However…
While I agree with Brad (and Lauren, as an aside) that the “everyhick” method of reporting on better-than-urban* America is complete bullshit, I think he’s wrong about one thing: The perception of Obama as Muslim is hurting him in West Virginia.
Maybe not as much as the Financial Times implies:
“I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife’s an atheist,” said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.
Mr Simpson’s remarks help explain why Mr Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival, by 40 percentage points ahead of Tuesday’s primary election in the heavily white and rural state, according to recent opinion polls.
Brad replies:
Well no, dude, they really don’t.
Only 10% of voters think that Obama is a Muslim. And unless they all happen to be West Virginia Democratic primary voters, I don’t think that Mr. Simpson’s remarks explain anything other than his own psychosis.
Not quite.
It’s kind of like having real money….
I grew so desperate for any hint of reality in this article in the NY Times denying that the gap between rich and poor is a problem in this country that I ended up doing a Ctrl F search for the word “debt”. All it gave me was the word “debate”. It’s like looking for the word “woman” or “women” or even “girl” in an article defending abortion bans. After a point, the lie of omission becomes the thesis.
The article is the usual denial that growing poverty is a problem—essentially, if the poor have no bread to eat, let them watch TV. The possession of a VCR is considered the only legitimate measure of wealth, which is like arguing that cats are people because we all have eyes. Basic financial security, the hallmark of the American dream, is dismissed as irrelevant. Skeptical? Don’t be.
The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.
The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? A look at the far right-hand column of the consumption chart, labeled “financial flows,” shows why: those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status.
100% of the women in the country have already rejected you.
The continuing series of rants from Dr. Helen about how women need to settle into marriage with anyone who asks, because men are men and like entitled and stuff, has been getting some attention around the blogosphere. (I briefly blogged it here.) For those who don’t want to click the link, the staunch economic conservatives over there have a really odd attitude about women—not that women are subhuman commodities that are exchanged on an open market (people all over the political map believe that), but that unlike every other good on the market in the libertarian eyes, communist principles should apply in the pussy market. The same people who’ll mock you if you don’t have enough money for food or shelter suddenly get teary-eyed and sentimental at the idea of some poor middle class white guy who can’t buy himself a model to marry like Donald Trump can. Anyway, I’ll get back to that in a bit, because Lindsay makes the good point about how there is a link between the declining fortunes of the rest of us (compared to the rising fortunes of the rich in what looks to be like a direct wealth transfer from labor to the elite) does in fact influence the marriage rate negatively.
I wish liberals would talk more about how increasing relative economic inequality might be affecting people’s day-to-day lives. Abject material deprivation is only part of the problem. For example, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that a lot of young people are priced out of marriage–not because they can’t find a willing partner, but because they don’t have enough financial stability to “justify” getting married.
If you don’t have substantial assets in common, or a job that would give benefits to a spouse, marriage just isn’t as practically alluring as it might have been.
That seems like it makes sense. For instance, if a couple is doing well enough to be saving money and perhaps getting assets like real estate, then marriage makes good sense, because it gives you a quick and dirty way to legally share your assets going forward. But if you’re both in debt (or if only one of you is), you sure as hell don’t want to get married and share the responsibility for debts you personally didn’t incur. As more and more Americans are going into debt and fewer and fewer are saving money all the time, we can probably expect that formula to kick in and marriage rates to decline.
Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown man! I’ll eat all the toxic chemicals that I’m unaware are in my food that I want!”
But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling. It really shows that “nanny state” is a code word that means, “In a conflict between public health and corporate profits, the latter should always prevail.” I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that. “How dare the nannies feed the children healthy food and teach them to read?!” It’s truly bizarre.
I do think there’s a limit on in loco parentis rights of a school, and luckily the U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights that I think should be respected on school grounds—cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and religion, etc., though there’s a certain reasonable amount of age-based restriction that should loosen up as they age on some of these. There’s no real reason to stock age-inappropriate books at an elementary school, for instance. But the rights that a student doesn’t relinquish on school grounds roughly correlates to those very things where citizens have strong disagreements that would necessarily mean that any school interference would be a genuine infringement on basic rights. Religious instruction in the schools, for instance, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment right, no matter how much wingnuts try to get around it. But healthy food and the eating of it? There’s no constitutional right to junk food, nor is there any sane disagreement in our society about the fact that it’s better to eat your broccoli than a Twinkie. And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.
What’s more insidious about this whining about federal school food guidelines is how the lack of these guidelines will disproportionately affect the poor. The lack of resources, both financial and geographic, for the poor to get good, healthy food has been discussed thoroughly here. Children living in that situation could really benefit from one or two nutritious meals a day at the school. So as usual with the pro-corporate “libertarian” nonsense, it’s not just about prioritizing corporate profits over public health, it’s specifically about prioritizing corporate profits over the health of people with a lower income. In other words, outright class warfare.
But I think we can all agree this is a problem that everyone, middle class or poor, shares. Everyone wants their kids to eat better, and they’re already bombarded with advertisements for junk food everywhere. When they’re out of your sight and at school, you can’t make them eat right. The school should be able to step in on behalf of parents on this one. It’s not just for kid health and parent peace of mind, either. It’s really unfair to teachers to load kids up on a bunch of sugary stuff at lunch so that they’re beginning their sugar crash phase when they return to their desks. It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.
If you consider yourself middle class—and statistically, I know most of us do, even those of us who are marginal on either side of the divide—and you’re wondering if you’re the only one who can’t seem to get it together, finances-wise, well, you’re not alone. The mid-20th century idea of “middle class” was not just middle income, but financial stability and possession of assets, and by that definition, the American middle class is small indeed and shrinking. (Hat tip.)
* Only 31 percent of middle-income families match our profile for being securely middle class. That is, despite falling into the broad range that defines middle-class “income,” fewer than one in three families has the necessary combination of other factors to ensure middle-class security.
* Our Index results vary by race. Thirty-four percent of white middle-income families are securely in the middle class, as compared to 26 percent of African-American middle-income families and only 18 percent of Latino middle-income families.
* One in four middle-class families matches our profile for being at high risk of slipping out of the middle class altogether.
* One in five (21 percent) white families is at high risk for slipping out of the middle class, as compared to one in three (33 percent) African-American headed households and an alarming two in five (41 percent) Latino families.Lack of Assets
* More than half of middle-class families have no net financial assets whatsoever-that is, no financial assets or debt levels that exceed their assets.
* Only 13 percent of middle-class families have sufficient assets to meet three-quarters of their essential living expenses for nine months, should their source of income disappear.
* About four out of five middle-class families do not have sufficient assets to cover three quarters of essential living expenses for even three months should their source of income disappear. We defined essential living expenses as food, housing, clothing, transportation, health care, personal care, education, personal insurance and pensions.
* Middle-class families have a median debt of $3,500 and median net assets of $0.Insufficient Income to Meet Living Expenses, Cover Housing Costs, and Buy Healthcare
* Twenty-one percent of middle-class families have less than $100 per week ($5,000 per year) remaining after meeting essential living expenses. These families are living from paycheck to paycheck with very little margin of security.
* In nearly one out of four middle-class families (23 percent), at least one family member lacks health insurance of any kind.
* Twenty-eight percent of middle-class families spend 30 percent or more of their income on housing expenses, putting them above federal guidelines for housing affordability.
The Washington Times is, in a moment of right wing desperation, trying to revive the latte liberal libel, publishing a supposed study by the Heritage Foundation demonstrating that Democratic districts are wealthier on average than Republican ones. Roy Edroso has a round-up of information on why this “study” is incredibly flawed and proves nothing, specifically pointing out that the study ignores the average income of voters, most likely because that more accurate measure of class and party affiliation is also the one that turns up inconvenient results. But just off the cuff, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find that Democratic districts are wealthier, but I think the causation that the Times is trying to imply is completely backwards. It serves one well to remember the adage about how all politics are local. Democrats, unlike Republicans, are not ideologically committed to the idea that the government’s only legitimate functions are graft and panty-sniffing,* and therefore are far more likely on average to do crazy things like represent their district’s interests, making their districts far more pleasant places to live and thereby attracting the coveted tax-paying professional class to live there. I got another strong reminder of that over the holiday, after visiting with my family in a Republican-heavy area that’s notable for being unpleasant and ugly and the sort of place that most people of means get the hell out of. And move to places like….Austin, TX, where things are far from perfect, but at least the place isn’t falling apart by the seams.
Common sense aside, it’s clear that the whole point of this non-study is to give wingnuts a chance to indulge the latte liberal libel, a bit of political smearing that’s never quite made sense to me. It’s wrong that some liberals have money because…..? It’s hard to really say, especially when the people whining about it usually think that having any wealth at all is an indication of moral uprightness and the authority to tell other people what to do. You get the sense that some slow-witted wingnuts tend to think there’s some hypocrisy involved, but if so, that’s a really weird understanding of hypocrisy. In the real world, a hypocrite is someone who tells other people not to do things (recycle, get abortions, fuck strange men in airport bathrooms) , but the latte liberal’s crime is having enough (food, housing, health care, opportunities) and wanting everyone else to have enough. It might actually be the opposite of hypocrisy, in fact.
Ampersand has a hysterical post up where he points out that Megan McArdle’s entire system of whiny arguments about using taxes for “charity” is based on the incorrect notion that only the wealthy pay taxes. But I what I find interesting about it is the conversation he references illuminates how libertarianism is simply a weak cover story for good, old-fashioned class warfare.
I don’t know why Matt should find this remarkable:
Still, the main psychological point remains that there’s a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.
After all, we’ve already internalized the notion that advocating taxing other people in order to give their money to someone else is somehow morally akin to charity.
That’s why I’m mostly unable to get on the train with the strange fascination with this woman. Yes, she’s horrendously wrong and pig-headed and possesses a shocking lack of self-awareness, but I’m a softie and I just end up embarrassed for her. I mean, she thought that was a zinger. It’s like watching a hobo in a top hat; some laugh at his delusions, but I just cringe and look away.
Anyway, the whole statement betrays the fundamental issue with libertarianism, which is that it’s not based around a concept of liberty so much as it’s based around the concept that the bodies of the working class are the actual property of the rich. Sending people to die in war while avoiding the service yourself makes perfect sense in this regard; the working class belong to you, and you can dispose of their bodies for your own means if you see fit. Not saying that Megan believes that outright, necessarily, but she clearly from this statement thinks that the use of other human beings lives to advance an imperialist agenda is, on the moral scale, far down the list from asking the worthy rich to pay back to a society that has given them so much while others have so little.
Her obsession with relabeling social spending “charity” makes me bananas; it’s a common trope on the right and it’s meant to reinforce the idea that the wealthy are morally superior to the poor. And because they are morally superior, they shouldn’t encourage moral inferiority with generosity, and if they privately extend charity, then it’s best to do so with strings attached, for the moral improvement of the poor. Get them off the welfare rolls and into the churches where they have to at least pretend to love your definition of Jesus before they get to eat. This view of social spending infects the government under conservatives—the maudlin concern for the souls of the poor has led BushCo to do things like tie welfare benefits to finger-wagging classes about the importance of marriage, for instance. The main thing is that if you’re poor, assistance needs to be tied to a ritual humiliation of some sort, some kind of admission from the recipient that they’re not worthy. Public assistance for the middle class and the wealthy (in the form of schools, roads, corporate tax breaks, the court system, government bailouts, etc.) is not tied to humiliation; because of our relative wealth, you can tell god already likes us better and therefore we don’t need moral improvement. It’s a baffling worldview to me—there’s no reality-based reason to think the poor are morally inferior as a class. For instance, the rich as a class start wars and wreck economies, leaving people in dire straits all the time. The poor do that pretty rarely, so already there’s two giant, overwhelming points in their favor. And even if some poor people do in fact spend welfare checks on alcohol and gambling, that’s still nickels and dimes in the moral account book compared to what Halliburton and Lockheed Martin do with their huge government no-bid contract giveaways, which end up feeding a machine that kills people. All the beer-soaked poker games in the world have no hope of causing the deaths of over 600,000 Iraqis. Single moms drawing welfare checks might not be submissive to a patriarchal definition of morality, but somehow that doesn’t caused millions of refugees fleeing a war-torn nation. I could go on, but you get the point.
Less sweet if shared?
One of the things about this S-CHIP debacle is that it’s exposing how the difference between the left and the right on reproductive justice issues really is our views on class and freedom, not “life”. Like this wonderful piece decrying the idea that the working class have any rights at all from Mark Hemingway.
While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says “Don’t Veto Me,” Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.
On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.” From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.
Our own professor of Dangeral Studies, Michael Bérubé, will be in Austin tomorrow night at 6PM to give a talk called “Somebody Killed Something, That’s Clear at Any Rate: Jabberwocky and the Western Canon.” For a general idea on what it will cover, check out his post at Crooked Timber.
2006-2008 Phi Beta Kappa Lecture Series
October 11, 2007
6:00 PM-7:30 PM
Avaya Auditorium, ACES building
Be there or be forced to explain how to “wang chung”.
Kyso has an interesting post up about the discourse that posits that certain liberal arts majors (like mine—English literature) are “useless”. It started with a thread that I couldn’t get invested in at Offsprung, because it was about whether or not you should pick your major for love or money.* It’s all very romantic, but I went to college with my dad’s advice to just get that damn piece of paper at the end and as quickly (therefore cheaply) as possible, which would incline me to say to pick your major for love, because that’s the only way that coursework will be exciting enough to get you to class every day and get that piece of paper for you.
Kyso’s post about defining terms was interesting. The “can’t get a job with an English degree” has never proven to be true in my lifetime. Sure, you may have to get a job closer to entrance level coming out, and I did, but I got promoted nearly immediately in most workplaces and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have the degree—and the way of speaking, carrying myself, dressing, and socializing that all indicates that I have one. I would say that what I do now, which I would actually call being a “writer” or a “cultural critic” would be pretty much impossible if I hadn’t been dumped into course after course where our main objective was to read a lot and come up with interesting and thoughtful opinions on the material. I’d like to flatter myself and say that I have some sort of natural talent and would have been a big time blogger without the degree, but there’s exactly no way. Natural talent will only get you so far. You need training and, just as importantly, you need social capital.
Over thirty-six million people in the US live in poverty.
The administration is trying to spin this as good news, by saying that income is rising in all economic classes. Problem is, it’s not keeping up with the cost of living. It also ignores the fact that the raise in income for African-Americans was tiny.
Children and African-Americans are the hardest hit by poverty, as well as single mothers. Over twelve percent of the poor are children. Over 24 percent of Black people are poor; poor Whites come in at a little over eight percent.
Granted, I’m sure some folks, who know they can’t say that the obvious solution would be to stop being Black, will tout personal responsibility, while ignoring the fact that it’s actually very expensive to be poor. (We already saw this with Katrina.) This is a self-perpetuating system, and it’s not because the poor person is so lazy. It’s because when you’re poor, you’re less likely to have reliable transportation to get to a decent paying job or a grocery store (grocery stores don’t tend to be located in poor cities or neighborhoods). If you have to rely on a convenience store or fast food place for your food, you’re not going to be healthy (but it’ll be your fault for not buying healthful food from the grocery store that’s far away and inaccessible to you). You likely won’t live in a safe area, so going out for a walk or a jog could be dangerous. Your kids won’t have a place to play if this is the case, and even if it’s not, your kids will be more likely to get asthma (thanks to environmental racism/classism–we aren’t likely to see a medical waste incinerator in affluent areas any time soon). Lack of exercise plus crappy food equals more health problems. And if you don’t have health insurance, well, then, you can go to the ER of the county hospital that is already overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded and hope that you’ll get care. Oh, and don’t miss any work, as you’ll get docked or fired.
Some pundits, like those at the Heritage Foundation, repeat the myth of the Marriage/Money Fairy. It goes like this: if these poor single mothers would only marry the fathers of their children, they would cease to be poor. The Marriage/Money fairy would come on their wedding night and shower them with good paying jobs, health benefits, decent schools for the kids, safe and affordable housing, and access (either by car or very convenient public transportation) to their jobs and the grocery store.
Problem is, if the father of your child is as poor as you are, marrying him isn’t going to solve your problems. Marriage as a cure all is bogus. Unless the kid’s father is running a private equity firm and is going to marry the mother of his child, I’d say this is about as useful as chilipepper toothpaste.
You know that actually helps the poor? Livable wages; healthcare; well-funded, staffed and maintained schools; safe and affordable housing; safe neighborhoods; access to things like jobs and grocery stores; clean air and water; and decent public transportation.
You can be married and oh-so-responsible and still be poor.
Neil had a post up last month about how the attempts to equate John Edwards taking money from unions and trial lawyers with Hillary Clinton taking money from corporate lobbyists is part of the larger conservative effort to redefine “class warfare” in a way that makes it look like workers’ rights are a bad thing.
John Edwards once got a debate question about how he could consistently rail against corporate lobbyists while accepting lots of donations from trial lawyers. Aren’t they just as bad? And how about the other group that likes Edwards so much — organized labor?
The answer is simple. If you think that consumers have been robbing corporations blind, or that the balance of power between workers and executives is unfairly tilted against executives, then these donors should make you look darkly at John Edwards. But if you think consumers need better protection against corporations whose products disembowel little girls, or if you think that the next president needs to fight tooth and nail for working people’s interests, you should be happy that trial lawyers and unions support him.
The “omigod trial lawyers and unions” crap is straight up monocle-clutching robber baron shit. It’s a philosophy that would posit that the real tragedy of a mine collapsing is not the loss of the coal miners’ lives, but the loss of profits that come from rebuilding the mines. It’s the philosophy that made people defend child labor and shoot into crowds striking for some time off so their families know what they look like. It’s the blatant belief that anyone who clears less than a million a year is subhuman. Literally subhuman, as demonstrated by this advertisement that ran in the NY Times a week ago.
Estrogen creates rose-colored glasses?
A couple of points today about the generation, use, and misuse of statistics. The first link from Nezua—MTV and the AP joined forces to poll a bunch of young people ages 13 to 24 about happiness, a term that should set off a few alarms because of the distressingly vague and fleeting nature of that thing we call happiness. They found a big gap between white kids and black and Hispanic kids in reported levels of happiness.
Also, research showed that non-Hispanic whites are happier than blacks and Hispanics. While 72% of whites say they are content, just 56% of blacks and 51% of Hispanics did.
With a 20+ point gap there, it’s pretty hard to deny that something is going on, though what is hard to say. One problem with the concept of happiness is that the pressure to claim you’re happy is often a bigger factor in whether or not you’ll claim you’re happy than how you actually feel. That said, the most likely explanation that comes to mind for the gap is that it dovetails with the way that white and non-white kids don’t have the same average wealth or personal opportunities for education, etc. It’s easy to be dismissive of the importance of money to happiness, but money buys security and opportunities, and those things are in fact pretty critical to happiness.
They found another fact you can be sure will be trotted out by anti-choicers from now until the end of time.
Sexually active young adults, as a rule, indicated “lower levels of happiness,” the research partners said.
How much and what the other factors were aren’t mentioned, but it does well to remember correlation doesn’t mean causation. Since the span was ages 13-24, I’m suspicious on this issue. A sexually active 13-year-old and a sexually active 24-year-old are much different beasts, and grouping them together on this issue is simply misleading.
This bit of silliness that has a mainstream media-ready hook has been all over the feminist blogs.
Hey, everyone remember the posts about New Orleans and how the survivors of Katrina are getting screwed left right and center? Remember Leigh, who gave a lot of good information? Well, she will be one of the people speaking about the post-Katrina Gulf Coast recovery tonight at The Democracy Center from 6:00-8:00. The center is located at 45 Mt. Auburn Street Cambridge, MA.
Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t how most people think.
The thing about reading business publications is that you are transported to an imaginary world where nothing really exists outside of the boardroom. It’s all quite interesting when it’s a board game, I suppose, but when real life bleeds in, folks get uncomfortable and start complaining about the people who rudely harshed all over their Wall Street euphoria.
You’d think that the biggest problem with the subprime mess was that already-wealthy investors would lose their bonus–which is of course, really, truly urgent–but that the everyday people caught in the vice-like squeeze of the credit trap and the quicksane of stagnating wages and inflated costs were just a few exceptions. You’d also think that the moves of business leaders and lobbyists had zero to do with this mess.
Recently in the press there’s been all kinds of stories about the subprime mess with (finally) some concern about the fallout–the foreclosures, bankruptcies, the private equity funds that are now on shaky ground, and the burden of debt on people, and the suspiciously high rate of exotic mortgages for people of color–despite their good credit, they were pushed into dubious mortgages at a higher rate than Whites when they refinanced.
And make no mistake, this is nothing to sneeze at. I’ve always been skeptical of the unusual mortgages out there such the adjustable rate and interest only mortgages. As Amanda pointed out, the subprime mortgage industry drove housing prices into the stratosphere. Unfortunately, enough people plugged them (hell, enough banks pushed them) with the result that people signed up and found themselves in the middle of a debt hurricane a few years later.
(more…)
Well, in all the hubbub of Yearly Kos, I didn’t completely neglect to follow the news and follow up on emails. Since the panels I was on were primarily concerned with power and helping traditionally marginalized people get it, I was extremely interested in reading that young women in certain urban areas are outstripping men in their earning power. The reasons are very specific to certain areas—a certain blue-ness in attitude, a tendency to draw college-educated women more than men, the fact that these women are single and childless. So while I have no doubt that anti-feminist sites are going crazy, all this really shows is that in some select areas of the country, women have achieved something closer to equality with men so long as they have no children.
“Citified college-women are more likely to be nonmarried and childless, compared with their suburban sisters, so they can and do devote themselves to their careers,” said Andrew Hacker, a Queens College sociologist and the author of “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women.”
I saw a representative of Moms Rising speak on a panel on online feminist activism, and she mentioned that the discrimination of this modern era is less against women than against mothers. But of course, it’s still against women, since the only reason that mothers feel this pinch is because we still live in a country where women do the majority of childcare work, and the expectation that a mother but not a father has a full-time job at home damages opportunities. From the Moms Rising website:
Shocking but true: There is deep bias against mothers in America today. One study found mothers are 44% less likely to be hired than equally qualified non-mothers, and are offered an average of $11,000 lower starting salaries. Another study found women without children make 90 cents to a man’s dollar, mothers make 73 cents, and single mothers make about 60 cents to a man’s dollar.
What we’re seeing here with young women in certain areas equaling and slightly surpassing men’s average wages is this bias in play. Considering that most of the women that are making these wages will likely marry and have children some day, the wealth and subsequent power that this survey points to is a bit of an illusion, since it’s going to evaporate when these women do move onto those steps and watch their husbands continue to excel while they get ghettoized.
That said, it’s good to see at least one step in the right direction. It’s good to see that some women can reasonably expect to have their talents recognized and their work rewarded. We just need to remember that we’re far from equality if marriage and children hurt women’s chances while doing nothing to men.
One thing that I missed in my prior post about Katrina evacuees was that the FEMA trailers which house them are toxic. The levels of formaldehyde are actually sickening the people “rescued” from New Orleans.
“Rescued” is an odd word, however. It’s more accurate to say that the US government pushed them off into camps with the hope that somehow, a wormhole would open up and transport them away. It’s the only explanation I have, as they are stranded, their homes in New Orleans are not a priority for rebuilding, their presence is obviously not wanted back in New Orleans or in these host communities, many which are trying to either revoke the trailer permits or let them expire. Jobs, transportation, and decent living conditions are simply scarce.
“Rescue” can’t even be considered when you realize that contrary to popular believe about FEMA, they actually did know about
The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday.
A trail of e-mails obtained by investigators shows that the agency’s lawyers rejected a proposal for systematic testing of the levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde gas in the trailers, out of concern that the agency would be legally liable for any hazards or health problems. As many as 120,000 families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita lived in the suspect trailers, and hundreds have complained of ill effects.
On June 16, 2006, three months after reports of the hazards surfaced and a month after a trailer resident sued the agency, a FEMA logistics expert wrote that the agency’s Office of General Counsel “has advised that we do not do testing, which would imply FEMA’s ownership of this issue.” A FEMA lawyer, Patrick Preston, wrote on June 15: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.”
FEMA tested no occupied trailers after March 2006, when it initially discovered formaldehyde levels at 75 times the U.S.-recommended workplace safety threshold and relocated a south Mississippi couple expecting their second child, the documents indicate. Formaldehyde, a common wood preservative used in construction materials such as particle board, can cause vision and respiratory problems; long-term exposure has been linked to cancer and higher rates of asthma, bronchitis and allergies in children.
Well, I’m glad FEMA’s on the ball when it comes to trying to cover its ass. They’ve got to be on the ball for something, after all. There is nothing like a cover up on top of outright abandonment and indifference to show us how much we value people who are Black and poor.
And I’ll take this opportunity to remind people to contact their senators and representatives about the bills in Congress that would help Katrina evacuees.
Update: If this makes you angry, go to this site and get the contact info for your Representatives and Senators. Then, contact them and ask them why these people, who have lost everything, are still getting screwed.
The New York Times has an article today about Katrina survivors who are still languishing in FEMA trailers two years after hurricane Katrina. That would be the hurricane where we watched as our government did little to help. I’m sure it’s just a startling and amazing coincidence that many of these people are Black.
Compounding the problem is that many of these people are yet again stranded, but at least the weather is better. The problems are exacerbated–unemployment, the grocery gap, and childcare. They lost their jobs because of the storm, or because they couldn’t get to them from the parks like Sugar Hill, where, if you do not own a car, you are screwed. The bus comes four times a week, and the supermarket is only within walking distance if you can walk eighteen miles and eat only dried food. You cannot get to jobs from these parks on the scant public transport, and if you have dependents and no access to care for them (or access to nearby relatives who can help), you cannot exactly leave for work anyway. Living right in New Orleans, most people had no need of a car (and thus found themselves stranded during the hurricane, and greeted with self-righteous lectures about how they should have gotten out, likely with magic fairy transport dust or something).
Because these folks were renters, they did not get grants to rebuild their homes. Their homes have not been rebuilt. I don’t understand why it’s acceptable for us to relegate them to lives that are the equivalent of being chained in a waiting room. I don’t understand why it’s okay for people to lecture and preach about hard work and sacrifice and how people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but it’s not okay for people who are trying to get jobs and rebuild their lives to get some reasonable help. Like, say, transportation. And housing.
But they aren’t wanted. They are too brown and too poor. The apartments and public housing where they lived are either gone or slated to be redeveloped. The rents for existing units have skyrocketed, and communities that have these FEMA communities are revoking permits for the trailers or allowing the zoning to expire. They are moving against any kind of assisted housing–including housing for the elderly–because of worries about crime. And when I say crime, I’m pretty sure the meaning is “Black people.”
“Affordable” apartments in New Orleans are affordable for people with a teacher or police officer’s wage, not a health care aide’s wage, or a maid’s wage, or a cashier’s wage. Not that it matters, because even though they want to work, and even though workers are needed, these workers, these Black workers, are apparently not what employers had in mind.
These are not people who fit the right-wing created boogeymen of welfare cheats and lazy whiners. But they are Black, and they are poor, and they apparently still don’t matter.
From one of Digby’s 4th of July posts comes this interesting book review from Rick Perlstein of a book called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook. The book is a look at how conservative attempts to dismantle the middle class have stymied intellectual and creative growth in the U.S., as middle class people have to choose between jobs where you keep your head down and your mouth shut (to stay middle class) or giving up on a chance to be in the middle class. Growing college debt, health care debt, and other conservative policy initiatives to shut down the middle class are essentially anti-freedom. When conservatives say, “Freedom isn’t free,” they seem to mean that it exacts a price, but perhaps a more accurate translation would be, “Freedom is slavery.”
Perlstein graciously offers that conservatives might just be too stupid to understand the relationship between economic stability and freedom, which is nice of him.
Black Looks: Public Sector Strikes in Africa: Any Subversive Elements?
Women’s Experiences of Abuse as a Risk Factor for Incarceration.
Professor Black Woman has to deal with the racist stupid. (Hat tip: Shannon.)
I thought this was satire. Apparently, it isn’t. Maybe we can get MB to give her a new, “Most Unintentionally Funny Blog Post” award or something?
Shark-fu posts on the recent dustup between Brownback and Romney, and the uncomfortable reality for many conservatives that no, actually, not everyone’s Christian faith similar or palatable to others.
Psuedo Adrienne blogs about the stakes for Moroccan women in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Public sector workers in Israel may have to strike to get decent pay.
Finally, I know I’m an anti-consumerist pinko, but wow. These folks put me to shame. Then again, I don’t think I’d get such a sweet haul in the dumpsters in my neighborhood, which is definitely not affluent. You’ll find no working iPods tossed away.
The health care option for the poor.
Let’s say you go to the emergency room because your stomach hurts so badly that you can barely sit up. The doctor sees you, can’t find anything wrong, gives you painkillers, and gives you a note telling you to come back if you are in still in pain and are nauseous, vomiting, or worse. Later that day, you come back because you’ve hit all of those criteria. Blood is coming out of your mouth. You can’t sit up straight, you are in so much pain.
What do you think the nurses would do? What do you think the doctors would do? Probably see the blood, hear the words “stomach pain” and figure they’d better check you out again, right?
But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday’s New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: “It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.” Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like “pretty thin gruel.”
One of the niftiest tricks the right has pulled in the past few decades has been to recast wealth redistribution as something that can only happen downwards, as if piddly welfare checks and Medicaid are the redistribution of anything that deserves the moniker “wealth”, when “sustenance” would be a better term. The fact of the matter is the entire issue of labor in a capitalist society is wealth redistribution—you as a laborer by definition have to make less than your work is worth or the owners won’t make a profit off it. With that in mind, the quotes from Roger Lowenstein in this article are particularly infuriating—basically, that you shouldn’t begrudge people the right to light Cuban cigars with $100 bills so long as your credit card debt isn’t immediately threatening to overwhelm you.
In Lowenstein’s view: “…whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It’s not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem…”
As Ehrenreich notes, the invocation of an athlete is no mistake, but a deliberate distraction from the fact that the vast majority of the wealthy make their money off the labor of the working class. So, yes, you have a right to begrudge the rich that $7,000 check you’re writing them every year with your labor. Lowenstein might not think he needs that money, but most of us do.
I missed the boat.
Blog for Domestic Workers was on June 5. So here’s a post and a roundup.
First, Saltyfemme posts the announcement, and with her support for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights.
Domestic workers, such as nannies and housekeepers do not currently have the protection other workers have. However, this may change in New York State.
For years, the more than 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and other domestic workers in New York State have been exempt from many basic labor protections.
But now 55 immigrant groups, labor unions and other organizations are trying to change that by pushing for legislation that would require a minimum wage of $14 an hour for the state’s domestic workers.
The legislation, called the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, would also require that these workers receive paid personal days, paid holidays, paid vacations, at least one day off each week, severance pay and 21 days’ advance notice before termination.
Note: Shannon beat me to posting the link to the article that inspired this post. I read the hard copy of this article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s long and fairly involved, but I think it points to an alarming trend that we need to continue to watch and fight against.
The Wall Street Journal (hey! shaddup! I have to read it for my job) had an article about how subprime lending has pretty much gutted a middle-class Black neighborhood in Detroit. It’s pretty chilling.
(more…)
Do libertarian ideologues long for the return of the poorhouse?
“Class warfare” is a lot like the “race card” or “race-baiting”—things that authoritarians participate in, but reverse the meaning of the words and accuse their opponents of being the real class warriors or race-baiters. So, in the World of Wingnut, opposing exploitation of the poor is “class warfare” against the rich and opposing racism is “race-baiting”. And with this nifty rhetorical trick of calling black white, they’ve managed to create a safe space bubble to escalate the actual class warfare against everyone-not-rich. Through the Carnival of Liberals, I read this excellent blog post about a Business Week article that exposes how big business is using their wealth and power to bankrupt working people.
In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.
Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. “It’s not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more,” says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
Those damn variable rate mortgages carry a lot of the blame, too, because people are lured into a mortgage thinking they’re getting a good rate, but really, the lender has no intention of letting them stay at the low entry rate.
The perfect NCLB teacher
Shorter Practically verbatim Ann Althouse: Reading great literature is no more educational or formative than watching Grindhouse or listening to Toby Keith.
And why does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don’t, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It’s not tied to economic success in life and needn’t be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music…
There are significant problems with advanced reading comprehension in this country, it’s true. Althouse provides a very good example of it, in fact, in her post. But her conclusions are either insulated from the real world, or disguising their intentions. Want to jack up the dropout rate even further than NCLB is already doing? Insist that children learn to read from science books. Imagine, if you will, coming from a household which places no emphasis whatsoever on reading, either for pleasure or learning, and arriving at school, which insists that you read only science and history textbooks. “Kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home” is a statement of privilege.
Happy mother’s day, Pandagonia! Today’s the day we celebrate sex and reproduction. Let the pagan fertility rites commence! Remember to give your mom $138,095 today to tell her just how much you value her. And here are some timely words from Ellen Goodman for those of you thinking of joining the New York Times-approved Opt-Out Revolution®:
The real story of the Mother’s Day economy is less rosy. This is what to expect when you are expecting — expecting to be a mom and a paid worker at the same time. You can expect to be mommified.
Please, won’t someone think of the profits?Via
Fourteen years ago yesterday, the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok burned down. 188 factory workers died, over 500 more sustained injuries. Most of these workers were women.
I don’t even know what to say in the face of this. We could call it a tragedy, but it’s not. Tragedies are things like dying from cancer or hydroplaning on a puddle and ending up in the hospital with grievous injuries. This wasn’t a tragedy.
It was an atrocity.
What else can you call the deaths of 188 people and the injuries of over 500 more, all in the name of cheap product to sell in the US? It’s a level of entitlement that is breathtaking on our part. We want those dolls, dammit. And those motherboards, and those pants, and that furniture, at cut rate prices. Or we want those things sold for a huge profit, so executive management and board members can make a nice, fat profit on their stock options. The spin of these policies are rife with myths.
Our way of life. Our way of life. We will fight and defend our way of life. And we will make damn sure other people pay for our way of life.
Now, I realize that pointing out injustices and entitled thinking is seen as victim-tripping in some camps. Because those girls could have bootstrapped themselves into a better job, dammit! And besides, didn’t you all know that naming the problem, speaking the truth, is unforgivable? How very grim.
I bring this up because the Triangle Shirtwaist fire usually gets all kinds of attention, as it should. This fire, I learned about a few years ago. If it made the news in a big way, I missed it. And that’s the point. It’s easier, much easier to not see and forget and refuse to question our own privilege. For instance: it sure is nice that I don’t work in a firetrap. That I don’t have to put up with sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions or lose my one source of income. That I don’t work for a contractor, and therefore there’s nothing the large multinational company that pays my employer can do. Conveniently, these companies are so terribly helpless. There’s not a thing they can do substantively–oh, they can spot check and be good corporate citizen and put guidelines into place–but they want low labor rates and high productivity and low, low overhead. And those they will get.
At a price, yes. But we’re not the ones paying the price.
Last week, Harvard students who were members of the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) started a hunger strike in support of unionized security guards at AlliedBarton. One hunger striker has been hospitalized.
The company is in negotiations with Harvard, and the protesters have pointed out that the guards are not paid on the same scale as Harvard employees. Harvard insists that the pay issue is between AlliedBarton and its workers, who are currently in a conflict over pay. Workers who are unionized, yes, but recently so. Workers whose quality of life could improve if Harvard makes it a stipulation in its contract that the workers are paid on scale with other full-time Harvard employees.
This happened five years ago with the university’s janitors.
AlliedBarton workers are pushing for pay of $15 an hour. They are currently paid nowhere near that, or what others at Harvard, or other universities, get.
The protesters’ demands center around the claim that AlliedBarton guards do not earn wages comparable to other workers at Harvard or their peers at other institutions.
The Service Employees International Union 615, the union that represents the guards, is asking for a minimum starting wage of $15 per hour.
According to information provided by the Harvard Stand for Security Coalition, the minimum salary for security guards under the AlliedBarton contract is $12.68 per hour, compared to the $12.87 earned by guards hired directly by Harvard.
The minimum salary for AlliedBarton guards is almost two dollars less than that of University dining hall workers and almost six dollars less than that of guards at MIT.
Harvard agreed to meet with the activists today after one hunger striker was hospitalized.
More information here. You can send a letter to Harvard here.
You can also read Why We Are Hunger Striking for more background.
Update: There’s a blog dedicated to this. Go and read it ASAP.
Just regular folks, honest!
Why is it that when John Kerry has hair that doesn’t go out of place, windsurfs, and has money, he’s an “elitist” who’s out of touch with the masses, but Mitt Romney, whose hair doesn’t go out of place, waterskis and goes horseback riding, and has scads and scads of money isn’t?
For that matter, why is it that our President, a man who comes from a moneyed Texas family, who attended Philips Andover Academy, Yale, and Harvard, and who has a ridiculous amount of money “just a regular guy”? I live in Massachusetts, and believe you me, Philips Andover and Harvard are not schools where the hoi polli go. From what I gather, Yale isn’t either, and Skull and Bones really has nothing to do with the great unwashed masses.
Hey, look. I’m not a fan of the system that paves the way for the wealthy to get into power. It stinks. I’d just like to see some consistency on the part of the conservatives, that’s all.
