NEWSBYLEIGH GRAHAM

Today is my last day blogging at Poverty in America. In January 2009, I began as the sole editor and writer for this new cause and site at Change.org, and am happy and relieved to turn it over today to a growing team of anti-poverty activists, who I have no doubt will continue to agitate and grow this site into the robust social justice effort it deserves to be. I am so close to finishing my PhD; I can "see" the proverbial finish line I hope to cross this summer. So I'm leaving PiA to concentrate my efforts on completing my dissertation on housing recovery activism and conflicts in post-Katrina New Orleans. If I'm going to spend most of my day hunched over my PC, at this point it needs to be in the service of finishing this manifesto thesis and MIT.

PiA is the smallest cause in terms of membership here at Change.org, and I hope in time it will grow at the pace its fellow causes have over the last 15 or so months. But our petite size does not reflect the passion our community brings to this issue. In particular, I have come to depend on regular commenters like Danetta and Jan for pushing our conversations forward. There are countless others like them -- I hope you know who you are! -- whose contributions to this site are immeasurable. You've inspired me to work everyday to translate our struggles, victories and concerns into informative, digestible and entertaining content that motivates your efforts. If it wasn't for Change.org, I would not have "met" activists like Diane or Rachel or Aaron or Leatrice, nor would I have had my assumptions and arguments helpfully challenged by advocates like Charlie.

I will miss blogging here and I will really miss this community. I am a better writer and more informed activist for having worked here. I am proud to have been one of the earliest members of the Change.org team, and I wish the best of luck to the new faces here and bid farewell to those still at it. You can continue to follow me on Twitter at uspoverty, and I encourage you to visit my personal blog The Redstar Perspective, where I will likely eventually resume blogging (sporadically, I'd expect, but check out my archives!). I will also probably start turning up in the comment threads more often here. I will still have a Change.org member profile if you'd like to send me a message. You can also email me at redstarperspective [at] gmail.

I leave you now with a lookback at my greatest hits of 2009: the exploitation of low-wage workers, the total unaffordability of housing for minimum wage workers, the high rates of unemployment among the disabled, the shame of being unemployed, incentives to discourage teen pregnancy, the stimulus, victim-blaming, and primers on poverty all got you talking and taking action. Keep up the good fight, people!

Photo credit: psd

While our Global Health blog has immediate information on how you can help the survivors of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I felt remiss not addressing the disaster here, given how poor Haiti is (news reports repeatedly call it the "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere"), and how domestic and global poverty are interrelated.

More than half a million Haitians have immigrated to the U.S. over the years; Florida, New York and Massachusetts are home to the majority of them. Nuanced coverage of the immigrant experience can be hard to come by here in the U.S. It's too easy (in fact, this happens with poverty talk more generally) to assume immigrant = poor, especially immigrant of color = poor. We imagine communities left wanting according to standards we set, which may have little bearing on the lived experiences of the people we're describing.

Fortunately, a writer named Belleisa has a touching and helpful description of growing up Haitian-American in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and her connections to Haiti through the "Brooklyn Diaspora," at the blog Postbourgie. Flatbush is a community that many would describe as high-poverty, with one-quarter of residents living below the poverty line. In Boston, the Haitian community is concentrated in Dorchester and Mattapan (one-third of all residents of Mattapan speak French Creole), also considered comparatively poor neighborhoods. But that's not what Belleisa's post reflects, and such stats tell us nothing about the lives of the Haitian cab drivers, nurses, students, parents, etc. interviewed on the news as they now wait for word from loved ones.

What we do know is this: immigrant communities in the U.S., many poor, many not, embody networks of families and communities that transcend national borders. Remittances, money sent from immigrant communities to people in their home countries, constitute an important development resource, earned from the immigrant labor that also strengthens our economy. Haiti is poor, but it is also proud (it is the first republic led by blacks). Please send your thoughts and, if possible, resources along to Haiti right now. Many anti-poverty organizations working here also work there and need your support more than ever. Indeed, our fight against domestic poverty is just one part of a larger global movement.

Photo credit: One Laptop Per Child

Street level bureaucrats are the employees who actually implement or carry out our laws and public policies. Consider the cop who's responsible for arresting offenders as part of the war on drugs -- does he apprehend every user he finds, or does he sometimes look the other way, maybe to give a kid a break? In a similar vein, sociologist Lisa Dodson's new book The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy documents the work of millions of middle-class Americans to override the rules and regulations that comprise our "unfair economy" and exploit their fellow low-wage workers.

The American Prospect excerpts some of their stories, such as a restaurant manager who falsifies timesheets for her corporate chain so as to allow her low-wage employees -- mostly mothers -- the forbidden flexibility to take brief breaks from their shifts for parental responsibilities. Her reward? Employee loyalty evidenced via unusually low turnover, which presumably creates a virtuous circle at her particular franchise -- respected employees respond to the allowances and trust by performing their jobs well, providing satisfying customer service, and staying with the company, thus ensuring their privileges continue under this particular supervisor.

It would be interesting to know what the collective outcomes are of this diffuse but widespread civil disobedience. How many families', women's and children's lives are improved by actions such as these? How much in lost wages, absenteeism and job losses are avoided? How many children have more stable upbringings because their parents are able to consistently provide childcare? How many families stay warmer or feel less hungry because of the additional income assistance provided?

When we think about the "de-skilling" of America, or the de-valuing of skilled labor here, we think of the loss of manufacturing jobs to low-wage competitors overseas, to the rise of a service-sector economy that pays poverty wages to workers lacking education and marketable skills. We blame immigrants, unions, employers and politicians. We may even acknowledge that technological innovation has killed good American jobs -- though we usually prefer to blame each other.

The Los Angeles Times has an alarming article showing that this de-valuing doesn't stop at the "shop floor" -- rates for freelance writing have dropped over the years from livable wages to no wages: from $2 per word to the value of "experience" in exchange for free creative or technical labor. Freelance writers are told that we should consider ourselves lucky to have the platform, to build our own audience, to get our names out there. Beyond eliminating writing as a professional career for millions of Americans, there are damaging consequences for readers, including under-reported, under-investigated and ignored news and information.

With the growth of large corporate conglomerates in the media industry making journalism's traditional practices of investigating and reporting beholden to a bottom line, our news sources have evolved into infotainment sites, with the cable news networks given over to entertaining blowhards for whom bluster and ideology trump facts and evidence. As ad revenues disappear, newspapers are closing bureaus and investigative units and fewer and fewer large sources are uncovering and disseminating stories, leading to a real loss in local reporting and a dearth of perspectives.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States needs 400,000 jobs PER MONTH between now and 2013 in order to get us back to our pre-recession unemployment rate. Even during the heady "peace and prosperity" days of the 1990s, we only added 200,000 or so new jobs monthly. The ugly long-term reality is that we're probably looking at unemployment in excess of 8% for years to come.

Rather than curl up into a ball and weep, as I'm feeling inclined to do right now, the EPI wonks have instead offered a 5-point jobs plan that is eminently reasonable and worth pursuing -- if only our political process weren't warped beyond repair. Much of the ground work for this plan, estimated to create four to six million jobs, has been laid by the stimulus. The key ingredients include:

1. Continuing unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance subsidies, though raising the latter to 80% to make it more affordable for more than just the two in ten households that currently use COBRA. Such spending creates a net financial benefit for the economy.
2. Continuing to provide fiscal relief to states and localities through 2011 to retain about one million jobs.

Based on the latest jobs report, is the glass half full, half empty or in shards on the floor? In December, the economy lost almost 100,000 jobs. Depending on your perspective, this is either:

1) WAY better than losing hundreds of thousands of jobs, as we witnessed monthly last winter.
2) A surprising but momentary setback after we gained 4,000 jobs in November.
3) Irrelevant; what really matters is that millions of Americans are out of work, many for unprecedented stretches, with little hope for imminent recovery.

Economists (who really are revealing these days that they don't know any more than the rest of us) agree on one issue here: we need millions of new jobs in order for our economy to recovery. MILLIONS. As long as we're cheering over a couple thousand gained here, sighing over a few thousand more lost here, we're missing the big picture. What are we going to do about substantial and prolonged job creation?

(This graph from the Center for Economic & Policy Research shows that in addition to closing out the decade with job losses, hours worked also declined by almost 4%.)

Photo credit: ChiBart

In a long but worthy article in The American Prospect, Alyssa Katz details the push in New York City to turn vacant luxury condos into affordable housing. Anyone familiar with real estate and housing markets knows that this is a long shot -- there's usually little political will on the part of elected officials to compel developers to repackage their housing into affordable properties. Developers would rather wait for the market to "return" than take a more modest but sure incentive from government agencies to house a family and get a property off their books.

This is an area where mandatory legislation aimed at permanent shifts in housing markets is essential -- such as San Francisco is doing now to ensure long-term affordability by taking ownership of land in exchange for a municipal loan to build housing on a site. As long as credit remains relatively cheap and we continue to promote housing as a commodity and profit center, most developers will be happy to wait for the market to bounce back, even if it never returns to its recent exorbitant rates. In the interim, some who have overseen renovations completed around lower-income tenants are abandoning the buildings even as people continue to live in them.

For some New Yorkers, a return to the economic climate of the 1970s, when property owners walked away from thousands of units rather than maintain them, seems like a real possibility. Until we realize that people have the right to safe and decent housing, regardless of their ability to pay, and owners' ability to profit, then we will continue to fight these battles, and these towers will stand empty until they crumble down around us.

Photo credit: JoshuaDavisPhotography.COM

Director Jason Reitman is getting a lot of press for his recently released film, Up in the Air, in which the lead character willingly embraces the anonymity of a life in the skies (and its frequent flier spoils) as he criss-crosses the country firing people for a living. Part of the buzz is that, rather than hire actors for the scenes in which George Clooney's you'll-never-see-me-again character Ryan Bingham fires employees, Reitman used residents of Detroit and St. Louis who'd recently lost their jobs. (Detroit, famous again, for all the wrong reasons.) Reitman and critics alike claim this gives the movie a needed authenticity and sobriety, considering its subject matter and our current economic reality.

I saw Up in the Air this weekend (at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA, which offers free movies to the unemployed on Thursdays) and enjoyed it. I can't get the images of wintry and bleak Detroit and St. Louis out of my head. But I wish I hadn't known about the use of unemployed workers.

I'm happy for them that they got a paycheck for their work (I'm assuming), that they had a chance to meet one another, and that ideally this will open up some opportunities for them or give them some restored sense of self-worth or purpose. Or just a bit of fun. But the unemployed characters are ultimately used as tools to reflect back on Bingham's and his privileged colleague's own personal growth. Just as I'd choke up watching someone fall apart on screen about losing their job and how he was going to face his family, the camera would revert back to Bingham's blank face or his mentee's troubled one. I get that they might have trouble sleeping tonight (or not, as the case may be), but this plot device bordered on exploitative to me.

Of course, had actors been hired, moviegoers might have wondered, hey, wouldn't it have been cool if people who'd really just been fired could have played those parts? Reitman's effort is a good one, even if motivated by self-consciousness over writing a snarky movie about emotional aloofness in which others' misfortune is the context. But I actually don't feel like I got all that much of a message about our "unemployment epidemic" so much as learned that hey, emotional intimacy is hard. No kidding!

If you've seen the movie, let us know what you think.

(Photo from St. Louis, MO by exothermic)

Sixty-three percent of local residents polled by The Washington Post believe that Detroit's economic fortunes will improve. Apparently, once your economy is "in ruins," American optimism kicks in and recovery meanders into sight.

On this blog, we've routinely covered three places to epitomize poverty in the US.

California is our developing world, with a booming, majority-minority population; demonstrative income inequality; a hobbled government; and an on-going political war waged by the privileged to keep their housing, jobs, schools and communities for themselves at the expense of the poor, including millions of immigrants.

New Orleans (and the oft-overlooked Gulf Coast) reflects the worst of ideological government retrenchment: decades of political neglect and disinvestment led to a seriously broken municipal infrastructure, from the toppled levies to inequitable do-or-die evacuation strategies to a failure to restore affordable housing, public schools, and skilled jobs.

And Detroit is the poster child for a bygone era, one that we've known died a long time ago. It was a company town with strong unions and good manufacturing jobs requiring only a high school education, with affordable places to live and raise a family -- for millions of whites, at least, though far fewer blacks. Now we find the majority-black city dotted with vacant lots, weighed down by deep poverty, and "boasting" the highest unemployment rate in the nation. According to residents, it no longer has a functioning economy. At all.

I wonder, reading articles like this WaPo feature, with its litany of Detroit's failings and the bleak circumstances of its residents, why we're still writing these stories.

The new year kicks off with some grim news about our on-going foreclosure crisis: with Obama's mortgage modification program increasingly panned as a failure, economists are predicting some 2.4 million foreclosures in 2010, a staggering number that threatens our already anemic recovery.

Being underwater on a mortgage -- owing more than the value of the home -- is now a greater predictor of foreclosure than unemployment. Fewer than 25% of all mortgages eligible for modification have been re-written, and fewer than 1% have been permanently modified to lower the principal to a more affordable amount.

Just a month ago, we sounded the alarm here about the abysmally weak performance of Obama's toothless foreclosure program, one in which the Administration knowingly avoided the bolder, more effective (but possibly more expensive in the short term) decision to require permanent mortgage modifications. At this point, critics are alleging that the current program is making things worse for thousands of homeowners, by keeping them in homes they can't afford, rather than breaking the difficult reality that it's time to let their homes go.