American Poverty

Reading notes and responses to:

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. Sasha Abramsky. 2013. ISBN 978-1-56858-726-4.

Americans want quick fix solutions

"No society in human history has ever successfully banished poverty; and no polity with a modicum of respect for individual liberty has entirely negated the presence of inequality. But it did reflect a confidence in America's innate sense of possibility; in an era of space travel and antibiotics, computers and robots, poverty was just one more frontier to be conquered, one more communal obstacle to be pushed aside. When it turned out to be an order of magnitude more complicated, Americans quickly grew tired of the effort." p3.

Consumerism is so ingrained in American culture that it is an inescapable way of life. To participate, to socialize, to feel like a member of this society you need disposable income.

"Too poor to participate in the consumption rituals that define most Americans' lives, too cash-strapped to go to malls, to visit cafes or movie theaters, to buy food anywhere other than dollar stores, these men and women live on America's edge... All of these people share an existential loneliness, a sense of being shut out of the most basic rituals of society." p4

The first step to change is intention. People often fail to change, not because they can't, but because they are not willing to change.

"Our political leaders have ignored what's staring them in the face and instead enacted policies that make economic hardship worse for those already on the margins or starting the long slide into destitution. As detailed in this book, they do so because America's political process is increasingly beholden to powerful financial interests, its priorities shaped by what used to be seen as a Southern mores: a belief not just in the inevitability of inequality, but in the desirability of oligarchy as a social structure, in the usefulness of poverty as a social control mechanism." p8.

Americans don't produce the goods that they consume. Our economy is not motivated by how much value we create, but by how much of that value ends up in the pockets of the rich.

"It is an economy that, to a large extent, revolves not around the making of things but around the shuffling of money - hence the overblown impact of financial sector, insurance, and real estate instability on the broader economic system. And it is one in which, for the last several decades, ordinary Americans have borrowed against home equity, run up credit card debt, and taken out loans to go to school, all just to survive on a daily basis." p8

Poverty is inescapable. However, inequality and socio-economic divide is intentional. These are products of our beliefs that condone systemic injustice.

"[Marshall] Ganz explained, "They're missing the whole point. Poverty is evidence of a problem; it's not the source of the problem. They're all based on the weakening of collective institutions - the decline of labor, of common interests. The core question is not about poverty, it's really about democracy. The galloping poverty in the United States is evidence of a retreat from democratic beliefs and practices." p11.

In every society there will be poor people. Poverty is not the problem. It's the systemic creation of poverty that is a problem. When the things we work for can't lead to sustainable living, not by chance or grave personal failings, but because the process does not deliver what it promises. Education, low wage employment, health-care are failed promises.

We are lead by a fabricated vision of consumption, material goods, and spending to lead a prosperous, healthy, happy life. Instead, it drives us into debt, enslaves us to depressing jobs, drives up the prices of homes and goods as we compete with each other to purchase better things and discard the outdated.

The wealth does not stay in the pockets of the lower and middle class. All our consumption funnels the wealth to the top. The working classes do not retain the wealth that they earn.


Academic merit is not merit based. It is biased, because social status and lifetime earnings are at stake here! The education system is a sham. It's a systematic way of rich people justifying the better positions their kids get in society, by virtue of 'academic merit' and being 'educated'.

Howard Friedman. The Measure of a Nation. 2012. "The poorer the family one was born into, the higher the likelihood that a child would struggle in school. Even if he or she did well in the classroom, there was a lower likelihood that the child would be able to attend college. Friedman noted that the most successful eighth graders from poor economic backgrounds had only the same chance of attaining a bachelor's degree as the least successful eighth graders from the wealthiest echelon of society." p25.

In economic depression, we expect that the poor get poorer...

"In 2010, the median annual wage in America fell to $26,364, representing a 7 percent decline over the course of the first decade of the new century." p26.

"At the bottom of that economy, income volatility is peculiarly high; casual laborers and hourly employees routinely see their hours cut, their wages reduced, or their jobs eliminated during downturns. Oftentimes, their crises are magnified by homelessness, addiction, and mental illness and by involvement with the criminal justice system - from the early 1970s through the early 2000s, America built up the biggest incarceration system in the world." p30.

.... but the rich are getting richer?

"As of 2011, Forbes magazine found 412 Americans had assets in excess of $1 billion... with a net worth of more than $50 million each, upward of 35,000... and the 2011 World Wealth Report estimated that the United States had 3.1 million millionaires." p26.

"During the boom years of the early part of the twenty-first century, for example, the number of Americans living in poverty grew by six million; during the bust years that followed that boom, another nine million people were impoverished,

while at the top of the economy the tremendous accumulation of wealth continued apace. The Census Bureau calculated that more than twenty-three million households had incomes of more than $100,000 per year.

What was being hollowed out was the middle.

Today, the most affluent 1 percent of the population control fully 40 percent of the country's wealth, the economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in Vanity Fair in 2011. And during the past three decades, the more rarified one's position on the income scale is, the more one has been able to accumulate a disproportionate share of the nation's treasure." p33.

How is this happening? The middle class is evaporating. It's turning into owners and laborers, rich and poor. The lower middle class are dropping into poverty, yet the upper middle class are continuing to try to climb and mistakenly see their advancement as signs that the economy is recovering.

"[Economist Emmanual Saez] and his colleagues at UC Berkeley estimated that fully 93 percent of income gains in 2010 went to the country's top 1 percent. If you were in that top 1 percent in 2010, Saez calculated, you could expected to see your income increase by 11.6 percent. If you were in the bottom 99 percent, your income would have grown by only 0.2 percent." p33.

What role does our political leadership play?

Politicians are basically Public Relations employees hired by wealthy interest groups. They don't make the decisions, they just smooth over the explanation of the actions of big companies to placate or put one over masses.

That's why you see actors and publicity figures making their way into politics.

Santa Barbara historian Alice O'Connor. "Politics has become increasingly reliant on big-dollar contributors, and in so becoming has lost touch with the expectations of the vast majority of Americans who cannot afford to buy access to the political process. 'The narrow politics of winning elections,' she averred, 'has less and less to do with connecting with what people really care about, and more to do with raising money and buying media.' p35

Being good at winning an election has nothing to do with being a good president. It's the clean image and relatable character story that can be sold to voters that has value. It's the dirtiness of policies that can be explained away, masqueraded that has value to the lobbyists.

The perfect politician is one who can smile and hug babies then demolish that baby's future without absorbing the blame. A two-face. A convincing sociopath.