America’s torrent of need

By Barbara Ehrenreich

By Barbara Ehrenreich Washington, DC, Aug. 5— The view from the White House, not to mention much of Capitol Hill, is idyllic. True, there are a few blotches on the landscape — a queasy stock market and what conservatives see as a long-running deterioration of America’s core moral values. But other than that, what’s to complain? Americans are gratefully cashing in their tax rebates to redo the kitchen counters or pay off some credit card bills. Welfare reform has been declared a universal success, with over 60% of former recipients making their own way in the job market. Unemployment is yesterday’s problem, and the official poverty rate has reached a comfortingly low 12%. But look more closely and the scenery appears a whole lot less pleasant. On July 24, the Washington DC-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a report showing that 29% of American families with young children — precisely the sort of families that policymakers say they are most concerned about — do not earn enough to live at any acceptable level of comfort and security. The EPI researchers got to this appallingly high number by calculating the basic — make that very basic — budget a family needs to live on. They figured in essentials like housing, food, clothing, health insurance, transportation, childcare and utilities, but no meals out, vacations, movies, cigarettes, beer or other routine middle-class indulgences. And even then, they found that nearly a third of American families can’t make ends meet. Things the more affluent take for granted — like Internet access, video rentals and saving for retirement — are almost impossible luxuries. But they get by, don’t they? Not exactly. EPI researchers looked carefully at data on families who earn less than the “basic” budget, which amounts to $33,511 for a family of four. More than 70% of these families worry about food, sometimes miss rent payments or have to rely on an emergency room for their medical care. Nearly 30% report facing far more dire hardships: having to miss meals, foregoing needed medical care, being evicted from their housing. In a purely selfish way, I’m relieved by all this statistical bad news: At least it wasn’t just me. While researching my recent book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” I spent a total of three months, in three different cities, attempting to support myself on the wages I could earn as an entry-level worker — as a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a maid with a housecleaning service, a nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart floor clerk. I found that I could not make ends meet, not with one job anyway. I averaged $7 an hour, an amount which fell tragically short of my bare-bone expenses — gas, food and, above all, rent. My coworkers had various strategies for coping. Many of them, of course, shared expenses with another breadwinner — a husband, boyfriend or grown child. A surprisingly high number worked more than one job — typically an 8-hour shift followed by a 6-hour one — an arrangement that is utterly destructive to family life as well as health and stamina. Most passed on company health insurance, simply because they couldn’t afford to pay the employee contribution, which was often well over $100 a month. Possibly some of them received help from the government in the form of food stamps or the earned income tax credit, although I never once heard these programs mentioned. Some of my co-workers were clearly not coping. I worked alongside people who turned out to be homeless, although in the peculiar hierarchy of poverty, they didn’t consider themselves homeless as long as they had a van or a car to sleep in. Others were not getting enough to eat, and not, as I first imagined, because they were dieting. Lunch, in low-wage America, can mean a small-size bag of Doritos or a few hot dog rolls. What my experience shows anecdotally, and the EPI’s “Hardships in America” report shows far more systematically, is that we’ve been fooling ourselves with the official poverty level, now pegged at $17,463 for a family of four. That number is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof, at least compared to medical care and housing costs. Rents especially have gone through the roof: I found a half-size trailer renting in Florida for $625 a month, a room in a genuinely creepy Minneapolis residential motel for $250 a week. There’s another reason for our leaders’ inability to see the true extent of economic misery in America. They’re used to thinking of poverty as a consequence of unemployment. Hence, for example, the optimistic assumption that welfare recipients would be lifted out of poverty once they were hustled into the workforce. But the relatively high-paying, traditionally unionized blue collar jobs that brought an earlier generation into the middle class have been de-industrialized and downsized out of existence. What’s left are the service and retail jobs I found in my foray into the workforce — and a new world of relentless toil for poverty-level wages. If the consequences of this massive economic shift are almost invisible from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., they are painfully evident to America’s hard-pressed charities. According to the hunger-relief organization America’s Second Harvest, food banks all over the country are experiencing “a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet,” and the US Conference of Mayors reports that nearly a third of the adults requesting emergency food aid are now working people with jobs. Almost everyone — 94% of Americans, according to a 2000 poll conducted by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based employment research firm — agrees that ‘people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.’ When that straightforward proposition no longer holds, then the social contract, at least as I always understood it, is no longer in force. And it is hard to imagine a more serious abrogation of “America’s core moral values” than that. We have a choice: either raise all wages to a “living wage” level or greatly expand the government programs that make life a little easier for low-wage families — food stamps, health insurance, childcare subsidies, the earned income tax credit, and – yes — welfare for families whose breadwinners must stay home as care-givers for the very young, the elderly or the chronically ill. Ideally, we should do both. With 4.5% unemployment in the US, most people who can work have jobs. Now it’s the system that isn’t working.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America.”

Chill factor: dubious lawsuit shuts down Narco News

By Ben Winters

By Ben Winters The word “mismatch” hardly begins to describe it. In one corner we have Banamex, the National Bank of Mexico, a massive financial institution just purchased by Citigroup for a whopping $12.5 billion. In the other corner, we have a guy with a laptop. That guy is Al Giordano, a Boston native now of no fixed address, and the product of his laptop is Narco News (), a Web site established in April 2000 to publish dispatches from all over Latin America about the drug war and its fallout. Among those dispatches has been a fair bit of investigative reporting: a piece detailing the various conflicts of interest that led to the resignation of an Associated Press correspondent in Bolivia, for example, and another on dark truths about Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Castano. Narco News also has published the allegations of a Mexican journalist named Mario Menendez Rodriguez, who reported in his Merida-based paper Por Esto that Banamex president Roberto Hernandez Ramirez was a narcotics trafficker. Por Esto’s reporters amassed evidence that drugs were being bought and sold on Hernandez’s many properties in Quintana Roo, including interviews with local fishermen who claimed to be eyewitnesses—not to mention the bags of cocaine literally washing up on the beach. To quote Giordano’s narco-centric prose style, Hernandez, on top of his duties at Banamex, was “a narco-banker” and a “narco-traficante.” Banamex was not narco-pleased. After Giordano and Menendez traveled to New York in March to speak about the Hernandez allegations, among other subjects, the bank brought a libel suit against Giordano, Menendez and Narco News itself. The Banamex lawsuit, which began hearings on July 20, is raising eyebrows in media-watchdog circles. Narco News, which is written in Mexico and run off a Web server in Maryland, is being sued in New York on a tenuous pretext; namely that it is “affiliated with” (read: linked to) the New York-based Web site mediachannel.org. Much about the lawsuit is patently ridiculous, says Narco News’ lawyer Tom Lesser, starting with its whereabouts. “This is a lawsuit brought by a Mexican corporation against two people, one of whom [Menendez] is a Mexican resident, and one of whom [Giordano] lives in Mexico presently, over events that occurred in Mexico,” Lesser says. “The lawsuit should be in Mexico.” In fact, the lawsuit has already been in Mexico, and more than once. In two separate cases, Mexican judges have tossed out similar lawsuits by Banamex against Menendez and Por Esto, ruling in both cases that the paper’s charges were legitimate and therefore not libelous. Lesser suspects that bringing the case to the Big Apple has nothing to do with proving libel. The goal of Banamex, he fears, is to drain the coffers of Giordano and Menendez, and caution anyone else who might have unpleasant things to say about the bank. “I think they want to cause Giordano to spend so much money and so much time that he has no resources to give to the Web site,” Lesser says, “so he will not print stories in the future which raise issues concerning the bank.” Or as Narco News correspondent Peter Gorman put it in an open letter to readers, soliciting contributions to Giordano’s already sorely depleted legal defense fund, “Hernandez knows that neither Por Esto nor Giordano have enough between them to buy him lunch. What he wants is to do is shut them down.” The heart of the Banamex lawsuit, which asks for unspecified damages on counts of libel, slander and “interference with prospective economic advantages,” is that the “defendants published the statements knowing they were false, and/or with reckless disregard for the truth.” This charge, Lesser says, may be the most laughable part of the whole affair. To win, Banamex would “have to prove that Giordano and Menendez made these statements with a reckless disregard of the facts — and that they said it with malice. But Menendez published 40 photographs. He published photos of eyewitnesses. Giordano did separate interviews; he investigated it. He absolutely believed it was a legitimate story.” Lesser has some trouble with the idea of “interference with prospective economic advantages” as well. “The bank just got bought for $12.5 billion by Citigroup. What, without this they would have gotten $13 billion? This is an enormous corporation. The sky is the limit. Banamex is used to having its way in Mexico and assumes it can have its way anywhere in the world. It’s the 800-pound gorilla. And Giordano and Menendez had the temerity, the sheer chutzpah to suggest that the president of the company did something wrong.”

Source: In These Times