street roots
June 22 2012
A history of poverty and what America can do about it
BY DEVAN SCHWARTZ
S T A F F W R IT E R
here are plenty of different ways to
portray history. Many historians focus
on nations, conflicts, and famous
men. Alternative histories map feminism
and Marxism, or the experiences of
minorities (Howard Zinn’s “A People’s
History of the United States, 1492-Present”
and Juan Gonzalez’ “Harvest of Empire”
among them).
A new book by Tavis Smiley and Cornel
West maps a history of poverty in America.
It tracks American poverty on its travels
through the years, through politics and
social progress. Yet Smiley and West aren’t
historians, and they don’t claim to be. Nor
do they claim to be policy wonks. Rather,
they self-identify as “democratic intellectuals
with public platforms to address issues that
matter.”
The authors of “The Rich and the Rest of
Us” cite America’s anti-poverty stalwarts
who they’ve spoken with during radio
broadcasts or during their Remaking
America Symposium (including Barabara
Ehrenreich, Michael Moore, Robert Reich,
Roger Clay, and Jeffrey Sachs). This builds
the platform from which they deliver a first-
person plural address — we the people, we
the authors.
Smiley is a talk show host and West is a
Princeton professor of Religion and
Philosophy. Both are steeped in the
rhetoric of the pulpit and the alarmist prose
of community organizing. Theirs is a full-
throated attack on the unequal holdings of
the 1 Percent and the poverty of the 99
Percent. Fueled by slick graphs and updated
numbers, they give an unequivocal
manifesto made up of “12 Poverty-Changing
Ideas.” They are:
1. Fundamental Fairness
2. Women and Children First!
3. The Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs Plan
4. Home Is Where the Heart Is
5. Universal Food Delivery System
6. Prisons and Mass Incarceration
7. Privatization Versus Public Investment
8. The Fundamental Fairness Lobby
9. Equitable Progressive Tax Codes
10. Recession Restitution Act
T
The Rich and the
Rest of Us: A
Poverty
Manifesto, by
Tavis Smiley and
Cornel West
11. Health Care Assurance
12. White House Conference on the
Eradication of Poverty
Of course, the authors do not endorse
high incarceration rates nor pervasive
privatization, they critique them. Each of
these 12 ideas are explored twice in the
book, once in a slimmer executive-summary
style, then in greater detail. One shortfall is
how they lack any real refutation or
disagreement within their own arguments.
For example, they say poverty is caused by
a lack of money. This may be true in a literal
sense — as a lack of oxygenated blood to the
brain ultimately kills each of us, though we
might call it cancer. And whereas more jobs
and housing and health care are
unimpeachable steps, some may wonder
whether the hasty construction of this book
(imagined this January) doesn’t smooth
away the nuisance of nuance.
Yet perhaps their strategy may be to
declare their manifesto from a place of
certainty and self-assurance—knowing that
presidential decrees and legislative actions
tend to become watered-down. Additionally,
the book’s confidence and clarity reflects a
burgeoning vocabulary in our culture.
Besides the terms 1 Percent and 99
Percent, the New Poor, the Near Poor and
the Working Poor are common-sensical, if
not already well-known. We might fit into
one of these groups, and we didn’t even
know it.
This book also takes on the issue of
power as it relates to language and identity,
how the poor are blamed and berated, the
wealthy idealized, and how so many
Americans aspire toward and self-identify
with the middle class - even as it shrinks
into near-oblivion. Smiley and West include a
number of stark statistics in their book.
Here are just a few they note:
• 150 million persistently poor and near
poor people in America.
• Children make up 36 percent of the
nation’s poor (21.6 percent of all children
are poor).
• “What does it say about the priorities
of a nation that allows 53 percent of its
children — the most vulnerable and valuable
— to live in or near poverty?”
• One percent of the nation’s richest
individuals controls 42 percent of the
country’s wealth.
• The Great Recession marked the
fourth period of consecutive annual
increases in poverty in 52 years.”
• The number of Americans who had
been unemployed for six months or more in
2009 reached 6.3 million — the largest
number since 1948, when the government
began counting the long-term unemployed.
• “More than 67,000 veterans are
homeless on any given night, but about 1.5
million are considered at risk of
homelessness due to poverty, lack of
support networks, or dismal living
conditions and substandard housing.”
• According to government criteria, a
family of four, living off less than $22,400
annually, fits the poverty, standard.
• The number of people behind bars has
grown from 300,000 in the 1970s to more
than 2.5 million today.
• 6 million people rely on food stamps as
their only source of income.
• The United States has lost a staggering
average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every
month since 2001.
“The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty
Manifesto” is worth a read if you want to
learn about the history of poverty and the
poverty our nation is currently experiencing.
The book may not be elegantly written,
though it is extremely clear, and at 210
pages, it is exceptionally approachable.
Besides, poverty doesn’t need elegant
solutions, it just needs solutions — and
anyone using their platform to call attention
to this epidemic deserves our respect,
especially these witty and incisive authors.
They write, “Gone are the days of ‘boot
strap’ lore when we were encouraged to get
tough, get out in the workforce, and
aggressively grab our slice of the American
pie. Profits have overruled the slogans, the
boots are made in Asia, and the straps can
be found only online ... we can no longer
judge anyone who is living poor in America
as someone who is lazy or who has made a
series of avoidable bad choices.”
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