Many of us who have been decades-long activists and advocates for low income people and who are savvy to the conditions of poverty, lament a great deal about the media's concentration on the middle class and how it is falling.
While we are glad that FINALLY this issue is gaining attention, as we have been proclaiming for decades that right underneath America's noses are the people in poverty who've been there all along. Our sorrow, while getting flamed by so-called "progressives", is that the middle class began to see their own situation as somehow "different" and this has been something to behold. I think I will scream if I hear one more time from someone who has fallen from their 6 figure job, "I did all the right things. I raised my kids in the Church. I went to college. I was civic-ally minded. I paid all my taxes. I obeyed the law. I was not a drug addict..."
Like we poor WEREN'T doing and being all those things too?????? GGGGRRRRRR!
After I learned about Institutionalized Racism and hearing all the above from falling middle class people, I began to see that poverty is also institutionalized. Institutions continue to exist because they benefit someone no matter how many people are hurt. I began to see that poverty is an institution based on racism, sexism (including homophobia), disabilities, ageism, and classism. So I asked myself, "So, how is it that marginalizing people like this becomes "institutionalized"? My answer: "Because it benefits somebody." Then I asked, "Whom does poverty benefit?" That is when the whole thing came into focus.
Poverty is BIG BUSINESS ~ for the upper classes, but for the poor it does nothing. It is quite profitable to blame the poor for their conditions and pretend their situation is because of their "choice".
How is this true? Let me count the ways ...
1. Large non-profits and religious organizations.
A. They are tax havens for rich "philanthropists" who can give their "chump change" of $hundreds of thousands and then keep their tax-free $millions
B. The upper income hire their spouses and relatives to manage their large foundations and "direct" these large nons in 6 figure salaries. Everyone feels real good about how "humane" they are while living off the backs of the poor.
C. In most of these nons you can literally ascend the stairs to heaven. At the bottom where the poor are hired to give service to other poor, there is broken furniture and old computers to the top where there is original art and modern furniture ~ with wages to match each level.
D. Middle class people are given livable wages as "middle management"
E. According to Guidestar, nobody questions that these non-profits alone receive in government funding and donations approximately $55-66,000 per client when they they spend on the average of $2000 in direct services. Much of this is government money. While it is true that it is expensive to run offices and buildings, one might question how it is that the director makes 6 figures while their lowest wage workers cannot even afford to pay the rent. So HOW are these organizations so wonderful again????
F They are able to depend on free labor with "volunteers" such as with Jobs Opportunities mothers (TANF) where the worker "works off their welfare benefit" at below minimum wage, as well as non-paid court ordered labor ~ whose "employers" do not have to observe labor laws and they have absolutely no obligation to hire them for this free labor after they are done using these workers.
2. Business
A. The ability to hire cheap labor in order to reap huge profits for the CEOs
B. Often these businesses are given tax breaks for "being so nice" as to make McJobs for the poor while profiting off the cheap labor
C. More tax breaks by cities and municipals given to these businesses
D. In fact most large businesses do little to support the local economy, they do not bank locally and their profits are not spent locally
E. See "F" above, some of these businesses are given free work by becoming "private contractors" with the government because they are "so nice" as to give a low income person some work for free (slave labor).
3. Society and blaming the poor
A. It is quite proftiable to blame the poor for everything from the health care system to hunger, to drugs, to housing.
While drug addiction and alcoholism by the upper classes is just as bad if not worse, it is traditional to blame the poor for their "bad choices" when they have no support system, are domestic violence victims, unable to afford the high rents, unable to find work or work for low wages, unable to feed themselves and their kids nutritionally, and/or have serious barriers to working for a wage
B. The Prison Industrial Complex. The poor are far more likely to be incarcerated than the rich. In private prisons (who are able to choose the healthiest most stable prisoners and reject the rest) they use laborers for literally pennies an hour to create products for their prison owners. Not only do these prisons extract $millions in government money and tax breaks, they also make even more profit off their labor force. More and more of the prison industry is done with private contracts by privately owned companies.
4. Housing. In the 1970s there was a program called "235" where it subsidized mortgage payments much like Section 8 does now. This enabled the poor to own their own houses. The benefits from this were many. Families were able to become stable instead of having to move every several years as renters do. Their children could grow up in the same neighborhood, there was an investment that no renter could have that a home owner could in their communities for infrastructure, schools, and government structure.
A. After 235 ended, HUD housing was then offered to the upper classes at pennies on the dollars with sweet tax breaks in order to become landlords, leaving the poor behind with no incentives to improve their surroundings. The poor is suffering to this day with homelessness increasing by the day and no hope of ever earning a liveable wage or owning their own homes, no matter how hard they work.
B. Recently in NYC, a band of brave homeless took on the The Powers That Be and documented literally thousands of empty homes, lots, and buildings with a program they had created called "Picture This". http://www.youtube.com/...
C. With volunteers they spread out into every one of their neighborhoods. They took pictures of properties that appeared to be empty and then cross-referenced these properties with city information as to the address, who owned the property, the size of the building, whether it was owned or rented, and whatever other information they could find.
D. These brave homeless learned that many of these places had livable space but were kept empty simply because the owner did not want to bother filling them with people ~ and profited just fine to keep them empty. With the assistance of Hunter College Urban Planning students and staff, they put this information on a database and proved quite graphically that, as a matter of fact, in spite of the city's claims there was not enough space and that was why there was homelessness, the city was not telling the truth. They were told by city officials before they began that the information they had gathered "was impossible to do".
E. Not only did they show up some very well paid 6 figure city planners that they were much more savvy than the ones paid tax dollars to know this stuff, they showed with one stroke that homelessness was a myth. They also proved that the homeless populations were quite proficient thank-you very much, that they did not need the $36,000 per year the city spent on shelters and useless "services", they needed affordable HOMES. Homes that were intentionally kept from them with little regard for the City's health to create vibrant neighborhoods ~ but lots of regard for a few to be raking in the dough.
5. We need to re-think what is called "work" and what is called "doing nothing". Paid work is "work" but care giving is "doing nothing". According to labor statistics (mostly) women lose on the average of over $275,000 in paid wages because they have to make the agonizing choice of care giving or work for a wage. These are not just women who have children. Women also make these hard choices for their parents and relatives, and then for their spouses.
F. If our society were to build institutions to replace this "free" work, it would cost $Billions ~ and merely be a subsidiy for big business to pay more crappy wages while their workers ignores their loved ones. Yet a woman who "does nothing" will seldom be supported for doing this work except by other family members and they pay dearly if they find themselves without that support such as becoming widowed or divorced
G. It should amaze anyone at the staggering amount of formerly middle class, middle aged homeless women who lived that bad dream. Many of them have degrees and a long work history, and no background of alcohol or drug addiction, but nobody will hire them. But since they "did nothing" all those years, they are too young to retire and too old to hire, so there is nowhere to turn for assistance unless they can prove they are disabled. Many of them raised families and contributed to their communities, but if their husbands found a better life with their secretaries or become ill and die themselves (using up all the retirement savings, etc), these women are left with nothing after "doing nothing" all those years.
H. Older men also suffer when they become unemployed or sick and used up all their resources. See G above. While they make $1.00 for every women's 75 cents, they are not hired for being "overqualified". If they are not "disabled enough" they will not see any assistance either.
6. The poor benefit the upper classes in other ways
A. By pretending being poor is a "choice" rather than an institution, the upper classes and so-called "benefit institutions" are not compelled to change anything.
B. By refusing to see they could be next, the denial of poverty as an institution keeps these institutions and upper classes with just an edge of un-named fear to keep themselves "in place" and everything running to their benefit while being blind to the damage they cause with the poorest.
C. I am in the business at this time of naming the VERY classist, racist institution of CPS as my "epitome" of classism, where it seems to be just fine to rip children from poor families and "give" them to upper income families with the attitude that even if this is a mistake, it is in the best interest of the child to live in an upper income environment. In fact these kids suffer a 5-7X more likely chance of being abused than if left in their homes with services.
D. The government financing of this attitude is reaping millions in The Poverty Industrial Complex by creating another "complex", The Foster Care and Adoption Industrial Complex, generating billions to take children and "sell" them to upper income couples. Most of these $millions are reaped by upper and middle class people. The problem is that this attitude obfuscates the many statistics that exist showing that only about 10% of these taken kids are in true danger.
E. They know the other 90% would thrive if the family were given services and the child left in the home and that over 80% of their accusations were false ~ with the court commenting they had no trust ANY of their accusations were accurate because of their terribly flawed system. This was admitted by the CPS officials under oath, a model of most other state's CPS systems, by the CA DSHS in the case "Humphreys vs County of Los Angeles" . they know full well that taken kids if left in the home with services fare far better than if taken. But there is money to be made, bonuses to be paid to case managers who successfully take children from their homes without observing basic Constitutional rights, and contracts to private companies to fill, who cares about the kids or their families who love them with all that?
Therefore institutions like CPS do little to "save" anyone but themselves, they do not serve the low income population correctly in such a way as to give a far greater margin of success. Instead they profit themselves from their "solutions" that do little ~ mostly by refusing to listen. The institution of poverty could be changed forever if they truly heard the voices within this circle and the true nature of poverty. If they but admitted their own part and did something more meaningful, it would vastly change this corrupt System. Instead they let their community leaders cry about the limited resources to actually give these opportunities to the low income, while taking it with their left hands to enrich themselves.
This is hard news to give, not only to the upper classes, but to the poor themselves because then the poor will understand better why they are in the situation they are (and maybe get mad like I am,but then I was mad already when not seeing this stuff ...sooooo now I am an activist, lol).
The upper classes have to take on the burden of generations of responsibility they do not feel they should take. Lord knows we've heard this plenty about racism, "I was not a slave owner, so why should I pay the price???" It is about seeing the long term consequences, the decades when these "solutions" have been implemented and how those consequences are now coming to INCLUDE these deniers as it comes to fruition.
Cat in Seattle
Cross posted in Peoplesing. org Permission to re-use with credits, all rights reserved