In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace. 

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around Grants Pass v. Johnson, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused. 

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who argued that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused. 

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs, for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.

Cruel but Not Unusual

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds. 

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Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her fiery dissent: the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.” 

The United States of Dispossession

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1% of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In Trash: A Poor White Journey (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.  

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, said so eloquently long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes than homeless people (28 for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us. 

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than 650,000 homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or eight times the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to 8 to 11 million nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. Afro-Brazilians were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were affirmed, although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights. And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” according to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research. 

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics. 

If Not Here, Where?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In Aberdeen, Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests. 

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations fight for their sovereignty and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe

In stark contrast to those images of bustling productivity stands an outcropping of tall towers along the southern end of Manhattan’s Central Park. Built in the last 20 years, those ultra-luxury residential complexes make up what is unofficially known as “Billionaires’ Row.” The name is apt, considering that millionaires and billionaires have flocked to those buildings to buy apartments at unimaginably high prices.

In 2021, the penthouse on the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue was listed at an astonishing $169 million (though its Saudi owner has since slashed the offering price to a mere $130 million). No less astonishing these days, such lavish, sky-high homes often sit empty. Rather than fulfilling any functional role, many serve as nothing more than speculative investments for buyers who hope, one day, to resell them for even higher prices, avoid taxes, or launder dirty money. For some among the super-rich, flush with more money than they know what to do with, Billionaires’ Row is simply an easy place to park their wealth. 

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Those empty apartments cast a shadow over a city full of people in need of affordable housing and better wages. Reaching from the southern tip of Manhattan into Brooklyn lies the most economically unequal congressional district in the country. To the north, in the Bronx, sprawls the nation’s poorest district. Just last week, the New York Times reported that, based on 2022 census data, “the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259.”

In New York, where land is a finite resource and real estate determines so much, it is a cruel irony that the richest people in the world are using their capital to literally reach ever higher into the clouds, while back on earth, the average New Yorker, grimly ensconced in reality, lives paycheck to paycheck, navigating a constant storm of food, healthcare, housing, transportation and utility costs. 

Abandonment Amid Abundance

Extreme economic inequality, characterized by a small class of the very wealthy and a broad base of poor and low-income people, may be particularly evident in cities like New York, but it’s a fact of life nationwide. In September 2023, the wealth of America’s 748 billionaires rose to $5 trillion, $2.2 trillion more than in 2017, the year the Trump administration passed massive tax changes favoring the rich. The new 2022 census data offers a very different picture of life for the nation’s poor in those same years. In fact, the numbers are eye-popping: between 2021 and 2022 alone, the overall Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) rose by nearly 5%, while child poverty doubled in size.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses two measurements of poverty: the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and that SPM. The OPM, it’s widely agreed, is shamefully feeble and outdated, while the Supplemental Poverty Measure casts a wider net, catching more of the nuances of impoverishment. Still, even that has its limitations, missing millions of people who flutter precariously just above the official threshold of poverty, constantly at risk of falling below it.

That said, the SPM remains a helpful barometer for this country’s attempts to address poverty. Shailly Gupta-Barnes, my colleague at the Kairos Center and a poverty policy expert, observes that, because the “SPM accounts for family income after taxes and transfers…, it shows the antipoverty effects of some of the largest federal support programs.” Considering that, it’s neither an accident, nor a fluke of the market that the SPM just skyrocketed at an historic rate.

The explanation isn’t even complicated. It’s because a number of highly effective Covid-era, anti-poverty programs were callously cut. (No matter that cases of Covid are again on the rise.) When the newest census figures were released in September 2023, Gupta-Barnes explained, “41% of Americans were poor or low-income in 2022, up significantly since 2021, mainly because of the failure to extend and expand tested anti-poverty programs including the child tax credit, stimulus checks, Medicaid expansion and more.”

The take-away from all of this seems clear enough. When the abundant resources of this society are mobilized to tackle poverty, it decreases; when we undermine those efforts, it increases. The more subtle, but equally important take-away: how we measure poverty has massive implications for how we understand human deprivation in our country. As it happens, tens of millions of people who live in regular economic peril are being made invisible by our very tools for measuring poverty. How, then, can we ever hope to address it in its entirety if we can’t even see the people suffering from its iron grip?

The View from the Bottom

In 2022, the official threshold for poverty was $13,590 per year for one person and $27,750 for a family of four — with about 38 million Americans falling below that threshold. That number alone should shock the conscience of a nation as wealthy and developed as ours. But the truth is that, from the beginning, the official poverty line has been based on an arbitrary and shallow understanding of human need.

First formulated in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson’s administration introduced its War on Poverty, the Official Poverty Measure focuses primarily on access to food for its base line and doesn’t fully take into account other critical expenses like health care, housing, and transportation. It is based on an austere assessment of how much is too little for a person to meet all of his or her needs. Because of its inadequacy, millions of Americans badly in need of support have essentially been erased from the political calculus of poverty. More than half a century later, they still remain so, since the OPM has endured not only as a bureaucratic benchmark but as the authoritative reference point for poverty, influencing our conception of who is poor and, on a policy level, who actually qualifies for a range of public programs.

Since the 1960s, much has changed, even if the official poverty line has remained untouched. The food prices on which it’s based have skyrocketed beyond the rate of inflation, alongside a host of other expenses, including housing, gas, utilities, prescription medicine, college tuition, and now essential costs like internet and cell-phone plans. 

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, wage growth has essentially stagnated. Since 1973, wages for the majority of workers have risen by just 9%, while actually falling for significant numbers of lower-income people. Productivity, on the other hand, continues to grow almost exponentially.  As a result, workers are making comparatively less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy.

This crisis of low pay is no accident. As a start, over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks for themselves out of their workers’ paychecks. In 1965, the average CEO made 21 times what his or her workers did. Today, that figure is 344 times more. The reason for such a dramatic polarization of wages and wealth (as so vividly on display in the current UAW strike) is a half-century of neoliberal policy-making intensely antagonistic to the poor and beneficial for the rich.

Over the decades, our economy has been completely reshaped, transforming the kinds of jobs most of us have and the ways we do them. Today, growing parts of our workforce are automated, non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. No one, therefore, should be surprised to learn that such an increasingly stark division of labor and money is accompanied by an unprecedented $17 trillion in personal debt. (And now, with student debt repayments beginning again on October 1st, there is even more needless suffering for those so poor that their economic value is in the negatives.)

In 1995, the National Academy of Sciences recommended the Supplemental Poverty Measure as a new way of assessing poverty and, in 2011, the Census Bureau began to use the SPM. But even that is insufficient. As Gupta-Barnes explains, “Although a broader and preferred measure, the SPM poverty threshold still remains an incomplete estimate of poverty. For instance, according to the SPM, a four-person household with an income of $30,000 is not poor because they fall above the designated poverty threshold. This means that many households living just above the poverty threshold aren’t counted as poor, even though they will have a hard time meeting their basic needs.”

Indeed, right above the 38 million people in official poverty, there are at least 95 million to 105 million living in a state of chronic economic precariousness, just one pay cut, health crisis, or eviction from economic ruin. In other words, today, the low-wage, laid-off, and locked out can’t easily be separated from people of every walk of life who are being economically downsized and dislocated. The old language of social science bears little resemblance to the reality we now face. When the economically “marginalized” are being discussed, it’s all too easy to imagine small bands of people living in the shadows along the edges of society. Unfortunately, the marginalized are now a near-majority of this country.

Poverty Is a Policy Choice

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, even paralyzed, by such a reality. No one — billionaires aside — is immune from the dread-inducing gravity of the situation this country finds itself in. But here’s the strange thing: deep in the depths of such a monumental mess, it’s possible to discover genuine hope. For if our reality is human-made, as it surely is, then we also have the power to change it.

Ironically, during the pandemic years, before the poverty numbers rose dramatically again in 2022, it was possible to see a notable and noticeable reduction in the numbers of poor Americans exactly because of decisive government action. In 2021, for example, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) played leading roles in reducing child poverty to the lowest rates since the SPM was created. The protection and expansion of Medicaid and CHIP also helped mitigate food insecurity and hunger. The research firm KKF estimates that enrollment in those anti-poverty programs rose from “23.3 million to nearly 95 million from February 2020 to the end of March 2023.” And millions of families were able to stay in their homes and fight unlawful evictions during the first couple of years of the pandemic thanks to federal and state eviction moratoriums.

Unfortunately, these pandemic-era programs were sold to us as only temporary, emergency measures, though they were commonsensical policies that advanced the interests of millions of people who had been poor before Covid-19 struck. And unfortunately, alongside Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, congressional Republicans quickly rolled back some of the most striking advances, including letting CTC expire in 2022 (and they continue to advocate for ever greater cuts).

We are now in the midst of what pundits are calling the “great unwinding,” an awkward euphemism for deliberate, brutal reductions to Medicaid expansion in dozens of states. Since April, nearly six million people, including at least 1.2 million children, have been stripped of life-saving Medicaid coverage and estimates suggest that between 15 million and 24 million people may be disenrolled by next spring.

In (harsh) reality, there are at least these two interrelated ways in which poverty is a policy choice. How we choose to define poverty fundamentally shapes how we understand it, while how we govern has enormous consequences for the everyday lives of poor and low-income people. Right now, we’re either getting celebratory messages about the strength of our economy from Democrats or accusatory scapegoating from Republicans. In truth, though, the current bleak reality of poverty is the consequence of decades of neoliberal neglect and animus by both parties.

The pandemic years, sad as they have been, offered a small glimpse of what it would take to confront the needless scourge of poverty in a time of tremendous national wealth. Those investments could have been a first step in launching a full-scale assault on poverty, building off their embryonic success in the pandemic moment.

Instead, the consequences of the rollback of those programs and the threat of yet more cuts brings us to a potential turning point for the nation. Will we continue to condemn tens of millions of us to cruel and unnecessary poverty, while feeding the drive to authoritarianism or even an all-American version of fascism, or will we move swiftly and compassionately to begin lifting the load of poverty and so strengthen the very foundation of our democracy?

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.

The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.

Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. This year’s report, “Survival of the Richest,” offered a striking vision of global poverty from the trenches of the pandemic years. Imagine this as a start: in the last two of those years, the world’s richest 1% captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth, or twice that of the bottom 99%. Put another way, this planet’s billionaires have collectively “earned” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for obvious reasons) $2.7 billion every one of the last 730 days. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, at least 115 million people fell into “extreme poverty,” with billions more hanging on by a tenuous thread. By 2030, Oxfam reports, the world could be facing the “largest setback in addressing global poverty since World War II.”

The grim realities laid out in the report left me wondering: What kind of cooperation were they talking about at Davos? Did they mean a collaboration among all global communities? (Not likely!) Or did they mean the continued partnership of economic elites intent, above all else, on protecting their own wealth? And what of fragmentation? Amid increasing warfare and beneath the ongoing fracturing of democracies (including our own, thanks in part to a billionaire whose name I hardly need mention), nations, and long-held international arrangements, do they recognize the deepest fragmentation of all, that caused by so much needless suffering and inexcusable gluttony?

Poverty Amid Plenty

Here in the United States, it’s the same story: untold wealth and shocking want, even as House Republicans are threatening to slash programs like Medicare and Social Security just weeks into a new congressional session. Today, in one of the richest nations in the world, nearly half the population is either poor or a single $400 emergency away from poverty. The moral and cognitive dissonance of such a reality can be difficult to fathom, as can the numbers. At a time when the U.S. economy is valued at nearly $25 trillion and the wealth of the three richest Americans exceeds $300 billion, at least 140 million people strain to meet their basic needs and face the daily threat of economic ruin thanks to one pay cut, layoff, accident, extreme storm, or bad medical diagnosis.

Over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks out of the paychecks of their workers, so much so that the average CEO now makes 670 times more than his or her employees. It tells you how far we’ve come that, in 1965, that number was “just” 20 times more. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year) has remained remarkably low, hurting not only those who earn it, but millions of other workers whose employers use it as the floor for their own pay scales. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had kept up with the economy’s overall productivity over the last half-century, it would now be $22 an hour, or close to $50,000 a year.

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All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the U.S. economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat — politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.

America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.

Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plus in personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. As a result (as I wrote in 2021 with Astra Taylor), “millions of Americans aren’t just poor; they have less than nothing. The American dream is no longer owning a house with a white picket fence; it is getting out of debt. In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people now aspire to have zero dollars.”

The view looks very different from the top. The first two years of the pandemic marked the most unequal recession in modern American history, with the wealth of the country’s 651 billionaires actually increasing by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of that year, he was joined by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. At Amazon, where the median pay in 2020 was about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made that year to his own endangered workers and would still have had well over $100 billion left.

As an anti-poverty organizer, I’m regularly asked if we can afford to end poverty, even as politicians and economists cite the specter of scarcity to justify inaction or even outright anti-poor policies. Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.

Don’t be fooled. We’re not living in a time of insufficiency, but in a golden age of plenty amid grotesque poverty, of abundance amid unbearable forms of abandonment.

To Tackle Poverty, Tackle Wealth

Despite the capacity to wipe out poverty altogether, antipoverty advocacy generally operates within two interdependent philosophical frameworks: mitigation and charity. The first assumes that poverty is indeed a permanent feature of our economy best alleviated by job-training programs, fatherhood initiatives, and work requirements, but never to be abolished outright. The second approaches poverty as a sad social condition that exists on the margins of society and treats poor people as, at best, pitiable and, at worst, pathological. Together, those two frameworks funnel billions of dollars in charitable and philanthropic giving to explicitly apolitical measures directed downstream from the source of poverty.

While such giving does indeed help many impoverished people meet immediate needs, it does very little to confront poverty in its fullness or why it exists in the first place — and in most cases, the help is inadequate given the need. No wonder the wealthy tend to be the biggest proponents of mitigating poverty through charity, because to fundamentally address the problem would also mean addressing the unequal distribution of political power in our world.

Oxfam’s new report is a good place to explore this, since it not only critiques inequality, but offers possible solutions to the nightmares such a situation creates, above all increasing tax rates on the wealthy, which right now are mind-numbingly low. Consider this statistic: “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of about 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%.”

To counter this, Oxfam proposes that worldwide taxes on the income of the richest 1% be raised to at least 60% (with even higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires). They also suggest that taxes on the wealthy be levied in such a way that their number would be dramatically reduced and their wealth redistributed to meet the needs of the poor.

Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s executive director, explained it this way:

“Taxing the super-rich is the strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy. We need to do this for innovation. For stronger public services. For happier and healthier societies. And to tackle the climate crisis, by investing in the solutions that counter the insane emissions of the very richest.”

A New and Unsettling Force

People often ask me for a plan to end poverty. Usually that means they want to know what policy positions and prescriptions to advocate for, a line of inquiry on which I have plenty of thoughts. As a start, I refer them to the fulsome agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign (that I co-chair), including our demands for fair tax policy. But long ago, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an approach to lifting the load of poverty that goes far beyond any single program or policy.

Some months before the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, having been endlessly asked for an itemized list of demands, King answered this way:

“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program. What is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen… The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”

The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest legislative victories. At the time, King pointed out that, beneath the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, areas in which they had made significant gains, millions of Black people remained locked in poverty in the South, as well as across the country, as did so many others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. King himself was surprised to learn that poor white people actually outnumbered poor Black people nationally. Taking that into consideration, he counseled that the movement had to make an evolutionary leap from “civil rights to human rights” and from “reform to revolution.”

This may not be the King whom the nation chooses to remember every mid-January in glitzy speeches by politicians who vehemently oppose the very positions for which he gave his life. In fact, this year, on that very commemorative day, I couldn’t help but think of the words of poet Carl Hines:

“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”

But the truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.” Years of experience, and the guidance of others, had convinced him that the next chapter of the struggle required a mass movement of a breadth and depth not yet awakened. As he came to see it, strategically speaking, the unity of the poor would be the Achilles heel of a society desperately in need of restructuring. If poor people could unite to form a new political alliance across the lines that historically divided them, they would be uniquely positioned to lead a broad and powerful human-rights movement that confronted militarism, racism, and economic exploitation together.

The same is no less true today. To end poverty, our smartest and most innovative ideas have to be brought to the table. The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Human Rights Watch ) – New survey data released recently by the United States Census Bureau found that housing payments for about half of all US renters were unaffordable in 2021 under guidelines set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The American Community Survey (ACS), an annual survey sent to more than 3.5 million households by the US Census Bureau, collected data to estimate the percent of household income spent on gross rent, which includes both rental payments and utilities.

The ACS found that, across the United States, half of renters paid more than 30 percent of their household incomes towards gross rent, which is the threshold that HUD uses to determine whether housing is affordable.

These ACS data also highlight how widespread housing unaffordability is becoming in the US. In 2021, median gross rent was unaffordable in about 47 percent of surveyed counties. This was a 14-percentage point jump from the 2019 ACS, the most recent comparison year because of Covid-related disruptions, which found that gross rent was unaffordable in only about 33 percent of the counties surveyed. 

The US has persistently failed to ensure the right to adequate housing under international human rights law, which includes affordability. Public housing is one of the few forms of housing affordable to those with the lowest incomes, and is a crucial source of housing stability for Black and brown people, but has been chronically underfunded by the US government for decades.  

Via Pixabay.

Similarly, because of insufficient funding for subsidies to help tenants afford rent on the private market, only about 25 percent of eligible households receive rental assistance. Housing voucher waiting lists in major cities have been closed for decades, and those lucky enough to be on the lists often wait months before receiving assistance.

While grim, these new data do not reflect the surging rent inflation that occurred in 2022 and may continue for some time, according to analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Without significant investment in public housing and social protection, the shortage of affordable and adequate homes in the US will continue to grow, further undermining the human rights to adequate housing and to an adequate standard of living.

Via Human Rights Watch

( Minnesota Reformer ) – Of the 20 states that have failed to raise the minimum wage above the federal $7.25 an hour standard, 16 have more than 12% of their children living in poverty, according to a States Newsroom analysis of wage and poverty data. Anti-poverty advocates say that’s a sign that there’s an urgent need for lawmakers to increase the federal minimum wage and do more to help struggling families.

Congress had the opportunity to achieve the latter by expanding the child tax credit before the end of the year, but lawmakers did not arrive at a deal with Republicans to include it in the omnibus spending package. The expansion, which was part of the American Rescue Plan, provided as much as $3,600 in monthly installments to qualifying families and is credited with lifting 3.7 million children out of poverty at least temporarily.

Raising the minimum wage would not lead to as fast or drastic an improvement, but a 2019 Congressional Budget Office analysis found that increasing the amount to $15 an hour would lift more than 500,000 children from poverty. And the Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2021, that if Congress passed a $15 minimum wage increase by 2025, up to 3.7 million people wouldn’t have to live in poverty — 1.3 million of those being children.

Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said there is a strong connection between the minimum wage and poverty.

“It’s not a 1-1 connection, but there is a pretty strong connection,” said Zipperer, whose expertise is on the minimum wage, inequality, and low-wage labor markets. “The main determinants of poverty in this country are whether you work and how much you work, so whether you have a job during the year and how many hours a week or weeks per year you work at that job. … And then the third [determinant] is how much you were paid for an hour of work at your job. If you’re getting paid relatively low wages, the minimum wage affects that.”

Congress last raised the minimum wage in 2009, but 30 states now require employers pay more than the federal standard, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Numerous municipalities have also passed living wage laws for city or county workers.

Twenty-seven states, including New Jersey, Florida, California and Missouri, will raise their state’s minimum wage in 2023, after passing legislation or voter-approved ballot measures that gradually increase the state minimum wage over several years or tie it to inflation. Washington ($15.74), California ($15.50) and Massachusetts ($15) will have some of the highest state minimum wages in 2023, although the high cost of living in those states mitigates the effect on poverty rates.

In Missouri, where the minimum wage will be $12 next year, a 2018 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that Proposition B, the ballot measure that is responsible for raising the wage, would increase wages for 677,000 people in Missouri.

States where legislatures have not raised the minimum above the federal $7.25 an hour include Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. All have child poverty rates of 20% or higher, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, a financial news site. Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the United States, at 27.6%, with Louisiana following at 26.3%.

Zipperer said that many of these low minimum wage states are concentrated in the Southern United States for a reason. He pointed to the political deals lawmakers made to leave Black workers out of 1930s labor rights gains, which were done for the benefit of Southern Democrats.

“That legacy of racism plagued the initial years of the national minimum wage and labor law generally in the United States, and while it was somewhat improved and overcome through the civil rights movement, you see the parallel to that now where you have a lot of places in the South that don’t have minimum wages and or have very low minimum wages, and so they follow the federal standard which Congress has refused to raise over the past 13 years,” he said.

He added, “That kind of decline in the cost-of-living adjusted value of the minimum wage disproportionately harms the people who are paid the lowest wages in the U.S. economy and because of our sexist and racist labor market, that is women and people of color.”

In Louisiana, for instance, 64% of women of color earn less than $15 an hour, while 58% of Black workers and 50% of Hispanic workers also earn less than $15 an hour, according to Oxfam America’s analysis of U.S. Census data.

The results of that disparity can be seen in an analysis of data on Lousianans’ standard of living done by Talk Poverty, a project of the Center for American Progress. It found:

• 19% of people in Louisiana had incomes below the poverty line in 2019.
• 20% of working age women and 29% of Black Lousianans in 2019 lived below the poverty line.
• Louisiana ranked 42nd in the nation in high school graduation rates and 45th in higher education attainment during the 2017-2018 school year.
• In 2018, 20% of young people aged 18 to 24 without high school degrees were not in school or working.
• From 2017 to 2019, 15.3% of Louisiana households were food insecure.

Peter Robins-Brown, executive director of Louisiana Progress, said several factors contribute to the number of Louisianans living in poverty. Louisiana hasn’t prioritized putting funding into programs that would provide economic relief, has focused its tax reform on benefits for the wealthy and for businesses, and has a particularly unjust criminal justice system that punishes the poor, he said.

“Social services in Louisiana are largely underfunded, making it easier for generational poverty to continue,” Robins-Brown said.

The state also favors landlords’ rights over tenants rights and people living in the southern parts of the state that experience the most severe weather disasters have to live with high premiums for homeowners insurance, which further contribute to economic inequality, Robins-Brown explained.

Although Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat, and has expressed support for raising the minimum wage, both chambers of the Louisiana Legislature are controlled by Republicans. Louisiana is one of 24 states without a process for citizens to offer ballot initiatives and voter referendums.

“Both the House and Senate committees that deal with labor issues are low-priority for Republicans and Democrats because industry interests usually predetermine the outcomes in those committees,” Robins-Brown said.

For these reasons, Robins-Brown says Louisianans are depending on the federal government to take action to raise the minimum wage. He said his organization supported expanding the child tax credit because it was been a powerful tool in reducing child poverty.

Congress last failed to increase the minimum wage in 2021, when it was proposed as part of a larger pandemic relief package. Fifty Senate Republicans and seven Senate Democrats voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025. The exclusion of the expansion of the child tax credit in Congress’ omnibus bill is one more lost chance to reduce child poverty.

“The child tax credit enormously reduced poverty during the recent expansion of that program and unfortunately that was temporary,” Zipperer said. “But I think that’s a very clear demonstration that we actually have, to some degree, the capacity to eliminate a lot of poverty in this country. All it takes is overcoming the political opposition to do that.”

Casey Quinlan is an economy reporter for States Newsroom, based in Washington D.C. For the past decade, they have reported on national politics and state politics, LGBTQ rights, abortion access, labor issues, education, Supreme Court news and more for publications including The American Independent, ThinkProgress, New Republic, Rewire News, SCOTUSblog, In These Times and Vox.

Via ( Minnesota Reformer

Creative Commons License 4.0

( Otherwords.org) – The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that poverty dropped notably in 2021. Amid a pandemic and widespread economic pain, this is a significant accomplishment.

There are three lessons here — about government programs, about how we measure poverty, and about how far we have left to go.

First, these numbers show that government programs work. After Social Security, refundable tax credits like the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) and stimulus payments were the biggest contributors to reducing poverty.

Without them, over 20 million more people would have been poor last year. The expanded CTC alone lifted millions of children above the poverty line and reduced racial inequities among poor children.

These programs worked because they departed significantly from how anti-poverty programs have worked for the past 30 years. They provided direct cash transfers to recipients, without any work requirements or bureaucratic indignities.

Welfare rights organizers have been pushing for these changes for decades. This year, they were proven right.

But unfortunately, official federal poverty figures still conceal the true number of people who are struggling — and underestimate the scale of our responsibility to help them.

At just $31,000 for a family of four, the federal government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM, is far too low. That’s less than half of the typical cost of living for a family this size in rural Mississippi, or just one-third for Chicago. And the official poverty measure, or OPM, is even lower.

I’m the policy director of the Poor People’s Campaign, which defines poverty to include everyone living up to 200 percent of the SPM.

Using this measure, which is still less than median income, we counted 140 million people — or 43 percent of the country — who were poor or one emergency away from being poor before the pandemic. In 2021, this rate went down to about 34 percent, or 112 million people.

This is a significant decrease. But it means over a third of our nation has little to celebrate.

In fact, the population living between 100 percent and 200 percent of the SPM threshold stayed basically the same between 2020 and 2021: nearly 90 million people, just one emergency away from poverty. If we only looked at the poverty rate, we would have missed them entirely.

That means we can and must do more. The expanded CTC expired in December 2021, and there has been no further discussion of reviving stimulus payments — even with the federal minimum wage at its lowest value in 66 years and the cost of living continuing to rise.

This is not to minimize the gains we’ve made. They just remind us that poverty is a policy choice — and fortunately, we can make different choices.

In 2020, there were over 80 million eligible poor and low-income voters. Fifty million of them voted in the presidential contest, accounting for a third of the electorate overall and even higher percentages in key states in the Midwest and South.

These voters share a common interest in securing health care, living wages, decent housing, and safe schools for their kids. If they could be organized to take action together — across race, religion, and other lines of division — we could advance the moral policies we need to fully address poverty.

“What’s hurting me in Kentucky is hurting you in Alabama, in West Virginia, and across the nation,” said Tayna Fogle, a leader in the Kentucky Poor People’s Campaign, earlier this year.

“Can you imagine all the poor and the low-income people coming to the ballot box?” she asked. “What if we did everything we could to make sure that our vote counted? We could overturn this madness that’s going on.”

If poor people vote in the midterms like they did in 2020, we could make another leap towards ending the madness of widespread poverty in the midst of plenty.

Shailly Gupta BarnesShailly Gupta Barnes is the Policy Director for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and the Kairos Center.

Via Otherwords.org

We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out?

In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.

In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.

In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.

Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.

Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.

The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.

As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.

Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones

Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.

And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.

It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival — at last — of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”

Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.

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And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.

Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels. Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.

Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.

On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.

Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.

Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering — from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.

In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.

Dark Clouds Blowing in from the “Equality State”

While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”

Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments — made in the “equality state” — may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses” — even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.

What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.

It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.

At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.

Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.

Copyright 2022 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

Hundreds of millions of people struggled to keep cool amid a sweltering summer heat wave as cities across the U.S. and mainland Europe experienced record-high temperatures. In the U.K., thermometers topped 104 Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) on July 19, 2022, the highest ever recorded.

While all this broiling heat is surely punishing on a personal level, it also has significant impacts on the broader economy.

As an economist who has studied the effects of weather and climate change, I have examined a large body of work that links heat to economic outcomes. Here are four ways extreme heat hurts the economy.

1. Growth takes a hit

Research has found that extreme heat can directly hurt economic growth.

For example, a 2018 study found that the economies of U.S. states tend to grow at a slower pace during relatively hot summers. The data shows that annual economic growth falls 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points for every 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.56 C) that a state’s average summer temperature is above normal.

Laborers in weather-exposed industries such as construction work fewer hours when it’s hotter. But higher summer temperatures also reduce growth in many industries that tend to involve indoor work, including retail, services and finance. Workers are less productive when it’s hotter out.

2. Crop yields drop

Agriculture is obviously exposed to weather: After all, crops grow outdoors.

While temperatures up to around 85 F to 90 F (29-32 C) can benefit crop growth, yields fall sharply when thermostats rise further. Some of the crops that can be hit hard by extreme heat include corn, soybeans and cotton. These reductions in yields could be costly for U.S. agriculture.

For example, a recent study I conducted found that an additional 2 degrees C (3.6 F) of global warming would eliminate profits from an average acre of farmland in the eastern U.S.

A prominent example of this was the collapse of the Russian wheat harvest in response to the country’s 2010 heat wave, which raised wheat prices throughout the world.

3. Energy use soars

Of course, when it’s hot, energy use goes up as people and businesses run their air conditioners and other cooling equipment at full blast.

A 2011 study found that just one extra day with temperatures above 90 F (32 C) increases annual household energy use by 0.4%. More recent research shows that energy use increases the most in places that tend to be hotter, probably because more households have air conditioning.

This increase in electricity use on hot days stresses electric grids right when people depend on them most, as seen in California and Texas during past heat waves. Blackouts can be quite costly for the economy, as inventories of food and other goods can spoil and many businesses either have to run generators or shut down. For instance, the 2019 California blackouts cost an estimated US$10 billion.

4. Education and earnings suffer

A long-term impact of increasingly hotter weather involves how it affects children’s ability to learn – and thus their future earnings.

Research has shown that hot weather during the school year reduces test scores. Math scores decrease more and more as the temperature rises beyond 70 F (21 C). Reading scores are more resistant to high temperatures, which this research claims is consistent with how different regions of the brain respond to heat.

One study suggested that students in schools that lack air conditioning learn 1% less for every 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.56 C) increase in the school year’s average temperature. It also found that minority students are especially affected by hotter school years, as their schools are more likely to lack air conditioning.

Lost learning results in lower lifetime earnings and hurts future economic growth.

The impact of extreme heat on development, in fact, begins before we’re even born. Research has found that adults who were exposed to extreme heat as fetuses earn less during their lifetimes. Each extra day with average temperature above 90 F (32 C) reduces earnings 30 years later by 0.1%.

Air conditioning can help – to a point

Air conditioning can offset some of these effects.

For example, studies have found that having a working air conditioner means fewer people die, student learning isn’t compromised and extreme heat outside during pregnancy doesn’t hurt fetuses.

Not everyone has air conditioners, however, especially in states such as Oregon and countries such as the U.K. that have more temperate climates but have nonetheless recently experienced unusually extreme temperatures. And many people can’t afford to own or operate them. Survey data from 2017 found that around half of homes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest
lacked air conditioning. And about 42% of U.S. classrooms lack an air conditioner.

While heat waves are shown to induce more households to install air conditioning, it’s hardly a panacea. By 2100, higher use of air conditioning could increase residential energy consumption by 83% globally. If that energy comes from fossil fuels, it could end up amplifying the heat waves that are causing the higher demand in the first place.

And in the U.S. South, where air conditioning is omnipresent, hotter-than-usual summers still take the greatest toll on states’ economic growth.

In other words, as temperatures rise, economies will continue to suffer.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 2, 2021.

Derek Lemoine, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A good many of us still fondly remember that poolside party scene. A 21-year-old “Benjamin” gets pulled aside for a career pep talk from an overbearing “Mr. McGuire” who says he has just one word of wisdom for Dustin Hoffman’s newly graduated young man: “Plastics!”

One real-life young man back then, James Dyson, would end up following Mr. McGuire’s advice — and go on to fashion plastic vacuum cleaners into the first global billion-dollar fortune that rests on polymers.

But no Mr. McGuire here in the 2020s would ever be pitching boring old plastics as a sure-fire path to grand fortune. What red-hot field of business endeavor would a modern-day McGuire be hawking? A new report from Bain & Company, a global consultancy with offices in 65 cities worldwide, has a suggestion: wealth management.

And why do analysts at Bain see wealth management — the business of helping people of means grow their assets — as such a promising career path? A simple financial fact: A colossal chunk of the world’s wealth now sits in the pockets of affluents who have no clue what to do with all their good fortune. The “investable assets” of these wealthy worldwide, Bain is predicting, figure to double by 2030.

“The rich are getting richer, that’s for sure,” as Bain partner Markus Habbel, one of the authors of the financial firm’s new report, told the Financial Times earlier this week.

“If you have a wealth management capability,” agrees Goldman Sachs chief operating officer John Waldron, “you have a much more valuable business.”

The new Bain study doesn’t dive deep into any detail about our continuing maldistribution of global income and wealth. But other analysts most definitely have been subjecting that maldistribution to some increasingly sophisticated analysis. Over the past quarter-century, these researchers — many inspired by the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty — have been developing new statistical approaches to determining just who has what and how much of it.

Researchers like Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both at the University of California-Berkeley, have taken us well beyond the tax return data that’s traditionally driven our core inequality stats. In their just-published latest work, Saez and Zucman have joined with their UC colleague Thomas Blanchet to tackle the challenge of calculating inequality in what they call “real time.”

U.S. government stats, the three authors point out, “do not make it possible to know who benefits from economic growth in a timely manner.” Indeed, until recent years, most numbers on income and wealth distribution came from snapshots taken well before the data went public. The most recent distributional stats currently available from the Federal Reserve’s exhaustive triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, for instance, cover 2019.

In that same year, Federal Reserve analysts did inaugurate a brand-new data series with a much briefer lag time. These new distributional snapshots have been appearing quarterly ever since, and the latest, released last month, covers this year’s first three months. In 2022’s quarter one, the Fed’s “Distributional Financial Accounts” show, America’s top 1 percent held 31.8 percent of the nation’s wealth. The nation’s bottom half held 2.8 percent.

The University of California’s inequality stats team has now trimmed the data lag time even further, to help us “track the distributional impacts of government policies” on a month-to-month basis and provide critically important information to have in the middle of an economic crisis.

The Berkeley team notes that none of the timely government economic stats we’ve had up to now — on total national personal income, unemployment, and more — have come “disaggregated by income level.” Without that disaggregation, we can’t know what social groups are benefiting from current government policies and what groups aren’t. And if we don’t have that information, then government programs successfully helping people who really need help can fall politically by the wayside.

The Berkeley analysts illustrate that dynamic by applying their new “real-time inequality” statistical methodology to our Covid pandemic years. At the end of 2021, their approach shows, America’s working-class households found themselves with 20 percent more disposable income than before the pandemic, thanks to the federal government’s expanded child tax credit and expanded earned income tax credit for adults with children.

But disposable income for the nation’s working families promptly then fell in early 2022 after Congress let those aid programs expire. By June 2022, the Berkeley economists sum up, the wealth share of America’s top 0.1 percent had returned “to its pre-Covid level.”

So what do we do with all the new distributional data we now have available? Do we gaze at the new numbers and marvel at how incredibly rich our rich continue to be? Or do we battle to create a much more equal society where helping the wealthy manage their money no longer rates as our nation’s hottest career option?

A host of long-time egalitarian activists are choosing the latter. They’ve just come together to establish an Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, and this new Institute, as its first order of business, is now teaming up with social justice advocacy groups and coalitions in a “Tax the Ultra-Rich Now” campaign to “TURN” America around.

TURN campaign activists will be initially “collaborating with grassroots organizations across five key states – Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – with a focus on organizations centered in communities of color.”

Other campaigns will no doubt follow, on a wide variety of fronts. Those campaigns will have no shortage of tax-the-rich proposals to draw from. Among the latest, from Bob Lord and Dylan Dusseault of Patriotic Millionaires, a call for the passage of an “Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Restore Civil Harmony Act.” This “OLIGARCH” legislation would key new taxes on the wealth of America’s super rich to the nation’s median — most typical — household wealth.

Under the OLIGARCH Act, households holding between 1,000 and 10,000 times America’s median household wealth would pay an annual 2 percent tax on their fortunes. Those rates would escalate on households sitting on even greater stores of wealth. In the top tax bracket, for households worth over one million times our most typical household wealth, the annual tax would run at 8 percent.

Back in 1980, Lord and Dusseault note, fewer than 0.005 percent of America’s adults held over 1,000 times the nation’s median household wealth. By 2020, the ranks of that wealth cohort had quintupled. In 1983, not a single American held a fortune that equaled 100,000 times the nation’s median household wealth. In 2021, slightly over 50 Americans exceeded that threshold, and two Americans actually held over a million times the wealth of America’s most typical households.

That can all change. We all can change it.

Via Inequality.org

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