Being poor is never enjoyable.
There are times, though, when the pain of poverty is even more acute.
One of those times is the holiday season.
When others are gathering with friends and family, poor people feel even more isolated than they usually do. They can feel more shame and powerlessness than that which they experience on a daily basis.
The poor don't have money to buy anyone else gifts, so it's embarrassing to attend parties or functions where gift giving is expected. That embarrassment lasts beyond a couple of kind people telling the poor person not to worry about not having a gift to give.
Though times are tough across the nation and at almost every level of society in the present economy, the group which seems to be most deeply affected now are black Americans:
Americans are being ravaged by this economic recession. Joblessness plagues black communities. The Economic Policy Institute projects that African-American unemployment will reach 17.2 percent, a 25-year high.
In several states, such as Michigan, Alabama, and Illinois, the EPI projects unemployment rates for African-Americans will climb above 20 percent.
Health care disparities ensure a shorter life expectancy for African-Americans. The housing crisis has foreclosed the dreams of many.
More black children are growing up poor. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 35 percent of black children live in poverty. In the 10 most populated states, "rates of child poverty among black children range from 26 percent in California to 51 percent in Ohio."
Black America can't rely on Obama alone
Unfortunately, it's never a "good" time to talk about poor folks. It's not interesting to many people. It's not sexy. And for many in the dominant culture, it seems, the topic of poverty becomes even less meaningful when it involves people of color.
But with white, college-educated people still facing non-crisis-level unemployment, it has been disturbingly easy for some politicians to ignore the deep and ongoing economic disaster in America.
Poverty in Black & White (and Latino and Asian)
Fortunately, some politicians are not tuning out the message.
Meanwhile Friday, the Congressional Black Caucus said its members are “overwhelmingly opposed” to the tax cut compromise. The group’s leaders said they embrace the payroll tax reduction and extension of unemployment benefits in the plan. But extending Bush-era tax cuts for the nation’s highest earners is unfair, unneeded and unaffordable, they said.
“If we recklessly cut taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent, then Obamanomics will look an awful lot like Reaganomics,” said Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., D-Ill.
CBC ‘Overwhelmingly Opposed’ To Obama’s Tax Cut Deal
As we all know, those massive tax cuts for the wealthy did go through. Reckless or not. And so did the payroll tax reduction, the element of the deal which many believe is the beginning of an assault on Social Security by the current administration and Congress.
What is especially troubling to Democrats is the apparent ease with which President Obama disregarded his campaign rhetoric regarding the Bush Tax Cuts.
Like the last one, the spot uses Obama's own campaign rhetoric (lofty even by 2008 standards) against him, with footage of the then-candidate proclaiming that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- as part of a larger economic philosophy -- "offend[ed]" his "conscience."
Liberal Group Ad Recalls When Obama Said Bush Tax Cuts Offended His Conscience
To make matters worse, there seems to be a feeling that exists which says that getting the tax deal done was more a matter of propping-up Obama's reelection prospects than it was sound long-term political or fiscal policy.
While causing President Obama problems with his liberal base, the tax-cut compromise the Obama administration has reached with Republican lawmakers is likely to improve the president's chances for reelection, say political and economic analysts.
Obama reelection prospects brighter with deal to renew tax cuts?
In other words, it appears as though Obama is leaving his campaign rhetoric and supposed political principles behind for what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is characterizing as a sugar high for the economy that would apparently come just as the 2012 election campaign is in full swing.
The danger is that though the short-term economic boost may help Obama get reelected, it is dangerous economic policy and political blunder for the Democratic Party. When and if the economy improves, Republicans will say that it did so because of the tax cut for the rich. This reinforces the widely-discredited concept of trickle-down economics and cedes the political "framing" of financial policy to Republicans and those in the Tea Party.
Krugman:
"Which brings me back to the Obama-McConnell deal. I’m often asked how I can oppose that deal given my consistent position in favor of more stimulus. The answer is that yes, I believe that stimulus can have major benefits in our current situation—but these benefits have to be weighed against the costs. And the tax-cut deal is likely to deliver relatively small benefits in return for very large costs. The point is that while the deal will cost a lot—adding more to federal debt than the original Obama stimulus—it’s likely to get very little bang for the buck. Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all; even middle-class tax cuts won’t add much to spending."
Thus the sentiment that while the "sugar high" of the tax cut deal may aid in Obama's reelection prospects, it is a bad overall policy. Particularly from a Democratic president.
In short, cynics believe that President Obama has sold-out progressive principles (by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and potentially allowing trickle-down rhetoric to gain credibility) for personal gain (a short-term economic boost which could help his reelection prospects).
Or to put it another way, the man who claimed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were offensive to his conscience just 2 years ago seems to have found the Reaganomics Jesus on the same issue when it is his own political bacon on the line.
This capitulation on fiscal principle by President Obama has outraged the sanctimonious and pure Left. But that's ok, say some political observers, because it allows Obama the chance to triangulate on the issue and build up his centrist "street cred" with political moderates and independents.
And, in truth, Sister Souljah-ing progressives could help Barack Obama politically. You know, 11-Dimensional Chess and such.
However, many of the people now being cast off were the same people who gave everything they had to help ensure Obama's election in 2008. It is dangerous to take one's political base for granted, and that seems the calculation being made by President Obama and his advisers now.
For those who don't care about all of the high-level political machinations and merely want to live a good and dignified life, President Obama's decision has real effects. As Ronald Reagan proved, a false and illogical narrative can eventually lead to the hardening of American hearts and the psychological acceptance of the dangerous concepts that the wealthy should be catered to and the poor are at fault for their own condition.
And we have not even gone into the issue of the payroll tax holiday and what that could mean for the future of Social Security.
All of this could spell even worse economic futures for myself and other poor people of color. Where I live, in the projects, seniors are having their Social Security checks essentially cut as the payments stay frozen and the costs of living go up. People don't understand why the rich are getting more when we, at the bottom, are being asked to pay for their new yachts and such.
There seems to be a disconnect in Washington DC. I don't know if the president and his team think that poor folk are dumb or that we are not watching what is happening, but my conversations tell me otherwise. People who have been uplifted and proud to support the first black president are now downbeat and shaken. The feel abandoned, I have heard.
Hot on the heels of just-released statistics about America’s staggering poverty problem, President Obama released a tepid statement attempting to hype health-care reform and his infrastructure plan.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 14.3 percent of Americans are now living in poverty, the most since 1994. For blacks, that rate is 25.8 percent, almost three times the white poverty rate of 9.4 percent. This is downright scary, but you'd not guess it by looking at Obama's statement, which tries to slough off the doom by saying that it "remind[s] us that a historic recession does not have to translate into historic increases in family economic insecurity."
Obama's Tepid Response to Widespread U.S. Poverty
Discontent is growing over the toll the economic hardship is taking on an often-neglected part of America's population.
Cornel West echoed Kanye West in rebuking Obama: “... He doesn’t care about the Black poor: The evidence is overwhelming! ... His policies [a]re racist in effect and consequence and especially classist in terms of generating misery among poor people, disproportionately Black and Brown. ... The Obama Administration seems to have very little concern about poor people and their social misery
Cornel West Says Obama’s Policies Have Same Racist Effects As Bush’s
Bob Herbert of the New York Times has been fantastic in chronicling the plight of poor black Americans. He is much less antagonistic towards Obama than is Cornel West, but his observations are similar.
Whether this is fair or not is irrelevant. There is very little sentiment in the wider population for tackling the extensive problems faced by poor and poorly educated black Americans. What is needed is a dramatic mobilization of the black community to demand justice on a wide front — think employment, education and the criminal justice system — while establishing a new set of norms, higher standards, for struggling blacks to live by.
For many, this is a fight for survival. And it is an awesomely difficult fight. But the alternative is to continue the terrible devastation that has befallen so many families and communities: the premature and often violent deaths, the inadequate preparation for an increasingly competitive workplace, the widespread failure to exercise one’s intellectual capacity, the insecurity that becomes ingrained from being so long at the bottom of the heap.
Too Long Ignored
It is a very, very difficult fight. And for those people of color who are out there fighting for survival, things such as DADT repeal signing ceremonies -- however important they are -- mean little. But tax cuts for the wealthy mean a lot, particularly when one who is fighting for survival is being asked to overcome yet another obstacle by a man whom many felt would take away such obstacles, and not add to them, when we voted for him in 2008.
Think of the poor people this holiday season, please. You won't see us at the holiday parties. We probably won't come up in the discussions. But we are here, and many of us are not from the dominant population.
We matter, we are struggling and we will not forget who helped us and who did not in the elections to come.
Happy Holidays to everyone here at Daily Kos.
