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Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version): On Turning Poverty into an American Crime
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then -- down at the bottom -- “Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought...” or “I hadn’t realized...”
To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn’t always an option. And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.
Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to -- only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes -- though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Post-Meltdown Poverty
When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book -- the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans -- you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.
In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed “experiment,” had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job.
For the last couple of years, I have attempted to find out what was happening to the working poor in a declining economy -- this time using conventional reporting techniques like interviewing. I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed.
This wasn’t easy, because most of the addresses and phone numbers I had taken away with me had proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and suspensions of telephone service. I had kept in touch with “Melissa” over the years, who was still working at Wal-Mart, where her wages had risen from $7 to $10 an hour, but in the meantime her husband had lost his job. “Caroline,” now in her 50s and partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, had left her deadbeat husband and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recession, but only because they had already been living in what amounts to a permanent economic depression.
Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” -- formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.
How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space -- by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities.
In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that “people who’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.” According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia, the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entire family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.
No one could call suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide -- or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families.
“Torture and Abuse of Needy Families”
We do of course have a collective way of ameliorating the hardships of individuals and families -- a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitution. But its response to the economic emergency of the last few years has been spotty at best. The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels. But welfare -- the traditional last resort for the down-and-out until it was “reformed” in 1996 -- only expanded by about 6% in the first two years of the recession.
The difference between the two programs? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.
Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.” Their troubles began well before the recession, when Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs -- only to find that those skills are no longer in demand. The obvious fallback was disability benefits, but -- catch-22 -- when Joe applied he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan. This would cost $800 to $900, which the Parentes do not have; nor has Joe, unlike the rest of the family, been able to qualify for Medicaid.
When they married as teenagers, the plan had been for Kristen to stay home with the children. But with Joe out of action and three children to support by the middle of this decade, Kristen went out and got waitressing jobs, ending up, in 2008, in a “pretty fancy place on the water.” Then the recession struck and she was laid off.
Kristen is bright, pretty, and to judge from her command of her own small kitchen, probably capable of holding down a dozen tables with precision and grace. In the past she’d always been able to land a new job within days; now there was nothing. Like 44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.
So the Parentes turned to what remains of welfare -- TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.
After Kristen applied, nothing happened for six weeks -- no money, no phone calls returned. At school, the Parentes’ seven-year-old’s class was asked to write out what wish they would present to a genie, should a genie appear. Brianna’s wish was for her mother to find a job because there was nothing to eat in the house, an aspiration that her teacher deemed too disturbing to be posted on the wall with the other children’s requests.
When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”
The Parentes discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting. In addition, Kristen had to drive 35 miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were “frankly a joke.”
Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.” There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.
How the Safety Net Became a Dragnet
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges...”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.
The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities -- the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando -- but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.
That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.
He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one -- for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.
“Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans.
One anti-sharing law was just overturned in Orlando, but the war on illicit generosity continues. Orlando is appealing the decision, and Middletown, Connecticut, is in the midst of a crackdown. More recently, Gainesville, Florida, began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day, and Phoenix, Arizona, has been using zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.
For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.
More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you’re in “contempt of the court.”
Or suppose you miss a payment and your car insurance lapses, and then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight (about $130 for the bulb alone). Now, depending on the state, you may have your car impounded and/or face a steep fine -- again, exposing you to a possible court summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” says Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”
The second -- and by far the most reliable -- way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”
In what has become a familiar pattern, the government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt. The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.
One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today, exactly the same number of Americans -- 2.3 million -- reside in prison as in public housing. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents. The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
It is not clear whether economic hard times will finally force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment. With even the official level of poverty increasing -- to over 14% in 2010 -- some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.
So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list -- a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.
This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to Barbara Ehrenreich's bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books.
Excerpted from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, published August 2nd by Picador USA. New afterword © 2011 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Excerpted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Show AllExcellent article.
If you had read the article by Ray McGovern posted on this site the other day, you could have seen the quote from a serving major in the U.S. Army; to wit, "We have a limitless supply of expendable labor." This was in response to an army suicide. These things are related.
Someone wrote in a book more than twenty years ago, "In the future, acts charity could be made illegal." Are we there yet?
Recall the statsement (by I believe a Brazilian bishop) that goes: "When I say we need to help the poor they call me a Christian. When I do something to help the poor they call me a Socialist."
"Quando dou comida aos pobres chamam-me de santo. Quando pergunto por que eles são pobres chamam-me de comunista." Translation: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist." Hélder Pessoa Câmara, Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil
Both quotes are good.
I thought it was Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador.
Oops. I see I was wrong.
30 years ago when Reagan put us on this "money above all else" course, I tried to tell people this was gong to be a disaster. I was called names, told that I didn't know what I was talking about and looked on as a pariah. I said that these policies wold lead to an unsustainable amount of greed, that this was an assault on the very soul of this country, and that it would only lead to problems for us. Again, I was told I was a traitor, and that greed was good, I had better start chasing that almighty dollar, too, if I knew what was good for me. Now look where those people are. They are all on MY side and conveniently don't remember a thing they said back then.
You can chase the dollar or you can care about humans. You can't do both. We have, for the last 30 years, chased the dollar and cut the humans loose to float in the wind. We do NOT have a country or a community anymore. What we have is a selfish, greedy, pig hearted place with no citizens, just consumers (I HATE that word, always have. It's w2ay too easy to go from "consumer" to "useless eater"). We have no soul left, we sold it to the lowest bidder.
We worship money. We see what you HAVE as being more important than who you ARE. We point to people like Donald Trump and tell our kids to be like that, rich and successful. We SHOULD be pointing to the teacher who showed year after year of young minds how to think and telling our kids to be like THAT. Or to the worker in any field who does what they do to the best of their abilities and make life better for others. We need to get off of this idiot dog eat dog nonsense and realize that life means more than money, or at least it SHOULD. Money is NOT the reason to live, and it shouldn't be seen as the point to our existences.
We should be telling our kids to be ashamed of the rich. To see them as the totally flawed humans they are. To see that their goal of having more than everyone else is a sickness, and should be pitied or better yet, TREATED. THESE are the people who should be drugged into submission, not the rest of us. We need to start looking on these people as the PROBLEM that they are, and not the answer to anything. These people are the biggest problem we have and it's time to start SEEING them as such.
You are of course right. Ms. Ehrenreich's commentary is on point, and yet does not identify the root of our troubles. You are closer to the mark here when you finger the Reagan policies that broke apart the social contract.
Yes, there were many failed policies of the Great Society. But people were not viewed as expendable, and society was held to a standard of responsibility for its poor. What has happened since the demise of the social contract, however, is the enshrinement of wealth as a moral value. Those who succeed are framed as morally superior to those who do not.
This is a long way from medieval times, by the way. The ways of the world, and especially those concerning Mammon, were regarded as temporary and misleading, and wealth was a spiritual encumbrance that could impede one's ultimate salvation. No more. Society has done a 180-degree turn.
(Another aside: the term "Mammon" may be the only Aramaic word to have infiltrated the English language.... does anyone know of any others?)
All this of course has been due to the influence of the wealthy in controlling the media, the messages, the electronic coccoon that serves as an effective prison for the public consciousness.
Yes, Abracadabra = Aramaic... Originally, Avra kehdabra, meaning “I will create as I speak”
Thanks for this, esabi. Who knew? I would have guessed that 'abracadabra' came from Farsi or Arabic. Well, you learn something new every day...
I know exactly what you're saying, WJM, and I still experience the "cleared room effect" after I dare to share my reasoned observations about our current predicament. Anyway, I appreciated Ehrenreich's book when I first read it, and find it resonates still.
People forget-- or are encouraged to forget-- that the market wasn't always the ultimate arbiter of wealth and worth for nations. The FIRE sector made very determined efforts to entrench themselves into state economies only within the last few decades, and backed only the candidates who could help them realize this transition. It has continued, and culminated, in the political climate we see today.
But more important than knowing this is to overcome the head-in-the-sand condition that has handicapped so many people. I sometimes despair that it is so endemic... too many people shut down when faced with bad news... and yet these will be the ones making the most fuss and panic when instability inevitably occurs. I can only hope that enough people with practical minds will turn up and contribute to alternative patterns of stability that don't require massive state bureaucracies. For my part I'm becoming involved in community farms and non-currency based systems of transaction. But it can be so many other things, too...
WJM, brother, you're giving me flashbacks.
I told people "Supply-side" Reaganomics was a cover for the destruction of the new Deal. I told 'em about Clinton's treacherous NAFTA and welfare "reform." I told 'em Bush was a tyrant and WTC was a Reichstag fire. I told 'em Obama was a Trojan horse, who will do less for black Americans than any president since Herbert Hoover.
I insisted the glorification of profit and accumulation of wealth is a sickness, and I say it now.
I was called a Marxist, a racist, and all kinds of childish ignorance.
Those bootlicking wannabe jillionaires spent the last thirty years enabling this catastrophe when they deluded themselves into thinking they would be in the rich man's lifeboat and now they're thrown overboard.
They're f**ckin' kulaks.
Now the chickens have come home to roost.
I totally agree WJM, and as a former social worker I have often wished our society would totally reverse its approach towards the poor and instead start looking more towards the rich for evidence of criminality and symptoms of pathology and dysfunction. Instead, as Barbara Eherenrich explains so well in her article here on CD today, we criminalize poverty and treat the poor as pathological and dysfunctional instead.
Sure seems to me a lot like kicking the dog instead of dealing constructively or courageously with the people who are giving you grief. But that's the norm in our society these days when most people feel angry and powerless against the system and their employers, so they kick the dog and blame the victim/attack anyone they can find that might be inferior/lower in the system than them/ or even more powerless than them.
But, just like kicking the dog, it only provides temporary, fleeting relief and does nothing to solve their real problems. Then again tho, most people seem to not have the courage or insight to try and really understand the problems they experience as oppressed members of this society and on top of that, my experience has been that most people act out their victimizing/scapegoating of others at a pretty unconscious level. They are usually unaware of it and have no insight into their motivations or why they feel the way they do towards others who are different than them, at least in their eyes.
Which unfortunately explains volumes of how and why most political ads and propaganda work so well as those behind those things understand this process masterfully.
The purpose of poverty and destitution amongst its population for the power elite is to remove any power that group may have.
The power Elite via schemes of media consolidation and privatization have ensured that only with dollars can the people survive and those dollars can only come from those in power. The money in and of itself is only the vehicle used to consolidate power.
Those that turn to prostitution , an act they hate and loathe, do so because they are desperate and see little in the way of alternatives. Imagine an entire population that desperate and WILLING to do something they hate and loathe in order to survive?
The people need an inviolate right to power and the same power as every other person otherwise there will always be these injustices and there will always be trends towards the same unequal distribution of it.
Gaining access to shelter and food and water, to an education, to the Members of ones own Government and to equitable treatment by the justice system all require MONEY and the more of it you have, the more of this you get. A person with a "higher minimum wage" (12.00$$ per hour perhaps) still has inequitable access when compared to a person making 1 billion dollars a year.
Minimum wages being raised, anti-poverty programs and the like will not serve this purpose. They are certainly a start but ultimately what is needed is a system where there can be no Koch brothers on one end of the table , negotiating for a better deal with a homeless person at the other.
It is not so much about designing a system where the poor get more (though that certainly needed when there absolute destitution) as it is ensuring those at the top of the pyramid have less. It is in fact about dismantling that entire structure of power that IS the pyramid.
Our most harmful institutions (the Military and the Corporation) operate under that model. It does not do any GOOD for a society. We must rid ourselves of them. There must be no Citizen that claims for himself the RIGHT to order the murder of another. There must be no Citizen with the power to send their own off to wars in foreign lands. There must be no Citizen who does not have his or her powers to do harm to others or an environment curtailed and if such rights does indeed exist in a Countries, laws, its Bills of rights or its Constitutions, then those laws and Constitutions and rights must be rewritten.
Well said, GWNorth.
Years ago I had a prophesy about this: "The rich shall be laid low and the poor lifted up and now that they are the same height, they will look into each other's eyes and see a brother".
There are two key ideas in this prophesy: It will end, and there are no throwaway people anywhere, not even the rich who exploit us.
The second part does not easily satisfy our vengence. But they are people too, misguided, but people.
Today I watched the History Chanel's piece on the French Revolution. "Storm the Bastille!". We could do it with a lot less bloodshed. We can morph from the "Me" generation into the "We" generation. Yes, we can.
BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
Would you like another glass of kool aid?
These are indeed ugly times. How long before poverty is made a crime and the poor are put in debtor prisons again. The English created Australia to deal with what was actually the criminalization of poverty there in the late 18th and early 19th century. Its coming here as well but here it will be German style "Arbeit Mach Frei" camps for profit as in Schlinders List.
When the poor get organized, or simply angry enough, that beast will not be stopped, by gated communities, Blackwater or anything else. It may have started already in England, which has been pushing the same "austerity" measures as the U.S. And who are the haves to trust in this crisis, Murdoch's Scotland Yard?
THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience) - William Blake
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
1794
...peace...
This well-written article is a testimony to why I've often called U.S. economics those consistent with the "school" of Scrooge, straight out of the Dickens novel. He had NO mercy for the poor until he was confronted--by the ghosts of conscience--with a mirror that brutally reflected his own callous actions. Would that the ghosts of past & present hold up a similar mirror to the likes of the Koch Brothers, that they amend their ways.
In general, our society's rules are getting more punitive for all but those with money to burn. The past year I have had to deal with a sudden code violation from the local electric power company, then the insurance idiots made demands on me (for insurance I suspect will not cover, if an event occurs... they're apt to follow the foot prints of the medical insurers. Both look for reasons NOT to cover, while they demand $, a symbolic pound of flesh, each month) that cost a lot extra, AND the court system has shown itself to function as little more than appearances. It's not about justice at all, just the pushing of paper in elaborate minuets of protocol.
Watching stocks tumble
Watching London burn
Watching fires surround Los Alamos... and still they plan to build bombs
Watching the waters putrify, and still they allow offshore oil drilling
Watching the decimation of public schools/education
Watching the Criminals run it, and richly reward themselves while the bottom drops out on everything and everyone else...
They ruin the economy so that there are no jobs inside the Homeland "Security" State, and then penalize the poor!
And the churches sing from their hymnals... as if this is right or righteous!
It's just INSANE! The system is what's criminal; and while checks and balances managed to spread the goodies around for several decades, the bad boys bought in, and gaining access, worked the gears to turn the clock back on hard won liberties and progress, overall. So here we are...
The rains are falling hard where I live today, and in my mind, the sky is crying.
It's gotten so bad for too many. (And I didn't even go into those within the range of drones, seeking water in DU contaminated zones, or mending their wounded loved ones... all because they live in regions the MIC has deemed necessary to further the interests of the make war state.)
Tragedy begets tragedy....
Well put, Siouxrose. Many of you commenting on CD express my own thoughts with much more eloquence than I can ever hope to muster. I alternate between extreme rage and extreme despair. I was VERY close to smashing my television with a baseball bat yesterday. I can't even remember at the moment which "effing" talking head politician was babbling on and on. It is a juggernaut. I don't think it can be stopped.
turn the tv off, my friend. i found myself in the same position, and when I did, I knew it was time to get a media divorce...:)
Open Letter To President Obama
Dear Mr. President,
A massive kill-off of the citizens of the United States is taking place and Billionaire Buffett is right when he declares that he and his Fellow Buffetteers are winning.
Is he also correct when he states that we aren't seeing this?
The truth at the door is in the house, Mr. President.
Yours Cordially,
Leland Mellott
cc: Var.
I think the letter should be addressed to Congress since that is where the laws are written, even in an ideal world in which Obama actually fought for the people. Every proposal would be stopped in the house and if not there, then in the Senate.
I met Barbara Ehrenreich about 10 years ago shortly after the original was published. It is good that she is still at it. Her's is one of the few compassionate voices these days. While the eyes of the press are on the Stock Market, many do not have money for food at the local grocery market.
NADER says: "A society that has more justice, is a society that needs less charity."
Be prepared for things to get much worse. VPR is now reporting that the USA has 75 secret wars going on - predicted to increase to 125 by the year's end.
It's impossible to read this article without simultaneously shedding a tear or two and having your blood boil. When I graduated from high school in 1957, I had no idea that the U. S. would be such a rotten society in 2011!
Barbara Ehrenreich, thank you so much for being this country’s most powerful defender of the poor, too many of whom, as you point out, are no longer even lucky enough to be working poor. This is a wonderful, compelling update, letting us know how much worse things have become. Ah, for the good old days on 2001!
This passage is the one that most got to me: “The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.”
I know that in the ghetto “suburb” East Cleveland just down the hill, the unemployment rate is very high—I’ve heard 50 percent for black males, but couldn’t track down any real statistics, not that I’d likely believe them anyway—and for thousands, the only real opportunity is to sell drugs, and boy what a violent game that is. When the McDonald’s announced new part-time jobs recently, so many people showed up it turned into a mob, and one person got run over in the mayhem (but thankfully not seriously hurt). Now, some of the coolest, sanest people I’ve ever met have come out of this area, but certainly this ghetto is cooking up a population which is indeed being tortured and driven insane just like the rats in the experiment you described above. And most all of them have guns.
Last spring, a couple of my students were absorbed in the death of one of their friends. Turned out her boyfriend had shot her to avoid paying child support. Nowadays you go to jail for not paying child support, but if you can’t get a job, what then? It seems clear to me that people are going to go insane, and often viciously insane, when you pack too many of them in a cage and subject them with the “erratically administered electric shocks” we inflict on the poor, as you so well describe.
But I live in a nicer suburb a couple of miles up the hill. My best friend lives in a tiny one-bedroom house around the street with her grandchild and brain damaged son. A nurse owns a home behind mine, where 13 people live in a four-bedroom home. One is a 13-year-old boy, said nurse’s nephew, who’s been lucky enough to escape foster care through her beneficence. His mother was murdered and his father’s in prison, but he’s not sure of the rest of the details.
Of course, we recoil in horror. What monsters! Well, true enough: we have a real talent for propagating monsters. Some of them have been bred in laboratories like East Cleveland. A lot of them, though, work on Wall Street and convene in Congress.
Thank-you for your account. The amazing thing about poverty in the US is how invisible it is - especially to the great part of the middle class who never leave their sprawling suburbs. And if they get a taste of the reality of places like East Cleveland from the 6 O'clock news, they dismiss it in a viciously racist and classist manner - why are "those people" so violent? Why don't they get a "work ethic"?
I read Nickle and Dimmed about 6 years ago.
Yes laws are made to criminalize poverty and keep the poor, poor. But, also, most importantly, to keep the poor marginalized. This way they have no power to change anything and no time/resources to have a voice.
I still believe that the vast majority of the middle class that find themselves in poverty, are still only the temporary poor. The people who were resigned to poverty jobs - no education, criminal records which prevent them from passing background checks for better paying jobs, etc., will be hurt far more by every recession. They have less resources to rely on even if that means their friends have far less to help them out with - ie. How many poor people have family/friends that ultimately will let them stay in a tent in their back yard of the house their friend/family owns, or park an rv or camper on the property and live there? The chronically poor losing their rank really does mean street homelessness and living under bridges as the shelters fill. That is something far harder to work out of than what the middle class will have to recover from. Even if a middle class person does end up living under a bridge(they're more likely to end up living in a car they own if it gets that bad), they still have a much better chance of rising out of it - by knowing someone with a stable address and a phone they can use so they can get a job when one does come up, and being able to rise up faster through better positions/pay.
According to the Indiana University School of Business, we no longer have a Middle Class.
If you read "Nickle and Dimmed" 6 years ago, maybe it's time to read "Nickel and Dimed." It's even better!
TANF has 2 components. There is a TANF for unemployed parents and a TANF for a single parent with children. The single parent TANF is the State paying the parent "Child Support". They then go to court and establish child support legally. The absent parent has to pay back the TANF that the single parent received. That is why there is paternity testing. I have never heard of finger printing in Indiana, and I was a caseworker for food stamps and Medicaid. But I have heard of Virginia doing something like that. It was a Corporation's attempt to get into micro-chipping humans. This Corporation also wanted to micro-chip those who are incarcerated. This is not common.
I work with the low income and was unemployed myself for over a year. Jobs are not available. Those who do hire are hiring part time and through Temp agencies, so that they don't have to pay benefits and retirement. And still there is the myth that those who can't find a job, and are on unemployment, are "Lazy".
"The single parent TANF is the State paying the parent "Child Support". They then go to court and establish child support legally. The absent parent has to pay back the TANF that the single parent received. That is why there is paternity testing."
I'm curious what you think about this.
I think that courts that award child or spousal support should be automatically charged with enforcing those orders, and it matters not to me if the order is for $100 a month or $10,000.
This should go hand in hand with a system that allows debtors to petition for variations - it sucks for the creditor if the debtor becomes unemployed and can pay only $300 a month instead of $1,000, but it sucks worse if the creditor ends up in jail or on the street and incapable of contributing anything.
I don't know what to do about bazillionaires who just take their cash and retire to some country that doesn't have a reciprocal agreement to avoid paying child or spousal support.
But why does the state enforce its own orders only when the creditor, which it identified by virtue of those orders, has become so indigent as to qualify for income assistance, and then require the CREDITOR to submit to drug tests and fingerprinting and work search requirements?
Can someone explain this to me?
“Enough,” he said, after I’d left a voicemail: “I read and hear that Citigroup made record profits and bonuses. How much bonus did you get? Can you spare a dime for someone laid off while you were bailed out with my taxpayers’ money?” “Enough,” he said, referring to another voicemail I’d left, saying, “Can you buy me medical insurance since it would cost me $410 a month and unemployment is $147? Oh, that’s right, you have to save your hundreds of thousands of dollars so your 7 kids can go on missions for the Mormons. THAT’S how I am to be saved from disaster. Your kids will convert the WHOLE world to ‘the one true church’ and then ‘Heavenly Father,’ who loves ALL his children will save me. “Enough,” he said, when I asked again if he’d give me health insurance. He and I had been friends since about 1995, going to Knicks and Giants games. Then we both got married . It is the Mormons’ belief that humans should “go forth and multiply” despite the crisis we face today over lack of resources, water, food, and on and on—things that the Bible writers couldn’t dream of 3,000 years ago. Yet, a top dog at Citigroup puts his faith in 3,000-year-old writings instead of 2011’s scientists. This guy still believes the earth is only 8,000 years old. This brilliant man also believes that a 25-year-old sex addict and libertine who was predisposed to magical thinking and fasts to induce hallucinations actually, in about 1825, “translated” golden plates inscribed by Heavenly Father with the Book of Mormon in ancient Egyptian letters with the aid of “seer stones” (No one else ever was allowed to see the plates or the seer stones.) The Book, written by Smith, who was a religious genius, having memorized the Bible , made the new “Americans” proud that Heavenly Father (HF) had told Jesus to ALSO visit America and had said that the Promised Land, would be here in the U.S. He and I had been friends in 2004 when his wife would invite us for Thanksgiving. One time, he and I were bringing food to hungry Mormons—not NON-members—in New York. My brother called and said our mother’s diagnosis was myelofibrosis. I was to fly home quickly. My friend didn’t offer a nickel for the flight although he knew we had just declared bankruptcy.Meanwhile, his wife became a brooder of his children. Joe Smith founded the Mormon church in 1829 and promoted polygamy. The real reason? So Joe could have an outlet for his sex addiction and all the male converts could spread their seed, which most men still want to do. The Mormons received a “revelation” from HF in 1890 that polygamy was wrong, when the U.S. said Utah couldn’t be a state while allowing it. So, the Mormons switched to having their wives have child after child, usually from 5 to 15. However, this means that if the wife’s calling is to be a child-brooder and run the brooding house, the man has to go and MAKE MONEY—for his family and for the 10% tithing for Joe’s church, which today is a $4.4 billion corporate enterprise. My ex-friend got caught between his Mormon belief that he had to sire kids, be self-sufficient, pay tithing AND keep his high-paying Citigroup job, which likely pays him $135,000 annual salary, plus another $35,000 annual bonus. Soon after my layoff, I saw him and asked, “Should members of CIti, who created these toxic mortgage debts and the housing bubble by defrauding the poor be kept on as workers? Shouldn’t those who screwed up be fired or laid off?” “Oh, we’ve PAID a price,” he said. “We’ve been working 24/7 since fall 2008 to handle the paperwork. You need someone who knows what he’s doing to clean up.” “Yeah, but….” But he wouldn’t stop spouting Wall Street and Mormon rationales at me. I shut up. Some people you just can’t reason with, like Hitler, or a religious fanatic, or a capitalistic pig. He had drunk the Kool-Aid and it had been good to him. He now had a house in Westchester for his 7 kids and two cars, paid for by bonuses paid with MY money that will set up ANOTHER recession--in which MY FAMILY will scrape for rent and food-- and in which Citigroup will be bailed out.My phone calls had begun with what I thought was a reasonable request: for my 3-member family: to stay in one of his bedrooms until we got back on our feet. But, as monitor of billions for a “too-big-to-fail” bank that sends officers to White House positions via a revolving door, and as a “righteous man” who follows all of Joe’s rules, he thought I was no longer self-sufficient and therefore not righteous. “We talked it over and it would not be a good time for us and we don’t think you and your wife could commute from here.” (When you belong to the “one true church”, you know more about peoples’ situations than even THEY do.) My next phone call: I also asked my ex-friend if he would co-sign on a loan for a car, so I could drive a cab. “We don’t do that.” So, my ex-friend, followed the Book of Mormon, written much the way the “Harry Potter” books were, by a genius with a photographic memory and creativity for all the battles and names you find in BOM. The names alone are ridiculous: Helamon? Battles in NY between huge armies yet no artifacts? My ex-pal feels self-sufficient, righteous, and destined for the “Celestial Kingdom” (heaven), which allows for some Mormons to BECOME gods and rule their own planets. Without asking me to lunch to talk, he spoke instead to Citi’s lawyers and left me a retaliatory voicemail: “Enough. Enough. If you keep leaving messages, I will press criminal charges of harassment.” This is today's U.S. All non-elites will be charged with something if they don’t comply with what people like my ex-friend thinks is right. If you’re not “righteous” “ye shall perish.” Nasty vise my friend is in. His religion sets him up as a potential GOD, demands 10 percent of $200,000, demands that he do work for the church, and send his kids on missions. So, he dumps on me when he could have helped us. That is the elite: if you haven’t a job by now, you must be non-righteous, even criminal. This is how religion has twisted Americans. Billionaires believe they are self-sufficient, righteous and Christ-like, while their antics literally kill millions in their own country. Millions they now believe, via RELIGION, are inferior and deserve to die. The elite believe they are more fit and adaptable, and they should survive. But—wait!!—isn’t that evolution? Mormons don’t believe in evolution! Another riddle to tear the glia of the elites’ brains apart.
I read this article after watching London burn on the news, thinking this is how you start a fire....
So they pulled a rabbit out ot the hat w/last weeks unemployment #s. The government & busienss reporters went with the less reliable CES (Current Establishment Survey) report which indicated a net gain of 117,000 jobs in July '11 (These are the 'B' Tables of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS). Even though the more reliable figure is the BLS's CPS (Current Population Survey) which showed a net loss of 198,000 non-agricultural workers (These are the 'A' Tables fo the BLS).
And poof, just like that, they had a not so negative jobs report, coming on the heels of the dismal reports on the collapse of manufacturing activity & consumer confidence....:-)
And get this: The 'B' Tables conceal the fact that over the past 4 months: a) 481,000 part-time workers were hired (to replace those who've lost full-time jobs with full benefits & at much lower wages), and ; b) 579,000 workers were not counted in the unemployment statistics since they've been so discouraged in finding work they've left the labour force altogether.
All told, the BLS' 'A' Tables show employment fell by a whopping/staggering 926,000 over the past 4 months (April - July)!
So, I think the BLS & Uncle Sam is using New Math from the 'No Child Left Behind' programm, a bizarro mathematics, where addition is addition & subtraction is addition...
One best way for the poor and disappearing middle classes to help themselves is to stop voting for religious, economic and socially conservative politicians who are the ones directly responsible for their plight, and to begin voting for progressive and liberal politicians only whenever possible. To recognize that contrary to popular propaganda, conservatives are the bad guys.
You'll get no argument from me.
This really is a sad state of affairs. It seems as though the corporations just keep winning battle after battle and working people cannot catch any kind of a break.
Thanks, Barbara. Your contribution is immense.
Yup, this society, engineered by a corporate media propaganda machine that would make Goebbels jealous, breeds a pathological hatred of the poor. This insane ideology renders everyone in the bottom 99th percentile incapable of acting collectively in their own interests, living in the delusion that they will achieve security by leaving their economic class for a higher strata.
Of course, the probability is they will remain stuck in the class they were born into, if they're lucky enough not to fall off the cliff entirely.
In the meantime, the rulers are constructing a feudal debt peonage system, arming mercenaries abroad and at home, and conspire to set the masses against each other by race, national or religious divisions, as they consolidate their power beyond anything we have imagined
As bad as events in London are, nearly anything that breaks the hold of the oligarchs even briefly is critical to give people a vision of a world in which they have power outside the confines of economic and psychological slavery.
We're a nation of colonized minds. If their hold over the mind is broken, well, the rest is tactics.
Could this be the beginning of a new Dark Ages? I still wonder at the loss of the ancient library of Alexandria. I wonder about what happened all those dark and mysterious centuries between the Roman Empire and the start of the Renaissance. I wonder at the folly of the destruction of so much of earliest human history when the Bush administration invaded Iraq under false pretenses. Is current human knowledge going to be once again obscured and totally destroyed by myopic human folly? Will humanity get any more chances after we foul the earth as much as we already have? Or will all of human history disappear forever as we perish from an earth no longer able to support us?
_Nickel and Dimed_ inspired me to write a memoir of my time on welfare (AFDC) which has just come out: _Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother_. The title reflects my sense of having become a criminal by asking for help, but with one baby and another on the way, no job, no savings, no health insurance, I didn't know what else to do. My experience was similar to what Ehrenreich describes above, though I also found many helping hands both inside and outside the system. As was true of the vast majority of women on welfare, after a few years, I was able to return to the workforce and have been working and paying taxes ever since, as have my kids. As Ehrenreich says, TANF has been much worse than AFDC, which was no picnic. We MUST keep speaking out about these issues!
It's foolish for any government to cause desperation, or a class of desperate people. Greed is indeed a form of insanity!