Incarceration & Crime
Policies give more kids summer jobs and health coverage
Published July 19, 2009 @ 09:20AM PT
Thanks to the stimulus and the expansion of CHIP earlier this year, nationwide more teens and kids of all ages, respectively, are benefiting from summer jobs and health coverage.
From the NYT: "13 states have invested millions of dollars this year to cover 250,000 more children with subsidized government health insurance." After the overall expansion of CHIP, the government estimates about 8M kids will remain uninsured. Tragically, about 2/3 of them are eligible but unenrolled. The federal government is providing grants to states to find this kids and enroll them.
In another positive development, $1.2B in stimulus funds is employing low-income, at-risk kids in summer jobs programs for the next two years. This infusion of money reverses - albeit temporarily - a declining trend in federal and state funds for youth employment initiatives.
Both of these programs symbolize a sensible up-front investment with long-term payoffs. Consider the jobs money:
For every year that teens work, their income in their twenties rises 14 percent to 16 percent, said youth employment expert Andrew Sum of Northeastern University. In addition, research shows that girls who have jobs are much less likely to become pregnant and boys are less likely to get involved in property crimes and drug use. High school graduation rates also go up for kids with work experience.
Of course, too few teens are being served by the stimulus money, just as millions of children continue to go uninsured. The goal here is to continue reducing the number of uninsured and idle children, and to build on the gains we're making now, turning some temporary fixes into permanent human development programs. Now all we need to do is retool our spending priorities just a bit...
(Photo by urthstripe)
Happy 4th: On Class, Ethnicity & Immigration
Published July 04, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
My fiance and I are dog-sitting for my mom this weekend. Hopefully we're walking them along the beach in her CT town, enjoying the sun, whose warmth I've forgotten in the cloudiest June in Massachusetts in over 100 years.
Here's some interesting links for that downtime between the BBQs and naps I hope you're enjoying today:
MySpace is the ghetto, trailer park, or barrio of the internet. Discuss.
The Obama Administration is halting Bush's Nothin' But Raids approach to immigration and going after employers who hire undocumented workers. It's most high-profile case is against American Apparel, which raises questions about the effectiveness of this approach. It's definitely more humane. But will a fine of $150,000 make a remote bit of difference?
Police Chiefs from Miami, Austin, and Sacramento come together to call for immigrant legalization and a separation of duties between local police forces and immigration enforcement. Money quote: “When you remove the emotion from the debate,” [Austin] Chief Acevedo said, "no one can argue that it is in the best interest of public safety to keep these people living in the shadows.”
Finally, Richard Trumka is on track to move from Secretary-Treasurer to President of the AFL-CIO. Perhaps most famous for his moving speech on racism in the labor movement during Obama's candidacy last year (video above), Trumka "a former coal miner and fierce critic of corporate America...would bring a more combative style to running the federation at a time when organized labor seems to be growing weaker in the nation’s workplaces but stronger in Washington."
This fighting style is right up my alley, of course. Others worry he'll be too polarizing. There's a hilarious-in-its-irony quote from an exec at the US Chamber of Commerce, fretting about Trumka's aggressiveness and potential bad publicity for the "employer community." As we document here at Poverty in America, I think Corporate America's already doing a bang-up job there! Good luck to Trumka and the labor movement. Don't forget: Support EFCA!
We Decide Who Recovers in New Orleans
Published July 01, 2009 @ 08:23AM PT
The invaluable Greater New Orleans Community Data Center released some excellent information this week, demonstrating recovery by neighborhood in the almost four years since the storm hit. Nine neighborhoods continue to house 50% or fewer of their pre-storm residents: the 2 neighborhoods that make up the Lower 9th Ward; Lakeview; the neighborhoods surrounding and encompassing the old Florida projects; the neighborhood surrounding the redeveloped Desire project; Pontchartrain Park in Gentilly; the demolished communities of the St. Bernard and B.W. Cooper projects; and West Lake Forest in New Orleans East. Like most of the city, most of these neighborhoods were majority black before the storm (Lakeview being the major exception). But more telling, all but P. Park and Lakeview had at least 4 in 10 residents earning less than a living wage before the storm hit (i.e., living at 200% below the poverty threshhold).
Certainly, patterns of physical devastation are related to topography and where neighborhoods grew up in proximity to the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the city's system of canals. But, the on-going social devastation is almost entirely man-made.
Action Alert: Congress Must Move on Immigrants' Rights & Gender Equity
Published June 24, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Apparently all the dawdling in Congress is getting under the skin of the NY Times Editorial staff, evidenced by three editorials yesterday demanding Obama lead on the Dream Act, the Paycheck Fairness Act, and legal aid. Read on to learn more about these bills and why we must nudge the Senate (and House) towards passage of these bills that will go a long way towards fighting poverty.
Poverty in America's Image Problem?
Published June 22, 2009 @ 09:49AM PT
Sorry for the long delay posting this weekend and today. I've been traveling around CT, NY and MA for wedding-related activities. I had a chance to catch up with a group of friends Saturday night that included fellow political junkies and writers and some finance types. People were pretty interested in my blogging gig, and Change.org more generally, which was very cool. A friend of mine's husband who I don't know too well wanted to know what the other causes were at Change.org, and was surprised to learn how popular global warming was compared to domestic poverty - and not because he's particularly interested in the latter. It was an interesting conversation in its randomness and it got me thinking - again - about how or whether people think about poverty in the U.S.
On the road yesterday with my fiance, I ventured that domestic poverty needs an appealing iconic image. He offered the migrant mother - taken by immigration, I responded. Homelessness is its own category; children offer represent hunger, child abuse or neglect, or the failure of public education. Or child poverty as its own issue area. Poor men are often memorialized as white homeless men, perhaps with mental illness or substance abuse problems, or as African-American criminals. Thanks to Reagan and the rest, all we're left with is the "welfare queen." Native American poverty is virtually invisible to the public eye, and the current economic crisis has disappeared the working poor, who, in their employee uniforms waiting for the bus, were the emerging image of domestic poverty in the 21st century.
The other challenge for domestic anti-poverty activists is to distinguish our work from global anti-poverty efforts. Of course, there's an indelible connection between our exploitative, global economic systems and poverty at home and abroad, and we'd benefit from a global workers' movement. But the surge in activism in recent years to significantly cut global poverty often overshadows the enduring problems we face here at home. The combination of our siloed approach to social justice with the scope of global poverty with our negative, individualistic approach to poverty in the U.S. really creates a rough road for us fighting economic hardship here at home.
I cruised around Flickr and Google this morning, comparing search results for the different Change.org causes and our respective blogs Google rankings. "Poverty" on its own is actually the biggest topic after immigration. But the more one encloses parameters around poverty, adding "America" or "domestic" or "United States", the more the web and image results shrink. "Poverty in America" is one of the smallest.
I'm pleased that this blog is in the top 20 Google results for "poverty in America" (3), "poverty" + "America" (6), and "domestic poverty" (14). I really believe a renewed anti-poverty movement is afoot in this country, but it's not going to look like the War on Poverty of years past, but more likely will grow hand-in-hand with rights-based movements for workers, immigrants, women, and as part of racial justice, environmental justice and economic human rights movements. Social justice is not neatly packaged nor successfully achieved within single-issue activist frames. The beauty of Change.org is its aggregation of a multiplicity of social causes in one place. But we must work together and learn from one another to make our world a more just and equitable place.
You want to know more about Poverty in America? Believe me, have we got it covered here at Change.org.
(Top photo from Newark, NJ by Tony the Misfit; bottom photo of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign's March for Our Lives at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN by Andrew Ciscel)
Neighborhood Blues
Published June 19, 2009 @ 06:05AM PT
Even though my energies are focused on issues facing homeless children, youth and families, I am not blind to the plethora of issues related to homelessness and poverty.
Take for example the all too common neighborhood problem, especially, but not limited to, urban areas--rampant theft. When it becomes personal, well, it's harder to ignore....
Race and the Recession
Published May 29, 2009 @ 11:30AM PT
Photo of murals under I-10 at Claiborne Ave in New Orleans. On Claiborne was a thriving black business district in Treme in New Orleans that was destroyed by the development of highway I-10. Urban renewal and federal highway projects repeatedly destroyed thriving black neighborhoods throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Race & the Recession is the title of a new report out by the Applied Research Center, subtitled "How Inequity Rigged the Economy and How to Change the Rules." I find it especially timely to cover here given the conversation on race, racism, right-wing politics and Reagan unfolding below. I'd also recommend hightailing it over to Ta-Nehisi today, who is just repeatedly nailing this topic with eloquence and erudition, not an easy thing to accomplish.
Race and the Recession mixes stories and data to demonstrate the disproportionate impacts on people of color in this recession. This does not mean that whites/Anglo-Americans are not also suffering - what it means is that given our respective demographic populations in the US, we are likely to see outsized numbers of stories of layoffs, foreclosures, low-wages, lack of health coverage, etc. among non-white Americans. The report details the way disparities in lending, in wealth accumulation, in hiring and employment practices, in wages, etc. create cumulative, downward effects on people of color that makes recessionary periods especially difficult to weather and overcome.
After the jump are highlights from the report, and the policies we need to reduce this inequality - recommendations include universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage, updating decades old community investment policies, assessing the racial impacts of proposed policies, and expanding our emergency relief for the time being.
