Poverty and Hunger in the U.S.A.
A SECRET IN THE NEWS:
On Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Bush backs "faith-based" programs: holy water for the social crisis in America
Poverty, the Law, and the Voices of People with Mental Illnesses
Bush, Cheney Report 2000 Earnings
Just another Saturday morning at COH-SF
Bad Diets May Breed Deadlier Viruses
POVERTY COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET
JUST SCRAPING BY Barbara Ehrenreich Reveals the Plight of the Working Poor
GETTING RIGHT WITH JESUS: The Link Between Public Piety and Capitalism
HUNGER STRIKE TO SAVE D.C. GENERAL HOSPITAL ENTERS 27TH DAY
United States Lagging in Economic Human Rights
What Has The Supreme Court Been Smoking? The High Court OKs Discriminatory, No-Fault Eviction Laws
Cul-de-sacs and soup kitchens: the new suburban poor
A SECRET IN THE NEWS: THE COUNTRY'S PERMANENT POOR
A SECRET IN THE NEWS: THE
COUNTRY¹S PERMANENT POOR
It can be the best of times or the worst of times, but whether in prosperity
or recession, there is one constant in the United States economy ‹ the
richest country in the world has maintained a permanent class of Americans
who are poor. That is not an accident. It is maintained by official action
as deliberate as Alan Greenspan¹s protection of the prosperity of banks and
stock markets. In this case it is the scandalous maintenance by new laws and
regulations, new tax codes, and special multi-billion tax waivers for
favored giant corporations. Those in this permanent class are not the
momentarily unemployed. Most of them shift jobs. Or are alcoholics, addicts
and handicapped people. Most of them work. Neither are they inevitable as
temporarily unlucky in a world of global economic change. Long before the
³new economy² and after it, none of our Western European peers of affluent
nations has sustained a permanent class of the poor like one in the U.S.
Those other countries have social policies that prevent it.
When confronted with persistent poverty in the world¹s richest country, the
American mainstream print and electronic media seem to take as their mandate
the Biblical words from Matthew, ³The poor ye will have always.² They do
this with little concern that poverty in the midst of plenty in the world¹s
richest country is an American exception among all advanced societies. (The
U.S. is the richest in Gross Domestic Product and in per capita income is
second only to Luxembourg.)
The news media may protest that they do cover the poor. And in one sense,
they do. But these are typically isolated stories about a hard-luck family
in a disaster area, or profile of the plucky Midwest downsized manager
flipping burgers at McDonald¹s ‹- sympathetic features but depicted as
isolated cases. Reported only rarely and obscurely is why the United States,
among all its affluent peer countries, retains a poor class year in and year
out.
Given the symbiotic relationship between our national politicians and the
main news media, that media failure has consequences. What the main media
ignore, political leaders know they can safely ignore. The needy appear only
at election time in stereotyped rhetoric and campaign photo ops. The empty
rhetoric without subsequent media follow-up has deepened the comfortable
assumption that in America poverty is an unavoidable act of God. When a
government report documents one element in permanent poverty, like the 1997
HUD 1997 document on the unrelenting rental housing crisis, it passes out of
print in one day, not followed up with emphatic subsequent stories, which is
the process that produces political pressures for action. Or the mainstream
news relates it to the ³millionaire-market² housing scene in San Francisco
Bay or midtown Manhattan, not the same crisis for average families in
suburbs of Chicago and rural Kansas and thousands of other cities and towns.
Permanent poverty may have been inexorable in biblical times, when there
really was inadequate food, inefficient use of arable land, rigid class
systems, slavery and serfdom. But today¹s world has enough food for
everyone, and affluent countries like the United States have enough rich
resources to guarantee their populations enough decent food, housing,
universal health care, jobs and pensions. Most of our peer countries do
exactly that. Only the United States has chosen not to rid itself of a
permanent poor.
The United States is unique among the world¹s advanced industrial
societies-France, Germany, the United Kingdom, for example. It has retained
this dubious exception for so long ‹ almost a half century ‹ that a poverty
class in this country is now seen as normal, inevitable, and, with parallel
media unconcern, consequently invisible.
Who are ³the American poor²
and are they really poor?
Government statistics periodically adjust the poverty level in the country
to reflect changes in the cost of living. In 1999, for example, a family of
three with a household income of $13,880 or less was classified as living in
poverty. Of the 32 million Americans in poverty, 72 percent were in
families. These include one of every five American children. These are not
poor because they lack Cuisinarts and BMWs. They are poor because they lack
enough food, shelter, and access to other elementary living conditions in
any modern society.
Why do we permit this when our peer nations do not? The answers are not
mysterious: official housing policies, deliberate shifting of national
wealth to the top through destruction of the national progressive income
tax, mammoth special favors for corporations, and cynical treatment of the
national minimum wage. Why do the mainstream news media share the blame?
A dramatic demonstration of media¹s guilty involvement occurred thirty years
ago. When, suddenly, as though from nowhere, we had homeless families living
in the streets. For national civic life it was the dead canary in the coal
mine. We know why the canaries die in the mines: it is a warning of methane
gas kills sensitive canaries before it kills human beings. The dead canary
of structural American poverty was the sudden appearance of the homeless in
the early 1980s.
In the 1980s, the number of poor Americans began climbing noticeably. By
1998-1999, the average poor child was further below the poverty line than he
or she was in 1979.
The 1979-1980s change tells something crucial. By the mid-1980s, seemingly
out of nowhere, for the first time since the Great Depression, large numbers
of individuals and families were living in the streets. ³The homeless,² is a
social phenomenon usually associated with countries like Bangladesh, but has
now survived as a visible urban fixture in this richest of countries.
Emblematic is the failure of the big newspapers and broadcasters to search
out the source of the new homeless when they first appeared in the 1980s.
Most often, the media refer to the homeless who are alcoholics, drug
addicted, or mentally ill. But we always had alcoholics, addicts and the
mentally ill before without large numbers of families living in the streets.
Something radical had changed.
A hint of what¹s changed is that homeless people ‹ a minority of the total
poor ‹ are homeless even though, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 64 percent of them have jobs, some of them two jobs, but they
are still poor by government standards.
No affluent democracy has been able to house its low-wage families by
depending on the private real estate industry. Government-subsidized
low-cost housing has been found indispensable if all are to be housed in
minimally decent homes and apartments. Before 1979, the United States
subsidized 200,000 such low-income units a year. In the early 1980s, in the
new fervor for shifting everything possible to the free market, subsidized
low-cost housing subsidies were cut by 92 percent. That is the central
reason we suddenly had a permanent beggar class and families living in the
streets. Few readers or TV news watchers were ever told the basic reasons
why our homeless happened ³out of nowhere.²
Why the media¹s strange lack of curiosity? It was part of the main media¹s
gingerly treatment of basic causes of social ills whose remedies might
involve an increase in taxes. On the contrary, the media generally celebrate
the opposite ‹ whatever reduces taxes. Explaining the ³dead canary² of the
suddenly-homeless might have stimulated renewed appropriations for
subsidized low-cost housing-taxes for the benefit of the most politically
powerless group in the electorate.
There are other contributing forces to persistent homelessness. Earlier it
had been found that most of the institutionalized mentally ill were improved
if they were released to local treatment centers in their home cities and
received counseling at local treatment centers. So mental hospitals were
effectively emptied, saving millions of tax dollars. But even more taxes
were saved by reneging on the promise to shift the saved money to local
treatment centers.
The majority of the poor are not mentally ill. They are mentally sound,
non-addicted individuals and families. But they remain poor. According to
the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD), from 1985 to 1993 the
private market for affordable housing dropped another 20 percent, and,
according to the Journal of Housing and Community Development, only 33
percent of Americans eligible by law for federal housing actually can find
such housing.
The Journal¹s December, 1997 issue reported, ³With affordable housing out of
reach for growing numbers of low-income Americans, the housing crisis can
only be expected to worsen... the recent actions by Congress have further
disenfranchised an already disadvantaged segment of the American family.² In
1995, there were 1.3 million low-cost housing units available for 2.6
million low-income renters, as shown by a survey by the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities. Yet, in that same time period, according to the National
Association of Realtors, the median price for a single family house rose 45
percent. With low-cost rental apartments unattractive to the real estate
industry and failure of the needed government subsidies for what the private
market prefers to reject, the ³mystery² of both the homeless and the
impoverished 32,000,000 Americans is not very mysterious.
In addition, the poor have been paying steadily higher percentages of their
income on rent-more than 50 percent of their disposable income. In a
Catch-22, from the remaining half or less must come other indispensable
human needs, like food, clothing and payment of their unfair burden of the
most regressive taxes.
Underlying the issue is the shameful phenomenon of a radical shift of
national personal wealth from the bottom 80 percent of the population to the
top 20 percent, with the lion¹s share of that going to the top 1 percent.
The fact that such a gap exists gets into American news occasionally, but as
a routine statistic, like the corn crop in Kansas.
The United States has the widest gap in the world between its very rich and
its unrich. The gap has grown year after year, neither by accident nor by
talent and hard work by the super-rich. American workers are unique in their
low share of their employers¹ revenues compared to our counterpart
countries. The typical American CEO receives 34 times the typical American
factory worker who now earns less (in absolute dollar terms) than hourly
workers in Japan, Germany, or Switzerland. The multi-million- and
billion-dollar executive compensations show no relationship to the
performance of those corporate executives, according to our most prominent
authority on executive compensation, Graef Crystal, formerly of the
University of California at Berkeley and now with Bloomberg News. He has
said, ³It gets worse and worse... It¹s absolutely sick.²
The massive shift of American wealth to the top has been reported in the
media, but without the sense of outrage and alarm that would puzzle a
Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Franklin Roosevelt, or any number of
political and media leaders of past eras. Though the main media attitude
toward the poor seems to take comfort from the Book of Matthew¹s resignation
to their plight, the media seem less interested in another biblical
reference, ³It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,
than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God...²
Other affluent countries lack the size and causes of the permanent American
poor. The answer is simple. The other rich countries have housing,
employment, pension, and tax policies that prevent it. The overall answer is
an inexcusable fantasy aided and abetted by our major media, newspapers
that, for example, have ³Correction Columns² for errors like printing the
wrong middle initial of a politicians. The media fantasy, aided and abetted
by politicians, have convinced the people of the United States of a
falsehood, namely, that we are a brutally over-taxed country. The truth is
that of all the affluent democracies, Americans are the lowest taxed in the
world, including the sum of all local, state, and national taxes.
Consequently, when this fantasy is shrill in every political campaign ‹
promising lower taxes as a dire necessity ‹ it is accepted as an urgently
needed rescue of that beleaguered population, the very rich. Though the main
media love to find culprits in social problems, on this they practice
selective amnesia. For more than half a century, the share of federal taxes
paid by corporations has been dropping radically and shifted onto families
and individuals. In 1940, corporations paid 40 percent of federal revenues.
By 2000 it had dropped to 12 percent.
Guess who pays for that
shift?
Even though money supply and national wealth have grown, in 1955 corporate
taxes paid for 6 percent of our Gross Domestic Product but now pay only 2.5
percent. Except for Japan, U.S. income taxes as 34 percent of GDP are lowest
among industrialized nations. The rate in Canada is 36 percent, Germany 39
percent, Switzerland 50 percent. It is not coincidental that most of those
other countries have universal health care, guaranteed housing and more
generous social benefits than United States.
The top federal income tax rate for the richest Americans was once 70
percent, though people that rich hired the best accountants and tax
shelters, so few paid anything like the top bracket. The top rate in 2000
had dropped to 39 percent, and in practice it is closer to 33 percent, and
few in that theoretical bracket pay that much for the same reasons. Now the
Bush Administration wishes to drop it to 25. The country¹s progressive
income tax is now close to dead.
However, some taxes do go up. The loss of our federal progressive income tax
has year-by-year shifted basic American taxes to the most regressive kind in
which the poor pay more of their income than do the rich. In the resulting
shift of taxes from Washington income tax responsibilities to states,
counties and cities, these jurisdictions have resorted to sales taxes, the
most regressive kind. Here, of course, the poor pay the most in terms of
disposable income. In 1995, according to Citizens for Tax Justice and The
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the lowest 20 percent of family
incomes paid 12.5 percent of all state and local taxes (property, sales, and
fees) while the top 20 percent of families paid 8.5 percent of their family
incomes. A 7.5 percent sales tax on a minimum wage worker represents a
significant percentage of that person¹s income. The same percentage sales
tax on a millionaire is a negligible percentage of total income, which is
why, in the need for revenues, corporations and the rich insist on sales
taxes instead of higher federal income taxes. The final insult to the poor
is the minimum wage. Corporations and the rich fight every move for an
increase, the way they fought against creation of the minimum wage in the
first place. In 1970 the minimum wage was worth 29 percent more in real
terms than it was in 2000. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in
1970 minimum wage workers were living above the poverty level. In 1998, only
19 percent were.
A standard objection that it will reduce the number of jobs available, or
force small businesses into failure, has no basis in reality. The Institute
says a raised minimum wage has never resulted in significant reductions in
jobs or closed businesses.
Objectors to Minimum Wage have always raised the image of denying the
after-school teen-ager learning how to be productive. But in 1999, 71
percent of people earning the minimum wage were adults.
If the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped steadily for twenty years it
would be front page and leading broadcast news day after day until
government took action. That 32 million of our population have their
housing, food, and clothing ³index² drop steadily for more than 30 years is
worth only an occasional feature story about an individual or statistical
fragments in back pages of our most influential news organizations. An
unnecessary poverty class is shameful in ³the leader of the free world² and
the richest one at that. A fraction of the media¹s daily attention to the
Dow, the media¹s role in creating the myth of overtaxed Americans and the
notion of an inexorable American poor class, make our mainstream papers and
broadcasters a party to a cruel and unnecessary flaw in our society.
Corporations and Washington legislators may point with helpless resignation
to the Biblical assertion that the poor will always be with us, but the
experience of other rich countries like Germany, France, Canada, and Britain
suggests that the answer lies less in Book of Matthew, and more in The
Congressional Record.
Ben H. Bagdikian
(Ben H. Bagdikian is the author of In the Midst of Plenty: The Poor in
America (Beacon Press, 1963), The Media Monopoly (6th Ed., 2000), and other
books. He also played a key role in obtaining and publishing portions of The
Pentagon Papers. He is the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism
at the University of California at Berkeley, and will appear as a featured
speaker at the 2001 North American Street Newspaper Association Annual
Conference July 26-29 at New College of California, San Francisco.)
--
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On Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
by Rachel Cooke and Barbara Ehrenreich
Four years ago, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich had lunch with the editor of a rather serious American magazine called Harper's (not to be confused with Harper's Bazaar; it is one place where you're unlikely to find Liz Hurley talking about the dastardly Bing). Over salmon, greens and fizzy mineral water, the pair discussed a few ideas. Soon, however, the talk drifted to one of her favourite themes - poverty. How, she mused, does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? In particular, how were the four million women then about to be booted into the labour market by welfare reform going to survive on just $6 an hour? It was at this point that Ehrenreich, who is in her fifties, said something that she subsequently had more than a few opportunities to regret (though, these days, she is pretty happy that she uttered the dread words, as we shall see). 'Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism,' she said, fork in hand. 'You know, go out there and try it for themselves.' In her mind, she pictured some hungry 'neophyte' hack with, as she puts it, 'time on her hands'. But, no. The editor of Harper's, a man with the wonderfully Tom Wolfe-ish name of Lewis Lapham, looked at her and, a crazy half smile spreading slowly across his face, replied: 'YOU.'
And so it was that she abandoned her writerly lifestyle in tropical Key West and set about living on the breadline. Over the next two years, she waitressed in Florida, cleaned houses in Maine and worked in Wal-Mart in Minnesota. First, though, she set some ground rules. During the endurance test ahead, she was not allowed to rely on skills learned in her old life; she had to accept the best-paid job available, then hang on to it for all she was worth; and she had to take the cheapest housing she could find. It was the last rule that proved the toughest; even the most drearily basic accommodation turned out to be so expensive that the term 'trailer trash' quickly became 'a demographic category to aspire to'.
Thanks to all this hard graft (luckily, Ehrenreich, the daughter of a copper miner, is a stubborn old boot), what started out as an article was soon a book, Nickel and Dimed - and, to its author's astonishment, it has taken America by storm, rushing up the New York Times bestseller list. 'Yeah,' she says, in her wry way. 'The paperback is still up there with Seabiscuit, a story about a horse - a book I've never read but one which I deeply resent.' A play based on Nickel and Dimed is about to open in Seattle and a documentary soon to be screened on TV. There is even talk of a film. 'I want Catherine Zeta Jones to play me, obviously,' she says. However, in the circumstances, it seems rather more likely that the role will go to the redoubtable Susan Sarandon.
By anyone's standards, Nickel and Dimed is an extraordinary achievement. Though the terrain is depressingly mundane (eating in the 'family' restaurant of a budget hotel is hateful enough, never mind working in one), Ehrenreich has produced what is surely one of the most gripping political books ever written. There is misery - the lives of her fellow workers are very miserable indeed - but her story is also a page turner. Will she survive the night in her seedy motel? Will she stand up to Ted, her odious boss at the Maids? And what will her colleagues think when she unmasks herself to them? She writes with sardonic verve and has a woman's eye for the Orwellian minutiae of life in post-industrial America.
'That was the biggest - and nastiest - surprise,' she says. 'Discovering how big an atmosphere of suspicion there was, how much surveillance we were under. First, there were the drug and personality tests, then the endless rules. At Wal-Mart, we were not even allowed to say "damn".' She touches the discreet gold hoops in her ears. 'These would have been way too big for Wal-Mart. All that was a shock and it got to me. I found that I could not distance myself from the situation as much as I would have liked. The work took over. I'd imagined that I would do all this reading. But I never opened a book, not even a novel. Nothing was really going on apart from the job, my attempts to make ends meet and my note-taking.'
For the duration of her visit to London, Ehrenreich is staying in a curiously old-fashioned West End hotel where she is a big hit on account of her propensity for generous tipping (a by-product of her labours in the low-wage economy). Small and bird-like, she was born in Butte, Montana, a city whose mines have since been replaced by a vast toxic waste dump.
'It was a strong working-class town,' she says. 'I grew up knowing you should never cross a picket line or vote Republican. We were upwardly mobile - my father got some education, became a metallurgist and drifted into administration - but my extended family is mixed. I have one cousin who is a physician, but I have others who are low-wage workers.'
Ehrenreich is divorced with two grown-up children, so untangling herself from everyday life was not difficult. In fact, she was able to tell prospective employers an almost truthful story: to them, she was simply another middle-aged woman starting out all over again. Her age certainly did not put them off. As she soon discovered, turnover in the low-wage world is so fast that companies simply use people up - literally working them until their backs give up the ghost or their knees buckle beneath them - and then spit them out. The poor are unlikely to have health insurance or pensions, so there is no prospect of retirement. 'This book justified all my visits to the gym,' she says. 'I was glad of every weight I'd ever lifted.'
Her odyssey begins - out of laziness - in Key West. She gets a job at the Hearthside restaurant ('your basic Ohio cuisine with a tropical twist'), where she is paid $2.43 an hour. Here, she finds that 'Joan', whose job it is to greet customers, is living in a van parked behind a shopping centre and showers in the motel room inhabited by another colleague. Ehrenreich, alas, is not in possession of a van and so, struggling to come up with enough funds to pay for her tiny bedsit and the gas required to drive to work, moves to a different joint, where she hopes to earn more tips (though her basic pay is still a paltry $2.15 an hour). At Jerry's, she works with a Czech dishwasher whose digs are so crowded he cannot sleep until someone else goes on shift, leaving a vacant bed.
But even with her new job - and, whoopee, how she loves mixing up those four-gallon batches of blue cheese dressing - Ehrenreich cannot make the figures add up. To save on petrol, she moves to a trailer park, closer to town. Her berth, No 46, is just eight feet wide. Outside is a liquor store, a bar - 'free beer tomorrow', says the sign - and a Burger King, but no supermarket or launderette. Desolation rules. 'There are not exactly people here,' she writes, 'but what amounts to canned labour, being preserved between shifts from the heat.' A month's rent and the deposit are $1,100. Amazingly, this is one of the better places she finds to live.
'Yes, that was quite cosy, looking back,' she says. It was during her third experiment, in Minneapolis, that she hit rock bottom and found herself in a stench-ridden room at a place someone with a sick sense of humour had christened the Clearview Inn. She had no cooker, fridge or fan.
'The curtains were so thin, I could only get undressed in the dark; the door had no bolt. Anyone could have come into that room if they'd wanted. Sure, I was scared. I slept in my clothes.' Don't imagine for a minute that she could have done better than this. Minneapolis has a chronic shortage of low-cost housing. This hovel cost $245 a week; at the time, Wal-Mart, the biggest retail corporation in the world, was paying her a mere $7 an hour.
In Maine, she joins a national cleaning franchise, The Maids. Ehrenreich has always done her own housework, so it is with a mixture of glee and bewilderment that she learns how the professionals do it. Rooms are cleaned left to right. Steel sinks are brightened with baby oil. The fringes of a Persian carpet are combed out with a pick. The vacuum cleaner, a crushing 14lb backpack affair, is used to make fern-like patterns on the carpets. Worse, the women are worked like so many mules - except that these beasts are not allowed to stop for even so much as a glass of water on a sweltering morning. Lunch is eaten in the car en route to the next house: a bag of Doritos and a couple of Advil to deal with the aches and pains.
'I've been asked what was the saddest story I came across,' she says. 'Well, the thing that upset me most happened at The Maids. It was the last day of a much older woman, Pauline. She'd worked there for two years - longer than anyone else - but was leaving to have surgery on her knees. At the morning meeting, Ted [the boss] didn't say anything to her - no goodbye, no thank you, nothing. I drove her home that day. She was so hurt. Yet all she could say was: "He's never liked me since I had to stop vacuuming because of my back."' When another (pregnant) worker at The Maids falls and sprains her ankle, she is too afraid of losing her job to admit to Ted what has happened - and her colleagues are too terrified of losing theirs to join Ehrenreich in a mutiny over her plight.
But while the dirty corporate secrets revealed in Nickel and Dimed have given low-pay campaigners new focus, Ehrenreich has had no comeback from the companies themselves. 'I gather my book's been a big hit in the Wal-Mart ladies department,' she grins. 'But so far as the high-ups go, nothing. I was very careful, you see, not to criticise anything the company was selling - and their employment practices are increasingly well known. Only the other day, it was revealed that in some states Wal-Mart has not been paying workers the overtime to which they are entitled by law.' Other companies were not identified by their real names.
'The only reaction I had at all was from the guy who owned the restaurant where I worked in Key West. His wife recognised the place and he invited me out for lunch. I agreed to coffee. I was a little nervous. I was afraid he might send his lawyers after me. But he was a nice guy, though I kept thinking how manicured his nails were. He had these spreadsheets with him. I thought he was going to say he was paying out so much in labour it was killing him. In fact, he admitted that everything I'd said was true. He was embarrassed and apologised. So I said: "Why don't you raise the wages?" But he shrugged that off.' Their lattes drunk, the only concession she won from him was that he would clean the employee rest room.
Ehrenreich ends her book on a positive note, but this is more wishful thinking stoked with hot anger than a promise (she dreams of a wave of strikes by an angry, newly unionised workforce). In the near future, she thinks, things will not change, for the simple reason that America's poor are so disenfranchised. 'I don't think anybody is expecting the federal government to do anything. What is Bush going to do about poverty? Bomb it? It's a vicious circle. The poor don't vote, because they don't see the parties addressing issues that matter to them; and the politicians don't address those issues, because they don't think those people vote.'
Her experiences, however, have had a lasting effect on her own conscience. 'I used to have a boyfriend who thought we should have a cleaner. I couldn't explain why I was opposed to the idea - it just seemed emotional on my part. Then I did the job and I knew why I felt so uncomfortable with it. Do I still eat out? Yes, but remember: even in an expensive restaurant, where the waiters do well in tips, there are still the dishwashers and the other people in the background.
'My perception really has changed. Now, when I see a woman behind the counter in a convenience store, I have so many questions. How long has she been on her feet? What does she get paid? Who does she go home to?'
The problem for Ehrenreich now, of course, is how should she follow up the mother of all assignments. Has inspiration struck? She cackles. 'I'm trying to convince my editor to give me a multi-million-dollar advance to experience the lives of the rich. But he just laughs... and I guess he's right. I'd have a hard time infiltrating that world. I'd have to get manicured, have plastic surgery. I just wouldn't fit in.'
More to the point, in conversation she'd probably get into all sorts of trouble; hard to imagine a sometime contrarian like her making polite small talk at cocktail parties. She raises her eyebrows, just a touch. 'Yes, there is that.'
*******************************
Alternative Press Review - www.altpr.org Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream PO Box 4710 - Arlington, VA 22204
Infoshop.org - www.infoshop.org News Kiosk - www.infoshop.org/inews
Just another Saturday morning at COH-SF
by chance martin
I just got off the phone with Anita (not her real name), who called us
collect from jail.
When you receive a collect call from jail here in SF, you get one of those
female robot (fembot?) voices "THIS IS A COLLECT CALL FROM *** (real voice)
'Amanda' *** AN INMATE AT THE SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY JAIL. TO ACCEPT THE CALL
PRESS '0' NOW. TO BLOCK FURTHER CALLS FROM THIS FACILITY PRESS '1' NOW."
(which blocks your phone from EVER receiving a collect call from the jail
facility)
Being mostly human (even five minutes after walking into the office on a
Saturday, and I hadn't had any coffee yet), I press '0'.
Then the voice comes on and says "YOU HAVE JUST ACCEPTED A CALL FROM AN
INMATE AT THE SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY JAIL."
The caller gets to hear all of this too.
We know Anita. She's struggling with homelessness along with her partner
Brian (not his real name). We had helped them help themselves to the point
where they were going to move into an SRO hotel room, which is a pretty
fucking sorry accomplishment, but the rains have been cold and regular
lately. They were supposed to move in last Friday, but then Anita got picked
up by SFPD on an old petty theft beef she walked away from five or six years
ago. Because she never took care of the charge, she can't be "cited
out" or
released on her own recognizance. We were trying to help by getting her
mom's number so her mom could bail her out, then she could find her Brian
somewhere on these fabled streets of San Francisco, and they could see if
their room was still available. Not too hard, right? Well hang on, 'cause
here's where it gets difficult.
Anita has Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Not exactly what one
might consider to be the kind of disability that lends itself easily to
enforced confinement. Exercise and cannabis are what she usually uses to
manage this situation, having successfully kicked drugs and alcohol for some
years now. But there's no room to run or play hacky-sack with a paper wad in
the new jail, and pot is pretty much out of the question. You can't even
smoke cigarettes in the state-of the-art facility behind 850 Bryant Street
in San Francisco.
When Anita comes on the phone, she's ping-ponging between panic and
hysteria. Seems a few days ago she was so feeling so frustrated and defeated
and alone she was sitting on the floor of her cell, weeping uncontrollably.
But here in San Francisco, this shining beacon of enlightenment, our jails
are equipped to accommodate prisoners with disabilities. She was placed in a
suicide watch "tank" or cell, better known to the the City and County
of San
Francisco's women prisoners as the "naked cell." It's called that
because
they strip you of your clothing and then place you in five-point restraints
in a cell with a window behind which a guard sits to watch you and whoever
else has merited such special attention 24 unending hours a day.
While Anita was there, one guard, a white male guard named Allen (his real
name), became so moved (or aroused) by Anita's helpless state that he became
especially interested in her. He stood inside the naked cell with Anita for
some considerable length of time and teased her about her remarkable lack of
body hair (Anita is Native American).
Anita was finally released from the naked cell, and placed in a pod where
all the other women are detoxing cold-turkey from heroin. This is only a
very small step down from the naked cell -- the women in this tank are all
sick and miserable as hell, and there is not one scrap of anything that
isn't a bare wall, mattress or blanket: no books or magazines, no cards or
checkerboard, no paper or pencils, no tv, no toiletries, not even
toothbrushes. The condition the jail staff places on Anita if she doesn't
want to return to the naked cell is that she is to do nothing without a
guard's permission except sit still on her mattress.
Here¹s the inevitable dilemma: while I'm trying to support Anita¹s effort to
regain some precious little bit of composure so I can give her mom's phone
number to her, she realizes she has nothing to write it down with. She has
nothing she can even use to scratch it on the surface of the walls or floor.
She has come so close to getting the telephone number that represents her
ticket out of the beast's belly (she's been there since before last Friday)
and now she's stymied once more. She starts getting really shaky again; the
little voice in the back of my head is telling me if she gets too animated
behind her frustration the guard is going to put her back in the naked room
and she won't have another opportunity to arrange bail until next week.
I listen to Anita. I tell her that we're going to stay on the line together
until the panic passes, no matter how long that takes. I tell her I think we
can figure this one out between us. The storm begins to ebb -- I know we're
making real progress when Anita manages a rueful, shaky laugh at the insane
irony of this inhumane, fucked-up situation. We talk about Brian: had we
seen him? We talk about how she's going to find him when she's finally
released.
We talk about preparing a deposition about what happened in the naked room.
Then Anita says: "Hey! There's a metal mirror here, and I think I can smear
the number in the soap scum on it!" (I knew you had it in ya, sis!) We
share
a hearty, victorious laugh. I give her the number. I ask her to repeat it
back to me. That's correct! We share a few words of relieved, relaxed,
normal conversation. I ask her to read the number back to me again. She's
got it. Anita won.
I tell Anita that she'd better call her mom before they finally clean the
metal mirror in the women's detox tank (yeah, fat chance). We laugh about
that for a moment. I ask her to come to the Coalition's office after she
gets out so we can document the violations she has been victim to -- let's
fight these assholes, ok?
More words of encouragement, then Anita and I disconnect.
Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I'm setting all this down,
other than for documentation purposes. It's because this is a very real look
into San Francisco's "homeless policy" that is rarely considered by
anyone
who hasn't been homeless. It describes a very small part of the terrible and
relentless violation of the civil and human rights of poor people that is
standard operational procedure in this city.
It's because Anita would have been off the streets and safe with her partner
this past week if the "status crime" of her homelessness didn't give
some
zealous "quality of life" enforcer probable cause to detain her and
imprison
her because of a five year old bench warrant.
It's because if we are ever going to organize together for justice, then we
must organize with people like Anita, and me, and every other luckless soul
who ever got drafted into America's War on the Poor.
It's because an injury to one is an injury to all.
Peace
Not to know is bad.
Not to want to know is worse.
Not to hope is unthinkable.
Not to care is unforgivable.
-Nigerian saying
STREET SHEET
A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco
468 Turk Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
415 / 346.3740-voice o 415 / 775.5639-fax
streetsheet@sf-homeless-coalition.org
http://www.sf-homeless-coalition.org
<http://cgi.newcity.com/go.php3?id=116.105.264.146>
Liby's bruised but hardly bashful
By Liby S. Pease, SF Bay Guardian
March 01, 2001
I got the crap beat out of me by the police a week ago. I'm healing, but
all in all, I'm really lucky that I'm not dead. I'm serious here, this is
not hyperbole, or for dramatic effect.
So, you ask, what happened, Liby? Surely you must have done something.
Well, as a matter of fact, I did, fair reader. I did the following:
* I protested against an international trade agreement (the FTAA) that, in
a short time, is going to displace and/or kill millions of people, and
wreck the environment.
* I used the constitutional rights that I allegedly have, no matter that
things like, well, getting the crap beat out of me always seems to happen
when I exercise those rights.
In return, I got the glorious privilege of:
* The police arresting me after they tried to shove me down a set of stairs.
* Being dragged down said stairs into the street. By my hair.
* Having my head slammed into the pavement a couple of times.
* Having my now-bloody head slammed several more times when they tried to
shove me into the police van and I couldn't bend over far enough to get in
through the doors.
* Being told "that I knew this was coming" and that I was a
"conspirator."
Thankfully, I didn't have to face this all alone, otherwise, it would
have been far worse. Don't believe me? Look at this photo.
<http://www.indybay.org/display.php3?article_id=2465>
Or this one. <http://www.indybay.org/display.php3?article_id=2443>
OK. I need to take a deep breath or two for a moment.
Who the fuck are these people, and why on earth do we keep respecting their
so-called authority? The only people that they are there to protect are the
privileged, and the only people they don't attack are the silent and well
off. Is it just me, or is this country looking more like Nazi Germany every
day? I know it's a tired cliche, but shit, look around you, peoples! We are
under attack. Period. Time to wake up.
So. China. You knew it was coming. Sorry, couldn't resist.
But seriously, y'all! What the fuck is with our (s)elected president? He's
like the PRI on crack. As I sit here nursing my bruised head (thank you,
goddesses of Arnica and ice packs), we are about to lose our power and have
our environment destroyed, we are reenacting the worst years of the cold
war, and last but not least, we may all be covered in water.
Unless y'all are planning to become a cross between a fish and a cockroach,
I suggest that you, dear reader, get off your butt as well and into the
streets now, before it's too late. Even if you get beat up, what's the
point? If this continues, lots of people are going to die. Lots of people.
You could be one of them.
Message to the thousands of privileged readers of my column (I know that
you're sneaking in, reading my column between fawning after what Alan
Greenspan ate for breakfast this morning, admit it): don't think that
having a not-so-stable job (heh), a nice car, and a condo that you
displaced a Latina grandmother to get your hands on is going to save you.
It won't.
Remember, dead is dead, and contrary to the myth, you die with the most
toys, you don't win. You're just dead.
But wait: I'm trying to reason with yuppies! What am I doing? I tried this
already. May you fall into the champagne bowl at your next "pity me, I'm
living with my parents, please give me a job" soiree and drown. At least
it'll be more pleasant than if I got my hands on you. Suggestion to all of
my disenfranchised readers: don't bother eating them, they probably have
mad cow disease. The revenge of the poor: you knew it was coming.
The only thing that poor people and malcontents like me lose in situations
like this that matters for shit to us is our spirits (which they can't take
from us) and our lives (which believe me they can). And now that they've
beaten us, fucked with us, and otherwise tried to kill us off, they're
moving in to finish off the job. Well, I say, they may take some of our
lives, but they are not going to take all of our lives.
As far as yuppies go, the powers-that-be nabbed their spirit a long time
ago, trust me. I pray for their children, I hope that they reject every
single one of the condescending, arrogant, "my way is the right way"
malevolent values that their parents tried to instill in their heads and
spit on their graves. Which their righteously angry children dug.
Speaking of the market: whee! Are we having fun yet? Question: is it
possible for NASDAQ to trade in the negative digits? I want them to start
giving out money for not investing. Every homeless person, every single
mom, every poor person of color, every broke working artist, money. For
being responsible by not investing in the stock market, which admittedly is
pretty easy to do when you have no money. But still, a favor is a favor.
Thank you for doing your part. God bless America, here's your brass-plated
watch.
As for the speculators who manipulated this whole nightmare into occurring,
from real estate dash to stock market crash: Jail, 'cause if we're even
going to have jails, they're the ones that should be in there, not us. I
think we owe the poor people of this country due thanks (and reparations)
for not engaging in this capitalistic nightmare spun out of control.
Let's honor the poor for a change, for real this time. Revolution, you knew
it was coming, Officer Krupke. It's not just a Nike commercial anymore.
Poverty,
the Law, and the Voices of People with Mental Illnesses
In every commentary that the SF Chronicle has recently printed in response
to their full-page editorial ³State of Neglect,² not once have they chosen
to reveal or discuss current laws in context with the issues of poverty and
wealth that govern involuntary psychiatric treatment and detention ‹ and the
lives and deaths of psychiatrically ill people in our state.
Current law (California Welfare and Institutions Codes 5150 et al) states
that a person can be involuntarily detained for 72 hours, then an additional
two weeks, then an additional three months, and then an additional year ‹ IF
they meet criteria for these kinds of detentions. Those criteria are: being
a danger to themselves or others, or gravely disabled. Grave disability is
defined as being unable to provide basic care for oneself (such as food,
clothing and shelter,) due to psychiatric illness. At any time during these
detentions if a physician feels that medications are warranted and the
patient refuses to take them, the physician can file for a Reese hearing,
citing the patient¹s lack of competency to make decisions and force the
patient to take the medicines.
So why are the people in Assembly-member Helen Thomson¹s camp agitating for
changes in the current laws?
Because the current laws
are not being enforced.
Why?
Because it has been deemed too expensive to provide real care for the
psychiatrically ill, and the stigma of psychiatric illness has relegated
people with this condition to third-class status, and thus third-class
medical care.
It is far more difficult to get into any level of care at this point than it
is to buy alcohol, or street drugs, or a gun. The only way for an uninsured
mentally ill person who knows that they need to be in the hospital to be
hospitalized is to be involuntarily detained ‹ essentially allowing
themselves to be psychiatrically arrested. There are few if any beds for the
under- or un-insured, and only those that are required by law will receive
acute in-patient treatment.
If a person is so ill that they warrant a conservatorship (which would allow
the court to place them in a locked hospital for up to a year) there is a
waiting list that is 6 to 9 months long for placement. People who wait in
expensive acute care hospital beds are ³decertified² by California¹s
Medi-Cal system because they warrant a different level of care, and the
hospital is not reimbursed for their stay.
In San Francisco, people who cannot prove residency in this County for at
least one year are not eligible for this level of care. If the person is
homeless, there are few ways that they can prove such residency.
The only way that this same person can get into supported, subsidized
housing is to wait for 18 to 36 months on a list, then pray that when their
number does come up someone will come and find them to let them know ‹ and
that they are still alive and coherent for an interview where they may or
may not be accepted into that housing. There is nowhere for them to wait for
housing since all residential treatment programs have waiting lists, and
usually take people that have been hospitalized first.
The Chronicle completely overlooks the utter lack of affordable housing for
anyone making less than $28,000, which in San Francisco is considered ³low
income². People on SSI receive $9348.00 per year. The average hotel room on
6th St. rents for $140.00 per week, or $7560.00 per year, leaving only
$149.00 per month for food and everything else.
In order to get into a treatment program providing support with medications
and social services you have to became so crazy that you become
involuntarily hospitalized; even then there is no guarantee that you will
get anything other than a brief stay in a psychiatric emergency room and
handed a discharge disposition that reads ³released to the community² or
³released to independent living.² Both are euphemisms for dumped on the
streets.
There is no capacity in any of our treatment systems for people who need,
want and are seeking care, and are living and dying on the streets for lack
of it.
The only thing that would be solved by a change in the laws that govern
involuntary treatment would amount to a further ability to blame the patient
for their lack of compliance to a treatment system that does not exist.
How did this happen? It does go back to the Reagan years, both as Governor
and as President. It has to do with money, more than anything else. When
state hospitals were closed, money from the cost savings was supposed to
follow the patients released into the community. In San Francisco it did,
until 1979 when the so-called ³taxpayers revolt² (the Jarvis-Gain tax bill)
was enacted. Then there was no longer enough money in the State¹s coffers to
support public services. Services were cut, and ³life saving² services like
police, fire and emergency medical services were deemed more necessary than
treatment for mentally ill people. These cuts, once made, were irreversible.
Residential half-way houses cut their stays from 2 years to 3 months.
Outpatient clinics closed, residential treatment capacity was lost, and
housing became more expensive.
While Reagan was President these cuts continued, and during the Œ80s we lost
virtually our entire community treatment system.
In the Œ90s, due to lack of funds, the criteria for treatment became
extremely restricted, and the damage was further entrenched. People who
tried to get into treatment before they were in acute crisis warranting
involuntary hospitalization were routinely turned away from outpatient
clinics, and were given excuses like ³get treatment for your addiction
first, then we will treat your mental illness.²
There was no treatment for mentally ill people who were also addicted to
drugs or alcohol, who might need medicines to control symptoms of mental
illness like paranoia or delusions. The substance abuse treatment system was
based on a non-medical model that discouraged and condemned the use of any
drugs, prescribed or not. There was no way that a disorganized schizophrenic
or someone with bipolar disorder could survive this treatment system, much
less figure out how to get into it. The same cuts affected this systems
capacity in the same devastating ways as they had the mental health system.
So what is a person who hears voices that tell him that he should cut his
throat or kill the President to do? What is available in plentiful supply
and works briefly is alcohol and street drugs. Alcohol helps you fight the
chill of the street and make friends fast. Heroin is very useful for voices.
Speed can clear your mind temporality until you crash, and crack will allow
you to feel pleasure for the first time in your life, breaking through the
numbing despair of trauma and alienation that prevents feeling anything at
all... except fear.
In a horrible and prophetic bit of irony, the California Department of
Corrections had broader treatment criteria than the City and County of San
Francisco. This was only because of multiple lawsuits faced by the CDC
stemming from prisoner suicides.
Combined with racist mandatory sentencing laws, thus began the great
increase in California¹s prison population, and the bitter joke was born
that the only way to get treatment was to go to jail.
This continued until Œ96, when San Francisco¹s Community Mental Health
Services adopted a supposed ³Single Standard of Care². It was supposed to
ensure that all people, insured or not, would receive the same treatment.
What never happened was the allocation of adequate funds and increase of
resources, so the Single Standard of Care has become another cruel joke for
those poor and homeless people that need it most.
We are in this
extraordinary debacle because of lack of political will,
which controls funding.
Mentally ill homeless people do not constitute a power base that can lobby
for funds that would make it possible to live healthy lives. No matter how
many times we go to the Mayor¹s office, or Sacramento, or Washington, we are
seen as brain damaged, feeble-minded, and therefore expendable. We are not,
and have never been a priority. This is the stigma that surrounds mental
illness.
There are always more pressing populations costing less to ³fix,² and that
will be more attractive on the evening news. We also represent a great fear
‹ the fear that any one of you could end up like us, and that there is no
cure for this most devastating and complex of conditions.
One in 5 of us will suffer
from mental illness in our lifetimes.
Yet we are pitied, or hated, and routinely shunned ‹ especially those of us
most visible, forced to live publicly, and too poor to get any relief except
a crackpipe or a bottle of vodka. We are the living embodiment of a nation
that values property and wealth more than human life; then justifies this
with cynical ³bootstrap² theories fueled by fear, racism and ignorance,
rather than policies and funds to actually provide accessible, voluntary,
community-based treatment.
So before the SF Chronicle advocates for ³reforming our system² by changing
the laws that protect the already fragile civil rights of poor and mentally
ill citizens, it should take a hard look at what the reality of the current
laws are. They cannot be enforced because of the lack of capacity in all of
our treatment systems, and they turn away people in the thousands every
year. The only system that doesn¹t turn people away is our prisons.
Why? Because of money... or
the supposed lack of it.
If this were any other devastating disease, like cancer or AIDS, there would
be a huge public outcry. It would be intolerable that people who have this
illness are forced to live and die on our streets, before our very eyes,
with the only hope of survival being incarceration.
For every story published of a grieving family member or someone forced into
treatment who is better off, we can tell you ten stories of people who have
been turned away, who have given up, or who have died. There are no real
stories on the criminal state of official neglect that has been in existence
for years. This neglect is not due to laws that protect the so-called civil
rights of mentally ill people; it is due to governmental indifference and
corporate greed.
³You have the right to live and die on the streets because it¹s easier to
blame you for your own condition than to admit that our health care system
and real estate market is governed by greed ‹ and YOU do not generate ANY
profit for US. Besides, you are smelly, scary and you don¹t vote. You barely
know what is happening to you or how to fight it, because you are too
consumed by your own illness to advocate for yourself effectively. So, in
order to appear like we care, we will change the laws and say that its for
your own good ‹ even though we know that you will not get any more treatment
because of the change in the law ‹ because we are unwilling to fund this for
you. And since we have now changed the laws, you are now guilty of not being
in treatment that does not exist, For breaking the law, you will go to the
place that does have room for you ‹ prison.²
Marykate Connor
Caduceus Outreach Services
Bush backs "faith-based" programs: holy water for the social crisis in America
By Patrick Martin
2 February 2001
The Bush administration's plan for a sharp increase in federal funding of social service programs run by religious institutions is both reactionary and fraudulent. It is an assault on the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, one of the fundamental tenets of American democracy. It is also a sham, since the social crisis in America dwarfs the resources and capabilities of church-based programs, no matter how well-intentioned.
The short-term political calculus of the initiative is obvious: it is a payoff to the Christian right groups which played such a critical role in Bush's capture of the Republican presidential nomination and his conquest, by means of fraud and the trampling of voting rights, of the presidential election. Hundreds of millions of federal dollars, if not billions, will flow into the coffers of the fundamentalist groups, many of them characterized by religious bigotry and racism.
Bush attempted to disguise this fact by holding the January 30 announcement of the program at a Christian school in a predominately black neighborhood in Washington DC. He was surrounded by black ministers, as well as a token rabbi, a Catholic nun, a Muslim cleric and, of course, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate whose campaign last year featured frequent and unctuous invocations of religion.
The inclusiveness is purely symbolic. Rules for the “faith-based” programs issued the following day permit the religious institutions receiving funds to discriminate in employment (by hiring only co-religionists, or barring gay employees, for instance), and allow them to require specific religious practices—Bible reading, participation in prayer services or other forms of worship—as a condition of receiving aid.
While Bob Jones University, the notoriously racist and anti-Catholic college where Bush gave a speech during the Republican primary campaign, has not indicated any interest in enrolling in the new Bush program, nothing in the rules would prohibit its participation.
Unlike current federal funding of church-based Head Start programs, soup kitchens and other charitable activities, religious groups given federal contracts under the Bush plan would be permitted to proselytize actively, seeking to turn aid recipients into converts. The only real restriction is that federal funds cannot be used for specifically religious purposes, i.e., buying Bibles, altars, crosses or other church paraphernalia.
Bush defended this policy as though it were an affirmation of civil rights. “Government, of course, cannot fund and will not fund religious activities,” he said. “But when people of faith provide social services, we will not discriminate against them.”
This stance contrasts sharply with the president's action only a week before, when he signed an executive order barring US government funds for family planning organizations internationally which provide information on abortion. Bush did not hesitate then to “discriminate,” through a gag order that attacks the democratic rights of groups like Planned Parenthood.
Bush signed two executive orders Monday. The first created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to be headed by University of Pennsylvania Professor John DiIulio. The second instructed five federal departments—Justice, Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services—to set up centers to promote collaboration between the federal government and church-based social service programs.
Bush also named former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, a top domestic policy adviser, to head the Corporation for National Service. Among his responsibilities will be the direction of AmeriCorps, the youth volunteer program established by the Clinton administration, which will be reoriented to funneling young people into working for church-based charities.
The appointment of DiIulio, a Catholic, and Goldsmith, the only high-ranking Jew in the administration, is a further cosmetic gesture to conceal Bush's alliance with the fundamentalists. But many non-fundamentalist religious groups have indicated reservations about the Bush plan. Significantly, neither Catholic Charities, the largest church-based social services organization, nor mainstream Protestant and Jewish groups sent representatives to the ceremony that launched the new initiative.
Civil liberties groups denounced Bush's plan. “This is going to be an all-out battle,” said Joseph Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “A lot of people see this as one of the biggest violations of church-state separation that we've seen in American history.”
Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress said, “The government was funding a program where religion is built into the warp and woof. Religious indoctrination is the essence of the program, and we think the essence of the First Amendment is that government cannot fund that sort of effort.”
There will be little or no opposition in Congress, which incorporated major concessions to religious groups in the 1996 welfare reform law that abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The “charitable choice” provisions in that law, drafted and promoted by then-Senator John Ashcroft, Bush's choice for attorney general, included funding for church-based programs to provide job training, day care and counseling to former welfare recipients.
In Texas the state government headed by Bush used the 1996 law to provide grants to a jobs program run by a fundamentalist group which required participants to study scripture and taught them “to find employment through a relationship with Jesus Christ.” A third of the program's students said they had been pressured to join a church or change their religious beliefs, according to a suit brought against the state of Texas by civil rights groups.
Bush claimed that church-based social services should receive federal aid because they were more effective than government programs, especially in such difficult tasks as the rehabilitation of prison inmates and drug addicts. It is debatable whether the transition from drug dependency to Pat Robertson's 700 Club represents much progress, either for the unfortunate individual or the wider society. But there is little evidence that such transformations are actually taking place, at least on the scale required to deal with widespread social maladies.
The new administration not only seeks to make government an instrument for promoting religion—in violation of over two centuries of constitutional precedent—it presents religion as the solution to deep-seated social evils created by the profit system. This not only credits religion with undue powers, it trivializes the problems of hunger, homelessness, drug abuse and crime.
Millions of people confront these social problems, not because they have turned away from god, as the Bible-thumpers would have it, but because they live in a capitalist society characterized by the grossest extremes of wealth and poverty. A tiny fraction of the population monopolizes the lion's share of the resources that have been produced by the labor of the entire working population. The victims of hunger, homelessness and drug abuse are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the working people, most of whom are only a paycheck or two away from real deprivation.
When Ashcroft and other right-wing politicians declared in 1996 that churches would take up the slack after the abolition of the federal AFDC program, responsible church groups denounced the claim, pointing out that the combined resources of all religious charities amounted to less than 10 percent of annual federal spending on aid to the poor.
The disproportion between social need and resources is even more stark today. The $20 billion which Bush proposes to funnel through religion-based charities over the next decade is less than what the federal government used to spend annually on AFDC alone.
The appeal to private charity has been the hallmark of capitalist regimes facing acute social crisis, and wishing to wash their hands of responsibility for alleviating mass suffering. This approach is especially cynical and sinister coming amid mounting signs of a sharp downturn in the US economy, with its inevitable toll of lost jobs, slashed incomes and increased social misery.
From the World Socialist Web Site
Bad Diets May Breed Deadlier Viruses
From Milenio Diario de Monterrey (Newspaper)
6-8-1
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Reuters) - Poor nutrition leads to mutations that
create more dangerous forms of the influenza virus and may contribute
to
newly virulent outbreaks of viral epidemics ranging from the common
cold to AIDS hemorrhagic fever, university researchers said on Friday.
Deficiencies of selenium allowed the human influenza virus to mutate
into more virulent forms in mice, and a similar mutation is likely to
occur in people, researchers said in a study in the FASEB Journal,
published by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental
Biology.
``Once the mutations have occurred, even mice with normal nutrition
are more susceptible to the newly virulent strain,'' said researcher
Melinda Beck of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ``Poor
nutritional status may contribute to the emergence of new viral strains
and might promote epidemics.''
In the study, groups of mice with normal and selenium-deficient diets
were exposed to Influenza A Bangkok, a mild strain of human influenza
virus. Although researchers had expected the malnourished mice to be
sicker than the well-fed ones, they confirmed that the virus also
mutated to a greater degree in these mice.
Selenium, which is found in meat and grains like wheat and rice, is a
component of an anti-oxidant enzyme that helps the body fight off
infections. Most people in developed countries would not need to
supplement their diet to maintain adequate levels of the mineral, the
researchers said.
``It's in everyone's best interest to make sure that populations are
well-fed -- both ethically and morally, and for public health
concerns,'' Beck said. ``It's a two-sided coin. More virulent (viral)
strains will affect healthy populations as well.''
The study focused on the flu virus, which hospitalizes more than
100,000 people each year in the United States alone. The research also
confirmed earlier studies into the causes of mutations of a virus,
Coxsackie B3, linked to a heart disease known as Keshan disease.
The disease, once found in China among children and women of
childbearing age with diets low in selenium, was largely eradicated by
dietary supplements, the researchers said..
Bush, Cheney Report 2000 Earnings
By SCOTT LINDLAW
.c The Associated Press
CRAWFORD, Texas (April 13) - - President Bush reported earning $894,880 last
year, while Vice President Dick Cheney took in $36 million, according to
income-tax documents released Friday.
The Bush family paid $240,342 in federal taxes, the Cheneys $14.3 million.
Bush released a federal Form 1040, without attachments. Cheney released only
a summary prepared by the White House. The information was released in
Crawford, Texas, where the president is spending the weekend.
The Bushes reported donating $143,300 to charity, including $75,000 in
royalties from his biography published during the presidential campaign last
year, ''A Charge to Keep.'' The book sale proceeds went to four
organizations: Boy Scouts of America, Girl Scouts of America, Boys and Girls
Clubs of America and Girls Inc.
The Cheneys donated stock options worth $7.8 million to three beneficiaries:
Capital Partners for Education, which provides educational assistance to
low-income children in Washington; George Washington University Medical
Faculty Associates, the hospital where he has been treated for his heart
condition; and the University of Wyoming, in Cheney's home state.
They also donated $41,646 to other, unspecified, charities.
Cheney's tax total put him in the rarified realm of the top 39.6 percent tax
bracket, which Bush wants to eventually reduce to 33 percent. Bush's
effective tax rate came to about 27 percent.
Both Cheney and Bush would stand to get a sizable tax cut under the
president's 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax relief plan.
According to a ''tax calculator'' on the Web site of the conservative
Heritage Foundation, Bush would get a tax cut of $38,979 using his 2000
reported income. That's a 16.2 percent cut.
Figuring Cheney's potential tax cut precisely is more difficult because he
did not disclose how much in itemized deductions he claimed this year. But
using the small standard deduction of $7,350, the calculator estimates
Cheney's tax cut under the Bush plan at more than $2.3 million, a 16.1
percent cut.
The bulk of Bush's income came from $549,236 in interest from investments,
held in state and federal blind trusts. He also reported $138,358 in capital
gains.
Bush reported earning $70,554 in salary. Bush was governor of Texas until
resigning in December.
Bush took $150,198 in deductions, but did not publicly disclose what they
were.
''This is the standard manner in which he has always released his taxes,''
said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
The Bushes were entitled to a federal income tax refund of $244,534.
They elected to apply about half - $127,220 - to their 2001 tax bill. They
were repaid the difference of $117,314.
Bush reported making $474,917 in estimated tax payments and payments applied
from his 1999 return, but his tax came to only $240,342 - meaning he overpaid
by $244,534 counting the $9,959 that was withheld from his governor's salary.
Bush decided to take a refund of $117,314 and apply the remaining $127,220
toward next year's return.
Most of Cheney's income came when he exercised stock options and sold stock
in Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based energy services firm he headed until
late in the presidential campaign. The White House did not specify precisely
how much Cheney earned from that.
The vice president received $4.3 million in deferred compensation and
bonuses. He reported $806,332 in salary.
Cheney sold part of his stock to avoid raising conflict-of-interest
questions, and he reported sustaining a $1.9 million loss.
By federal law, some of those losses will have to be carried to future tax
years, the White House said.
He also reported $823,509 in capital gains.
There was no mention of Cheney tax deductions in the statement released by
the White House.
Last year, former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore
released more extensive tax information, including detailed accounts of their
deductions, investments and interest income.
By releasing only the two-page Form 1040, Bush gave no details on how he made
$549,236 in taxable interest or $138,358 in capital gains - typically from
investments - or what made up his $150,198 in itemized deductions.
AP-NY-04-13-01 2053EDT
|
Naomi Klein is the author of No
Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
Reproduced from: |
JUST
SCRAPING BY
Barbara Ehrenreich Reveals the Plight of the Working Poor
Reproduced from:
Tamara Straus is a consulting editor at AlterNet. She has written for Salon, In
These Times and several alternative weeklies, and is the author of The Literary
Almanac: The Best of the Printed Word, 1900 to the Present(Andrews and McMeel).
Why should Americans care about the poor? This is a question that has been asked
rarely during the boom '90s, presumably because low unemployment and the rising
stock market have lifted most boats. Also common is the belief -- exemplified by
the 1996 welfare reform -- that if you can't make it in these flush times, you
don't really deserve to make it at all.
But statistical research tells another story. The Preamble
Center for Public Policy, for example, estimated at the height of the boom
the odds against a typical welfare recipient landing a job that would provide
decent housing and a "living wage" were 97 to 1. The same year, 1998,
the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute
reported that 30 percent of the workforce toiled for under $8 an hour, in other
words, at a wage that would barely guarantee subsistence.
So why does the rosy picture of mass economic prosperity persist? One place to
look for an answer is Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Nickel
and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-time America. It makes real what
the above statistics do not, for Ehrenreich spent two years and six jobs
investigating how close of an equation could be made between a minimum-wage job
and a life of poverty.
At the urging of Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's magazine,
Ehrenreich went "undercover" in 1998 to figure out "How does
anyone," as she put it, "live on the wages available to the unskilled?
And how, in particular, were the 12 million women about to be booted into the
labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 and hour?"
Her plan was simple. She presented herself as "divorced homemaker
re-entering the workforce after many years" and quickly landed jobs as,
among others, a waitress in Key West, a housecleaner in Portland, Maine, a
WalMart "associate" in Minneapolis. But she found that, thanks largely
to the lack of affordable housing, she could barely get by.
Ehrenreich's book of investigative essays, and particularly her concluding
"Evaluation," should be required reading for anyone who abides by the
all-boats-rise theory of economic prosperity. Her co-workers lack health
insurance; they have no savings; they certainly do not own their homes, yet they
seem to be working all the time. And when trouble strikes -- in the form of a
sick relative, a pregnancy or a work injury -- there is often nowhere to turn.
Social service agencies provide inadequate resources. Food kitchens are in
crisis. Employers do not come to the rescue, nor does the government in the form
of extended sick pay, affordable childcare or adequate low-income housing. One
of her co-workers lived in her car; another was pregnant but withering away from
lack of food. Many held two jobs.
Just as disturbing for those foreign to low-income work are the labor conditions
Ehrenreich describes. And the words she uses are not subtle: they are
"authoritarian," "dictatorial" and other adjectives usually
associated with life under communism. Ehrenreich is shocked to find that her
employers freely search her belongings, chastise her for "gossiping,"
submit her to personality tests, do not allow bathroom breaks and generally
treat her as if she were in high school. She reports that WalMart, the nation's
largest private employer, frustrates attempts at unionizing or job negotiating,
advocating instead a philosophy to "respect the individual, exceed
customers' expectations and strive for excellence."
"You have relative freedom when you're not at work," Ehrenreich told
me in a telephone interview. "When you're not at work you are a citizen of
a democracy and a bill of rights applies to you. But when you enter the
workplace, especially in low-wage jobs, you check your civil rights at the
door."
This may seem ludicrous to those with job benefits and negotiating power, but
Ehrenreich proves that work conditions for low-wage laborers often violate the
First and Third Amendments of freedom of speech and right to privacy. "You
can be fired at the whim of employers," said Ehrenreich, "because
there's no protection [from constitutional infringements] unless you have a
union contract."
Why this story has gone under-reported is no mystery to Ehrenreich. She chalks
up the absence of poverty coverage to a series of New Economy blinders. Blinder
number one might be called The State of the Media. "So many media outlets
are pitched to affluent consumers," Ehrenreich argued. "They really do
not want low-income viewers and readers because it harms their demographics.
Rather, they want to tell advertisers how wealthy their audience is." One
editor of a national news magazine gave her the green light to write a piece on
women and poverty only if she "made it upscale."
Blinder number two, according to Ehrenreich, stems from class bias and
ignorance. "Editors and media decision makers," she said, "are
often from a fairly insular world. I remember pitching a story to an editor --
actually at a quite liberal magazine -- about how the so-called man shortage
could be solved if women dated blue-collar men, and her response was, ‘But can
they talk?'"
Nickel and Dimed offers no economic prescriptions, no blueprint for a
fairer labor market. Yet embedded in the descriptions of low-wage life is a call
for the reevalution of the government's definition of poverty, which since 1960
has been based largely on food costs.
A family of four with an income above the current poverty line, $17,229, is
still poor, according to Ehrenreich's assessment. "Today's definition of
poverty doesn't take into account rent inflation and things like health
care," she said. The other major problem in assessing poverty, argued
Ehenreich, is the long-held idea that full employment is the chief solution to
poverty. It is an idea she calls a "liberal myth."
Ehrenreich ends her book on an upbeat note, predicting that low-wage workers
"are bound to tire of getting so little in return, and demand to be paid
what they're worth." But during the interview, she admitted, "I'm not
sitting around feeling smug and happy about the prospect [of significant change]
until it happens. The guys in Washington are very scary and I'm waiting for
resistance on all fronts."
Whether that resistance will come from the working poor or the outraged elite is
far from clear. Ehrenreich said she takes heart in the demonstrations against
corporate influence in politics that have taken place in Los Angeles and, more
recently, Quebec City, even though it seems the bulk of the participants are
college students. In the end, she is not surprised that so many low-income
workers -- and those more economically fortunate -- have tuned out:
"Politics seems very remote when you don't see a candidate working for
you."
With Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich has written 11 books in between reams
of op-eds and investigative articles for magazines ranging from the Progressive
to Time magazine. Her book-length subjects have explored the sexual
politics of sickness, the inner life of the middle class, the origins of war,
the flight from commitment by American men. And she even has written a novel, Kipper's
Game, based loosely on her early years as a scientist. (Ehrenreich earned a
Ph.D. in biology before becoming a journalist).
But Nickel and Dimed is her most personal book. Throughout it, she
connects to her low-wage co-earners by summoning her late father, who worked
himself out of the copper mines of the Union Pacific into a middle-class life.
"In my own family," writes Ehrenreich, "the low-wage way of life
had never been many degrees of separation away. ... So to me, sitting at a desk
all day was not only a privilege, but a duty: Something I owe to all those
people in my life, living and dead, who've had so much more to say than anyone
ever got to hear."
This sense of responsibility and good fortune has led Ehrenreich to what she
calls "a question-driven life driven in part by a commitment to social
justice." It also has led her to a sustained outrage against the suffering
that comes from inequality. Asked to describe the most striking experience
during her low-wage investigation, she responded:
"What sticks out the most was how much pain we choose not to see everyday,
we who are middle- and upper-middle class people; how much discomfort, actual
suffering there is behind what we take for granted."
Ehrenreich said this was made very vivid during the time she worked for The
Maids cleaning franchise in Maine. "I was working next to sick women
polishing up some McMansion," she said. "And the people who would
return would have no idea that during the day there were tears shed while their
butcher-block counters were being cleaned."
But would those people, even if they were to read Ehrenreich's book, care? Is
poverty -- always with us, constantly avoided out of guilt and pain -- just part
of human experience? To that question, Ehrenreich responded that living in a
sharply divided world hurts well-off people just as much as the poor. It
frightens us all.
But then she took a deep breath, as if confronted by her own demons. "Well,
I guess I would drag out the Bible," she said. "Though I'm not a
religious person, the Bible makes it pretty clear that you turn away from the
poor at your own moral danger. I didn't say that. They did."
Originally published at:
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/05/16/index.html
© 1999-2001 The Florence Fund
GETTING
RIGHT WITH JESUS: The Link Between Public Piety and Capitalism David Greenberg , a graduate student in history
at Columbia University, is working on a book about Richard Nixon and American
culture. He is a longtime journalist. To respond to this article click
here and send us an e mail.
What's
Behind the Self-Help Movement
We are living in a time of both reverence for the marketplace and public
religiosity. The presumptive presidential nominees of the major political
parties, Al Gore and George W. Bush, trumpet their personal relationships with
God while embracing "market solutions" to public problems. At first
glance, these trends--enthusiasm for unmitigated capitalism and public
piety--may seem unconnected. History suggests otherwise. Over the last hundred
years, the injection of religion into the public sphere has often provided
cover for a celebration of materialism and a neglect of those left out of
economic high times.
The turn of the last century marked the dawn of a society centered on consumer
capitalism. Americans on the whole started identifying themselves less by the
productive work they did and more by the goods they bought and the lifestyle
they led; they found meaning not in their crafts but in their leisure
pursuits.
The era also brought a new wave of homegrown religions, such as Christian
Science, Theosophy and "mind cure." These early self-help creeds
preached that spiritual belief would heal physical and psychic ailments and
ensure happiness. The creed caught on in part because it was compatible with
the growing smorgasbord of consumer goods and leisure pursuits being made
available in the bounteous new economy.
The economist Simon Patten articulated the link between the sunny optimism of
this new spirituality and the beneficence he saw in the new proliferation of
consumer goods. Rejecting Puritan claims that moral behavior involved
self-denial, Patten redefined morality to meet the era's material desires. He
extolled corporations, which subordinated individuality for the ostensible
good of the group and hailed businessmen for satiating human desires, thus
easing people's frustrations and producing happiness.
Patten's economics pervaded early 20th century popular culture. Eleanor Porter
earned fame, and money, with her children's book Pollyanna (1912),
whose incurably cheerful title character professed: "When you look for
the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the
good--you will get that." In 1900, L. Frank Baum, an enterprising
businessman and trailblazer in department-store-window display, published The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which celebrated the opulence found in Emerald
City. Its characters achieved their wishes (a heart, a brain, a trip home) not
through strenuous labor but by willing them into existence. Meanwhile, as
historian William Leach pointed out, the Barnumesque huckster who deceived
them by falsely claiming magical powers got off scot-free--judged a "very
bad wizard" but "a very good man." In Oz, salesmen, even
dissembling ones, aren't immoral; they're the brokers of self-actualization.
There was no recognition of the hardship and suffering wrought by the
Industrial Revolution.
The ideology of materialism-cum-self-help spirituality returned periodically
throughout American history, generally in the periods that historian Arthur
Schlesinger has described as dominated by "private interest" over
"public purpose": the 1920s, the 1950s and the 1980s and afterward.
In the '20s its champion was the advertising pioneer Bruce Barton. Co-founder
of the firm BBD&O, Barton gained fame by writing inspirational literature
that elevated "salesmanship" into a recipe for success. His most
popular work, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), retold the life of Jesus not
as a humble, ascetic carpenter but as a charismatic salesman of a new
philosophy-the founder of modern business and "the most popular dinner
guest in Jerusalem" to boot.
In the '50s, with the return of full-throttle consumerism after depression and
war, came more "positive thinking" in the person of Norman Vincent
Peale. Misreading Freud (as Donald Meyer has shown), Peale described the
unconscious not as a wellspring of fears and dark wishes but as a positive
life force. "Religion allows only good and beautiful thoughts to enter
the unconscious," he wrote. For Peale, religion became a tool for worldly
success: "Christianity is entirely practical. It is astounding how
defeated persons can be changed into victorious individuals when they actually
utilize their religious faith as a workable instrument."
The ideas of Patten, Barton and Peale resurfaced again in the 1980s, embodied
in Reaganomics on the right, communitarianism on the left, and the
mind-boggling success of self-help and spiritual literature among the
apolitical. Throughout the last decade, these ideas have grown in popularity
and stature. The latest embodiment of this thinking, Suze Orman's best-seller The
Courage to Be Rich, combines self-help religion with a celebration of
money-making. "My message," she has said, "is that you can have
anything you want in life as long as you can afford it." Urging followers
to recover "early money memories" and prescribing "nine steps
to financial freedom," Orman effectively turns wealth into a measure of
spiritual worth. It's a worldview not dissimilar from the rampant unquestioned
regard for the personified "market" as our national savior.
However innocuous to their private practitioners, American spirituality
becomes pernicious when injected into political discourse, as it so frequently
is these days. As the social critic Wendy Kaminer argues in Sleeping with
Extra-Terrestrials, the vaunting of testaments of personal
revelation--subjective experience that's immune to challenge--leaves no place
for reason in public debate. But the embrace of self-help also does something
just as bad, if not worse: it provides cover for ignoring misfortune. After
all, if anyone can attain the good life by following twelve easy
steps--whether to heal one's psychic ailments or to make a killing in the
stock market--then there's no reason to involve the state in solving social
problems. Those who are suffering just need to get with the program.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: HUNGER STRIKE TO SAVE D.C. GENERAL HOSPITAL ENTERS 27TH DAY
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 21:01:54 -0400
From: David Graeber <drg9@pantheon-po04.its.yale.edu>
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 11, 2001
New York/Washington D.C. Health Care Rights Coalition
contacts: D.C., Chuck Munson (301)
325-4652
NYC, Eric
Laursen, NYC: (212) 620-7615
HUNGER
STRIKE TO SAVE D.C. GENERAL HOSPITAL ENTERS 27TH DAY
Washington, D.C. activist, Jamie Loughner, has entered her 27th day of a
hunger
strike in protest of the closure of D.C. General Hospital, the city's only
publicly funded, full service hospital, which the city's Mayor and the D.C.
Control Board have slated to be demolished to make way for luxury apartments.
Loughner, a member of the housing rights group Homes Not Jails, began her
hunger
strike after a local Pastor who started the strike, Mildred King, collapsed
after a week of fasting. After 27 days of fasting, with a diet reduced to a
cup
of beet juice a day, Loughner is by now in danger of permanent physical damage
or even death. Nonetheless, she has vowed to continue her fast at least until
a
court decision expected later this week on a challenge by two city concil
members to the local Control Board's decision to privatize the hospital.
Her action is just one of many protests and vigils that have occurred since
news
of the hospital's closure reached the community.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams and the D.C. Control Board, a city governing body
created and appointed by Congress, have officially closed the hospital in
preparation for the sale of the property to real estate developers. Critics
say
that the city's action places the poor and disadvantaged of D.C. in serious
jeopardy of loosing adequate and affordable health care. Critics also claim
that
several people have already lost their lives since the hospital has closed;
dying en route to other distant hospitals or as the consequence of being
turned
away from from hospitals whose emergency rooms have become overcrowded due to
the closure.
"I have grown more and more sure that we can win this essential battle to
ensure
a continuing, responsive health care system for the poor", Loughner said.
"26,000 people do not have health care under the Mayor's and Congress's
plan. So
we need to continue to fight by calling Congress and rallying until everyone
is
covered by health care. This can only be accomplished by a full-service, fully
funded public hospital. I will continue this fight and so must you."
Loughner, who has received constant attention and support from local
activists,
urges everyone who receives word of her hunger strike to spread the word about
the case of D.C. General and the attack on public health care in America.
United States Lagging in Economic Human Rights
OAKLAND, CA -- When
Americans think of human rights violations,
they don't normally think of people like
Freman Davis, a 71-year old retired African-
American machinist living here in the Oakland Homeless
Project. Mr. Davis' troubles began seven years ago when
he was evicted from his apartment. With rising real estate
prices here, he was never able to find another one that
would fit within the means of his $570 monthly Social
Security check.
Mr. Davis, who is also
a disabled veteran of the
Korean War, is one of the witnesses testifying as part of
the Economic Human Rights Bus Tour. They told their
stories this week to network TV crews, and audiences
that included US Representatives Barbara Lee of
Oakland, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, and John
Conyers of Detroit. They were articulate, persuasive, and
often eloquent. A sixteen-year-old homeless high school
girl noted that while "other girls my age were worrying
about who to date and what to wear, I was thinking about
where I was going to sleep and where my next meal
would come from."
The Bus Tour, sponsored
by the Oakland-based
policy group Food First, visited homeless centers and
single room occupancy hotels in downtown Oakland this
week to shine a spotlight on homelessness and poverty in
California. More ambitiously, the affiliated groups are
demanding that such basic needs as food, shelter, and
health care be recognized by the United States
government as fundamental human rights. They are
backed not only by hundreds of activist and advocacy
groups throughout the country, but also by the 56-
member Progressive Caucus in the US Congress.
Are they ahead of their
time? Or is America
behind the times? The United States is alone among the
wealthy nations of the world in its failure to provide
universal health insurance. The resulting patchwork of
public and private insurers is so wasteful and inefficient
that we end up spending twice as much per person on
health care as do countries like Sweden, and still leave 43
million people uninsured. With insurance premiums now
rising again at double-digit rates, it is possible that the
switch to a more efficient, universal, single insurer
system would actually save money over the long run. But
even if it cost more, it is well within our means to insure
the millions of people whose first and only visits to the
doctor are in the emergency room.
Estimates of the
homeless vary widely, but we
could easily provide for them with a lot less than the $500
billion that the Bush Administration's tax cut is giving to
the richest one percent of taxpayers (average income:
$1.1 million). And we already have a food stamp
program, which would need to be expanded as well as
extended to the millions of families who are currently
eligible, but do not participate.
Although some may think
these battles have been
lost with the passage of President Bush's tax cut, this is
not necessarily true. That tax cut represents only about a
quarter of the projected budget surpluses over the next
decade. Right now, both parties are committed to using
more than half of these surpluses -- that is, twice the
amount that went to the tax cut -- for paying down the
national debt. This commitment -- which would provide
very little, if any, benefit to the economy -- is a recently
developed bit of ideological nonsense that will surely
fade if the economy continues to slow.
But we should not have
to wait for a recession
before we do something to provide for people's most
basic needs. On the contrary, the recent economic
expansion -- the longest in American history -- has
provided opportunities far beyond those that existed in
the 1960s, the last time this country officially committed
itself to a "War on Poverty." Regardless of what happens
to the economy in the next year or so, the government's
future finances look better than they ever have in the past
half-century.
Less than five years
ago we lost our most
important federal entitlement for poor children -- Aid to
Families with Dependent Children -- despite the fact that
we have the highest child poverty rate in the developed
world (currently one in six). And our largest and most
successful anti-poverty program -- Social Security -- is
being set up by the Bush Administration for partial
privatization and cuts.
All the more reason to
establish the principle that
basic needs such as food, shelter, and health care are
fundamental economic human rights -- so they cannot be
swept aside with shifts in the political winds.
-----------
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is
co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: the
Phony Crisis (2000, University of Chicago Press).
What Has The Supreme Court Been Smoking?
The High Court OKs Discriminatory, No-Fault Eviction Laws
Arianna Huffington is a syndicated columnist and author of How to Overthrow the Government.
In an infuriating blow to reason, logic, fairness, compassion and equal justice, the Supreme Court ruled last week that people living in public housing can be evicted for any drug activity by any household member or guest -- even if the drug use happened blocks away from the housing project and even if the tenant had no inkling that anything illegal was taking place.
Chew on that for a second. The highest judicial body in the land has said -- unanimously -- that it's OK to toss people who the court acknowledges are innocent out of their houses for crimes they didn't commit and didn't even know about. The generals in the drug war are getting mighty desperate -- and silly.
The justices did not just uphold the constitutionality of the "One Strike and You're Out" eviction policy, first implemented by the Clinton administration in 1996; they also rushed to its defense, calling it "reasonable," "unambiguous" and "not absurd."