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Karen,
Ray loves living in his "urban sinkhole". (Just kidding,
Ray.)
It was all examined in a book published in 1878. George looked at
this situation and wrote a book "Progress and Poverty" which
analyzed it.
The more things change . . . . .
.
Harry
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Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 6:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] Before you can reinvent or revive an ideal... …don’t you have to take challenge the myths,
of prosperity, of the bootstrap, of a secure middle-class?
A New Kind Of
Poverty
Winter
flits in and out of New York City in the late fall, hitching a ride on the wind
that whips the Hudson River. One cold morning not long ago, just as day was
breaking, six men began to shift beneath their blankets under a stone arch up a
rise from the water. In the shadow of the newest castle-in-the-air skyscraper
midwifed by the Baron Trump, they gathered their possessions. An hour later they
had vanished, an urban mirage. There’s a new kind of homelessness in the
city, and a new kind of hunger, and a new kind of need and humiliation, but it
has managed to stay as invisible as those sleepers were by sunup. "What we're
seeing are many more working families on the brink of eviction," says Mary
Brosnahan, who runs the Coalition for the Homeless. "They fall behind on the
rent, and that's it, they're on the street." Adds Julia Erickson, the executive
director of City Harvest, which distributes food to soup kitchens and food
pantries, "Look at the Rescue Mission on Lafayette Street. They used to feed
single men, often substance abusers, homeless. Now you go in and there are bike
messengers, clerks, deli workers, dishwashers, people who work on cleaning
crews. Soup kitchens have been buying booster seats and highchairs. You never
used to see young kids at soup kitchens." America
is a country that now sits atop the precarious latticework of myth. It is the
myth that work provides rewards, that working people can support their families.
It's a myth that has become so divorced from reality that it might as well begin
with the words "Once upon a time." According to the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, 1.6 million New Yorkers, or the equivalent of the population of
Philadelphia, suffer from "food insecurity," which is a fancy way of saying they
don't have enough to eat. Some are the people who come in at night and clean
those skyscrapers that glitter along the river. Some pour coffee and take care
of the aged parents of the people who live in those buildings. The American
Dream for the well-to-do grows from the bowed backs of the working poor, who too
often have to choose between groceries and rent. Even
if you've never been to the Rescue Mission, all the evidence for this is in a
damning new book called "The Betrayal of
Work" by Beth Shulman, a book that should be required reading for
every presidential candidate and member of Congress. According to Shulman, even
in the go-go '90s one out of every four American workers made less than $8.70 an
hour, an income equal to the government's poverty level for a family of four.
Many, if not most, of these workers have no health care, sick pay or retirement
provisions. We
salve our consciences, Shulman writes, by describing these people as "low
skilled," as though they're not important or intelligent enough to deserve more.
But low-skilled workers today are
better educated than ever before, and they constitute the linchpin of American
industry. When politicians crow
that happy days are here again because jobs are on the rise, it's these jobs
they're really talking about. Five
of the 10 occupations expected to grow big in the next decade are in the
lowest-paying job groups. And
before we sit back and decide that that's just the way it is, it's instructive
to consider the rest of the world.
While the bottom 10 percent of
American workers earn just 37 percent of our median wage, according to Shulman,
their counterparts in other industrialized countries earn upwards of 60 percent.
And those are countries that
provide health care and child care, which cuts the economic pinch considerably.
In
America we console ourselves with the bootstrap myth, that anyone can rise, even
those who work two jobs and still have to visit food pantries to feed their
families. It is a beloved myth now more than ever, because the working poor have
become ever more unsympathetic. Almost 40 years ago, when Lyndon Johnson
declared war on poverty, a family with a car and a Dutch Colonial in the suburbs
felt prosperous and, in the face of the president's call to action, magnanimous.
Poverty seemed far away, in the shanties of the South or the worst pockets of
urban blight. Today that same family may well feel impoverished, overwhelmed by
credit-card debt, a second mortgage and the cost of the stuff that has become
the backbone of American life. When the middle class feels poor, the poor have
little chance for change, or even recognition. Does anyone think twice about the
woman who turns down the spread on the hotel bed? A
living wage, affordable health care and housing, the bedrock understanding that
it's morally wrong to prosper through the casual exploitation of those who make
your prosperity possible. It's a tall order, I suppose. The lucky thing for many
Americans is that they don't even have to see or think about it. The office
hallways get mopped somehow, the shelves get stocked at the stores. And on
Thanksgiving Day, children will be pushed up to the table for a free meal in a
church basement or a soup kitchen, with the understanding that that is the point
of the holiday--a day of plenty in a life of want. http://www.msnbc.com/news/997103.asp?0dm=N11QO
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- [Futurework] Before you can reinvent or revive an ideal... Karen Watters Cole
- RE: [Futurework] Before you can reinvent or revive... Harry Pollard
- RE: [Futurework] Before you can reinvent or revive... Cordell . Arthur
- Re: [Futurework] Before you can reinvent or re... Ray Evans Harrell
