Poverty – Page 13

Roma Issues

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone at Feministe for the opportunity to guest blog here. I was thrilled to be asked and am looking forward to adding my two-pence worth to this community for the week.

Secondly, I just need to explain something. I have just moved house in the past two weeks and have no phone or internet connection at the moment. I normally research and write “live”, so this is a different experience for me, writing posts and then having to travel to a wifi hotspot to post. I am not sure how much time I will be able to spend online each day so if there are any comments, they might go unanswered for a day. I hope no-one will be offended by that. I wish it could be different but that’s the way life goes…

Thirdly, a short introduction. I am Devious Diva or DD. I chose to use a pseudonym for good reason. I blog about human rights issues in Greece, the country that has been my home for the past 13 years. Ordinarily, this should not be a problem but Greece has been slow to accept its racism and xenophobia (in fact, any of it’s shortcomings) because it seems to still want to revel in its glorious past. This has led to a number of nationalists finding me and making it pretty unpleasant at times to even turn on the computer, let alone blog. I have also been outed recently. Full name and my well-known occupation posted all over nationalist sites here. Scary stuff. Most of it has died down except one persistent overgrown schoolboy who keeps trying to keep the silliness going. Anyway, enough of all that. You can read up about it on my blog if you like.

Over the last year or so I have been blogging about the Roma communities here in Athens, specifically those living in Votanikos in the very centre of the city. My first visit had a profound effect on me and led to further meetings and much writing. I was angry. I still am. What prevented the Roma Series from being a pointless exercise in blogging was that people began to take notice. I am not claiming that I started the ripple of interest in Roma issues here in Greece but I have been part of it and it inspires me to keep writing about this largely ignored and abused community.

Everyone has been evicted from Votanikos and are scattered to wherever they can find a scrap of land, but I will be following their plight and writing about it as soon as I know more. I hope you will read the Roma Series and leave your comments, impressions or suggestions either here or over at my place.

Bush A*&holery continues re: SCHIP

[image removed. damn those protected images! Picture the President making an idiotic face.]

Under the headline “White House Acts to Limit Health Plan for Children,” I just read this gem:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

So. During a recess, the president acts to prevent implementation of a law that Congress has passed and for which it could likely override what would be a very unpopular veto. Because the Bushies are so afraid (at least ostensibly) of the specter of socialism (so far off at this point that it’s laughable), that they prevent kids (KIDS!) from getting health insurance.

It gets worse. One of the conditions the Bush administration wants to impose is to mandate that states which set their cutoff for SCHIP participation at a level the federal government deems too high (above about $50,000 per year for a family of four) must require a family to be uninsured for a year before the children of that family can benefit from SCHIP. So a kid must be uninsured for a whole year before she or he can be covered by SCHIP. Nevermind what might happen during that year.

Jaw on the ground yet? Mine is. Can I hear it for the so-called champions of a culture of life?

Go read the whole article to find out more about the Bush administration’s vindictiveness.

Happy “I Hate Fat People” Week!

No, it’s not actually I Hate Fat People week, but it kind of feels like it. A (very questionable) new study says that obesity spreads like a “virus,” and having fat friends can make you fatter. Another says that mothers who work outside the home make their kids fat. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, obese girls are less likely to go to college. And now Dick Cavett has a thing or two to say about obese people daring to show their faces on television (or just about anywhere). It’s an incredibly hateful piece, and it demonstrates just how bigoted people can be towards overweight people — something further illustrated in a recent Zogby survey which found that 26 percent of Americans believe most people would least want to work with a morbidly obese person.

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Tenacious justification of choice does not equal freedom

I will be turning 30 this year and it seems every time I go to a social function another friend is announcing her belly is full of baby. For me it still seems so grown-up and I still prefer to sit at the kids table during Thanksgiving dinner. A few months ago one of my girlfriends had her first and only biological child. She married a high school teacher who had 2 other children from his previous marriage and they agreed that they did not want more children.

I was dismayed, although not surprised to hear how difficult it was for her to convince her doctor to perform a tubal ligation after the birth. Feeling that their family was complete, she insisted from her very first appointment that she wanted to have permanent birth control. Her physician simply would not consider it, and I am sure if it wasn’t for her pushy insistent nature she would not have been granted the procedure. Her choice was constantly challenged, not only by her doctor, but nurses, hospital staff, family and friends. You would think that by limiting herself to one biological child she was robbing herself and humanity of a messiah.

It is infuriating that women still have to “convince” doctors that we know what is right for us in regard to our reproductive choices. Considering the recent Supreme Court decision, it’s not shocking to discover that many still believe women to be fickle about our decisions that impact whether or not we reproduce. Medical and judicial establishments have a long history of pernicious dominion of women’s physical autonomy, not limited to abortion. When women have to be tenacious in justifying their choices to those who dictate and “grant permission” it is a reminder that emancipation is an illusion.

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Race, class, and street harassment

So, I have to admit – I was a little nervous when posting about street harassment the other day. I was really eager to open up the conversation, especially because it was focused on a queer/gender non-conforming/trans experience and perspective that I’m not used to hearing. But I was also worried about certain dynamics that tend to surface during these conversations, namely dynamics of race and class.

While women and other gender underprivileged folks of all races, ethnicities, and classes can and often do experience street harassment, the voices that I usually hear in these discussions are most often of women with either race or class privilege. This is not unique to conversations about street harassment: most larger conversations are dominated by the voices with the most privilege. In conversations about street harassment, though, this has an interesting and profound effect, as you’ll often have some very complex and conflicting power dynamics going on: men exerting their gender privilege and sexism over women who have class and/or race privilege over them.

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You keep on using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means, James Harkin

Talk about missing the point of feminists getting upset about sex trafficking.

There’s a big difference between illegal immigrants choosing consensual prostitution and illegal immigrants being lured with false promises and then abducted into sex slavery, moron.

Thankfully the commentors at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free mostly don’t fall for his argument about open borders (really, to argue for open borders he had to defend sex trafficking), except for the inevitable few who don’t think Harkin blamed feminists sufficiently in the post.

The real question is what is more immoral-the creation of a neoliberal world order which impoverishes so many and gets them to work for a dollar a day or the fact that some women might want to use their phzsical attractiveness to lure a lonely Western man who can provide for her without having to deal with Western women who seem cold, egotistical and obsessed with their careers.

This is a point made strikingly in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Platforme ( 2001 ). When whole swathes of the old Soviet Union were reduced to destitution because of shock therapy or where South East Asia is forced to reform by the IMF and introduced competitive neoliberal capitalism there the inevitable result is sex tourism if not out-and-out prostitution.

Feminists might well react with ‘moral disgust’. After all, who wants a system of neoliberal perfect competition in sex with a new supply of attractive and unspoilt women from countries where they value the male contribution?
Robin Brown, posting from Hungary

Nice.

Life without family planning

A new World Bank report warns that poor countries, wealthy donors, and aid agencies are losing sight of the value of contraception, family planning, and other reproductive health programmes in helping to boost economic growth.

The report – Population Issues in the 21st Century: The Role of the World Bank – stresses the urgency of reducing high birth rates which are strongly linked with endemic poverty, poor education, and high numbers of maternal and infant deaths.

This is what the anti-contraceptionists hiding behind “pro-life” rhetoric aren’t telling us all as they bleat about beautiful, precious babies. The result of their programs is beautiful, precious babies dying in infancy or growing up in hopeless squalor to bring more beautiful, precious babies into poverty in their turn. Generation upon generation of misery and despair.

There’s a lot to digest in the article, let alone the full report. I’ll just highlight a few snippets:

of the estimated 210 million women who become pregnant every year worldwide, more than 500,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth, and about one in five of them resorts to abortion because of poor access to contraception.

The report says that some 68,000 women die each year as a result of unsafe abortion, 5.3 million suffer temporary or permanent disability, and many end up being ostracized within their own communities.

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Monday Afternoon at the Welfare Office

The following is a post I originally wrote for the now-pretty-much-defunct Our Word, and then reposted again on my site. It is still extremely relevant: I’m still on food stamps (but not welfare), thousands of moms and their kids are still forced into waiting long hours for minimum benefits, and their time is still treated as completely without value.

So I spent a lovely couple of hours at the obligatorily ugly welfare office today, me and about 200 other moms & kids, waiting to see my worker for my yearly review in order to continue to get my monthly allotment of $152 in food stamps that comes between my family and starvation.

This is really funny, this cinder-block montrosity in the middle of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhood (aren’t they all) surrounded by corner stores and cheap furniture stores. Anyway, the funny thing is that they closed it down a couple of years ago for “remodeling” and then temporarily relocated (for 1 1/2 years) to the courthouse downtown while they remodeled the ugly welfare building. I heard a rumor that there was a rat problem, but what I really think is the folks in charge just needed to spend some federal block grant money. And fast.

During the remodeling period moms & their kids, who already have to spend bus time, bus-stop time, and sitting-in-ugly-welfare-building time, now had to re-route themselves to the downtown courthouse, which wasn’t prepared for the mom/baby/toddler onslaught. Not to mention that the few moms who have cars had to keep running outside every few minutes to feed the parking meter, thus taking the chance of missing their call to see their worker and then having to explain to the bored receptionists why they simply COULDN’T reschedule their appointment, they just went out to feed the meter, and why couldn’t they still see the worker? Please? Please, goddamnit???

For almost two years Milwaukee shut down the main welfare office on 12th and Vliet and forced the moms to hang out in the downtown courthouse, and when the remodeling was finished and the finished product was unveiled—IT LOOKED EXACTLY THE FUCKING SAME! Same concrete blocks, same boarded up places where windows are supposed to be, same dirty sidewalk and street where the only people allowed to park are the workers.

Except the city was nice and put a few frescos over the areas where windows are supposed to be, and re-named the building after some politician. So now I guess when a couple of moms are talking we aren’t supposed to say “oh I have to go to 12th & Vliet” which every poor person in the city knows about, but instead will feel a sense of purpose and self-worth when we talk about making our appointment at the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services Center.

Where business goes on as usual. Where you wait on plastic chairs alongside what seems like every teething baby in the city. Where caseworkers routinely lose families’ paperwork so the worker has no choice but to sanction 100% of that family’s foodstamp allowance for the month.

The place where we come to beg our workers to give us back our foodstamps or our medical assistance. The welfare building where we sit sometimes for hours in those plastic chairs.

What always gets me about places like the foodstamp welfare building, or the shiny new W2 buildings (Wisconsin Works, our euphemism for cash welfare), is the absolute acceptance that life is about waiting in line without complaint, cuz that’s what you get for daring to be poor and looking for a handout. Or trying to keep from losing your cash/food stamps/childcare/medical assistance/home/children. I call it the welfare waiting-line mentality, and I see the same thing anytime the city or the state or some private charity decides to give some stuff away.

Toys for Tots is an example. I’m sure every city and town in America has something similar, where you get free toys if you’re too poor to show your kids the wonderful American Christmas tradition of spend-and-go-into-debt. So you go to apply for Toys for Tots. You wait in line outside of some building alongside a couple hundred other moms. Then you get inside and prove to some worker somehow that you’re truly poor and not a middle class person trying to scam the charity out of free toys.

Once you’ve verified your poor-needy status, you get a number to–get this–go stand in another line in a couple of weeks, once more outside in December in Wisconsin–while you wait to get called in to choose one–sometimes two–toys for your kids. And in addition you get a few generic wrapped toys that basically amount to department store over-runs (a few years ago my daughter got a Scott Baio coloring book, I kid you not).

Few question this welfare waiting-line mentality. We wait in line at the food pantry. We wait in line at St. Ben’s meal program, where I dare anybody in the city of Milwaukee to drive to 9th and State after 5 pm during the week to see all the people (hundreds!) waiting in line for a hot meal.

We stand in line to get Energy Assistance, a worthy program that keeps We Energies (our gas/electric monopoly) from shutting off our electricity and gas in the middle of the summer. They used to shut it off in the winter too, but activists shamed the utilities with all the deaths they were causing and now they wait to shut us off til we no longer need electricity or gas–i.e. the summer. Such fun camping out in the dark, with no refrigerator or fan or lights. Such fun for the disabled who die in the summer heat because our bodies/hearts/immune systems are too weak. Such fun having no hot water–but who wants to take hot baths in the summer anyway? Or cooking gas–but wait, all the meat and milk in the fridge spoiled when they cut off your electric anyway, so I guess that’s not such a big issue. Besides, there’s always the barbecue grill.

But back to the welfare waiting-line mentality. Wait in line for emergency shelters, even if you’re black and blue and have just got to escape that battering ram of a man who lives in your house.

Wait at the Social Security office. Wait at the clothing bank that will give your kids a used winter coat or shoes. Wait, wait, wait.

But don’t forget what makes waiting really interesting and fun–it’s toting along the kids. The brand-new babies, the toddlers with never-ending head colds, the babies still in the womb. Tote along all the kids’ accessories–diapers, change of clothes, bottles, backpacks, toys to keep them from driving you crazy, books, drawing papers, crayons, snacks, lunches, homework if it’s during the schoolyear.

If you’re disabled it’s a case of standing in line with your walker or cane or oxygen. Standing in line is no fun when you can only stand for a few minutes at a time anyway. Think about what else disabled moms have to tote: wheelchairs, canes, oxygen, scooters, babies, babies in womb, toddlers with runny noses, bored older kids, and the inevitable kids’ accessories. Plus we have to tote along our tired, disabled bodies.

And if anybody still doubts that every one of us waiting-in-welfare-line moms deserve a mother of the year award, remember that most of us get to that waiting line BY BUS. And almost every one of us finds time for the waiting line after or between or before long hours of low-wage work in some fast-food restaurant or nursing home or day care center or unpaid workfare-for-welfare.

And yet our kids are reasonably well-behaved, considering that many of them are either up too early or too late, are standing out in all kinds of weather, or spend inordinate amounts of their lives in day care centers. Our kids’ hair is combed and braided (well, except my kid, who often runs screaming from the comb). Kids do homework, help with taking care of the younger kids, and cope with the situation with remarkable aplomb.

I’ve decided that there must be a giddy sense of power that comes from being able to command poor people to stand in line, at the drop of a hat. Social service agencies and poverty pimps know that as long they either terrorize people with the loss of benefits, or lure them with the promise of something free (but of implied scarcity, such as Toys for Tots or Energy Assistance), they will be able to command already-exhausted and over-extended moms and kids to wait, wait, wait.

Well hello there

Hello to everybody at Feministe, and thanks Jill for this chance to guest-blog. This is a much bigger gig than the one I usually do over at my place, so I’m understandably a bit nervous. So I’m going to calm my nerves by telling you a little about myself before I go to my first post.

Over at my place I focus mostly on poverty issues at the micro-personal level: this is what poverty looks like for my family and me, this is how we cope, and in the meantime, life still goes on. I started out wanting to make the lives of women and families in poverty more visible on the net, especially since it seemed to me when I began blogging that most of the blogs I was familiar with were mind-numbingly middle-class. Where were the voices that sounded like mine? Where were the families and issues like mine? So I started my little experiment in saying, without apology, that I am poor, I’ve been on welfare, I don’t regret it, and that I believe our society has a moral obligation to take care of each of its members. From healthcare to guaranteed income, from food to shelter, we are connected and our survival depends upon recognizing that connection.

I also believed it was necessary to combat some of the stereotypes of what a person in poverty looks like and sounds like. If I can make myself real to you, perhaps I can make poverty real, and not something that happens to some vague Other; perhaps I can make our common humanity more recognizable.

So those are my lofty goals; but a lot of the time I just get lazy and talk about my kids and my life and stuff like disability and losing my car and how shitty it is when the electric company comes to shut your power off. I talk about the things that impact me, my kids, my neighbors, the inner city of Milwaukee, and always make the political very, very personal.

So this little introduction seems to be turning into a post of its own! With that, I’ll be back in a short with something of real substance. And I look forward to being in the guest-room this week!

Another post about health care

I’ve seen this anti-Sicko article by Larry Elder a few times in the past week, and it’s so full of bullshit, I just can’t ignore it anymore. Brace yourselves, this is going to be another long one:

First, understand that lack of health-care “insurance” does not mean a lack of health care. Many emergency rooms, by law, provide medical care to anyone who walks in, whether an illegal or legal resident of this country.

Tell it to the parents, spouses and children of the 18,000 people who will die this year because they don’t have access to routine, preventative care without insurance. (That’s 49 deaths today, 49 tomorrow, 49 the next day… two every hour.)

The emergency room is only required to do the bare minimum in an emergency situation (sometimes they don’t even do that), and going to the ER is outrageously expensive if you don’t have insurance. In fact, hospitals routinely charge uninsured people 2-4 times more than what health insurance companies pay.

Second, when Moore asserts that 50 million Americans lack health care insurance, he most assuredly includes some of the estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal aliens living here.

80% of the uninsured are native or naturalized US citizens.

Nearly half go without health insurance only for four months or less, usually while between jobs.

That’s funny… Kaiser Family Foundation says that 59% of uninsured adults have gone without insurance for at least two years.

Others with employment could easily add health-care insurance through their work for a very small premium.

Only 61% of employers offer health insurance to some of their employees. Many employees are ineligible or can’t afford those “very small premiums.” When my ex worked at Denny’s, for example, they offered health insurance… it would have taken more than HALF his paycheck. I’m sure premiums like that are nothing for a nationally syndicated talk show host, but for average folks it’s an impossible burden.

Many without health-care insurance consist of young people (18 million uninsured are between the ages of 18 and 34) who consider themselves — given their youth and good health — unlikely to face large health-care costs.

I’m 18-34, and I don’t consider myself “unlikely to face large health-care costs.” I would love to have health insurance, if only we could afford it. I’m sick and tired of seeing this little “fact” that 18-34-year-olds don’t want health care. It’s a goddamn lie.

Over 14 million of the uninsured, according to the Census Bureau, live in households earning $50,000 or more annually. Over 7 million are in households earning more than $75,000 a year.

Two-thirds of the uninsured population are either in poverty or just above poverty.

A small number of the uninsured include criminals. Should taxpayers provide health care for them, as well?

Why not? Most criminals aren’t eligible for the death penalty. Why is it OK to kill them by neglect?

But according to an ABC News-Kaiser Family Foundation-USA Today survey, 89 percent of Americans with health-care insurance say they are, in fact, satisfied with the quality of care they receive.

Of course they are; most of them are healthy. They haven’t faced a major illness and been weeded out by the health insurance industry yet:

Most people in countries with universal health care are satisfied, too. The difference is that their satisfaction is justified. They don’t have to worry about losing coverage. They never have to consider getting a divorce, quitting their jobs and selling off their assets so they can be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid to save their child’s life. They don’t have to worry about going bankrupt due to medical costs. They don’t have to worry about any of that shit.

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