Poverty 2 bak

see poor tag

see EJ un=

see also repo debt collector

SEE SOCIAL SAFETY NET SNAP MEDICARE

see also prison ind complex, but do i need a sep category for fines extraction from poor/ppl of color?

yep, cash bail

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rww Joel Webbon Says That If You're Poor In America "It's Because You're Lazy" | People For 11 24

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https://www.alternet.org/america-third-world/

thom no lnx

Have you noticed America is looking like a third world nation?

SEATTLE, WA - NOVEMBER 3: A homeless encampment known as Nickelsville, located on steep, muddy hillside next to Interstate 5 and 90, is viewed on November 3, 2015, in Seattle, Washington. Seattle, located in King County, is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, and is experiencing an economic boom as a result of its European and Asian global business connections. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann and Raw Story March 15, 2023

Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights.

Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other “Third World” countries. At that time, four decades ago, the “slums” in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems.

But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities,” along with their more upscale neighbors: roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.

Instead of referring to their denizens as slum-dwellers, we call them the “homeless,” and their numbers have grown so large in the past decade of our neoliberal experiment that they signal an undeniable national housing crisis.

America, in other words, is more and more resembling a Third World nation.

But why?

Homelessness and slums like these aren’t an accident or act of G-d; they’re the result of intentional policy decisions made by politicians. They reflect the confluence of multiple choices we’ve made as a nation over the past four decades, choices that were sold to us by the morbidly rich with the promise that their increases in wealth would “trickle down” to the rest of us even as they cut services and raised the retirement age to 67.

Historically, the wealth or poverty of a nation has first reflected its natural resource base. Countries with lots of stuff under or growing above the ground that can be exported or used as energy end up with lots of money and, broadly, a healthy society.

A nation sitting on billions of barrels of oil will generally have a wealthier populace (Saudi Arabia, UAE) than one living on scrub brush and desert (South Sudan).

The exception to this is the application of human labor and ingenuity to whatever natural resources may be available. Japan, for example, is a relatively resource-poor nation but has maximized arable land through terraced rice farming and used manufacturing — importing raw materials and exporting finished goods — to create wealth that’s turned it into a First World nation.

America is both resource rich (from arable land to minerals and fuels) and was once the manufacturing floor of the world, producing extraordinary wealth across the land. By the 1950s we were the first large nation in the world to have a middle class made up of more than half its population, largely because of our manufacturing base, supplemented by our resource sectors.

But then Reagan brought America some new ideas, rejecting classical economics — from Adam Smith in 1776 to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s — and embraced a new system called neoliberalism by its founders, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

The theory was that if we just abandoned government regulation and taxation of large companies and the morbidly rich, it would free them up to turbocharge our national prosperity. The newly created wealth, Reagan Republicans told us, would be shared by all.

Of course, that’s not how it worked out.

Instead, neoliberalism has reduced our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than 45 percent of us today; thrown two generations into massive student and healthcare debt; produced a handful of morbidly rich individuals and families; and created a housing crises that rivals the Hoovervilles of the Republican Great Depression.

Reagan promised American workers if they’d go along with his war on organized labor that wages and benefits would go up because companies would no longer be “burdened” with having to work things out with “union bosses.” This new “right to work for less” would, he said, make us all richer.

Instead, cutting union membership from a third of our workers down to around 6 percent of the private workforce has caused wages to stagnate so badly that the standard of living a single full-time worker could provide his family in 1980 now requires at least two full-time workers. While “household income” (the number Republicans love to cite) has risen slightly in the past 42 years, individual income relative to living expenses has collapsed.

Reagan promised us that if we’d stop enforcing anti-trust laws (as he did in 1983) and let giant companies become ever bigger, the increased efficiencies and economies of scale would translate into a widespread prosperity.

Instead, giant monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations have used their increased efficiency to run small- and medium-sized competitors out of business, reducing our urban downtowns and rural cities to ghost towns. The pharaonic wealth produced by these giant corporations is tightly held by their largest investors and senior executives.

Reagan promised us that if we’d just cut the “tax burden” on the wealthiest Americans and our largest and most profitable corporations it would provoke morbidly rich “job creators” to use that extra cash to hire millions more Americans and give everybody a raise.

Instead, billionaires are buying half-billion-dollar super-yachts, private jets, and shooting themselves and their rich buddies into outer space while paying an average 3 percent income tax.

Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.

Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and the tent cities I mentioned at the start of this article.

Reagan promised us if we’d just end the “oppressive regulations” designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms the “magic of the free market” would instead provide all those things in spades.

Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.

Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.

Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with this American republic.

Reagan promised us, as he and George HW Bush were negotiating the GATT/WTO and NAFTA, that if we’d just abandon 191 years of protectionist tariffs and trade policy so American companies could move their manufacturing overseas, we’d see an eruption of high-paying white-collar jobs in technology without having to get grease under our fingernails.

Instead, over 60,000 factories left this nation, moving at least 16 million good-paying and previously unionized manufacturing jobs to mostly China. When I lived and studied in Beijing in late 1986, the country was impoverished. Today, China’s manufacturing sector — built over the past 30+ years by American “free trade” policy with American inventions and technology — is double the manufacturing capacity of the US.

Reagan promised us if we’d just deregulate our mediaand abandon local ownership requirements for newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets that we’d end up with a flourishing, diverse, and edifying media sector. He kicked it off by ending enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton carried it forward with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Instead, a small handful of billionaires and rightwing companies own virtually every consequential radio and TV station in the country; most of our local newspapers are bankrupt; more than half of the ones left are owned by a couple of New York-based hedge funds; and hate, lies, and disinformation have proven more effective at driving profits than honest information or concern for the public good so they’ve become an unscrupulous business model on the right.

Reagan promised us if we’d stop blindly trusting our government to do the right thing, a healthy skepticism would make our country’s bureaucracies more efficient. After all, he claimed, there are no truly competent people working in government because, if they were really talented, they’d be out making more money in private industry.

Instead of getting a more efficient government we ended up with an entire political party made up of fascist-tolerant hacks, sellouts, and opportunists anxious to dance to the tune of any billionaire willing to fund their way of life. They now populate the majority of the Supreme Court, the federal court system, control the House of Representatives, and run about half of our states.

Reagan promised us if we’d just drop all those silly regulations on gun ownership and throw the doors open to weapons of war in civilian hands, the result would be “an armed society is a polite society.”

Instead, bullets are the number one killer of our children and the GOP’s answer to “the crisis of our youth” is to ban drag shows.

Reagan promised us if we’d just kill off the “welfare” programs of the New Deal and Great Society, then Americans would no longer be infuriated when a “strapping young buck” was using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

Instead, as the social safety net collapsed, poverty became more deeply entrenched andhunger among America’s children has increased since the 1980s.

Years ago, I was up late one night in an Asian city watching financial news on a hotel TV. A young American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the young man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. Like the Patriotic Millionaires group, they embrace an opportunity to help our country, often via Democratic politicians.

But the billionaires who fund the Republican Party and own right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the moral and political guts out of their own nation, condemn its future to severe weather, and turn its people against each other if it helps them fill their money bins.

They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox “News” and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC.

They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial, anti-abortion, and pro-death penalty legislation to get enough political power toincrease their own profits through buying deregulation.

And, increasingly, Americans of all stripes are realizing this truth.

I’ve lived seven decades in this country, and have literally traveled pretty much everywhere, from hitchhiking from Michigan to San Francisco and back in 1967 to raising a family and living in five different states, to traveling for business to almost every other state.

But it wasn’t until America got seriously whacked, the endpoint of 40 years of austerity politics and Reaganomics combined with the stress of the century’s worst pandemic, that it became absolutely unavoidable.

I’ve never in all that time — and I’ll bet this is true of you, too, regardless of how old you are — seen tent cities growing across our land like the last five years.

Homelessnessthat can be directly and scientifically tracked back to one primary cause, which was one of the programs of the Reagan Revolution. That was the explosion in the cost of housing driven by parasitic speculators and Wall Street billionaires following widespread Republican deregulation of housing, particularly at state and local levels.

Reagan’s housing policies, which opened the door to slumlords like Jared Kushner, got the interest and involvement of the speculators from the beginning. They really jumped into the real estate market, though, at its bottom in 2008, and now in some parts of the country as many as half of all houses that are offered for sale get sold to speculators or foreign buyers.

As they drive up home prices and raise their rental rates, cities see eruptions of homelessness.

The Reagan Revolution, as we are confronted with daily,broke our nation.

It set the stage for a cynical George W. Bush to tell his biographer in 1999 that if he was elected president in 2000 he’d start a war in Iraq that would last long enough to get him re-elected in 2004, unlike his father, whose war with Iraq didn’t last long enough. Bush Jr. was our first president to act like a Third World politician, right down to the torture, wiretapping, and secret prisons.

America is now haunted by the daily dozens of suicides among veterans of those two unnecessary, expensive, and illegal wars Bush lied us into.

The Reagan Revolution also set the stage for the Trump administration.

Like Reagan, who tried to destroy the EPA by putting Anne Gorsuch in charge of it (she eventually had to resign in disgrace; her revenge is that her son now sits on the Supreme Court) Trumpgot rid of more than half its scientific staff.

He then tried to take over the military, the courts, and the Department of Justice including the FBI. Just like a classic Third World strongman dictator.

And that, of course, was just the beginning of Trump’s corruption of our government, his infiltration of fascists and white supremacists into our systems who, in far too many cases, are still in place and sabotaging things.

Trump’s holdovers appear to have dissuaded the FBI and DOJ from investigating and prosecuting Trump and the insider senior officials around him for more than two years, until shamed into a quick handoff to Jack Smith by a Congressional committee.

Even Mike Pence went along with the coup until the last minute, when he finally realized it couldn’t work and then pretended he was outraged. Sort of. Years later. Without giving testimony under oath. Like a Third World political opportunist.

The Reagan Revolution and the corruption it brought to Washington, DC and state capitols across the land — think Kari Lake, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Scott Walker, or Kristi Noem — changed the very nature of America.

The question for today is whether, how, and at what cost we can right our nation and repair Reagan’s, Bush’s and Trump’s damage.

end of covid boost 3 23

https://www.alternet.org/food-stamps-gop/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/inequality-of-life-usa-poverty/

no lnx

Inequality of life: One-third of the United States lives in poverty or teeters on the brink

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and TomDispatch October 27, 2022

Liz Theoharis: The Poverty of the Political Mind

Yep, in a world in which inflation and oil prices reached disastrous levels this year, the latest polls seem to indicate that the Republicans may be taking advantage of that reality — or do I mean un-reality? — just as the midterm elections loom. Forget the fact that, as a “conservative” British prime minister demonstrated strikingly just weeks ago, the political right has less than nothing to offer Americans, economically speaking.

Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be relying on abortion to carry the day on November 8th. And — much as I support them on that issue — that’s too bad. Really it is! Senator Bernie Sanders is preparing to “blitz” the country during the final two election weekends, saying just that. And it’s true, the Democrats can’t let the acolytes of America’s very own potential autocrat (and you know just whom I mean) claim that they can offer an answer to this country’s economic problems. As Sanders put it earlier this month,

It would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered… We have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the modern history of this country, with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Is there one Republican prepared to raise taxes on billionaires, or do they want to make a bad situation worse by extending Trump’s tax breaks for the rich and repealing the estate tax?

He’s exactly right, of course. But tell that to America’s billionaires, including (again) you know who, and their party. In the meantime, if you want a sense of just what that inequality truly means for so many tens of millions of Americans, consider the latest piece on poverty in history’s richest nation by TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of We Cry Justice. There oughta be a law, don’t you think? Tom

The Quality (or Inequality) of Life: Assessing the True Extent of Poverty in the Richest Nation on Earth

Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.”

Neither exists in this country. Rather than an honest sense of self-awareness when it comes to poverty in the United States, policymakers in Washington and so many states continue to legislate as if inequality weren’t an emergency for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of us. When it comes to accurately diagnosing what ails America, let alone prescribing a cure, those with the power and resources to lift the load of poverty have fallen desperately short of the mark.

With the midterm elections almost upon us, issues like raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare, and extending the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit should be front and center. Instead, as the U.S. faces continued inflation, the likelihood of a global economic recession, and the possibility that Trumpists could seize control of one or both houses of Congress (and the legislatures of a number of states), few candidates bother to talk about poverty, food insecurity, or low wages. If anything, “poor” has become a four-letter word in today’s politics, following decades of trickle-down economics, neoliberalism, stagnant wages, tax cuts for the rich, and rising household debt.

The irony of this “attentional violence” towards the poor is that it happens despite the fact that one-third of the American electorate is poor or low-income. (In certain key places and races raise that figure to 40% or more.) After all, in 2020, there were over 85 million poor and low-income people eligible to vote. More than 50 million potential voters in this low-income electorate cast a ballot in the last presidential election, nearly a third of the votes cast. And they accounted for even higher percentages in key battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, where they turned out in significant numbers to cast ballots for living wages, debt relief, and an economic stimulus.

To address the problems of our surprisingly impoverished democracy, policymakers would have to take seriously the realities of those tens of millions of poor and low-income people, while protecting and expanding voting rights. After all, before the pandemic hit, there were 140 million of them: 65% of Latinx people (37.4 million), 60% of Black people (25.9 million), 41% of Asians (7.6 million), and 39.9% of White people (67 million) in the United States. Forty-five percent of our women and girls (73.5 million) experience poverty, 52% of our children (39 million), and 42% of our elders (20.8 million). In other words, poverty hurts people of all races, ages, genders, religions, and political parties.

Poverty on the Decline?

Given the breadth and depth of depravation, it should be surprising how little attention is being paid to the priorities of poor and low-income voters in these final weeks of election season 2022. Instead, some politicians are blaming inflation and the increasingly precarious economic position of so many on the modestly increasing paychecks of low-wage workers and pandemic economic stimulus/emergency programs. That narrative, of course, is wrong and obscures the dramatic effects in these years of Covid supply-chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, and the price gouging of huge corporations extracting record profits from the poor. The few times poverty has hit the news this midterm election season, the headlines have suggested that it’s on the decline, not a significant concern to be urgently addressed by policy initiatives that will be on some ballots this November.

Case in point, in September, the Census Bureau released a report concluding that poverty nationwide had significantly decreased in 2021. Such lower numbers were attributed to an increase in government assistance during the pandemic, especially the enhanced Child Tax Credit implemented in the spring of 2021. No matter that there’s now proof positive such programs help lift the load of poverty, too few political candidates are campaigning to extend them this election season.

Similarly, in September, the Biden administration convened the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, hailed as the first of its kind in more than half a century. But while that gathering may have been a historic step forward, the policy solutions it backed were largely cut from the usual mold — with calls for increases in the funding of food programs, nutritional education, and further research. Missing was an analysis of why poverty and widening inequality exist in the first place and how those realities shape our food system and so much else. Instead, the issue of hunger remained siloed off from a wider investigation of our economy and the ways it’s currently producing massive economic despair, including hunger.

To be sure, we should celebrate the fact that, because of proactive public intervention, millions of people over the last year were lifted above income brackets that would, according to the Census Bureau, qualify them as poor. But in the spirit of Reverend King’s message about diagnosing social problems and prescribing solutions, if we were to look at the formulas for the most commonly accepted measurements of poverty, it quickly becomes apparent that they’re based on a startling underassessment of what people actual need to survive, no less lead decent lives. Indeed, a sea of people are living paycheck to paycheck and crisis to crisis, bobbing above and below the poverty line as we conventionally know it. By underestimating poverty from the start, we risk reading the 2021 Census report as a confirmation that it’s no longer a pressing issue and that the actions already taken by government are enough, rather than a baseline from which to build.

Last month, for example, although a report from the Department of Agriculture found that 90% of households were food secure in 2021, at least 53 million Americans still relied on food banks or community programs to keep themselves half-decently fed, a shocking number in a country as wealthy as ours. More than 20% of adults in the last 30 days have reported experiencing some form of food insecurity. In other words, we’re talking about a deep structural problem for which policymakers should make a commitment to the priorities of the poor.

An Accurate Diagnosis

If the political history of poverty had been recorded on the Richter scale, one decision in 1969 would have registered with earthshaking magnitude. That August 29th, the Bureau of the Budget delivered a dry, unfussy memo to every federal government agency instructing them to use a new formula for measuring poverty. This resulted in the creation of the first, and only, official poverty measure, or OPM, which has remained in place to this day with only a little tinkering here and there.

The seeds of that 1969 memo had been planted six years earlier when Mollie Orshansky, a statistician at the Social Security Administration, published a study on possible ways to measure poverty. Her math was fairly simple. To start with, she reached back to a 1955 Department of Agriculture (USDA) survey that found families generally spent about one-third of their income on food. Then, using a “low-cost” food plan from the Department of Agriculture, she estimated how much a low-income family of four would have to spend to meet its basic food needs and multiplied that number by three to arrive at $3,165 as a possible threshold income for those considered “poor.” It’s a formula that, with a few small changes, has been officially in use ever since.

Fast forward five decades, factor in the rate of inflation, and the official poverty threshold in 2021 was $12,880 per year for one person and $26,500 for a family of four — meaning that about 42 million Americans were considered below the official poverty line. From the beginning though, the OPM was grounded in a somewhat arbitrary and superficial understanding of human need. Orshansky’s formula may have appeared elegant in its simplicity, but by focusing primarily on access to food, it didn’t fully take into account other critical expenses like healthcare, housing, childcare, and education. As even Orshansky later admitted, it was also based on an austere assessment of how much was enough to meet a person’s needs.

As a result, the OPM fails to accurately capture how much of our population will move into and out of official poverty in their lifetimes. By studying OPM trends over the years, however, you can gain a wider view of just how chronically precarious so many of our lives are. And yet, look behind those numbers, and there are some big questions remaining about how we define poverty, which say much about who and what we value as a society. For the tools we use to measure quality of life are never truly objective or apolitical. In the end, they always turn out to be as much moral as statistical.

What level of human deprivation is acceptable to us? What resources does a person need to be well? These are questions that any society should ask itself.

Since 1969, much has changed, even if the OPM has remained untouched. The food prices it’s based on have skyrocketed beyond the rate of inflation, along with a whole host of other expenses like housing, prescription medicine, college tuition, gas, utilities, childcare, and more modern but increasingly essential costs, including Internet access and cell phones. Meanwhile, wage growth has essentially stagnated over the last four decades, even as productivity has continued to grow, meaning that today’s workers are making comparatively less than their parents’ generation even as they produce more for the economy.

Billionaires, on the other hand… well, don’t get me started!

The result of all of this? The official poverty measure fails to show us the ways in which a staggeringly large group of Americans are moving in and out of crisis during their lifetimes. After all, right above the 40 million Americans who officially live in poverty, there are at least 95-100 million who live in a state of chronic economic precarity, just one pay cut, health crisis, extreme storm, or eviction notice from falling below that poverty line....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-shame-of-child-poverty-in-the-trump-era-poor-kids-lose-as-billionaires-cash-in/

no lnx

Rajan Menon / Tom Dispatch February 3, 2020

The plight of impoverished children anywhere should evoke sympathy, exemplifying as it does the suffering of the innocent and defenseless. Poverty among children in a wealthy country like the United States, however, should summon shame and outrage as well. Unlike poor countries (sometimes run by leaders more interested in lining their pockets than anything else), what excuse does the United States have for its striking levels of child poverty? After all, it has the world’s 10th highest per capita income at $62,795 and an unrivaled gross domestic product (GDP) of $21.3 trillion. Despite that, in 2020, an estimated 11.9 million American kids — 16.2% of the total — live below the official poverty line, which is a paltry $25,701 for a family of four with two kids. Put another way, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent — so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

Yes, the proportion of kids living below the poverty line has zigzagged down from 22% when the country was being ravaged by the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and was even higher in prior decades, but no one should crack open the champagne bottles just yet. The relevant standard ought to be how the United States compares to other wealthy countries. The answer: badly. It has the 11th highest child poverty rate of the 42 industrialized countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Winnow that list down to European Union states and Canada, omitting low and middle-income countries, and our child poverty rate ranks above only Spain’s. Use the poverty threshold of the OECD — 50% of a country’s median income ($63,178 for the United States) — and the American child poverty rate leaps to 20%.

The United States certainly doesn’t lack the means to drive child poverty down or perhaps even eliminate it. Many countries on that shorter OECD list have lower per-capita incomes and substantially smaller GDPs yet (as a UNICEF report makes clear) have done far better by their kids. Our high child-poverty rate stems from politics, not economics — government policies that, since the 1980s, have reduced public investment as a proportion of GDP in infrastructure, public education, and poverty reduction. These were, of course, the same years when a belief that “big government” was an obstacle to advancement took ever-deeper hold, especially in the Republican Party. Today, Washington allocates only 9% of its federal budget to children, poor or not. That compares to a third for Americans over 65, up from 22% in 1971. If you want a single fact that sums up where we are now, inflation-adjusted per-capita spending on kids living in the poorest families has barely budged compared to 30 years ago whereas the corresponding figure for the elderly has doubled.

The conservative response to all this remains predictable: you can’t solve complex social problems like child poverty by throwing money at them. Besides, government antipoverty programs only foster dependence and create bloated bureaucracies without solving the problem. It matters little that the actual successes of American social programs prove this claim to be flat-out false. Before getting to that, however, let’s take a snapshot of child poverty in America.

Sizing Up the Problem....

1119 an

How diversion courts punish povertyhttps://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-diversion-courts-punish-poverty/

Thousands of poor patients face lawsuits from nonprofit hospitals that trap them in debt

Maya Miller, Beena Raghavendran / ProPublica

NJ school district debates whether or not to feed kids who owe more than $20 in school lunch ‘debt’

Marissa Higgins / Daily Kos

Another day, another school debating whether or not to punish hungry kids because they can’t afford to pay for their lunches. Today’s horror brings us to New Jersey.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/west-virginia-bets-big-on-plastics-and-the-backing-of-trumps-administration/

no lnx

West Virginia’s industrial might has faded, but as 2020 approaches, the state has two resources that could be crucial to President Donald Trump as he seeks reelection and tries to make good on his pledge of “American energy dominance” — Republican votes and abundant natural gas.

It was a stretch of rural counties along the Ohio River in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania that form the largest natural gas field in the world and helped Trump win the states in 2016.

West Virginia’s elected leaders see the vast reserves as a path to renewed political and economic relevance for the Mountain State, which they envision rivaling the Gulf Coast as a center for processing natural gas and producing plastics.

And to make that a reality, the state’s top officials have lined up behind a plan to spend as much as $10 billion to build a mammoth underground storage facility — big enough to hold the U.S. Capitol complex, or 10 million barrels of the liquid byproducts used in plastics manufacturing.

By providing a sizable and stable storehouse for ethane and other so-called gas liquids, the facility would, its proponents say, encourage the expansion of a chemical production corridor that is emerging along the upper Ohio River and would help bring thousands of jobs to a region that has seen its industrial moorings slip away over the past two generations.

The prospect of an energy jobs bonanza in a politically vital state stirred the interest of the White House. A senior Energy Department manager has been assigned to work on the project, known as the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. In April, the president issued an executive order on energy that encouraged “opportunities, through the federal government or otherwise, to promote economic growth of the Appalachian region, including growth of petrochemical and other industries.” And the president’s newest budget proposal includes funds to study the region’s gas-related industrial potential.

But a ProPublica examination has found that the proposed storage facility would be far larger than the region could support and that questions about its cost, its viability and its environmental risks have been overshadowed by a public relations strategy heavy on the politics of jobs and light on the economics of energy policy.

“The scale of the Appalachian hub is out of line with what industry needs or will require in the region,” said Michael Tritt, president of Lane Power and Energy Solutions, a Houston-based construction company that designs and builds energy storage caverns.

The Trump administration’s relations with China and Russia are adding to the questions about the hub. China had agreed to invest tens of billions of dollars in West Virginia’s natural gas industry but now is embroiled in a trade war with Trump. And American Ethane, a Houston-based company financed by three Russian businessmen, has signed 20-year contracts to send ethane produced in the United States to China, which could raise prices and weaken demand for the facility proposed for West Virginia.

Far from being dissuaded, state leaders, led by Sen. Joe Manchin III, are pressing forward, talking up the project and perhaps most significantly trying to secure a $1.9 billion federal loan guarantee that could attract billions of dollars in private investment.

If the hub’s developers succeed, taxpayers could be on the hook for a big piece of any failure. The federal loan guarantee sought for the hub is nearly four times as large as a guarantee awarded more than a decade ago to Solyndra, the California solar firm that collapsed in 2011. “This whole project is a gamble,” said Dustin White, project coordinator with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, an environmental group in Huntington, West Virginia. “Billions of dollars could go up in smoke. We just need to stop it now.”

Banks, though, would be in line for tens of millions of dollars in finance fees. “If that project gets a federal loan guarantee, banks will be lining up 10 deep,” said James Cutler, an energy industry investor and veteran chemical plant builder from Houston. “Anybody who gets involved gets 1.5 to 2% in fees just for getting the deals together. If you have a $4 billion, $5 billion project, that’s $80 million, $100 million.”

Other big winners could be Manchin, a Democrat, and Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican. The energy, construction and labor sectors contributed $841,591 to Manchin’s 2018 election campaign. Energy, finance, construction and labor contributed $169,600 to Justice’s 2016 campaign, according to Vote Smart, which tracks election campaign financing.

In an interview, Manchin said that he is looking to Energy Secretary Rick Perry for help in “streamlining” the loan review and that he is urging the Treasury Department to invoke national security concerns to halt American Ethane’s export plans.

John Houghtaling, the chief executive of American Ethane, said Manchin is wrong. “The national security threat is not exporting ethane to China,” Houghtaling said in an interview. “They need the gas. If they don’t get it from us they’ll get it from Russia and Qatar, people who don’t like us so much.”

Manchin, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the federal government has to intervene. If it doesn’t step in, the project is doomed, he said. “You can write off the storage hub for sure. You can write off everything.”

From its start where two tributaries meet at a wedge of parkland in Pittsburgh, the Ohio River surges north, then south, then west past high banks that have been the stage of every era of American industrial development. Thousands of feet below the river are thick layers of salt and seams of shale and hard rock that encompass eons of geological evolution.

Few regions of the country have been endowed with such a rich repository of water, land and minerals, or have seen natural resources so grossly mismanaged, than the three states and 50 counties along the first 180 miles of the Ohio. Forests fell to the mills that provided the first burst of manufacturing wealth in the 18th century and that produced gaping tracts that poured great gouts of mud into the river.

...

===

AN 9pa threat to jail take kids] links to

Last year in Texas, as his friends stood and watched, a 12-year old boy had his school breakfast taken from him and thrown in the trash. It wasn't the class bully acting out, it was a school cafeteria worker supposedly following policy. Why? The child's meals card, which can be refilled by parents, was 30 cents short. This week, it happened again, only it wasn't a 12-year old boy in Texas, it was 40 elementary school kids in Utah who had their school lunches taken out of their hands and thrown in the trash in front of them. The reason? Insufficient funds on their meals cards. The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed one parent, who said she had not been notified that her child's meals card was overdrawn.

The school claims to have notified all the parents and saw a growing problem with non-payment, so they took action -- by literally taking food away from hungry children, in front of their friends. Apparently, no teacher or administrator stepped in to stop the madness, although one teacher may have paid for some of the lunches from her own pocket. "It was pretty traumatic and humiliating," said Erica Lukes, whose 11-year-old daughter had her cafeteria lunch taken from her as she stood in line Tuesday at Uintah Elementary School," the Salt Lake Tribune reports. "Lukes said as far as she knew, she was all paid up. 'I think it's despicable,' she said. 'These are young children that shouldn't be punished or humiliated for something the parents obviously need to clear up.'" KSL reports "Sophia Isom, Lukes' daughter, was met by a district nutrition manager who was monitoring accounts."

"SO SHE TOOK MY LUNCH AWAY AND SAID, 'GO GET A MILK,' " SOPHIA SAID. "I CAME BACK AND ASKED, 'WHAT'S GOING ON?' THEN SHE HANDED ME AN ORANGE. SHE SAID, 'YOU DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY IN YOUR ACCOUNT SO YOU CAN'T GET LUNCH.' " SHE SAID THE FOOD WAS BEING THROWN OUT. SOPHIA SAID THE SAME THING HAPPENED TO MANY STUDENTS, AND IT WAS THE TALK OF THE LUNCH PERIOD.

Jason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district's child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches. As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said. The school district released a statement saying the "situation could have and should have been handled in a different manner. We apologize." The statement, posted to Facebook, has almost 6000 comments, most of them negative.

How Chicago, a Hospital and Private Companies Make Money Off the Poor

Three stories about debt, bankruptcy and the institutions that perpetuate them.

by Logan Jaffe

July 5, 4 a.m. CDT

Hospital Suspends Debt Collection Lawsuits Amid Furor Over Suing Its Own Employees

Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare is reevaluating its policy after an MLK50-ProPublica investigation found that it had filed 8,300 lawsuits in the past five years, including against many of its own employees.

by Wendi C. Thomas, MLK50

July 3, 10:01 a.m. EDT

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/is-the-gig-economy-a-path-to-prosperity-or-the-indenture-of-just-getting-by

...We know just how violently exploitative slavery was as an institution but how many Americans know that by some historical estimates half to three-quarters of European immigrants that came to the colonies had some form of indenture price hanging over their head.

Capital has been kicking labor’s ass since it wore powdered wigs in this country and the data shows it hasn’t let up since, as the widening wealth and income gap demonstrates.

Scroll forward a few hundred years, the entire recorded history of the country and according to a 2018 Federal Reserve Report on the Economic Well Being of the U.S. Household in the 21st century “four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”

So that’s the great wheel of progress? More like the randomness of the wheel of fortune. At least when you were indentured there was a chance you might get free food and shelter.

In the 2020 debate for the Democratic nomination, the constant refrain we hear from the moderators of the cable debate is that the greatest danger Democrats face is the perilous prospect they will go too far left, too fast.

If anything, we have been moving too slow for too long and we can see it in the data related to the growing affordability crisis that’s been documented by the United Way across the country with its analysis of the working poor in several states.

The national non-profit takes a detailed look at the local cost of living and wages for families they define as asset limited income constrained but employed (ALICE). In California 48 percent of the state’s families are either poor or struggle week-to-week to get by. In Florida, it is 46 percent. In Ohio, 42 percent are in that ALICE cohort. In New York, 45 percent either live below poverty or are struggling on the edge over which they will plummet after one major unexpected expense.

We did not get to these numbers overnight. This is the consequence of decades of permitting corporations to grow larger and larger as the union movement shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Fifty years ago, almost a third of Americans were in a union while today it is just one in ten. Is it any wonder that since the 1970s wages have declined or stayed flat as worker productivity skyrocketed along with the cost of living?

As I have written in this space before, there are signs of a grass roots labor union revival born out of something that has been brewing for several Presidential election cycles. It is driven by data that shows this generation of young adults are on track to be the first that won’t do better than their parents economically.

For me it appears to be most evident In New York State that has a bit of a head start with one of the highest concentrations of organized labor in the country. In the next few weeks the state’s union movement is hoping to right what New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento, believes is a “decades old disgrace” with the passage this session of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act (S-2837/A-2750).

In the 1930s America’s farmworkers were excluded from the landmark protections extended to the rest of the nation as codified during the New Deal. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Practices Act expressly exempted them, along with domestic workers.

These landmark reforms codified the concept of overtime and a minimum wage.

“People think we all took these huge leaps forward, but these reforms were not universal,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor and labor historian at the City of New York’s Graduate Center. “It depended on your race and gender and the farmworker and domestic worker cutouts were to get southern Congressional Democrats on board who did not want to see black workers covered.”

During the eighty-plus years since, resistance to farmworkers organizing and gaining legal work place protections has remained intense with less than one percent of the workforce being able to benefit from union membership.

In New York State’s the drive to, at long last, provide farmworkers with labor rights they have been denied for decades is led by 33-year-old State Senator Jessica Ramos, who was first elected last year and chairs the State Senate Labor Committee.

“We must ensure that farmworkers are granted the rights that all other workers in our state are afforded — a day off, overtime pay, unemployment benefits and the right to collectively bargain,” she said in an email exchange...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/trump-continues-his-attack-on-working-people-by-moving-to-redefine-poverty-and-slash-social-programs-for-millions

Julia Conley / Common Dreams May 8, 2019

The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as…

The Trump administration on Monday moved to change the definition of “poverty” in the United States in a proposal which combines the president’s attempts to portray the U.S. economy as strong with his repeated attacks on the working poor and their access to government services.

In a regulatory filing, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) wrote that it may change how inflation is calculated in order to reduce the number of Americans who are living below the federally-recognized poverty line and are therefore eligible for certain government support services and social programs.

As Melissa Boteach, who oversees income security programs at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), wrote on Twitter, the change “seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people.”

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

May 6, 2019

Replying to @mboteach

Remember last year when the Trump admin declared that “our War on Poverty is largely over and a success”? https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Expanding-Work-Requirements-in-Non-Cash-Welfare-Programs.pdf ….

Now he’s acting on this bogus notion, trying to slowly define people out of poverty by decree. 2/

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

Seems technical, but it’s actually a big attack on working people. In short, Trump wants to weaken how our poverty definition keeps pace with cost of living. So each year, as costs go up, many working people w/low pay would gradually be stripped of WIC, Medicaid & other basics 3/

5:27 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

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See Melissa Boteach's other Tweets

Under the administration’s proposal, which was first reported by Bloomberg News, the government would shift to a system known as “Chained CPI,” which assumes consumers will change what they buy as items grow more expensive through inflation, suggesting that they are not struggling to afford necessities.

The definitional change would result in a slower inflation rate, which is used to determine how many Americans are eligible for programs like Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and other federal assistance.

As of 2018, a family of four making $25,900 per year was considered to be living in poverty, based on the necessities they could afford with the current inflation rate.

Under the new system, OMB officials wrote in the proposal, “changes to the poverty thresholds, including how they are updated for inflation over time, may affect eligibility for programs that use the poverty guidelines.”

Boteach wrote that the proposal demonstrates “how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class people,” noting that even the current poverty line does little to reflect the amount of money an American family actually needs to live comfortably in the wealthiest country on the planet.

In fact, wrote Boteach, the new standards will make the government’s understanding of poverty and inequality even less accurate.

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

May 6, 2019

Replying to @mboteach

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

This proposal shows how out of touch Trump is with lives of working-class ppl. “Americans on average report that it would take more than $55,000 in annual income to be considered out of poverty.” That’s more than TWICE our current threshold https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2014/01/07/81702/50-years-after-lbjs-war-on-poverty/ …

5:29 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

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50 Years After LBJ’s War on Poverty - Center for American Progress

A major new study of public attitudes about poverty, work, and economic opportunity reveals that many Americans remain in economic hardship and desire new efforts to provide low-income families with...

americanprogress.org

15 people are talking about this

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

May 6, 2019

Replying to @mboteach

Sadly, even w/low unemployment, poverty & hardship are still a mainstay in American life. And guess what? Unilaterally redefining it doesn’t do a damn thing to help someone secure a better job, put food on the table, or pay critical health care bills.6/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2018/03/07/447412/ensuring-basic-living-standards/ …

View image on Twitter

Melissa Boteach

@mboteach

This is a cynical attempt to squeeze working-class people. Their incomes will STILL be too low to make ends meet, but Trump’s decree would make it harder for them to qualify for help. 7/

5:40 PM - May 6, 2019 · Washington, DC

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Some critics on social media denounced the proposal as Trump’s latest “cruel” measure aimed at weakening the systems meant to support the poorest Americans and struggling working class families.

David Roberts

@drvox

Trump is going to change how poverty is measured, with the intent of rendering a bunch of people ineligible for social assistance. His base will support this arbitrary cruelty b/c even though it hurts them, it also hurts brown people. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

133

12:15 PM - May 6, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

79 people are talking about this

Democratic Coalition

@TheDemCoalition

This appears to be the latest cruel and incompetent effort by the Trump administration to make it harder to access welfare programs.#ShitholePresidenthttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

243

12:53 PM - May 6, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

358 people are talking about this

Paul Krugman

@paulkrugman

For the moment, Republicans have mostly stopped pretending to care about deficits. But they're still eager to cut aid to the poor 1/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/trump-poverty-line-inflation …

1,691

5:32 AM - May 7, 2019

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Trump May Redefine Poverty, Cutting Americans From Welfare Rolls

The Trump administration may alter the way it determines the national poverty threshold, putting Americans living on the margins at risk of losing access to welfare programs.

bloomberg.com

862 people are talking about this

The OMB’s proposal follows multiple attacks on social welfare programs by the Trump administration as it attempts to keep families from accessing SNAP benefits, commonly known as food stamps, and Medicaid. The administration and the Republican Party have pushed in 2018 to require people who use food stamps to work at least 20 hours per week, a move which would push at least one million Americans out of the program.

The federal budget proposal unveiled in March also included more than $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, threatening the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans.

The administration has spent much of the last two years insisting that the American economy is thriving—frequently pointing to the GDP, the stock market, and low unemployment rates as evidence.

But studies have shown that low unemployment numbers offer a misleading picture of how American families are actually coping in the economy, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count “600,000 ‘discouraged workers’ who say they are no longer looking because they don’t think they can find a job,” according to Quartz.

Critics have pointed out that 40 percent of families are unable to save enough money to pay for a $400 emergency; 137 million American households struggle to pay healthcare costs; and nearly 80 percent of workers live paycheck-to-paycheck—regardless of the GDP or the stock market.

The OMB’s proposal, wrote Georgetown University and public policy researcher Joan Alker, is “a novel way to take healthcare, etc., away from people AND make it look like there are fewer poor people.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/many-people-are-too-broke-for-bankruptcy-heres-what-congress-and-bankruptcy-organizations-could-do-to-help/

robt reich

RR: In addition to being a massive drain on the economy, these fees don’t even help cash-strapped cities. Uncollected court debt for traffic and criminal offenses totaled $12.3 billion in 2016 in California alone. A lotof the fee revenue that does come in goes to collection services, that are private and for profit. Which means very little of the money that is collected winds up going to roads, bridges, schools, and other good things we all need.

WKB: That’s why we need to stop the criminalization of poverty. Have you heard of win-win? Well, this is lose-lose, non-win. It sucks. It’s bad for EVERYBODY.

RR: Bad for poor people, bad for the social fabric, and doesn’t even help the bottom line for government.

WKB: Our home state of California is helping to lead the charge to stop the criminalization of poverty. Go to CAdebtjustice.orgfor more information. Go. Don’t just watch the video. Go.

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trump trying to kill aca in ct w/ team red, also

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/a-federal-judge-just-struck-a-blow-to-the-trump-administrations-cruel-plot-to-gut-medicaid/

On Wednesday, a federal judge dealt a massive blow to one of the Trump administration’s pet projects.

Washington, D.C. District Court judge James Boasberg struck down work requirements in Kentucky and Arkansas, ruling that the waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were not valid because work requirements do not further the Medicaid Act’s mission of improving public health.

The rules differ in some ways, but both broadly require certain Medicaid recipients to complete a minimum number of work or community service hours each month and provide proof to the state.

Kentucky’s work requirement, known as Kentucky HEALTH, was the first to be approved by the Trump administration but was struck down last year by the same judge, and the newly revised rules were scheduled to take effect on April 1. Arkansas has already implemented its work requirement system, known as Arkansas Works, with disastrous consequences — over 18,000 people in the state have lost Medicaid coverage, many of whom actually were working but couldn’t figure out how to meet the state’s confusing reporting requirements, especially those in rural areas who don’t have easy access to the internet.

Boasberg criticized Arkansas for doing virtually nothing to help Medicaid recipients understand and comply with the new work requirement, saying “the State’s outreach efforts may well be falling severely short.” He further criticized Kentucky, which argued that their work requirement does further the mission of expanding health coverage because Gov. Matt Bevin intended to cancel Medicaid expansion entirely if he didn’t get his way: “The Court cannot concur that … states are so armed to refashion the program Congress designed in any way they choose.”

Several other Republican-controlled states are currently seeking approval for similar work requirement programs.

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program — both Congress and the states provide funding, and the states are in charge of administering the program within their borders. The Medicaid Act sets strict guidelines about how the program can be run, but the Department of Health and Human Services can approve what are called “Section 1115” waivers if a state has a custom-designed plan that would promote health and coverage beyond what traditional Medicaid does. The Trump administration is trying to flip this on its head, encouraging states to apply for waivers that will lead to fewer people being covered.

Boasberg’s ruling holds that states cannot use Section 1115 waivers in this manner. “That provision of the Act does not turn the comprehensive Medicaid program into a buffet for states,” he wrote.

Medicaid work requirements are a particular passion of Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. She has claimed that denying low-income people health coverage is actually good for them, insisting that “it is not compassionate to trap people on government programs or create greater dependency on public assistance.” She has also claimed that work requirements do further the mission of Medicaid, pointing to studies that show people with jobs tend to be healthier (when in reality the correlation is probably the other way around.)

Arkansas and Kentucky were early adopters of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which made the program available to people up to 138 percent of the poverty line. The Affordable Care Act originally required states to expand Medicaid, but a Supreme Court ruling allowed states to decide whether they wanted to or not. Republicans in these states are now intent on chipping away at this progress, and work requirements are one way the Trump administration is encouraging them to do it.

For now, that effort has hit a roadblock.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/republicans-are-claiming-that-poverty-no-longer-exists-heres-why-thats-ridiculous/

chapman

For the longest time, one of the big talking points from Republicans was that government anti-poverty programs failed at their primary goal, merely trapping people in dependence on the government. “The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” said President Ronald Reagan in an address to Congress. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) took it as fact, telling a constituent in 2017, “Our poverty rates are about the same as when we started this war on poverty.”

It’s a compelling talking point — it’s just completely wrong. In the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson enacted the broad package of programs referred to as the “war on poverty,” including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal housing programs, the poverty rate stood at 19 percent. In 2017, when Ryan had that exchange, the poverty rate stood at 13.5 percent, and it has never gone above 15.2 percent at any time since Johnson’s reforms. That might even be understating things a little, because the supplemental poverty rate — a more accurate calculation of poverty that accounts for transfer payments and the cost of living — has fallen from 26 percent to 14.3 percent during the 60s, meaning we’ve cut the poverty rate almost in half.

Now, however, Republicans in the Trump White House seem to be taking the exact opposite argument as Reagan and Ryan. In their reasoning, we should cut government assistance programs because poverty has already been solved!

“President Johnson’s War on Poverty, based on 1963 standards of material hardship, is largely over and has been a success,” said this year’s report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “However, victory was not achieved by making people self-sufficient, as President Johnson envisioned, but rather through increased government transfers.” The answer, says the report, is to scale back social programs by adding increasingly restrictive work requirements to weed out people who aren’t sufficiently deserving of federal and state aid.

First of all, the claim that poverty has been eliminated is itself incredibly dubious. The Council of Economic Advisers uses something called the Full-Income Poverty Measure, which measures consumption as well as income, to show that the “real” poverty rate has actually declined from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 2.3 percent in 2017. The problem with this measure is that an ever-increasing number of households finance consumption through debt, and most people who go into debt would not consider themselves out of poverty no matter how much they are consuming. Indeed, by the White House’s measure, poverty was lower during the financial crisis and recession of 2008 than they did during the 1990s tech boom, because people consumed more!

A recent economic study at the University of Michigan found that the “consumption poverty” rate does not correlate as well with the percent of households struggling to afford food, housing, or medical care, as the traditional poverty rate does.

Second of all, the Trump administration’s conclusion doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If anti-poverty programs have all but eliminated poverty, why would scaling back these programs benefit anyone? It is similar to the logic that parents shouldn’t have to vaccinate their kids because we have eliminated childhood epidemics.

Moreover, study after study has shown that the sort of “work requirements” Trump’s advisers are pushing do not work — some programs have seen their enrollment decline slightly after adding work requirements, but the rules don’t make people more self-sufficient and barely affect employment or household income. Part of the reason is that many people on welfare already work, they just aren’t paid enough to feed their families.

The notion that poverty has already been solved, much like the notion that racism has already been solved, makes for a great justification to allow Republicans to attack the safety net. But it isn’t true, and telling poor people they aren’t really in poverty is not a substitute for addressing social problems.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/democrats-newest-proposal-could-slash-child-poverty-by-a-third-heres-how/

On Wednesday, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) introduced a bold proposal known as the American Family Act. And while it hasn’t yet attracted much attention, this bill is likely to become a fixture of Democratic economic policy in the coming years.

This bill, an earlier version of which was introduced in 2017, would effectively expand the child tax credit into a “child allowance”, much like what other countries including Canada and the United Kingdom currently have. Under the law, families would receive $300 per month for children under 5, and $250 a month for children ages 6-16. According to researchers, this plan would cut child poverty by a third, taking it from 14.8 percent to 9.5 percent — an estimated 4 million children.

The current child tax credit, which was expanded slightly in 2017 as part of the GOP tax bill, is severely flawed — higher-income households are eligible for up to $2,000 in tax credits a year, but lower-income families that actually need the money get almost nothing.

As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains, Democrats are in a position to unify behind this proposal, and even if the odds of passage in the current Republican Senate are remote, there will be key opportunities down the road to make a serious push for it:

[I]n its latest incarnation, the bill has the support of the majority of the Democratic House and Senate caucuses, including the No. 2 Democrats in the House and Senate (Steny Hoyer and Dick Durbin, respectively); just about every possible Democratic 2020 contender currently in Congress from Tim Ryan in the House to Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate; and leaders of both the moderate (Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Chris Coons) and left (Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) wings of the party. Thirty-five Democratic senators (out of 48 Democrats total) and 168 Democratic House Reps (out of 235) are sponsors or co-sponsors.

Given that the bill could easily be passed through budget reconciliation — which requires only a bare majority in the Senate — it has a strong shot at being enacted the next time Democrats have a governing trifecta in the House, Senate, and presidency, whether that’s in 2021, 2025, or later. What’s more, the expiration of the Trump tax bill in 2025 will force a reconsideration of the US tax code, giving Democrats an opportunity to push for the inclusion of a child poverty-slashing provision in whatever deal comes out of that deadline.

Over the decades, Democrats have delivered massive reforms for the working and middle classes, from Social Security to Medicare to the Affordable Care Act. The American Family Act would be a similarly large disruption to the status quo, that would combat some of the ugliest, most life-destroying poverty in the United States, and provide for those who need it.

===

Trump’s HUD wants to expand flawed program that is ‘privatizing public housing’

It leaves vulnerable residents at the mercy of developers.

DANIELLE MCLEAN

FEB 27, 2019

https://thinkprogress.org/a-flawed-public-housing-program-leaves-vulnerable-residents-at-the-mercy-of-developers-66a0ee5b2321/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/an-expert-in-geography-and-sustainable-development-explains-the-surprisingly-dark-side-of-the-tiny-house-movement/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-has-plan-even-further-demonize-food-stamps

In an attempt to find new ways to make life worse for people receiving any government benefits, the Trump administration is seeking to lump together all government benefit programs into a renamed and reorganized Department of Health and Human Services. And you can be sure that the word “welfare” will be emphasized in any new organization.

According to a story that ran first in Politico, the White House Office of Management and Budget soon will release a new report outlining a plan to move all safety-net programs into HHS and to give the federal department a new name, emphasizing the “welfare” moniker that used to be part of the department’s name. A big reason for this recommendation is to lump the $70 billion Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps, in with Medicare and Medicaid. SNAP would move out of the Department of Agriculture, where it is now housed.

The reasoning is likely that once these benefits are combined under one departmental roof, it will be easier to cut them all.

"owned" doc levittown

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-june-13-2018/

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/affordable-housing/colonialism-and-the-lost-indigenous-housing-designs-20180528

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/those-new-employment-numbers-trump-bragging-about-look-great-because-they-dont

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ben-carsons-war-poor-people-bad-news-republicans

no lnx

Trump's choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson, delivered on the president's command to move people "out of poverty" by proposing to raise the rent on some of America's most vulnerable communities.

On Wednesday Carson released legislative text that would raise rent for tenants in government-subsidized housing to equal 35 percent of gross income (based on the assumption that they work 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage). This amounts to an increase of 5 percentage points from the current policy, which established a cap on the rate of rent at 30 percent of adjusted income. This means that the cap on rent for America's poorest families would rise to $150 per month instead of $50 per month.

Carson titled his proposed bill the “Making Affordable Housing Work Act,” in one of his most distinctly Trumpian moves since assuming office. And officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development claimed this would only affect about half of the 4.7 million families currently receiving housing benefits. But not all policy experts agree with that estimate.

"More than 4 million households will see their rents rise," Will Fischer, Senior Policy Analyst at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Salon. He also emphasized that the effect of Carson's new policy on poor families would be devastating.

"These proposals will raise rents for working poor families, the elderly and people with disabilities and force them to divert money from other basic needs like clothing or food or medicine," Fischer told Salon. "In some cases it's gonna push them to the brink and put them at risk of eviction or homelessness. The HUD says that these are reforms but they don't pursue any particular policy goal other than squeezing rent out of these families."

Fischer also cast doubt on the idea that Carson's underlying goal is to reform the system and help poor families.

https://www.propublica.org/article/cairo-thebes-in-small-town-america-the-public-housing-crisis-nobody-is-talking-about

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-states-most-rapid-increases-homelessness

Homelessness increased in the U.S. in 2017 for the first time since 2010, and advocates for homeless people are alarmed. Ten city and county governments have declared states of emergency since 2015 in response; meanwhile, Department of Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson shows ongoing disinterest in supporting local governments’ efforts. While cities like Los Angeles are facing a well-publicized crisis as they struggle to find long-term solutions, California is surprisingly not even one of the states with the five fastest increases in homelessness, according to a new survey compiled by Credit Loan.

Measuring homelessness in any city is a challenge. For one, most major cities count more homeless people in residing shelters than unsheltered people living on the street or in encampments (Los Angeles is a major exception). This survey includes both sheltered and unsheltered, but notes the frightening rise in unsheltered homeless (nationwide, about a third of the homeless lack shelter).

“Unsheltered homelessness is on the rise, and major cities are feeling it most,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “As cities bear the burden of increasing unsheltered counts, it is essential that they address the affordable housing crisis, increase investments in proven housing interventions, and ensure that they have appropriate emergency shelter capacity.”

Beyond the division of sheltered versus unsheltered, experts disagree on the best methods of measuring rates of homelessness. The Credit Loan survey uses a point-in-time (PIT) count from HUD data that communities collect from physical outreach to determine how many individuals are literally homeless on a designated day. This data is pulled from PIT count numbers from 2007-2016. Other groups like the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness prefer to rely on the numbers generated through statewide data systems to measure homelessness in their states.

According to the Credit Loan survey, these are the states that saw the most significant increases and decreases in homelessness over the past 10 years:

Credit: Credit Loan

The states vary significantly in geography and cost-of-living expenses (South Dakota, for example, is one of the least expensive states to live in, yet the same factors drive that state’s homelessness as in New York), but there is a surprisingly strong common thread explaining why so many people go without homes. In any city or state, the homeless crisis is directly tied to lack of available low-income housing.

A number of diverse factors make the situation in South Dakota unique. The state has seen the largest increase in homelessness in the past 10 years. Native American homeless rates are rising as it becomes more difficult to find affordable housing on reservations, where isolation and lack of abundant infrastructure make construction difficult. Elsewhere in the state, homeless advocates have noticed the homeless population getting younger.

Traci Jensen, homeless liaison for the Sioux Falls School District, told KSFY in December, "We do see the number of youth over the last couple years has increased." Though a different estimate at the end of 2017 claims the homeless rate had dropped 12% in the past year in South Dakota, three shelters say that number doesn’t tell the full story. "The demand that we see for homeless services certainly hasn't decreased," Brett Johnson with the Sioux Empire Homeless Coalition, said. Many of the area's homeless are living in cars or with friends, Johnson added. Local representatives are pushing for more inexpensive housing options. Rep. Kristi Noem recently wrote, “Despite South Dakota’s relatively low cost of living, finding affordable housing can still be a challenge for low- and middle-income families. That makes it no surprise that there are 120 families on the waiting list for Habitat Homes.”

In densely populated metro areas like D.C. and New York, homeless advocates are unanimous in blaming the problem on sky-high rents. “The one single thing that really has changed is the lack of affordable housing,” Michael Ferrell, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the New York Times. “The housing that’s being created today in the District is not for working-class people,” he said. Gradually widening inequality is to blame: in D.C., as in many other American cities, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In New York City, the Coalition for the Homeless similarly reports that lack of affordable housing is the main cause for the city with the highest number of homeless people. Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

There is some good news in the struggle to house the homeless. Though Michigan is hurting from the nationwide lack of affordable housing, the state managed to decrease its homelessness rate by 67% over the past 10 years, according to the survey. “We saw the incidence of homelessness spike during the recession and it’s been trending downward each year since in Michigan,” Eric C. Hufnagel, executive director of Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, told AlterNet. “That’s due in part to a short-term funding infusion, an improved economy and policies which have strengthened the homeless service delivery system in Michigan. Additional funding remains a key need, but there are many other barriers to ending homelessness, including the affordable housing crisis.”

These are some of the cities with the most homeless:

...

Report: Cash Bail System Hurts Poor and Communities of Color in L.A.

“Many people don’t even have $100 in the bank, so paying 10 percent to a bond agent means that money won’t be going toward rent or food.”

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/cash-bail-system-hurts-poor-and-communities-color

https://www.c-span.org/video/?436568-1/after-words-peter-edelman

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

Professor Peter Edelmantalked about his book Not a Crime to Be Poor, in which he argues that courts are exploiting the poor by charging excessive fines and fees for minor crimes. He was interviewed by Representative Hank Johnson(D-GA).

AH 12/17

djt dick-ensian:

hat same attitude is driving social policy in the United States today. Only now that the tax overhaul is all but a done deal have we begun to read about why our Republican House and Senate and President seem so little worried about tax cuts that, simple arithmetic tells us, we cannot afford. All month we have been reading about the size of the tax cuts and the plutocrats who will benefit, but there has been very little honest reckoning about what will be the most serious human consequences.

Now, however, are we learning the reason. The real goal is eliminating dependency by punishing the poor for being poor.

In a short update, Chye-Ching Huang of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us: “The congressional budget resolution that Congress approved in October, which created the process and set the parameters for the tax bill, also calls for $5.8 trillion in budget cuts over the coming decade, including deep cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and other health care programs; basic assistance including food assistance through SNAP (formerly known as food stamps); and non-defense discretionary funding, the part of the budget that funds education and training, transportation and other infrastructure, medical research, child and elder care, and other important priorities.”

From the *Washington Post*‘s Caitlin Dewey we learn that Trump-appointed officials in the Department of Agriculture are considering major limitations within the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): “SNAP is America’s largest anti-hunger program, providing an average benefit of $125 per person each month to 42 million Americans. The majority of SNAP recipients are children or seniors, though participation rose sharply across all demographic groups during and after the recession, peaking in 2013 at 47.6 million.” Officials are considering “new restrictions on purchases of soda and candy,” but also considering more significant cuts: “The agency is also considering a proposal to allow states to reduce payments to some groups of people, including undocumented immigrants’ citizen children… The secretaries’ proposals would allow states to significantly change how they offer nutrition assistance. Through the use of the waivers, the USDA could unilaterally enact the proposals on a state-by-state basis without further congressional action….”

Why are these proposed changes so utterly devastating? Here is Harvard University ethnographer Kathryn Edin—from her (2015) book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America—reporting on the collapse of welfare programs after passage in 1996 of the welfare reform law and the subsequent shift of responsibility for welfare programs from the federal government to the states, which have provided very unevenly for poor families: “Starting in 2001, more and more families with children who were receiving SNAP began to report that they had no other source of cash income to live on—not from work, not from public assistance. By 2006, the number of such families had grown 143 percent from a decade before. By 2012, 1.2 million families on SNAP told eligibility workers they had no other income.” (pp. 30-31)

Earlier this week *POLITICO* published a scathing indictment of planning that has been going on in federal departments to reduce federal servicesonce tax reform has been enacted: “The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are hoping to make the most sweeping changes to federal safety net programs in a generation, using legislation and executive actions to target recipients of food stamps Medicaid and housing benefits. The White House is quietly preparing a sweeping executive order that would mandate a top-to-bottom review of the federal programs on which millions of poor Americans rely. And GOP lawmakers are in the early stages of crafting legislation that could make it more difficult to qualify for these programs… Federal health officials are encouraging states to impose work requirements on able-bodied adults on Medicaid—a major philosophical shift that would treat the program as welfare, rather than health insurance. The Agriculture Department said last week that it would soon give states greater control over the food stamp program, potentially opening the door to drug testing or stricter work requirements on recipients of the $70 billion program long targeted by fiscal conservatives… The president is expected to sign the welfare executive order as soon as January, according to multiple administration officials, with an eye toward making changes to health care, food stamps, housing and veterans programs, not just traditional welfare payments… Although the effort to reshape the country’s welfare system is all but guaranteed to produce powerful political backlash, it appears to have broad backing from conservative congressional Republicans, who are already coordinating with the White House on a legislative agenda to complement expected executive actions.”

Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who, for years, has proposed his own miserly federal budget plans, is quoted by POLITICO: “We have a welfare system that’s basically trapping people in poverty and effectively paying people not to work, and we’ve got to work on that.” Not considered in all this planning is whether jobs are available and whether people using programs like SNAP are able to work.

Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and regular columnist for the *NY Times,* is one writer who has highlighted what all this will mean for our society and our children. As an economist, Krugman believes cuts in programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and welfare programs like SNAP—programs that, incidentally, help children be able to thrive at school—are economically foolish. He also deplores what such cuts to social programs say about the decline in our society’s ethic of social responsibility: “Children who get adequate care are more likely to be healthier and more productive when they become adults, which means that they’ll earn more and pay more in taxes. They’re also less likely to become disabled and need government support… By the way, broadly similar results have been found for the food stamp program: Ensuring adequate nutrition for the young means healthier, more productive adults, so that in the long run this aid costs taxpayers little or nothing. But such results, while interesting and important, aren’t the main reason we should be providing children with health care and enough to eat. Simple decency should be reason enough. And despite everything we’ve seen in U.S. politics, it’s still hard to believe that a whole political party would balk at doing the decent thing for millions of kids while rushing to further enrich a few thousand wealthy heirs. That is, however, exactly what’s happening.”

If you wonder what all this commentary about planned cuts to social service and health and nutrition programs is doing in a public education blog, consider these previous posts—about sociologist Sean Reardon, writing about the impact of poverty on education—about Harvard’s Daniel Koretz examining how poverty affects test scores—about author Jack Schneider reflecting on poverty and public education.

Jan Resseger is a writer and public education advocate in Ohio. She formerly chaired the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Ed

no link

https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/horrifying-step-backwards-sessions-retracts-guidance-designed-end-abuse-poor-courts

Civil rights advocates accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of "turning back the clock" on criminal justice reforms after the Department of Justice rescinded Obama-era guidance that protected low-income defendants from being forced to pay gratuitous fees to local courts.

"Profit-minded court policies targeting the most economically vulnerable Americans have resulted in a resurgence of unconstitutional but widespread practices penalizing the poor and people of color," said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law. "Attorney General Jeff Session's decision to retract guidance from the Justice Department rooting out practices resulting in a perpetual cycle of fines, debt and jail of America's poor is a horrifying step backwards in ongoing efforts to reform the criminal justice system."

Under President Barack Obama, the DOJ issued a warning to local courts in May 2016 regarding the common practice of handing fines to poor defendants in order to boost their own revenues.

"Individuals may confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment despite posing no danger to the community; lose their jobs; and become trapped in cycles of poverty that can be nearly impossible to escape," wrote Vanita Gupta, the head of the DOJ's civil rights division at the time, and former Office for Access to Justice director Lisa Foster. "Furthermore, in addition to being unlawful, to the extent that these practices are geared not toward addressing public safety, but rather toward raising revenue, they can cast doubt on the impartiality of the tribunal and erode trust between local governments and their constituents."

The "Dear Colleague" letter of guidance sent by Gupta and Foster, which was not legally binding, cited examples of unfair demands for payment made by municipal courts, including drivers who could be ordered to pay a penalty of $300 for a driving citation and told that a court date could only be scheduled after the payment was made.

Such requirements "can have the effect of denying access to justice to the poor," they wrote.

Sessions said Friday that he was reversing the guidance to combat "the long-standing abuse of issuing rules by simply publishing a letter or posting a web page" and to prevent "confusing the public with improper and wrong advice."

Gupta told the Washington Post that Sessions's decision "seems like an abdication of the Justice Department's responsibility" to guide municipal courts.

"I think it just takes the pressure off of some jurisdictions that may have been more reluctant to engage in reform," she said.

On social media, other critics denounced Sessions's decision.

Radley Balko

@radleybalko

Sessions pulls mostly symbolic Obama era DOJ memo advising judges not to fill city coffers by imposing huge fines on poor people for petty infractions.

Merry Christmas everybody! https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-rescinds-justice-dept-letter-asking-courts-to-be-wary-of-stiff-fines-and-fees-for-poor-defendants/2017/12/21/46e37316-e690-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.84f6cb14eb64 …

4:19 PM - Dec 21, 2017

Sessions rescinds Justice Dept. letter asking courts to be wary of stiff fines and fees for poor...

The move is the latest in the attorney general’s effort to reshape the Justice Department.

washingtonpost.com

13 13 Replies 214 214 Retweets 182 182 likes

Radley Balko

@radleybalko

Sessions pulls mostly symbolic Obama era DOJ memo advising judges not to fill city coffers by imposing huge fines on poor people for petty infractions.

4:19 PM - Dec 21, 2017

Sessions rescinds Justice Dept. letter asking courts to be wary of stiff fines and fees for poor...

The move is the latest in the attorney general’s effort to reshape the Justice Department.

washingtonpost.com

13 13 Replies 214 214 Retweets 182 182 likes

justin kanew

@Kanew

To avoid confusion, Sessions rescinds a DOJ letter asking courts not to fine poor people just to fill their coffers.

Yes, wouldn't want anyone mistakenly thinking he actually cares about that.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-rescinds-justice-dept-letter-asking-courts-to-be-wary-of-stiff-fines-and-fees-for-poor-defendants/2017/12/21/46e37316-e690-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.e60dd9316f2a …

4:49 AM - Dec 22, 2017

Replies 7 7 Retweets 9 9 likes

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/civil-rights-group-reaches-agreement-mississippi-reinstate-over-100000-drivers

http://www.alternet.org/books/gig-economy-permanent-low-wage-nomads-nomadland

http://www.alternet.org/economy/6-cruel-moves-made-local-governments-against-poor

http://www.alternet.org/recycling-declines-and-centers-close-homeless-are-really-screwed

http://www.alternet.org/video/how-bail-system-really-screws-you-if-you-are-poor

HUD cut The proposed reductions are in line with Trump’s recent claim that he will pay for a $54 billion increase to the war budget in large part by cutting domestic programs.

But long before Trump made this assertion, HUD Secretary Ben Carson—who has no prior experience in housing policy—has been open about his desire to dismantle key public housing initiatives. In 2014, he opposed an agreement between the city of Dubuque and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address the city’s housing policies that discriminate against black residents, suggesting it was proof America was "becoming communist." In 2015, he vocalized his opposition to a HUD fair housing rule that is aimed, in part, at reducing segregation, calling it a “failed socialist experiment.”

...

While the latest figures from the office of Department of Housing and Urban Development show that homelessness has declined by three percent in the U.S. overall, it has also increased in 15 states, especially those in the West.

California had the dubious honor of hosting America's largest homeless population—its count (118,142 people) was up 2 percent from 2015 to 2016. Washington, DC, saw the highest year-to-year increase (more than 14 percent), and was followed closely by Idaho. Of the 15 states that saw increases in homelessness, eight were in the West: Washington state gained more than 7 percent and Colorado 6 percent. Hawaii had a 4 percent increase.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that with this report, the U.S. has seen homelessness drop again for the seventh year.

The new figures, released Thursday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in its annual report to Congress, mark the seventh consecutive year that homelessness has declined nationally. Sixty-eight percent of the affected people were staying in transitional housing and emergency shelters. The number experiencing chronic homelessness, defined as people with a disability who have been consistently homeless for at least a year, dropped 7 percent from 2015 to 2016—and 35 percent since 2007.

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t gotten around to discussing his cabinet pick for HUD, but the current secretary is hopingthe policies that have cut away at the problem will continue.

[HUD secretary Julian] Castro told reporters he hoped the incoming administration would retain, or expand, current programs. He pointed to a 47 percent decline in homelessness among veterans since 2010—that's when President Barack Obama launched the Opening Doorsinitiative, an effort to wipe out veteran, chronic, and family homelessness.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/low-income-families-evicted-silicon-valley-apartments-so-building-can-rebrand-facebook

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/heres-how-three-cities-aim-to-beat-youth-homelessness-this-year/

pediatirians now collect malnutrition #

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-subtle-design-features-that-make-cities-feel-more-hostile

http://www.alternet.org/economy/shocking-unacceptable-levels-hunger-and-homelessness-american-cities

12/15

Are We in Ferguson -- or Kabul?

What surprises me most, however, isn’t the corruption at the top, but the ways in which lives at the bottom are affected by it. Reading Thieves of Stateset me thinking about how regularly money in this country now flows from the bottom up that pyramid. If you head down, you no longer find yourself on Main Street, U.S.A., but in a place that seems uncomfortably like Kabul; in other words, a Ponzi-scheme world of the first order.

Consider, for instance, the Justice Department’s 2015 report [45] on the police in Ferguson, Missouri, about whom we’ve learned so much since Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot [46] to death on August 9, 2014. As it happens, the dangers for Ferguson’s residents hardly ended with police misconduct. “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the city’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs,” Justice Department investigators found:

“This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community.”

The report then recounted in excruciating detail the extent to which the police were a plague on the city’s largely black population. Ferguson was -- make no mistake about it -- distinctly Kabul, U.S.A. The police, for instance, regularly accosted residents for what might be termed “sitting in a car while Black,” and then charged them with bogus “crimes” like failing to wear a seat belt in a parked car or “making a false declaration” that, say, one’s name was “Mike,” not “Michael.” While these arrests didn’t make money directly for the police force, officers interested in promotion were told to keep in mind that their tally of “self-initiated activities” (tickets and traffic stops) would have a significant effect on their future success on the force. Meanwhile, those charged often lost their jobs and livelihoods amid a welter of court appearances.

Ferguson’s municipal court played its own grim role in this ugly scheme. As Justice Department investigators discovered, it did not “act as a neutral arbiter of the law or a check on unlawful police conduct.” Instead, it used its judicial authority “as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance[d] the city’s financial interests.”

By issuing repeated arrest warrants when people missed court appearances or were unable to pay fines, it managed to regularly pile one fine on top of another and then often refused to accept partial payments for the sums owed. Under Missouri state law, moving traffic violations, for instance, automatically required the temporary suspension of a driver’s license. Ferguson residents couldn’t get their licenses back until -- you guessed it -- they paid their fines in full, often for charges that were manufactured in the first place.

As if in Kabul, people then had to weigh the risk of driving license-less (and getting arrested) against losing their jobs or -- without a car -- not making it to court. With no community service option available, many found themselves spending time in jail. From the police to the courts to city hall, what had been organized was, in short, an everyday money-raising racket of the first order.

And all of this was linked to the police department, which actually ran the municipal court. As the Justice Department report put it, that court “operates as part of the police department... is supervised by the Ferguson chief of police, is considered part of the police department for city organizational purposes, and is physically located within the police station. Court staff report directly to the chief of police.” He, in turn, ran the show, doing everything from collecting fines to determining bail amounts.

The Harvard Law Review reported [11] that, in 2013, Ferguson had a population of 22,000. That same year, “its municipal court issued 32,975 arrest warrants for nonviolent offenses,” or almost one-and-a-half arrests per inhabitant. The report continued:

“In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail.”

Whether in Kabul or Ferguson, this kind of daily oppression wears people down. It’s no surprise that long before the police shot Michael Brown, the citizens of Ferguson had little trust or respect for them.

Privatizing Official Corruption

But might Ferguson not have been an outlier, a unique Kabul-in-America case of a rogue city government bent on extracting every penny from its poorest residents? Consider, then, the town of Pagedale [47], Missouri, which came up with a hardly less kleptocratic way of squeezing money out of its citizens. Instead of focusing on driving and parking, Pagedale routinely hit [47] homeowners with fines for “offenses” like failing to have blinds and “matching curtains” on their windows or “unsightly lawns.” Pagedale is a small town, with 3,300 residents. In 2013, the city’s general revenues totaled $2 million, 17% percent from such fines and fees.

Might such kleptocratic local revenue-extraction systems, however, be limited to just one Midwestern state? Consider then the cozy relationship that Augusta, capital of Georgia, has with Sentinel Offender Services, LLC [48]. That company makes electronic monitoring equipment used by state and local government agencies, ranging from the Los Angeles County Probation Department to the Massachusetts Office of the Commissioner of Probation. Its website touts the benefits to municipalities of what it calls “offender-funded programs” in which the person on probation pays the company directly for his or her own monitoring, saving the courts the cost of administering a probation system. In return, the company sets its own fees at whatever level it chooses. “By individually assessing each participant a fee based on income,” says Sentinel, “our sliding-fee scale approach has shifted the financial burden to the participant, allowing program growth and size to be a function of correctional need rather than budget availability.”

“Profiting from Probation,” a 2014 Human Rights Watch report [49], offers a typical tale of an Augusta resident named Michael Barrett. Arrested for shoplifting a can of beer, he entered a local court system that was focused on revenue extraction via a kind of official extortion, which is the definition of corruption. Even to step into a courtroom to deal with his “case,” he had to hand over an $80 fee for a court-appointed defense lawyer. Then, convicted, he would be sentenced to a $200 fine and probation. Because the charge was “alcohol-related,” the court required Barrett to wear an electronic bracelet that would monitor his alcohol consumption, even though his sentence placed no restrictions on his drinking. For that Sentinel bracelet, there was a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly “service” charge, and a $12 “daily usage” fee. In total, he was forced to pay about $400 a month to monitor something he was legally allowed to do. Since Barrett couldn’t even pay the startup fee, he was promptly thrown in jail for a month until a friend lent him the money.

Such systems of privatized “justice” that bleed the poor are now spreading across the U.S., a country officially without debtor’s prisons. According to the Harvard Law Reviewarticle, some cities charge a “fee” to everyone they arrest, whether or not they’re ever convicted of an offense. In Washington, D.C., on the other hand, for “certain traffic [50] and a number of lower level criminal offenses,” you can simply pay your arresting officer “to end a case on the spot,” avoiding lengthy and expensive court costs. Other jurisdictions charge people who are arrested for the costs of police investigations, prosecution, public defender services, a jury trial (“sometimes with different fees depending on how many jurors a defendant requests”), and incarceration.

Watch Your Ass(ets)

Even Machiavelli, who counseled princes seizing new territory to commit all their crimes at once because human beings have such short memories, warned that people will accept pretty much any kind of oppression unless “you prey on the possessions or the women of your subjects.” So many centuries later, while we women now tend to believe we belong to ourselves, civil asset forfeiture [51] is still a part of American life. Unlike criminal asset forfeiture, which permits the government to seize a person’s assets after conviction of a crime, civil forfeiture allows local, state, or federal law enforcement to seize and keep someone’s money or other property even if he or she is never charged. If, say, you are suspected of involvement with drugs or terrorism, the police can seize all the money you have on you on thespot, even if they don’t arrest you -- and you have to go to court to get it back.

Federal asset forfeiture collections have risen from around $800 million in 2002 to almost $4.5 billion in 2014, according [51] to the Institute for Justice (IJ). Governments defend the practice as a means of preventing suspected criminals -- especially high-level drug dealers -- from using their money to commit more crimes. But all too often, it’s poor people whose money is “forfeited,” even when they've committed no crime. The Pennsylvania ACLU reported [52] that police take around a million dollars from Philadelphians each year in 6,000 separate cases -- and not from drug lords either. More than half the cases involve seizures of less than $192, and in a city that’s only 43% black, 71% of those seizures from people charged with no crimes come from African Americans. If your property is seized, you can try to go to court to get it back but, says the ACLU [53], you should expect to make an average of four court appearances. Most people just give up.

Reading Thieves of Statereminded me that we’re not living in the country many of us imagine, but in something like an American klepto-state. Corruption, it turns out, doesn’t just devour the lives of people in far-off nations. Right now, it’s busy shoving what’s left of our own democracy down our throats.

Chayes documents how such corruption can lead to violent explosions in other countries. Indeed, it was a final kleptocratic insult -- a police woman’s slap in the face after he refused to pay a bribe to retrieve his confiscated vegetable cart -- that led Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi [54] to burn himself to death and touch off the Arab Spring. As Machiavelli wrote so long ago, people will put up with a lot -- torture [55], mass surveillance [56], even a car full of clowns [57] masquerading as candidates for president -- but they don’t like being robbed by their own government. Sooner or later, they will rebel. Let’s hope, when that happens, that we don’t end up under the rule of our own American Taliban [58] or some billionaire reality TV star.

Rebecca Gordon is the author ofMainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States [59]. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Fran

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/housing-crisis-insane-6-cities-where-homelessness-out-control

ny sf portland, HI LA

http://www.alternet.org/15-million-american-families-live-2-day-these-authors-spent-years-finding-out-why

history AA latino urban renewal

http://www.alternet.org/economy/4-most-shocking-times-rich-people-displaced-poor-people-profit-america

Della Curry is now the former kitchen manager at Dakota Valley Elementary School in Aurora, Colorado. Last week she was fired for giving out school lunches to elementary school kids who did not have money.

“I had a first grader in front of me, crying, because she doesn’t have enough money for lunch. Yes, I gave her lunch,” Curry said.

In the district, students who fail to qualify for the free lunch or reduced lunch program receive one slice of cheese on a hamburger bun, and a small milk.

http://www.propublica.org/article/pets-killed-over-unpaid-fines-and-more-in-muckreads-weekly

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/pf/pet-fines/?sr=twmoney0411dogskilled11aINT

The Kansas legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) desk that limits welfare recipients to withdrawing just $25 a day from their benefits and enacts a range of other restrictions.

If Brownback signs the law, recipients of the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program would only be able to withdraw $25 a day with their benefits cards from ATMs, which act like debt cards. No other states or the federal government currently limit withdrawals.

While one of the backers of the bill asserted that recipients could take out more at a bank counter, the cards can’t be used at counters and many poor people lack access to bank accounts given the need to maintain balances and pay fees. Seventeen million Americans are unbanked, going without formal financial products. Meanwhile, during debate over the bill state Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau (D) pointed out that many recipients need to withdraw hundreds of dollars some days in order to be able to pay rent.