#SayHerName: Joyce Curnell

[Content Note: Misogynoir; police brutality; death.]

In a deadly incident reminiscent of Sandra Bland's death, 50-year old Charleston resident Joyce Curnell, a black woman, died in her cell at the Charleston County jail, after allegedly being denied water.

Curnell was at the hospital for gastroenteritis in July of last year when she was arrested on a bench warrant issued in August of 2014 after she stopped making payments on fines issued on a 2011 shoplifting case. Her family does not know, and the police aren't saying, how they became aware that she was at the hospital.

Curnell was hydrated at the hospital, given medications and told to seek prompt medical attention if she continued to experience pain and vomiting. On top of her illness, she had a history of sickle cell disease, high blood pressure and alcoholism.

Doctors discharged her from the hospital with instructions. The deputies then took her to the jail around 2:30 p.m. It was her only arrest in South Carolina, according to a SLED background check.

A nurse at the jail who examined Curnell when she got there later told SLED that she was complaining only of a headache, this week's court filings stated. A doctor prescribed medication for the headache and nausea, but the documents alleged that the staffers didn't follow the Roper doctor's recommendations.

Instead of staying in the jail's medical facility, Curnell was taken to a housing unit. Jail officers reported later that she vomited "through the night" and "couldn't make it to the bathroom," the documents stated. They gave her a trash bag.

The jailers said they informed the medical staff of Curnell's condition, but the experts "refused to provide any medical attention to (her) whatsoever," the court documents stated.

She couldn't eat breakfast the next morning. No records indicated that she was given water or intravenous fluids to prevent dehydration, the filings added.

A sheriff's incident report stated that the medical staff checked her around 2 p.m., but within three hours, she was dead.

She spent the last 27 hours of her life in the jail, because of five-year-old fines totaling $1,148.90.

And she died because the people in charge of her care neglected her and refused to give her water.

The staff of the jail where Curnell was detained did not just have an ethical obligation to take care of her; they had a legal obligation to do so, too.

The family attorney, James Moore III, said in a statement that her death resulted from a "deliberate failure." While a suit in state court is planned, Moore said one in federal court could follow.

"Providing access to reasonable medical care to those under police custody is a necessity, not a privilege," he said. "It is a constitutional right. We are committed to seeking justice for Joyce and for her family."

...State law requires officials to render medical care when inmates need it, said Shaundra Scott, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina. The Bill of Rights, she said, also demands humane treatment of those incarcerated.

The ACLU plans to monitor the case closely, Scott said.

"It is very unfortunate to hear of another death of an African-American while in police custody," she said. "If Ms. Curnell was denied medical treatment, then it is our position that her constitutional rights were violated."

Leaving a woman who is slowly dying from dehydration to sit in a cell with a garbage bag is tantamount to torture. And all because of a fucking fine that was less than the cost of a pair of designer shoes.

This is the Two Americas: Some people are so wealthy that shoes have to be priced at $1,000+ just to make them feel like they're actually spending money. More than half of people in the US have less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts combined. Which can cost them their lives.

But it isn't just classism that killed Curnell. The people who assumed charge of her care when they arrested her at the hospital clearly saw an older black woman and substituted all the racist, misogynist, and agist stereotypes for her actual humanity. Almost certainly, she was treated like a hysteric, a "drama queen," attention-seeking, and disposable—instead of an ill human being who desperately needed help.

My sincerest condolences to Curnell's family, friends, and community. I am so sorry and so angry.

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Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

"America is the richest country on Earth because we've been able to put capital together, and we've been able to make our poor somewhat the envy of the world."—Republican Congressman from California Darrell Issa, who is the single richest man in Congress. "Issa's personal wealth is by far the greatest of any congress member. His net worth in 2013 was $448.4 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and stems from a car alarm business he built."

CNN Money Anchor Cristina Alesci: As one of the wealthiest members of Congress, do you feel personally responsible at all to address income inequality here in the US?

Representative Darrell Issa: Absolutely.

[Text Onscreen: "Darrell Issa on income inequality."]

Issa: America is the richest country on Earth because we've been able to put capital together, and we've been able to make our poor somewhat the envy of the world. Uh, if you go to India, or you go to any number of other third-world countries, you have two problems: You have greater inequality of income and wealth; you also have less opportunity for people to rise from the have-not to the have—the quality of public education, the availability of that access. So, you know, I think America is a good example. Can we do better? I think we can.

Alesci: Yeah, I don't think the comparison really is the one we want to make, right? We don't wanna compare ourselves to India; we wanna set the bar pretty high, right? We wanna set the bar—

Issa: Why shouldn't we? No, no, it's— I appreciate your, your comment, uh, but you're wrong. You do have to compare yourself with the rest of the world. We compete with the rest of the world. If we're going to have people, uh, produce automobiles, they have to compete with the rest of the world. Uh, can we be better, smarter, and produce cars in, in Georgia, uh, that compete with Japan? Yes. Uh, can we produce certain things, uh, in spite of our high cost of labor? Absolutely. But we're in a global economy, and it's extremely important that we be able to amass capital, have a trained workforce, and, quite frankly, if we wanna get paid more, we have to be able to produce somehow better than many of those countries, including India.

I love the way he pivots from Alesci pointing out that comparing people in poverty in the US to people in poverty in other nations is bullshit (because the only relevant comparison is how people in poverty in the US are doing compared to wealthy people in the US) to defend the comparison by essentially saying that corporations make those comparisons in order to best decide which people are simultaneously the most profitable and exploitable, and then victim-blaming US workers by saying they have to be more competitive.

The richest man in Congress, everyone. The Republican Party, friends.

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We Need Jobs to Support People, Not Profits

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

Last week, when the new jobs numbers were reported, I said: "That sounds great, except: What kind of jobs are they? Are they full-time jobs with benefits and a livable wage?" And this piece in the New York Times, about people who are working but still need public assistance to survive, underlines exactly why I asked those questions.

A home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald's cashier in Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Maywood, Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed.

Yet these same people also are on public assistance — relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short.

And they are not alone. Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald's and Walmart to mom-and-pop businesses.

These aren't jobs to support the people who hold them; they are jobs to support the profits of their employers—to make money for shareholders and corporate executives, who can line their pockets with the wages stolen from people doing the actual work that generates revenue.

And then those thieves promulgate cultural narratives about welfare recipients being lazy, shiftless, unhelpable moochers who can't be convinced "that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives," and about the jobs that working poor people work not being "real jobs," and about how raising the minimum wage kills jobs and ambition.

They call people who rely on public assistance "welfare queens" and then sit back and collect checks for work they didn't do, without a trace of irony.

We need jobs, but not just any jobs. We needs jobs with a basic wage that guarantees self-sufficiency, security, and a decent quality of life to the people who hold them.

That is not an unreasonable exchange for a lifetime of labor. That is not an unreasonable exchange for a lifetime of labor.

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What Are We Even Doing

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

This is what class warfare looks like:

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program in the 2012-2013 school year.

Above is a static screen cap of an interactive infographic at the WaPo, which provides state-by-state poverty rates. And, yes, you will surely notice a correlation between states which tend to be highly gerrymandered, have Republican state legislatures, and are thus less likely to have robustly funded state social safety nets.

But that doesn't tell the whole story. This is a national issue, and it speaks quite clearly to what our national priorities are. The United States is (nominally) the wealthiest country in the world, and we have a defense budget that could fund mansions built from recycled drones for every person on the planet, and we're fine with the fact that 51% of our public school students can't afford food.

Or many of their other needs.

The shift to a majority poor student population means that in public schools, more than half of the children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home to succeed, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school and are more likely to drop out and never attend college.

It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the swelling ranks of needy children arriving at the schoolhouse door each morning.

...[No Child Left Behind's] federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrong-headed, [Michael A. Rebell, the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Columbia University] said.

"We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education," he said. "We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we're serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, afterschool programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early childhood services. These are the so-called 'wraparound services.' Some people think of them as add-ons. They're not. They're imperative."

They're imperative. And the Bootstraps Brigade shouts about how their parents are moochers, while making sure their parents don't have a livable wage, and sneers that you shouldn't have children if you can't afford them, while eroding at every turn the ability for women to control our reproduction.

What are we even doing in this country. This is intolerable.

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Numbers of the Day

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

Seven and seventy:

A new Pew Research Center analysis of wealth finds the gap between America's upper-income and middle-income families has reached its highest level on record. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation's upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500), the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data.

In addition, America's upper-income families have a median net worth that is nearly 70 times that of the country's lower-income families, also the widest wealth gap between these families in 30 years.

These are, of course, averages, and do not reflect that the disparities are even more glaring when adjusted for privilege or the lack thereof.

This is not justice. The people who keep collecting more and more, hoarding vast amounts of wealth, cannot keep pretending that they "deserve" it on the basis of "hard work." They can't keep pretending that they're just generating more wealth, instead of stealing it from the lower classes.

Well, they can, but the situation is untenable. This system can't be sustained; it will collapse under the weight of need or revolution.

[Related Reading: The Haves and the Have-Nots, Wealth Gap, Quote of the Day, $10.10, Number of the Day, This Is What Privilege Looks Like, Speaking of Racism.]

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Two Americas

[Content Note: Class warfare; bootstraps rhetoric.]

Or what feels, truly, like two different planets, sometimes. The planet on which people live who understand the reality of being unemployed in the US, and the planet on which Republicans live. Paul Krugman:

Last week John Boehner, the speaker of the House, explained to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute what's holding back employment in America: laziness. People, he said, have "this idea" that "I really don't have to work. I don't really want to do this. I think I'd rather just sit around." Holy 47 percent, Batman!

It's hardly the first time a prominent conservative has said something along these lines. Ever since a financial crisis plunged us into recession it has been a nonstop refrain on the right that the unemployed aren't trying hard enough, that they are taking it easy thanks to generous unemployment benefits, which are constantly characterized as "paying people not to work." And the urge to blame the victims of a depressed economy has proved impervious to logic and evidence.

But it's still amazing — and revealing — to hear this line being repeated now. For the blame-the-victim crowd has gotten everything it wanted: Benefits, especially for the long-term unemployed, have been slashed or eliminated.

...I don't know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can't find jobs has been. But it's a striking picture. ...[E]xtended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further.

The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it is now. It's not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its out-of-work citizens.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

The people who constantly bray this fairy tale of lazy moochers who cruise through life on government benefits are so out of touch with multiple realities—how difficult it is to secure long-term payments (e.g. disability); how difficult it is to live on government welfare; how many people who desperately need welfare aren't getting it because they don't qualify; how many people are desperate for work they can do; how many places in the US simply don't have enough jobs with livable wages to support the community anymore—that their ignorance, willful or otherwise, would be laughable if it weren't so unfathomably harmful.

And then there is this: Poverty is extremely difficult. It is stressful, demoralizing, exhausting. Poverty is not for lazy people. No one is getting rich, or even living a carefree life, on the paltry sums that constitute government benefits in the US.

The only lazy people in this discussion are the ones who repeat ad nauseam the reprehensible lie that unemployed people are shiftless takers, because that's a hell of a lot easier than just admitting their theory that making life difficult for unemployed people will force them to "get a job" is rank garbage.

Like the rest of their fantastical contentions underwriting their contemptible policies.

[Related Reading: $10.10.]

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Wage Stagnation: Our Central Economic Challenge

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

This economic report by Elise Gould for the Economic Policy Institute is a must-read: "Why America's Workers Need Faster Wage Growth—and What We Can Do About It." Here is just part of the intro:

The last year has been a poor one for American workers' wages. Comparing the first half of 2014 with the first half of 2013, real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages fell for workers in nearly every decile—even for those with a bachelor's or advanced degree.

Of course, this is not a new story. Comparing the first half of 2014 with the first half of 2007 (the last period of reasonable labor market health before the Great Recession), hourly wages for the vast majority of American workers have been flat or falling. And even since 1979, the vast majority of American workers have seen their hourly wages stagnate or decline—even though decades of consistent gains in economy-wide productivity have provided ample room for wage growth.

The poor performance of American workers' wages in recent decades—particularly their failure to grow at anywhere near the pace of overall productivity—is the country's central economic challenge. Indeed, it's hard to think of a more important economic development in recent decades. It is at the root of the large rise in overall income inequality that has attracted so much attention in recent years. A range of other economic challenges—reducing poverty, increasing mobility, and spurring a more complete recovery from the Great Recession—also rely largely on boosting hourly wage growth for the vast majority.

Emphasis mine.

There's so much good information in this article, which makes clear how wealth redistribution upwards has been happening; how theft of both workers' wages and productivity have enriched the top 1%; and how increasing income inequality stagnates quality of life improvements for the vast majority of the population, whose labor is being harvested by the top 1%.

In recent decades, the vast majority of Americans have experienced disappointing growth in their living standards—despite economic growth that could have easily generated faster gains in their living standards had it been broadly shared.

...It is clear that most of the overall income gains from 1979 to 2007 bypassed the vast majority of American households. As such, their living standards are lower than they would be had these gains been shared more broadly. In other words, there is a growing wedge between economy-wide average income growth and income growth of the broad middle class—a wedge we sometimes refer to as the "inequality tax"—that has effectively reduced middle-class incomes.

...The U.S. economy has generated enormous amounts of income in recent decades, even in the post-1979 period when overall growth slowed. It can certainly provide far faster growth for the broad middle class than it has over the past generation, and its failure to do so is an economic catastrophe.

Our economy is being destroyed by greed. People's lives are being destroyed by greed. It is not that there isn't enough to go around. It's that the 99% are busting our asses so that the 1% can accumulate more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

We know this intuitively, but Elise Gould's work here makes the irrefutable case.

[Related Reading: The Haves and the Have-Nots.]

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Number of the Day

[Content Note: Poverty; class warfare.]

36%: The percentage of USians 18 or older who have no retirement savings, according to a survey.

More than a third of American adults have no retirement savings, including 14% of those 65 years of age or older, according to a new study released Monday.

The low savings rate for people at or approaching retirement age is alarming, said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate.com, which conducted the survey.

About a quarter -- 26% -- of those age 50 to 64 haven't started saving for retirement, the survey said; the figure was 33% of people who are 30- to 49-years-old.

Overall, 36% of those 18 years or older have not started saving for retirement, according to the survey of 1,003 adults.

"They still have time to start, but they still have to save so much as a percentage of their income to make up for the years they weren't saving that it puts them in a tough spot," McBride said.

..."There's no better time than the present to start saving for retirement," he said. "This isn't money that's gone. You've just put it aside for your future self instead of spending it on your present self."

I love the idea that all those people could be saving for retirement, but are simply choosing not to.

And, sure, that's probably true for some people. But I suspect that the vast majority of people who have no retirement savings aren't being capricious as much as they are using that money for things they need right now.

There's also the little issue of people who used to have retirement savings, but had to raid it after some sort of emergency or crisis. How many people used to have retirement savings until they needed it to pay medical pills, or come up with balloon mortgage payments, or buy basic necessities after being laid off?

I mean, if I'd had a choice between not being laid off and continuing to save for my retirement and being laid off and having to decimate my savings to live, I can tell you which one I would have chosen.

[Related Reading: Culprits.]

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The Haves and the Have-Nots

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

This is a good piece on a new report by S&P which has found that "an unequal distribution in incomes is making it harder for the nation to recover from the recession and achieve the kind of growth that was commonplace in decades past."

"From my research and some of the analysis I saw from others, when you have extreme levels of inequality, it can hurt the economy," [Beth Ann Bovino, the chief US economist at S&P] said.

Because the affluent tend to save more of what they earn rather than spend it, as more and more of the nation's income goes to people at the top income brackets, there isn't enough demand for goods and services to maintain strong growth, and attempts to bridge that gap with debt feed a boom-bust cycle of crises, the report argues. High inequality can feed on itself, as the wealthy use their resources to influence the political system toward policies that help maintain that advantage, like low tax rates on high incomes and low estate taxes, and underinvestment in education and infrastructure.

This is something that it doesn't take a degree in economics to understand. Anyone who has lived paycheck to paycheck, without a social or personal safety net on which to fall back, knows that when you don't have money to spare, you don't save money. And thus the opposite is true: People with money to spare are the people who save money that they don't need to spend.

"Money doesn't buy happiness" is a thing we're told, a thing we say. And there's certainly some truth in that. But many of us who are not independently wealthy, especially those of us who have been broke and have been financially okay at different times, have probably had some version of this conversation: Sure, money doesn't buy happiness, but there is something valuable, something that feels a lot like happiness, in having enough money to meet all your basic needs.

There is a huge psychological freedom in having enough money to meet your basic needs. Call that happiness, call it contentment, call it a lack of anxiety, call it whatever feels right for you, but that feeling is the thing that money buys.

Because money buys food and shelter and clothes and healthcare and toiletries and transportation.

Money buys survival.

And if you're lucky enough to have enough money to buy your survival, then money also buys the ability to thrive a bit. Money buys education and access and opportunities.

And if you've got those bases covered, then maybe you've got some money to buy some luxury. Some relaxation. Some ability to make your life a little easier and to take time away to recuperate and rebalance.

Maybe, depending on your priorities, and your individual demands (like whether you have children), you might start saving before you consider spending on a holiday, no matter how needed it may be.

This is the place where one starts balancing whether to spend or save. Because, for the first time, you have options.

Meaningful options. Not the sort of options like: I can eat lunch today, or I can buy this magazine—because just treating myself to anything, even a stupid magazine, to make me feel like I'm worth something and that life isn't all just drudgery and survival, seems more important than an empty belly right now.

Money buys choices that don't involve empty bellies.

Once you have enough money to be making those sorts of choices, money has bought you something very important indeed. But well beyond that point, at the point where sustained affluence can make you say something like "Money doesn't buy happiness" with the jejune arrogance of a person who imagines that "this new financial adviser isn't making my money enough money" is a relatable subversion of happiness, there is too much money to be spent to buy anything meaningful anymore.

Once you can buy multiple yachts and still have plenty of money to spare, once money can buy you everything you ever wanted and then some, money loses its capacity to buy anything (for you) except more money.

The only thing left to do (besides give it away—yuck!) is hoard it. And see how much you can accumulate before the clock runs out.

That's always going to be true. And the more wealth disparity there is, the more that the middle class is eroded, the more we're left with two extremes—people who don't have money to spend, and people who have more money than they can spend.

We're increasingly a nation of people who aren't even paid a livable wage and people who are basically dragons sleeping on a giant pile of gold.

And we don't—or shouldn't—need reports to tell us the truth about what that means for our economy.

Of course wealth inequality makes recovery impossible. Of course it does.

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No Loyalty, Just Profits

[Content Note: Exploitation.]

One of the things I've written many times before (ex. here) is that corporations have no loyalty. They may have been deemed persons, but they are not patriots. And they will move on to the next emergent empire as soon as they've bled this one dry. Or at the slightest hint of an expectation that they have some responsibility toward sustaining the country that has sustained them:

Washington policymakers are bracing for a wave of corporations to renounce their U.S. citizenship over the next few months, depriving the federal government of billions of dollars in tax revenue and stoking public outrage ahead of the Nov. 4 congressional elections.

So far this year, about a dozen U.S. companies — including such well-known brands as Medtronic medical devices and Chiquita bananas — have merged with foreign firms and shifted their headquarters offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, analysts say.

Dozens of additional deals are in the works, according to administration and congressional officials, and other companies are quietly contemplating the move. Last month, CVS Caremark chief executive Larry Merlo met with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and urged him to act to stop the rash of expatriations. Otherwise, Schumer said that Merlo warned him, CVS "might be forced to do it, too," to duck a total tax bill expected this year to approach 40 percent.

"There's a huge number coming," Schumer said in an interview. "We hear there are going to be several big announcements in August."

The maneuver, known as tax "inversion," has been around for decades, but the pace has accelerated in recent years as U.S. firms have expanded overseas and other nations have adopted lower tax rates. At the same time, company executives have grown increasingly frustrated with Washington, where political gridlock has stymied efforts to reduce a 35 percent federal corporate tax rate that is higher than in any other advanced economy.

"What we're seeing is one more manifestation of why the business tax structure needs to be fixed," said John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives at some of the nation's largest corporations. "We're the proverbial frog that's being boiled in the water, and a few frogs have decided to jump out."

Last month, President Obama loudly questioned the patriotism of inverted companies, calling them "corporate deserters" who are abandoning their country "just to get out of paying their fair share of taxes. ...My attitude is, I don't care if it's legal. It's wrong."

So let's say we decrease the corporate tax rate. What's next? If corporations complain that workers just have too gosh darn many rights in the US, making them marginally more difficult to exploit than in another country, do we erode workers' rights even further? If corporations complain that other countries don't force them to contribute to paying for workers' healthcare at all, do we agree to that?

And this isn't about these companies' abilities to continue to pay (or even continue to employ) their employees. Of course it isn't. It's about their ability to pay their shareholders a nice percentage of an ever increasing mountain of profit. It's not like most of these companies are at risk of going out of business; it's that their businesses might be worth slightly less.

Shareholders will make money no matter where they go.

The free market solves everything, we're told. Sure it does. And right now, the invisible hand of the market is packing a suitcase.

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Number of the Day

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

77 million: The number of USians who "lived in a high-poverty area in 2012, according to Changes in Areas with Concentrated Poverty: 2000 to 2010, a recently released report that analyzes data from the United States Census Bureau and the American Community Survey."

The [one in four] Americans who live in poverty areas - defined as an area where over one-fifth of the residents earn incomes below the current poverty line of $23,600 for a family of four - is a significant increase from the 18 percent recorded by the Census Bureau in 2000. Southern states, which have been found to have a higher percentage of low-income public school students than others, have especially seen their numbers grow. In 2012, 57.3 percent of people living in the south lived in poverty areas, up from 46.7 percent in 2000.

The increase has affected Americans across the board, but the report found that Africans Americans are the most likely to live in poverty areas, at 50.4 percent, followed by American Indians and Alaska Natives. About 20.3 percent of white Americans live in poverty areas.

The growth of poverty areas can largely be attributed to exclusionary zoning and the migration of affluent people into suburban areas, according to Paul Jargowsky, a professor of urban research and education at Rutgers University and an analyst of the report. Exclusionary zoning occurs when suburban districts set requirements for joining a neighborhood, such as large minimum house sizes, that are impossible to meet for lower-income families. These policies contribute to highly segregated neighborhoods.

"You have many, many politically independent suburbs that use exclusionary zoning to create housing only for families with higher incomes," said Jargowsky. "As families with wealth move further and further out of urban areas you develop these very high-poverty neighborhoods where the schools begin to fail, you have high crime and low wages."

On top of higher crime, lower wages, and schools lacking in resources, low-income families living in concentrated poverty areas often face a lack of job opportunities and lack of access to good housing conditions and health services.

Conservatives call "wealth redistribution," i.e. higher taxation on wealthy individuals and corporations to robustly fund a functional social safety net, "class warfare." That is not class warfare. This is.

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It's Almost Like People Have Noticed That They Are Working Very Hard and Getting Nowhere Fast

A CNN/ORC International survey released today has found that a majority of US respondents want the government to implement policies that reduce the income gap:

A majority of Americans surveyed believe the government should work to reduce the income gap between rich and the poor, according to a new national poll.

A CNN/ORC International survey released Wednesday indicates more than six in 10 Americans strongly or somewhat agree that the government should work to narrow that gap, compared to 30% who believe it should not.

"That sentiment may put Republicans in a difficult position, because nearly seven in 10 of those surveyed believe GOP policies favor the rich compared to the 30% of respondents who said Democratic policies benefit the wealthy," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

...Most Republicans oppose such measures, and nine in 10 Democrats favor them. Among independents, two-thirds believe the government should work to reduce the income gap.

It's not the sentiment that puts Republicans in a difficult position. It's their policies. Like being opposed to raising the minimum wage to a paltry $10.10, and THINKING THAT PEOPLE AREN'T ENTITLED TO FOOD.

The Republican Party has spent a very long time winning elections on the basis of obfuscation and scapegoating, instead of winning on facts and superior policy. But they can't spin the reality that people are hurting, and they want the pain to stop already.

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Oh Right. Our Economy Was Built (in Part) on a Big Middle Class with Purchasing Power. Whoooooops.

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

Particularly juxtaposed with the unfathomable fact that raising the US minimum wage is still a controversial proposal, this article about the shrinking middle class, and how corporate retailers are dealing with it, is striking.

In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann's, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital Grille are thriving. And at General Electric, the increase in demand for high-end dishwashers and refrigerators dwarfs sales growth of mass-market models.

As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.

...In 2012, the top 5 percent of earners were responsible for 38 percent of domestic consumption, up from 28 percent in 1995, the researchers found.

Even more striking, the current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to [economists Steven Fazzari, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Barry Cynamon, of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis]. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

More broadly, about 90 percent of the overall increase in inflation-adjusted consumption between 2009 and 2012 was generated by the top 20 percent of households in terms of income, according to the study, which was sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a research group in New York.

...While spending among the most affluent consumers has managed to propel the economy forward, the sharpening divide is worrying, Mr. Fazzari said.

"It's going to be hard to maintain strong economic growth with such a large proportion of the population falling behind," he said. "We might be able to muddle along — but can we really recover?"

Gee, it's almost like trickle-down economics doesn't fucking work or something.

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Here Are Two Stories I Just Read Back-to-Back

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

1. Economic Policy Institute: Unemployment Rate Drops as Workers Flee Weak Labor Market.

The jobs report released this morning marks six years since the official start of the Great Recession in December 2007 and four-and-a-half years since its official end in June 2009. Today's report shows a very weak labor market, and the continued fleeing of workers from the labor force because job opportunities are weak.

The unemployment rate dropped from 7.0 percent to 6.7 percent in December, but as has been a constant refrain throughout this recovery, the improvement was not for "good" reasons. The share of the working-age population with a job did not increase in December, and the labor force participation rate dropped back down to its lowest point in 35 years. The number of "missing workers" increased from 5.6 million to 6.0 million. (Missing workers are jobless workers who are not actively seeking work but who would be either employed or looking for work if job opportunities were stronger, after taking into account long-run demographic trends.) If these workers were in the labor force looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 10.2% instead of 6.7%.

...With job opportunities so weak for so long, workers have gotten stuck in unemployment for record lengths of time. Last month, the extensions of unemployment insurance benefits were allowed to expire—an unprecedented move given the weak state of the labor market. The share of the workforce that is long-term unemployed (i.e., jobless for more than six months) is nearly twice as high today as it was in any other period when we allowed an extended benefits program to expire following earlier recessions. This is no time for Congress to turn its back on the long-term unemployed.

Emphasis mine.

2. OpenSecrets: Millionaires' Club: For First Time, Most Lawmakers are Worth $1 Million-Plus.

For the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of personal financial disclosure data by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Of 534 current members of Congress, at least 268 had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012, according to disclosures filed last year by all members of Congress and candidates. The median net worth for the 530 current lawmakers who were in Congress as of the May filing deadline was $1,008,767—an increase from last year when it was $966,000. In addition, at least one of the members elected since then, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), is a millionaire, according to forms she filed as a candidate. (There is currently one vacancy in Congress.)

Last year only 257 members, or about 48 percent of lawmakers, had a median net worth of at least $1 million.

Members of Congress have long been far wealthier than the typical American, but the fact that now a majority of members—albeit just a hair over 50 percent—are millionaires represents a watershed moment at a time when lawmakers are debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources, as well as considering an overhaul of the tax code.

Emphasis mine.

The ruling elite has never been so elite! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Meanwhile, thanks to a slew of garbage decisions by the US Supreme Court, like the democracy-obliterating Citizens United, he (used advisedly) who has the most money wins. It's virtually impossible for a candidate with fewer resources to win a congressional campaign now. So we are looking forward to a whole lot more of privileged millionaires making decisions about a social safety net they will never need.

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Growing Support for Raising Minimum Wage to $10

This is truly a pathetic proposal:

The White House has thrown its weight behind a proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $10 an hour.

"The president has long supported raising the minimum wage so hard-working Americans can have a decent wage for a day's work to support their families and make ends meet," a White House official said.

President Obama, the official continued, supports the Harkin-Miller bill, also known as the Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, from its current $7.25.

The legislation is sponsored in the Senate by Tom Harkin of Iowa and in the House by George Miller of California, both Democrats. It would raise the minimum wage — in three steps of 95 cents each, taking place over two years — to $10.10, and then index it to inflation. The legislation will probably be coupled with some tax sweeteners for small businesses, traditionally the loudest opponents of increases to the minimum wage.

...Under that provision, small businesses would be able to deduct the total cost of investments in equipment or expansions, up to a maximum of $500,000 in the first year.

First of all, I laugh mirthlessly in the general direction of anyone who can say with a straight face that a minimum wage of $10/hour is "a decent wage for a day's work" that will totes allow people to "support their families and make ends meet." A paltry and insulting sum that will still be wholly insufficient for meeting all basic needs in most parts of the country is more accurate. Never mind what it will be two years from now.

And, you know, fine—give small businesses a tax break, but how about closing all the goddamn loopholes exploited by massive global corporations and using the billions of tax dollars we ought to be collecting from them, which they instead keep as profit that does not get passed on to their workers, and using that money to subsidize a real living wage that small businesses can't afford to pay their workers?

Capitalism is garbage in a whole lotta ways—but one of the worst is that it is built on the damnable lie that everyone earns what they deserve. And there are far too many high-earning people in the US who believe that they work harder behind a desk than every single person who works a behind a counter. Bullshit. BULLSHIT.

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Quote of the Day

"The greatest commonly shared story in this country is economic insecurity. If you think poor people don't deserve to have children, the problem is not SNAP or the people that rely on it to survive. The problem is you."—Mijin Cha. [Content Note for disablist language at link. Via Imani.]

Once more, I will observe that the Social Darwinist heapshits who believe that people aren't entitled to food and say things like "People who are poor do not deserve to have children" are the same assholes who seek to curb access to affordable contraception and abortion. Which is deeply relevant, given that, according to this Guttmacher study (pdf), "Can't afford a baby now" was cited by 73% of women who terminated pregnancies as a reason for seeking an abortion.

In the qualitative sample, of women who stated that they could not afford to have a child now, the majority had children already. Financial difficulties included the absence of support from the father of either the current pregnancy or the woman's other children, anticipating not being able to continue working or to find work while pregnant or caring for a newborn, not having the resources to support a child whose conception was not planned and lacking health insurance.

And that study was done in 2004, several years before the beginning of the Great Recession.

So, on the one hand, they're yelling at poor people women to not have children, and, on the other, they're yelling at poor women who want to have abortions that they'd better have those goddamn babies.

Pushed to justify these totally incoherent positions, they will inevitably argue that poor people women shouldn't even be having sex if they don't want to pregnant and can't afford to have a child.

But, of course, these are the also the same lot who most passionately defend a patriarchal system that primarily defines women as a sex class in which an individual women's value is largely if not exclusively determined by her sexual deference to straight cisgender men. A system in which a women who refuses such deference may be at real risk of harm, a risk that increases exponentially with her every axis of marginalization—including (and perhaps especially) by lower class status.

So the conservative solution is basically this: Poor women should agree with them that poor women's lives are worthless. And all the rest of us should agree with that, too.

I do not agree with that. I never will.

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Two Americas

[Content Note: Misogyny; racism.]

Gary Langer for ABC News: Poll Finds Vast Gaps in Basic Views on Gender, Race, Religion and Politics.

An almost unfathomable gap divides public attitudes on basic issues involving gender, race, religion and politics in America, fueled by dramatic ideological and partisan divisions that offer the prospect of more of the bitter political battles that played out in Washington this month.

A new ABC News/Fusion poll, marking the launch of the Fusion television network, finds vast differences among groups in trust in government, immigration policy and beyond, including basic views on issues such as the role of religion and the value of diversity in politics, treatment of women in the workplace and the opportunities afforded to minorities in society more broadly.

While these issues divide a variety of Americans, this poll, produced for ABC and Fusion by Langer Research Associates, finds that the gaps in nearly all cases are largest among partisan and ideological groups – so enormous and so fundamental that they seem to constitute visions of two distinctly different Americas.

Consider:

• Among all adults, 53 percent think women have fewer opportunities than men in the workplace. But that ranges from 68 percent of Democrats to 38 percent of Republicans, a difference of 30 percentage points. Comparing the most unlike groups, liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, it’s 76 vs. 35 percent.

• Forty-one percent overall think nonwhites have fewer opportunities than whites in society. Fifty-six percent of Democrats say so, as do 62 percent of liberal Democrats (more than the number of nonwhites themselves who say so, 51 percent). Among Republicans that dives to 25 percent.

• Forty-three percent of Americans say it would be a good thing if more women were elected to Congress – but the range here is from six in 10 Democrats and liberals alike to just 26 percent of conservatives and 23 percent of Republicans. Instead two-thirds or more in these latter two groups say it makes no difference to them.

Et cetera.

Two Americas: One interested in social justice, and one that believes it's already been achieved—or imagines their privileged selves to be the victims of profound injustice.

That feels overwhelming. It is difficult to not become hardened and despondent, reading something like that. I resist it with the resolve to invite my twin countrypersons to empathy, and hope that they affirmatively RSVP.

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Number of the Day

Zero: The effective tax rate of just over 10% of the companies on the S&P 500.

There are 57 separate companies listed on the index that paid a zero percent rate from the past year. Those companies include both household names like Verizon and News Corp. and lesser-known corporate giants like the data storage manufacturer Seagate (market value $15.9 billion) and Public Storage (market value $29.5 billion). Many of the companies USA Today identified in its analysis as paying negative rates make the list because they lost money, but several were profitable. Previous analyses have shown that the typical corporation pays a lower effective tax rate than most middle-class families, and a far lower one than the statutory corporate tax rate against which business interests disingenuously rail.

Getting to a zero percent tax rate despite turning a profit requires creative accounting, but not lawbreaking. The corporate tax code allows companies to avoid tax liability even in years when they turn a profit. Some of the profitable companies on the newspaper's list, such as General Motors, achieved a zero percent rate by banking tax credits from previous years when business was bad. But the more common gambit involves moving revenues from parent companies to offshore subsidiaries based in tax haven countries in the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere.

Neat!

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today.

[Content Note: Guns; violence] The teacher who died in yesterday's school shooting in Nevada, math instructor Mike Landsberry, died trying to nonviolently disarm the student shooter. Blub.

Here are two headlines I just read back-to-back: 1. US CEOs break pay record as top 10 earners take home at least $100m each. 2. US unemployment little changed at 7.2% as recovery remains sluggish. Corporations constantly say they don't have the funds to create new jobs, while they overwork current employees and pay CEOs salaries in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Two Americas.

[CN: Drones] Two new reports on the US drone program—one from Amnesty International detailing drone strikes in Pakistan, and one from Human Rights Watch collating civilian drone casualties in Yemen—"call into question the legality of the US drone program and raise the specter of American war crimes."

[CN: Homophobia] The DOMA dominoes begin to fall: "Four legally married same-sex couples who live in Tennessee filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Nashville, challenging Tennessee laws that prevent the state from recognizing their marriages and treating them the same as all other legally married couples in Tennessee."

NBC has "quietly put Parks and Recreation on hiatus for most of the rest of the year." When Jess gave me the news yesterday, I said: "Boo. Although, if I'm honest, I'm so tired of hearing how fat/gross everyone in Pawnee is, that I kind of don't even care anymore. :(" So I am sad for multiple reasons!

Ha ha! The Fifth Estate is a huge flop!

A pit bull named Elle is the 2013 Hero Dog of the Year.

A US soldier has been reunited with the cat who befriended him while he served in Afghanistan: "She gave companionship no human could understand and now I want to take her home to America."

This guy passed maths and his dad is SO PROUD OF HIM!

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I Got Your Compassionate Conservatism Right Here

Speaking of class warfare and who, exactly, is waging it: House Republicans pushing for major food stamp cuts.

After watching the cost of food stamp assistance soar during the recession, the Republican-led House of Representatives on Thursday plans to vote on a bill to cut the food stamp program by a whopping $40 billion over 10 years.

Welp, that logic is almost TOO perfect. More people need help, so let's cut funding to help people.

The major cuts were designed to satisfy House conservatives who rejected more moderate reductions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) earlier this year, but with millions of Americans still struggling to recover from the recession, Democrats are balking at the GOP bill.

"What the House Republicans are saying is this: get a good paying job or your family will just have to go hungry," Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "But there aren't enough good paying jobs, as you can see... The Republican approach is like saying we're tired of spending so much on wildfires, so we'll just cut the budget of the fire service. That isn't going to work."

It isn't going to work if one's objective is actually making sure that everyone in the wealthiest nation on the planet has enough to eat. If, however, one's objective is "reducing dependence on government," i.e. vile social Darwinism justified by bullshit beliefs about bootstraps and fairy tales about how people earn what they deserve; if one's objective is making sure that the wealthiest fuckers in the wealthiest nation don't have to pay a penny more in taxes so that the workers they exploit to become billionaires have enough food to stay alive and drag their exhausted, malnourished asses to jobs that won't pay them a livable wage; if one's objective is staging a political coup to turn corporations into the only "people" of, by, and for whom the government is made; if one's objective is modern conservatism in all its contemptible, grotesque, empathy-free avarice, then this plan is going to work just fine.

The Republican Party thinks people are not entitled to food. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THINKS PEOPLE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO FOOD.

They think people are not entitled to jobs. They think people are not entitled to healthcare. They think people are not entitled to homes. They think people are not entitled to education. They think people are not entitled to safety. They think people are not entitled to equality. They think people are not entitled to vote. They think people are not entitled to agency. They think people are not entitled to any of what the baseline security of being a citizen in a wealthy democracy should guarantee.

They think people are entitled to guns and bootstraps, and that's about it.

Unless those people are corporations, robber barons, military contractors, or members of the Republican Congressional Caucus. And then they are entitled to everything for which they could ever ask, no matter the cost to the rest of us.

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