The latest hubbub illustrating this strange double standard came after the New York Times reported on a new contract between the New York Hotel Trades Council (UNITE HERE Local 6), representing city hotel workers, and the Hotel Association of New York, representing hotel owners. Over the course of a seven-year contract, hotel housekeepers will have received (cumulatively) a 29 percent raise, with a typical worker going from making around $46,000 per year to earning almost $60,000 per year. The contract also includes good union health insurance and other benefits.

It is a great contract, and members of the union should be congratulated for their work in securing it. But for some conservatives, the idea that a lowly hotel maid could possibly be paid $60,000 is an abomination. Fox News analysts called it a “nightmare.”

There’s plenty to say about their disgust. The first thing to note is the sheer hypocrisy of the right-wing revulsion. Back when we were debating the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, conservatives repeatedly rallied to assert that those making $250,000 per year were not at all rich. Among other absurdities, their apologetics produced the audacious spectacle of a University of Chicago professor with a household income of more than $450,000 per year complaining about how he is just barely getting by, noting that he and his wife “occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget.”

Fox News types worked overtime to back up such sob stories from those they dubbed the “so-called rich.” On the very same program where the right-wingers decried hotel workers’ $60,000 pay as a “nightmare” (Varney & Co.), analyst Chris Cotter previously asserted that, if you’re “in New York or San Francisco,” living on $250,000 is “very, very tough.”

It’s interesting to look a little more at what’s behind this contradiction. The conservatives aren’t really basing their criticism on the idea that New York City hotel rooms are overpriced. To do so would involve examining the price of a room and determining why it costs what it does. You’d have to figure out what percentage of the room rate goes to the workers who actually keep the hotel running, how much to executive compensation, how much to corporate profits, and so forth. Going down that road could lead to some uncomfortable questions, so they avoid it.

Nor are they standing up for the hotel owners, arguing that the new contract violates some tenet of capitalism. It doesn’t. The agreement was a product of employees collectively negotiating with their employers in fair market fashion. There are no government “handouts” here, no idle slackers who are not working for a living. In fact, according to the Times, the hotel owners’ association is very pleased with the contract: “In a constructive and cooperative spirit, we were able to reach this early agreement, which is good for our members, the union, and the city of New York,” association president Joseph E. Spinnato said.

So what’s the conservative objection really about? It comes down to their opinion of what a hotel housekeeper is worth. It’s a matter of principle: heaven forbid that a maid should have decent health insurance and make a living wage—even if that wage is a fraction of what elites themselves have a “very, very tough” time making due with.

I have a dog in this fight. In addition to being generally pro-labor, several family members of mine work with the hotel, casino, and restaurant employees union (although not the local in question). For this reason, I’m thankful to Nathan Newman for his fine Huffington Post commentary, “Why Shouldn’t Housekeepers Make $60,000 Per Year?”

Newman gives some important context. How, he asks, did we get “to the point that it is a bit ‘shocking’ in some sense that workers in what is seen as a low-wage industry are making a living wage?” He answers:

The disappearance of good working class jobs is the flip side of the anger many feel at income of the richest 1% exploding—that group had a 275 percent “raise” in income between [1979 and 2007] according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The problem is not that the wealthy are getting wealthier, but that they seem to do so at the expense of everyone else seeing wages drop and benefits like health care and pensions disappear.

Which is what makes the story of $60,000 housekeepers such an anomaly in the news. When Local 6, which represents New York City hotel workers, was founded back in 1938, they were actually just a latecomer to a wave of union drives that raised wages and brought labor rights to the workplace for previously low-wage workers in the auto industry, steel, telephone, garment and range of other industries.

But many of those jobs have disappeared to either globalization or technology and, except for a smaller group of high-paying professional service jobs, the decline of union strength has meant many new service jobs pay less than needed to raise a family.

So why do we have $60,000 per year housekeepers in New York City?

Well, you can’t outsource cleaning a room to China and so far no robot can make a bed as well as a human being, so hotel workers have escaped the job destroying forces sweeping other industries.

But you don’t have $60,000 housekeepers in most places in the United States or anything approach it except in a handful of cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, so the answer goes beyond technological determinism.

The answer is hard-fought organizing by the hotel workers themselves in New York City and the supportive pro-union sentiment of other residents in the city, what was once unapologetically called “solidarity” in this country before the term seemed to get reserved by the elite for only talking about supporting workers in Poland.

Newman goes on to make solid points about the importance of union density and about the labor movement’s role in fighting inequality in America.

At the outset of this post, I framed the right-wing stance on wages as something of a curious contradiction. But actually, this whole thing is not all that complicated. Stripped down, it’s just class warfare, waged by the rich. Unless we have institutions that can repel the assault and advance the interests of working people, our democratic society as a whole stands to suffer.

For all this, the United States deserves a good deal of the blame.

I was pleased to see the New York Times recently publish a hard-hitting op-ed by Dana Frank that makes this case. Lest anyone in this country think that things in Honduras have settled into a peaceable, post-coup normality, Frank describes the post-June 2009

chain of events—a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted—[that] has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since [President Porfirio] Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The police in Tegucigalpa, the capital, are believed to have killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the country’s biggest university, along with a friend of his, on Oct. 22, 2011. Top police officials quickly admitted their suspects were police officers, but failed to immediately detain them. When prominent figures came forward to charge that the police are riddled with death squads and drug traffickers, the most famous accuser was a former police commissioner, Alfredo Landaverde. He was assassinated on Dec. 7. Only now has the government begun to make significant arrests of police officers.

State-sponsored repression continues. According to Cofadeh, at least 43 campesino activists participating in land struggles in the Aguán Valley have been killed in the past two and a half years at the hands of the police, the military and the private security army of Miguel Facussé. Mr. Facussé is mentioned in United States Embassy cables made public by WikiLeaks as the richest man in the country, a big supporter of the post-coup regime and owner of land used to transfer cocaine.

This past Tuesday, a comical response to Frank’s piece appeared at Foreign Policy, written by former Bush administration official José Cárdenas. It was humorous in that it included an understated disclaimer at the end. Cárdenas wrote, “Full disclosure: In July 2009, I helped to advise a Honduran business delegation that came to Washington during their presidential crisis to defend Manuel Zelaya’s removal from power.”

Not surprisingly, given his qualifications, Cárdenas frames Honduras’s current problems as solely the product of drug trafficking, and he encourages the United States to recognize that “Honduras’s war on drugs is ours too.”

Frank did a good job preemptively responding to this notion. She wrote, “Much of the press in the United States has attributed this violence solely to drug trafficking and gangs. But the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.”

Backing up Frank’s point, Human Rights Watch notes in its World Report 2012: Honduras that the country

failed in 2011 to hold accountable those responsible for human rights violations under the de facto government that took power after the 2009 military coup….Violence and threats against journalists, human rights defenders, political activists, and transgender people continued. Those responsible for these abuses are rarely held to account.

Whether or not you recognize political violence as part of the problem (Cárdenas neglects to mention it) goes far in determining your view of appropriate policy remedies. Cárdenas recommends working closely with the Honduran government and supporting its military with continued aid. Frank, in contrast, quotes the rector whose son was murdered: “Stop feeding the beast,” Julieta Castellanos says. “She, like other human rights advocates, insists that the Lobo government cannot reform itself,” Frank adds.

Cárdenas complains that Lobo is not a strong enough anti-drug leader. Yet, in a final sad statement, he reveals that his model of an appropriately serious drug warrior is Colombia’s former president Álvaro Uribe. Of course, Colombia is an excellent case of a country in which political violence and the drug trade have long gone hand in hand. On that topic, Human Rights Watch’s Daniel Wilkinson, writing in the New York Review of Books, offers a recommended read on the not-pretty connections between Uribe and narco-trafficking paramilitaries. Armed right-wing groups, Wilkinson reports,

continue to kill trade unionists and, increasingly, leaders of displaced communities seeking to reclaim their lands. These groups no longer present themselves as a national counterinsurgency movement, but they do continue to traffic illegal drugs and terrorize civilians the way the AUC [the paramilitary group that Uribe’s government ostensibly disbanded] once did. They are the legacy of Uribe’s approach to “justice and peace.”

If this is the model for Honduras, the country is sure to remain a Washington-abetted human rights catastrophe for a long time to come.

I know that I’m late in plugging this; Daisey’s piece originally aired on the radio on January 6 and (as we will see below) has since attracted a ton of attention. But the story deserves all of it and more. There’s no way to do the tale justice in a brief write-up. Suffice it to say, the story is vividly delivered and full of remarkable, often counter-intuitive insights. As just one example, after stepping out of the plant (which employs a jaw-dropping 430,000 workers, according to the This American Life piece) Daisey reflects:

When I leave the factory, as I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out, the way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking, how often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don’t we? “I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch.” But that’s not true. There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.

Everything is handmade. I know. I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair. One after another after another. Everything is handmade.

Not only is the story a marvelous piece of narrative journalism, it has already made a big impact—the kind of impact that we usually wait for after an excellent exposé comes out, and then wait some more…and then keep waiting until despair sets in. In this case, as Daisey reports on his Facebook page:

In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in This American Life’s history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming.

That same week news broke that hundreds of Foxconn workers had a stand-off that lasted two days, where they were all threatening mass suicide by throwing themselves off the roof of the plant over their working conditions. (Details here.)

This is at Foxconn, a company which Apple’s own 2011 Supplier Responsibility Report said was completely up to code, and which Apple applauded for their efforts. This is the company about which Steve Jobs said the employees enjoyed a virtual paradise of movie theaters, swimming pools, and luxury.

A week after our show was broadcast, Apple made an abrupt announcement. After years of stonewalling and silence, they released the full list of their suppliers, and agreed to outside, independent monitoring of working conditions in the factories they use. It is not everything, but it is a small step down the right road. (Details here.)….

I’ve received a number of emails from Apple employees who have told me they believe that hearing this story on This American Life, a program many Apple employees listen to with their families and their children, created “a morale situation” that finally compelled Apple to begin to do the right thing.

All this is unusual to say the least. Subsequent to Daisey’s radio story, the New York Times launched a series of much-read, much-discussed articles in what it is calling its “iEconomy” series. The stories revealed that “Last year, [Apple] earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.” Such profits, not surprisingly, were built on a firm foundation of exploitation:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors. More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health.

At the end of his radio story, Daisey does a fine job of standing up to defenders of sweatshops who portray exploitative factories as a legitimate stepping-stone on the path to economic development. It’s a silly debate. Advocates are not talking about Chinese workers receiving U.S.-level wages. They are talking about basic health and safety protections, basic standards for child labor and working hours, basic rights to organize—human rights that can and should be held inviolable.

Last week, I wrote a complaint about columnist Thomas Friedman who, after reading the first Times article in the series, expressed admiring wonder at the speed and flexibility of Chinese manufacturing—while neglecting to voice one iota of concern for workers’ rights. That was before I had heard the This American Life story, so I was taking Friedman to task just on the basis of the reporting in the Times. But do this: listen to Daisey’s interviews with workers who have been discarded at age twenty-six, their nervous systems damaged by toxins or their hands no longer useable due to repetitive stress. Then read Friedman’s column—with its gee-whiz awe at corporate globalization’s splendid efficiency—and tell me that this guy doesn’t look like a slimeball.

Even as he serves as a leading champion of corporate globalization, the New York Times columnist and flat-world author has a way of highlighting how ordinary people hardly have reason to be thrilled by what transnational capitalism has on offer. Case in point: in his most recent column, Friedman argues that “Average is Over.” Those with merely par-for-the-course skills and education, he tells us, are bound to find their jobs replaced by foreign workers or by new technology.

Friedman writes:

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation, and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra—their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

We should have seen this coming, especially since Friedman used the same title for a chapter in his latest book (That Used to Be Us, with Michael Mandelbaum). But the column still irks.

Many people (Marie Burns at the NYTimes Examiner being just one) have already beaten me to the inevitable Lake Wobegon reference. Others, such as Dean Baker, have taken on some of the economic misconceptions in the column—about productivity, for instance. (In a well-aimed parting shot, Baker remarks that “average” is apparently not over among high-paid professionals; “Thomas Friedman does a good enough job of demonstrating this directly twice a week in the NYT.”)

The point that I would add is that the column reflects a contempt for workers’ rights—and for established standards of decent living—that has become recurring feature in Friedman’s writing. In a key paragraph of the piece, he writes:

What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s terrific article in the Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’”

Friedman puts all this in a suspiciously positive light. If you hold your breath waiting for him to denounce the exploitation inherent in this description of labor conditions, you’ll suffocate. Nor will you find his mention of the repression of any Chinese workers who would dare to advocate that they and their coworkers should be able to form a democratic union, or his sentence about how managers at the factory in question have had to install safety netting in the dormitories to break the falls of employees moved to attempt suicide.

This absence of concern for workers fits a pattern for Friedman. Faced with tales of gross exploitation in the globalized labor market, his consistent response is not to insist that we find a way to protect human rights internationally. Rather, it is to argue that employees in the United States and Europe need to work harder.

This attitude was perhaps most clearly expressed in Friedman’s 2005 column about the thirty-five-hour workweek in France. There he derided “French voters [who] are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” He ridiculed the European six-week vacation as a hopelessly passé and argued,

The dirty little secret is that India is taking work from Europe or America not simply because of low wages. It is also because Indians are ready to work harder and can do anything from answering your phone to designing your next airplane or car. They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top….Yes, this is a bad time for France and friends to lose their appetite for hard work—just when India, China, and Poland are rediscovering theirs.

Friedman somehow frames all this as a “race to the top.” However, as I have previously written:

It is unclear what Friedman sees as getting to the “top” if paid vacations, unemployment insurance, and retirement—benefits traditionally regarded as signs of a civilized economy—must be sacrificed. In The World Is Flat, he approvingly quotes a Microsoft “team member” in China describing his group of recruits: “They voluntarily work fifteen to eighteen hours a day and come in on weekends. They work through holidays, because their dream is to get to Microsoft.”

That Indian and Chinese workers are willing to sell themselves into bondage for Microsoft, of course, is a dubious sign of global progress. But, Friedman tells us, that is the new reality. His recipe for success in this climate is to “work harder, save more, sacrifice more.”

This brings me back to the weekend. Why stop at attacking the thirty-five-hour workweek? If you’re pitted against someone working fifteen- to eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week, an “average” forty-hour workweek is nearly as indolent and outmoded. So you can kiss those lazy Sundays (and Saturdays) goodbye.

What Friedman seems to miss in all of this is that saying “average is over” (as in his most recent column) or arguing that those who will succeed in the global economy are those who are willing to “sacrifice more” (as in The Lexus and the Olive Tree) is merely another way of stating that labor conditions are worsening for a distressingly large number of people. Even while marveling at the wonders of corporate globalization, he has made the critics’ point for them.

The only remaining debate, then, is about solutions. I appreciate Friedman’s call in his column for expanded public support for higher education—something that would be helpful, if insufficient, in shoring up what remains of an American middle class. But until we’re willing to address the imbalance of power between working people and those transnational corporations that are free to roam the globe in search of tea-and-biscuit sweatshops, we will live in a world in which exploitation is the average.

In response to the call, several hundred people dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods turned in unison, faced east on Pennsylvania Avenue, and began a slow march toward the U.S. Capitol building.

Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo Bay as part of the “War on Terror.” To mark the date, a coalition of human rights groups—including Witness Against Torture, Code Pink, Amnesty International, and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture—held a protest in Washington, DC. The solemn procession of orange-clad demonstrators stretched for blocks, making the event the largest protest on the issue since the start of the Obama administration.

“Guantanamo is a full-system failure,” a speaker announced as the march commenced. Reflecting this distribution of blame, the procession snaked past the White House and Congress, passing near the Department of Justice, before ending at the Supreme Court. Organizers aimed to have at least 171 marchers in hoods and jumpsuits—one for each detainee still being held at Guantanamo—and they passed out well over a hundred coveralls to facilitate this. But many more people showed up with their own orange suits, adding to the line. Moreover, the silent “prisoners” were followed by a crowd of hundreds more protesters, who carried banners and chanted. Taking advantage of the extra rhyme that this issue lends to the old protest standard, they called out, “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Guantanamo has got to go!”

Prior to the march, at a rally in front of the White House, speakers explained the many reasons why indeed the notorious detention camp must go. Amnesty’s Tom Parker outlined “ten powerful anti-human rights messages that the continued existence of the detention facility sends out to the world.” Attorney Martha Rayner read a statement from more than “100 lawyers who have represented or currently represent men imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in federal habeas corpus proceedings.” The statement elaborated the ways in which the U.S. government, since early 2002, has “tried to make the prison camp a ‘legal black hole’ where the sanitizing light of due process and the rule of law would not penetrate.”

The speakers made their case well—just as it was made well in a recent New York Times op-ed by former detainee Murat Kurnaz, who had been rounded up on spurious charges in 2001, taken to Guantanamo, nearly drowned by interrogators, hung by his hands for days, exposed to prolonged abuse, and held for years before being released, still without trial, in 2006.

But what struck me as I marched toward the Supreme Court was how ridiculous it is, a full decade after the facility’s establishment, that the case for Guantanamo’s closure must still be made at all.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama constantly pledged that he would end Bush administration abuses, vowing, “We’re going to close Guantanamo. And we’re going to restore habeas corpus. We’re going to lead by example—by not just word, but by deed. That’s our vision for the future.”

Obama was elected on a mandate to do just that. And even many conservatives had come around on the issue. As Parker noted, “In his memoir Decision Points, President Bush recalls that by his second inauguration in January 2005 he had come to appreciate that Guantanamo had become ‘a propaganda tool for our enemies, and a distraction for our allies.’”

Yet still the prison camp remains.

One protest sign distributed by Amnesty at the march—a sign with black type on a bright yellow background—read, “End Indefinite Detention: Charge or Release!”

I was left to wonder at how this ever became a demand at a demonstration. The types of things I am used to seeing on protest signs—Repeal NAFTA; Make the CEOs Pay; Medicare for All—all contain at least a hint of utopianism. While they are not impractical suggestions in themselves, one would be surprised to see them enacted in full anytime in the near future. But “Charge or Release”? A demand that those being held as criminals should have the charges against them presented? How have we come to a point where this is something that needs placard space?

“The sad fact is that demanding very basic principles of American justice is actually a radical demand, given the systematic violation of these principles by our government,” said Jeremy Varon, associate professor of history at the New School for Social Research. Varon is a friend and colleague who is active in Witness Against Torture and with whom I spoke with at the march. “Simple statements like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ or ‘charge or release’—things that should be core parts of any due process framework—have become things that have to be fought for tooth and nail. And, yes, it can feel weird as someone who is actually quite radical to be asking for things that are such basic components of liberalism—in the philosophical sense of the word. But that’s the political situation we’re in.”

Varon added: “The utopian element is that we want a world beyond torture, beyond coercion, beyond tyranny, and beyond the denial of basic human rights and civil liberties. These shouldn’t be radical propositions, but they need to be defended.”

I asked him how he felt about President Obama’s handling of Guantanamo.

“Completely and totally betrayed,” he said. “At Witness Against Torture, we say that defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. With Obama’s executive orders on day one of the administration, we thought we’d accomplished most of what we had been fighting for. We contemplated dismantling our organization and retiring our ‘Close Guantanamo’ banner. But, just as a matter of due diligence, we stuck it out in Washington in 2008 and had a ‘100 Days to Close Guantanamo’ campaign. We framed it in terms of supporting the president in his effort to realize his executive orders. And then it all unraveled terribly.”

“As many have said, the Obama administration has since restored the immoral and illegal detention apparatus of the Bush regime and given it a patina of bipartisan legitimacy. Once-controversial practices have been institutionalized and normalized. That’s squarely on the head of the Obama administration.”

Going forward, Witness Against Torture is continuing its week of protest. The group expects up to thirty arrests at the White House on Thursday. Also, some forty-five people will be breaking a ten-day fast they have been maintaining in solidarity with Guantanamo prisoners.

Late in the afternoon I spoke to another friend, writer and teacher Matthew Mercier, who had joined this fast. To my surprise, in his tenth day of subsisting only on water, juice, and tea, he seemed lucid and energetic throughout the demonstration. He assured me, however, that he often found himself fading. The night before, he told me, he had been standing vigil outside the White House with another faster between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. “We started talking, trying to keep ourselves warm,” he said. “And we found ourselves incredibly articulate about food: What we’d put on a sandwich. The best tamale we’d ever had. The virtues of lard.”

“But it’s a small thing,” he added a moment later, “denying ourselves a little something to make ourselves aware of the suffering of others.”

The neighborly good cheer and democratic bonhomie of the caucus I attended was almost enough to make me forget, at least for a few moments, that I was sitting four rows up in a set of bleachers packed full of rabid conservatives.

Approaching the caucuses, #OccupyIowa and progressive community groups promoted a variety of tactics for individual activists. One option was to register as a “Republican for a Day” (Iowa allows same-day registration) and to support “uncommitted” delegates to the state convention. This was essentially the equivalent of voting “none of the above” for the conservatives in the running. Some on the left did the same thing at the Democratic Party’s caucuses, issuing a symbolic vote of no confidence for President Obama.

Others focused on introducing progressive resolutions for the state party platforms—for example, proposals to repeal the Citizen’s United ruling, to defend Medicare and Social Security, or to provide relief for homeowners in danger of foreclosure. Former Democratic State Representative Ed Fallon, a veteran activist, told me that he successfully sowed some mischief along these lines. Not only did he register as a Republican for the day and attend a precinct caucus, he got himself elected caucus secretary for the event (apparently, there were no other volunteers for the position), and then he managed to get a resolution passed in support of a marriage equality amendment for gay and lesbian couples. (It was a narrow vote, and the crowd leaned toward Ron Paul libertarians, but still…)

Nothing so unusual happened in the precinct caucus I attended, where appeals to extreme conservatism carried the evening. In the gymnasium of my former middle school (which I had not set foot in since escaping the eighth grade), I watched a speaker promoting Newt Gingrich vow that his candidate would lower corporate tax rates and repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, the regulatory law enacted in the wake of Enron and other corporate accounting scandals.

Shortly thereafter, a Texan volunteer imported to campaign for Rick Perry lauded his candidate’s advocacy of a flat tax, called Perry “America’s most pro-life governor,” and celebrated anti-Planned Parenthood legislation passed in Texas that defunded the group and “closed twelve of their clinics.”

Rick Santorum was represented at the session by his former Senate chief of staff. The man, dressed in jeans and a blue v-neck sweater, explained, “What we need is not to compromise; we need a warrior.” He then awed me by beginning a sentence, “Rush Limbaugh said it best when…”

In the end, only the Romney spokesperson addressed the issue of electability: “We simply cannot have four more years of the current administration,” he said. “Everyone in this room knows that.”

“Everyone in this room” exempted me—and no doubt many of the dozens of other reporters and photographers who swarmed about the event, including members of the press from Sweden, Japan, German, Italy, Belgium, and France. The day before the caucuses I had attended a Ron Paul campaign appearance at the Marriott in downtown Des Moines. A camerawoman from the local ABC affiliate was standing near me. “There’s no real people here,” she whispered to a newscaster colleague in precise make-up. “I know,” the other woman said, “it’s all press. No Iowans.”

Politico’s Roger Simon later tweeted: “Ron Paul no fool: Holding rally in hotel where 400 reporters are staying. I think all of them are here.”

Back at the middle school, when the votes were being counted, caucus officials had to repeatedly implore news cameras to step back and give tally-takers room to breathe. Despite the commotion, after ten minutes, the count was in. Romney had steamrolled through the neighborhood, gathering 105 votes to Paul’s forty-seven and Santorum’s seventeen. Of course, this was in the state’s largest city. Social conservatives in rural precincts voted in much greater numbers for Santorum, giving him his unexpectedly strong overall finish.

After my caucus was done, I drove downtown to OccupyDSM’s semi-industrial “East Village” workspace to hear the activists give a closing statement for their week of action. They celebrated demonstrations that had produced more than sixty arrests and captured significant press attention. They reiterated their call to oust corporate money from our politics. And they celebrated the ability of grassroots movements to outlast the insanity of the caucus season. (“The circus is taking down its tents,” said one spokesperson of the impending exodus from the state.)

I also stopped by Mitt Romney’s Des Moines headquarters. The mood—at least an hour or so before the candidate came to speak—was subdued. A Fox News reporter got laughs from Romney supporters when he announced on air that their candidate, after going head-to-head with Santorum in New Hampshire, would face a “pig pile” of still-unvanquished rivals in South Carolina.

Perhaps a hard-fought primary will weaken the ultimate Republican nominee enough to give President Obama an easy reelection campaign. Yet after the Iowa caucuses, I am less convinced that a Democratic win will be so simple. The week’s protests included not only actions at Republican campaign headquarters, but also denunciations of Obama for the National Defense Authorization Act’s assaults on civil liberties. Disappointment abounds. Meanwhile, when passing the hat to raise money for the Republican Party at the caucus I attended, the precinct leader argued with a straight face, “This is probably the most important election in the past 100 or 125 years.”

None of those who were Republicans for more than just a day seemed to disagree.

About 250 protesters from at least 11 states turned out Tuesday night for the first event of Occupy Iowa’s most aggressive attempt to influence the presidential campaign.

The protesters ramped up for demonstrations at the candidates’ local headquarters and the offices of the Republican and Democratic parties. They were prepared to be arrested en masse, and they were fired up.

Des Moines happens to be my hometown, and so I’ve watched OccupyDSM for months. The impressive strength and resilience of local activists there is one of the things that first convinced me that this could be a movement with truly national reach.

From its start, OccupyDSM has had a hostile relationship with Republican Governor Terry Branstad—who was known to Iowans, not altogether happily, as “governor for life” when he lorded over the state from 1983 to 1999, and who added a fifth act to his undying reign when he won reelection as part of the Republicans’ state-level surge in the 2010 midterms. Branstad swiftly evicted the OccupyDSM protesters from the State Capitol grounds when they set up camp in early October. That event produced some of the movement’s first arrests outside of New York.

However, Mayor Frank Cownie offered OccupyDSM a new space for an occupation on city property, which has since hosted a tent city that has persevered into the Iowa winter. OccupyDSM has also maintained a good working relationship with the city police force.

One of the interesting and impressive things about the local movement is how, even as its new occupation continues to stand, it has moved beyond a sole focus on the encampment. With the “People’s Caucus,” activists are taking advantage of the intense national spotlight shined on the state once every four years, hosting a week of teach-ins and nonviolent direct actions focused on Occupy issues, most prominently the need to get corporate money out of politics. In addition to scoring a plethora of press hits in the local media, the actions have made the national nightly news coverage and have produced multiple stories in outlets such as the New York Times.

The Tuesday night opening event for the People’s Caucus was designed to mirror the experience of attending one of the actual caucuses in Iowa. After some welcoming speakers, participants were given a chance to offer resolutions to the assembly. Unlike in the Democratic or Republican caucuses, these resolutions were not voted up or down for possible inclusion in a state party platform. But the process gave a wide range of speakers—including Occupy representatives from Iowa City, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle—a chance to speak out in favor of things like nullifying the Citizens United ruling, reversing the National Defense Appropriations Act’s violations of civil liberties, “dismantling the U.S. military empire,” ending Bush-era tax cuts, and instating public financing of campaigns.

Next, caucus participants would ordinarily form “preference groups” for specific candidates, trying to get together enough support to win a delegate to represent their pick at the state party convention. In the Peoples’ Caucus, participants instead formed “dispreference groups,” choosing candidates they’d most like to protest.

On Wednesday, I went with the anti-Mitt Romney group to occupy Romney’s Des Moines campaign headquarters. Office staffers (who sheepishly removed the Romney banner from their front window while the action was taking place) locked out the crowd of approximately sixty protesters. Seven people were ultimately arrested at the office door, while others worked on building a cardboard pipeline to Wells Fargo, a bank (conveniently located a few doors down) that has pumped a steady stream of money into Romney’s campaign. Police arrested three additional protesters who entered the Wells Fargo branch.

When activists first announced that they would “Occupy the Caucuses,” Branstad helped stoke fears that dissidents would be interrupting the democratic process itself. However, People’s Caucus delegates emphasized that they would instead be targeting campaign offices, demanding that the candidates be transparent in disclosing the big business contributions that are fueling their efforts. As my younger brother Paul, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Working Poor and active OccupyLA participant, stated as part of the People’s Caucus’s opening panel: “We are not here to disrupt the caucus. We are here to make the caucuses a true representation of democracy…The real disruption is how much money Wall Street has put into our political system.”

A good friend of mine, Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs, gave the opening welcome for the People’s Caucus on Tuesday night. The following was his statement (as seen on C-Span):

Friends, neighbors, members of the press, visiting Occupy delegates, honored guests, welcome. I’d like to begin with some words from a great American leader of the past. He wrote:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

These words of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1864, resonate loud and clear tonight, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2011.

We have gathered here tonight because the political system in the United States no longer represents the values of the American public. Just as President Lincoln predicted, the money-power of the country now resides in the hands of a tiny portion of the population, the 1 percent.

We are here tonight to overthrow money-power with people power. We are here tonight as citizens and patriots to preserve our democracy from the corrupting influence of Wall Street and big corporations. We are here tonight to raise our voices in defense of the American dream. We are here tonight to restore the American political system and American society, to make it human-centered, not profit-centered. We are here tonight to follow through on the vision of our founders and the vision of the great American social movements of the past, the movements that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, ended racial segregation in our communities, established safe working conditions and good wages for hard-working Americans and their families. We are here tonight because our political leaders are no longer able to lead us.

Now is the time for us to lead, for the people of the United States, the 99 percent, to rise up, and restore America, to recreate it, truly, as a nation of opportunity, equality, and justice. Honored guests, members of the 99 percent, we are here tonight because of you. “Join Us!” we cried, and you have answered. And for that, we thank you, and we bid you welcome to the first-in-the-nation People’s Caucus!

I am referring to the “We Are the 99%” Tumblr, the most direct and articulate explanation available of why so many—across America and beyond—have rebelled. The site is a blog to which people submit pictures of themselves. Usually, a person holds out a notebook or sheet of paper, their face partially obscured. On the paper, they have written their stories. Almost always, you can see their eyes.

A stocky man with a short beard, maybe in his forties, has written neatly in marker: “947 days unemployed. 2,000+ resumes sent out. 0 job prospects.”

A young woman in light lipstick: “I’m a full-time grad student and a full-time worker. I have chronic, excruciating migraines. I live in fear of the next attack. I can barely cover rent, gas, and groceries. I can’t afford a doctor’s visit, let alone health insurance.”

A woman with a weary stare: “My husband has been looking for work for five years. I support him, myself, our 6-year-old-son, and (increasingly) my aging parents. Now my job is in jeopardy too.”

They write: “I am one paycheck away from not being able to make my loan payments.” “I am 32 years old and live with my mother.” “I have lost hope.” “What am I doing wrong?”

They sign their messages, “I am the 99%.”

You will not get through all of the stories. As I write, there are 185 pages of them. Yet the message of the site is immediately clear: While our society’s richest 1% enjoy a hugely disproportionate share of wealth and income, the economy has left the vast majority of us behind.

The majority has had enough.

Conservatives say that those protesting Wall Street are just complaining. Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain tells them, “Get a job.”

As a response to the movement’s Tumblr, right-wingers have made a blog called, “We Are the 53%.” It is based on the misleading notion that since only around half of Americans pay federal income taxes, the rest are freeloading. (In fact, even those not subject to federal taxes on income nevertheless pay state and local taxes, gas and excise taxes, plus mandatory contributions for Medicare and Social Security.)

The “53%” stories are testimonials to dogged determination. One man, a father of a 5-month-old, expresses pride in working 70-hour weeks in an effort to pay $100,000 in student loans. “I will be responsible for my own success through character and hard work,” he writes. Another story that has gained notoriety reads: “I am a former Marine. I work two jobs. I don’t have health insurance… I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners.”

These stories only reinforce the message of the occupations. For, if you’re working nearly all of your waking hours, we think you deserve health care. We want you to be free of crippling debt. In fact, we want these things for those who work 40 hours per week. We believe a just society should allow you to spend time with your children.

In large part, the difference between the two blogs is not the description of our economic plight. It’s whether individuals have recognized their personal struggles as part of something larger.

Those who have joined the #Occupy movement are not whining. They are drawing strength from shared experience. They are laying bare the failure of a system. And they are doing something to change it.

Their signature is not merely a denunciation of economic inequality. It is an assertion of a solution: true democracy and collective action. It is a statement of power. We Are the 99%.

That is not to say the aircraft, which lands like a helicopter and flies like an airplane, is invulnerable in combat. Like any other combat aircraft, the V-22 could face anti-aircraft fire or otherwise be shot down by enemies. In fact, it might even go down of its own accord, since the V-22 has been unusually prone to accidents. The Osprey has been plagued by safety concerns throughout its development history. During its testing phase between 1991 and 2000, four Osprey crashes resulted in 30 deaths. Since being activated in 2007, one V-22 has been lost in an accident and a number of others have been damaged in smaller incidents.

But the Osprey is indestructible in a different sense. As a piece of political pork and as an enduring paycheck for military contractors, the Osprey seems to be virtually impossible to kill—even at a time when Congressional leaders claim that controlling the federal budget deficit is a top priority, and when even many conservatives have claimed that military cuts should be “on the table.”

Despite being often regularly highlighted as a weapons system that could be cancelled to produce cost savings for the military, the V-22 remains in production. During the debate over the House appropriations bill in late May, Democrats introduced two different amendments that would have cut funding for the Osprey. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), who offered one amendment, called the program a “boondoggle” for the military-industrial complex and argued, “The job of the Pentagon is not to make defense contractors rich.”

Yet the House overwhelmingly voted down the amendments after Rep. Patrick Meehan led a campaign to save the V-22. Breaking from typical conservative stances against public spending on employment programs, he wrote in a “dear colleagues” letter:

“Cutting this program will take away high-paying jobs and add to unemployment at a critical time in our economic recovery. Our Congressional priority should be on creating and preserving jobs, not destroying them.”

Over the summer, demands for austerity only heated up. Nevertheless, since the failure of the bipartisan “Super Committee” to reach a budget-cutting deal in November, Republicans have vowed to block the automatic cuts to military spending that are supposed to be triggered for the future. And the defense authorization bill that passed the Senate on December 15 included $2.43 billion for the Osprey.

The V-22′s remarkable longevity is rooted in an ingenious ploy often used to arms contractors to ensure continued funding. Because the manufacture of the Osprey’s components is strategically spread over 2,000 contractors in 40 states, the program has been able to draw on a deep well of political goodwill. A short tour of just a few of its local bases of support would include:

• Ridley, Pennsylvania: A Boeing facility in Ridley is a main site for development of the V-22. In 1991, as prices for the aircraft began to skyrocket and production delays mounted, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney recommended cancelling funding, reportedly calling the Osprey “a turkey.” Yet the program was saved, thanks to Representative Curt Weldon of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who formed the bipartisan “Tilt-Rotor Technology Coalition” to lobby for the beleaguered aircraft. Overriding the wishes of the Department of Defense itself, the Osprey lived. And Boeing, the largest employer in Delaware County, continued receiving contracts for its development. Today, Patrick Meehan, the leader of the recent fight to defeat the anti-Osprey amendments, serves in Weldon’s district.

• Amarillo, Texas: Bell Textron Inc., a key partner with Boeing, is based in Amarillo, a town known as “Rotor City U.S.A.” owing to its production of V-22s. Like many of his fellow Republicans, Mac Thornberry, the U.S. representative from the area, has railed against the Obama administration’s stimulus efforts, arguingthat “When government bails people out, someone still has to pay the bills,” and, “If Washington wants to help the economy, the best thing it can do is get out of the way.”Yet in 2010, after a bipartisan White House commission released a $3.8 trillion deficit reduction plan that targeted the Osprey, Thornberry, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, was irate. “I appreciate the chairmen of this commission offering some initial proposals to deal with the deficit,” he said in a statement, “but their charge and their expertise does not extend to evaluating individual weapon systems.” He then added, “The V-22 is doing a great job for our military. They need it, and they will have it.” Bell Textron employs more than 1000 people in Amarillo.

• Hayden, Idaho: The city of Hayden is home to Unitech Composites and Structures, which has a contract to produce manifolds and ducts for the V-22. The city falls within the district of freshman Congressman Raúl Labrador. As one of an incoming cohort of militantly conservative Republicans identified with the Tea Party, Labrador has made even some veteran members of his own party uneasy with his callto “make drastic, across-the-board cuts to our federal spending levels.”Might the Osprey be included in his drastic cuts? The answer appears to be no. In the most recent House debate, Labrador voted against the Woolsey amendment.

While the Osprey is a gift to defense contractors, it has also served as a boon to activists by so nakedly illustrating the wastefulness and cronyism that drives defense budgeting and undermining claims that bloated military budgets actually correspond with national security needs. The annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States”—an alternative defense budget prepared by a coalition of groups including the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and the Cato Institute—has regularly placed the Osprey alongside systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as a poster child of needless spending. The 2011 edition of the report notes, “Halting production of the V-22 will save… over $10 billion during the next five years, and would still leave the Marines with more than 150 of the V-22 hybrids.” Similarly, the non-partisan group Citizens Against Government Waste targeted the Osprey program as their “Spending Cut of the Week” in April.

Although the V-22 has become notorious in many respects, it is hardly unique as an example of how military contractors have cleverly manipulated U.S. politics. Since the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, Occupy-related actions in Washington, D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa protesting the measure have produced arrests. Activists have focused primarily on the NDAA’s extension of presidential authority to indefinitely detain individuals as part of the “War on Terror;” however, groups such as United for Peace and Justice also highlight how the bill “wastes billions of dollars that 99% of Americans need for a more secure life here at home.” The phoenix-like Osprey is but one resilient emblem of this waste.

The current “Exhibit A” for this idea comes from the debate about the Keystone XL pipeline. Construction of this proposed 1,700-mile pipeline, designed to carry oil from environmentally disastrous wells in the Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas, was considered virtually inevitable just six months ago. But that was before climate change activists revved up an aggressive campaign against it, staged a week of civil disobedience outside the White House, and made the issue a make-or-break decision for Obama with regard to his relationship with the environmental community. Ultimately, the campaigners won a suspension of the pipeline, seriously crimping Big Oil’s plans.

Conservatives have not been happy about this. Currently, they are demanding that the Keystone pipeline be revived. As the New York Times writes in a strongly anti-pipeline editorial:

The Keystone XL oil pipeline has become the House Republicans’ weapon of choice in their fight with President Obama over jobs and taxes. Mr. Obama has said he will not make a decision on the pipeline until 2013. The Republicans are insisting that he approve it now and have attached an amendment to a bill extending the payroll tax cut in hopes of forcing his hand.

This legislative booby trap seems unlikely to make it through the Senate, and the president has all but said he would reject it if it does. But this has not stopped the House Republicans, led by Speaker John Boehner, from using the pipeline as a political cudgel—or from wildly inflating its economic benefits.

A central part of the right-wing case for the pipeline is that it will create jobs. Indeed it will. How many jobs, and at what cost, is the subject of debate. And this is where make-believe dies hard.

Bill McKibben, author and leading climate campaigner, has taken on the near-ubiquitous industry claim that the pipeline will create 20,000 jobs. He writes:

Twenty thousand jobs. All summer and fall, while the Keystone pipeline debate raged, that was the one constant….

It lives still….As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce put it last week as it announced its support: “The $7 billion project is expected to create more than 20,000 jobs during the manufacturing and construction phases.”

Not surprisingly, he explains, the source of the 20,000 jobs claim is a suspect one:

The number came originally from a report paid for by Transcanada, the company building the pipeline. The original State Department review, however, found that the actual number would be 5,000 at best—and these jobs would be temporary, lasting the year or so it took to build the pipeline. (No reporter that I know of ever pointed out the simplest truth: The reason you build a pipeline is because once it’s built, it takes almost “hundreds not thousands,” according to the Transcanada chief executive officer.)

In addition to McKibben, a few mainstream media sources have called out conservatives for using the inflated number. Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Steve Mufson debunked the industry study at the root of the 20,000 jobs mantra. Moreover, the New York Times, in its Tuesday editorial, wrote:

Mr. Boehner calls Mr. Obama’s delay “theatrics” and described the project as a “no brainer” that will create “tens of thousands” of jobs immediately. This is a fairy tale, implying not only short-term but permanent benefits. The pipeline company, TransCanada, says the project could create 6,500 construction jobs annually, most of them temporary.

The State Department, the lead federal agency on the project, also estimates 6,500 temporary jobs. And the only independent study, conducted by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute, concludes that it may generate no more than 50 permanent jobs when the work is done.

Making up job creation numbers for political purposes is nothing new. And, in fact, the Keystone situation actually compares favorably to “Exhibit B”: the outlandish jobs claims used to justify passage this fall of “free trade” deals with Panama, Colombia, and Korea.

Measuring the impact of trade on jobs requires a two-step evaluation: First, you measure the amount that a given deal will increase your exports (thereby supporting domestic industry). Then you subtract the amount that it will increase imports (thereby undermining domestic industry). If you end up in the negative, you have a deal that will increase your trade deficit, and you can’t honestly advertise it as a job creator.

And yet that’s exactly what the Obama administration and other “free trade” boosters did with the Panama, Colombia, and Korea deals. They perpetuated a numbers scam that worked beautifully in the media. I recently discussed this with Global Trade Watch’s Todd Tucker in an interview:

ENGLER: There are serious reports—including a study by the government’s own International Trade Commission—showing that these agreements will increase the U.S. trade deficit, therefore costing domestic jobs. Do you think the White House just doesn’t believe the jobs numbers or that it doesn’t care?

TUCKER: Shortly after President Obama’s December 2010 trip to Korea, a talking point emerged that the trade deals were going to increase U.S. exports and therefore support 70,000 jobs. As it turns out, the administration got that number by looking at just the export predictions—and not the import predictions. Why it was seen as even remotely credible, especially given the number of jobs that we need to be creating, is beyond me….

ENGLER: But do you think they really believe that the deals will create 70,000 jobs, or was that just a statistic created to sell the agreements politically?

TUCKER: Someone at the White House knew what they were doing when they spliced off one page of the official projections from the subsequent page and didn’t look at what the net impact was going to be. That was a decision to willfully distort their own research.

At Global Trade Watch, we tried every day with the reporters who were covering this issue to get this point across. We said, “Look, we’re not asking you to take our economic projections versus their economic projections, or to engage in some sort of independent econometric investigation. All we’re doing is saying that there are two pages in the government’s own study that you need to look at in order to hold them accountable to the claims they’re making.”

We put this to all the trade reporters, day after day, and hardly a one was willing to call the administration on its own trick. Whether it’s because journalists are stretched too thin at these downsizing publications, or whether they’re actually just being very partisan, for whatever reason the facts just never come out.

I think that if the facts had been consistently reported, we could have had a different outcome. The deals were sold—especially to a lot of the Tea Party freshmen—as something that we needed to do for job creation. If the representatives had realized, “Oh, wow, the government’s own projections show that this is likely to increase the trade deficit and might cost jobs,” I think the tenor of the debate would have been a lot different.

With Keystone, we can be thankful that a few news organizations have cast a critical eye on the jobs numbers. But that doesn’t mean that conservative make-believe will go away—nor that pundits will be satisfied with imagining a mere 20,000 people employed.

Stephen Colbert recently did a montage of Fox News types tripping over themselves to claim that the Keystone pipeline would create 50,000 or 120,000 or even a million new jobs. “Those numbers,” Colbert quipped, “come from the pipeline those experts built from their ass straight to the airwaves.” (Check out the clip, starting at about 1:30.)

If you want to see it come directly from the horse’s mouth, Big Oil’s self-produced propaganda can be found at FuelingJobs.com. Their video argues that Keystone would produce 340,000 jobs, although the text of their website merely claims “tens of thousands of new jobs,” which seems like a retreat. Although the tone of the industry video is meant to be earnest, its soundtrack (alternating between ominous Middle Eastern music and soaring American melodies) and its depiction of elderly sit-in participants wearing sun hats as “green radicals” tends toward self-parody. Try as he might to exaggerate for comic effect, Stephen Colbert has little on reality.