Manifesto for a Sane Economy:

Okay, in order to write a manifesto for a sane economy, we must agree that the economy we currently have is insane.

Whether you are Republican or Democrat, or Independent, or Progressive or Conservative, I think we can all agree that a 15% rate of poverty among Americans living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world is ‘abnormal’.

Houston, we have a problem...

Rather than focus on the nuts and bolts of this issue – the very familiar stats and graphs pointing to an historic wealth gap between the rich and the poor -- I’d like to focus on something I have experienced myself that I feel is one of the underlying causes of this situation; its pathology, if you will.The factor that again and again deters us from coming up with a rational and practical solution to the problem; and that causes many of us to spin out into a myriad  of basically irrational -- cultural, religious, political, racial  -- conjectures for an explanation of the problem.

Four years ago, I became homeless and destitute after taking care of a terminally ill parent for a number of years. I then had to rely on social services and for the first time in my life, I learned what is like to be poor in America.

Outside of the physical hardships that go along with being in a situation like this – mainly, how to secure housing without any financial resources – the thing that struck me most was the existential challenge brought on by society's attitudes towards people in temporary or permanent poverty. (Your particular circumstance doesn’t mater; everyone gets lumped into the same generic group: poor people.)

Where this becomes problematic and counter-productive to bringing people back into the economy, is when poor people, specifically, are singled out and blamed for being the central cause for the social pathology that creates this wealth gap and hardship for so many.

It is as if people in financial difficulty are either choosing to be that way (because they are too lazy to find work) or else they are chronically poor because they are too degenerate in their ways of living to overcome personal weaknesses and become productive members of society.

True as this may be in some cases, it is also true that there are lazy and degenerate people occupying all strata of  society. Some are taken care of for life by family trust funds, or other forms of private largesse, and others get by via social services. Most families of any size has one or more members who, for whatever reason, are incapable of ‘making it in this world’.

Fine. Do we shoot them?  Let them roam the streets like feral animals looking for scraps of food? Or do we simply ignore them so that they resort to criminal activities and become the ultimate drags on society -- expensive lifetime  incarcerated wards of the state. No, whether it’s in a family or a nation, we try to provide them with some form of a safety net.

Good.  So now we’ve gotten that out of the way: not all of the poor, nor all of the wealthy, are saintly or inveterate sinners.

But that’s not how you are made to feel when you are in financial difficulty. The first questions, or attitudes, that society puts upon you are: What did you do wrong? And/or, What is wrong with you?

A Hobson’s Choice if there ever was one.

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Say you are one of the many thousands of people in the last decade who lost their employment and incomes, and then their homes. You were okay financially one day, and then not okay the next. Is your changed situation due to some lack of work ethic, or bad lifestyle choices? In the overwhelming majority of cases: no.

But our society will make you feel that – in addition to all the rest of the tangible difficulties you need to overcome, you must also deal with the existential claims against your worthiness as a human being and citizen. It’s one weight too many and therefore becomes counter-productive to the shared goal of getting people back into improving society and strengthening the economy.

Now I understand and appreciate the need for people to have a strong work ethic, and the importance of cultivating that as a bedrock for maintaining a solid social fabric and viable national economy. But the work ethic was memorialized in an era when America was an agriculture-based economy. Damn right, you better be able to get up early and work hard to feed your family and make some money for essentials. 

But we are no longer that economy, nor can people be that autonomous and self- sufficient. Hell, you can’t even find a menial job these days without a computer that can connect you to countless resources that you depend on.

We are more inter-dependent now than at any time in history; we all depend on one another for our survival and economy.

Never the less, the old attitudes persist, and that’s understandable; peoples’ attitudes change slowly, it takes time.

But the point of my argument is that there is a proportion of our population – with enormous financial and political power -- who are knowingly and purposefully (and perhaps for their own amusement) exploiting these dated attitudes and negative projections about the poor for personal, economic and political gain. They pit the 'righteous' poor against those they characterize as unworthy and undeserving. I liken these ‘1%ers’ to the elites in ancient Roman times who derived great pleasure from watching their captive slaves fight against one another to death in gladiator pits. It was pathologically anti-social then, and still is.

Our world economy is not going to improve – be better for more – until these attitudes change and the rich and powerful stop proselytizing lies about one segment of the population at the expense of everyone.

Give Us a Break!

The two most damning misconceptions about poverty in America is that it is the result of a weak economy, and that poverty is, 'in fact' , caused by poor people.

Weak economy?  

The details of an historically unprecedented explosion in wealth among a small percentage of the population in America during the last 40 years has been well-documented. If you need a refresher please revisit this video from Upworthy:


Or this article from Alternet .

And yet, despite this, there is a significant number of people in our political elite who are waging a war against poor people.   "The war against working people should be understood to be a real war.... Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class.... And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it." -- Noam Chomsky

Why? I think the simple answer is greed. But if you are going to be greedy in public, one must then find a way to justify such an otherwise socially unacceptable behavior.

Here's where it gets interesting, and creepy: after you abscond the nation's wealth you then blame the poor for being poor, for creating the economically and socially degraded condition they find themselves in.

To pull this off requires advanced wizardry (or as they used to call it in my hood, blarney):  I'll just use one such person as an example, Paul Ryan -- the wanna be VP. It's his Christian faith, specifically Catholicism, that informs and inspires him to be tough on the poor -- "for their own good". As if the current wealth disparity isn't tough enough on poor people, let's clobber them further with self-righteous moral judgments.  

I quoted Chomsky above. Now I'll retell an anecdote from one of his books. Alexander the Great is having a  marvelous time reeking havoc on the world as he goes about plundering and conquering it. Then one day he comes upon a man who has set up shop on a small Mediterranean port, where he is making a modest living pilfering from the largess of wealthy seafarers.

When Alexander encounters the man, he is beside himself with contempt: "My dear sir, how dare you pirate these waters?" 

The man looks back with world-weary eyes: 'My dearest Lord, how dare yay pirate the whole world?'

Give us a break.

Please visit my Facebook group: Advocate for Economic Fairness!

The Predicament of Impoverishment in America

In 1968, CBS aired a documentary called Hunger in America. It awakened many Americans to the fact that a very large number of their fellows citizens were underfed and malnourished. 

This led to significant legislative initiatives aimed at combating poverty and hunger in America during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Then, in 1976, came this ditty: "She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

The 'she' is the infamous 'welfare queen' and the person making the lumpen remark would become president of the United States in 1980.

Words matter. And the remark marked a significant turning point in American attitudes toward their fellow citizens receiving financial and/or food assistance from the government.

This is the way things bounce in American politics and American peoples' opinions.  It's a democracy; things should bounce and change.

In the meantime, though, the problem of poverty and hunger in America got worse: The percentage of Americans living in poverty, in real terms (adjusted for inflation) has increased from around 11% in the 1970s  to 15% now. That's a lot of people. This took place while at the same time our national income per person is now more than twice as high as it was in 1970.

So what's up? (And down?)

A couple of things: one, there's a recognition, based on statistics, that many of the 'anti-poverty' programs of the 1970s did work to reduce poverty and hunger. And two, our attempts to deconstruct these programs in the name of improving them has failed -- failed to reduce hunger and poverty, which is the only yardstick I'm interested in here. (If it makes you feel better knowing that government cuts increased the number of your fellow Americans living in poverty and going hungry,  well that's another gauge for someone else to measure -- perhaps your shrink or pastor.)

The point is, we already know how to reduce poverty and hunger in this country because we've done it. (Was it perfect -- yeah right, tell me what is?) But instead of learning from those programs how to make them better, we've taken a step back and made things worse.

Like I said in the middle of this essay, we are a democracy, and democracy's bounce.

So let' s bounce. 

Please read and consider signing the petition below that seeks to protect housing  assistance from budget cuts: http://signon.org/sign/exempt-housing-assistance

  

How the Hell Have We as a Culture Become so Inauthentic

This does, of course, beg the question,''What do I mean by 'inauthentic'?'"

Being a story-teller, I prefer to answer the question this way. There was, once upon a time,  an infamous  gun-slinging Western cowboy who became so vexed with angst, so desperate, so fraught with anxiety, that he sought out the counsel of an American Indian healer, or Shaman.

The Shaman wanted to help him, deeply, but had to turn him away saying,  "Son, you have gotten so far away from who you really are that I don't think I can bring you back to your self."

Did you know that in the 19th Century our first 'psychologists' were know as 'alienists'? They defined themselves that way because they felt they were treating people who had become alien to themselves.

Okay, so to my point here: we are presently living in a culture that not only supports being inauthentic (or being alien to oneself) but promotes it.  Not to shoot at sitting ducks, but have you watched morning TV talk shows lately? It's a competition among the hosts as to who can be the  more superficial, inauthentic and unengaged in any real way with either the news they report or the guests they interview. Not actually being there is evidently more charming, interesting, and profitable, than being there with the people who have done something in order to get on the show. (Sorry, but I only recently learned how much money these a-list, a-holes earn.)

But in a larger sense, I feel, these kinds of goings on are a reflection of who we are and what we are becoming: alien to who we really are; and no longer fully  engaged in our own experiences.

Seeing that, as a result of recent experiences, I have become a defacto spokesperson for the neglected, downtrodden, homeless -- pick your epithet -- I would like to point out that we as a society  have our least authentic relationship to these people. We fear them, label them, ignore them, (alienate them), do anything but engage with them personally (authentically).      

Therefore we exist, culturally, in a 'Make Believe Ballroom', in which all the guests come to the party on equal terms and everyone gets their fair shake. Would be nice, if it were true. But we don't all come to the party in the same shape; though, with help, we can all learn to dance -- at least adequately.

So enough with the metaphors. We are living in a society that has become alien to itself as a people, as an organic entity  in which all persons depend on and nurture one another for the greater good of the whole.   

Pollyanna? Maybe. But ask yourself this: Do you feel more authentic when you feel connected to your fellow citizen, or when you feel alienated and separated?

It's a choice; and a choice that makes a big difference in the lives of many people living  in America who are feeling alienated from their own society and nation. 

It's not necessary; it's inauthentic.

(Please check out the petition below. Stop Sequestratian cuts to Housing Assistance.)

Petition

http://signon.org/sign/exempt-housing-assistance

The Human Cost of Maintaining Our Economy & the Creative Challenge to Change It

Contrary to some modern myth-making that suggests our economy was created organically by ‘market forces’, (or 'blessed' winds of fate) the economy we find ourselves in is the one we have created for ourselves.  

If it were a purely free market capitalist system, we would not have government financed assistance programs for the aged, unemployed and disabled;  and if our economy was engineered exclusively by socialist dictates,  the ‘super-wealthy’ would no longer be welcomed here, and the ‘horse-trading’ of our basic living commodities, including money itself, would not be tolerated.

We have a hybrid system that combines elements of a variety of economic practices and social ideals.  

Which is my point: it’s an amalgam, and a peculiarly American one that we have collectively created over time. As such, does it directly reflect our attitudes about how an economy and nation should function?

To me, it seems there is a fundamental contradiction between the values most Americans maintain and promote, and the economic system we find ourselves in. On the one hand, when there is a major catastrophe taking place in the world -- be it an earthquake, tsunami, or other form of natural disaster – Americans, through their government and individually, are usually the first and most generous providers of aid. 

Even while, at the same time, there exists an ongoing tragedy of catastrophic proportion taking place right here in our own nation, affecting the lives of one out of every six Americans. It’s a problem that we largely ignore and deny, squabble over briefly during election cycles, but do nothing to fix: domestic, American poverty. And the real potential social, political and economic cataclysm is that it’s getting worse, not better.

Right now, there are more than 40 million Americans living at or below the official threshold of poverty; that’s nearly 20 percent of the population. These are the highest rates of poverty since The Great Depression; and, from the 1990s until the present, the most dramatic reversal of fortunes in our history.   

If you’d like to throw around a political football trying to guess at the causes for this dilemma, go right ahead. But the fact of the matter is that this crisis is devastating the lives of millions of Americans, and at the same time depleting the government’s financial resources and helping it to rack up unprecedented and arguably insurmountable debt.

So who or what is benefiting from this socially bankrupt and financially bankrupting situation?

Statistics bear out that it’s the wealthiest Americans who are benefiting the most by owning larger and larger portions of the nation’s economic pie.  Plus, recent judicial legislation has virtually allowed the wealthy to own politicians outright.  The system is, undoubtedly, a mess. And, during this particular swing of the political pendulum, political and economic power appears to be moving decidedly in favor of people who already own wealth.   

But the wealthy do not as yet live here by themselves (or with the rest of us in debtor prisons).

  

This, I feel, must make one wonder whether or not the wealthy know how the rest of America lives? I would argue that a central reason why the problem of more and more Americans living in poverty is being ignored, and is persisting and growing worse,  is that most wealthy Americans are oblivious of the devastating effects living in poverty has on their fellow citizens.

One reason for this – despite the fact that anyone who has not been living in a cave knows about the glaring growing disproportionate gap between the poor and wealthy in America – is that no one,  rich or poor, wants to be reminded of it all the time.

Another reason, I observe, is that we are becoming an increasingly segregated population: the ‘haves’ are safely ‘gated'  in communities among themselves, while the’ have-nots’ flail around where and if they can. For the most part, wealthy and poor Americans live in separate worlds within the same nation. This is not a successful blueprint for maintaining a healthy society, democratic or otherwise.    

I propose that what is needed are not more stats and facts on the issue, or political discussions, legislation,  and 'resolutions'; but more real human interaction with one another and increased actual interface with the problem.

How do we do that?

 First, it starts with individual initiative. Whatever your view is on the subject, express it. If enough people agree with you, that will then lead to group endeavors and eventually the formation of a social movement. This is also something Americans do peculiarly well:  we are very good at expressing ourselves individually, and creatively, and in the process setting in motion movements that in time lead to progressive changes in our society.  

I believe that the social movement of our time, the one that affects more Americans than any other, is addressing the issue of the increasing numbers of Americans living in poverty -- before the problem expands, destroying us individually and socially and bankrupting us financially.    

If you agree (or disagreed) express yourself!

(One small way that you can begin to express yourself is to review the following petition:)


Help  Reduce Poverty & Homelessness