“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” - FDR
...as the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity , economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity, and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one. Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, Kurt Anderson. p343
Poverty is the 4th greatest cause of U.S. deaths Only heart disease, cancer, and smoking were associated with a greater number of deaths UCR study (4/17/2023)
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor, the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
Aristotle
A well-funded, widely supported, and wildly successful counter-movement to deny basic human rights to poor and working-class people has grown steadily since the 1970s. The movement manufactures and circulates misleading stories about the poor: that they are an undeserving, fraudulent, dependent, and immoral minority. Conservative critics of the welfare state continue to run a very effective propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the working class and the poor must battle each other in a zero-sum game over limited resources. Automating Inequality, How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor: Virginia Eubanks
"Poverty is a principal--probably the principal--obstacle to democratic development. The future of democracy depends on the future of economic development. Obstacles to economic development are obstacles to the expansion of democracy." Samual P. Huntington in his famous article "Democracy's Third Wave"
This rich country has the means to abolish poverty. Now we must find the will to do so - the will not to reduce poverty but to end it. America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own (3/15/2023)
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor. Voltaire
"I'd seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I'd never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight--house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster--if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing. Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?" Karl Ove Knausgaard: Saga
"Finland’s child poverty rate at less than 5 percent, the lowest of all rich countries. By contrast the child poverty rate in the United States comes close to a shocking 25 percent ... nearly a quarter of the entire population of children. Out of all the countries that UNICEF surveyed, the United States was actually next to last. Only Romania fared worse." the Nordic Theory of Everything, In Search of a Better Life: Anu Partanen
Correlation Between Poverty and Religiousity
Collapse of the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren
Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign
Center For Poverty and Inequality
Center For Poverty and Inequality Issues
SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center
Who's Afraid of Francis Fox Piven : Francis Fox Piven
Poverty Rises As Wall Street Billionaires Whine (9/17/2010)
Poverty Rises in the World's Biggest Economy (9/17/2010)
There are problems that need attention. See this book
— Robert Vogel 🌊🌊🌊 #FBR #BLM (@robert_vogel) August 19, 2024
Poverty, Inc.
Government’s decades-old experiment in letting corporations deliver social services has been a disaster—for taxpayers and the poor.https://t.co/QM4qOSHqLm https://t.co/D5m5P29Zwq pic.twitter.com/7d6MZpkgtJ
Welfare reform passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton gave states the power to set their own rules for distributing welfare $.
— Wide Mind | Fierce Heart 🦓🥄 (@wydmindfeersart) April 7, 2023
Now, successfully applying for many welfare programs in Texas "is as rare as successfully applying to MIT or Yale."https://t.co/88bu4fRyir https://t.co/VydFNgL6E3
Republican lawmakers want older Americans to work for food stamps. This is how they want to close the budget deficit even after adding Trillions to the federal deficit for tax breaks to the rich.
— Papo (@pjampaganza) March 20, 2023
This is appalling, do you agree? https://t.co/PBiKrFuo0q
Poverty is a method of social control. Just as money confers freedom of various kinds, poverty constrains.
It is a consequence of wealth inequality.
Typically, it is racist, it leaves people unhealthy, uneducated, and dependent on the more wealthy. It is worst in Republican States associated with the Confederacy and inner cities.
Recently the poor have been confined in rotting inner cities,
kept in place by militarized police, and well out of reach (by
public transit) of suburbia. They tend to be people of color and
they are arrested and sent to prison more
frequently.
Privatized prisons prosper from their mass incarceration, because slavery is still legal in prisons. After prison, they lose the right to vote.
Repression of labor unions and declining
wages tend to keep them in poverty permanently. Since jobs
are scarce in the cities, some are, for all practical purposes,
permanently unemployed.
Lax gun laws and the 'war on drugs' play a role in making poor communities more violent.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, people without opportunity, isolation,
and lack of social relationship, are most vulnerable to demagogic mass
movements, such as Nazism, Fascism,
Stalinism, or even McCarthyism.
Republicans, continuing their
wilding of America, favor cutting all social
programs whether Food Stamps, Social Security,
Medicare, Obamacare, or any assistance
for the poor. No religion should be ok with that.
Deaths of despair, morbidity and emotional distress continue to rise in the US. The increases are largely borne by those without a four-year college degree—the majority of American adults. For many less-educated Americans, the economy and society are no longer providing the basis for a good life. Concurrently, all-cause mortality in the US is diverging by education—falling for the college-educated and rising for those without a degree—something not seen in other rich countries. We review the rising prevalence of pain, despair, and suicide among Americans without a BA. Pain and despair created a baseline demand for opioids, but the escalation of addiction came from pharma and its political enablers. We examine “the politics of despair,” how less-educated people have abandoned and been abandoned by the Democratic Party. While healthier states once voted Republican in presidential elections, now the least-healthy states do. We review the evidence on whether or not deaths of despair have risen during the COVID pandemic. More broadly, excess mortality from COVID has not increased the ratio of all-cause mortality rates for those with and without a four-year degree, but has instead replicated the pre-existing mortality ratio. The Great Divide: Education, Despair and Death by Anne Case & Angus Deaton
We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor Ezra Klein (6/13/2021)
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants. Francis Fox Piven
"The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today's problems in the inner city ghetto neighborhoods - crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on - are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work" William Julius Wilson: When Work Disappears.
Because the digital poorhouse is networked, whole areas of middle-class life might suddenly be subject to scrutiny. Because the digital poorhouse serves as a continuous record, a behaviour that is perfectly legal today but becomes criminal in the future could be targeted for retroactive prosecution. It would stand us all in good stead to remember that an infatuation with high-tech social sorting emerges most aggressively in countries plagued by severe inequality and governed by totalitarians, and here, a national catastrophe or a political regime change might justify the deployment of the digital poorhouse’s full surveillance capability across the class spectrum. The Digital Poorhouse by Virginia Eubanks (an excerpt from her book Automating Inequality)
"Government assistance is said to undermine the American dream ... Wait. Undermine whose American dream?” Nancy Isenberg
Here's something we don't discuss much. Life expectancy is in direct correlation to income. If you're rich you're likely to live a much longer and healthier life than if you're poor. Poverty kills. Our job: build a health care system and economy that work for all, not just a few.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 10, 2020
New data paint an unpleasant picture of poverty in the US https://t.co/hIZngrdl60 @rawstory #poverty
— 50 Major Economists (@50MajorEconmsts) February 3, 2019
Here is a map of poverty in the U.S. See if you can guess
which States are republican.
Click here
to see the map.
It breaks my heart how much some liberals hate poor people. 💔
— Wide Mind | Fierce Heart 🦓🥄 (@wydmindfeersart) February 16, 2021
I expect it from Republicans; but it feels like a slap in the face every time I see it — frequently disguised as attacks on Progressives who fight for economic justice — from Dems. pic.twitter.com/zBzdObDnIU
What are the Causes of Poverty?