Religions > Atheism > Poverty Rate Went UP Thanks to Bush (GOP, the Party of Treason)
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Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Yang, AthD h.c, Kicking AWOLs Cocaine Snorting Ass" |
| Date: |
12 Sep 2005 10:30:57 PM |
| Object: |
Poverty Rate Went UP Thanks to Bush (GOP, the Party of Treason) |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287641/site/newsweek/
"For the first time in half a century, the third year of a recovery
(2004) also saw an INCREASE in poverty. In a nation of nearly 300
million people, the number living below the poverty line ($14,680 for
a family of three) recently hit 37 million, up more than a million in
a year."
-----
Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec (aka aka Yang's little poltregeist *****)
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 1.6 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12.5 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -1894 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush ***** up my country: Worthless
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| User: "torresD" |
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| Title: TO BE A LIBERAL IS TO BE INSANE ==> Poverty Rate Went UP Thanks to Bush (GOP, the Party of Treason) |
13 Sep 2005 10:19:43 AM |
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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:30:57 -0700, "Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's
Cocaine Snorting *****" <eacmole@/*AWOLBUSH*/mail.com> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287641/site/newsweek/
"For the first time in half a century, the third year of a recovery
(2004) also saw an INCREASE in poverty. In a nation of nearly 300
million people, the number living below the poverty line ($14,680 for
a family of three) recently hit 37 million, up more than a million in
a year."
-----
Yang
a.a. #28
AthD (h.c.) conferred by the regents of the LCL
a.a. pastor #-273.15, the most frigid church of Celcius nee Kelvin
EAC Econometric Forecast and Sorcery Division
Proudly plonked by Lani Girl and Crazyalec (aka aka Yang's little poltregeist *****)
The Bush 'balanced' budget: 1.6 trillion and worsening
The Bush 'economic' policy: 12.5 million FEWER jobs than Clinton and counting
The Bush Iraq lie: -1894 GIs, one friend's co-worker's son and mounting
Having Bush ***** up my country: Worthless
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: Poverty Rate Went UP Thanks to Bush (GOP, the Party of Treason) |
17 Sep 2005 10:24:28 AM |
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On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 20:30:57 -0700, "Yang, AthD (h.c), Kicking AWOL's
Cocaine Snorting *****" <eacmole@/*AWOLBUSH*/mail.com> wrote:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287641/site/newsweek/
"For the first time in half a century, the third year of a recovery
(2004) also saw an INCREASE in poverty. In a nation of nearly 300
million people, the number living below the poverty line ($14,680 for
a family of three) recently hit 37 million, up more than a million in
a year."
The Other America
An Enduring Shame: Katrina reminded us, but the problem is not new.
Why a rising tide of people live in poverty, who they are—and what we
can do about it.
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek
Sept. 19, 2005 issue - It takes a hurricane. It takes a catastrophe
like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and
not-so-benign neglect. It takes the sight of the United States with a
big black eye—visible around the world—to help the rest of us begin to
see again. For the moment, at least, Americans are ready to fix their
restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race and class that
have escaped their attention. Does this mean a new war on poverty? No,
especially with Katrina's gargantuan price tag. But this disaster may
offer a chance to start a skirmish, or at least make Washington think
harder about why part of the richest country on earth looks like the
Third World.
"I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren't just
abandoned during the hurricane," Sen. Barack Obama said last week on
the floor of the Senate. "They were abandoned long ago—to murder and
mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing,
to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness."
The question now is whether the floodwaters can create a sea change in
public perceptions. "Americans tend to think of poor people as being
responsible for their own economic woes," says sociologist Andrew
Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. "But this was a case where the
poor were clearly not at fault. It was a reminder that we have a moral
obligation to provide every American with a decent life."
In the last four decades, part of that obligation has been met. Social
Security and Medicare have all but eliminated poverty among the
elderly. Food stamps have made severe hunger in the United States
mostly a thing of the past. A little-known program with bipartisan
support and a boring name—the Earned Income Tax Credit—supplements the
puny wages of the working poor, helping to lift millions into the
lower middle class.
But after a decade of improvement in the 1990s, poverty in America is
actually getting worse. A rising tide of economic growth is no longer
lifting all boats. For the first time in half a century, the third
year of a recovery (2004) also saw an increase in poverty. In a nation
of nearly 300 million people, the number living below the poverty line
($14,680 for a family of three) recently hit 37 million, up more than
a million in a year.
With the strain Katrina is placing on the gulf region (and on families
putting up their displaced relatives), it will almost certainly
increase more.
The poverty rate, 12.7 percent, is a controversial measurement, in
part because it doesn't include some supplemental programs. But it's
the highest in the developed world and more than twice as high as in
most other industrialized countries, which all strike a more generous
social contract with their weakest citizens. Even if the real number
is lower than 37 million, that's a nation of poor people the size of
Canada or Morocco living inside the United States.
Their fellow Americans know little about them. In the last decade,
poverty disappeared from public view. TV dislikes poor people, not
personally but because their appearance is a downer and—according to
ratings meters—causes viewers to hit the remote. Powerful politicians
aren't much friendlier: poor folks vote in small numbers. Republicans
win little of their support and Democrats often take it for granted.
Until Katrina, the pressure was off. After President Clinton signed
welfare reform in 1996, the chattering classes stopped arguing about
it. With welfare caseloads cut in half—more than 9 million women and
children have left the rolls—even many liberals figured the trend
lines were headed in the right direction. The real-world challenges of
welfare reform explained in Jason DeParle's landmark 2004 book,
"American Dream," went unheeded, as Clinton initiatives and the boom
of the 1990s pulled 4.1 million of the working poor out of poverty.
(Good times don't always have that effect. The Reagan boom of the
1980s did the same for only 50,000.) Meanwhile crime plummeted in
cities across the country, down to levels not seen since the 1950s.
Few noticed that progress in fighting poverty stalled with the economy
in 2001.
President Bush, preoccupied with terrorism and tax cuts, made no
mention of it. His main involvement with poverty issues has been on
education, where he sharply increased aid to poor schools as part of
his No Child Left Behind initiative. Democrats have offered little on
education beyond opposition to NCLB. They've shown more allegiance to
the teachers unions (whose contracts are models of unaccountability)
than to poor kids. Bush's other antipoverty idea was to bolster
so-called faith-based initiatives by shifting a little federal funding
of social programs to religious groups. Post-Katrina, this will likely
be extended. But it's a Band-Aid, not an antipoverty strategy. The
last notable poverty expert working in the White House, John Dilulio,
departed in 2001 after explaining that the administration had no
interest in real policy analysis.
The president has made a point of hiring more high-ranking
African-Americans than any of his predecessors. But his identification
with blacks is a long way from, say, LBJ's intoning, as he did in
1965, "Their cause must be our cause, too ... And we shall overcome."
Bush rarely meets with the poor or their representatives. His mother
made headlines when she visited the Houston Astrodome and said: "So
many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway. So this is working very well for them"—as if sharing space
with 10,000 strangers was a step up.
Who are the poor? With whites making up 72 percent of the population,
the United States contains more poor whites than poor blacks or
Hispanics. In fact, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports
that the increase in white poverty in nonurban areas accounts for most
of the recent uptick in the poverty rate. But only a little more than
8 percent of American whites are poor, compared with 22 percent of
Hispanics and nearly a quarter of all African-Americans (in a country
that is 12 percent black). This represents a significant advance for
blacks in recent decades, thanks to the growth of the black middle
class, but it's still a shamefully high number. By contrast,
immigration has sent poverty among Hispanics up, though it has not
been as intractable for them across generations.
After 40 years of study, the causes of poverty are still being
debated. Liberals say the problem is an economic system that's tilted
to the rich; conservatives blame a debilitating culture of poverty.
Clearly, it's both—a tangle of financial and personal pain that often
goes beyond insufficient resources and lack of training. Family issues
are critical. Married-couple families are significantly less poor than
female-headed households. While hunger, crime, drugs and overt racial
discrimination have eased, other problems connected with poverty may
have worsened: wage stagnation, social isolation and a more subtle
form of class-based racism. Each can be found in New Orleans,
pre-Katrina.
The primary economic problem is not unemployment but low wages for
workers of all races. With unions weakened and a minimum-wage increase
not on the GOP agenda, wages have not kept pace with the cost of
living, except at the top. (In 1965, CEOs made 24 times as much as the
average worker; by 2003, they earned 185 times as much.) Since 2001,
the United States has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs. New
Orleans's good jobs left much earlier, replaced by employment in the
restaurant and tourism industry, which pays less and usually carries
no health benefits. Medicaid covers poor children but few poor adults,
who put off seeing the doctor, cranking up the cost. For the poor, the
idea of low-wage jobs' covering the basic expenses of living has
become a cruel joke.
Consider the case of Delores Ellis. Before Katrina turned her world
upside down, the 51-year-old resident of New Orleans's Ninth Ward was
earning the highest salary of her life as a school janitor—$6.50 an
hour, no health insurance or pension. Pregnant at 17 and forced to
drop out of high school, she went on welfare for a time, then bounced
around minimum-wage jobs. "I worked hard all my life and I can't
afford nothing," Ellis says. "I'm not saying that I want to keep up
with the Joneses, I just want to live better."
Ellis is hampered by cultural habits, too. Like almost all poor
evacuees interviewed by NEWSWEEK, she has no bank account. Before the
storm, she did own a stereo, refrigerator, washer and dryer, two color
TVs and a 1992 Chevy Lumina with more than 100,000 miles on it. This,
too, is common among the poor; like more comfortable Americans, they
spend on consumer goods beyond their means. But these are often their
only assets. The reason that more African-Americans didn't heed
warnings to leave New Orleans before the hurricane hit goes beyond the
much-publicized lack of cars. They were reluctant to abandon their
entire net worth to looters. John Edwards, who has spent much of the
year since he lost the vice presidency studying the problems of "the
two Americas," says that establishing thousands of bank accounts is
critical—not just for Katrina evacuees, but for others in poverty.
Isolation is the second big factor that makes poverty even worse.
While racial segregation in housing is at its lowest levels since
1920, Sheryll Cashin, author of "The Failures of Integration," has
found that only 5 to 10 percent of American families live in stable,
integrated communities. More than half a century after Brown v. Board
of Education, public schools are still almost totally segregated—the
result of where people choose to live, not law. Blacks and whites
increasingly go to school with more integrated Hispanics, but not with
each other. One big change is that blacks seem only a little more
interested in integration than whites.
But there's a steep price to this voluntary segregation. While overt
discrimination is dwindling—in part because perpetrators can be
successfully sued for practicing it—it still exists. A 1999 University
of Pennsylvania study showed that telephone callers using "black
English" were offered fewer real-estate choices. At a deeper level,
Harvard's Glenn C. Loury has identified what he calls "discrimination
in contact." Informal contacts between people across racial lines
break down wariness and lead to the connections that help people find
jobs. When perfectly legal social segregation prevents blacks from
having such informal networks, they slip back.
This isolation has hampered many Katrina evacuees and other inner-city
blacks. Joycelyn Harris has spent her whole life in the Ninth Ward.
One of 11 children, she dropped out of school at the age of 12 and
went on to have five children of her own, later working at Burger King
and as a hotel chambermaid. She and her boyfriend, Kenneth Anthony,
fled the city last week with nothing but $9 in their pockets and the
clothes on their backs. They lived for a time in a New Orleans housing
project isolated by two industrial canals and railroad tracks.
"Sometimes I wanted to back out, but you can't," says Anthony, who has
lived in four different housing projects. "I felt like I was
incarcerated."
In the last decade, the government has torn down more than 70,000
units of public housing nationwide, including where Harris and Anthony
once lived. But too often, the people who resided there are left to
fend for themselves. While everyone agrees that housing vouchers are a
good idea, the waiting list to use them for public housing is five
years.
Following the Gatreaux model in Chicago, the Clinton administration
launched a "scatter-site" housing program in four cities that found
homes for the poor in mixed-income neighborhoods. While the move
doesn't much benefit adults, their children—confronted with higher
expectations and a less harmful peer group—do much better. "It really
helped in Atlanta," says Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the civil-rights
movement. Bush and the GOP Congress killed the idea, as well as the
Youth Opportunity Grant program, which had shown success in partnering
with the private sector to help prepare disadvantaged teens for work
and life. They tried to cut after-school programs—proven winners—by 40
percent, then settled for a freeze.
The third problem exacerbating poverty is what some call racism.
Others argue the word is too inflammatory for a more subtle but no
less debilitating effect.
Racism was clearly present in the aftermath of Katrina. Readers of
Yahoo News noticed it when a pair of waterlogged whites were described
in a caption as "carrying" food while another picture (from a
different wire service) of blacks holding food described them as
"looters." White suburban police closed at least one bridge to keep a
group of blacks from fleeing to white areas. Over the course of two
days, a white river-taxi operator from hard-hit St. Bernard Parish
rescued scores of people from flooded areas and ferried them to
safety. All were white. "A n--ger is a n--ger is a n--ger," he told a
NEWSWEEK reporter. Then he said it again.
Was the slowness of Washington's rescue efforts also a racial thing?
In 2004, Bush moved huge resources into Florida immediately following
hurricanes there. No one was stranded. The salient difference was not
race but politics. Those hurricanes came just before an election.
Obama, the only African-American in the U.S. Senate, says "the
ineptitude was colorblind." But he argues that while—contrary to
rapper Kanye West's attack on Bush—there was no "active malice," the
federal response to Katrina represented "a continuation of passive
indifference" on the part of the government. It reflected an
unthinking assumption that every American "has the capacity to load up
their family in an SUV, fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick
some bottled water in the trunk and use a credit card to check into a
hotel on safe ground." When they did focus on race in the aftermath,
many Louisianans let their fears take over. Lines at gun stores in
Baton Rouge, La., snaked out the door. Obama stops short of calling
this a sign of racism. For some, he says, it's a product of "sober
concern" after the violence in the city; for others, it's closer to
"racial stereotyping."
Harvard's Loury argued in a 2002 book, "The Anatomy of Racial
Inequality," that it's this stereotyping and "racial stigma," more
than overt racism, that helps hold blacks in poverty. Loury explains a
destructive cycle of "self-reinforcing stereotypes" at school and
work. A white employer, for instance, may make a judgment based on
prior experience that the young black men he hires are likely to be
absent or late for work. So he supervises them more closely. Resenting
the scrutiny, the African-Americans figure that they're being
disrespected for no good reason, so they might as well act out, which
in turn reinforces their boss's stereotype. Everybody goes away angry.
Such problems are often less about race than class, which has become a
huge factor within the black community, too. It's hard for studious
young African-Americans to brave the taunts that they're "acting
white." The only answer to that is a redoubled effort within the black
community to respect academic achievement and a commitment by white
institutions to use affirmative action not just for middle-class
minorities but for the poor it was originally designed to help.
Beyond the thousands of individual efforts necessary to save New
Orleans and ease poverty lie some big political choices. Until Katrina
intervened, the top priority for the GOP when Congress reconvened was
permanent repeal of the estate tax, which applies to far less than 1
percent of taxpayers. (IRS figures show that only 1,607 wealthy people
in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi even pay the tax, out of more
than 4 million taxpayers—one twenty-fifth of 1 percent.) Repeal would
cost the government $24 billion a year. Meanwhile, House GOP leaders
are set to slash food stamps by billions in order to protect subsidies
to wealthy farmers. But Katrina could change the climate. The
aftermath was not a good omen for the Grover Norquists of the world,
who want to slash taxes more and shrink government to the size where
it can be "strangled in the bathtub."
What kind of president does George W. Bush want to be? He can limit
his legacy to Iraq, the war on terror and tax cuts for the rich—or, if
he seizes the moment, he could undertake a midcourse correction that
might materially change the lives of millions. Katrina gives Bush an
only-Nixon-could-go-to-China opportunity, if he wants it.
Margaret Schuber, who evacuated to Atlanta, was a middle-school
principal in Jefferson Parish before retiring recently. "I have lived
in the city all my life and I didn't realize there were so many people
suffering socioeconomically. If you believe in the idea of community,
then we all bear responsibility." Schuber is concerned that so many
energetic young people aren't planning to return. She's going back to
volunteer in the schools. "We all need to do what we can to turn
things around," she says.
America was built and saved by the Margaret Schubers of the world. Now
we need them again, not just in the midst of an emergency but for the
hard work of redemption.
With Joseph Contreras and Sarah Childress in New Orleans, Jessica
Silver-Greenberg and Anne Underwood in New York and Pat Wingert in
Washington
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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