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It's the weekend! Time for visiting all the lit venues for the latest on what's being written that's elucidating and fun (intellectually stimulating, anyway).
I'm currently reading Bob Shacochis' latest world-shaker, with Pyncheon's and Leibovich's in the queue. I saw the one below earlier today and thought it deserved some serious comment as I've been wondering for years when someone would pick up Michael Harrington's fallen banner. I'll let you know how good it is in a bit.
September 20, 2013
Poor in the Land of Plenty
By David K. Shipler
THE AMERICAN WAY OF POVERTY
How the Other Half Still Lives
By Sasha AbramskyRead the rest here.
Illustrated. 355 pp. Nation Books. $26.99.
Virtually everything worthwhile written about American poverty is essentially about moral failure. It is the failure of the society (according to liberals) or of the poor themselves (according to conservatives) or of institutions and individuals together in a complex combination (according to centrists). Poverty violates core American values. It challenges the American dream’s promise of prosperity for anyone who works hard, a faith central to the national ethic. Richard Wright called this faith “the truth of the power of the wish.”
The dream dies in the early pages of Sasha Abramsky’s intricate study, “The American Way of Poverty.” Abramsky, a freelance journalist who has written for The Nation, The Atlantic and other publications, regards inequality “as a social control mechanism” supported by financial interests’ belief in “the desirability of oligarchy.” He endorses the notion, popular on the left, that poverty is not just a glitch but a feature of the American system, “a corrosive brew,” he writes, “capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.”
His observant reporting is less doctrinaire than these grand assertions. He travels the United States meeting the poor, whose wrenching tales he inserts in tight vignettes among data-driven analyses and acute dissections of government programs. The country he portrays is damaged by indifference at high levels — his American heroes are not in Congress or boardrooms
— but is rescued here and there by caring citizens at the grass roots, their inventive programs achieving small successes.
Abramsky presents himself as an heir to Michael Harrington, whose book “The Other America,” published in 1962, awakened parts of the political establishment to the shadows of poverty beneath the country’s gleaming affluence. But that work came during the civil rights movement, which was already sensitizing Americans to social injustice. Fifty-one years later, injustice does not readily incite outrage. This is so even as millions of middle-class Americans, in free fall during the economic collapse that began around 2008, have had a taste of what it means to be poor.
The absence of a strong movement for change is striking, especially given the diversity Abramsky finds as he maps the landscape of poverty. “There are people with no high school education who are poor,” he writes, “but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.”
The destitute include those “who have never held down a job, and others who hold down multiple, but always low-paying, jobs, frequently for some of the most powerful corporations on earth.” There are the chronically poor — “children whose only hot meals are what they are given at school” — and the newly poor who have lost the middle-class comfort of “huge suburban houses and expensive cars.”
Many of these people’s wounds are intimate and invisible to outsiders. Frank Nicci, a chef in Pennsylvania who lost his leg to diabetes and his job to his ill health, could not even afford to pick up his 8-year-old son for their monthly custodial visits. Lorenza and Jorge Caro, living in a storage room in New Mexico, regularly ran out of propane during the winter and relied on herbs and Tylenol for medical treatment. A 40-year-old mother in California, laid off from her job, had reached the lifetime limit for welfare and so was denied benefits after she had a new baby; she became homeless, and her older son had to quit college to support her. A Hawaii woman named Emily could never free herself from the legacy of a family racked by alcoholism and violence.
“What should we do,” Abramsky asks, “with someone like Emily?” His answer is not to blame the victim, and he skewers conservatives for doing so. Whether poverty “is caused by dysfunction, or the dysfunction is itself a product of the poverty, or, as is likely, the dysfunction and the poverty interact in ever more complex feedback loops, for the larger community to wash its hands of the problem represents an extraordinary failure of the moral imagination.”
Abramsky has written an ambitious book that both describes and prescribes. He reaches across a wide range of issues — including education, housing and criminal justice — in a sweeping panorama of poverty’s elements. Assembling them in one volume forces him to be superficial on occasion, but that price is worth paying to get the broad scope. In considering solutions, it’s crucial to understand how the disparate problems of poor families interact in mutual reinforcement.
Are the big banks conducting their business better or worse than before their much-pleaded-for bailout?
Washingtons Blog contains a huge amount of documentation on exactly what the state of these big banks is today (after supposedly being reformed). Get ready for your knees to buckle.
5 Years After Financial Crisis, Big Banks Are Still Committing Crimes
by Washingtons Blog - September 20th, 2013
. . . The executives of the big banks invariably pretend that the hanky-panky was only committed by a couple of low-level rogue employees. But studies show that most of the fraud is committed by management.
Indeed, one of the world’s top fraud experts – professor of law and economics, and former senior S&L regulator Bill Black – says that most financial fraud is “control fraud”, where the people who own the banks are the ones who implement systemic fraud. See this, this and this.
Even the bank with the reputation as being the “best managed bank” in the U.S., JP Morgan, has engaged in massive fraud. For example, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report today quoting an examiner at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency – JPMorgan’s regulator – saying he felt the bank had “lied to” and “deceived” the agency over the question of whether the bank had mismarked its books to hide the extent of losses.
And Joshua Rosner – noted bond analyst, and Managing Director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co – notes that JP Morgan had (as) many similar anti money laundering laws violations as HSBC, failed to segregate accounts a la MF Global, and paid almost 12% of its 2009-12 net income on regulatory and legal settlements.
Read the rest of this stomach-churning dissection here.
Paul Krugman continues to document the "Crazy Party" (formerly the merely "Stupid Party").
I suppose it's good to have these facts all together in one place.
Although one could argue that seeing them as "crazy" leaves the facts that testify to their intentional "craziness" unaddressed. And there are dozens of those needing to be seriously disclosed and brought into court for adjudication (and rectification) before another financial catastrophe occurs due to their further "craziness" from which we at the bottom will have absolutely no chance to recover.
The Crazy Party
By Paul Krugman
Published: September 19, 2013
1094 Comments
Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart.
Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party.
I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past.
It helps, I think, to understand just how unprecedented today’s political climate really is.
Divided government in itself isn’t unusual and is, in fact, more common than not. Since World War II, there have been 35 Congresses, and in only 13 of those cases did the president’s party fully control the legislature.
Nonetheless, the United States government continued to function. Most of the time divided government led to compromise; sometimes to stalemate. Nobody even considered the possibility that a party might try to achieve its agenda, not through the constitutional process, but through blackmail — by threatening to bring the federal government, and maybe the whole economy, to its knees unless its demands were met.
True, there was the government shutdown of 1995. But this was widely recognized after the fact as both an outrage and a mistake. And that confrontation came just after a sweeping Republican victory in the midterm elections, allowing the G.O.P. to make the case that it had a popular mandate to challenge what it imagined to be a crippled, lame-duck president.
Today, by contrast, Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president.
Yet, at the moment, it seems highly likely that the Republican Party will refuse to fund the government, forcing a shutdown at the beginning of next month, unless President Obama dismantles the health reform that is the signature achievement of his presidency. Republican leaders realize that this is a bad idea, but, until recently, their notion of preaching moderation was to urge party radicals not to hold America hostage over the federal budget so they could wait a few weeks and hold it hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Now they’ve given up even on that delaying tactic. The latest news is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has abandoned his efforts to craft a face-saving climbdown on the budget, which means that we’re all set for shutdown, possibly followed by debt crisis.
How did we get here?
Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise.
No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.
But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.
So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?
Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.
I guess having it now sounds good to people who have jobs and nice places to live.
And enough to eat. And a vehicle for transportation.
Somehow I don't think the millions of unemployed (and underemployed) will view it that way.
Think it over.
Because it seems like the plans are being laid.
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