The war on unions will continue. The Republicans are explicitly anti-union, while the Democrats are pro-union in words, but anti-union in practice. Obama's much touted Race to the Top national education policy directly targets the heart of the teacher's unions — the most powerful union in the country — by attacking seniority rights and restricting wages and benefits. Also, Democratic and Republican governors on a state by state basis aim to either carve giant concessions from public employees, or take away their rights as unionists altogether — the lesser evil policy of demanding concessions (Democrats) is but one step from ending collective bargaining (Republicans). As the recession grinds on, this bi-partisan anti-union policy will intensify, no matter who is president. The aim of this anti-union policy is to lower wages for all workers, since unions artificially skew the labor market to the benefit of workers in general; attacking the unions is thus an attack on all workers, organized or not, so that corporations can regain "profitability" by having their labor costs lowered.
The war on the environment will continue. Both parties treat the environment like they do organized labor. The Republicans openly degrade it and the Democrats make pro-environment statements while practicing the opposite. Whoever wins will continue to pander to Big Coal, and they will continue to advocate for dangerous arctic and Gulf oil drilling, wreak havoc by shale "natural gas" drilling, build the cross continental Keystone pipeline, while continuing to do little or nothing to build the absolutely necessary alternative energy infrastructure that would provide jobs and hope for humanity against climate change. Obama and Romney refuse to take the necessary actions to address the climate crisis because doing so would harm the profits of the big corporate polluters. Neither presidential candidates will do so much as begin an honest public discussion about the problem, ensuring that other countries will follow suit, to the peril of all of us.
If you believe that poverty is the domain of the comfortably poor, unemployed, uneducated and lazy among us, you have been sadly mistaken. When the subject of welfare is brought up many immediately talk about people they see cheating the system. Whether the people they have in mind really are cheating the system or not, poor people are routinely conceptually linked with those of the lowest common denominator: idle, stupid, cheats. Negative assertions about the poor are in part a product of the myth of the American Dream: Anyone who works hard enough in America will have a great life. And if you don't have a great life, then you lack the will, integrity or intelligence to succeed. A cornerstone in the mythology is that the poor just won't take responsibility for their lives and get to work! It is a system of thought that distorts, oversimplifies and fosters ignorance about, and shame amongst, oppressed groups of people. The stereotype that the poor are work-shy and lack the desire or self-respect to seek work is a product of genuine ignorance and class privilege.
In 2010 the Census Bureau reported that 1 in 6 Americans (15 percent) are poor, a rate that was held steady in 2011. Even these statistics disguise the real poverty numbers. A sampling of the existing poverty thresholds - boundaries separating the officially "poor" from the "non-poor" - are as follows: $11,704 for one-person households where the adult is under 65; $10,788 for those where the adult is over 65; $15,504 for households with one adult and a child; $18,106 for two adults and one child; $22,811 for two adults and two children; $30,056 for two adults and 4 children. A person just barely above the poverty line and a person just barely below it likely have similar living situations, despite being classified in two different groups
The myth includes the stereotype that all poor people are unemployed. This thinking gives rise to the conclusion that the best way to address poverty is to get everyone a job. But these fallacious assertions gloss over the glaring fact that many poor people are working. Department of Agriculture reported that 30 percent of households receiving food assistance had earnings in 2010; 41 percent of food aid beneficiaries lived in a household with earnings from a job. Nearly a quarter - 21.8 percent - of non-elderly adult food stamp recipients were employed. Working for 40 hours a week at $8 an hour yields a $17,000 annual salary. Increasingly these poverty-level-wage jobs (retail, fast-food, etc.) are the most abundantly available to Americans. But with so many people out of work, even those jobs are hard to come by.
Many recipients of government assistance such as food aid are children, elderly, and/or disabled. According to the Department of Agriculture, "In fiscal year 2010, 76 percent of all SNAP households included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled nonelderly person. These households received 84 percent of all SNAP benefits." In fact, 46.6 percent of food stamp recipients are children, and another 7.9 percent are elderly.[15] Add those together and you realize that the "just get a job" solution is inappropriate for upwards of half of all food benefit recipients. Of course, this figure does not even include those who are not children or elderly but who have a disability that either prevents them from working or limits their work options.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told an audience that he believes "the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps." Rival candidate, Rick Santorum had said that he did not "want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money. And provide for themselves and their families." The not-so-subtle message is that black people are getting by on white America's dime. But the fact of the matter is that about 1 in 7 Americans are receiving food assistance, and most of them are white: 35.7 percent of head of households receiving food aid are white, 22 percent are African-American, and 10 percent are Hispanic.
When politicians start declaring that they don't want to give black people welfare checks, but rather want to put them to work, poor whites have a decision to make: Challenge the lie that poor people are all lazy and not working, or direct their anger and frustration with their own conditions, all of the shame it brings them, at black people. Too often the latter is chosen. By identifying poverty with people of color, the powerful manipulate those poor whites who are either outright racists or who unconsciously fear identification with the stereotyped character of non-whites. Though aimed at people of color, the thinking that suggests the poor lack respectable work ethic and virtuous moral character becomes a conceptual lever that functions to induce shame that makes the poor easier to manipulate. This is why dominant culture works so hard to identify scapegoats (black people, undocumented workers, migrants) to channel anger and self-hatred. This is "horizontal hostility," when oppressed groups turn on other disadvantaged groups rather than address the root causes of inequality.
Another myth suggests that a lack of education is the root of poverty, and that education is the answer to poor people's plight. This is also an assertion many liberals like President Obama regularly make. It is a way of thinking legitimize the plight of the poor, effectively blaming victims of exploitation: blaming low-income workers' conditions on their failure to possess a real job, which means a job that requires a degree. When politicians incessantly repeat the mantra that world-class education is needed to acquire good jobs, what does this say to farmworkers, retail workers, housekeepers, childcare laborers, and other so-called relatively "low-skilled" workers? The inescapable logical implication of these assertions is that they do not deserve to earn enough to sustain themselves and their families. This line of thinking is rendered absurd when we consider how essential such workers are in our economy and social structures.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) reports that Florida Tomato pickers have to pick more than two tons of tomatoes in grueling conditions to earn the equivalent of Florida minimum wage for a 10-hour workday. Workers make an average of 45 cents per 32-pound bucket of tomatoes, a rate that hasn't meaningfully changed since 1978. CIW cites a 2008 USDA report indicating that farmworkers are "among the most economically disadvantaged working groups in the US" and "poverty among farmworkers is more than double that of all wage and salary employees." Despite including wages from managers and supervisors, who make up 21 percent of all farm workers, The National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) shows that the average individual income is less than $13,000 and the average household income is less than $18,000. The "get an education" mantra tells the poor that they should only expect to be treated with dignity once they have earned a college-degree. Both ignoring the working poor, and assuming the solution to the working poor's poverty is education, functions to disappear the routine, systematic exploitation of the poor for the benefit of CEOs and investors.
The rising number of impoverished graduate degree holders further demonstrates that the "education is necessarily the solution to poverty" mantra is a fallacious oversimplification that distorts reality. As ABC News reported in May 2012, the number of people possessing a PhD who received some kind of public assistance increased more than three-fold between 2007 and 2010, and nearly the same for those with master's degrees. Ironically many of these impoverished academics are engaged in full-time work at part-time pay in the institutions of higher education that are said to remedy the problem of poverty! The exponential rise of poor graduate-level educated people is driven by the fact that non-tenured, part-time instructors - adjuncts - comprise nearly 70 percent of college and university faculties. In June 2012, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) released a report, finding that the median adjuncts were paid for a standard college course was $2,700 in fall 2010, $2,235 at two-year colleges and $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities.
Poverty doesn't just mean trouble making ends meet and having few assets. According to data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Americans in poverty are more likely to suffer from a variety of chronic health problems, both psychological and physical. Nearly 31 percent of adults who lived below the poverty line in 2011 said they had been diagnosed with depression at some point, almost twice as high as the rate for those not in poverty — 15.8 percent. The share of adults in poverty with asthma (17.1 percent) or obesity (31.8 percent) was also roughly 6 percentage points higher in each case than the share of adults not in poverty. The study also showed that diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart attacks were slightly more likely to afflict those in poverty than those who are not.
Liberals and progressives think themselves ever so wise and enlightened when in fact their beliefs are superficial and often contradictory. Socrates said "Although I do not suppose either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows."
The Democrats and Republicans have the same "big picture" agenda that all working people should find abhorrent. Once workers feel compelled to organize themselves to put up a fight, as the Chicago teachers did, all illusions in the Democrats will begin to fade, as people see with their own eyes the Democrats not only refusing to help them but actively opposing them, just as they did to the teachers in Chicago. Developments like this will allow a real movement to emerge. Until labor and community groups can unite on a widespread basis in independent action against the bi-partisan "Grand Bargain" agenda, we'll be forever dragged into rooting for one of two candidates, neither of who have our basic interests in mind.
Adapted from here
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