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poverty

May 7, 2012
House Leaders Push Effort to Slash Funding for Poor
by Jeremy Leaming

The severely conservative U.S. House of Representatives is peddling yet another effort to slash services for the poor.

As TPM’s Sahil Kapur reports “House Republicans are set to advance legislation to replace automatic defense spending cuts they agreed to last year with cuts to programs for the poor and working class.”

Yes, the House’s plan is likely only to be symbolic, as Kapur notes the legislation is expected to go nowhere in the Senate. Yet it provides, as if anyone needed it, another example of the conservative party’s extreme opposition to any policy that might raise taxes on the super wealthy.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, (pictured) the House Budget Committee’s Ranking Member, in a May 3 report blasted the proposal for advancing “costly additional tax breaks for millionaires while finding savings by ending the Medicare guarantee for seniors, slashing investments that strengthen our economy, and shredding the social safety net.”

As noted here, a string of commentators have argued that the conservative party has been retooled to focus solely on protecting tax cuts for the wealthy, even as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows.

A recent study from political scientists at the University of Georgia and New York University reflects a drastically changed political party, noting that the “Republican Party is the most conservative it has been in a century,” NPR’s Frank James reports.

In a piece for The Huffington Post, Mike Lux said the political scientists “are underestimating.”

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Economic inequality, Legal services, Frank James, Mike Lux, poverty, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Republicans, U.S. Census Bureau
December 9, 2011
D.C. Human Rights Offices Honor Peter Edelman with Humanitarian Award
by Jeremy Leaming

Peter B. Edelman, a longtime champion of fighting poverty in American, was honored this week with a humanitarian award from the D.C. Commission on Human Rights and the D.C. Office of Human Rights.

The D.C. human rights offices presented Edelman with its annual Cornelius R. “Neil” Alexander Humanitarian Award on Dec. 8. Edelman (pictured), the newly elected ACS Board Chair, is a professor at Georgetown Law. Edelman’s distinguished career has included work for Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was an eloquent and forceful tribune of the nation’s oppressed, especially African and Native Americans or the “disaffected.”

In a press statement regarding its Award, the D.C. Office of Human Rights says Edelman’s “name is near the top of any list of people who have worked to make poverty and economic justice front-burner issues in the United States. He has spent much of the last four decades working to make the nation focus on poverty and find solutions that would make a difference, including being at the forefront of concerted efforts to make the welfare system more responsible, productive, and accountable, attempting to do so without making it harsh or inhumane.”

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Access to Justice, Economic inequality, Legal services, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Cornelius R., D.C. Commission on Human Rights, D.C. Office of Human Rights, Peter B. Edelman, poverty, the Justice Gap
October 17, 2011
Strengthening Families, Addressing Economic Inequality
by Jeremy Leaming

A couple of national newspaper columnists examine some numbers and commentary on poverty and economic inequality, as the Occupy Wall Street protests hit their one month anniversary with noted momentum.

The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., notes in this piece, some comments on poverty rates of families made during a recent Republican presidential debate by former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Essentially Santorum, a longtime advocate of Religious Right activists, argues that government should push policy that supports only families headed by mothers and fathers. “You can’t have a wealthy society if the family breaks down,” Santorum said.

Dionne says Santorum “is broadly right,” citing a study by the National Center for Children in Poverty covering “the 2005 – 09 period,” that “5 percent of married family households were poor at some point within a given year, compared with 28.8 percent of single-parent households. For 2010, the figures were 8.4 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively.”

But instead of going off on a tangent about how government recognition of marriage for gay couples will render straight marriages meaningless, as Santorum often does, Dionne says “Liberals should acknowledge, as Obama has, that strengthening the family is vital to economic justice. Conservatives should acknowledge that economic justice is vital to strengthening families.”

And Dionne points to some work in this area by Harry Holzer, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and Peter Edelman, an ACS Board member and longtime advocate for tackling poverty in America.

In a 2006 book published by the Urban Institute, Holzer, the late Paul Offner, and Edelman (pictured) tackle “the thorny challenge of getting ‘disconnected’ young men back in school or the workforce.”

The book, Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, focuses on African American and Hispanic men “because young women have made more progress in recent years and their prospects have been spotlighted in discussions of welfare reform and other social changes,” a press statement about the publication says.

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, E.J. Dionne, Harry Holzer, Nicholas Kristof, Occupy Wall Street, Peter Edelman, poverty, Rick Santorum, single families
October 14, 2011
Reigniting the Dream
Guest Post

By Rep. John Conyers Jr. This post is part of an ACSblog symposium in honor of the unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial.

The dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial provides an opportunity to reflect and commit ourselves to Dr. King’s work. The ceremony on Oct. 16 will also serve as a homecoming for people of every nation who heeded Dr. King’s dare to dream and then worked toward the twin goals of justice and equality. In addition we honor the sacrifices of those who marched, sacrificed, and died – including Dr. King – in the struggle for equality and equal justice under law.

But what exactly was King’s dream? The easy answer is an America free of racial injustice. But Dr. King understood that at the root of racial injustice lay economic injustice. Poverty went hand-in-hand with segregation. Poverty kept African Americans struggling under the yoke of segregation, and poverty bred the racism and ignorance that made segregation popular amongst their poor white neighbors. Dr. King dreamed to end not just racial injustice, but the poverty that had allowed it to flourish.

When you examine the levels of poverty and unemployment in the nation today, when juxtaposed against the current levels of defense spending from a decade of war, I believe that Dr. King would determine that the nation had failed to heed his vision of jobs, justice and peace.
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Civil rights, Racial justice, Democracy and Voting, Equality and Liberty, Dr. Martin Luther King, Economic injustice, Guest Post, MLK Memorial online symposium, poverty
August 25, 2011
Can We Think about Poverty without Thinking about Criminality?
BookTalk

Cheating Welfare

Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty

By:
Kaaryn Gustafson

Available Here

By Kaaryn Gustafson, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law

Every September, the Census Bureau releases updated statistics on the poverty rate in the United States. For a day or two I will read media reports about poverty, and then poverty disappears from the news until the next September. The poverty rate varies a bit from year to year but remains consistently — and shamefully — high.

According to a 2009 study drawing upon data from the Luxembourg Income Study, a project that gathers comparative economic information from various nations, the only upper-income countries with child poverty rates equal to or higher than United States (22 percent) were Russia (also 22 percent) and Mexico (27 percent). Some level of economic inequality within a population may be inevitable, but poverty — and the stress, hunger, homelessness, and daily chaos that go with it — are not. How much attention a county gives poverty, how a country tolerates poverty, and how a country allocates the resources targeted for the poor are political decisions. The United States has become poverty-tolerant and, increasingly, tax dollars are going to police the poor rather than to address poverty.

There have been moments in American history when poverty has been an issue of public and political concern but those moments are distant memories. Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the public and politicians have become complacent about ameliorating poverty. Political concern about the poor has, indeed, remained but it has taken a new form. Over the last few decades, federal and state governments have instituted a host of policies and practices that equate receipt of certain public benefits with criminality, that police the everyday lives of the poor, and that weave the criminal justice system into the fabric of the welfare system.

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Economic inequality, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Equality and Liberty, BookTalk, poverty, welfare reform, welfare system

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