4
street roots
Jan 17, 2014
POVERTY, fro m page 3
overambitious in the language, it set the
stage for backlash.
So by the ’80s, a politician like (Ronald)
Reagan could use public anxiety about the
amount of money that had been spent on
the War on Poverty and use it to carve a
very reactionary political rhetoric.
One of ways Reagan built a coalition in
1980 was by bashing welfare.
J.T.: Nixon had done the same thing.
Journalist Sasha
Abramsky’s latest
book, ‘The
American Way of
Poverty: How The
Other Half Still
Lives,” includes
many interviews
with people
experiencing
poverty. You can
listen to those
interviews at www.
thevoicesofpoverty.
org.
S.A.: Nixon had talked the talk into
wedge issues. When it actually came to
poverty, Nixon was actually fairly good.
Nixon proposed universal health care. At
one point, Nixon embraced Milton
Friedman’s idea for a basic income
guarantee. No president before or since Mbs
embraced that idea. It didn’t go anywhere,
but in many ways, Nixon was a continuum of
Johnson. He expanded food stamps, he
expanded the free breakfast and lunch
program for low-income kids at school. But
once Reagan comes to power in the '80s,
there really is a dismantling of most of the
safety-net infrastructure.
J.T.: And Welfare to Work requires that
there are jobs.
SJL: One of the things we saw in the
worst recession since the Great Depression,
in 2008 and the years following, in many,
many states, the number of people on
welfare actually declined. That didn’t mean
that single women and kids were suddenly
getting affluent. It meant that the state was
rolling back its
responsibilities. I
talked to people all
over the country who
X t h in k it's a n e x tra o rd in a ry
weren’t eligible for
•benefits and their lives"
that point where we can h a w wereextraordinary.
They had literally no
so many people liv in g so
access to cash. People
grecar
and yet the
were surviving on food
conversation Is about how to stamps, which is
noncash benefit, or oh
cnt their benefits«
charity, people
scavenging anything
they could. I talked to
a family who literally
had nothing. Nothing.
They didn’t have bank accounts. They didn’t
have savings. They didn’t have money in
their wallet and they didn’t have food in
their fridge. They lived lives entirely on or
outside the margins. And I think that that
happens gradually. You don’t suddenly go
from a war on poverty to the kind of
extraordinary lack of empathy that we see
across the spectrum. It took years and years
in which the political rhetoric shifted and
the understanding of poverty in a sense was
dumbed down. We came to think of it almost
as an individual disease. If you were poor,
you were poor because you had done
something wrong or you were somehow
morally unworthy. In some ways it’s a very
19th-century understanding of poverty: the
idea of an undeserving underclass.
One of the consequences is that as a
society views it as a tragedy, but not as
something we can do anything about. I
concluded that calling it a tragedy is too
easy. That what it is, is a scandal. This is the
most affluent country in the world. This is a
country with more resources than any other
country in human history. And yet, one in
four of our kids lives below the poverty line.
Fifty million Americans live below the
poverty line. And many, many millions live
below half the poverty line. We have a level
of poverty and a level of inequality that no
other first world democracy comes
anywhere near matching. And to my mind
that becomes a scandal. It seems to me that
we’ve made a series of political choices and
economic choices that have built up this
well of poverty at the bottom of the
economy.
And it isn’t just the unemployment. It’s
also the working poor. These are working
families. They’re playing by the rules.
They’re doing what they can to get ahead.
And they’re getting swept backwards.
Over the course of the years while I was
doing this book, I meant so many people
who had thele stories that were just
extraordinary. People who were told they
were ineligible for Medicaid because they
bought themselves a burial plot for when
they finally died. I spoke to people who
bought houses that were massively
underwater, and then they lost their jobs in
the recession. And these guys were doing
everything they could to get ahead and
instead they were swept back. They were
selling their household possessions in
garage sales so that they could just enough
to pay .their next bill.
J.T.: The thing that scares me, with the Tea
Party mentality, is that poverty is worthwhile:
'That it’s a means of social control, that the
poor are not deserving and they deserve to be
dismissed.
S.A.: We’ve always been far more than
one coherent country. We’ve always been at
the very least two distinct cultures, and that
goes all the way back to the pre-Civil War
years. The aspirational North and the
institutionalized immobility of the South.
Everything about the Southern structure
was designed to create a group at the
bottom that was immobile. In many ways
the Southern model has begun to percolate
more generally into the national economics
model and political culture. So today the
language around food stamps and the
language around welfare, in which
conservatives are going off on a nutritional
supplement as a something that breeds
laziness. That in my mind, historically
comes out of the South. I.think it’s an
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extremely dangerous development Putting
things like food stamps in the crosshairs;
that used to be immune. In the conversation
about welfare, they usually kept silent about
food stamps. Now you see a significant part
of the political process trying to find ways to
not just marginally cut food stamps but to
massively cut them. We’re not talking about
abstract numbers. We’re talking about real
people.
Real people like a woman I met in L.A.
She had worked for the state and then she
was laid off. She had three kids, and the
only thing that was keeping her and her kids
fed was food stamps. I met another women
whose husband ran a business, and he died
of cancer, and even though they had medical
insurance, the bills bankrupted them. She
was now a widow and on food stamps and
she had nothing. When we talk about cutting
food stamps, there are real people who get
hurt when that happens. I think it’s an
extraordinary indictment that we’re even at
that point where we can have so many
people living so precariously, and yet the
conversation is about how to cut their
benefits.
J.T.: Did you get a sense that the inside-fhe-
beltway mentality makes people indifferent to
the needs of people?
S A.z One of the things that I find
encouraging in the past few months is this
series of labor actions at Walmarts and fast
food outlets around the country. These are
workers making 7 or 8 dollars an hour.
These are usually part-time workers with
almost no benefits for their work.
MacDonalds, KFC, all of these fast-food
places have been seeing walk-offs. And it
actually gives me hope, even though this
political culture is beset by this lack of
empathy. If you actually get people one-on-
one, arid you start talking with them, most
people will sympathize with someone if •
they’re making pizzas or flipping burgers or
standing on their feet all day long. At the
very least they should be able to buy their
own food in the evening, or put gas in their
car or buy a bus pass. For me, this actually
gives me tremendous hope, that even
though there’s a stalemate federally, on the
ground that’s a precursor from any activity
in D.C. It’s not going to come from the top
down.
J.T.: Wg recently celebrated the Poor People’s
March o f1963, and that was a case of people
from the ground up, pushing Kennedy and the
administration to acknowledge the needs of
black folks.
S.A.: You saw hundreds of thousands of
people coming into Washington to push for
social justice. They made a tremendous
impact, first on John Kennedy, and then on
Lyndon Johnson, and then later in the
decade on Bobby Kennedy! I think it is a
See POVERTY, page 5