Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the smartest, savviest, most cut-to-the-chase scholar/commentators I know. Her latest piece on the criminalization of poverty is heart-breaking.
To paraphrase someone quoted on a National Council of Churches a few years ago, "When money becomes an idol, to be poor becomes a sin."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Great article, especially the hidden motivation for the crackdown on poverty. Tell somebody they've done wrong, and they may feel "relieved" to get out of it by paying a fine, especially when they are already marginalized.
I read her well regarded book "Nickel and Dimed" a few years back. After going "undercover" as a low-wager, she determined that large numbers of the people who make our economy hum live in cars. The extreme level of economic inequality in America is one of its defining features.
To see how deep the rabbit hole goes, one needs to leave the mainland. Thomas Frank's book "The Wrecking Crew" talks about a magical island in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Saipan, a Pacific paradise exempt from all federal regulation, notably immigration, labor and minimum wage laws. Saipan was made (more) famous by the Abramoff scandal. The jurisdiction is an elite Republican's dream, where imported workers have no rights other than the right to sometimes be paid an hourly pittance, if the employers feel like it. 12 year old Filipino girls are imported to be prostitutes, sometimes to service American corporate bigwigs (guess which party Saipan's execs uniformly belong to). The poverty rate gets as high as 35%.
The Republican insiders would remake America in Saipan's image, if only they could. As it is, they've made significant headway in the past forty years.
Post a Comment