Wow! if you’re poor, things cost more!... and other startling news…

this shocking information from the washington post:

The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace.

they go on to explain:

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.)

read more on The High Cost of Poverty.

in further shocking news:

Climate change is disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities in the United States - a “climate gap” that will grow in coming decades unless policymakers intervene, according to a University of California study.

a study.  that found:

For instance, the report finds that African Americans living in Los Angeles are almost twice as likely to die as other Los Angelenos during a heat wave. Segregated in the inner city, they’re more susceptible to the “heat island” effect, where temperatures are magnified by concrete and asphalt. Yet they’re less likely to have access to air conditioning or cars.

read more on Global Warming Will Harm U.S. Poor Disproportionately

next up, the conclusion of a 12 year study that found… yes, water really is wet.  who knew?!

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Tagged as: news,class,society June 04, 2009 @ 01:58 pm

executive salary caps - class war?

from When Class War Is NOT Class War:

Posted By: Cliff Mason

Class war?

That’s what lots of people are calling this move to limit executive compensation at companies that are on the Federal dole.

Oh, please! That’s not class war, it’s barely a class skirmish.

When it comes to the real class war, the stuff that matters, not just optics about CEO earnings, the rich are thrashing the rest of us, just like they always do.

It’s class war when Washington passes a $700 billion TARP bailout for Wall Street with feverish haste, but struggles to pass an $800 to $900 billion stimulus package for everybody else.

Think about that for a second.

Bail out the banks, no problem! But give a helping hand to poor, working class, and middle class people? That we have to debate endlessly. Washington knows how to bail out the rich, but our incredibly popular President is having trouble bailing out the other 99% of the country.

That, my friends, is class war. And it’s so institutionalized that we don’t even realize it’s going on. The establishment in this country is so tilted in favor of the folks at the top, that we scream “socialism” when executives at banks that have taken billions of dollars of bailout cash from the government because they ran their companies into the ground aren’t allowed to earn more than $500,000 a year.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s not a real victory for the proletariat, or the middle class, as everyone in this country likes to think of themselves. It’s totally symbolic.

When you go below the symbolism and look at the substance—sure there are salary caps, because we already gave these banks hundreds of billions of dollars—it’s pretty clear which side is winning this war.

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Tagged as: politics,news,economy,class,society February 14, 2009 @ 08:52 pm

either andrew sullivan is an idiot, or a serious provocateur…

i have as yet to make up my mind.  while there have been times that i was in agreement with him, the saying “even a broken clock is right twice a day” always comes to mind.

and now there’s this:

“in defense of walmart”

Journalist Charles Platt follows Barbara Ehrenreich’s lead and tries working at Wal-Mart:

  Several of my co-workers had relocated from other areas, where they had worked at other Wal-Marts. They wanted more of the same. Everyone agreed that Wal-Mart was preferable to the local Target, where the hourly pay was lower and workers were said to be treated with less respect (an opinion which I was unable to verify). Most of all, my coworkers wanted to avoid those “mom-and-pop” stores beloved by social commentators where, I was told, employees had to deal with quixotic management policies, while lacking the opportunities for promotion that exist in a large corporation.

Platt says that such stories are not easy to place in magazines:

    I considered writing about my brief experience, but a book defending a company that has been demonized does not have a large potential audience, and the writer tends to be dismissed as either hopelessly naive or bribed by corporate America.
   
  Similar factors result in someone such as Adam Shepard remaining relatively obscure.

  If you haven’t heard of Adam Shepard, this illustrates my point. His remarkable book Scratch Beginnings, now being promoted through http://www.scratchbeginnings.com, describes how he went through an experience far more gruelling than my brief flirtation with low-paying work. He placed himself in a homeless shelter with $25 in his pocket, found a job as a day laborer, then worked for a moving company, and after 10 months had a pickup truck, an apartment, and $2,500 in savings. His conclusion: People can still make it in the United States if they are willing to live carefully on a budget and work hard.
   
  Somehow that kind of news is never as popular as denunciations of the free market written by professional handwringers such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

what exactly is the point here?  that anecdotal evidence by “just a guy” (charles platt happens to be a senior writer with wired magazine) somehow outweighs the ample evidence provided by walmart workers in labor dispute after labor dispute? 

does platt seriously think that a book “defending a company that has been demonized” wouldn’t be prominently displayed at every walmart in the country and thus have a HUGE potential audience? 

the example of adam shepard is even worse.  do these people seriously think it’s JUST THE SAME to go and pretend you’re homeless as it is to actually BE homeless, with nothing to fall back on?  the meme is getting really old and really tired: “if poor people would just work harder, they wouldn’t be poor”.  statistics have shown time and again that there is very little class mobility.  by and large, people are stuck in the circumstances in which they were birthed.  while they may improve conditions to some extent, they will not leave that class. 

to even come close to mimicking reality, they’d need to travel back in time, assure that generations of their family have all lived with lower class incomes, in circumstances in which they had no hope of better education or better income opportunities, THEN be birthed, live through it themselves and THEN try to see what it’s like to work at walmart or to be homeless.  then…

come back and talk to me when you’re working for a supervisor who throws a full trashcan into the middle of the floor, because the night staff forgot to leave it on the aisle to be emptied and he tells you to go pick it up. 

come back and talk to me when your supervisor asks you daily to stay past your scheduled time, but when it comes time to turn in timesheets, tells you he can’t pay you over your 36 scheduled hours.

come back and talk to me when your company locks you into the building at 7am for inventory and refuses to allow you to leave until inventory is completed.  god forbid you’ve forgotten to bring your lunch.

come back and talk to me when you ask for time off for a funeral, because your grandmother has just passed away, and your supervisor tells you that you can’t be gone more than 2 hours for it.

come back and talk to me when your employer fires all of your stock people and tells a department of older women that they must lift the boxes themselves and stock their shelves.

come back and talk to me when YOU PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT, because you need the fucking job and you don’t have the skills or education to find something better. 

nevermind that the conditions at other similar employers aren’t any better - they’re just new and different.  the employers KNOW they can treat you like shit, because YOU HAVE NOWHERE TO GO.  they laugh and tell you, “if you don’t like it, leave”.

i’ve seen entirely too many people treated like dirt, myself included, who were working HARD for their pay and received nothing but derision, humiliation, and abuse from their employers.  nevermind the fuckhead customers who come in and expect you to treat them like they’re queen sheba, acting as if their world will just END if they don’t get the perfect powder blue satin sheets RIGHT NOW.  while in your head, you’re running through the list of bills that are due:  rent.  electricity.  phone.  doctor bill.  it’s a litany that you repeat every single day of every single month, wondering which you can pay and which ones you can let slide, so that you have enough money for groceries.

color this anecdotal if you will; however… statistics back me up as do labor complaint after labor complaint against companies like walmart.

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Tagged as: politics,culture,economy,class,society February 09, 2009 @ 02:29 am

Capitalism’s Crisis: Elites Play with Class War by Chris Spannos

“It is important to note and remember that while less mobility is worse, more mobility isn’t the end of injustice. If an elite monopolizes wealth all the time, the fact there is some movement into and out of that elite doesn’t diminish the inequality that rules every moment. Additionally, reforms can also be made to increase class mobility while at the same time make wealth and power disparities greater than they were before the reform and also further strengthen elite rule over their class position.”

Capitalism’s current crisis is not the same as the crisis called capitalism. The former was caused by elite efforts to free themselves from constraints on profit making, which not only worsened material conditions for millions of people, but jeopardized their own wealth. The latter is an institutionalized class war waged by elites on the rest of us and is characterized by extreme disparities in material wealth and decision making power. The two combined could prove a detonator for class conflict in the U.S. and some have already begun to fight back.

Conditions for the bottom 80 percent of the U.S. population continue to worsen. Home foreclosures are forecast to be roughly 2.25 million for this year alone, over double the annual rate before today’s housing crisis. The month of November saw the loss of over half-a-million jobs bringing total losses to almost 2 million since the start of recession in late 2007. Two-thirds of these losses occurred since last September and there are forecasts for more. The auto industry is undergoing almost certain restructuring with hundreds-of-thousands more jobs and connected businesses in jeopardy. Republican opposition to the auto bailout plan demanded a 50 percent wage cut for workers implemented over the next few months. Now Washington is considering tapping into part of the $700 billion bailout plan under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). However, Republican opposition to the auto bailout has further antagonized class relations in an already volatile economic environment and uncertain future.

Among those who have fought back—-and won—-are the 240 workers in the Chicago Republic Windows and Doors factory. They gained international attention on December 5th by occupying their workplace using Depression-era tactics. The detonator to their struggle was also related to class antagonisms in the U.S. Weeks after taking $25 billion in TARP bailout money Bank of America cut off its line of credit to the factory causing the company to halt operations and terminate its workers with only three days notice and without severance. Their struggle and victory earned them a settlement totaling $1.75 million covering eight weeks of pay, two months of continued health coverage, and pay for all accrued and unused vacation. United Electrical Director of Organization Bob Kingsley described the outcome as “a victory for workers everywhere,”...“an historic victory for America’s labor movement,” and “a win for all working men and women who face uncertainty, unfairness and job loss in a troubled economy.” And this is just the beginning of another struggle for the Republic workers who have created a new foundation they have named the “Window of Opportunity Fund,” dedicated to reopening the plant.

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Tagged as: politics,culture,economy,class,capitalism December 28, 2008 @ 06:56 pm

Crisis At Home

another article on who we’re forgetting in our rush to “save teh middle class”.

Crisis At Home

If you live in affluent neighborhoods you might have conditioned yourself to ignore the significant sector of US society that gets in your face by showing they’re poor, suffering from disease and acute angst - if not worse.

Sure, plenty of tree-lined, suburban streets contain apparently normal, satisfied men and women who work and take children to school. Advertisers understand that underneath the “normal” exterior, these people have anxieties. They prey upon fragile middle class publics by selling them “relief,” from their physical and psychic “pain.”

When a “normal person” confronts a “homeless one,” the “normal” might well say “there but for the grace of God go I.” “I see those people [homeless] and I buy books like on how to increase my financial intelligence quota,” an acquaintance told me. “They scare me.” Yet, Hollywood and television continue to use stereotyped middle class characters to display “The Real America” - the country George Bush sells to the world in his speeches. This made-up America faces “a security threat,” from which “Homeland Security” will protect. Sell that to the homeless!

When mass media chatterers raise abstractions - like is the working class bitter, should candidates wear flag pins or will withdrawal from Iraq mean less security? - desperately poor people shake their heads and laugh. Security means a bed, a roof over it, and a minimal and healthy meal, plus occasional access to medical care.

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Tagged as: culture,bush,poverty,class May 12, 2008 @ 12:43 pm