Huffington Post / By Leo Hindery Jr.
Our Dirty Little Secret: Who's Really Poor in America?
The problem today for most isn't this recession, it's that except for the top 10 percent, average household income hasn't changed a bit for 10 to 20 years.
March 9, 2010

Two old friends, civil rights activist David Mixner and former U.S. Senator (and my oft co-author) Don Riegle (D-MI), believe that in the economic recovery, not enough attention is being given to 'who's really poor' now. David and Don have for years advised me -- and others -- on the issue of poverty in America, and they are worried that too many people, and especially too many people in the administration and Congress, are missing this imperative.

To help make their point, they referred me to poverty activist Marsha Timpson, who describes today's poor as "America's dirty little secret, hidden in the backyards of America's shining homes, the hollows, the reservations, the border towns and the dark ghettos of the city where they are the lie of the American dream."

I agree with my friends, and with Ms. Timpson's view, and everyone else should as well, for right now in America:

--At least 50 million people are ill-fed -- up from 37 million just a year ago -- including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions -- the very large 15-state 'South' being one of them -- where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.

Although I myself grew up in a fairly hardscrabble environment, as the father of a daughter who was in fact able to create a successful life from the opportunities her mother and I could give her, it is hard for me to imagine what it must be like to have your child needy and hungry. Yet all of us need to 'imagine' this, because each night in America millions of children do in fact go to bed hungry and under-nourished, while also lacking proper housing, needed clothing, and the basic education required to develop and ultimately find gainful employment. And while I wholeheartedly support the First Lady's new "Let's Move" effort to improve the nutrition of America's children, we must first react to basic hunger rather than to food quality.

--30% of the nation's 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011. It would cost about $745 billion, more than the size of the original 2008 bank bailout, to restore these borrowers to the point where they were breaking even, which there is no obvious political will to find right now.

--Despite the truly dismal 'real unemployment' figures with which most everyone now agrees -- a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force -- very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation's 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 -- an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 -- which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.

The overwhelming problem today for most workers isn't this recession, as horrible as it is -- it's the fact that for every earned income level except the top 10%, average household income hasn't changed a bit for 10 years, and that for the bottom 60% of wage earners it hasn't changed for more than 20 years. Through economic expansions and recessions -- and bull and bear markets -- alike, 90% of workers in America have been standing still earnings-wise.

--And 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population, are at or below "200% of the federal poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four", which is a needs-measure made lame by the fact that no family of four can actually comfortably live on such a low annual income.

**********

The best response to this scourge would be for our government to embrace in today's troubled time the same "economic bill of rights" that FDR, in his last State of the Union Speech in January 1944, demanded for his.

Roosevelt's "bill" sought to guarantee, in addition to health care and education, rights to:

--"a job with a living wage...that would earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

--"protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; and

--"a decent home".

And with his typical sensitivity, FDR concluded his last SOTUS, when he knew that he was dying, by saying that, "We cannot be content, no matter how high the general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people -- whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth -- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and insecure."

Until we in this time include the eradication of poverty as part of our economic recovery efforts, as FDR tried to do in his time, no matter how much we attempt to rebuild the nation's economy through better trade practices, enhanced workers' rights, and investments in infrastructure and the 'green economy', tens of millions of Americans, literally, will still be left impoverished.
More... http://www.alternet.org/story/145950/our_d...

Bill Quigley's blog
Fifteen Reasons it's Time for a US Revolution
by Bill Quigley | March 8, 2010 - 9:44am
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/27209/...

It is time for a revolution. Government does not work for regular people. It appears to work quite well for big corporations, banks, insurance companies, military contractors, lobbyists, and for the rich and powerful. But it does not work for people.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said forty three years ago next month that it was time for a radical revolution of values in the United States. He preached "a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies." It is clearer than ever that now is the time for radical change.

Look at what our current system has brought us and ask if it is time for a revolution?

Over 2.8 million people lost their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions - nearly 8000 each day - higher numbers than the last two years when millions of others also lost their homes.

At the same time, the government bailed out Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the auto industry and enacted the troubled asset (TARP) program with $1.7 trillion of our money.

Wall Street then awarded itself over $20 billion in bonuses in 2009 alone, an average bonus on top of pay of $123,000.

At the same time, over 17 million people are jobless right now. Millions more are working part-time when they want and need to be working full-time.

Yet the current system allows one single U.S. Senator to stop unemployment and Medicare benefits being paid to millions.

There are now 35 registered lobbyists in Washington DC for every single member of the Senate and House of Representatives, at last count 13,739 in 2009. There are eight lobbyists for every member of Congress working on the health care fiasco alone.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that corporations now have a constitutional right to interfere with elections by pouring money into races.

The Department of Justice gave a get out of jail free card to its own lawyers who authorized illegal torture.

At the same time another department of government, the Pentagon, is prosecuting Navy SEALS for punching an Iraqi suspect.

The US is not only involved in senseless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. now maintains 700 military bases world-wide and another 6000 in the US and our territories. Young men and women join the military to protect the U.S. and to get college tuition and healthcare coverage and killed and maimed in elective wars and being the world's police. Wonder whose assets they are protecting and serving?

In fact, the U.S. spends $700 billion directly on military per year, half the military spending of the entire world - much more than Europe, China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Venezuela - combined.

The government and private companies have dramatically increased surveillance of people through cameras on public streets and private places, airport searches, phone intercepts, access to personal computers, and compilation of records from credit card purchases, computer views of sites, and travel.

The number of people in jails and prisons in the U.S. has risen sevenfold since 1970 to over 2.3 million. The US puts a higher percentage of our people in jail than any other country in the world.

The tea party people are mad at the Republicans, who they accuse of selling them out to big businesses.

Democrats are working their way past depression to anger because their party, despite majorities in the House and Senate, has not made significant advances for immigrants, or women, or unions, or African Americans, or environmentalists, or gays and lesbians, or civil libertarians, or people dedicated to health care, or human rights, or jobs or housing or economic justice. Democrats also think their party is selling out to big business.

Forty three years ago next month, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached in Riverside Church in New York City that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." He went on to condemn the Vietnam War and the system which created it and the other injustices clearly apparent. "We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing oriented" society to a "person oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Dave Lindorff's blog
The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being
by Dave Lindorff | February 6, 2010 - 12:23pm


There were two points in President Obama's State of the Union address that provoked resounding and universal applause in the chamber from the assembled senators and representatives of both parties. One point was when the president said he wanted to start his job-creation program "in small businesses, companies that begin when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, or a worker decides its time she became her own boss." The other point was when he said, "While we're at it, let's also eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment; and provide a tax incentive for all businesses, large and small, to invest in new plants and equipment."

The lusty cheering and applause were not based upon some belief on the part of the assembled legislators that this was about alleviating the pain and suffering of the one-in-five Americans who is out of work, or who is struggling to support a family on the income from some pathetic part-time job paying minimum wage. It was apparent that this was a cheer for the idea of giving more money to the capitalist class. Period.

In today's America, those in power have completely disavowed one of the key goals--if not the key goal--of democratic government, which is, as the Constitution put it so admirably in its opening sentence, to "promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty."

There is nothing in that Preamble about promoting the welfare of the business classes. The only justifiable reason for doing so then would have to be in order to promote the general welfare. And yet decades of policies aimed at promoting the welfare of the corporate elite and to a lesser extent promoting the welfare of the business classes in general (what used to be called the "trickle-down theory"), have demonstrably not only not promoted the general welfare; they have worsened the general welfare.

By every measure, the tax policies, welfare policies, trade policies, labor law policies, and Wall Street deregulation policies of the government, whether in Democratic or Republican hands, have led to a declining standard of living, a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, and a gradual increase in the underlying level of unemployment (the "acceptable" base level of unemployment which establishment economists consider to be "full" employment), not to mention to the extraordinary current level of unemployment.

"Trickle-down," it turns out, really means "piss on."

President Obama's talk about jobs is bogus. Jobs are leaching away from the US at a prodigious rate, like water pouring through the holes of a sieve, thanks to trade policies that encourage companies to shut down US operations, move production abroad, and then sell the once locally-made goods back to increasingly impoverished Americans. Any new jobs created are lower wage, and prone to interruption, given that they are in services, and aren't linked to any major capital investment.

Proposed programs like a $5000 tax credit for hiring a worker or revoking tax breaks for companies that shift production overseas are a joke, simply a rhetorical sop to the listening audience not meant to be taken seriously. (No employer will make a new hire just to snag a $5000 cut in taxes, and in any event, a credit is only useful to a company that is making profits and paying taxes, and such firms have no need of assistance to get them hiring. It's the companies that are in trouble that would need encouragement to hire, and they aren't paying any taxes.)

What is clear from the wild applause to these two lines in the State of the Union address is that government at this point is not about improving the general welfare at all (if it ever was). It is self-evidently about enriching the rich.

And at that point such a government has lost its reason for being.

This explains why the health "reform" bill has been such a farce. It was never about improving the health care of average Americans (something that could have been easily, quickly and efficiently accomplished by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone). It was always about ensuring the enrichment of the various players in the health care industry, who already own 17.5 percent of the entire US economy.

It explains why we aren't getting any kind of re-regulation of the predatory financial industry. The goal of de-regulation was never to make life better for average Americans. It was to enrich the financiers, and it did that very well. And no de-regulation is going to happen, because the goal of Washington politicians is to continue to enrich those financiers.

It explains why we're at war in Afghanistan. There is no conceivable threat posed by this poorest of nations located, landlocked, in a part of the globe that is maximally remote from the US. Yet we are being committed to an endless war there, costing a nominal $100 billion a year (times two or three when you add in the financing of the debt, and the costs of care for the injured troops over their lifetimes), because that war enriches the munitions industry, and also provides justification for an annual $800 billion military budget--a staggering sum that sucks the very life out of any program aimed at "improving the general welfare."

The whole government enterprise at this point is an ugly affront to the Preamble of the Constitution.

We will all be better served if and when the whole thing is brought down.

The way I see it, we've pretty much lost our government, and just voting in new politicians isn't going to fix anything (we just demonstrated that!). Our best hope then is a popular groundswell for a new Constitutional Convention. Let's roll the dice and try over, now that we've seen how our government can be stolen.

I agree it's a scary idea. Who knows what we Americans are really like? Maybe we are a nation of selfish imperialists and racists and sduch a convention would lead to a restoration of slavery or apartheid, a mass deportation of minorities, incarceration of gays and lesbians, and open endorsement of empire and a police state. But I like to think that we Americans are actually as good as our mythology tells us we are, and that a constitutional convention could lead to a new government that would really be of the people, by the people and for the people.

If MLK Were Around, He Wouldn't Care About Racial Brushfires in the Media -- He'd Be Talking About Poverty
By Rich Benjamin, AlterNet. Posted January 15, 2010.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/145203/if_m... /

<<snip>>

Forgive, for a moment, some biographical speculation: Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would not likely be bothered by these racial brushfires. Instead, he would be appalled by the larger afflictions engulfing this nation, all of which threaten the realization of his dream - not the therapeutic, saccharine dream peddled to us in candle-lit commemorations, but the urgent dream anchored by his gritty work.

The just-released jobs report shows 85,000 more jobs lost in December, with startling unemployment across the board: Teenagers (27 percent), Blacks (16.2 percent), Hispanics (12.9 percent), Whites (9 percent), and the general population at 10 percent and rising.

Socio-economic progress in the United States is no better today then during the latter years of Dr. King's life. America faces the same poverty rate today (13.2 percent) that Dr. King denounced in 1968 (12.8 percent). Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty in that time span has grown from 25 million to a whopping 40 million, including 12 million children.

As the House and Senate dither over healthcare reform, and tens of millions of Americans hover on the brink of poverty, Martin Luther King's Dream remains more pressing and relevant than at any point since his assassination.

<<snip>>

Why not ask how we can expand middle-class stability -- earnings, savings, homeownership -- to the hordes of Americans, among all races, who are one pink slip, one lapsed mortgage payment, one cancer diagnosis, one car wreck away from destitution?

<<snip>>

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane," King declared in 1966. Two years later, the year he was assassinated, King launched his Poor People's Campaign, "a multiracial army of the poor," that marched on Washington to demand an Economic Bill of Rights from Congress.

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar," Dr. King maintained. "It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Recounting the Biblical parable of the beggar on the Road to Jericho, King called for sweeping changes to the conditions that cause economic suffering. What does fixing the Road to Jericho mean today?

<<snip>>

Dr. King did not view poverty as a natural or inevitable condition of humankind. Instead, he believed it was the result of unjust economic policies and a lack of government investments that help people realize their potential. King's actual legacy teaches Americans and political leaders a great deal about implementing an equitable, purposeful, and long-term economic recovery.

A manifesto for progressives
Blog By Brent Budowsky - 01/05/10 08:00 PM ET
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/bren...

The Progressive Caucus in Congress can save Democrats from a disaster in the 2010 elections that could destroy any semblance of a governing majority and erase any hope for the mandate for change that voters gave Democrats in 2008.

Nothing has changed. Lobbyists dominate the town. Money dominates the legislation. Democrats repeatedly fail to fight for first principles. Voters are angry. Democrats are now the party of incumbency in a nation that again demands change.

It is astounding that Republicans, who adopt nihilism as a strategy and banana-republic obstruction as a tactic, who hope that America fails as a plan and who have popularity at rock-bottom levels, could win a major election victory over Democrats.

With a president who remains on the sidelines and a majority that becomes a mockery, the Senate looks like the movie “Casablanca” without Bogart or Bergman. The 60-vote rule is not respected as the result of a mandate for change, but exploited as a tool of legislative extortion that brings humiliation to one of its prime practitioners, who is now down 30 points in the polls back home.

Here is a great truth that remains unspoken in official Washington today: On issue after issue it is the Progressive Caucus that speaks for the majority of political independents, not the president who gives in too easily, not the Republicans who oppose any change, and not the Casablanca Democrats who exploit the 60-vote rule for petty cash, petty pork or petty vanities.

While Democrats surrender on a long list of major healthcare reforms supported by large majorities of independents, insurance and drug companies pour campaign cash into Republican coffers in states throughout the nation. The front page of The New York Times said it all, in bold ink, on Dec. 29: “Money pours to G.O.P.”

These gushing rivers of special-interest money are aimed at electing Republican governors and state legislators, who would dominate the great redistricting following the 2010 census, threatening Democratic members of the House and Senate in 2010, sounding a death knell for Democratic control of the House once the redistricting is done, if not sooner.

Insurers and Big Pharma cannot be blamed for thinking of Democrats, Never give a sucker an even break. First they induce surrender on progressive issues of great popularity with independents at the federal level, then they wage partisan war against Democrats at the state level, against what is left of an unpopular bill.

1. Progressives should speak for the huge majority of independents and fight for a public option with an opt-in provision that would allow states that favor it to have it. This would regain the political ground and reverse the political-sucker play against Democrats. Progressives should propose sending the money saved by the public option back to participating states for job-creating programs.

2. Progressives should fight for the huge majority of independents and make price-fixing, price-gouging and collusion by insurers illegal. Any insurance exchange with legalized price-fixing is ludicrous and repellant to a large majority of Americans.

3. Progressives should fight for the huge majority of independents and allow import of cheap lower-priced drugs that Americans overwhelmingly want.

4. Progressives should fight for the huge majority of independents and repeal the Bush tax cuts for upper incomes, enact an unjust-enrichment surtax on Wall Street bonuses and use the revenue in the short term to lower payroll taxes to generate growth, cut small-business taxes to create jobs and give hard-time rebates to seniors and military families of active-duty troops.

Progressives should fight for the majority of independents by battling against bank rip-offs of credit card customers and foreclosure abuses even against American churches during the holiday season, as reported last week in The Washington Post.

Progressives would be joined by many Republicans in the House and Senate to end legalized insurance price-fixing and allow import of lower-priced drugs. These issues will win more than 60 votes in the Senate and should be pushed through relentlessly. On other issues where progressives speak for the majority, the reconciliation process should be used for the majority to defeat the minority that obstructs the changes the people demand.

It is false and folly to suggest Democrats win by repeatedly surrendering on issues where they speak for the majority. Only by fighting for the majority they represent will Democrats win the next great change election that is coming.

Poverty is up, but how much? Census tells two stories.
Almost 16 percent of Americans lived in poverty last year, according to new data released by the Census Bureau. The numbers were sharply higher than official rates, which reflect different measures.
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer/ October 20, 2009 edition
http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebui... /

The way you measure poverty makes a big difference in the results you get.

The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that 15.8 percent of Americans lived in poverty last year, using an alternative gauge that differs sharply from the 13.2 percent official poverty rate the agency released last month.

The difference is even starker for some specific groups within America.

For example, Americans over age 65 have a poverty rate that’s twice as high – 18.7 percent – using the alternative measure.

In all, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 7 million more than indicated in official poverty statistics last month.

Why the difference?

The official measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care, or geographical variations in living costs. Nor does it consider non-cash government aid when calculating income. As a result, official figures released in September may have overlooked millions of poor people, many of them 65 and older.

So to help give a more rounded understanding of poverty in the country, the Census Bureau releases alternative measures developed by the National Academy of Sciences.

Here are the alternative poverty rates, followed by the official rate in parenthesis, for groups where the gap is significant:

• Single dads: 19.8 percent (versus 14.2 percent)

• Hispanic Americans: 29 percent (versus 23.2 percent)

• People in the West: 19 percent (versus 13.5 percent)

• People in the Northeast: 16.1 percent (versus 11.6 percent)

• People age 65 and up: 18.7 percent (9.7 percent)

The poverty jump for the West and Northeast reflects higher living costs in some of the most populated areas in those regions.

<<snip>>

Under either measure, poverty rose significantly last year as the nation was entering recession. And the number in poverty has gone up even more since the Census gathered data early last year, as the recession deepened.

The gap between the official and alternative poverty measures has widened significantly in the past decade – and the White House and Congress are considering whether to change the definition used for the official rate.

The National Academy of Sciences “Measuring Poverty: A New Approach” can be read here http://bit.ly/OIjqD .

David Sage

Born: 9/24/2009

Weight: 7 lb 5 oz

Lenght: 20 inches

THANK YOU!!

Here's what really bugs me. We finally have the opportunity to get some real reform signed into law, but President Obama and the Dem Congress seem to be coddling the repubs on healthcare. HR 676 has been floating around the House for years now, we have a solid majority of Dems. So why can't they get it through? If anyone knows, please tell me because I am getting disgusted with the whole thing righ now.

Obama needs to stop worrying about pleasing everyone because that will never happen. He needs to get the Dem majorities behind this bill so they could get it to his desk for signing. He has the best chance we may ever see and if he doesn't take it we will be totally screwed. He has a real chance to make history, like FDR with Social Security, or LBJ with Medicare and Medicaid. They fought for those laws and they won, we need a leader like that now or the chance will pass us by.

When the republicans were in charge they didn't care about bipartisanship, that is why we are in this mess we are in now. Its the Dems turn to run the show, but they are just twiddling their fingers and worrying about the next time they are up for election. That is the problem, they could care less about passing something worthwhile, to them getting reelected is more important than anything that will help the people of this country. So someone please tell me why our President and Dem leadership are playing games with such an important issue.

40M Americans in Poverty
by Leigh Graham
Published September 10, 2009 @ 11:42AM PT
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/40m_...

The census results on poverty in the U.S. in 2008 are in, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/re... and they're worse than we thought. The lowlights:

--Median household income declined by 3.6%, to $50,303 from around $52K.

--The poverty rate rose to 13.2% from 12.5% in 2007. That's an additional 2M Americans who have fallen below the nation's already absurdly low poverty threshold to officially qualify as poor.


--Over 46M people - or 15.4% of the population - lack health insurance.

Of course, the specter of poverty hits some groups harder than others. Median incomes for Hispanics, Southern households, and foreign-born households declined by about 5%. If you were earning $10/hour, now you're earning $9.50 - this adds up to almost $1,000 in wages lost over a year for someone already struggling full-time at such a low wage.

Almost every group is worse off, including those with comparatively low rates of poverty: households headed by married couples; non-Hispanic whites; and working age adults.

Interestingly, the number of people with health insurance also grew - because more people are receiving coverage from the government. What's that now about a public option?

Finally, income inequality is unchanged (yippee?), but the poverty rate is the highest in 11 years. It's worth combing through all the data to really get a full picture of how many more Americans have become so poor even the government has officially taken notice - your neighbors, your grandmother, your kid's friends at school, perhaps even you.

Please help us get this info out today (#PDD09!)http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/pove... as part of Poverty Day. And you know the drill - Take Action to Fight Poverty in America now! http://www.change.org/actions?cause_id=270...
------------------------------------
I think its time that something should be done about the way the government measures poverty, but that's for another post!!

Income Gap Highest in 30 Years
by Leigh Graham
Published July 06, 2009 @ 06:34AM PT
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/inco...

The poorest among us have increased their incomes by only $1,600 in 27 years - that's 16 cents per day.

Buried on page 15 of the National section in the NYT yesterday is coverage of a new report from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, demonstrating that the poorest among us - mostly jobless households with children - were not benefiting from our safety net programs (e.g., food stamps, etc.). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05saf...

This is no newsflash; our safety net is designed specifically around temporary hardship. Lost your job and need food stamps or cash subsidies for a bit? No problem! But if you've got any condition that makes holding a job difficult (disability, young children, lack of a good education and a diploma), then you're screwed. Time limits, and emphasis on low-wage work at any cost over educational gains and child care assistance guarantees that we will consistently leave (mostly) single mothers with young children behind. That's how we've chosen to structure the system and it delivers long-term consequences for these households.

When I went looking for the report on the Center's website, though, I found this (I can't discover the NYT-referenced report, I'll keep looking):
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&...

...in 2006, the top 1 percent of households had a larger share of the nation’s after-tax income, and the middle and bottom fifths of households had smaller shares, than in any year since 1979, the first year the CBO data cover...The data reveal starkly uneven income growth over recent decades. Between 1979 and 2006, real after-tax incomes rose by 256 percent — or $863,000 — for the top 1 percent of households, compared to 21 percent — or $9,200 — for households in the middle fifth of households and 11 percent — or $1,600 — for households in the bottom fifth. (my emphases)

Could this data be any starker? Bush era policies, basically Reaganomics on crack (heh), have dismissed the vast majority of us, not just the very poor. But for the most vulnerable, the effects have been brutal. $1,600 over 27 years? I know this isn't really acceptable as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but consider this: that amounts to less than $5 per month, or about $.16 per day. Heck, we spend more than that to sponsor a child through the Christian Children's Fund.

The report points out that inequality will likely shrink in this recession, but in miniscule part because of a temporary targeted redistribution of funds to struggling households. I feel like a broken record here lately: how can we use this moment of crisis to advocate for - and achieve - a sturdier, more equitable, more realistic, social safety net?

(Graph from the CBPP report on the income gap shows that the top 20% of earners in the US take home more than 50% of all after-tax income.)

The recent news of the predictions that there will be no COLA raise for all Social Security recipients for the next two years and maybe longer has hit many people I know very hard. I know that many of you will say that its not Obama's fault or not even Congress's fault, its the law and there is nothing they can do. Well, I agree, its not their fault, but I disagree about there being nothing they can do.

First of all there are many questions about the numbers they use to figure out the CPI, which the COLA is based on, and something should be done immediately about that. That is in both Obama's and Congress's control. Secondly, a very similar situation happened back in the mid 1980s, where the numbers showed that there should be no COLA raise. When it was announced back then the heat was immediately felt on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Congress acted quickly to pass a bill to give a raise anyway and Reagan eagerly signed it. Reagan, of all people, the same man who cut every social program he possibly could, felt enough pressure to change the law.

The same thing could be done now!! Can you imagine what the threat of a voting block of more than 50 million people can do to our lawmakers? That's right it would scare the crap out of them, and I'm sure Obama would sign it, changing the law again. It was done before and it can be done again!! I have already contacted my Representative and Senators and I know a few others who have done the same. They are handing money away to the banks like its candy, I believe it is now time for the government to do something for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak. Maybe it will be the difference of somebody having a place to live or becoming homeless, maybe it will be the difference of a child going hungry or being able to have at least one meal a day. Reagan changed the law once and I'm sure Obama and the Democrats can do it again. Acting or not acting is literally a matter of life and death!!

The Comparisons to Johnson Begin
by Leigh Graham
Published March 02, 2009 @ 07:29AM PST
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/the_...

Lyndon Johnson is my favorite President. The Great Society, the War on Poverty, a Virgo. What's not to like? (Oh right, VIETNAM...) So much of our anti-poverty infrastructure came about under Johnson, programs such as Medicaid and Medicare and Head Start that remain less villified (if much more costly) than FDR's welfare ever was.

My understanding of Johnson's anti-poverty efforts is that they were explicitly urban and originally aimed to strengthen urban poor communities to advocate and plan for and take care of their own needs, through the creation of the Community Action Program and Model Cities that delivered federal support directly to local non-profits and neighborhoods. This was a pretty provocative move, in effect an attempt to cut out the middle-man of mayors and local elected leaders so that more funds could reach mostly black and Latin@ inner-city neighborhoods that had been torn up in the prior decades by federal highways, slum clearance programs, and public housing construction (which, as you know, has a complicated history). Unsurprisingly, federal funds poured directly into neighborhoods to support organizing of the poor and non-white worried and angered local leaders. Their lobbying eventually led to the rollback of these initiatives. About 1,000 Community Action Agencies remain, providing job training, energy efficiency, utility assistance and other stop-gap or skills improvement programs for poor Americans.

The comparisons of Obama to Johnson have arrived, following his budget outline last week.

He's proposing a "Great Society" for "the middle-class;" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/us/polit... which is not exactly bold, the author argues. (Though is it just me or is there a bit of CDS going on in that piece?) Alternatively, no one has spoken this boldly since Johnson declared war on racial discrimination and oppression. So which is it? Is he boldly going where few have gone before, or is he a policy milquetoast like Clinton?

I think our vaunted middle-class is economically vulnerable like never before, and I think we should have woken up to this impending reality a long time ago. I think Obama's efforts to improve education, deal with healthcare, and lay the beginnings of a new energy infrastructure are necessary, long overdue, inevitable and promising. Bold? I'm skeptical. Targeting the middle-class is both politically popular and feasible in a way that truly going after poverty and inequality will never be. As this Tribal elder fears, in this time of crisis, the programs and funds Obama has promised will go to the better off among those of us who are hurting - they will reach the tribes, states and towns that know how to write grants, or have able-bodied populations who can transfer easily into new jobs programs. I was in a meeting a few weeks ago with NYS representatives who were trying to figure out how to design a jobs program that reached both the chronically hard to employ versus laid-off middle-managers. This is no small feat, and one countless localities will by-pass, choosing a "skimming" strategy that gets the easiest to help back into the workforce as quickly as possible.

This makes sense from their perspective. But it's likely we'll have entrenched inequality as bad or worse than we have now. That's typically the reality after disasters, which is what we're living through. Sadly, our sizable middle-class (pretty much any American if you ask them) has never proven interested in confronting poverty and inequality in their neighborhoods. Johnson may have been a...chose your word that I can't really type on this site...but he drove through some controversial anti-poverty programs, many of which succeeded and many of which didn't. I give him a lot of credit for that. Obama....well, I wish I could be as enthusiastic.

Measuring Poverty in the United States
Authors: Nancy K. Cauthen and Sarah Fass
Publication Date: June 2008
http://nccp.org/publications/pub_825.html

This fact sheet discusses how the U.S. government measures poverty, why the current measure is inadequate, and what alternative ways exist to measure economic hardship.

How does the U.S. measure poverty?

Figure 1: Federal poverty guidelines, 2008
The U.S. government measures poverty by a narrow income standard that does not include other aspects of economic status, such as material hardship (for example, living in substandard housing) or debt, nor does it consider financial assets (including savings or property). The official poverty measure is a specific dollar amount that varies by family size but is the same across the continental U.S. According to the guidelines, the poverty level in 2008 is $21,200 a year for a family of four and $17,600 for a family of three (see table). 1 The poverty guidelines are used to determine eligibility for public programs. A similar but more complex measure is used for calculating poverty rates.

The current poverty measure was established in the 1960s and is now widely acknowledged to be flawed. 2 It was based on research indicating that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food – the official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the figures have been updated annually for inflation but have otherwise remained unchanged.

Why is the current poverty measure inadequate?
The current poverty measure is flawed in two ways.

The current poverty level – that is, the specific dollar amount – is based on outdated assumptions about family expenditures.
Food now comprises only one-seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately. Thus, the poverty level does not reflect the true cost of supporting a family. In addition, the current poverty measure is a national standard that does not adjust for the substantial variation in the cost of living from state to state and between urban and rural areas.

More accurate estimates of typical family expenses, and adjustments for local costs, would produce substantially higher dollar amounts.

The method used to determine whether a family is poor does not accurately count family resources.
When determining if a family is poor, income sources counted include earnings, interest, dividends, Social Security, and cash assistance. But income is counted before subtracting payroll, income, and other taxes, overstating income for some families. On the other hand, the federal Earned Income Tax Credit isn’t counted either, underestimating income for other families. Also, in-kind government benefits that assist low-income families – food stamps, Medicaid, and housing and child care assistance – are not taken into account. This means that official poverty statistics cannot be used to analyze the effectiveness of these programs.

Are there alternative ways to measure poverty?
Considerable research has been conducted on better methods to measure income poverty, but to date, the political will necessary to implement change has been lacking. In the early 1990s, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to investigate alternative measures. The NAS panel of experts issued a report in 1995 that recommended revising the poverty level and the method of determining which families are poor. 3 The panel’s recommendations included the following:

Create new poverty thresholds that more accurately reflect the cost of food, clothing, and shelter.
Adjust thresholds by region to account for variation in the cost of living.
When counting families’ resources to determine whether they fall below the poverty line:
use families’ post-tax income;
include earned income tax credits and the value of near-cash benefits (such as food stamps and housing assistance); and
subtract the cost of work-related expenses (such as child care and transportation) and medical care.
If the NAS recommendations were adopted, millions more people would be considered officially poor. But even these recommendations underestimate the cost of family expenses and thus produce poverty thresholds well below what it takes to make ends meet, for example, increasing the poverty level for a family of four by only about $3,000 annually. 4

How much does it really take to make ends meet?

Figure 2: Basic needs budgets for a family of four, in selected urban, suburban, and rural localities*

Given that the federal poverty level grossly understates how much it takes to support a family, researchers have developed budgets that realistically quantify basic living costs in specific localities. 5 Building on earlier efforts, NCCP has developed Basic Needs Budgets that include only the most basic daily living expenses and are based on modest assumptions about costs. For example, the budgets in the table below assume that family members have employer-sponsored health coverage, even though the majority of low-wage workers do not have employer coverage. 6 NCCP’s Basic Needs Budgets do not include money to purchase life or disability insurance or to create a rainy-day fund that would help a family withstand a job loss or other financial crisis. Nor do they allow for investments in a family’s future financial success, such as savings to buy a home or for a child’s education. In short, these budgets indicate what it takes for a family to cover their most basic living expenses – enough to get by but not enough to get ahead.

Across the country, families typically need an income of at least twice the official poverty level ($42,400 for a family of four) to meet basic needs. In high-cost cities such as New York, it may take an income of over three times the poverty level to make ends meet, whereas in some rural areas, the figure may be under double the poverty level.

In short, even if the official poverty measure is revised along the lines suggested by the NAS, it would remain a measure of deprivation and severe hardship. In contrast, Basic Needs Budgets provide a way to think about what families need to maintain a minimally decent standard of living.

Endnotes
1. The federal poverty guidelines are used for administrative purposes, such as determining financial eligibility for benefit programs. For statistical purposes, researchers use a different – but quite similar – version of the federal poverty measure, the federal poverty thresholds, issued by the U.S. Census Bureau. Both the guidelines and the thresholds are commonly referred to as the federal poverty level (FPL).

2. Cauthen, Nancy K. 2007. Testimony on Measuring Poverty in America. Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, Committee on Ways and Means. Aug. 1, 2007.

3. Betson, David M.; Citro, Constance F.; Michael, Robert T. 2000. Recent Developments for Poverty Measurement in U.S. Official Statistics. Journal of Official Statistics 16(2): 87-111.

4. Bernstein, Jared. 2007. More Poverty than Meets the Eye (Economic Snapshots, April 11, 2007). Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Accessed April 23, 2007.

5. These efforts include Self-Sufficiency Standards developed by Diana Pearce for Wider Opportunities for Women and the Economic Policy Institute’s Basic Family Budgets.

6. Only 59 percent of all workers have access to employer-sponsored health coverage; the proportion is much lower among low-wage workers. Krugman, Paul. 2007. The Conscience of a Liberal. New York, NY: W.W. Norton& Co.

LBJ's "War on Poverty" spawned some of the most radical, evil right wing fringe groups that are still in existance today, the only difference is that they are no longer on the fringes, but have become mainstream, conservative think tanks. They have bought themselves lawmakers, judges and even Presidents, and have been setting policy for over three decades now. One of these think tanks is The Heritage Foundation, an evil group who laid the groundwork for Reagan to cut every social program he could and helped Newt Gingrich write "the Contract with America" which led to Bill Clinton passing "welfare reform" and is one of the reasons we are where we are today.
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http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipient...
Heritage Foundation, The
TYPE: 501(c)(3)

EIN: 23-7327730

239 institutional roles for $26,335,542

214 Massachusetts Ave., NE
Washington, DC 20002

www.heritage.org

The creation of the influential Heritage Foundation was probably the single most important event in the development of a national network of conservative policy-oriented institutions. Heritage was founded in 1973 by the anti-labor, racist, homophobic brewery magnate Joseph Coors together with prominent right-wing activist Paul Weyrich and wealthy right-wingers Richard Scaife and Edward Noble. The initial funding came from Coors ($250,000), Scaife ($900,000), and "significant sums" from Noble. Large corporations, including Gulf Oil, also made early contributions. In the early 1980s, Heritage reported that "87 top corporations" were supporters. By 1995, it had an annual budget of $25 million.

In 1980, Heritage published a 3,000 page, 20-volume set of policy recommendations called "Mandate for Leadership" that proved to be the intellectual blueprint for the so-called "Reagan Revolution," including trickle-down economics, massive cutbacks in social programs and the Star Wars Defense Strategy, the gargantuan feeding trough for the military-industrial complex that even the Pentagon admitted was militarily useless.

More recently, the Heritage Foundation had substantial input into the writing of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America."

Among other Heritage efforts have been the publications "Beware of the Union Label," "The Case for Plant Closures," "Upsetting the Balance of U.S. Labor Law: The Striker Replacement Bill" and "In Praise of Corporate Radiers: Junking Three Fallacies About Hostile Takeovers."

The U.S. labor movement is a particular target for Heritage. Ronald Reagan's first appointment to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was Robert Hunter, a conservative activist who wrote the chapter on the Labor Department for the foundation's "Mandate for Leadership." In that paper, Hunter called for increasing the use of NLRB injunctions against unions., gutting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and drastically cutting the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In addition, Heritage "...has given berths to a range of Reagan/Bush officials, including former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former Education Secretary William Bennett."


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http://the-spark.net/np728203.html
Ronald Reagan: Acting for the Capitalist Class

Ronald Regan, president of the United States from 1981 to 1989, died after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease. The press is calling him the man who imposed curbs on government spending in order to reduce size of the government. In fact, it was Reagan that introduced the biggest government budget deficits seen since World War II – almost literally handing over the government purse to the capitalist class to rob. All subsequent presidents followed in his footsteps.

Having declared war on deficits in his first budget address, Reagan turned around and pushed through "reforms" to the tax code that severely reduced the amount of taxes paid by the corporations and the wealthy. At the same time, he increased multibillion dollar payments to the biggest corporations through the military budget. Taken together, these measures increased the budget deficit enormously. Reagan then used the pretext of this budget deficit to push through the so-called "Balanced-Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act" of 1985. The act supposedly required the federal government to automatically cut all programs a certain percentage in order to bring the budget in balance by 1990. In fact, the cuts were concentrated in the social programs and public services, even while military expenditures, interest payments to banks and a range of other goodies for the corporations escaped the budgetary ax.

In 1986, pointing to the 736 billion dollar deficit racked up during his first four years in office, Reagan proposed actual cuts in almost every single social program, including Medicaid, Medicare, housing assistance, child nutrition, social services, tuition assistance, etc.

While these cuts are associated with Reagan's name, we should remember that the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during those years by very big margins (the smallest was 242 to 190). And neither was Reagan the one who started cutting taxes to the wealthy and to the corporations – that had begun during the presidency of Democrat John Kennedy, and continued under Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Democrat Carter also made the first big outright cuts in some of the social programs, cutting out, for example, the 26-week extensions from unemployment benefits and changing the inflation formula that determined the amount of food stamps poor families would receive.

If Reagan took this policy much further than anyone had done before – it was more than anything due to the working class and the black population pulling back from the political scene. The bourgeoisie and its political servants, feeling they had a free rein, overtly began to reverse many of the gains in social programs, public services and education that had been imposed in earlier years by the population when it was mobilized to fight for its own interests.

Reagan had served in the late 1940s and early 1950s as president of the Screen Actors Guild, using that post to help carry out attacks on the communist militants who had built the unions during the 1930s. In the 1980s, he used the power of the federal government and its armed forces to break the strike of the air traffic controllers. When union leaders refused to call other workers out on strike or to mobilize them for actions that really could have tied up business, the strike was defeated, and the die was cast for a whole period.

The fact that every president since Reagan has carried out the same policy shows that it is not just a question of personalities or of party. Clinton, who sat in the White House during an economy that expanded, couldn't use the pretext of current budget deficits to cut social programs, so he began to preach the necessity of rolling up "surpluses" in order to reduce past deficits. And just like Reagan, he used the power of the presidency to attack workers who dared to strike – the mineworkers, the pilots at American Airlines and the UPS workers.

This long-term policy of stealing from the working class majority to hand wealth over to a small minority of parasites who sit on the top of society will be reversed only through a new widespread mobilization of the working class – like those of earlier years that created the public school system, that forced the establishment of social programs and that made government extend public services such as clean water, sewage, decent roads, public health facilities, and so on.

What do you think of when you hear the name Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? You probably remember the "civil rights movement", or the peaceful way in which he led such a large revolution, or the march on Washington D.C., where at the Lincoln Memorial Dr. King gave one of the greatest, and most famous speeches in American History. He started by saying saying he was there to "cash a check" for "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" but warned fellow protesters not to "allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force." And he finished this most inspiritational speech so elegantly with: "And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.'"

This year Martin Luther King Day means something even more important and more special, for the first time in our history, Tuesday, January 20, 2009 we will inaugurate an African-American as President of the United States!! We have certainly come a long way since that August day back in 1963 when Dr. King proclaimed "I have a dream," but not far enough. I think we can all agree that even with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, racism and poverty still have deep roots in our nation. Yes, that's right, poverty, the other "great cause" of Martin Luther King Jr., if you don't remember that, don't worry, because it is something we are rarely, if ever, reminded of. Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get obligatory media reports about "the slain civil rights leader." What is truly amazing is that you see or hear nothing about the last few years of his life, its as if they didn't exist. What we do see is the same footage of Dr. King in Birmingham in 1963; the march in D.C., about which I spoke above, also 1963; Selma, Alabama in 1965; and finally, that motel balcony in Memphis, 1968. Why is there such a gap in those final years? Most of those speeches were filmed and yet we do not see them!!

With the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the winning of the Nobel Peace Prize all behind him, he was determined to conquer his other great cause, poverty. Seeing that a majority of Americans living in poverty were white, King developed a class perspective. He called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power. "True compassion," King said, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Despite many of his closest friends and advisors warning him against it, with the media no longer his ally and the FBI's increased harrassment, he proceeded to criss-cross the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that he called, the "Poor People's Campaign." He spent what would be his last months planning a new march on Washington, this time for "human rights" and "economic rights," "a poor people's bill of rights." King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He felt the need to confront Congress, which had shown its "hostility to the poor," appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

More than 40 years after that night in Memphis, doesn't that sound familiar today? The Media, Congress, The White House, all conspiritors in allowing the blight of poverty and homelessness, to not only remain the shame of this nation, but to, I dare say "delight" in it. With the onset of the "Civil Rights Movement" and the "War on Poverty" 45 years ago, I ask, are we any better off today on either front? Yes, we have elected a black man as President, and that may give one reason to hope. But a walk through any inner city, a drive through Appalachia or a trip across rural America with its many small towns and rolling farmlands, a conversation with any of the people you happen to come upon, will show one exactly what is wrong in this country and how difficult a job is awaiting our new President and Congress. Will they have the compassion and fortitude to take on this overwhelming project? And more importantly, will WE have the will to press for change in poverty, because when it comes right down to it, it's not about Obama, or Congress, or the Media, it's about US. WE'VE accepted poverty and homelessness for so long... are WE going to DEMAND that it change? For the sake of the survival of this nation, we ALL better prepare for the struggle ahead, and NO excuse can be accepted!! As Dr. King said, "There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."

Posted with permission of peoplesing.org