In Guatemala, I watched former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who oversaw the country’s worst period of genocidal bloodletting, form a political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG), whose entire motor ran on anti–elite rage and was eventually revealed to be more criminal enterprise than political vessel.

As I come from the exact strata of American society – the white, blue collar, Rust Belt working class – among whom the current president’s message has the most resonance - and have seen its like up close before, I feel a special duty to speak out.

People with a strong work ethic feel all their hard work has been spat upon and shunted aside by years of free trade deals championed by both parties and a tax system that lavishes breaks on the wealthy and penalizes those of more modest means (championed, ironically, by the very same party to which they now claim allegiance). There is real pain and real despair there. But there is also a whining self pity that often can’t see anyone’s struggle as worthy as their own and a nearly millenarian sense of grievance that sees politics not as the art of the possible but as an apocalyptic struggle between a largely white industrial world that has gone and will never return against a confusing kaleidoscope of liberal urban elites, the country’s burgeoning non–white population, immigrants, alternative sexual orientations and other shocks to their system. If Trump voters often sound as if they think the world is about to end, it’s because the world as they have known it is ending. But these forces of demography cannot be reversed, and it is not a world my fellow working–class whites need to fear, but fear is the currency on which our president trades.

The American democratic project has been characterized by inconsistencies since it commenced in 1776. Some of these tensions involved America’s actions abroad, and some in the way it treated its most vulnerable citizens at home. But, with the exception of a wrenching civil war that saw over 600,000 Americans die, few have ever questioned the value of the project itself.

When, at the end of the Revolutionary War, a group of dissident officers in the Continental Army all but suggested a coup against the newly inaugurated Congress in what came to be known as the Newburgh Conspiracy, the army's commander in chief (and future first U.S. President) George Washington gave an impassioned speech in which he inveighed on behalf “of our common country,” charging

As you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.

America has had a complicated, schizophrenic history and it has been a messy project.

In the mid-1700s, a group of Scotch-Irish frontiersmen who had settled along the Susquehanna River became known as the Paxton Boys and conducted a spate of racially-motivated violence here in the south-central and eastern portions of Pennsylvania.

On December 14 1763, the gang murdered six members of the Susquehannock tribe (known as Conestoga among English-speakers) and burned their cabins for good measure. When 16 of the remaining Susquehannock were placed in protective custody in the old city jail in Lancaster (just next to the site of the present-day Fulton Opera House), on 27 December, the Paxton Boys broke into the jail and killed, scalped and dismembered the six adults and eight children who sheltered there.

Just last year, Scott Wagner, who is running for governor, was recorded disparaging the businessman and philanthropist George Soros as a “Hungarian Jew” who harbored “a hatred for America.” Soros, along with a number of prominent other individuals and journalists was sent a bomb last month,

Also last year, a white supremacist organization called Identity Evropa held a rally in Penn Square, and at around the same time stickers and posters promoting it were found plastered at Elizabethtown College and here at Millersville.

That’s part of our history and present. But equally a part of it is Lancaster’s  prominent role as the political base of the fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, who represented the region in the U.S. Congress for most of the era between 1849 to 1868. Equally part of it is Lancaster’s history of religious tolerance and welcoming attitude towards those fleeing persecution. The fact that the county welcomes 20x as many refugees per capita as the rest of the country is something you can all be proud of. The future is unwritten.

But need to think very carefully about the path we are heading down.

In the July 1932 elections in Germany, also a democracy at the time, the Nazis received 37% of the vote, the most they every got. In the next election four months later, their share shrank to 32%. But by then it was too late. The serpent was already in the garden. Tellingly, in their quest for absolute power, the Nazis were aided unwittingly by leaders such as the German Communist Party’s Ernst Thälmann, who thought the centre left was a greater danger than the extreme right. Before he realized his miscalculation, he was arrested, held in solitary confinement for eleven years and then shot in Buchenwald.

In the 1990s, the people of the Balkans put their faith in leaders like Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić who led the region into ethnic cleansing, genocide, NATO bombing and bloody war for a decade. In 1999, the people of Venezuela, desperate and vengeful after being ignored by their politicians for years, turned the reigns of their country over to former coup leader Hugo Chávez, his successor Nicolás Maduro and their “Bolivarian revolution.” They haven’t gotten it back since.

In Cuba, where I have spent a lot of time and which has its own experience with strongmen promising to expunge a collective grievance through a cleansing release of violence, after the 1959 overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista, the new government, led by Fidel Castro, executed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people tied to the ancien régime after only the most summary trials (and many with no trial at all). Whether all or even most of them were guilty will never be known. The cry of paredón (to the wall) resounded, and the will of the maximum leader had to be obeyed. Today, one can still visit El Morro, where so many of them died, and El Capitolio, where Cuba’s congress met and debated, but which was shuttered after 1959, and remains so to this day.

Now, at another time, in another place, that cry raises its sanguinary voice again, with  calls for political opponents to be jailed, for journalists to be arrested and killed, for desperate people who could just as easily be any one of us to be described in terms of vermin and plague and for those who speak out against this rhetoric of terrorism to be attacked and battered into submission.

When things like this start, at first it might be the opposition party that is sent to the wall. It might be Jewish journalists, or Muslims, or Latinos or immigrants. But one of these days, not too long from now, the mob will scream for blood and it will be someone you love who is brought to the wall, for some transgression real or imagined. It might even be you. In my 20 years as a journalist I’ve seen it in countless countries before. People think it can’t happen here, but it can.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Tucydides discussed a reinvention of vocabulary for the civil war in Corcyra that went thusly:

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant one was totally unfit for action.

So what is the solution to all of this, when we’re confronted with such cruelty and brutal machinery - when things like building tent camps in the desert for children who have been forcibly separated from their parents and calling journalists “enemies of the people” - a direct reference to genocidal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin - have become normalized?

One of the writers who had the biggest influence on me over the years was the British author George Orwell. A lot of people know his anti-totalitarian fables 1984 and Animal Farm, perhaps fewer his gripping account of fighting against the forces of fascism during the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, and perhaps still fewer his 1937 study of the living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier. But there are some words from that book that I think are worth reading here tonight

The people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies….Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain-pen.

I encourage all of you here to night to embrace the world as much as you can, not to shrink from it. Along with my time spent in distant lands, my view of the world and its struggles have been equally shaped by the books I have read, as literature as an art form, both fiction and non-fiction, can be a kind of pinnacle of dissent. Writers like Reinaldo Arenas, Marguerite Duras, Milan Kundera and Mario Vargas Llosa helped influence me and hone my analytical mind in a way that, say, engaging on Twitter does not.  And as the struggle to build a more decent and just world continues, I try to remember the words of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who, in her penultimate book, A hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star) wrote of her main character, Macabéa’s, struggle to survive in Rio de Janeiro, that “she saw among the stones lining the gutter the wisps of grass green as the most tender human hope.”

Don’t give up.

Thank you.

'Everything kind of fell apart': Demographics surrounding poverty in Lancaster County shatter myths

26 December 2017

'Everything kind of fell apart': Demographics surrounding poverty in Lancaster County shatter myths

By Michael Deibert

LNP

(Read the original article here)

The modest home that John Torbett used to share with his mother in Ronks in East Lampeter Township overlooks rolling hills and sloping fields, undulating bleached brown in the wan autumnal light.

“Things were running pretty much smooth until my mom died last year," says Torbett, a 54-year-old computer repairmen and desktop support specialist who became disabled in 2010 due to a combination irritable bowel syndrome and vision problems.

“We were alternating the expenses month by month," Torbett says. “But when she died last year, I inherited all the taxes, the oil bill, the electric bill, and I was already in debt."

Soon Torbett, a Delaware County native who had moved to Lancaster to take advantage of the lower cost of living, found himself tripping over the narrow precipice that separates the lower-middle class from the truly needy.

His is a story that has played out time and again throughout the region.

Nearly 60,000 of the county's 536,624 people are living below the poverty line. Their average age is 30.

Outside of Lancaster city, where the rate is 29.2 percent, the highest rates of poverty are in the boroughs of Mountville (21.4 percent), Millersville (21.2 percent) and Columbia (20.4 percent), and the townships of Upper Leacock (15.6 percent), Lancaster (14.4 percent), Conoy (13.8 percent) and Fulton (13.0 percent).

“The truth is, 66 percent of the poverty (in Lancaster County) is outside the city," says Sue Suter, president and chief executive officer of the United Way of Lancaster County. “And the face of poverty here is really a single white woman with children." 

Complex situation

Poverty in Lancaster County is a complex condition that does not lend itself to easy caricatures, its endurance prolonged by a variety of ancillary factors.

Though many seem to continue to visualize poverty as an urban — and, to be stark, non-white — problem in the region, the potential for rural residents to slide from paycheck to paycheck into desperation is one that knows no ethnic or geographic boundaries.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau the poverty rate in Pennsylvania was 13.3 percent in 2016, down slightly from 13.5 percent in 2015. It was 10.8 percent in Lancaster County in 2016, up slightly from 10.7 percent in 2015.

About 27 percent of the state's population — or roughly 3.4 million people — live in its 48 rural counties.

The federal government defines poverty as income below $12,060 for a single person, $16,240 for a family of two, $20,420 for a family of three, and $24,600 for a family of four.

When things fall apart
 

One of the women the United Way's Suter referred to is Brenda Gabriel. When she greeted a journalist recently, Gabriel was residing in a transitional living facility — a wooden cabin whose location, off a main road and nestled among trees overlooking a hollow where deer often bed down for the night, could fairly be described as bucolic.

Gabriel is, like John Torbett, an example of how easily one can slide into poverty from a middle-class life.

“Everything kind of fell apart," Gabriel says of her eviction from her home in September, at the end of a marriage in which she became the sole breadwinner after her husband, a salesman at an industrial cleaning products company, become disabled and attempted to collect disability.

A 50-year-old-bus driver with an 11-year-old daughter, Gabriel initially stayed in a motel for two weeks before moving in briefly with her sister and then finding her temporary housing.

At the transitional living site, residents pay electric, but not rent, through the Factory Ministries and Timberline Church. Factory Ministries is a Paradise-based program that acts as a hub for connecting people in need to various resources and services that also assisted John Torbett . 

Seeking support

“This is not something I ever wanted to have to deal with, but I have to take care of my daughter," Gabriel says of the lugubrious process of forms and meetings that getting into the system of government financial aid entails.

The Pennsylvania State Department of Public Welfare has thus far granted her help for child care and medical coverage (through Medicaid), but no cash assistance. She is waiting for a decision on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, also commonly referred to as food stamps.

Finding regular accommodation has also not been easy in a county where landlords often requires that tenants earn three times the monthly rent.

“It's been a very difficult time because my daughter is embarrassed," Gabriel says, wiping a tear away as she sits at the kitchen table of her small cabin, a cup of coffee evaporating its warmth in curls of steam in front of her.

“To see her go through this is hard, but it's going to get better and I'm out of the situation I was in,” she adds. “Getting out of that was the best thing I ever did. The Lord has been good to me through all of this." 

Profile of poverty

The demographic outline of poverty in Lancaster County shatters many myths. According to numbers provided by the the Center for Rural Pennsylvania — a bipartisan legislative agency that serves as a resource for rural policy within the Pennsylvania General Assembly — 74 percent of those living in poverty in Lancaster County are white, while 58 percent are female.

Some 35 percent have at least a high school diploma and 17 percent have an associate’s degree or higher.

Far from being shirkers, 30 percent of those in poverty have full-time employment, while 23 percent work part time. The makeup of poor housheolds is also an amalgam, with 42 percent in single-person households and 38 percent in households with children.

According to the Census Bureau, 37 percent of rural households had incomes below $35,000. Among Pennsylvania counties, Lancaster hovers in the middle in its portion of residents eligible for medical assistance through Medicaid. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, 17.3 percent of the local population qualifies for Medicaid. And that number has been rising steadily over the last decade.

Many of those on Medicaid also participate in the state's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps. 

Lack of resources

“Poverty is about more than not having money, it's about lack of resources," says Chuck Holt, the president and CEO of The Factory Ministries. The organization is one of several here that attempt to centralize access to various services that the poor may need. Other entities include Pathways out of Poverty and the Elizabethtown Area Hub.

“In rural poverty, homelessness looks different than in the city," says Holt. “We don't have people sleeping in the street, or shelters, we have doubling, tripling up, three families living in one place. Many are single moms with multiple kids. There's a growing Hispanic population. Some single dads, too."

One of those single dads, Josh Roten, a 35-year-old groundskeeper who lives in Peach Bottom and struggles to support himself and his 9-year-old son, points to another factor present in this strata: A strong sense of alienation from politicians and the political process itself.

“Have you ever tried to call a politician?" asks Roten, who voted for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as he smokes a cigarette outside on his porch while his son arrives home from school in the gathering dusk. “They don't return calls, their voicemails are full … . They ignore us. Politicians never listen to us, they don't care what we think until their position depends on us." 

Battling isolation

One chronic and continuing issue of rural poverty, both in Lancaster County and elsewhere, is the lack of connectedness with the larger world.

“If you look at Elizabethtown, eastern Lancaster County and the Quarryville area, those are three areas where you have a concentration of rural poverty, and one of the dynamics shared was transportation is a huge barrier," says Andrea L. Heberlein, the lead director of Collective Impact for the United Way of Lancaster Country.

“Residents had a hard time accessing services because they are located in (Lancaster) city," she says.

Holt echoes Heberlein’s comments.

“If you're down here, there's no public transportation. The bus runs routes 30 and 340, and not all day long," Holt says. “In Pequea Valley, there was only one laundromat, and that burned down three months ago."

In addition, the Factory Ministries in Paradise runs the only food pantry for 80 square miles. 

Impact of opioids

As with so many others facets of Pennsylvania life, the opioid epidemic has also hit the most vulnerable like a freight train. At least 155 people died of drug overdoses here in 2017, up from 117 the year before.

“Our cases continue to increase in their complications," says Jessica L. Laspino, executive director of CASA of Lancaster County. The seven-year-old organization trains and supervises court-appointed volunteer advocates who work with children in the foster care system, of which there are around 500 on any given day.

“In a lot of the (families) we've been working with, the layers seem to have increased,” Laspino says. “It's not just one or two factors working against the family, it's multiple factors.

“The opioid epidemic has a great impact on the youth we work with," Laspino continues. “You have more young people who are drug addicted and more coming into care because addiction has ravaged the family. So has the lack of adorable housing.

“Parents that did the work and addressed issues still cannot provide safe and stable housing for their kids to return home to, so you have parents who have done the work but kids still languishing in foster care," Laspino says. 

Low-paying jobs

Though jobs are being created in the state's rural pockets, their pay remains punishingly low. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, per capita personal income in rural Pennsylvania counties was $40,938 in 2015, or $12,030 less than in urban counties.

During the same year, more than 1,000 more people fell into poverty in Lancaster County than during the year before, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

“Regardless of what the subject is, when you're talking about rural PA you always have to address the issues of lack of population density and geographic isolation," says Barry L. Denk, the director of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania.

“If you don't have the numbers to aggregate, the return on investment, both from public and private, becomes questionable."

Perseverance

And yet, through a patchwork of public and private services and their own pluck, those on the downside of economic advantage in Lancaster County continue to persevere.

John Torbett is looking for part-time work in his field of computer repair and recently adopted a small cat, Paulette, who prowls around his house and keeps watch.

Brenda Gabriel, after months of searching, recently found an apartment she could afford and moved into it with her daughter to great the new year.

Despite her struggles, Gabriel, who now has a financial coach and regularly attends counseling and church at The Factory, is envisioning a happier future story.

“I would like to have a little house for my daughter and I, to have my job — I love my job — and to support her in the things she wants to do."

Families who came to Lancaster from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria adjust to new way of life

16 December 2017

Families who came to Lancaster from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria adjust to new way of life

By Michael Deibert

LNP

(Read original article here)

When Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico in September, its winds and lashing rain moved like a murderous scythe across the lush island, toppling power lines, hurling cables across roadways and depositing vehicles upside down in fields. 

Madelyn Velez Santiago's hometown of Mayagüez was spared the worst of the storm's direct impact. However, the collapse of the island's electrical grid wiped out her livelihood. 

"I worked as a dental assistant, but there was no work with no electricity, and we didn't know when it would come back," the 36-year-old mother of two says.

Almost three months after the storm devastated the island, Velez Santiago, who used to travel to Lancaster to visit family as a child, now shares a modest apartment with her children and a childhood friend on the city's west side. 

"The transition from Puerto Rico to here is an intense one, but we've decided to do it because there is nothing in Puerto Rico now," she says. "It's tough, but it's what I have to do." 

Velez Santiago and her children — Luis, 15, and Fabiola, 7 — are among nearly four dozen families who are now adjusting to life in Lancaster, some 1,600 miles way from their former home. 

Blown off their tropical island by the tempest's destructive force, many are here to stay, despite the daunting tasks of finding steady jobs, affordable housing and education for their children. 

"The transition from Puerto Rico to here is an intense one, but we've decided to do it because there is nothing in Puerto Rico now. It's tough, but it's what I have to do."  The challenges of families relocating from Puerto Rico will be an issue city officials will have to face. 

"Thus far, individual families, communities of faith and the school district have been really stepping up in big ways to support families that have been displaced from Puerto Rico," says Lancaster's incoming mayor, Danene Sorace. "But one of the things I'm trying to get a handle on is where families can go whether their needs are housing or counseling services, as for many this has been a traumatic experience. 

"I'd like to have some coordination and to establish a welcome page on our website with some basic information to get families connected depending on what their needs might be," Sorace says. "I do feel we can help people get acclimated and communicate that individuals and families who have been displaced by Maria have a home here."

'Families are struggling' 

As the bare trees of early winter line the street up to Velez Santiago's apartment complex, the mood within is warmed by a glowing Christmas tree and the energy of her children. Sometimes called "the Spanish Rose" — a play on its traditional designation as "The Red Rose City" — Lancaster boasts a large Latino population that makes up roughly 40 percent of the city's nearly 60,000 residents, the vast majority of whom are of Puerto Rican extraction. 

"I like history a lot," says Luis, who attends J.P. McCaskey High School. "But it's a little difficult here because I don't speak much English yet."  "I don't have friends here yet like I did in Puerto Rico, where I had a lot," says Fabiola. 

"I don't have friends here yet like I did in Puerto Rico, where I had a lot." 

While hundreds of thousands of people have fled the island since Maria tore it asunder, tens of thousands had already been leaving amid a grinding economic crisis even before the storm. 

Since Maria, the School District of Lancaster has welcomed 72 students from 47 families, ranging in ages from elementary school to high school. Educating the youngsters, however, is only one of the hurdles that new arrivals face. 

"These families are struggling to find decent housing and jobs," says Damaris Rau, SDL's superintendent. "And I think for many of the adults, they may have been doing great in the middle class in Puerto Rico, but they come here and they can't speak English and they are unable to get the level of employment they should." 

"When we put out a call to the community for backpacks, uniforms, people came forth and gave us tons of things, (but) the county says they have jobs and can't fill them and I think the community needs to stand up and find employment for these people," she says. 

Some already have.

Trying to help 

Tyson Foods has a specifically designed slate of jobs "for people who were affected by Hurricane Maria and had to relocate from Puerto Rico," according to its website. 

Both the Lancaster-Lebanon IU 13 and the Literacy Council of Lancaster-Lebanon are offering free English classes to new arrivals. 

"We created a new arrival class for any newcomers in Lancaster County who need to learn English, and we've been able to accommodate the arrivals with that class," says Cheryl Hiester, the council's executive director. "Nearly all the Puerto Ricans taking the class are professionals," Hiester says. "And we are also trying to match them with mentors to try and help them connect with their related careers in Lancaster." 

When the families displaced by the hurricane can return to the island remains an open question. Though the official death toll from the storm is 62, mortality data from the island suggests the true total might be well over 1,000.


After a federal response widely criticized as lethargic and unfocused —which saw many towns fending for themselves for weeks after the hurricane — only around 65 percent of the island's 3.4 million people have regular access to power, according to the Puerto Rican government, and material damage to buildings and roads remains widespread. 

U.S. Reps. Lloyd Smucker and Charlie Dent wrote to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi late last month calling for additional federal disaster funding for schools in Pennsylvania's 15th and 16th congressional districts, both of which have seen an influx of school-aged children from Puerto Rico after the storm. The money would come from $1.2 billion in proposed aid that would go towards an educational recovery fund. 

Amid such emigration, however, many of Puerto Rico's business leaders have criticized the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — which both Smucker and Dent supported — with the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association warning that new levies on Puerto Rico's businesses contained among its proposals would be "catastrophic" for the island's already-battered economy and lead to more citizens fleeing to the mainland. 

Neither congressman was available to comment on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

'My kids ... need stability' 

Evanisse Maria Rivera, 33, welcomed her two children to her East King Street apartment in Lancaster last month. Danievy and Luis had been living with their father on the island. 

The sandy shores of Salinas, the town on Puerto Rico's southern coast where her family hails from, have been replaced by brown leaves swirling on the sidewalk in a winter wind outside her door. 

"It was very scary," Danievy, a fifth-grader at Wickersham Elementary School, says of the hurricane. "A lot of tress fell down, the noise was very loud. At first the light was there, but it started flickering and the next day it just left completely."

Living in a two-bedroom walk-up with her two other children, Rivera has been told that her two new arrivals may jeopardize her eligibility for rental housing assistance for affordable housing. 

"It's scary sometimes when I go to bed, I have to think about that," says Rivera, a certified peer specialist working at a local Dollar Tree since being laid off from a previous job in her field earlier this year. 

"I'm a single mom, there's no more income than what I get, and my kids coming from Puerto Rico need stability," Rivera says. "(But) we're very resilient people, and there's more opportunity here." 

Her son, soon to be a sixth-grader at Lincoln Middle School, likes being here, but some things take time to get used to. 

"I feel great being in Lancaster," Luis says. "But the temperature is horrible."

One Rural County’s Battle to Stop a Pipeline From Slicing Through Pennsylvania

August 15, 2017

One Rural County’s Battle to Stop a Pipeline From Slicing Through Pennsylvania  

Lancaster County, Penn. is rising up against the $3 billion Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline.

BY Michael Deibert

In These Times

(Original article appears here)

LANCASTER COUNTY, Penn.—Under the banner of a piercing blue sky at the edge of a cornfield, hundreds gathered on July 9 to pray and raise their voices in song.

Drawn from a diverse group of multi-faith actors, local activists and concerned residents, the assemblage had arrived at this spot to consecrate a prayer chapel they hope will stand in the way of the $3 billion Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, slated to be built through 37 miles of this county in southeastern Pennsylvania by the Oklahoma-based Williams Partners.

In this largely rural county of nearly 600,000, encompassing rolling farmland and the hardscrabble city of the same name, Williams and its subsidiary—the Transcontinental Pipeline (Transco)—have already gained permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to seize private property via eminent domain along the route. Coming on the heels of the 2016 to 2017 protests against the construction of Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, some believe this may be the new front in the battle between the fossil fuel industry and its enemies.

The sisters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ are the Catholic religious order that owns the land on which the prayer chapel—little more than a pulpit and several rough wooden benches—stands in the pipeline’s path. They don’t intend to go without a fight.

“We have a land ethic: We consider all creation to be interconnected, and the land is holy,” says Sister Janet McCann, who is on the leadership council of the Adorers at their mission center based in St. Louis, Mo. “To have something come through that could endanger the lives of human beings and the ecosystem, that’s something we need to stand up against. We don’t want to be part of that.”
Her fellow sisters echo this call.

“We are women of faith, and we see this as part of the gospel,” says Sister Sara Dwyer, the social justice coordinator for the nuns. “We are here to be responsible stewards of the earth, and to preserve it for generations to come.”

The chapel is the latest chapter in a years-long battle that has placed hundreds of local residents against the power of the natural gas industry and its enablers in both local and federal government. With echoes of the face-off at Standing Rock and other movements around the country, the battle in Lancaster is one that has politicized many residents who never thought of themselves as activists before.

For Malinda Clatterbuck, her involvement began with a knock on the door of her home in the heavily-rural southern part of the county one afternoon in March 2014.

There, she found a surveyor contracted by Williams standing on her front porch asking for her and her husband, Mark, to sign a form permitting their property—acres of woods she had grown up on—to be surveyed for the pipeline. The surveyor said the Clatterbucks should have already received the paperwork, and that the new project was to be built using already existing pipelines (of which there were none). Clatterbuck told the surveyor she would have to do more research before she signed anything.

When she looked into it, she found that the pipeline was slated to traverse her property (the route has since been moved). Furthermore, it was to cut through other farmland and run directly under the Conestoga River, an umber-hued tributary of the larger Susquehanna River which snakes along for about 65 miles, spanned by covered bridge and abutting local Amish and Mennonite farms.
The experience, and what they viewed as the prevarication on the part of Williams and its ancillaries, led the Clatterbucks to form Lancaster Against Pipelines (LAP), a local advocacy organization committed to opposing the Williams project through non-violent civil disobedience. Among other actions, LAP built an outfitted treehouse on the property of local landowners sympathetic to their cause at the point where Williams was to drill under the Conestoga. They dubbed the structure The Lancaster Stand.

“We’re an agricultural community in many ways, and we depend on the earth for our livelihood,” says Malinda Clatterbuck. “In a way, I think Lancastrians have a better understanding of humanity depending on earth for life than some other places. But this is also the rights of communities to protect their own health and safety, rights that have been taken away from us. This incident has given us an unwanted education about our government not being about people having power, but about industry dictating what happens to everybody else.”

For its part, Williams has been quick to point out what it says are the financial benefits of the project.

“The existing Transco pipeline currently delivers about 40 percent of the natural gas consumed in Pennsylvania, operating more than 1,000 miles of pipe and serving major local distribution companies such as Philadelphia Gas Works, PECO Energy, Columbia Gas and UGI in Lancaster County,” Christopher Stockton, a spokesman for Williams, wrote in an email.  “Any one of those existing Transco pipeline customers will be able to take advantage of new gas supply access made possible by the Atlantic Sunrise project.”

Stockton also pointed to a commitment by Williams to invest $2.5 million in environmental stewardship in the project areas and the “economic relief” that the firm says will come to local communities from natural gas impact fees in Lancaster County.

The response from local and national officialdom to the locals’ concerns has largely not been supportive.  A new bill, H.R. 2910, the “Promoting Interagency Coordination for Review of Natural Gas Pipelines Act,” passed the U.S. House of Representatives in July. It seeks to streamline the permissions needed to commence work on fossil fuel infrastructure.

“I’ve always wanted to see Pennsylvania grow its energy infrastructure,” says Scott Martin, the state senator for Pennsylvania’s 13th District, of which Lancaster is a part. Martin, a Republican, has been a strong proponent of the pipeline. “We’ve tried to bridge the gap between the company and the landowners, but, in the end, if we don’t have these things, how do we expect to have energy for the future?”

In a move that made national news, this past summer, Martin co-sponsored legislation in Pennsylvania’s senate to make any protesters convicted of “rioting” or “public nuisance” liable for the costs related to any protest or demonstration. Those leading the initiative explicitly referenced the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. State Senator Scott Martin noted that, while the local protesters had been peaceful, “if the situation deteriorates … protesters should not be able to walk away from the damage they cause without consequence and expect first responders and taxpayers to deal with the fallout.”

Pipeline advocates frequently accuse protesters of having been infiltrated or in thrall to outside forces and even of being ‘homegrown terrorists.’ The local protesters bristle at the suggestion that they are motivated by anything other than the desire to protect the county where many have made their homes for generations.

“We have been accused of being outside, paid agitators, but most of us here are from community churches—Unitarian, Lutheran, Mennonite—and some of us here are from some of the oldest families in Lancaster County,” says Joanne Musselman, whose family helped found the nearby town of New Holland in the early 1700s. “It’s a sacred covenant between the farmers and the land to be passed onto our grandchildren. And now the big oil and gas boys from Texas and Oklahoma are here to ruin our farmland and sacred places. It’s criminal, and it’s criminal that our elected representatives don’t represent us on this issue.”

Such activism in Lancaster is hardly new. Before, during and after the Civil War, the county served as the political base for the fierce abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, whose grave in Shreiner-Concord Cemetery in the city of Lancaster remains a place of pilgrimage.

Since the electoral college victory of Donald Trump, direct action groups such as Lancaster Stands Up have also emerged in the county, staging demonstrations and advocating for progressive political goals.

The battle, however, remains an uphill one. In late July, pipeline opponents were informed that the landowner on whose land the Lancaster Stand had been built had finally caved and sold the property to Williams for $2.8 million. In recognition of this, the local protesters dismantled the Lancaster Stand rather than allow it to fall into the hands of Williams.

“The industry has a hell of a lot of power in institutions that should be protecting the rights of people,” says Malinda Clatterbuck, with LAP and its allies vowing to fight on. “This is a systemic problem in our country right now. We’ve come to understand that this problem is larger than just protecting Lancaster and what’s beautiful in Lancaster. No one stands alone. We live in community. We have to depend on one another and we have to protect one another.”

The Guns of August

The Guns of August

By Michael Deibert

In November 1787, writing to William Smith from Paris, where I live, Thomas Jefferson, future president of the United States and then U.S. Minister to France, penned the following lines:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

This month, outside a town hall meeting held by President Barack Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire to discuss his efforts to reform America’s health care system, a man named William Kostric appeared with a loaded handgun strapped to his thigh and a sign reading “It’s time to water the tree of liberty.”

At a town hall meeting hosted by Senator Arlen Specter, a longtime Republican turned Democrat, which took place in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, about 40 minutes from the working-class, largely conservative enclave of Lancaster County where I grew up, a disheveled man shrieked at Specter, who has represented Pennsylvania in the senate since 1981, that "one day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies.”

In the midst of the debate of overhauling our national health care system, these two eruptions were not isolated incidents. Attendees brought firearms to events held by members of Congress Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and Steve Cohen of Tennessee, both Democrats. Death threats have been sent to four Democratic congressmen: Brad Miller of North Carolina, Dennis Moore of Kansas, Brian Baird of Washington and David Scott of Georgia. Baird’s office received a fax this month in which Obama was depicted as The Joker from the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” with a Communist hammer-and-sickle painted on his forehead and the words “Death to all Marxists! Foreign and domestic!” scrawled beneath. A similar fax was sent to the office of Scott, an African-American, with the added element of Scott, an Africa-American, being denounced as “a nigger” A large swastika was spray-painted across the sign for Scott’s office.

Firing the furnace of such sentiments have been such ideologues for the right as television host Glenn Beck, who appallingly play-acted the murder of House speaker Nancy Pelosi on his nightly show on Fox News, and the radio host Rush Limbaugh with his opining that President Obama is “trying to destroy the private sector as it exists...Let’s face it, President Obama’s black, and he’s got a chip on his shoulder...He’s using the power of the presidency to remake the country”

This is what the debate over health care appears to have been reduced to in the country of my birth. In a nation where some 46 million Americans currently lack any health insurance whatsoever, and millions more have only the most limited access to any kind of coverage, a reasoned, sober discussion on the best way to overhaul our fabulously expensive and fabulously inefficient system comes down to threats of political assassination and vows of divine retribution.

The words of Jefferson, who was writing at the time in defense of the French Revolution and the overthrow of a monarchy, are now used to intimate violence against the man who occupies the office that Jefferson himself once held, a man whom, in one of those exquisite bits of historical justice, is of mixed-race ancestry much like the children that the freedom-extolling Jefferson fathered with a slave, Sally Hemings, as Jefferson’s compunctions about slavery did not extend to not participating in the institution itself.

Today, however, the Republican Party of another storied U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, which has been in power for 20 of the last 28 years, has been supplanted by Barack Hussein Obama, son of an ethnic Luo Kenyan father and a white American mother from Kansas, a man who seems very earnest about trying to re-tool much that is brutal, wasteful and stupid about American political culture. The party does not seem to be taking to opposition well.

The need to re-haul our health care system could not seem more dire. Knowing, as I do, people in the United States who have gone bankrupt attempting to cover their health care costs, as well as many more who put off going to the doctor, receiving treatment or buying medicine because they simply cannot afford the prohibitive cost, I am also myself a statistic. Despite working 50-60 hours per week as a freelance journalist, I have not had health or dental insurance since early 2006.

The current system, dominated by insurance and pharmaceutical companies and defined by a health-care scheme absurdly tied to employment status, is being portrayed by opponents of change as a triumph of American know-how worth preserving. But compared to the health care system of France, for example, the country where I currently live and from where Jefferson wrote his famous letter, its performance comes up woefully short. Though the French system has consistently been rated among the best in the world (while the U.S. system recently ranked 37th, according to the World Health Organization), the 11 percent of GDP that France spends on it is far below the 17 percent of GDP spent in the U.S., a cost that comes without the vast benefits, safeguards and universal coverage that the French system offers.

However, none of these costs and benefits are currently being debated, nor are the political leaders of the opposition to the new health care reform bill urging any sort of moderation in their discourse.

Former vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin took to the social networking site Facebook earlier this month to denounce the “death panels” she charged the bill would create where “bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care,”, a completely false allusion to a provision that would allow Medicare to reimburse doctors providing voluntary counseling regarding end-of-life issues. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa echoed Palin where he told a recent rally that “we should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma.” A memo by a volunteer affiliated with FreedomWorks, a conservative organization chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey, recently advised protesters on how to "disrupt" and "rattle" town hall meetings. Obama and the advocates of health care reform in the United States are routinely denounced as “socialists,” compared to Nazis and Adolf Hitler and the very legitimacy of Obama’s birth in the United States (which took place in Hawaii in 1961) is questioned.

Seeing the party of Lincoln reduced to a clutch of Talibanesque religious fundamentalists, science-denying climate change skeptics and openly xenophobic racists and bigots might be simply depressing if the implications were not so deadly serious.

A new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center concludes that “after virtually disappearing from public view a decade ago, the anti-government militia movement is surging across the country – fueled by fears of a black president, the changing demographics of the country and fringe conspiracy theories increasingly spread by mainstream figures.” The report echoed in its particulars an April intelligence assessment by the Department of Homeland Security.

In May of this year, George Tiller, a Kansas physician who performed abortions and who had been pilloried by the right and by television host Bill O'Reilly in particular, was shot and killed while attending a church service, allegedly by an antiabortion extremist, Scott Roeder. In June, Stephen Tyrone, an African-American security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, was shot and killed, allegedly by James Wenneker von Brunn, a Holocaust denier and white supremacist with a long history of anti-government militancy.

And, in perhaps a telling echo of the past, the words of Thomas Jefferson that William Kostric alluded to with his sign and gun outside of the Obama appearance in New Hampshire this month where the same ones that Timothy McVeigh, convicted and executed for carrying out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, wore emblazoned on his t-shirt on the day of his arrest.

Having reported in the past on tumultuous political environments in countries such as Guatemala, Haiti and India, I have watched as pseudo-populist demagogues have often proved highly successful at using intemperate rhetoric to whip up groups genuinely or perceiving themselves to be disenfranchised to act against “the other.” I believe that as my country continues forward this August there is a real danger that a union will occur between the violent and shrill political rhetoric currently being spouted and actual physical violence against those who are being so demonized among anti-government elements of the right. I increasingly fear that I have seen this script played out before, always with the same disastrous results.

Much as we hold the intellectual authors and instigators of political violence in foreign countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia culpable for the actions of their underlings even though they themselves may have never carried a weapon into battle, the opponents of health care reform would do well to pause for a breath and look at the political climate they are creating and what its likely outcome will be. And they should remember the oft-forgotten words with which Thomas Jefferson commenced to conclude that famous 1797 missive from Paris:

"I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only."

Michael Deibert is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

Pennsylvania election know-how

As unknowns kept entering my father's yard at night and stealing his Barack Obama campaign signs in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, he and my younger brother came up with a novel solution, as can be seen here.

Why I am voting for Barack Obama

The vagaries of the Democratic presidential primary in my native state of Pennsylvania may seem, literally and figuratively, miles away from the struggles of Central Africa, but as Pennsylvania approaches its crucial vote in determining the Democratic nominee, I feel compelled to weigh in with a few thoughts on the decision before us on 22 April.

Democratic voters in Pennsylvania are presented with a simple and stark choice: Barack Hussein Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois who first assumed his senatorial duties in January 2005, or Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic senator from New York and former First Lady who first assumed her senatorial duties in January 2001.

In recent days, much has been made of comments that Obama made regarding Pennsylvania at a fundraiser in San Francisco. Clinton, who has been losing delegates left and right to Obama, seized on the comments in an attempt to portray Obama as elitist and out of touch with the state’s working-class voters.

The most authoritative account I have seen of what Obama said runs as follows:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

As a product of this milieu, of the working-class, small-town Pennsylvania that Obama was speaking of (though, indeed, for me, that experience seems like a lifetime ago), I see nothing at all elitist about Obama’s comments, and rather find them extremely perceptive, and I will try and explain why.

I have seen first-hand the struggles of working-class people in the region not as part of some study but rather in the experiences of my friends and family, growing up first in the city of Lancaster (about 55,000 people and three hours away from New York City) and later in the small town of Strasburg (about 3,000 people). Though I spent time visiting New York and Philadelphia while in high-school, my first real taste of the world outside was when I left for university in New York in 1992 and, especially, when I did a semester aboard studying at University College Galway in Galway, Ireland in 1994 and did a bit of traveling throughout Europe.

I have seen people like those in the cities and towns where I spent my youth watch as their ability to support their families on an honest day’s work was gradually eroded, as their ability to seek and afford quality medical care for their families disappeared and as, often, cynical and opportunistic politicians of the right exploited this sense of frustration and loss for political gain. Though Pennsylvania boasts two major urban centers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and despite an increasingly large number of Latino residents, the majority of the state (where I grew up) might be best described as Budweiser-drinking, Merle Haggard-listening, gun-owning and very much white working class. Though I have moved far away from those days, I would be foolish to deny that at least some element of that background is still present within me, and I believe that it is most noticeable in my often visceral dislike for pampered elites of any political stripe, who pontificate while never having had to eek out an honest day’s work in their entire lives. I believe that, far more than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama understands the struggles of the kind of people I grew up with and is thus in a position to effectively address them.

To me, Hilary Clinton, much in the same way as George W. Bush though to a lesser extent, represents much of what is wrong with the current political system of the United States. Aside from her penchant for outright lying about serious matters when the truth would do just fine, Clinton seems to feel, as George W. Bush did when he ran for the office in 2000, that she is entitled to the presidency as a result of her proximity to the throne of power for so many years. But a look at Bill Clinton’s eight years in office paints a far different picture to the one that many, including myself, were content to believe at the time. I voted for Bill Clinton, and happily so, in the 1990s and, given the choices we had at the time, I would probably do so again, but in the intervening years I have come to the conclusion that he and his wife are two of the most destructive, cynical people in U.S. politics, which, given the current climate, is saying a lot.

How easily we (and I include myself in this) forget that Bill Clinton was the candidate who flew home to Arkansas to execute a retarded black man to gain political mileage out of it in the middle of his first run for the presidency. Or that he signed into law the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy, which denied gays the right to serve openly in the armed forces. Or that his wife voted in favor of the Iraq War Resolution and for the USA Patriot Act. But all this pales, in my view to President Clinton's Africa policy, which was probably the worst of any president in American history. People like to forget that Bill Clinton, with his wife at his side, sat on his hands during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and then, out of guilt or geopolitical skulduggery, green-lighted the newly Tutsi-led Rwandan government's dismembering of Eastern Congo and their own genocide against Hutu refugees there, thus helping to set in motion a war that has killed over 5 million people thus far. By holding up profoundly undemocratic leaders such as Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni as paradigms for the continent, Clinton exposed his deep cynicism about Africa and Africans and did incalculable damage to the region.. One of his chief advisers for this disastrous policy was Madeleine Albright, currently one of Hilary Clinton’s top advisers on foreign policy matters.

Of the Democrats’ Republican rival, I believe my friend Sutton Stokes was accurate when he noted that , in many ways, John McCain is “the closest thing to a human being that party has put forward since Eisenhower, but that ain't saying much.” Though I have been glad that McCain has taken the right stand on issues such as the use or torture and the pernicious influence of big money on the American political process, his eight year embrace of George W. Bush, at a time when the latter was manifesting malevolence and incompetence on every issue from Iraq to the Middle East to Hurricane Katrina to healthcare to the environment for me definitively rules him out as the man to lead the United States at this critical time.

Barack Obama isn’t perfect. He isn’t the messiah. He is the junior senator from a Midwestern state, and yet I do believe he is the person for this moment. in our history. As he has served as local legislator for a decade in Illinois, and as he has served in the senate for the last three years during one of the most tumultuous times in American history, I believe that he is admirably qualified for the job. Yet beyond that, as the son of an ethnic Luo Kenyan father and a white American mother from Kansas, born in Honolulu,, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, schooled in politics in Chicago, I believe that Obama, by pointing towards a definitive and hopeful break with the poisonous cynicism that has informed our national political dialogue in recent decades, represents that best chance for the United States of America to move beyond the disastrous legacy of the last eight years.

Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote about “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” I don’t know if Barack Obama will be able to bring the country that far back from the path onto which it has strayed, but after hearing his thoughtful, intelligent and brave speech on race delivered in Philadelphia last month, for example, I do believe that, far more than Hilary Clinton, Obama recognizes the country’s ills and knows where we should be heading as a nation.

I hope that we, as a nation, are given the chance to start our journey there together.