irondoor827

alex Loc: michigan now imperial beach californa

when you were asked to list things he had done we ment things he has done that were GOOD for the country not things to help destroy it

irondoor827

ITS time to blame Congress for its FAILURES;

John Boehner’s Republican-controlled House has failed to pass a farm bill. This gives John Boehner a black eye to go with his mahogany face. The thing about a farm bill with a food stamp program included is that it has something for everybody. But House Republicans only want things for somebodies. Traditionally in a farm bill, the farm subsidies help rich agribusiness, and the food stamp program helps poor people. Democrats are willing to let Republicans give money to those who don’t need it, in exchange for getting food to poor children. But now Republicans won’t even do that.
The Republicans added an amendment to the bill that would have let states require that food stamp recipients work for their food. Amazing! The Republicans seem to have adopted a carrot and stick approach to food stamps—and they want people to have to work for the carrot. There was also an amendment that would have allowed states to drug-test people to qualify for food stamps. Interestingly, there was no similar requirement to drug-test people applying for farm subsidies. They could pee in a silver cup.
Celebrity chef Paula Deen admitted in a court deposition that she told racist jokes, used the N-word, and wanted to design a slavery-themed wedding. Here is a phrase that will never again be associated with Paula Deen—“too sweet.”
E.W. Jackson, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia, said that the social programs of the 1960’s did more harm to African Americans than slavery. In Jackson’s mind, the Great Society wasn’t as great as slavery.
color=red|green|blue][/
A new study indicates that Tea Party supporters tend to be racist. In a related finding, water is wet. The study concludes that “racial animus is nuanced.” You know what’s not nuanced? The racist signs at the Tea Party rallies.
color=red|green|blue][/
Rightwing loons have been trying to equate their obsession with guns to the struggle for civil rights. Sorry, losers—when they said “Eyes on the prize” they weren’t looking through a gun-sight. Civil rights protesters were being beaten, tortured, and murdered. What is being done today to gun owners? They don’t even have to show that they’re not a criminal before they’re handed a killing machine.

http://www.randirhodes.com/main.html#ixzz2WsfjpTBj

russ1945

You get on Boehner for failing to pass a bill. When is the last time Reid in the Senate passed a meaningful bill. Dem’s and racism, what an obsessive compulsion that is. Like blaming everything on Bush. I wish people on welfare and food stamps would do something to earn their keep. What the hell is wrong with doing some community service.
Tea Party and racism is even funnier. You do realize blacks belong to the Tea Party. How do you explain that. You leftwing loons (back at ya) only know how to feel sorry for others and for yourselves. You have no answers. You bring up ancient American history to try to prove what point. You guys had the House and Senate for 2 years and what did you get done…..Obamacare. Take a hike, a long one, and if you get lost in the woods look for a republican he can tell you how to get home. Racism, you have to be kidding.

Yankee Clipper

1. Passed Health Care Reform: A completely partisan vote, not Republicans supported it and the general public didn't like it either. The Marxist usuper is stealing money out of Medicade to pay for the start up over-runs. After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems. Healthcare was and is not the cause of America's long term fiscal problems. Over spending by both party's is the real problem. The only way this program will work is it has to deny life saving health care to seniors so they will die of sooner. And the major question is, who's going to pay for it.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. That's at best a stretch if not an outright lie. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs. Take away government over hiring of employees jobs creation doesn't look so good. Three point seven million private sector jobs in 5 years equals only three quaraters of a million job per year. What's so good about that?

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies. I also have heard and read that almost everyone wants to recende Dodd/Frank, so it may not be so good after all.

4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.The Marxist usurper didn't end shit, we were already of a time table to pull out of Iraq. The usurper merely expedited it.

5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year. All the usurper and Panetta are doing is declaring victory where there is none and are leaving, they want more money for the entitlements to buy votes with plain and simple.

6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered. The Marxist usurper showed no leadership there, it was already planned all he had to do is say go. And don't forget we deserted the Doctor who helped us locate Obama, er Osama. What a nasty thing to do.

7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases. I keep hearing GM is going down the tubes again, I don't know about Chrysler, all I know is I will never again own anything from General Motors because of the usurper's connection to them.

There's too much of this BS to go through, but most of it I would not consider major accomplishments, however some of it is, probably in the end 50/50. I'm not even going to to out and look for sites with his failures on them, too much trouble. You believe how you want and I will do the same.I might pick this up at a later date when I feel like researching each and every item, I'm just not in that mood today

The Dutchman

The Dutchman wrote:
Re:the screendoor827 who constantly shows it's ass!

Geeze Oh Pete screendoor enough of your mindless rants, In just what way are you related to or conected with queenie?

How about coming up with that oh so long list of great things this bastard son of who knows messiah of yours whom you idolize has done for this country?



Just another misfit parsite you resemble to a "T"

Now how about coming up with that oh so long list of great things this bastard son of who knows messiah of yours whom you idolize has done for this country?

The Dutchman

What a line of bull $hit! Randi Rhodes is an American progressive talk radio personality, a bleeding hear liberal (AKA] communist useless useful idiot. Is this the best you can come up with?

The Dutchman

This faulking idiot hasn't done anything for anyone but the no-load welfare parasits, the queers and his muslim brotherhood and downlow butt buddies!

Have you forgotten about the Benghazi murders he and his company of criminals orchestrated?

The Dutchman

Yep that's all this ever transparent screendoor puts out is bull shit!

irondoor827

As The world knows give a republican the facts he ask for and then he renigs on it

irondoor827

"You see things; and you say Why?
But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?"


— George Bernard Shaw: Playwright, Nobel Prize Winner

irondoor827

http://billmoyers.com/category/what-matters-today/
On Democracy

June 24, 2013
Shooting It All in Las Vegas
by Michael Winship
I’ve just flown back from Vegas, and boy, are my arms tired. And brain boggled. After all these years, it was my first visit, and although I’ve been to Reno and Tahoe and even the casinos of Winnemucca, Nevada — “The Crossroads of the West” — nothing prepared me for the splendor, squalor, sleaze and squander of the ultimate American pleasure dome.

“This is where feminism came to die,” my girlfriend Pat sardonically joked as weary, bikinied women danced on bars and we walked through the heat past the umpteenth sidewalk vendor handing out escort fliers and wearing a neon-colored “Las Vegas Girls Direct to You in 20 Minutes” tee-shirt, a piece of apparel so ubiquitous the casino gift shops now sell them as souvenirs.

Then there was the pop-up “Hitched in a Hurry” wedding chapel along the Strip where too-young, too-inebriated couples dressed in shorts and flip-flops were exchanging vows as passers-by watched through the windows. We fought the urge to build pop-up intervention centers a hundred feet on either side.

None of which is to say we didn’t have a good time, although in some ways it was more a replica of enjoyment, like the fake Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Venetian canals and other reproductions that dot the Vegas landscape. This is America through the distorting, funhouse looking glass, whether it’s the 32-ounce, frozen cocktails in adult sippy cups or (I’m not making this up) the Kardashian Khaos boutique in the Mirage Hotel.


Las Vegas Metro Police officers stand outside the entrance to the Excalibur hotel-casino after a shooting left two dead, Friday, Dec. 14, 2012, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
And guns. True, we didn’t spot anyone overtly packing heat, except for the occasional law enforcement officer, but the culture certainly was magnified all around us, from the stores with stacks of American Gun, the bestseller by Chris Kyle, the ex-Navy SEAL who was shot to death in Texas four months ago, to the multiple billboards advertising machine gun firing ranges, and the jeeps in camouflage paint that prowl the boulevards promoting commando-style training in the desert.

The city’s homicide rate for the first quarter of this year is up fifty percent from the same period in 2012. In February, for example, a fatal shooting on the Strip only a couple of blocks from our hotel led to a car crash that also killed a cab driver and his passenger, for a total of three deaths. And just two weeks before we arrived, two died and two were injured in a gun-related, double murder-attempted suicide.

The Vegas police department has above-average success arresting the perpetrators — 75% against the national rate of 65% — but oddly, as columnist J. Patrick Coolican of the Las Vegas Sun reports, “In nonlethal shootings, when the victim survives, the criminal is more than 90 percent likely to get away with the crime… In 2012, for instance, there were 313 nonlethal assaults with firearms. Just 20 of the cases led to an arrest.”


Solving gun violence should be a primary goal of law enforcement, but government departments remain hamstrung by budget cuts and hiring freezes, not to mention the relentless bigfooting of the NRA, firearms manufacturers and the rest of the gun lobby.A police spokesman told Coolican that homicides are easier to solve because, he said, you have a corpse and a murder scene. But Eugene O’Donnell, a former cop who’s now a criminologist at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York rejected that rationale and asked, “What’s a police department for if not to solve gun violence?”

Obviously, a police department’s for a lot of other things, too, but the question bears consideration. Solving gun violence should be a primary goal of law enforcement, but government departments remain hamstrung by budget cuts and hiring freezes, not to mention the relentless bigfooting of the NRA, firearms manufacturers and the rest of the gun lobby. Despite continued tragedies and public support for tougher regulation, not only do they continue on a federal level to prevent further regulation, they strong-arm states and municipalities into relaxing the rules or changing them to favor the gun business.

Last week, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell made his state the latest of at least 22 to adopt a “Stand Your Ground” law, allowing the use of deadly force if the owner of a gun feels threatened. He signed the law on the eve of George Zimmerman’s trial for the fatal “Stand Your Ground” shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and chose to hold the signing ceremony — with heavy-handed symbolism — at a shooting range so he could, Alaska Public Media reported, “send a message.”

And the day before we arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada’s Governor Brian Sandoval vetoed a bill authorizing universal background checks for gun purchases in the state. According to the website ThinkProgress, “The bill, passed by Nevada’s Democratically controlled state legislature, would have required a background check prior to all gun sales and would have increased reporting of mental illness data. The National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm called the proposal ‘misguided gun control legislation being forced on law-abiding citizens of Nevada.’”

In fact, an April poll found that 87 percent of Nevada voters favored the background check, but “Sandoval said his decision was in part due to the loud voices of that small minority that does not believe criminal background checks should be required prior to gun purchases. He told a local TV station that he’d received 28,000 calls from opponents, and only about 7,000 from supporters.”

There’s the real power of the NRA and the gun lobby for you. Not just the money they throw at media buys and at officeholders and candidates — in fact, last year only three of the sixteen U.S. Senate candidates endorsed by the NRA won. No, it’s the sheer stridency and lungpower of their opposition to any perceived threat to gun ownership. (Add to this the deep and usually unexpressed anxiety that hey, these folks have weapons. As John Oliver recently proclaimed on The Daily Show, “The Second Amendment has won the Bill of Rights. It has defeated all the other amendments, which of course it did when you think about it — it’s the only amendment with a #$@&* gun.”)

The success of this fierce outspokenness and the corresponding failure of the majority are known, Alec MacGillis wrote in The New Republic, as “the intensity gap: While plenty of people support stricter gun laws, few advocated for them or voted on the issue unless they had been personally affected by gun violence.”

Andy Kroll in Mother Jones quotes political scientist Jonathan Bernstein: “Action works. ‘Public opinion’ is barely real; most of the time, on most issues, change the wording of the question and you’ll get entirely different answers. At best, ‘public opinion’ as such is passive. And in politics, passive doesn’t get results.”

Kroll also cites a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll that one in five gun owners had “called, written, or emailed a public official; only one in ten people without a gun in the household had done the same. In the same poll, one in five gun owners said they’d given money to a group involved in the gun control debate; just four percent of people without a gun in the home previously gave money.”

In just the six months since the Newtown killings there have been more Americans murdered by guns than the 4,409 United States armed forces killed in the Iraq war. Despite its failure in April, reports are that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may bring a background check bill back to the floor between the Fourth of July and August recesses.

So now is the moment for outrage and action to join hands, to swivel the intensity gap in the other direction, to join with such groups as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Sandy Hook Promise, Americans for Responsible Solutions (Gabby Giffords’ group), Moms Demand Action, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and others; to speak out in force, make the phone calls and send the e-mails, to pressure your representatives. Do that, and this time — as they say in Vegas — I wouldn’t bet against you.

irondoor827

The Poverty Line
June 21, 2013
‘Two American Families’ Sneak Preview and Panel
by Theresa Riley

A scene from the 2000 PBS Special "Surviving the Good Times" with Bill Moyers.
Since 1992, Bill Moyers has been following the story of two hard-working families in Milwaukee — one black, one white. A remarkable portrait of perseverance in the face of factory shutdowns and job loss, Two American Families, which airs on Frontline on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, raises unsettling questions about the changing nature of the U.S. economy and the fate of a declining middle class.

On June 20 in Washington, D.C., Frontline hosted a special preview and discussion of the film to explore what happened to the American dream, and whether current policies are enough to help the millions of Americans living on the edge of poverty. MORE

6 CommentsThe Poverty Line
June 18, 2013
What Congress and the Media are Missing in the Food Stamp Debate
by Greg Kaufmann
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, as it considered proposals to the 2013 Farm Bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)To follow the Congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the Farm Bill — and media coverage of that debate — you would think that the relevant issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger in the U.S.

Weill insists that there is plenty that we know about food stamps that Congress and the media are busy ignoring, including from the government’s own data: A January 2013 Institute of Medicine (IOM)/National Research Council (NRC) report clearly described the inadequacy of SNAP benefits for most people struggling with hunger.

“The whole thrust of the report is that this is not a benefit allotment that’s adequate for people in most real world circumstances,” says Weill.

Since the average daily benefit for a SNAP recipient is just $4.50 per day, this conclusion shouldn’t come as much of a shock. But the authors — who comprised a blue ribbon panel charged with conducting a scientific analysis of benefit levels — did a good job breaking down exactly why the benefit allotment might come up so short. MORE

irondoor827

The Poverty Line
June 21, 2013
‘Two American Families’ Sneak Preview and Panel
by Theresa Riley

A scene from the 2000 PBS Special "Surviving the Good Times" with Bill Moyers.
Since 1992, Bill Moyers has been following the story of two hard-working families in Milwaukee — one black, one white. A remarkable portrait of perseverance in the face of factory shutdowns and job loss, Two American Families, which airs on Frontline on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, raises unsettling questions about the changing nature of the U.S. economy and the fate of a declining middle class.

On June 20 in Washington, D.C., Frontline hosted a special preview and discussion of the film to explore what happened to the American dream, and whether current policies are enough to help the millions of Americans living on the edge of poverty. MORE

6 CommentsThe Poverty Line
June 18, 2013
What Congress and the Media are Missing in the Food Stamp Debate
by Greg Kaufmann
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, as it considered proposals to the 2013 Farm Bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)To follow the Congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the Farm Bill — and media coverage of that debate — you would think that the relevant issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger in the U.S.

Weill insists that there is plenty that we know about food stamps that Congress and the media are busy ignoring, including from the government’s own data: A January 2013 Institute of Medicine (IOM)/National Research Council (NRC) report clearly described the inadequacy of SNAP benefits for most people struggling with hunger.

“The whole thrust of the report is that this is not a benefit allotment that’s adequate for people in most real world circumstances,” says Weill.

Since the average daily benefit for a SNAP recipient is just $4.50 per day, this conclusion shouldn’t come as much of a shock. But the authors — who comprised a blue ribbon panel charged with conducting a scientific analysis of benefit levels — did a good job breaking down exactly why the benefit allotment might come up so short. MORE

13 CommentsOn Democracy
June 10, 2013
Take Me Out to the Ball Game — But Pay Me a Living Wage
by Michael Winship

Pregame festivities are shown at AT&T Park before the final game of the World Baseball Classic between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in San Francisco, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
It was in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, 125 years ago this month, that there first appeared a poem titled, “Casey at the Bat, a Ballad of the Republic.” In the decades since, “Casey” has become the classic ode to baseball as the all-American pastime; its stanzas once memorized by school kids, its lines recited and recorded by everyone from James Earl Jones to Garrison Keillor. So poignant and evocative is its tale that Albert Goodwill Spalding, 19th century professional pitcher, team owner and co-founder of the sporting goods company that still bears his name, wrote, “Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its somber story in measured lines. Baseball has ‘Casey at the Bat.’”

The melancholy account of the vainglorious power hitter Casey stepping to the plate, his Mudville team down 4-2 at the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and two outs, epitomizes baseball as the game that will break your heart, especially in its immortal final lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

The poem was written by Ernest Thayer, a college friend of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day who owned the Examiner and the man on whom Orson Welles based Citizen Kane. Thayer used the pen name “Phin,” and was paid five dollars for his masterpiece, or around $125 at today’s prices.

I know of some baseball employees who can relate to that kind of bargain basement salary, and they’re in San Francisco, too. They’re not the A-Rods, Riveras and Pujols who pull down ten million and more. The people I mean are the 800 concession workers who sell hot dogs and beer, serve and clean the restaurants, and cater to the luxury skyboxes at AT&T Park, home of the 2012 World Series champion San Francisco Giants. Employed by a South Carolina-based company called Centerplate, their jobs only last the six months of the season and they make but $11,000 a year, right at the poverty line for a single individual in the United States. Their situation is yet another flagrant example of the vast and widening gap created by income inequality in America.

As Dave Zirin at The Nation magazine recently wrote:

“Concession workers at the park earn their $11,000 in a city where a one-bedroom apartment runs $3,000 a month and people are spending near that much to live in laundry rooms and unventilated basements. These same workers, who commute as much as two hours each way to get to the park, have now gone three years without a pay increase. This despite the fact that the value of the team, according to Forbes, has increased 40 percent, ticket prices have spiked and the cost of a cup of beer has climbed to $10.25. This also despite the fact that, as packed sellouts become the norm, the stress and toil of the job has never been greater.”

MORE

12 CommentsThe Poverty Line
June 8, 2013
‘American Winter’ Arrives at Capitol Hill
by Greg Kaufmann
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Diedre Melson, John Cox and Pamela Thatcher. (Credit: Don Mathis.)On Thursday, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) got off to an auspicious start as chair of the Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy by doing something that is all too novel — inviting people with the most at stake in economic policy decisions to testify in Congress.

Three Oregonians featured in the HBO documentary American Winter joined four public policy experts at the subcommittee’s first hearing, entitled “The State of the American Dream — Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle Class.”

Senator Merkley set the context with some powerful and totally depressing statistics, including that between 1989-2010, hourly productivity grew more than three times as fast as wages did during that time; the bottom 20 percent of wage earners saw their average hourly wages decline by 30 cents; the next lowest 20 percent saw their earnings decline by 4.3 percent. In contrast, over that same period, the top 20 percent of workers enjoyed a nearly 30 percent increase in earnings.

And while middle class earnings have declined, Senator Merkley noted that “the costs of basic features of the middle class such as public college, rent and utilities, and health expenditures have increased between 41 and 80 percent between 1970 and 2009.”

“The data seems to suggest that ordinary families have been slowly hurting for awhile, the financial crisis and recession nearly crushed them and our budget austerity policies are making it even worse,” said the senator. MORE

13 CommentsSmart Charts
May 29, 2013
U.S. Poverty: By the Numbers
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

U.S. poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent

Click pie chart to enlarge. Read the full report at the National Center for Children in Poverty website.
Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million
(program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty)

People in the U.S. experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans MORE

irondoor827

The Poverty Line
June 21, 2013
‘Two American Families’ Sneak Preview and Panel
by Theresa Riley

A scene from the 2000 PBS Special "Surviving the Good Times" with Bill Moyers.
Since 1992, Bill Moyers has been following the story of two hard-working families in Milwaukee — one black, one white. A remarkable portrait of perseverance in the face of factory shutdowns and job loss, Two American Families, which airs on Frontline on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, raises unsettling questions about the changing nature of the U.S. economy and the fate of a declining middle class.

On June 20 in Washington, D.C., Frontline hosted a special preview and discussion of the film to explore what happened to the American dream, and whether current policies are enough to help the millions of Americans living on the edge of poverty. MORE

6 CommentsThe Poverty Line
June 18, 2013
What Congress and the Media are Missing in the Food Stamp Debate
by Greg Kaufmann
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stacks of paperwork await members of the House Agriculture Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, as it considered proposals to the 2013 Farm Bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)To follow the Congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the Farm Bill — and media coverage of that debate — you would think that the relevant issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger in the U.S.

Weill insists that there is plenty that we know about food stamps that Congress and the media are busy ignoring, including from the government’s own data: A January 2013 Institute of Medicine (IOM)/National Research Council (NRC) report clearly described the inadequacy of SNAP benefits for most people struggling with hunger.

“The whole thrust of the report is that this is not a benefit allotment that’s adequate for people in most real world circumstances,” says Weill.

Since the average daily benefit for a SNAP recipient is just $4.50 per day, this conclusion shouldn’t come as much of a shock. But the authors — who comprised a blue ribbon panel charged with conducting a scientific analysis of benefit levels — did a good job breaking down exactly why the benefit allotment might come up so short. MORE

13 CommentsOn Democracy
June 10, 2013
Take Me Out to the Ball Game — But Pay Me a Living Wage
by Michael Winship

Pregame festivities are shown at AT&T Park before the final game of the World Baseball Classic between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in San Francisco, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
It was in The San Francisco Examiner on June 3, 1888, 125 years ago this month, that there first appeared a poem titled, “Casey at the Bat, a Ballad of the Republic.” In the decades since, “Casey” has become the classic ode to baseball as the all-American pastime; its stanzas once memorized by school kids, its lines recited and recorded by everyone from James Earl Jones to Garrison Keillor. So poignant and evocative is its tale that Albert Goodwill Spalding, 19th century professional pitcher, team owner and co-founder of the sporting goods company that still bears his name, wrote, “Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its somber story in measured lines. Baseball has ‘Casey at the Bat.’”

The melancholy account of the vainglorious power hitter Casey stepping to the plate, his Mudville team down 4-2 at the bottom of the ninth with two men on base and two outs, epitomizes baseball as the game that will break your heart, especially in its immortal final lines:

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.

The poem was written by Ernest Thayer, a college friend of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day who owned the Examiner and the man on whom Orson Welles based Citizen Kane. Thayer used the pen name “Phin,” and was paid five dollars for his masterpiece, or around $125 at today’s prices.

I know of some baseball employees who can relate to that kind of bargain basement salary, and they’re in San Francisco, too. They’re not the A-Rods, Riveras and Pujols who pull down ten million and more. The people I mean are the 800 concession workers who sell hot dogs and beer, serve and clean the restaurants, and cater to the luxury skyboxes at AT&T Park, home of the 2012 World Series champion San Francisco Giants. Employed by a South Carolina-based company called Centerplate, their jobs only last the six months of the season and they make but $11,000 a year, right at the poverty line for a single individual in the United States. Their situation is yet another flagrant example of the vast and widening gap created by income inequality in America.

As Dave Zirin at The Nation magazine recently wrote:

“Concession workers at the park earn their $11,000 in a city where a one-bedroom apartment runs $3,000 a month and people are spending near that much to live in laundry rooms and unventilated basements. These same workers, who commute as much as two hours each way to get to the park, have now gone three years without a pay increase. This despite the fact that the value of the team, according to Forbes, has increased 40 percent, ticket prices have spiked and the cost of a cup of beer has climbed to $10.25. This also despite the fact that, as packed sellouts become the norm, the stress and toil of the job has never been greater.”

MORE

12 CommentsThe Poverty Line
June 8, 2013
‘American Winter’ Arrives at Capitol Hill
by Greg Kaufmann
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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Diedre Melson, John Cox and Pamela Thatcher. (Credit: Don Mathis.)On Thursday, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) got off to an auspicious start as chair of the Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy by doing something that is all too novel — inviting people with the most at stake in economic policy decisions to testify in Congress.

Three Oregonians featured in the HBO documentary American Winter joined four public policy experts at the subcommittee’s first hearing, entitled “The State of the American Dream — Economic Policy and the Future of the Middle Class.”

Senator Merkley set the context with some powerful and totally depressing statistics, including that between 1989-2010, hourly productivity grew more than three times as fast as wages did during that time; the bottom 20 percent of wage earners saw their average hourly wages decline by 30 cents; the next lowest 20 percent saw their earnings decline by 4.3 percent. In contrast, over that same period, the top 20 percent of workers enjoyed a nearly 30 percent increase in earnings.

And while middle class earnings have declined, Senator Merkley noted that “the costs of basic features of the middle class such as public college, rent and utilities, and health expenditures have increased between 41 and 80 percent between 1970 and 2009.”

“The data seems to suggest that ordinary families have been slowly hurting for awhile, the financial crisis and recession nearly crushed them and our budget austerity policies are making it even worse,” said the senator. MORE

13 CommentsSmart Charts
May 29, 2013
U.S. Poverty: By the Numbers
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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U.S. poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent

Click pie chart to enlarge. Read the full report at the National Center for Children in Poverty website.
Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million
(program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty)

People in the U.S. experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans MORE

29 CommentsPerspectives
May 28, 2013
Democrats Accept More Cuts in Food Stamp Program
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 14, 2013, during the committee's hearing on the Farm Bill, officially known as the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2013. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
I always expect the worst from the House Republicans when it comes to SNAP (food stamps) and the Farm Bill. So while much attention and anger has been focused on the $20.5 billion cut proposed by the House Agriculture Committee — which would take food stamps away from nearly 2 million people and result in several hundred thousand low-income children no longer receiving free school meals — my reaction was more along the lines of… yeah, what did you expect?

I was actually more disturbed that the Democratic Senate Agriculture Committee would vote for a $4.1 billion cut in food stamps — even though the average benefit is about $1.46 per person, per meal, and a recent Institute of Medicine report demonstrates that benefit levels are already too low to stave off hunger. The cut “would mean $90 less a month for 500,000 families already struggling to make ends meet,” according to Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. Berg noted that an amendment by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would have prevented the SNAP cuts “by instead cutting subsidies for crop insurance companies, many of which are foreign owned.” MORE

59 CommentsPerspectives
May 19, 2013
Fighting Poverty Through Wall Street Accountability
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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This year, I’ve been focused on how anti-poverty activists can move from a defensive battle defined by trying to save what needs to be saved during these budget debates, to an offensive one, laying out a vision that inspires ongoing, unified action and builds a vibrant movement that connects with people in their communities.

I offered one modest proposal for an “anti-poverty contract” — five issues that impact both low-income and middle class people — around which activists and groups could organize. The Western Center on Law & Poverty and a handful of other national and local groups are trying to build an effort around that idea.

However, when you consider the scale of the problems we face — and what inspires people to take action — clearly much, much more is needed. As I wrote previously, to build a new anti-poverty movement will require the kind of organizing and actions that are as creative, visible and gripping as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Enter Stephen Lerner.

Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers and other low-wage workers into unions. These efforts resulted in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days and other improvements on the job. The architect of the historic Justice for Janitors campaign, he is currently working with unions and community groups across the country to break Wall Street’s anti-democratic grip on our politics and our economy.

Lerner lays out a powerful case about the intersection between poverty and Wall Street accountability — and how a Wall Street accountability movement can transform an economy that offers so few pathways out of poverty, and so many ways to keep people impoverished.

Here is our conversation: MORE

3 CommentsTake Action
May 12, 2013
12 Things You Can Do To Fight Poverty Right Now
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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In this March 29, 2013 photo, women walk past blighted row houses in Baltimore. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels not seen since the mid-1960s, while $85 billion in federal government spending cuts that began last month are expected to begin squeezing services for the poor nationwide. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)This is a tough moment in the fight against poverty.

Sequester is the latest chapter in a time-honored tradition of kicking the poor when they are down. A do-nothing Congress certainly isn’t going to do something about poverty without pressure from the grassroots. And it seems that the only way most of the mainstream media will pay attention to the more than 1 out of 3 Americans living below twice the poverty line — on less than $36,000 for a family of three — is if their lives make good fodder for tabloid television or play out in a courtroom drama.

That said, there are still plenty of people and groups fighting for real change, and plenty of ways you can get involved or stay engaged. I reached out to a handful of folks who dedicate their lives to fighting poverty in different ways. Here is what they asked people to do: MORE

24 CommentsThe Poverty Line
April 21, 2013
America is Ignoring Homeless Families
by Greg Kaufmann, The Nation
We’re proud to collaborate with The Nation in sharing insightful journalism related to income inequality in America. The following is an excerpt from Nation contributor Greg Kaufmann’s “This Week in Poverty” column.


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In this 2007 photo, Kevin Smith, left, and Chimera Tucker, coo at their 7-month-old baby Jazzmine Smith inside of the D.C. Village shelter in Washington. The couple were homeless and had been staying in D.C. Village for six months. They were later approved for transitional housing through the Coalition for the Homeless that year. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)More than one-third of Americans who use shelters annually are parents and their children. In 2011, that added up to more than 500,000 people.

According to Joe Volk, CEO of Community Advocates in Milwaukee, prevalent family homelessness is no accident.

“In 2000, we as a nation — and the Department of Housing and Urban Development — made the terrible decision to abandon homeless children and their families,” said Volk, speaking at a Congressional briefing on The American Almanac of Family Homelessness, authored by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness. “Families for a decade have been ignored.” MORE

4 CommentsSmart Charts
April 16, 2013
Measuring Income Inequality Along the NYC Subway
by Theresa Riley
Last week, we took a look at the growing inequality in Silicon Valley with five charts that show the hollowing out of the middle class and growing poverty rates in that region.

And today, we came across this smart chart on Facebook. It’s the coolest infographic we’ve seen in a long time. The New Yorker staff took the most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau and mashed it up with NYC subway stops so you can see the median income of people living along a train’s route. It’s a fascinating look at the income disparities among NYC neighborhoods.


Click on the image to try the interactive at NewYorker.com
Some highlights from The New Yorker:

$205,192—The highest median household income of any census tract the subway has a station in (for Chambers Street, Park Place, and World Trade Center, all in Lower Manhattan).

$12,288—The lowest median household income (Sutter Avenue, on the L in Brooklyn).

$142,265—The largest gap in median household income between two consecutive subway stations on the same line (between Fulton Street and Chambers Street on the A and the C lines, in Lower Manhattan).