The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (7 page)

Increasingly, however, large numbers of Americans
do
seem to be troubled by the political elite’s acceptance of wholesale poverty as a normal part of contemporary life. Members of the overwhelming majority—the much-touted 99 percent—who haven’t benefited from this epic economic change are realizing the plutocratic implications of this shift. “We’re all out here and we all get it,” said 26-year-old Thomas Reges, one of the Occupy D.C. protesters camped out in the capital’s MacPherson Square, in October 2011. “We’re all angry. We all know something is wrong, and we’re trying to make it better.”

That month, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, an NBC/
Wall Street Journal
poll found 37 percent of Americans supported the protests, and only 18 percent opposed them, with the remaining 45 percent presumably neutral. A couple of weeks later, a CBS News/
New York Times
poll found that 43 percent of Americans sympathized with the protests.
²⁷
Other polls during this period found that more than six out of every ten Americans believed the economic system was rigged in favor of the wealthy; three-quarters felt that things were getting better for Wall Street CEOs but not for ordinary middle-class Americans, and a majority of the population
believed that economic inequality was a bigger problem than government overregulation. Sizeable majorities also supported the notion that the administration should pursue policies intended to reduce economic inequality.
²⁸
This was subsequently reinforced by exit polling on November 6, 2012, showing that most voters favored raising taxes on the wealthy to help deal with the country’s burgeoning deficits.

When the American Bankers Association held its annual conference in Chicago in 2009, several thousand protesters descended on the event. Three years later, groups such as National People’s Action, run by a longtime organizer named George Goehl, trained large numbers of people in what they termed “economic civil disobedience”: Protesters would attend shareholder meetings and demand that their economic grievances be heard; often, they engaged in sit-down protests and sometimes blockades.

For many of the protesters, the economic crisis, and the ways in which large banks treated small borrowers, had catalyzed a political response that they didn’t know they previously had in them.

Barb Kalbach, for example, was a retired farmer who, in the years following the 2008 collapse, joined an activist group called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, began devoting much of her time to protesting economic injustice, and ultimately embarked on campaigns of civil disobedience aimed at putting a spotlight on corporate malfeasance around mortgage foreclosures and other themes. “We ask to meet people like Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorgan Chase],” Kalbach explained. “They ignore us, like we are riffraff. That’s when we go forward; we go to their places. I call it ‘Going to see the person who doesn’t want to see you.’” An unlikely direct-action advocate, the elderly farmer had had enough. In all good conscience, she felt she simply couldn’t do nothing. Her aim, she declared, was

to shine light, and now to get corporations to change their tactics. We’re trying to get the lawmakers to see that what’s happened out in America isn’t right, that corporations can’t walk all over people. It’s
like a pie, and they’re pulling all the money they can out of the pie. The homes were a pie, pensions and 401(k)s, that was a pie. They robbed us, and then they took a taxpayers’ bailout. Money and power and wealth is being pulled out of America into fewer and fewer hands. It’s the same way with wages and salaries and benefits—it’s a part of a pie.

Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, began organizing low-paid, often undocumented domestic workers in the late 1990s, shortly after graduating from Columbia University. For years, she said, they were considered “shadows,” an out-of-sight, out-of-mind pool of caregivers who cleaned up other people’s messes, changed other people’s soiled bedclothes, and administered other people’s medications. In recent years, however, more and more of the people she encountered were finding that their working conditions resembled those of the domestic workers. “Increasingly, the conditions that define the lives of domestic workers—like instability, low wages, low benefits—these are conditions increasingly defining the reality for most American workers. We’re in the same boat more than ever.”

Yet, while more people
were
making these connections, this hadn’t yet translated into mass political movements. Occupy Wall Street garnered much public sympathy, but most people sympathized from the sidelines. They didn’t have the time and energy to engage in the sort of all-in protests that came to define the Occupy movement—at least in part because so many people were working such long hours just to keep their families afloat—they didn’t like the confrontational tactics and scruffy style of the Occupiers, or they didn’t feel that camping out in parks and outside of city halls would actually change a whole lot in their lives. And despite the opinion poll data showing that Americans were becoming increasingly uneasy about the degree of inequality seen in the country, on the whole that unease was more about the shrinking middle class than it was about the conditions of those at the very bottom of the
economy. In fact, politically the country as a whole remained remarkably tolerant of the continued existence of mass poverty and, at the same time, remarkably reluctant to embrace policies that might change this dynamic significantly.

“There are essentially two stories over the last forty years,” Georgetown Law School’s Peter Edelman explained. “The positive story is there would be forty million more people who are poor if we didn’t have the public policies we have—including Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and Medicare and Medicaid. They have helped quite measurably in keeping poverty from being even higher than it is. So it isn’t that we’ve been unwilling as a country to take steps to alleviate poverty.” But, Edelman continued, there’s a second, less savory story that runs parallel to the first. “Over the last forty years, we’ve increasingly become a low-wage economy. People in the bottom 20 percent are worse off than they were forty years ago. Income distribution has deteriorated. The gaps between the rich and poor have widened spectacularly.”

Another way to look at this is to consider that, to a point, America has worked out how to ameliorate some of the consequences of profound economic hardship—albeit reluctantly and with an increasing number of gaps. Yet it is failing, in ever greater degrees, to prevent that hardship from arising in the first place—in changing power relationships in the workplace, the broader economy, and the political process, so as to stop tens of millions of Americans from experiencing desperate insecurity on a daily basis.

That something has gone horribly awry in how we, as a community, distribute our economic goods has to do in part with a breakdown in collective empathy. Witness GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s extraordinary slip, during the early primary season in 2012, that he wasn’t concerned about the very poor. His back-pedaling a moment later, saying that he meant the very poor were
already adequately provided for by a safety net, only made the statement that much more grotesque. Either a major national candidate was genuinely unconcerned by the plight of the poor—betting that there wasn’t political capital to be gained in highlighting the desperately hard times so many millions of families were trapped within—or that same candidate, who at one point in the campaign casually mentioned that his wife drove “a couple of Cadillacs,” was so out of touch with daily realities that he honestly believed the poor weren’t really that badly off.

It also has to do with a mutation of the country’s political discourse, over a period of decades, which today makes it all but impossible for political figures to talk about the needs of the poor—or the societal obligations of the wealthy—without being accused of promoting an almost Bolshevik form of class warfare. In July 2011, as the debate over raising America’s debt ceiling risked pushing the country into a default on its obligations, Senator Mike Lee of Utah argued that the president was pitting one class against another. “Class warfare, as much fun as it may be for the president, is not going to solve this problem,” the senator told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
²⁹
Representative Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee (and subsequently Romney’s vice-presidential pick), appeared on Fox News in September 2011 to accuse the president of just such a position after he stated that closing the budget deficit would involve both cuts in services and also tax increases on the wealthy: “Class warfare . . . may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics.”
³⁰
A couple of days later, Sarah Palin accused Warren Buffett—the billionaire investor who had gone public with his arguments that it was unfair that he paid a lower effective tax rate than did his secretary—of a similarly noxious attempt to “gin up this class warfare rhetoric.”
³¹

There’s an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to much of this. Wealthy individuals who oppose tax increases on the rich are, according to such views, fighting an uphill battle against a vicious conspiracy hatched by a cabal of underachieving but somehow politically all-powerful riffraff. In contrast, other wealthy individuals, such as Buffett, who support
such tax increases are, somehow, self-hating billionaires suffering from something akin to Stockholm syndrome. Pushed by their grassroots and wealthy funders, most Republican state and federal lawmakers have signed on to Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge, thus inflexibly committing themselves to stripping down government programs no matter what the need or circumstance.

In 2010, California state senator Carol Liu, a onetime school-teacher and longtime anti-poverty activist, pushed SB 1084 to develop a California Economic Security Task Force. Its intent was to reduce poverty and inequality in the state and to explore the connections between different problems that, cumulatively, locked families into hardship. At the time, Liu and her colleagues estimated that more than 13 million Californians were experiencing significant economic insecurity. SB 1084 went nowhere. Investing in broad-based anti-poverty programs wasn’t, Liu came to think, “sexy” for many of her fellow legislators, especially in an era in which California’s budget-making processes had been hobbled by a minority of legislators absolutely refusing to countenance any tax increases to allow for the continued funding of at-risk social programs.

As she put it, “We didn’t used to see families in our homeless shelters. In the last few years we’ve seen more people needing help. We have tremendous challenges. At the state level we’ve severely cut back on our safety net programs. As policy makers we’re really challenged to do more with less.” To Liu’s mind, not enough of her colleagues had a grasp of the moral urgency of the issue.

Some people think poor people want to be poor, they just don’t want to work, there are means to lift themselves out of poverty, but they don’t apply themselves. I don’t think that’s true. People are anxious
to improve their lives and especially the lives of their children. But it’s hard to lift yourself out of this malaise if it’s the only thing you’ve known, and you’re without healthcare and without reliable childcare. In this economy, many have fallen into poverty through no fault of their own. Many of these folks have lived, quote, “middle-income lives,” and have found themselves in this economic climate falling further behind.

CHAPTER TWO

BLAME GAMES