Hundreds scramble for Dallas County rental vouchers, page 2

Originally posted by desert
reply to post by whaaa

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Exactly, whaaa! And thanks for that CS Monitor link.

Americans must understand the extent of their working poor. In my life time I have never seen so many working poor or those living one unfortunate event (accident, medical, etc.) away from poverty.

With so much talk these days of taxation, it is interesting to note that our current system was based on "the abillity to pay". The wealthy were EXPECTED to pay more, based on ability to pay.

most low-income Southern and Western states endorsed federal taxation based on ``ability to pay'' and favored a graduated federal income tax differentially burdensome to wealthier states in the North and East.

source

Through three decades of demagoguery, the poor and the middle class (now shown to be ranking among the poor as far as dollars) became convinced that the wealth holders with the "ability to pay" are somehow being harmed. "Class warfare!" shouts the demagogue.

Such trickery, as those are the groups who lost their wealth to the have-mores. Your wealth and financial security is gone, yet some of you continue to either, 1) believe you still have it or will one day have it, or 2) the have-mores will somehow, benevolently give it back to you if you give them more.

A national sales tax?

Changing the current U.S. federal taxation from a progressive system to a national sales tax system could have a major social needs complication. Wealthy individuals and families may experience increased benefits through a national sales tax as they save or invest their money to avoid paying federal taxes. This increases the burden of paying for social needs to middle and lower-income individuals. If the government is unable to collect enough federal taxes to pay for the social needs of citizens, it may be forced to raise the national sales tax rate. This will usually increase the tax burden on lower income individuals.

source

Originally posted by spyder550
I did see some people make it, but damn I now know what that life is like, it is mean and it is hopeless and if you can get out of it you are a better person than I am. Many of the people were never going to acomplish anything in life. They lived on the left side of the bell shaped curve. Basically 1/2 of the population.

for all your posts. This line made me think about the idea of "culture of poverty"

Lewis gave some seventy characteristics (1996 [1966], 1998) that indicated the presence of the culture of poverty, which he argued was not shared among all of the lower classes.

The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty that exists in the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor. (Lewis 1998)

source

If you have an HDTV and an iPhone - you ARE NOT poor.

The "working poor" is a ridiculous figment of our societies imagination. When farmers used to live in mud dug-outs during the depression era ... THAT was working poor.

We don't even know the meaning of poor in this nation.

reply to post by gncnew

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no, they wouldn't be homeless, but their landlords would be a heck of alot less wealthy!!!
and well, the slums would probably be a little more slummier...

reply to post by groingrinder

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The cost of housing, whether homes or rental units is too high for one person and one income. I lived in section 8 housing for years even though I was gainfully employed and earning six to eight dollars an hour. Housing rents are not "market priced" when an average working person cannot afford to pay them. When I was first out of high school and working fast food, we had eight people in a three bedroom apartment with one guy living in the walk in closet.

and that was legal ? the city never inspected? wonder why?

it wasn't "market priced" because the interference was present from Sec8 guarantees.

i was hypothetically referring to a non-sec8 environment.

normally, you get evicted when you can't pay da rent !

Originally posted by gncnew

If you have an HDTV and an iPhone - you ARE NOT poor.

The "working poor" is a ridiculous figment of our societies imagination. When farmers used to live in mud dug-outs during the depression era ... THAT was working poor.

We don't even know the meaning of poor in this nation.

There seems to be two working definitions of poverty. One is poverty defined in lacking the income to afford basic food, shelter, clothing to maintain health.

Two years ago I found a family (2 adults, 3 children, including an infant) living in an old minivan, who had a laptop and cell phone, which they used to find jobs. The kids were clean and food was stored in an ice chest. When the father told of work in a town about 80 miles away, all I could do was offer some gas money and good luck (as I knew the jobless in that town was increasing). When I grew up, we would have called this family "dirt poor", from the Depression era living in earthen shelters.

And when they found work, when would they be able to save enough money for rent first/last and deposits? At what point would they go from "dirt poor" to poor?

Anyway, the other definition of poverty is "relative poverty". When one cannot afford a certain level of a country's standard of living. People in other countries looked to America, dreamed of coming here, because they wanted to model/participate in a certain standard of living. We were the United States of Abundance, not the United States of Austerity. Some are really surprised when they move here, that not everyone can enjoy even a "middle class" standard of living.

Actually, where I live, much of the population defines "success" to be when you can afford to start shopping at WalMart and not only at a swapmeat or yard sale.

What I have noticed starting about three years ago, when the Great Recession hit, that there are more and more families giving up cell phones and large tvs and satellite tv service, not just apartments and new cars and pets. The reality is that the American standard of living is slipping away for more and more people.

America didn't want its citizens living in the abject poverty brought on by the Great Depression and sought to set minimum standards then and again in the 1960s, as it was felt that any great nation must not harbor the poverty that still existed.

But whatever definition of poverty, there has built up over the years a "poverty industry", turning poverty into big business. And I don't just mean private businesses who contract with govt agencies to supply goods or services for poverty programs. (I can remember when commodities were given to the poor, but food stamps and the school lunch program sure also help out the food industry nowadays.) Poverty industry in general. And here's an interesting read, especially re housing.

the whole thing is part of the magical "picture in a picture" plan.

Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

bottom line: somebody else makes the money ... a classic fundraiser tactic at YOUR expense !!
the "targets" don't get much ...... just higher prices.


en.wikipedia.org...

Impact of the strategy

Cloward and Piven themselves, in papers published in 1971 and 1977, argued that mass unrest in the United States, especially between 1964 and 1969, did lead to a massive expansion of welfare rolls, though not to the guaranteed-income program that they had hoped for.[8] Political scientist Robert Albritton disagreed, writing in 1979 that that the data did not support this thesis; he offered an alternative explanation for the rise in welfare caseloads.

In his 2006 book Winning the Race, commentator John McWhorter attributed the rise in the welfare state after the 1960s to the Cloward-Piven strategy, but wrote about it negatively, stating that the strategy "created generations of black people for whom working for a living is an abstraction."[9]

According to historian Robert E. Weir in 2007, "Although the strategy helped to boost recipient numbers between 1966 and 1975, the revolution its proponents envisioned never transpired."[10]

Some commentators have blamed the Cloward-Piven strategy for the near-bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.[11][12]

Conservative Fox News commentator Glenn Beck has referred to the Cloward-Piven Strategy on his broadcast since 2009, stating that it forms part of the basis for President Barack Obama's economic policy. On February 18, 2010, he said, "you’ve got total destruction of wealth coming... It’s the final phase of the Cloward-Piven strategy, which is collapse the system."

sound familiar ?

edit on Jul-16-2011 by xuenchen because:

reply to post by dawnstar

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"well, this is what you get when you allow the cost of living to continually keep raising.....for the sake of profit, while not allowing the wages to keep pace....for the sake of profit!!"
dawnstar, are you sure you're not some highfalutin economics professor trying to explain to me in simple terms what has happened to the American economy since the 1980s?

and this... "service economies hire servants, and for the most part, the servants historically, have been at the bottom of the society!! bring back manufacturing, the craft's guilds were way more powerful than the servant class!!!!"

And service economies can be the most vulnerable, as citizens shed services in harsh economic times, being unable to afford services they once could, making more and more jobs vulnerable and sending the service economy into a downward spiral.

I've been thinking that America is still trying to overcome its greatest past service economy, slavery:

The southern white oligarchy used its economic power to organize the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups. Northern politicians began to weigh the advantage of the political support of impoverished blacks-maintained in voting and office only by force-against the more stable situation of a South returned to white supremacy, accepting Republican dominance and business legislation. It was only a matter of time before blacks would be reduced once again to conditions not far from slavery.

Du Bois saw this new capitalism as part of a process of exploitation and bribery taking place in all the "civilized" countries of the world:

Home labor in cultured lands, appeased and misled by a ballot whose power the dictatorship of vast capital strictly curtailed, was bribed by high wage and political office to unite in an exploitation of white, yellow, brown and black labor, in lesser lands... .

Was Du Bois right-that in that growth of American capitalism, before and after the Civil War, whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves?

all same source

And we have today politicians signing pledges that contain this...

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

and these politicians are part of a larger group of politicians that are now in Washington pretending to care about the economy? "Damn The Country, Obama Must Fail"

John Little, a former slave, wrote: They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetters; yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and to keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it,-must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself-I have cut capers in chains.

A record of deaths kept in a plantation journal (now in the University of North Carolina Archives) lists the ages and cause of death of all those who died on the plantation between 1850 and 1855. Of the thirty-two who died in that period, only four reached the age of sixty, four reached the age of fifty, seven died in their forties, seven died in their twenties or thirties, and nine died before they were five years old.

But can statistics record what it meant for families to be torn apart, when a master, for profit, sold a husband or a wife, a son or a daughter? In 1858, a slave named Abream Scriven was sold by his master, and wrote to his wife: "Give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for me, and if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven."

same source as above

Originally posted by xuenchen
sound familiar ?

Yes.

Horowitz first wrote of the Cloward-Piven strategy on his website Discoverthenetworks.org, which claims to be "a guide to the left." His description is a crude and false account of what Cloward and Piven argued. For example, the words "capital" and "capitalism" never appear in their article. The piece is about precipitating a crisis in the welfare system by legally enrolling masses of eligible recipients, which the welfare bureaucracy could not handle, thus creating a demand for more radical reforms, like a guaranteed minimum income--a proposal that Nixon, of all people, floated in 1969 and that, in fact, Democratic-majority Congresses voted down through 1972 ... Moreover, as Piven recently explained to me, although the article was written as a strategic thought experiment, in many ways it described and reacted to changes already sweeping the nation, chief among them the civil rights and welfare rights movements, which created newly politicized constituencies to which the Democratic Party had to respond. "The mainstream," Piven says, "was responsive to the idea that we could end poverty because of these movements." In short, the stresses placed on the welfare system were caused by a confluence of factors, of which an article published in The Nation, it is safe to say, was but one, and most likely a minor one at that.

source

not really the best place to put this, but well, here's another aspect of our current economic problems that I haven't really heard much about.....
are we really losing jobs because labor is cheaper in other countries, or we have too many regulations, or businesses just don't know what to expect out of our gov't..
or is there something else at play???

this article is written by Ellen Brown, I've read other artcles from her, and she seems well informed.
basically what she is saying is that on Oct. 9, 2008, the fed began a new policy of paying banks interest on their reserves.
so, well, why lend out the money to small businesses or start up businesses and take the risk, when you can just sit on it and make money??
the small businesses aren't getting the loans the need to operate, so they aren't hiring....

globalresearch.ca...

reply to post by gncnew

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Well from my experience, section eight has driven up the cost of rent for those of us that fall in-between the cracks, just above poverty level but we make to much for section eight, we struggle paycheck to paycheck, no food stamps, no health care, no section eight, but our tax dollars go to support all those that get the benefits,

Yea, well I think we are the truly forgotten, I hang on to the internet because I think it is important source of valuable information, but I don't know how much longer I can continue to do so.

reply to post by desert

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only at a swapmeat or yard sale

Been doing that for years to make ends meet, we buy and sell at flea markets, also do jobs on the side and make jewelery, my husband never has a day off, they don't make men like him any more,

I am sorry but I am more than a little saddened when all around me people get healthcare off our backs while my husband and I can't get any help, it makes you resentful, we are invisible,

I am just being honest here.

reply to post by dawnstar

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Yes, I happened upon that read today, too. 'I don't think I had heard of her before, so thanks for info. $1.6 Trillion I'm pretty slow when it comes to economics, but it sounds like this is affecting Main Street to have so much money tied up. Jeezu, how does a small business survive/get started? What a bunch of BS when politicians talk about supporting small business, yet this happens! Lip service.

Is all the talk of business "uncertainty" a banking psyops to create a climate where this $1.6 T won't be touched but allowed to just sit there and accumulate interest?

Re jobs going overseas...when it first started decades ago, yes, high wages here were blamed. But corporations also found that they could avoid regulations that helped American workers and could manufacture in countries that could care less about pollution. And Americans ended up with cheaply made and at times harmful products.

Originally posted by Stormdancer777

... my husband never has a day off, they don't make men like him any more,

I am sorry but I am more than a little saddened when all around me people get healthcare off our backs while my husband and I can't get any help, it makes you resentful, we are invisible,

I am just being honest here.

And in appreciating your honesty, I will be honest, too.

What I say goes back to the late 1970s. There was a lot of resentment building up in people who felt bypassed/betrayed by the federal govt programs/edicts. Why should only certain people be entitled to govt help?

This resentment boiled over into the election of 1980, where govt was made the evil villain. The election was cathartic, but the expected relief from their elected leaders was not forthcoming. What I find most despicable is the cynical abuse of voters by using cultural issues to lure voters to the polls, baiting them with these issues, to elect politicians who would then arrive in Washington and switch allegiance from citizen to corporate lobbyists.

Back in 1970-80s, there was the Silent Majority, who earnestly believed their voices were finally going to be heard. What I fear has happened, however, we all find ourselves having not only been made mute but worse, Invisible, as you so well put it.

Elected leaders indeed looked over the citizens in front of them as if they were invisible, preferring to look beyond to the corporate lobbyists who came with carpetbags stuffed with cash and offers of lucrative careers after terms expired.

I think the following read says it best:

Memo to the Middle Class is the title, but it is for Everyone

Yes, you and your husband are hard working citizens who deserve healthcare every bit as the next person! We all must struggle together to become Visible again.

If a politician's answer to our material condition, our health, is to be grateful to God, have Faith in Him, maybe we need to answer that you can't pray away low wages and no jobs. Maybe we need to pray to God to give us the strength to band together, refusing to be divided, in order to become Visible again.

Oh, and your husband sounds like a great guy! I got one, too.
Also, the day I no longer see you post because you lost your internet would be a tragic day.

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