Check this out from an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, whose new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, promises to be a must-read (set for release in mid-October 2009).
Here's a sample from the interview:
During the Great Depression, a mind-over-matter book called Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, was a best seller, which was odd since it seemed obvious that there were other factors than one’s own desires at work in shaping the world. Today, prosperity preachers like Joel Osteen are just going on as always. These guys preach that God wants you to have everything, and if you don’t, it’s because you are thinking small—it’s not even that you’re not praying hard enough. A few weeks ago, I Googled “Osteen” and “foreclosure”; it didn’t yield anything.
Showing posts with label Barbara Ehrenreich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barbara Ehrenreich. Show all posts
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Poor folks as criminals?
The longer I work and live in the inner city and the more I observe what low-income people face on a daily basis and how the "non-poor" react to them and their plight, the more convinced I become that most Americans just don't understand poverty.
Poverty results from and is sustained by ill-informed public policy. The criminalization of poverty being a case in point. The move of cities to outlaw many of the unavoidable actions of the poor only serves to deepen the poverty the poor experience. Systemic, "legal" forces serve to institutionalize poverty in urban America.
By now many readers here are rolling their eyes, thinking, "Here he goes again!"
My apologies for coming across like a broken record, but I find it necessary.
If you want to gain a better grasp of what ordinary poor people face in Dallas and the other major cities of the nation, please take the time to read insightful essay that follows.
Some will be surprised to learn how the legal system attacks the poor of all ages and life situations.
This article is worth your time, I promise.
Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: August 8, 2009
IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.
If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.
Ehrenreich's article (read more here) is the third so far in a series that helps people like us come to grips with what it means to live in poverty. A Home Spun Safety Net (July 11, 2009) and Too Poor to Make the News (June 11, 2009), the first two installments of her extremely insightful series, should be read carefully by anyone who cares enough about poverty in the world's wealthiest nation to at least make the effort to understand the facts of the matter.
Reactions welcome here, as usual.
.
Poverty results from and is sustained by ill-informed public policy. The criminalization of poverty being a case in point. The move of cities to outlaw many of the unavoidable actions of the poor only serves to deepen the poverty the poor experience. Systemic, "legal" forces serve to institutionalize poverty in urban America.
By now many readers here are rolling their eyes, thinking, "Here he goes again!"
My apologies for coming across like a broken record, but I find it necessary.
If you want to gain a better grasp of what ordinary poor people face in Dallas and the other major cities of the nation, please take the time to read insightful essay that follows.
Some will be surprised to learn how the legal system attacks the poor of all ages and life situations.
This article is worth your time, I promise.
Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Published: August 8, 2009
IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.
If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.
Ehrenreich's article (read more here) is the third so far in a series that helps people like us come to grips with what it means to live in poverty. A Home Spun Safety Net (July 11, 2009) and Too Poor to Make the News (June 11, 2009), the first two installments of her extremely insightful series, should be read carefully by anyone who cares enough about poverty in the world's wealthiest nation to at least make the effort to understand the facts of the matter.
Reactions welcome here, as usual.
.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Crucifixion as silencer
Recently, I broke down and cleaned out my office, including all my "piles" of stuff set aside to read, use and/or file. Every time I engage in this purging process I find treasure and trash!
Much of what I uncover makes me wonder why I ever set it aside.
But, I always find jewels that make me sorry they got lost in my clutter.
Here are words that ended up in one of my journals--
I ran across the darnest quote today. . .it was in Barbara Ehrenreich's recent study (2001) of life for people "living" on minimum wage or slightly above, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America--she describes a tent revival (populated by very poor working people who were impoverished) that she attended in Maine while working for minimum wage as a part of her year-long study of real life in the good old USA among working people:
"The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful 'amens.' It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth (emphasis with underlining mine here--as an ex-preacher, this may be one of the most indicting things I have read about the church in many years--lmj) . . . .I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walked out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole." (pages 68-69)
Reflecting now on that passage from my long, lost journal, it occurs to me that only someone who understood the cruel realities of poverty could write like that.
Much of what I uncover makes me wonder why I ever set it aside.
But, I always find jewels that make me sorry they got lost in my clutter.
Here are words that ended up in one of my journals--
I ran across the darnest quote today. . .it was in Barbara Ehrenreich's recent study (2001) of life for people "living" on minimum wage or slightly above, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America--she describes a tent revival (populated by very poor working people who were impoverished) that she attended in Maine while working for minimum wage as a part of her year-long study of real life in the good old USA among working people:
"The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful 'amens.' It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth (emphasis with underlining mine here--as an ex-preacher, this may be one of the most indicting things I have read about the church in many years--lmj) . . . .I get up to leave, timing my exit for when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walked out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole." (pages 68-69)
Reflecting now on that passage from my long, lost journal, it occurs to me that only someone who understood the cruel realities of poverty could write like that.
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