The Poverty Nation Washington Built

[marmar]

from The Nation:



The Poverty Nation Washington Built
Kai Wright


The maddening thing about Beltway political culture is not its oft-maligned partisan divide, but rather its ever-present consensus that tomorrow will be better, when all evidence points to the contrary. American families have been spiraling in a steady and quickening economic decline for years, a devolution that did not begin with this recession and will not soon end without massive and sustained intervention. That hard truth is as plain as the troubling reality that few in Washington are prepared to face it.

Thursday, the U.S. Census Bureau released data showing record-breaking poverty in 2009: Nearly 44 million Americans lived below the poverty line; that's more than the Census Bureau has logged in the 51 years it has kept track. This may have been the year's least surprising headline—such numbers grow from our political choices just as surely as night follows day.

Nor is it surprising who fared most poorly in 2009. While the overall poverty rate climbed to 14.3 percent—one in seven—more than a quarter of both African Americans and Latinos lived in poverty last year. The data for poor children is the most arresting. Nearly 36 percent of black kids and 33 percent of Latino kids were poor in 2009, as were 38.5 percent of all families headed by single moms. Stop and try to digest this data: More than a third of all black and Latino kids are growing up destitute. With numbers like that, how can we talk meaningfully about a future of any kind, let alone a better one?

It's a question the whole nation would do well to consider. Because the troubles of black and brown families are better understood as leading indicators than outliers. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/154856/poverty-nation-washington-built

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[DJ13]

2. a steady and quickening economic decline for years

That has been working for the elites for 30 years.

The more people that get squeezed financially, the easier it is to foster the politics of resentment the conservatives (in both party's) thrive on to stay in power.

We are seeing an excellent example of this with the tea partiers, who have had their anger at economic inequalities redirected at the poor (lazy, living on entitlements), the elderly (useless sponges soaking up SS money) and even rank and file government workers (how dare they actually expect...GASP!...the pensions they were promised)....instead of the real cause of our economic woes, the corporate influence on our political system.

[izquierdista]

3. They are authoritarians too

Those teabaggers would never direct their anger at the haves, the people who pay their salaries and bus them around to events. They would never bite the hand that feeds them, even though the other hand is fleecing them as they feed.

[billlll]

4. Unions built the middle class but school gave the

Impression that tycoon kindness was behind good wages. Clark Gable types.

[Hannah Bell]

5. kik

[wuvuj]

6. And as things decline...

...guess who has the money to buy everything at pennies on the dollar?

[bobbolink]

7. The Census did something really good this year.... this is the first time that POVERTY has been

talked about this much since the 60s.

What these pundants still feel the need to do is to divide us up... which favored group is the most poor, etc. All that does is keep the divisions going, and the arguments buzzing, so that nothing actually gets done.

I doubt that any real action will come from all this talk, but I hope you all will prove me wrong.