A lesson in poverty

Went to Fred's Discount store today to get a new shower head. Three people at checkout ahead of me. First one was an elderly black granny with a preteen granddaughter. Granny was digging in her purse to pay for garbage bags. She came up one penny short. The clerk let it go.

The next was an tiny older white woman. She paid for the soup and crackers with a SNAP card. It was so old it wouldn't scan. They had to punch the numbers in. She was fifty cents short for the OTC cold medicine. She was going to use her debit card. I offered to pay the fifty cents because it would probably cost her a buck to use the debit card. She didn't want to me to do it. She dug way deep in her purse and found the fifty cents.

The clerk told us she had to use her SNAP card to pay for a snack at work. She only had thirty cents left on the card. So she had to use her debit card to pay the rest. Except she only had thirty cents left on that so she had find three cents in her pocket to pay the balance. She said, "Hey. Two days before payday. You gotta do what you gotta do. Probably went without a snack today.

None of these people were fat. Obviously the clerk has a job. They were clean, reasonably well dressed. Clearly they're barely surviving even with the paltry assistance. It's heartbreaking to watch it happen. These are people who suffer when the GOPers cut assistance for the poor because they want to punish the one overweight person who goes through the checkout buying candy and soda.

Addendum: No sooner had I posted than I saw this, about administrative incompetence in distributing SNAP aid in NC. They talked about this at the checkout. The cashier said she waited six months to get a card after she had already been approved.

Shaming the poor - Updated

Crackpot conservatism reached a new low in Portland, Oregon. This anti-poor flyer campaign is pure thuggery.

Dear Reader of This Note,

There are twenty seven people in this neighborhood who vote and receive food stamps. The names of these people are being posted where they can be seen by taxpayers and the neighborhood can decide who is truly in need of food.

(signed) Artemis of the wildland

 And he's not just targeting the hungry, he also attacked the disabled.

This happened before just last month. A letter signed with the same name, targeted people with disabilities. In that letter, the author suggested that receiving benefits makes people with disabilities a threat to the Republic.

Of course, this courageous concerned conservative is taking these potshots against the poor anonymously. Guessing he also finds the mere idea of a gun registy an odious infringement on his privacy rights.

Update: Charlie Pierce catches this story today and adds deep context to this contemptible thuggery.

Poverty is not healthy for children and other living things

A new study shows poverty is bad for your brain:

The mental strain of living in poverty and thinking constantly about tight finances can drop a person’s IQ by as much as 13 percent, or about the equivalent of losing a night of sleep, according to a new study. It consumes so much mental energy that there is often little room to think about anything else, which leaves low-income people more susceptible to bad decisions.

Previous studies have shown it is also bad for your health and diminishes a child's chances to escape the cycle of poverty:

Poverty has other negative impacts. The chronic stress of growing up in poverty has been found to impair children’s brains, particularly in working memory. A study of veterans found that poverty is a bigger risk factor for mental illness than being exposed to warfare. The mental stress of being poor is also a major reason for why low-income people tend to have negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and cholesterol or elevated rates of obesity and diabetes.

Poverty takes its toll on health in a number of other critical ways: It prevents people from buying healthy food, makes people more likely to smoke, means they are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality, and can cause health problems that begin in the womb.

I've long been astounded that so many people believe living in poverty is a willing choice because, free government cheese. I can only believe these people have never been poor or spent any significant time among the poverty stricken. Poverty hurts. The poor have to work ten times harder just to accomplish the simplest tasks of daily life. Small wonder they seek to escape the pain and fear in short term pleasures when their future prospects are so harsh and uncertain.

Ann Romney's struggles

Bit of buzz today about this verbal slip by Ann Romney at a speech in Stamford, CT.:

Romney alluded to the fact that not all women can stay at home saying, “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

Commentators are being careful not to misinterpret it, but I'm not so sure she didn't actually mean exactly what she said. People are forgetting the Mormom church is very much against women working outside of the home. Their elders preach financial sacrifice so they can devote themselves solely to child rearing and homemaking for their husbands. So she may well really love that some women have a valid excuse to seek a fuller work life than being simply consigned to mere chattel status.

Thinking, this pandering is the real insult to mothers forced to work.

“I know what’s like to finish the laundry and to look in the basket five minutes later and it’s full again. I know what’s like to pull all the groceries in and see the teenagers run through and all of a sudden all the groceries you just bought are gone,” Romney said to the crowd. “And I know what’s like to get up early in the morning and to get them off to school. And I know what’s like to get up in the middle of the night when they’re sick. And I know what’s like to struggle and to have those concerns that all mothers have.”

Clearly, Ann is still milking the diminishing Rosen kerfluffle with this, and it's pure bullshit.

Ann doesn't have clue what it's like to have never-ending laundry when you have to cart the wash to a laundramat, nor has she worried about how she's going to pay for that second trip to the grocery store. She's never had to explain to her kids why there's no food in the house because they ran out of money. She's never had to drag herself off to a crummy job after staying up all night with a sick kid, nor has she had to choose between taking time off from a job to care for them and not being able to pay the utility bills because she's lost a day's pay.

Of course, this sob story no doubt plays well in Stamford. She's pitching a big money crowd where no mom really has to work an outside job. But she will never know the struggles of all mothers. She never can, because she'll never have to make the agonizing choices forced on poor moms by the contraints of poverty. It's deeply insulting that she never acknowledges her own advantages in making those bogus claims. [photo via]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Baby you're a rich Mom now

Republicans always want it both ways. I ignored the fauxrage over Hillary Rosen's comment about Ann Romney never having held a job. Of course the GOPers seized on it to declare Democrats were waging a war on stay at home mothers. Which is of course, totally different than the GOP's war on stay at home mothers who are poor. Just last January, Mitt Romney had this to say about poor moms.

“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.”

Fred at The Slackvist [via] finds the new GOP graphic to go with that meme and expands the banner.

Maybe the slogan on the GOP’s banner above was just shortened for space. It might be that what they’re really saying is “Wealthy White Married Moms Do Work That We Count As Work, But Non-Wealthy and/or Non-White and/or Non-Married Moms Who Stay Home With Their Kids Are Still Just Lazy Freeloaders And Their Work Still Doesn’t Count.”

Rosen's comment was somewhat ackward but of course she was right. Ann hasn't a clue what it's like for regular working moms who don't have nannies and maids to help out, or who can't go practicing for dressage competitions when they need a break from the bedlam of family life. But the GOPers get away with the double standard every damn time because the media mostly just reports what they say, but they rarely mention that the talking points are completely bogus.

Because, you know, telling the obvious truth might be construed as taking sides, and some conservative blowhard might call them biased. Cowards.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Falling through the cracks

A lot of people outraged by this story today. It is infuriating and sad to read about the callous disregard our ruling class shows to the children of poverty, especially when the state cuts off welfare from mothers of young children. But this is the part I found the most revolting:

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

So I ask, what programs did the money go to? And why was there a shortfall in the budget that needed to plugged in the first place? Guessing, but willing to bet most, if not all, of those states are being run by Republicans who passed out tax rebates to corporations and the wealthy like Easter candy.

Meanwhile, the children of this enforced, abject poverty grow up in (often abusive) households where petty crimes and other desperate measures to survive are routine. Underfunded schools in the ghetto aren't going to show them the way out, so many willl take up the same lifestyle. Some two thirds of the boys and men will get arrested. Leaving single mothers to start the cycle again.

If you think about it, it's a helluva long range plan to keep all those private prisons filled to capacity.

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We all want to change the world

I can't remember ever seeing a better description of soul rending, bone crushing poverty and its remedy than this link John Cole just posted on the twitter. It's all like this:

Movements will fall away, but the movement will endure. Temporary conditions will change, and with them the short-term self-interest of the self-interested, but you can be irresolute. Fads in politics and media, new ideas and new rallying cries, all of that is inevitable and temporary. All that will remain is privilege and its lack, entrenched poverty and embedded affluence, and the reactionary power of what is and what has been. And only this political question will endure: do you want to change the miserable condition that exists on this earth?

Well? Do you? Because I do.

Have no idea who this person is, and it's said so often that nobody listens, but seriously. Read the whole thing.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Stupid con tricks

Don't know what possessed me to read this tripe, but this idiot con at National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke has a eureka moment. He discovers it's easy to get free condoms. In New York City. Which of course, the pea brained cretin decides is conclusive proof that all this concern about access to contraceptive care for women is so invalid. Because you know condoms are exactly the same as birth control pills.

Meanwhile Edroso finds another conservative genuis who has figured out how to free the poors from the slavery of food assistance dependence. Make it as difficult and as humilating as possible for them to buy food. And it can only be shitty food in ugly packaging and of the lowest quality possible to qualify as sustenance. And it can only be sold in government stores. Because, the producers like him abhor the indignity of having to stand in the cashier lines in real grocery stores and watch these damn poor people burn up his tax dollars on staying alive.

This tirade was born of his allegedly having seen a food stamp recipient with a cell phone that was nicer than his. So of course, they're not even poor anyway. And by the way, if they take food assistance they shouldn't allowed to vote, because they'll just vote to give themselves more free cheese.

Every time I read one of these idiot screeds, I wonder where the hell these people shop. I've seen a lot of people use an EBT card. Sure some few buy soda and candy with them. But more often they're buying a very few essentials and end up desperately digging through their pockets because they're a few cents short of the money they need to pay for the toilet paper that isn't covered. And a whole lot of them are elderly.

I shouldn't read these heartless morons. It makes me wish evil would befall them and they find themselves someday subject to the same deprivations and humiliation they wish on their fellow human beings.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

The rock bottom of the 99%

Finding this image just haunting. This is a reality for so many people and more are joining them every day. Could happen to anybody.

[Via Cape Cod Gurl, original photo here]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Our children are homeless

Got caught up in real life yesterday and I've been fooling around with my newly redesigned Detroit News blog this morning. So all I have at the moment is this tweet of the day:

HoneyBearKelly: RT @MiaFarrow: 1 in 45 American children is now homeless. That's 1.6 million children. #poverty

No doubt they are also -- what's the new euphemism for hungry these days -- food insecure? That's criminal. We're the richest country in the world. This shouldn't happen here.

It only contains old archived posts at the moment but link to new Detroit News blog in the tagline below Glad to get rid of that horrible head shot in the old one. Of course, now I have none at all but I consider that an improvement.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Children of the Scorned

I don't watch much television, but I happened to catch this 60 Minutes segment on newly homeless children last night. (
easy access to the video here at LGM.) Powerful and heartbreaking.

It is simply unconscionable that in a country as rich as our own that 25% of our children are living in abject poverty. Homeless. Hungry. Cold. The fastest growing demographic in the land.

Meanwhile, our political overlords are busily figuring out how to spare the fat checkbooks and soothe the hurt feelings of the "wrongfully maligned" wealthholders. And where are the "real Murkin" Tea Party cons who have been screeching about "generational theft" when it comes to protecting the children who are suffering the indignity of poverty right now?

Oh yeah, there they are. Shaking their poms-poms and cheerleading the souless GOPers while they slash and burn every social program designed to feed these kids, or keep them healthy or to assist their families in getting back on their feet.

Banana Republic

Banana Republicans used to be a sort of internet joke, but it's no laughing matter. Nicholas Kristof notices the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Worse yet, there are all these voters who just elected a bunch of real Banana Republicans who are hell bent on making us number one -- in income inequality. And they intend to make the poor suffer for being "too stupid" or "too lazy" to reach that top 1% of wealth holders by shrinking the government spending on social programs that alleviate the misery of poverty. The slogan voters don't care. They feel important when the 1%ers wine and dine them, even if they always leave just before it's time to pick up the tab.

All while the ranks of the impoverished grow daily. One person tweeted today, "My son spent the weekend helping the homeless in Boston. Middle class families a year ago, homeless now." Another tweep tells me 1000 people live under Las Vegas in tunnels. Nothing lazy about those people. Surviving on nothing is hard work.

Slogan voters are feeling good right now. "They" won. They can't hear the 1%ers snickering at them while they plot to rig the game and end up with all the money. They don't realize how fragile their own safety nets really are and they won't until they break and they find themselves in the tunnels too. By then it will be too late.

Myth of the self-made man

Not sure why I bother to engage my critics who are never in a million years going to admit they're wrong. I suppose I have this absurd optimism that someday, I'll evoke a Helen Keller breakthrough -- like when she finally gets the concept of water. But since I spent way too long answering the last comment, let me link to the thread wherein guys who probably don't make over $40K a year will zealously defend the top 1% of wealthholders as if they were one of them.

I've never actually investigated the backgrounds of the top 14 on Forbes list, and not to denigrate their intelligence or the work they put into their companies, but self-made seems a bit of a stretch when all but one comes from well-to-do and/or well connected families and went to the best schools money can buy. I don't suggest you read the whole tiresome thread but if you're curious, my summary of the advantages they had in getting where they are today is near the top right now. I for instance, never knew that Warren Buffet's dad was a Congressman.

On a related note, WaPo had a long piece on the high cost of being poor. Most people have no idea what it's like to live in real poverty. This piece didn't really explore the working poor aspect enough. They make just a little too much money to get government assistance but not enough to get ahead. It's a contributing factor to keeping people on welfare that is too little noticed.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]