Time for a Little Thanks

by Diane Nilan

categories: Health & Healthcare, Hunger, Immigration, Inequality, Jobs & Unemployment, Women

Published November 20, 2009 @ 05:08AM PT

With our national holiday of Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, I'd like to offer some therapeutic thoughts to counteract the ongoing bleak economic reality, including this recent and timely report about people suffering from hunger.

With health care dominating national news, I was delighted to read a positive story about a hospital administrator's approach to coping with their fiscal crisis. The Boston Globe reported that Paul Levy, the hospital CEO, walked around the hospital and made simple, but critical, observations.

He stood at the nurses' stations, watching the transporters, the people who push the patients around in wheelchairs. He saw them talk to the patients, put them at ease, make them laugh. He saw that the people who push the wheelchairs were practicing medicine.

He noticed the same when he poked his head into the rooms and watched as the people who deliver the food chatted up the patients and their families.

He watched the people who polish the corridors, who strip the sheets, who empty the trash cans, and he realized that a lot of them are immigrants, many of them had second jobs, most of them were just scraping by.

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Women and Children Most Hit By Hunger

by Greg Plotkin

categories: Children, Culture of Poverty, Government, Hunger, News

Published November 19, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

By now, many of you have probably heard the news that 49 million people in the United States did not have access to a sufficient amount of food last year, more than any year since the USDA started keeping records in 1995.  Even more disturbing, this represents a 36% increase in hunger between 2007 and 2008.

Although there has been both statistical and anecdotal evidence concerning the spread of hunger across the United States recently, a new report released by the USDA paints a more accurate, and unfortunately grim, picture of the true extent of food insecurity in the most powerful nation on earth.

The numbers themselves are startling -- 16% of all people went hungry in 2008 -- but they do not go far enough in showing who is suffering the most.

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Long-term Unemployment Worst Since the Great Depression

by Leigh Graham

categories: Children, Cities, Health & Healthcare, Inequality, Jobs & Unemployment, News, Nonprofits, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, States, The Economy

Published November 17, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

Record-setting joblessness: it's not just for the elderly. 5.6M Americans have been out of work for at least 6 months; this is the highest proportion of workers out of work for that long since the Great Depression. Joblessness is highest among younger workers.

I've written about unemployment and joblessness a lot lately. Here's some other poverty news items I'd love to spend more time on as well:

• A new documentary, "The End of Poverty" (in limited release), makes a case for capitalism's systematic inequality and hints at a need to resurrect Marxist critiques of our cherished economic system.
• Speaking of leftist advocacy, ACORN has sued the federal government over the House's decisions to defund the anti-poverty group, saying it is unconstitutional and effectively deeming ACORN guilty without trial.
• In DC, job training programs for public assistant recipients fail to tell 97% of enrollees about skills training programs that might actually help them find and keep jobs. That's one way to encourage self-sufficiency: designing failure right into aid programs!
• Hawaii considers getting out of the public housing business entirely.
• Is the Catholic Church's assault on women's healthcare in the reform debate an attempt to level the playing field for Catholic hospitals that currently provide a more limited range of health services than secular hospitals?
• More school districts are basing busing decisions on income rather than race in an attempt to get mostly children of color out of low-performing schools.
• NIMBYism comes to rural Maine to block housing for Latin@ farmworkers. 6 whole units worth.  Now that's a ghastly, infectious island of concentrated poverty if I've ever heard of one.
• Happy Birthday Sesame Street! (5 days late, my bad!) Over 40 years, the program has moved from racial and economic integration and diversity training goals to foodie fads and wellness.  Discuss.
• And this is a feel good story: West Philly inner-city high school kids beat MIT teams in a $10M green car contest not once, but twice. Sweet! Well done!

(Sesame Street sure looks scrubbed clean in that photo, don't you think?  Taken at Sesame Place by steve.ie)

44% of Congress are millionaires

by Leigh Graham

categories: Federal, Government, Inequality, The Economy

Published November 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

And we wonder why Congress can't pass bills to support low-income households and working people...ok, we don't really wonder, do we?

1% of Americans are millionaires, compared to 44% of Congress (237 elected officials, to be exact). The median income in the Senate is just under $2M, in the House it's just over $600k. Median household income in the US is $50,303.

Just because an individual is rich does not preclude them from pursuing pro-poor or equitable policies, nor does it suggest that they cannot relate to poverty or economic inequality. But when the group norm is staggering wealth compared to the typical American, including in countless districts these officials represent, then it is understandably difficult to consider or develop policies that truly address economic hardship. Add to this wealth disparity the reality that 9 in 10 House incumbents and 8 in 10 Senate incumbents are re-elected each election year, and my despair over Congressional legislation benefiting the average American certainly deepens.

I hear from political insiders that nothing is more important in running for election than a person's ability to raise money.  Forget your political views, your commitment to social equity, your desire to make a difference. If you're not rich or you don't know rich people who can bankroll your campaign, it's over before you've begun.  Yes, we need to keep putting progressive candidates up for election, and we need to diversify the ranks of political leadership along racial, gender and certainly class lines.  But how can we do that, when we're up against the nation's economic elite? Maybe our Average Joe VP, who's net worth is $27,000, has some advice.

(Original graph of House incumbency trends here at the Center for Responsive Politics)

Swine Flu Driving Paid Sick Leave Laws

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Corporations, Federal, Government, Health & Healthcare, Jobs & Unemployment, Policy, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, States, Women

Published November 15, 2009 @ 11:39AM PT

President Obama is urging anyone showing symptoms of swine flu to stay home for at least four days - a nearly impossible task for the 50% of working Americans who lack any paid sick leave.  With legislation stalled in Congress to mandate paid sick leave, 15 states and several cities around the US are proposing their own sick leave laws.  Sen. Dodd (D-CT) has proposed mandatory sick leave just for those diagnosed with swine flu, a rather pathetic compromise, in my book. (And I already know people who likely had swine flu earlier this year only to have it missed by their docs.)

I wrote about this issue less than 2 months ago (first link above), and not too much has changed.  Unsurprisingly, many lawmakers resist the reality that public health and labor issues can be intertwined as is the case here: ill workers showing up to their jobs cost businesses roughly $180B per year, more than the cost of absenteeism. (Also of note: how many women's policy institutes are providing the data on worker/labor policies - gee, I wonder why...)

We have a window of opportunity here to pass some long overdue laws.  I commend Democrats for using swine flu to raise awareness of this issue, and states and cities for responding to the very serious reality of a pandemic sweeping through their populations.  Now if only people could actually get access to the vaccine...

(Photo of mask, liquid soap and paper tissue bfishadow)

Homophobia Trumps Anti-Poverty Mission of DC Archdiocese

by Leigh Graham

categories: Cities, Corporations, Nonprofits, Race Ethnicity Class & Gender, Social Programs

Published November 13, 2009 @ 10:11AM PT

I'm with Mike on this one: I've got to headline this unbelievably craven move by the Catholic Church to threaten its social services to Washington D.C.'s poor if the city approves a same-sex marriage law. (Via.)

When I began writing for Poverty in America, the first action I created was to a pledge to join Catholic Charities Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America.  Then I posted their video about the campaign.  I remarked to our Editor at the time that as a lapsed Catholic, someone who'd fallen out with the Church over their anti-modern, anti-women, anti-choice points of view, that I felt weird highlighting their anti-poverty efforts. But I reconciled that the Catholic Church had a positive record of serving the poor - indeed, it seemed like their only redeeming quality these days.

Well, aren't I naive.  Turns out the Church is perfectly willing to abandon DC's poor in their outdated, hateful, confused crusade over gay/lesbian civil rights.  $10M is at risk here, what Catholic Charities contributes to public services for the poor. So far, some City Council members seem willing to let the Church walk, considering - fortunately - that it's only one of many social service providers in town.  (And surely some of these other providers would love to step up and accept the $8M in public funds the Church receives every year to do these good works.)

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Poverty--'Prison Without Bars'

by Diane Nilan

categories: Culture of Poverty, Government, Housing, Incarceration & Crime, Inequality, The Economy

Published November 13, 2009 @ 05:03AM PT

While I think I know something about poverty, I could never succinctly describe it as Dorothy Thomas did, "Poverty is prison without bars." Her homelessness probably galvanized her way of looking at her income-deficit disorder.

It just takes a glance at headlines to realize that our country suffers from economic schizophrenia. We've got a bazillionaire plunking down a cool $43.8 million for Warhol's painting of 200 $1 bills, and 237 of the 535 members of Congress counting up their millions, although hard times have hit a few...

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that a number of lawmakers are estimated to have suffered double-digit percentage losses in their net worth from 2007 to 2008. The biggest losers include Kerry, who lost a whopping $127.4 million; Warner lost about $28.1 million; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) lost about $11.8 million; and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lost about $10.1 million.

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