Class – Page 4 – Feministe

Matthew Boyle steals from the government to prove that poor people don’t need food.

Wow, this is really horrible you guys: Did you know that you can use food stamps to buy actual food? Thank goodness right-wing investigative “journalists” are on the case.

Matthew Boyle lied on his food stamps application, thereby defrauding the government and receiving social services to which he was not actually entitled. He then went to Whole Foods and bought a single gourmet meal with the generous $105 in benefits he received for the whole month. The next month he bought $100 worth of candy.

The point, I guess, is that since Matthew Boyle defrauded the government and spent the money he stole on organic food and Rite Aid candy, food stamps are bad. Because poor people should not buy food. Definitely not organic food. Definitely not non-organic candy either. Or maybe the point is that the government should regulate what people are able to buy with their food stamps? (Boyle, of course, is a small-government-promoting Tea Partier). It’s unclear, actually, what the point of his article is, other than to admit to the world that he stole from the government — which is exactly what Republicans routinely accuse poor people of doing. Apparently he couldn’t find an actual poor person who wanted to spend their $105 for a month of food on Skittles, and so he did it himself. Awesome.

Amanda has more. Perhaps poor people just don’t need to eat more than once a month?

Cash-Transfer Programs Show Remarkable Success in Fight Against Global Poverty

Last week, Newsweek published a story about how a growing strategy against global poverty is showing strong signs of success. The plan isn’t about infrastructure, or making necessities like food, water, and education more readily available. It involves handing out cash directly to those who need it.

As she approaches her 50th birthday this month, Zanele Figlan has seen firsthand what does and does not work in the fight against global poverty. Living in a shack on the outskirts of Cape Town, her family serves as a reminder of South Africa’s 15-year failed effort to house its poor. Instead, Figlan says, the most effective help she receives is the $1 a day the government provides for each of her two youngest sons, which amounts to more than double her monthly income and allows her to make sure they’re well fed. It also means she can afford to send them to a reputable school in a wealthier part of the city, something that was previously unthinkable.

At first glance, simply handing out cash to the poor may seem naive. When cash-transfer programs, as they’re known in the parlance of international aid, first rolled out in Latin America in the 1990s, they were met with skepticism, especially from development agencies more intent on structural reform than redistributing wealth. More than a decade later, however, evidence shows that even modest payments grant the world’s poorest the power to make their own decisions; it also indicates that they make smart choices, especially on matters of health and education. Today, cash-transfer programs are thriving in some 45 developing countries and helping more than 110 million families. The World Bank has put at least $5.5 billion into nearly a hundred different projects.

What some may find most shocking of all is that attaching restrictions to the funds actually decreases their overall impact:

One of the biggest impacts of these programs: education. Since its launch more than a decade ago, South Africa’s Child Support Grant has cut the number of children out of school in half. South Africans are free to use their payment any way they wish, but some countries require school enrollment to keep the money coming in. “It changes the dynamics of the way people conceptualize welfare,” says John Hoddinott, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “Both parties have rights and responsibilities.” In many cases, however, simply having cash in hand allows parents to keep their children in the classroom. “Poor households … need the labor of their children; that’s why they don’t send them to school,” says Santiago Levy, the architect of Mexico’s cash-transfer program, now called Oportunidades. But what works in one country doesn’t always work in another. In Malawi, one of the least-developed countries in the world, the World Bank compared two different groups of school-age girls: one was given cash only if they went to school; the other was simply given the money. The results showed little difference in attendance. In fact, those without conditions fared better when it came to reducing teen pregnancy and teen marriage, factors that often pull Malawian girls out of the classroom.

Now, it should be against emphasized such ideas aren’t really “new.” Activists working on poverty issues both locally and globally have advocated similar plans for a long time. But they can certainly use all of the good press that they can get, because convincing people in powerful positions, and those who vote them into office, that the idea has incredibly strong merits is an uphill battle.

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Money Is Power

You probably also noticed that the economy isn’t doing so well, and it isn’t producing jobs. Instead of caring about the wage collapsing effects that are draining public funds, the people who were wrong about everything in the first place and missed the crisis coming, have busied themselves with slashing the social safety net for ordinary people.

In the middle of this complete economic failure, promises to the middle class aren’t worth much and the kinds of jobs that always sustained a middle class seem to be vanishing.

This is the political climate in which we have to work to close the gender pay gap. There are uncanny similarities to when the New Deal coalition fell apart in the 1970s, as eerily highlighted by Jefferson Cowie; the early racial integration of the labor force had the bad fortune to coincide with a contraction that decreased opportunities for (almost) everyone.

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Transit cuts hurt car drivers too

The Post-Gazette has a story today detailing the costs of transit cuts in the city of Pittsburgh.

The city’s Port Authority needs $47 million to avoid cuts of 35 percent. According to the P-G, the Port Authority would have to reduce services hours by 35 percent, lay off 555 employees, and eliminate more than 40 routes, resulting in service ending entirely to over 50 communities. Pittsburgh public transit would lose 15 to 22 percent of its ridership under these cuts.

This could be devastating to many communities, and leave a lot of people stranded. Either you walk or you drive to wherever you have to go. Don’t have a car? Can’t walk that far? Sorry, you won’t be going to work today. Or bringing groceries home.

But people who ride public transportation are not the only people who would be affected by these cuts…

Chris Sandvig, project manager of the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group’s GoBurgh Initiative, which has studied the benefits of transit in stimulating development, said Wednesday the actual costs would be far greater than those absorbed by displaced riders.

He estimated that $100 million to $200 million in infrastructure spending would be required to accommodate the additional traffic generated.

With Downtown parking already scarce and the city proposing to lease its parking garages to a private operator, increased demand could cause prices to skyrocket — an impact that would be felt by all commuters, not just former transit riders, he said.

“We really don’t have anywhere to put those cars,” Mr. Sandvig said.

Much of the additional money spent by former transit riders “doesn’t stay in southwestern Pennsylvania,” he added. “It leaves,” going to oil companies and automobile manufacturers.

Parking in the city of Pittsburgh is already a contentious affair. And driving? Do you really want to ask?

I grew up in California and I am used to navigating snarled, jammed, poorly-designed and/or simply overloaded roads and highways. It’s highly frustrating! But I know how to handle it. But I can tell you that driving in western Pennsylvania, especially the city proper, is nothing like I’ve ever experienced on the west coast. It’s not just that the roads are jammed; that’s true in any city. It’s the way Pennsylvania doesn’t know the value of a good sign — they’ll tell you when a lane is going to shift three feet, but they won’t tell you where the hell you are. That makes it rather difficult to figure out where you’re going, too.

Ahem. Anyway.

Imagine how bad it is trying to drive in a city already packed to the brim with wheeled vehicles (and the occasional duck boat) and occupied parking. Now imagine adding another 16,000 to 24,000 drivers.

Just because you don’t personally ride public transit doesn’t mean transit policy doesn’t affect you.

Cross-posted at three rivers fog.

Oscar Grant, Audre Lorde, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the question of loving our enemies.

[Trigger Warning: discussions of sexual assault and deadly State force.]

Love your enemies.

For feminists, is there any phrase more terrifyingly reactionary?

Love your enemies. Even the one who assaults you in private and reaps accolades as a brilliant community organizer in public. (One of my mom’s former boyfriends.)

Love your enemies. Even the ones who throw cherry bombs at you in the school bathrooms. (My dad’s fellow students at Yale, in the 1950s.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you women should be seamstresses, not lawyers. (Opa — my mom’s dad.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you, as a child, to bit down on your lower lip so it won’t grow too big. (Grandma — my dad’s mom.)

Love your enemies. Even the white police officer who shot and killed you while you were lying helpless, face-down on the ground with another officer’s knee on your neck. (Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed Jan 1, 2009 in an Oakland subway station.)

Jury deliberations began yesterday for Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant. All of Oakland awaits the verdict. Both police and non-profits are making preparations to quell the “violence” anticipated after this “deadly lightning rod” of a trial.

Deadly? Violence? According to CNN’s coverage, not one single person was seriously injured in the 2009 protests following Grant’s death. Nobody injured, let alone killed. Windows were broken; dumpsters set afire. Is this violence? Sounds more like property destruction to me.

Whatever happens, whether riots flare up or not, things will once again settle, and the ordinary state violence will resume as usual. After all, there’s only one individual on trial — not an entire racist police force armed with deadly weapons. Not an entire patriarchal, militaristic, anti-immigrant, plutocratic (ruled by wealth) law enforcement system. Not California, the US state running “the largest prison system in the Western world.” That won’t be standing trial anytime soon. So what are we supposed to do?

Love your enemies.

What an injunction, huh? Just how are we supposed to achieve this? And why?

The “how” I’ll leave aside for now. Let’s focus on the why.

Why should we love our enemies? Why not hate them? Or at least get angry?

Audre Lorde, one of my all-time favorite feminists, has one answer. With hatred we harm ourselves, and anger only takes us halfway to where we need to go. From “Eye To Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”:

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We like dancing and we look divine

We don’t have ideology; we don’t have theology; we dance.
-Shinto monk to Joseph Campbell

It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it.
– my version of the oft-paraphrased Emma Goldman line. also the tattoo on my forearm.

From an elite perspective, there is one inherent problem with traditional festivities and ecstatic rituals and that is their leveling effect, the way in which they dissolve rank and other forms of social difference.
-Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets

It could be a bad joke. What do a Shinto monk, Emma Goldman, and Barbara Ehrenreich have in common? Though it could be a lot of things, really. But right now, I’m thinking about dancing. Dancing as ecstatic ritual. Dancing as celebration. Dancing as bonding, as a way to work out problems, as self-care and love for your body.

Dancing has been reality-show-ified (see below! ha) and commodified and sold to us again and again, but it remains something that anyone can do. It’s not about perfection and skill, at its most basic level, it’s about moving to a beat you can feel as well as hear.

Women are so often divorced from our bodies, taught to see them as a site of shame. They’re not perfect! But dancing has always been a way for me to reconnect with mine, to love it, moving it, using it, reminding myself that while it is not “perfect” it is strong, and it is mine, and it gives me pleasure. I dance in the elevator to music on my iPod and I dance in my apartment, alone, while the dog cocks his head and follows me.

Trying to write about dancing is difficult because I’m always fighting to make the words dance as well, to put a sentence together that echoes the feeling when the first chords of that perfect song (for me it’s “Rebel Rebel” or “Lust for Life” or “Just Like Heaven”) brush your ears and then swell and I can’t sit still any longer. If I’m somewhere that I can’t just dance I have to move anyway, twisting my waist and moving my hips in my seat, bobbing my head, shimmying my shoulders just a little. Writing about dancing should make you want to dance.

Nothing is more threatening to a hierarchical religion than the possibility of ordinary laypeople finding their own way into the presence of the gods. -Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich was writing about ecstatic ritual as a form of solidarity, as something that breaks down all the boundaries between classes and races and genders. She wrote of Carnival, where costumes and masks let you shed your very identity and toss social norms to the winds. She writes of a revolution that could come through dancing, not through armies marching. And isn’t the use of bands to march to just a way of stylizing and controlling the dance?

Music is my religion, or as close as this non-practicing, tattooed Jew gets. The slam-dancing of the punk rock shows of my wayward youth where boys find ways to dance touching one another without having to admit that desire, the high school dances where my girlfriends and I felt no such shame, holding hands and spinning, dipping each other. My college days where I lost my fear and scrambled up on a go-go girl’s box on a New Orleans stage or climbed up on the bar in my red glitter platforms and shook it for everyone to see. A few weeks ago on a London dancefloor mostly empty where I spun madly across the floor because there was no one to get in my way and then sat down for a breather and made a new friend for life.

It’s not a surprise that a few of my college boyfriends were bouncers in the club I danced at twice a week, 80s Thursdays and Glam Rock Saturdays, because it was their job to stand and watch the dancefloor and not join in but they watched me as I got bolder and bolder and it was Bowie, Madonna, the Bangles, Prince, Michael, T. Rex, Iggy, Siouxsie and more who brought me there. High school girl’s neurosis about extra pounds around my waist melting away as the makeup ran down my cheeks. No room for hate on the dancefloor, baby, not even self-hate.

To extract pleasure from lives of grinding hardship and oppression is a considerable accomplishment; to achieve ecstasy is a kind of triumph. -Ehrenreich

Social justice work can get you down. This morning I read what Matt wrote at 4am and though he gives me too much credit it’s true, this work crawls into your soul and hurts. And we need to realize that taking our pleasures in the face of it is liberatory in itself. In a world that denies you basic humanity sometimes, where you can be thrown out of a city or country or job you desperately need, where some corporation’s cutting corners can lead to the death of your livelihood or even the end of your life, it is positively fucking revolutionary to find something beautiful. And to do it in a group, a roomful of people moving at the same fever pitch?

Well, there’s a reason that conservatives have always tried to shut down the party, and it ain’t their concern over offensive rock and rap lyrics or drug deaths. No, it’s because they know full well what happens when we all reach that moment together when we look around and we don’t know how much the person next to us makes or where they were born or what their citizenship status is or who they sleep with or voted for, we just smile because we are there, together, and none of it matters but our basic humanness.

In my perfect society we’d subsidize musicians and public free concerts (I love you, Celebrate Brooklyn!) and dance nights to the level we subsidize corporate oil drilling and weapon-making and bailouts of massive banks. And we would all dance more. Dance however we define dancing. We would spend less time looking in and wanting (Ehrenreich is great on the difference between spectacle and festival) and more time being and being together.

Festivity–like bread or freedom–can be a social good worth fighting for. -Ehrenreich, because she’s RIGHT.

So what exactly should female attorneys wear?

This article is kind of horrifying. It covers an event at the Chicago Bar Association, where they highlighted fashion Dos and Don’ts for lawyers. Above the Law brought in two writers to cover the event, one of whom (Attractive Nuisance) seems pretty bright and is understandably horrified at all the What Not To Wear lectoring, and the other of whom (Legally Fabulous) uses her personal blog to compare herself to Elle Woods, and seems to invest a lot in the idea that female “appropriateness” means not being slutty, and slutty also kind of correlates to looking poor and/or female. So, you know. They had different takes, to say the least. While it sounds like the panel attempted to be gender egalitarian, the advice for men boils down to “make sure your suit fits and is clean,” whereas the advice for women is 40-parts long, all detailing ways to not be trampy. Also, even though it is 2010, women should wear skirts always. Also pantyhose. Says Legally Fabulous:

If you’re wearing a skirt, you have to wear tights or pantyhose. Get over it. I’m still of the old, conservative school of thought that women should be in skirt suits. The Honorable A. Benjamin Goldgar, a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy court for the Northern District of Illinois disagreed. He said he doesn’t even notice if women are in skirts or pants in court. I’d say for an interview – stick with a skirt.

Attractive Nuisance, God bless her, was a little more skeptical of the advice offered by the panelists, and didn’t seem to take too kindly to the laundry list of ways that women are apparently soiling the legal profession with our hair and our jewelry. She summarizes the advice to female attorneys thusly:

The chorus of female attorneys added some caveats: make sure your suit is not too fitted, wear flats, wear minimal jewelry, wear minimal makeup, do not wear hair in a pony-tail, do not wear hair down in a distracting way, wear pantyhose, do not wear open-toe shoes (especially in front of a jury says Justice Goldgar), do not wear peep-toe shoes, and do not wear dark nail polish (avoid burgundy, cautioned Professor Collins). Wear a shirt under your suit that is not too tight, not low-cut, not bright colored, not patterned, not ruffle-y, and not too feminine. Finally, when going on a job interview, do not carry a recognizable brand-name handbag because you are trying to project the image that you need money. Oh, and do not wear your engagement ring if it is large because it may anger your women interviewers and cause jealousy (and perhaps rage).

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New York Domestic Workers Fight to Pass Bill of Rights

Via Equal Writes, the BBC has recently reported on the struggle of domestic workers in New York state to pass a bill of rights for those in their line of work. In this context, the term domestic workers refers to nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, of which there are over 200,000 in NY alone. Domestic workers are overwhelmingly women — they are also very disproportionately low-income, women of color, and immigrants. And under U.S. law, they have very few legal rights and are subjected to all kinds of heinous abuse by unscrupulous employers.

For 17 years, Barbara Young from Barbados has worked as a nanny in New York, arriving at 0700 to care for the children of high-flying parents, often working through the night to care for newborn babies.

Because domestic workers are specifically excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of the 1930s, nannies operate in the shadows, their pay and conditions determined by their employers.

Ms Young has had to endure a lot over the years.

She told me how one employer paid her the bare minimum for her daily nannying work, and then expected her to sleep in a room with an infant, and feed that baby overnight, all for no extra pay.

“Because you work in the home, people don’t see you as an employee. It’s seen as women’s work, not proper work,” says Ms Young.

…

Ms Young believes the bill would make a huge difference to her.

“It would require notice of termination, paid sick leave, paid holidays, the right to a day off, and it would recognise domestic work as real work.”

The bill would also give nannies the right to organise collectively.

Because domestic workers are frequently economically vulnerable, vulnerable to deportation, and/or likely to face racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and other prejudices, it’s usually not so easy as “just quit.” Abusive employers, of course, know this and use it to their advantage. And legal action is rarely an option.

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David Brooks has a question.

He would like to know if you would rather win an Oscar and be stuck with a cheating husband, or have zero personal or professional accomplishments but have a really happy marriage. If you take more than three seconds to decide, he says, you are an idiot.

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

Uh-oh. I’ll bet things are even worse for people like me who have no marriage at all. Perhaps now is the time to start adding to my cat collection?

He continues:

If the relationship between money and well-being is complicated, the correspondence between personal relationships and happiness is not. The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. According to another, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.

So if that’s the case and if marriage is so great, why is Brooks not a bigger advocate of marriage equality? Why isn’t he a bigger advocate of feminism and gender equality, which helps to improve marriages and lowers divorce rates? Why isn’t he a bigger advocate of contraception, which improves marital happiness by allowing couples to have sex without having more children than they can manage? Heck, if we are against Things That Make Us Sad, why doesn’t he support commuting reforms?

Brooks is right that the relationship between money and happiness is complicated. But so is the relationship between marriage and happiness. And the “traditional” marriages that conservatives, including Brooks, tend to fetishize? Are not the happy-making kind.

Also: It’s pretty easy to wax poetic about how great marriage is when you take for granted your right to enter into one. Just like it’s pretty easy to talk about how money doesn’t bring happiness when you have more than enough money to provide for the basics.

The New Jim Crow

A must-read article about race, class, caste and the American prison system. A few facts from the piece:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

The mass incarceration of African Americans over the past 30 years is primarily related to the War on Drugs — a convenient cover for a program essentially targeted at the black community. The talking points all came back to the supposed rates of drug-related violence, but that doesn’t exactly compute with historical fact:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The vast majority of people arrested for drug-related offenses are non-violent, and are arrested for possession rather than selling. Just read the whole thing.