Poverty – Page 4 – Feministe

Selling Food Stamps for Kid’s Shoes

I’m incredibly far behind on the recent Colorlines investigation into the practice of poor U.S. families selling food stamps for cash. But now that I’ve finally gotten to reading it, it’s certainly worth the time to bring it to the attention to those of you who have not.

Due to the welfare “reform” of the 90s, which placed time limits on how long one can receive cash welfare assistance, a substantial and growing number of families who have already used what the government is willing to supply literally have nothing else left. More still simply do not have enough for what they need. In order to buy basic necessities (soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent) and pay bills, they’re forced to illegally sell their food stamps as their only option for making ends meet. According to the article, not only were a staggering one in eight Americans (one in four among children) using food stamps in November, but about 6 million Americans receiving food stamps say that they have no other income.

And yes, women, and particularly women of color, are by far suffering the greatest impact:

Blacks, Latinas and Asians nationwide are about two times more likely than whites to have been pushed off cash assistance as a result of time limits, rather than for another reason, according to a ColorLines analysis of 2008 data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Because women-led families make up 90 percent of TANF cases that have been closed, women of color like Eva are now more likely to be living without access to any cash assistance.

For many people then, food stamps are all they have.

Not discussed in the article is the conundrum of the legions in the U.S.’s bootstraps obsessed culture who will insist that women selling food stamps is not a sign that our system is broken, failing desperately, inherently cruel, and on the brink of collapse, but evidence that those receiving any assistance at all are “scamming” the system, and do not even deserve the scraps the middle-class is willing to throw their way. After all, this situation didn’t occur by accident; it was predicted and chosen.

But what the Colorlines investigation does do is follow the life of a woman, called Eva, who is unable to find a job, and must both sell her food stamps and run up a tab at her local store every month in order to ensure that she and her daughters can survive. It’s also the result of interviews with several other women in similar circumstances, as well as service providers. If you haven’t read it yet, go do that.

via Racialicious

Workers With Disabilities Frequently Paid Less Than Minimum Wage

Straight out of my “things I’m embarrassed to have been sitting on since before the New Year” file comes this article about the fact that in the U.S., many people with disabilities are working jobs that pay below the already paltry minimum wage. And when I say “below,” I mean way below. What makes this most shocking to me isn’t the fact that people with disabilities are being exploited by unscrupulous employers — that much, I was aware of — but that it’s entirely legal under federal law.

The minimum wage might have been bumped up to $7.25 an hour in 2009, but that number means little to the over 300 workers with mental disabilities working at state-run homes for the people with disabilities in Iowa. That’s because they were making, on average, $0.60 per hour for their work. One employee was even making an average of a mere $0.11 per hour, a sweatshop-level wage in any country. Yet paying employees with mental disabilities piddling wages is legal in Iowa and the rest of the country. Should it be acceptable for companies and government to pay workers pennies an hour because of a mental disability?

The law under which Woodward and Glenwood, the two homes that are being looked at for providing very low wages, were able to pay so little is a controversial law meant to provide job opportunities for people with mental disabilities. The idea is that employers will have an incentive to hire people who might not be able to perform tasks at the same level as non-disabled employees because they can pay them less. However, this law has always been controversial among disability rights and labor rights advocates, and has been increasingly questioned since a Texas-based Turkey company was found to be exploiting and trafficking disabled workers.

It shoudn’t surprise us at all that those who think it’s totally cool for people to be working for $.11 an hour support their position by arguing that if employers aren’t allowed to pay sweat shop wages, jobs will be lost. Because that is the exact same argument that those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage use every single time topic comes up.

And if those of us who are progressive don’t accept that argument against a livable wage for able-bodied workers, we sure as hell shouldn’t be accepting it for those with disabilities, either. It’s certainly true that the unemployment rate among people with disabilities is significantly higher than among able-bodied people. But it’s also true that many other employment inequities exist. For example, blacks have a much higher unemployment rate than whites — in fact (while there is of course significant overlap between the two groups), black Americans in the workforce have an unemployment rate the same as Americans with disabilities in the workforce — and I think we know that the reason for that is discrimination of various kinds, not the minimum wage. And discrimination is never solved through further methods of discrimination, only compounded.

Which isn’t to say that ending the legal use of sweat shop level wages for people with disabilities would solve the problems of ableism, exploitation of workers, poverty, or unemployment/difficulty in finding work. It wouldn’t. Just like with the conversation about the minimum wage in general, it’s only a small start to a wider solution that involves creating a more equitable society overall, including for those workers (like undocumented workers) who aren’t recognized by the government in the first place. But when people are working for pennies per hour, with the full permission and approval of our government, it strikes me as a step that, while insufficient, is sorely needed.

h/t FWD/Forward

IRS Targets Single Mother Because of Her Low Income

This is absurd. Via Raven’s Eye, Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times has uncovered a case in which the IRS audited a single mother with two kids, who earns $10 an hour at Supercuts and lives with her parents. What was their reason for doing so? Random selection? An incorrectly completed return? No, they just thought that she was too poor to be telling the truth:

“I asked the IRS lady straight upfront — ‘I don’t have anything, why are you auditing me?’ ” Porcaro recalled. “I said, ‘Why me, when I don’t own a home, a business, a car?’ ”

The answer stunned both Porcaro and the private tax specialist her dad had gotten to help her.

“They showed us a spreadsheet of incomes in the Seattle area,” says Dante Driver, an accountant at Seattle’s G.A. Michael and Co. “The auditor said, ‘You made eighteen thousand, and our data show a family of three needs at least thirty-six thousand to get by in Seattle.”

“They thought she must have unreported income. That she was hiding something. Basically they were auditing her for not making enough money.”

Seriously? An estimated 60,000 people in Seattle live below the poverty line — meaning they make $11,000 or less for an individual or $22,000 for a family of four. Does the IRS red-flag them for scrutiny, simply because they’re poor?

The IRS must either think that the United States is just filled to the brim with liars, or that they receive an awful lot of tax returns for people who don’t exist. A whole lot of people in this country, not just in Seattle, live under the poverty line — even though the poverty line is actually placed ridiculously low. And more still live above the official poverty line while still being poor. It’s usually not pretty. It’s sure as hell not just. And often, those people need the help of friends and family to get by. But as they will tell you, it can be done — because, simply, it has to.

Department of Housing and Urban Development Announces Protections for LGBT Community

Earlier this week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced plans to ensure that people eligible for their programs will not be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. From the press release:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan today announced a series of proposals to ensure that HUD’s core housing programs are open to all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

“The evidence is clear that some are denied the opportunity to make housing choices in our nation based on who they are and that must end,” said Donovan. “President Obama and I are determined that a qualified individual and family will not be denied housing choice based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The initiatives announced today will be a proposed rule that will provide the opportunity for public comment. The proposed rule will:

clarify that the term “family” as used to describe eligible beneficiaries of our public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs include otherwise eligible lesbian, gay, bi-sexual or transgender (LGBT) individuals and couples. HUD’s public housing and voucher programs help more than three million families to rent an affordable home. The Department’s intent to propose new regulations will clarify family status to ensure its subsidized housing programs are available to all families, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

require grantees and those who participate in the Department’s programs to comply with local and state non-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation or gender identity; and

specify that any FHA-insured mortgage loan must be based on the credit-worthiness of a borrower and not on unrelated factors or characteristics such as sexual orientation or gender identity.

In addition to issuance of proposed rule, HUD will commission the first-ever national study of discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the rental and sale of housing.

The regulatory process is to begin immediately, with the study following soon after.

Ted Kennedy’s Call to Service (And How I Got Into Harvard)

ted kennedy in hyannisport

(x-posted at Social Science Lite)

It’s not wholly surprising, given the current political climate, that Ted Kennedy’s legacy has been framed by the mass media in relation to healthcare reform. But Kennedy’s political and public impact reached far beyond bipartisan policy legislation. For me at least, Kennedy’s most powerful (and, successful) leadership came in the form of support for service and collective social change.

Following his death, Be The Change founder/City Year co-founder/potential candidate for Kennedy’s vacant senate seat Alan Khazei offered a moving tribute that highlighted Kennedy’s influence on nationwide opportunities for service and civic engagement. In part, Khazei wrote:

Senator Kennedy is the true godfather of the service movement. Without his tireless commitment, this movement as it thrives today never would have come about. He indelibly changed the fabric of America by not just inspiring, but personally enabling millions of citizens to give their time and skills to improve their communities and country. Through his visionary and bipartisan leadership in authoring the National and Community Service Act of 1990, the legislation that created AmeriCorps in 1993, and most recently with his good friend Senator Orrin Hatch, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009, he created the infrastructure that empowers people all across our nation to put their energy and idealism to work addressing critical social needs.

While Kennedy’s service-oriented community development legislation continues to empower and invigorate communities across the country, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the personal impact these organizations had on my own life.

In the summer of 2006, I received a community-based research fellowship through the University of Michigan. The fellowship paired me with a non-profit community development corporation in Detroit, where I created and administered a neighborhood-wide survey. But the non-profit didn’t foot the bill for my services. Nor did Michigan. Instead, my research was subsidized by funds from AmeriCorps. In fact, two other Michigan students also worked at this particular non-profit for the summer, and both were funded by AmeriCorps. One was a graduate student in urban planning, and catalogued the non-profit’s real estate holdings. The other, an undergraduate student in Michigan’s business school, created and organized the Northwest Detroit Farmer’s Market, now in its third year of operation. If you know anything about Detroit, you know how monumental it is to offer fresh produce to the city’s residents. And all this work was made possible by AmeriCorps funding.

My research with the non-profit later became my research on the non-profit, forming the basis for my senior Honors thesis. That research became the basis for my applications to graduate school, which led me to Harvard where I study inequality and public policy. So in a Kevin Bacon-esque “six degrees of social justice separation,” Ted Kennedy helped me get into Harvard.

On a larger sociological level, Kennedy’s commitment to government-funded service organizations and legislation influences two related, critical components of urban poverty: civic engagement and social organization. When work disappears from central cities, as Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has so brilliantly argued, the rhythm and pulse of neighborhoods are disrupted. A lack of employment opportunities not only influences neighborhood economic stability, but it also removes valuable role models from day-to-day urban life. Social organization—the kind of informal rules and regulations that act as social control mechanisms and structure interpersonal interactions—is undermined when men and women don’t work regular, consistent hours.

Moreover neighborhood poverty, in part influenced by the aforementioned lack of employment opportunities, often reduces levels of civic engagement. Low levels of civic engagement often means less community cohesion and cooperation, which suppresses political power and places formidable barriers against paths to upward mobility. But organizations like AmeriCorps and other service groups empower impoverished neighborhoods and encourage active civic engagement—powerful mechanisms that help reduce inequality.

To be sure, service organizations like AmeriCorps are not without their conservative critics. But that’s probably just a testament to their continued relevance and effectiveness in bringing about social change. It’s also a testament to Ted Kennedy’s lasting legacy, one that stretches far beyond the fight for healthcare reform.

The Women of Country Music

I have to tell you, as much as I like country music and as much as I sit around and piss and moan about how great it used to be, it’s sometimes very difficult for me to listen to the women of country music. It’s almost a relief that the industry is turning itself into a landing pad for girls that could have been on the Disney channel and washed up rockers, because you don’t have to turn your face too far towards the past before you hear songs that make you realize that “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” is about the understatement of the century.

I was at the International Country Music Conference this spring and one of the presenters gave a talk about Patsy Cline’s reception in her own home town. If I were to tell you now that there’s opposition to preserving her home and making a museum because of how “trashy” she was, do I even have to tell you that they booed her and made her cry even after she was one of the most famous women in the country? And yet, god damn it, if she didn’t crash a parade in her own home town, her and her band, at the end of it, in her fancy car, driving like they belonged there. Which, of course, they did.

Still, it breaks my heart.

Or the other day someone was talking about how Loretta Lynn’s dad married her off at thirteen to her husband, Mooney, with advice about how to beat her to keep her in line. In Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s book, Finding Her Voice, Lynn says, “After we had kids of our own, Doo [another nickname of Mooney’s] would take a belt to me as quick as he would to one of them,” and “It’s funny how it’s the old hurts that never heal.”

Of course she also said, “He never hit me one time that I didn’t hit him back twice.” But to me that sounds like bravado. But hell, so is getting in your car and joining a parade you’ve been clearly excluded from. Bravado doesn’t exclude action, I guess.

There’s another moment in Finding Her Voice, when Lynn is talking about getting grooming tips from Cline.

“You know, for years my husband wouldn’t let me wear makeup or cut my hair,” Loretta said years later. “To shave my legs, I had the children watch at the doors and the windows in case he came home. He didn’t want it, wouldn’t allow it. But I wanted to do just like Patsy Cline did, to be as pretty as her.”

I’m sitting here right now with legs I haven’t shaved in a week, hair I haven’t cut in a year, and no makeup. And, to me, that’s symbolic of my ability to buck certain gender norms, to have a little freedom from what’s culturally expected of me. But how can there be any doubt that being able to wear make-up and do your hair and shave your legs was a profound symbol of independence for Lynn?

Growing up, I didn’t feel poor. I thought we were middle class. We weren’t the richest folks in the towns we lived in. We weren’t the poorest. But going to college was a revelation about just where I stood in the pecking order, a very unfun revelation. And when I was 27, I got a raise that meant I was making more than my dad made when I was a senior in high school. And I was eating rice for dinner. It’s true that he didn’t have to pay for housing, but I didn’t have three kids.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it threw me for a big loop–making more than my dad and still struggling to get by. It made me feel like he and my mom had sheltered us from a lot, especially about how dependent our whole family had been on my mom working.

And I always thought I would get married to a man I hated.

I know that’s a strange thing to say out loud, but it’s one of the things you learn, if you spend a lot of time in church kitchens (and if you’re a girl of any age and your family was active in the church, back in my day, it meant you were going to spend a lot of women-only time in church kitchens), is that the era of 1974-1996 was full of smart, funny, articulate women who had given birth to your friends, who were tied, through marriage to men who were ruining their lives.

None of these women were feminists.

In fact, that was often very clearly articulated, not only in the familiar “I’m not a feminist, but…” formation, but also in the “Well, I’m not a man-hater like those feminists, but…”

The feminist monster gave room for women to talk about the kind of stuff that would just tear your heart out and to try to figure out what to do about it.

And the women they listened to on the radio, so many of them those great women of country music, seemed to help them make it through, which, to me, feels like a very feminist thing.

I want Loretta Lynn to be a great feminist hero. But I get why she wouldn’t call herself a feminist. Not only because the things that helped liberate her felt like ways to keep me stuck, and visa versa, but because being able to say “I’m not a woman’s libber” gave her a little wiggle room to act like one.

Fallout from the Kingston Ash Spill

Last December 22, a retaining wall at the Kingston Fossil Plant (run by the TVA) gave way and dumped over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry across a great swath of Roane County, Tennessee. It was one of the worst, if not the worst, man-made environmental disasters in our country’s history. People’s homes were swept away. Nearby rivers and streams were poisoned. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, or what you’ve heard about it.

The experience, even over here in Nashville, was that it was just a little something that happened, not that bad. It’s only been in the ensuing months, as the TVA’s obfuscations have become clearer that the scope of the disaster is coming into focus.

All along the way, it seems, we have made deals with the Devil.

Oh, the TVA. Yes, it brought electricity to the South and with it, air conditioning, and with that, modern civilization (I over-simplify some, but only a little). In exchange, though, there are towns sitting at the bottom of vast lakes, ‘lost’ cemeteries filled with loved ones. And we haven’t even touched on coal itself, a devil’s bargain if ever there was one. Yes, it brings money into regions that otherwise would be dirt poor, but at the cost of people’s health and their lives. They sometimes blow the tops off of mountains to get to it. And, in order to burn it for electricity, the TVA has to have somewhere to put the fly ash that’s a byproduct of the process.

And then the TVA gets a couple of decades of lax oversight and the ability to be a private enterprise when they need to be and a government enterprise when it suits them and before long you have 5.4 million cubic yards of muck spilling out of a pond the TVA claimed only held 2.6 million cubic yards.

And now, the TVA is shipping the coal ash they’re cleaning up from the site to Perry County, Alabama. The New York Times article is interesting and heart-breaking.

To county leaders, the train’s loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton “host fee” that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county’s budget of about $4.5 million.

The ash has created more than 30 jobs for local residents in a county where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and a third of all households are below the poverty line. A sign on the door of the landfill’s scale house says job applications are no longer being accepted — 1,000 were more than enough.

But some residents worry that their leaders are taking a short-term view, and that their community has been too easily persuaded to take on a wealthier, whiter community’s problem. “Money ain’t worth everything,” said Mary Gibson Holley, 74, a black retired teacher in Uniontown. “In the long run, they ain’t looking about what this could do to the community if something goes wrong.”

It’s true that Roane County, Tennessee, is whiter than Perry Country, Alabama, but I was a bit taken aback by the claim that Roane County was richer.

And then I remembered that Oak Ridge is in Roane County, which does indeed mean that the residents of Roane County are, on average, richer than the residents of Perry County. But I don’t think I have to spell out for you what the citizens of Roane County had to accept in order to get that higher income. Another devil’s deal.

So, when it comes to putting this fly ash someplace, the charges of racism have been flying–environmentalists are claiming environmental racism because the fly ash is going to a predominately black community; some folks in the community are claiming that it would be racist to deny them the fly ash, like “Here come the white folks to protect the black folks from themselves.”

And, frankly, from where I sit, both claims seem to be oversimplified but also probably true. Isn’t that the pernicious thing about how we do racism in America? There can be racism on both sides and probably is.

Still, I like how Southern Beale puts it: there is something really fucked up about asking anyone to choose between poverty and poison.

(Cross-posted at Tiny Cat Pants)

Is it a crime to be poor?

That’s what Barbara Ehrenreich asks in her latest New York Times op/ed, and the answer is a pretty resounding “yes.” Low-income people — and especially low-income people of color — are routinely targeted by police as communities continue to criminalize actions associated with the poor (sleeping on the street, receiving free food, walking into public housing without ID, etc). It’s a must-read piece.

The High Cost of Poverty

This won’t surprise people who have ever been poor, but poor people pay more for things that middle-class people take for granted.

Poverty 101: We’ll start with the basics.

Like food: You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 — $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

Prices in urban corner stores are almost always higher, economists say. And sometimes, prices in supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods are higher. Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. “First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don’t get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get,” says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University and the author of “The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination.”

“The real estate is higher. The fact that volume is low means fewer sales per worker. They make fewer dollars of revenue per square foot of space. They don’t end up making more money. Every corner grocery store wishes they had profits their customers think they have.”

Of course it’s not just that groceries are more expensive — it’s also that there’s a dearth of fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy food items. Where those items are available, they’re significantly more expensive than frozen foods. If you have a family to feed and a box of frozen fish sticks is the same price as one pear, it’s not a tough calculus.

And food is just the start of it:

When you are poor, you don’t have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. You wait until Monday afternoon, when the laundromat is most likely to be empty, and you put all of that laundry from four kids into four heaps, bundle it in sheets, load a cart and drag it to the corner.
…
“When you are poor, you substitute time for money,” says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed.”

The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.

The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money. Payday advance companies say they are providing an essential service to people who most need them. Their critics say they are preying on people who are the most “economically vulnerable.”

“As you’ve seen with the financial services industry, if people can cut a profit, they do it,” Blumenauer says. “The poor pay more for financial services. A lot of people who are ‘unbanked’ pay $3 for a money order to pay their electric bill. They pay a 2 percent check-cashing fee because they don’t have bank services. The reasons? Part of it is lack of education. But part of it is because people target them. There is evidence that credit-card mills have recently started trolling for the poor. They are targeting the recently bankrupt.”

Read the whole thing.

Ways I Will NOT Be Celebrating Earth Day

By trying to figure out how to get my ass down to an arbitrarily approved size that will not result in my being accused of attempting to destroy the planet.

Of course, there is no discussion here of the fact that many “overweight” people do not overeat, do exercise, are vegetarians, and/or do not eat in a way that is necessarily or uniquely unhealthy as compared to “thin” people. It also ignores the fact that there are plenty of ways to be “green” that don’t involve starving yourself through dieting (I’m quite sure that many overweight and obese people use public transportation, choose vehicles that are not gas-guzzling, support public policies that cut down on pollution, and more), or the fact that our personal environmental choices are important, but not nearly as much as those made by the world’s biggest polluters.

And best of all, in talking about what people who don’t meet a certain BMI requirement should be doing to end global warming, there’s no mention made whatsoever of the connection between obesity and poverty, how healthy foods can be downright unavailable in low-income neighborhoods, the way that our government subsidizes less healthy foods and therefore makes them far more affordable, or that while certain kinds of exercise may be “free” in a monetary sense, it does in fact cost time (which is something that not everyone, particularly those who are low-income, have).

No excuse is a bad excuse, it seems, to not-so-subtly shame fat people for the sin of existing.

Thanks to Rich for the link.