The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (32 page)

In failing to adequately account for how poverty creates its own specific set of challenges across the board—from small ones such as shortsighted kids coming to school without glasses, to larger ones such as public health emergencies created by a paucity of community medical clinics and a failure to provide any social protections to the undocumented—we routinely end up with policy solutions that fall far short of what is necessary. Or, worse, we fail to even begin to discuss reforms that would be easy and affordable to implement if we only had a better understanding of the needs of poor Americans, and a better sense of empathy for the plight they too often find themselves in.

For example: Over the past decade, we have regularly had oil price spikes that have been nothing more than a nuisance to the affluent, but have been cataclysmic to the poor—especially to retirees on fixed incomes and to the working poor in rural areas, who tend to work minimum-wage jobs and to drive long distances for those jobs, or who are more likely to heat their homes using old-fashioned oil-based heating systems.

Witness, for example, the damage caused the precarious finances of John and Stephanie France, grandparents living off the grid on the edge of the rainforest on Hawaii’s Big Island, when gas prices in the state veered near $5 a gallon in the winter and early spring of 2012. John, a disabled air force veteran, and his wife lived on small Social Security checks and a couple hundred dollars a month in food stamps. “We have a generator, and I have to buy gas for the generator. But it’s $4.69 a gallon for gasoline,” John explained. “It’s not easy; that’s what I have to do every day. I try to make it [money] stretch to the end of the month. But by the end of the third or
fourth week we’re out of money, out of everything. There’s us, my daughter, her husband, and their four kids. Her husband goes fishing, but he doesn’t have a job. We help with the children.”

When they ran out of food, “we go to the church. We go to the food bank,” said Stephanie. “I make sure we stretch our food stamps out. We don’t have no icebox, so we also have to get ice. Every other day we have to get ice; that’s about $2. We don’t have electricity, so that’s why we have to have the cooler. If we had an icebox, we’d have to have the generator on all the time. Then we’d have to fill it up with gas.”

John added, “We leave the generator on four hours a day; at the end of the month, two hours a day. We turn it on about four or five o’clock. We go to bed about seven o’clock, because it’s dark, and you can’t see. When we turn the generator on, that’s the only time we can use the bathroom, because we don’t have running water otherwise.”

Stephanie had a hacking cough when we met, one probably not helped any by the omnipresent damp weather and the fact that her home was never heated properly. The Frances wore multiple layers of clothes when it got cold and rainy, and prayed, on a daily basis, for something most Americans have taken for granted for more than half a century. “I’d like to have electricity, but electricity cost too much. The last time I had electricity it was four hundred and something dollars, and I couldn’t afford that. If we had electricity, it’d be a lot better,” John announced softly.

Like the Caros in southern New Mexico, hoping against hope for the day that they owned a flush toilet while living in their windowless storage unit, this was both an insanely modest expectation and also one that they were unlikely to realize anytime soon. For years now, the Frances had been going in reverse, their incomes and their options constricting, their chances of enjoying the amenities of modern life fading away by the day, their finances held hostage to energy economics and the vagaries of oil politics.

While America clearly needs a national energy strategy that works to stabilize long-term energy prices, in the short term the
country also needs financial assistance programs that can be speedily directed to the poor during price spikes. In the same way that some states are now experimenting with methods of automatically enrolling people in certain income brackets in food stamps when they apply for other programs—SSI and Social Security, in particular—so it ought to be possible to send out gas stamps, worth, say, five gallons per week, to recipients of food stamps and other means-tested benefits once gas hits a certain predetermined price. Flexible, short-term, and not particularly expensive to the government, they could, in fact, easily be paid for by raising taxes on oil producers’ profits during price spikes; after all, in the first six months of 2012 alone, the five biggest oil companies made windfall profits of more than $62 billion.
⁴
The assistance provided by gas stamps could prevent spiking prices from pushing the rural poor into hunger, into having to skip medicines and all the other unpalatable choices that the poor routinely make when one part of their financial calculus changes.

In the contemporary anti-tax environment, such a proposal might seem farfetched. It isn’t. In fact, a very similar law, the Crude Oil Windfall Profit Tax Act was passed by Congress in 1980, and remained on the books until it was repealed, at the urging of President Reagan, eight years later.

The act imposed windfall profit taxes on producers that ranged from 30 percent up to 70 percent, and was designed to generate approximately $227 billion during a ten-year period. The money raised was to be ploughed back into tax reductions for the working poor, low-income assistance, and investments in energy and transportation programs.
⁵

If, with today’s high oil prices, a similar profit tax were enacted, bringing in revenues in the $30 billion per year range, fifteen million households (roughly the number of households receiving food stamps) could each be given $20 per week in gas vouchers, and that would still leave the federal government with an additional $15 billion per year to use either for other assistance to the poor, or for
reducing the national deficit. Why hasn’t such a tax been enacted? Not because it’s impractical; not because it would bankrupt oil companies—but because those companies pump a huge amount of money into lobbying against such measures, and because today in America the political process is far more finely tuned to meeting the needs of the affluent than those of the poor.

This leads to the third and last problem: until the Occupy movement grabbed the political spotlight, for decades America’s poor had come to think of themselves as ever more disempowered, ever more passive in the face of their poverty. And to a large extent, the assumption of powerlessness became self-fulfilling. Unable to influence the body politic, more and more people simply opted out: not voting in elections, not joining trade unions, and not informing themselves about the great issues of the day. And, in opting out, they all but ensured their continued marginalization.

In 1974, the English political philosopher Steven Lukes published his book
Power: A Radical View
. In it, he argued that there were three core ways in which power could be exercised, each more pervasive than the next. The first was raw coercion: one person, group of people, or institution had power and through force compelled others to bow down before it. The second was slightly more subtle, but even more effective: The groups with power managed to convince their underlings to legitimate that power, both by shaping people’s preferences and, as effectively, by determining what they
didn’t
want in their lives. In such a society, those without power voluntarily acquiesced in their own situation. The third, and most dominant of all, occurred when powerful individuals and institutions managed to so control the psychology of those without power that populations no longer even realized they were being manipulated. They acquiesced in their powerlessness and no longer could even envision alternatives.
In such a scenario, power relationships were so utterly omnipresent that they had become invisible; they were simply the background to every experience, to every choice made in society. And, in a world so governed, the manipulation of the many for the benefit of the few became normal, the currency of political business.

That, unfortunately, is indeed how too many transactions are conducted in American politics today. That’s how people who live just inside the margins are convinced to blame those just outside the margins for their poverty; it’s how people whose wages have shrunk, whose benefits have been eviscerated, and whose access to government assistance has waned are convinced to vote for anti-tax, anti-regulatory, anti–safety net politicians who will further batter their pocketbooks and throw them into insecurity. It’s how people without pensions are convinced to blame public sector workers who still have pensions for the country’s economic plight, rather than asking why more workers in the world’s wealthiest country don’t have secure retirements in the first place.

Looking back at a half-century of economic justice organizing work that he had been involved in, Harvard’s Marshall Ganz believed that many of the anti-poverty movements in the 1960s, had a broader political agenda. “They were movements for dignity, fairness, economic rights, justice,” he stated. Then, increasingly, poverty came to be thought of as a sickness rather than a consequence of unjust social systems and relationships.

The War on Poverty has gotten a terribly bad rap, given it did a hell of a lot of good; part of the Great Society dealing with health, beautification. There was a whole package of reform of which it was a part. By naming it an anti-poverty program, it became more vulnerable politically. I don’t know, there’s this odd dissonance there, something clinical about “poverty.” Describing that condition of life as “poverty.” It misses the critical moral, social resources that people draw on to survive and transform their conditions of life. It’s
injustice. It’s people having to live in conditions of deprivation that are unjust. It takes a justice issue and turns it into a social engineering problem or a charity problem.

Arguably, that’s one reason why the original War on Poverty failed: Moral arguments, such as those detailed by Harrington, brought poverty center stage, but, once there, technocrats took control, essentially reducing a massive moral conundrum—poverty amidst plenty—into a set of scientific and statistical data. And once that occurred, the energy was sucked out of the process. Thus, even while a “poverty industry” grew up that developed ever more specialized knowledge about
how
to tackle particular manifestations of economic hardship, the political language about
why
we should do so dissipated.

Without a re-energized political process, without more people participating politically, without a more informed electorate and a renascent grassroots movement, twenty-first-century poverty will
never
receive the attention that it so urgently deserves. This is not, primarily, a book about grassroots politics. But, that said, readers should continually have an awareness of the political conditions in mind as they read this second section of
The American Way of Poverty
. The solutions that I advocate, taken as a whole, would go a long way toward ending poverty in this most affluent of nations. But the initial catalyst for pushing such systemic reform will only occur once more people participate more proactively in the politics and the movements that, like it or not, define all of our worlds. In both 2008 and 2012, Obama’s campaign team activated more voters and more organizers than their opponents thought possible. After 2008, much of that energy was left to dissipate. After 2012, if a progressive set of policies is to be nurtured, it has to be sustained, to provide an ongoing citizen-led impetus for reform, to push the political process, from the ground up, to enact a new economic fairness agenda.

CHAPTER ONE

SHORING UP THE SAFETY NET

Food pantry client and cancer patient Vicenta Delgada in line for food in North Philadelphia.

T
hat poverty increased so dramatically not only during the George W. Bush presidency but also once Barack Obama assumed power in January 2009 is one of the great political tragedies of the age. After all, Obama had spent years working as a South Side Chicago community organizer; he understood poverty, and cared about both its causes and its consequences. Prior to assuming office, he had a solid track record on the issue. And in getting elected, a core part of his appeal had been that he would represent the ordinary men and women of America and not its elites. The festivities surrounding his inauguration in January 2009 had been marbled with grandiose historical references to renewal; to a reinvigorated social compact; to the unsung, working-class heroes who had helped to build the country.