As is self-evident, Republicans are gung-ho on cutting taxes because there is very little that government does that they truly value. The bigger the gaps are in the safety net, the better it is for many Republicans. The less protection of the environment, the more freedom there is, particularly for abusers. The more unregulated the financial institutions are, the more opportunity there is to create “funny money,” and the poor will only get a piece of that when it becomes a known counterfeit commodity.

We talk about the value of having a bird’s eye view of our society. If you could fly over every nook and cranny of our country, swooning down when desirable to get a better look, what would you see as America’s greatest, and most obvious problems? Since your flyover would include observations of the hollars in Appalachia as well as the neighborhood of Chicago’s west and south sides, you would see the abject poverty that reflects how tens of millions of Americans live.

You would also fly over Hempstead, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. To a reasonable person, it might appear that the residents have more wealth than is necessary to live a comfortable life. That is particularly so when compared to the squalor in which so many of the others who we have seen are forced to live.

So, the obvious question arises. How can a country of so much wealth have so much poverty in it midst? This seems like such an obvious question to me. But that may be the problem. I am projecting my vision of America on everyone else, whether they agree with me or not. I don’t like the presence of poverty in our society, but clearly for many more, it is either a minor inconvenience or a badge of honor representing that some people clearly have it better than others.

For those who subscribe to the Bible, there is a line about the meek inheriting the earth. I guess that like virtually every other line in the Bible, it has a throw-away factor; a shelf-life only as long as it is convenient for someone the believe, or at least, espouse it. So, if I’m hung up on the economic disparity in our society, it may be that this is my problem and I need to “get over it.”

Like most people, I can be fairly stubborn and don’t like to sacrifice my values on a whim. But this leaves me in a position where I’m quite distant from the American mainstream.

I can be a bit of a policy wonk, but what good is advocating a set of policies if the public does not back them? The only other option is to grab an inordinate amount of the levers of power as so many well-healed Republicans seem to have done.

I could try to be preacher and spread the gospel of income inequality. But I think that many of our problems are papered over because there is the “preacher-industrial complex” telling us what to think and do.

I guess that the answer is for me to own my problem and hope that in small ways, the logic of the undesirability of income inequality will prevail. I can take a knee for that.

The post Is it my hang-up, or society’s, that we are so tolerant of poverty? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Alas, it’s a lousy time to be a senior in Missouri.  Besides the Circuit Breaker, other special help for our older neighbors is under attack in Jefferson City and Washington.

Let’s look at Grandma Jane, a hypothetical but friendly women in her 70’s living with a bunch of health problems. She has a modest but cute apartment in an area suburb.  She worked a bit after raising her kids but her Social Security payment, like many widows, is based on the survivor formula on her late husband’s account. She gets $900 a month, $10,800 per year. That’s a bit above average for surviving spouses , yet, not enough for her to sit pretty. That’s not a surprise since the Poverty Level for a single person is $12,060 a year or $1,005 a month.

Fortunately, she qualifies for several programs…

$ 500 Missouri Circuit Breaker  a tax credit to lower-income seniors to help offset property taxes

$ 1,200 Missouri Rx Program   help paying for her many prescriptions beyond Medicare’s coverage

$ 1,716 Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB)  Medicaid payment towards her share of Medicare

$ 2,160  Food Stamps   $180 per month, or, around $1.94 per meal

$250  Heating Assistance Grant  a state pass-through of a federal allocation to Missouri

Wow!  Grandma Jane gets $ 5,826 in special help each year!  This targeted aid gives her a standard of living of about $16,600. Not golden toilet living like Donald Trump, but a lot better than Social Security alone.

Uh-oh!

Remember, in 2017 the Circuit Breaker for renters got SEALed [by Missouri Governor and former Navy Seal Eric Greitens]. The legislature also cut back on the Missouri Rx program, meaning that $100 a month will become $50 or $0. Proposed federal cuts to Medicaid (MO HealthNet) will target that QMB.

And, the Trump administration and friends plan to trim food stamps by 25%, and, give states a 10% to 25% co-pay…Maybe Grandma Jane will get $20 or $50 a month when the dust clears.

That heating grant?  Trump has targeted the Low-Income Heat Assistance Program (LiHEAP) for complete elimination.

In other words, a series of trims and cuts which don’t sound that big each on their own wind up taking $3,000 a year or more out of Grandma Jane’s standard of living. Poverty’s sting grows sharper.

Of course, we’re told these inefficient and wasteful programs must be slashed.  Missouri and America must “pay for” tax cuts for wealthy ‘job creators.’

Sorry grandma.

The post Poverty stings: What’s left in grandma’s wallet after program cuts appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Late every January – as reliable as the buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio each March – the revised Poverty Guidelines are published in the Federal Register…until Donald J. Trump became President.

As noted in the article below, the Trump administration pulled a couple of dozen of items (most very routine) from today’s Federal Register.  The guidelines were among the items yanked.

http://thehill.com/regulation/315839-trump-administration-withdraws-23-rules-from-federal-register

Oh, due to low inflation the numbers were not going to change much.  (I’m guessing the 100% poverty level for a family of four was going to climb from $24,300 in 2016 to about $24,360 this year.)  But they are going to increase.  Remember, government programs from food stamps to rural home loans utilize the guidelines.  And, many non-profits, such as food pantries, update their criteria based on the federal numbers.

Of course, we should not be surprised that the Trump Administration would interfere in such a mundane automatic function of the federal bureaucracy.  You see, the 2017 Poverty Guidelines will become facts when they’re issued.  Only the President gets to create facts.  Or, more correct, what he considers facts.

The post Trump disappears poverty guidelines from Federal Register appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Throughout the coming weeks of sport and competition, keep in mind the cost Rio and Brazil are bearing to host us. More than 77,000 citizens have been forced from their homes and communities and placed in public housing far out on the peripheries. Many can’t afford their new rent.

Since 2009, “Pacification” forces have been deployed throughout many of Rio’s working-class communities, (paradoxically) killing 307 residents in 2015 alone  — the majority young, black men. A “shoot first, ask later” attitude matched with virtual impunity has lead to the deaths of children by stray bullets, innocent youth by prejudice and suspicion, and a retaliatory spike in violence and crime (followed by a 103% increase in police killings only recently). An involved property developer was quoted admitting the “pacification” strategy was really one of deliberate isolation, designed to hide the squalor and disarray working-poor communities are subjected to not by gangs, but by the government. His goal, he said, was to make Rio, or at least give the impression of, “a city of the elite.”

Very few plans for improvements in these communities that helped win Rio the games in 2009 were implemented. The single metro line that was completed only reaches the most affluent areas, and bus lines have been changed to avoid poorer areas. Some of those areas have been literally walled-off from highways and travel routes. Rio legislation requires community participation in budgeting, yet the community as a whole has been left in every meaning of disregard. The internationally-lauded family financial assistance program that helped raise 50 million Brazilians into the middle class over the last decade recently ran out of funding. Schools and hospitals have seen funding cut and even been closed over and over while politicians and elite public servants raise their salaries and ignore the constitution (well, at least they’re working to change that so their activities wouldn’t be illegal…). Even the police and other first responders, who are clearly playing such a central role in this event, went without pay because of shameless corruption and mismanagement on the city and state levels.

On the Federal level, President since 2010 Dilma Rousseff was ousted several months ago amid the largest corruption scandal in Brazilian history on accusations of accounting tricks in order to clean up her record for reelection. The Senate investigative committee, full of those who voted to impeach her, found no evidence at all of the crime. More than half of those in Congress who voted to impeach her, however, are implicated and/or convicted in the multibillion dollar scandal, among others (of course). Several recorded conversations have been leaked revealing that the motivation behind impeachment is killing the investigation. The former-Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha, who championed and prioritized her impeachment process over the past year, was found guilty of multiple counts of corruption and stripped of his title (though not his perks, unlike Dilma). Current President and former-Vice President Michel Temer — who is also implicated in the ongoing scandal — operated very closely with Cunha to drive the effort for impeachment, promising cabinet offices to leaders of major parties to draw support. Within three weeks, three cabinet ministers in Temer’s all white, all male, all millionaire cabinet had resigned facing corruption charges (including, ironically, the anti-corruption minister). REMINDER THAT HIS PREDECESSOR DILMA WAS THE COUNTRY’S FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT.

This so-called “soft coup” by the pragmatic corporatist party of Temer, Cunha, and Rio’s mayor — Eduardo Paes — has been fueled in large part by the country’s mass-media, who have a history of supporting conservative coups. For instance, when paper Folha de São Paulo polled Brazilians on their thoughts on Dilma vs. Temer, Folha published results construed to show that the majority of the country wanted Temer to remain president until the end of the term. In reality, originally unreleased data implied that a clear majority still wanted new elections. Domestic media as a whole are now suggesting Temer run for reelection in 2018, though he is legally banned from doing so for violating campaign finance laws in his last personal campaign. Other media have downplayed anti-Temer protests and highlighted and even exaggerated anti-Dilma acts, while offering mostly pro-impeachment commentators on air and in print.

Though most Brazilians did and do support Dilma’s impeachment for her lack of charisma along with her being head of government during a major scandal, just as many or more did and do not want Temer as president (he received a shockingly low 1% of the vote in a presidential poll only months ago). He’s less popular now than Dilma at her worst. Yet, he, unlike Dilma, refuses to entertain the notion of new elections. With no vote or other input by the nation, he is pushing major “reforms” with a huge swing to the right from the previously social-democratic government, privatizing the nation’s resources and slashing any and all social programs (in order to please “Goldman, Sachs and the IMF” and his adoring foreign investors — those with no investment whatsoever in the country or people, only in making money), while simultaneously increasing the salaries of the judges who will vote on whether to proceed with Dilma’s impeachment and whether or not to indict he and those in his party and new coalition. That coalition heavily features the right-wing party who has lost four consecutive elections to Dilma’s center-left party.

Clearly, there is quite a bit for Brazilians to be angry about, so please — POR FAVOR — cut them some slack over the next few weeks. They, like most of us, would prefer to continue to be able to go to school and to get an ambulance in under 5 hours. Keep them and their struggles in sight and in mind. An investment of your patience, attention, and empathy will go a long way to finally grant the longtime “Country of the Future” its rightful place as a country of today.

The post The social and political costs of the Rio Olympics appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You can tell a lot about a society by what its citizens compliment themselves about. You might also learn a great deal about a society’s insecurities by what citizens say to make themselves feel good.

The United States is perhaps the most charitable nation in the world. According to the 2014 World Giving Index, the U.S. actually tied with Myanmar (you can use that factoid to win some points, somewhere, somehow). The U.S. is the only country that ranked in the top ten of each of the three categories: (a) the percentage of people who donate in a typical month to charity, (b) volunteer time and (c) help a stranger.

This is much to gloat about, but is it possible that this positive trait covers up shameful statistics for the United States?

We are proud of the money and sweat equity we give to food panties. According to the non-profit Feeding America, the U.S. has 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs that provides food and services to people each year. But our pride is possible only because according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one in six people in America faces hunger. If wealth were distributed in the United States so that all people had the financial resources to feed themselves, then there would be no need for charity to be a source of food for our citizens. America would be less charitable.

More than 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness each year. The figure is nearly 580,000 each night. Thirty-five percent of the homeless population are families with children,  the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. Twenty-three percent are U.S. military veterans. Yet hundreds of churches and other non-profit organizations run shelters for the homeless. Americans are indeed very charitable towards these organizations, but it is no substitute for a nation in which every citizen has sufficient income or wealth to have a roof over his or her head. We make charity possible by failing to insist that government fulfill its obligation to provide a basic standard of living for all Americans.

It is basically Republican politicians who stand in the way of providing a livable safety net for American citizens. They oppose: raising minimum wages, offering a guaranteed income, expanding Social Security and Medicare where necessary, fully funding health care for veterans, and providing even minimal health care for many poor people in states that resist Medicaid expansion. Who benefits from Republican obstinacy? Three sectors of our society:

1. American business, which pays lower taxes because we do not fully fund a safety net. At the same time, business brag about their charitable donations, even though they are far smaller than would be their fair share in providing a livable level of income for all Americans.
2. Churches and other religious organizations, who benefit from the holes in the safety net. Churches can take the lead in charitable enterprises. But if the government was taking care of all Americans, religious institutions would be largely stripped of their charitable functions. That in turn would likely be a disincentive for many Americans to join or remain members in religious organizations.
3. Wealthy people in the United States, who can brag ’til the cows home about how charitable they are, even though the amount that many give is far less than what would be their fair tax in a society that cared for its poor, its infirm, its children, and its senior citizens.

I previously wrote  about how Republicans are more charitable than Democrats and Europeans. They love to brag about it. They and the causes that they support receive ongoing adulation from Americans, particularly from mainstream media outlets. What is not said is that it’s all a good economic deal for Republicans. They are able to pay less and brag more. Regrettably, this may be too difficult a concept for most Americans to understand.

The post Americans are too charitable appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A recent article published here on Occasional Planet stated that the Republican debates last Thursday night were not as much of a clown car as expected. A friend of mine watched the Republican debates and had a similar take on how the Republicans sounded.

However, the realities of the world in which we live came home to roost for him the following day. Conversations with, and requests from, several people repeatedly burst the bubble of the mean-spirited economic policies that all of the GOP candidates share.

No sooner had his alarm clock gone off at 7:30, when a twenty-four year old friend of his called and reluctantly asked if he could have $350, because his children’s clothes had been destroyed in a fire at their mother’s house. And since he was going to take the boys, two and four years old, into his own new apartment, he needed money for a bunk bed and a microwave. This was hardly the first call my friend had received from the twenty-four year-old. The young man was now working one full-time job and another part-time, but since the paychecks were erratic, he had needed money for a monthly bus pass. A few days earlier, he needed help paying his cell phone bill; he had to stay in touch with his employers, his children and day-care, as he was juggling the responsibilities of essentially being a single parent. Prior to this, my friend had been helping the young man pay off fines from a myriad of North St. Louis County jurisdictions, where he had been found guilty of what we now call “poverty crimes.”

My friend couldn’t help but wonder how different things would have been for his friend if he was living in a European democracy or Canada. In these industrialized countries with a large measure of socialism in their economic policies, there is an awareness that for all of us, there are times in our lives when “shit happens,” and an economic safety net is necessary in order to seamlessly help people through difficult times.

According to the “Republican Seventeen,” when rough times occur in the U.S., people should either declare bankruptcy or pull themselves up by their boot-straps. What these Republicans fail to recognize is that if you’re poor, you really can’t declare bankruptcy. And as for pulling yourself up by your boot-straps, well that only works if you have boot straps. The twenty-four year old friend of my friend is working his butt off, well over twelve hours a day, but still has not been able to catch up basic expenses, much less to begin saving.

Later that day, my friend received a call from another of his friends. She’s sixty-five years old and not in good health. Her Social Security can get her through two, perhaps, three weeks of the month. Now she was calling my friend because she had four  prescriptions waiting for her at Walgreen’s. She did not have money for the co-pays. My friend helped her out with those co-pays. This happened while the Republicans were urging cutbacks in Social Security.

This friend of mine has repeatedly helped others and rarely complains.

But I am outraged by how callous our society can be, with that meanness mainly fueled by Republicans. Because so many in our society see charity as an adequate substitute for social justice, those in need are repeatedly placed in positions where they have to go into “asking” mode. “Asking” can easily become begging. Republicans repeatedly fail to do the math; charity can provide only 3 to 5 percent of the costs of an adequate safety net.

In so many sectors of our society, the power elite seems to think that begging should be a normal part of the human experience. It can be those citizens among us who do not have the economic wherewithal to adequately support themselves; it can be college students who can only secure their education if they assume long-term burdening debts; and it can be our political leaders, who bombard us continuously with dire requests for money in support of their campaigns.

Yes, most of those Republicans sounded articulate. The media was quick to pick that up. What the mainstream press continuously refuses to do is to say that the basic tenet of the modern Republican Party is meanness. No matter how well they phrase their words, they are still mean.

The post You can be mean and still sound rational appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The short answer is the Fed has been propping up the stock market. And, high stock prices are not always tethered to traditional methods of stock valuation, like productivity, price, earnings, growth—all those “fundamentals” you learn about in the “Investing for Dummies” book. The market has become a highly manipulated gambling casino for the elite, where bank and hedge fund investors, high frequency traders, and the Fed’s massive injection of liquidity into the system have fueled a record-breaking, inflated, and unsustainable market.

Of course, if you are invested in this market—and a lot of working stiffs are—you have done well, but it’s a market without a foundation, a house built on sand. Unlike the wealthy, you probably can’t afford to lose your money when the market “corrects”—and it will.

These record-breaking Dow averages are not the result of the “invisible hand of the free market,” because there’s no such thing as a “free market.” Central banks around the world are injecting $200 billion into the system, per quarter, to avoid a market crash.

Tyler Durgen, at Zero Hedge, says that, “without the Fed’s (and all other central bank’s) liquidity pump, the S&P would be about 70% lower than where it is now.

Mike Whitney at Counterpunch writes: “. . . in the last five years, stocks have tripled because the Fed, has added a “hefty $4 trillion in red ink to its balance sheet. Naturally, when someone buys $4 trillion in financial assets, the price of financial assets goes up.”

Besides, the Fed doesn’t give a rip about the real economy. If it did, it would have loaded up on infrastructure bonds instead of funky mortgage backed securities (MBS). The difference between the two is pretty stark: Infrastructure bonds put people to work, circulate money, boost economic activity, and strengthen growth. In contrast, MBS purchases help to fatten the bank accounts of the fraudsters who created the financial crisis while doing bupkis for the economy. Guess whom the Fed chose to help out?

Whitney is talking about the Fed’s practice of Quantitative Easing (QE)— buying toxic assets from banks—and then lending money back at zero percent interest. This gives banks and hedge funds tons of free money with which to speculate. This same policy that enriches the already wealthy takes money out of the pockets of ordinary people who can’t earn any interest on their meager savings accounts.

The Fed announced on Wednesday, October 29, that it would end QE3, effectively removing one of the helium tanks from this inflated stock market. It remains to be seen how the markets will react.

While too big to fail banks are speculating like crazy, corporations are busy pumping stock prices. Instead of doing something constructive with the billions in cash they are sitting on, say, creating jobs here at home, executives are increasing share value (and the value of their stock options) by buying back company stock.

Back in the real world we are left with higher food prices and lower wages. The sticker shock you’ve been experiencing at the grocery store is not just because you shop at Whole Foods. In September, the BLS reported that the price of ground beef increased 17 percent since September of 2013.

The Obama administration claims credit for a lower unemployment rate, but it fails to mention that the jobs it helped create are mostly low paying, part time, or both. If you take a part-time, low-paying job, you are considered “employed,” so you fall off the rolls even though you can’t live on what you make. And, if you give up looking, as many have, you are no longer counted. The so-called lower unemployment rate in no way reflects the reality of the job market.

In April of this year, the New York Times reported the following:

The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants.

In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones. That is the conclusion of a new report from the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy group, analyzing employment trends four years into the recovery.

What this reality check tells you about our economy, our markets, and our banking system, is that they are rigged to benefit the elite. They are unstable, unsustainable, and do not serve the majority of working people. Fed policy is to give banks hundreds of billions in gambling money which does nothing for the real economy and further enriches the already rich. Meanwhile, 16 million American children live in poverty, and 1.3 million school children are homeless.

The next global “crash” will happen when international central bank manipulation of all varieties ceases to work. The phony economy, this “house of cards,” will fall, and bank balance sheets will go up in flames. Because banks are interconnected, when liquidity locks up, they will all go down together, and the markets and what’s left of the economy will go down with them. Some say the coming crash will make 2008 seem like a dress rehearsal. The wealthy, of course, will be fine, but ordinary people around the world will suffer.

Mike Whitney blames the surge in wealth at the top and the growing gap between the rich and poor on the Fed’s zero interest rate and QE policies put into place in 2008—policies deliberately designed to transfer money from the poor to the rich. In other words, the crushing of the working and the middle classes isn’t an accident; it’s a feature of an economy run by and for bankers and billionaires.

The post Why is the stock market soaring when the real economy is on its knees? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We Democrats keep asking ourselves why in the world poor people vote Republican when it’s the Democrats who build and defend programs that will help them. Like most Democrats who don’t have poor Republican friends, I’ve always thought it was about abortion, prayer in the schools and stuff like that.

When campaigning a few years ago for a Democratic candidate, I was given a lesson in the extremism of the the “theo-pubs.” A man told me that if his 14-year old daughter became pregnant by a rapist, she would want to carry the baby to term because it’s god’s will. So, naturally, I’ve assumed low-income people who vote Republican were probably thinking the same as that guy.

Yesterday I had a chance to learn what’s in the heart and mind of at least two low-income Republicans, and it ain’t pretty. Turns out it has nothing to do with abortion or “god’s will.” They are just basically selfish. The conversation happened because my husband and I wanted to put one of my larger campaign signs at a strategic rural intersection. I have seen signs for Dem candidates at that corner before and was hoping it would be okay.

Turns out the woman living there is renting and NOT a Democrat. So picture this. We’re standing in a farm yard avoiding horse manure piles with two dogs barking and running around. Her male friend from Illinois started the conversation after noticing on my campaign card that I support local control of farms, ranches and natural resources. He repeated the whole litany of anti-EPA talking points about the update of the Clean Water Act now being considered in D.C. He said farmers are going to have to stop planting crops right up to the edge of streams and creeks. That would mean taking acres and acres of land out of production. I told him about Ameren’s plan to build a coal ash dump in the floodplain of the Missouri River. He didn’t like that idea, but he didn’t see that farmers who pollute creeks and streams are basically doing the same thing. It’s all about maximizing profit for them.

The woman said she can’t get health insurance. She drives school buses and makes $19 an hour. She said she talked to someone about “Obamacare” and they wanted $300 a month for insurance. I asked her what she’ll do if she gets sick. She said she’d just “lay down and die.” But she went to the ER with back pain and didn’t like the fact that it cost her $600. I didn’t think quickly enough to tell her how much that visit really cost the rest of us.

She then told us that she figured out how much she has paid in taxes on her income this year, and it was six weeks worth of pay. Her view of this is that she worked six weeks for “the government” and got nothing in return.

Her friend who is in his 50’s and not educated enough to get a better job drives some kind of public transportation vehicle and complained that he is expected to work mornings, “sit around and twiddle my thumbs” for a few hours and then work again late afternoon. I told him there are probably a lot of people who would take that job in a minute and asked why he didn’t quit. He said he had to work because “welfare won’t support ME.” Emphasis on “me.” What I heard was the right wing mantra about welfare supporting all those lazy people who don’t want to work for a living.

As we were heading to my Prius that gets 47 miles a gallon, the man walked with us wishing me luck on my campaign. I pointed to the large diesel-powered truck that had been sitting with the engine running the whole time we were talking. He kind of agreed with me that the woman was wasting gas leaving that truck running. Then I saw her get in the truck and light a cigarette. I told him if she can afford to let a large truck sit running for 20 minutes and she can afford to smoke, she can afford health insurance. AND if she’s a smoker she had better get health insurance.

That whole experience put me on edge, but I’m glad I had the chance to hear what goes on the minds of people who are just basically selfish and don’t give a damn about the common good. She’s thinking about getting a gun because she lives alone. And I have no doubt she’d shoot first and ask questions later.

The good news is she hasn’t changed her voter registration to her current address so she can’t vote for my opponent.

The post Inside the mind of a low-income Republican voter appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Back in 2012, the most famous losing candidate in American wanted to be the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri. Todd Akin became late night code for a maladroit, an instant punch line.

Bad news folks. St. Louis and to a large part Missouri are now defined by what most of us want to forget.

If outsiders dig deeper they find the new inalienable right to guns, sales tax exemptions for fast food restaurants and a domed building full of people so out of touch with common sense that I still expect Comedy Central to open a Jefferson City bureau.

Let’s remember that economic things haven’t been that great in the Show-Me state or here around St. Louis for a good while. I stand among those wonks pleasantly surprised that the 2013 American Community Survey by the census found median household income had grown by 2.2% in Missouri from 2012 to 2013. We’re still better than $100 a week below the national average but I would have put the smart money on a fifth year of declining median income!

The harsh reality remains that the St. Louis area – the economic heart of Missouri – still struggles, with the SMSA (if you don’t know that acronym I can’t help you) underperformed, again coming in below average even with a 2.7% increase. While the 2013 median household income in Chicago was $60,564 and Minneapolis was $67,194, St. Louis came in at $54,449. When St. Louis runs $245 a week below the Twin Cities, well, I understood when a good friend told me tonight that he and his wife are considering a move to Jacksonville, Florida. A few years ago she was recruited for a job with a nice window in the headquarters of a locally based national company. He sells big expensive things. Their extended families are here but they’re not sure their future is.

Okay, remember that we don’t have enough lifeboats. Most of us are going to have to stay here and work things out.

What to do?

Admit that we have problems

That sounds simple but I have heard a number of elected officials dismissing what erupted in Ferguson as a ‘north county thing.’ We know that many suburbs were created to exclude, not include, “those people.” It’s not just race (though that remains an issue). Here in Oakville people barely held their bladders at the thought of housing for moderate income seniors. [BTW: the building is filled, has a waiting list and Armageddon has not rolled down Telegraph Road.] I would love to see a developer go to Town & Country proposing an apartment complex like Canfield Green where a two bedroom unit goes for $550 a month. From experience I know it would be 100% rented before it opened, filled with working poor wanting to be closer to their jobs and good schools for the kids. Don’t laugh. Until such a proposal gets a real hearing and building permits economic segregation and racial separateness will rule our region.

Talk about our problems

Why do we wait for PBS to come to town to discuss things we all know need to be discussed? We can all get along at Cardinal games. All the well-earned pride people take in their community ought to be a the start for working together to address regional problems. We have bridges over the rivers. We need to build bridges among the disparate neighborhoods.

Focus on real economic development

I think we have more than enough big box stores. How about a foundry? High tech contract fabricators to job for the burgeoning 21st Century entrepreneurs? I’m not fond of handing $30,000 in tax breaks per job to manufacturers but if we can create long-term, full time work I’ll bite my tongue. Remember, starting next week a family of four can have someone working full time at $14.90 an hour and still qualify for food stamps! Whatever it takes to get $20.00 an hour jobs is worth doing.

Develop an attitude

Quick: which city’s sports fans threw snowballs at Santa Claus? Sure, being nice is nice but if we are to climb back to the top of the heap we need mean. Despite a huge, poor core the Philly region has a median income $100 a week above St. Louis’. We can be smarter, harder working, higher achieving and more determined than Eagles fans.

Play long

Our problems developed across generations. Making changes won’t be easy nor will it be fast. Easy answers – call it community dialogue – can be a start. The commitment to real change, knowing it will take years, is the first step. Does St. Louis County need 50+ police departments and three score of municipal courts? Should Manchester fight Town & Country over a Walmart? Why does a line on map make a difference about the quality of education a child gets? Be brave and not afraid to be bold. Change basic things.

Remember, that with the current situation in Ferguson the biggest losers are not multinational corporations or big box stores or the Federal Reserve system. Those losing the most are the people who live in apartments and ranch houses, along with the woman owner of the beauty shop or the guy with the meat market. They are us.

Wouldn’t it be great if we went back to the time when the jokes about St. Louis featured Todd Akin as the punch line?

[Okay, SMSA = Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. The St. Louis SMSA is one of the top 25 in the nation. It includes the collar counties in Missouri and Illinois. If current trends continue, St. Louis will drop out of the top 25 by the 2020 census.]

The post What’s the matter with Missouri, and what we can do about it appeared first on Occasional Planet.

On the recommendation of someone who said everyone should see the movie “Rich Hill,” I attended the early show this morning.

I hadn’t read anything about the film before going and didn’t know it was a documentary about three families in Missouri. Rich Hill is near the Kansas border on highway 71 between Kansas City and Joplin. One of the families also lived temporarily in Thayer and Nevada, MO.

The movie focuses on three adolescent boys and lets them tell about their lives in their own way and their own words. To say they live difficult lives doesn’t begin to describe the tragic circumstances they are dealing with. None of the boys has a stable family or capable parents. One boy does receive some affection from his drug-addicted mother and mentally challenged father. The other two boys are constantly criticized for their behavior, which, of course, makes them act out even more.

This evening, I called up the list of programs on my DVR to find something to watch that wasn’t about Ferguson, the police, protests and the racial divide in our country. I chose an episode of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” and the guest was Tracy Droz Tragos, the woman who made the Rich Hill documentary. What are the chances of that?

Jon Stewart tried to describe the living conditions in the places where the three boys lived but had trouble verbalizing something so totally foreign to him. I would imagine the scenes in the movie would be foreign to many of us too, but they are just a short drive away from our safe, comfortable homes. A person doesn’t have to go very far off one of Missouri’s major highways to find conditions every bit as heart wrenching as those in Rich Hill.

Stewart commented that the congresswoman who represents that part of Missouri voted to cut SNAP benefits. I assume he was referring to Vicky Hartzler. Some of the progressive blogs mentioned her several times during the debate last year about the farm bill and food stamps. I’ve become so numb to the injustices committed by our U.S. Congress and Missouri General Assembly, that it takes a movie like “Rich Hill” to force me to experience them as real.

One of the scenes that made me shake my head was in the principal’s office when a boy suffering from having been sexually abused by his stepfather as a child wants to call his grandmother to come get him. The principal follows the rules and tells the boy he can’t keep going home pretending to be sick. In an exchange with the principal, the boy exhibits quick thinking and logic that reminded me of an attorney questioning a witness. But this is the same boy who is confused in the gun and knife store when he can’t find any money in his wallet to buy another knife.

I think about the conversations I’ve had with friends about why parents don’t take more responsibility for their children’s education. How can parents not know when school is beginning? Most of them have television, and they must see the “Back to School” ads. How can they not be curious enough to find out when the first day of school is? Why don’t they feed their kids a healthy breakfast and get them to school ready to learn?

This movie made me realize I’ve been asking questions based on all the wrong information. I’m reminded of a recent panel discussion about gun violence where the superintendent of the Jennings School District described why the school provides breakfast and lunch on Saturdays for their kids. She said that, in some cases, it’s a long time from Friday night to Monday for kids dealing with events in their neighborhood that no kid should have to experience.

The kids in Rich Hill shouldn’t have to live in such abusive situations either. Jon Stewart and the filmmaker talked about the boys’ resiliency. One of the boys is, in fact, the parent to his mother, father and younger sister. He keeps hoping God will help his father find permanent employment. When he realizes his father is not mentally or emotionally capable of sticking to one job very long, he rationalizes that his dad has hopes and dreams like anyone else. No rancor. No accusations. After failing at everything else, the dad decides to go west and look for gold or silver. He says he wants to have enough money to take his two kids to Wal-Mart and give them each $400 to buy whatever they want. The postscript on the screen after the movie said that the mother died of an overdose and the boy is living with his father and sister in Colorado.

As we left the theatre, my friend said, “Well, that was depressing.” That’s all she will probably think about the movie, but I always want to understand and ask why things are the way they are.

From “The Other America” by Michael Harrington to “Rich Hill” by Tracy Droz Tragos, have we, as a society, made any progress in the poorest parts of rural America? From the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-sixties to protests in Ferguson, have we made any progress in our attempts to treat all groups with respect and dignity?

Looking back 50 years, I think we can say, yes, there have been some good things happening. Child molestation is a serious crime with serious penalties. In the movie, the stepfather wasn’t arrested because the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. The boy’s mother is now in jail for trying to kill her husband. I’d like to think the police would handle a case like that differently today.

We’ve made progress in many ways, but, in many parts of the country, we still seem to be falling deeper and deeper into helplessness. I have to agree with those who say some people create their own failures by the choices they make. I’m thinking about how almost everyone in the movie smoked, including the 13 year old boy. One of the mothers lights her cigarette from the heating coil of the toaster. Several of them were smoking in bed. Where do they get money for cigarettes? One of the boys calls his grandmother and begs her to spend part of their food stamp money on an energy drink for him. She explains she has only $200 for the whole family, and it has to last a month. The boy who gets kicked out of 6th grade for assaulting other students plays violent video games at home. It makes me wonder what in the world those parents are thinking.

But then I see commercials on TV where scantily dressed supermodels are taking big bites out of enormous hamburgers. I see ads telling us to relax, pamper ourselves, call in sick to work to go to a baseball game, borrow money for cars we can’t afford, TGIF. No one ever says they are anxious to get back to work on Monday. We never hear people talking about how they love their jobs and feel good about making a contribution to society. We leave all of that to charities, churches and other non-profits.

I keep going back to a book I read in the early 1990’s by Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business was published in 1984 and analyzed how television and other forms of visual entertainment were changing the basic ways people see and process information. Most of Postman’s predictions have come true. We have become consumers not just of material things we don’t need but of political propaganda intended to keep us ignorant. There are ads on TV telling us how to get out of paying taxes. We’re encouraged to blame everyone else for our problems and sue anyone who causes us distress. There are lawyers who will gladly champion just about any case where there is money to be made. We’re more interested in the sex lives of celebrities than in what our kids are learning in school. Newspaper articles discuss what percentage of the tax “burden” the middle class bears. I remember when newspaper articles began with the facts (who, what, where, when and how) instead of an emotional story about one of the people in the story. Education has to be “fun” or kids tune out. But so do their parents, so what can we expect of the kids?

Obviously I am not talking about 100% of Americans. No need to list the hard workers and their achievements. They get their share of attention, and good for them. But can we honestly say the values needed to keep a society functioning properly are strong enough to keep us afloat much longer? The stock market is doing great, but wages haven’t kept up with inflation. CEO’s earn 400 times as much as their employees. Corporations are not embarrassed about using “inversion” tactics to open an office overseas and avoid paying taxes. Sea levels are rising but we can’t do anything about it because fossil fuel companies control Congress and the media.

So who can blame those people at the bottom of the economic ladder for not setting goals, planning ahead or trying harder to be self-sufficient? Letters to the editor blame parents for not providing a stable, healthy learning environment for their kids. But what if those parents didn’t have a nurturing home as children, and their parents didn’t either?

I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it will take programs like that in the Jennings District to open up opportunities for success to students whose families are not up to the task. Students in that district receive good nutrition, after school tutoring and activities, home visits by school personnel including the superintendent, help with buying uniforms and keeping them clean, and challenging classroom activities. Not to mention dedicated teachers. To increase attendance at PTA meetings, parents receive a bag of groceries as they leave. This may be what will have to happen all over the country. There probably are many more examples of communities raising children and giving them the positive environment they need to develop character and ambition.

In Missouri it will be an uphill battle because there are profiteers who have been sabotaging districts that need more help, not defunding. They set up impossible goals and then punish districts that can’t compete. Anyone who goes to see “Rich Hill” will recognize the futility of making more and more demands on students whose splintered lives make it impossible for them to meet our expectations.

I, for one, will not be making any more judgmental comments about a world I know nothing about.

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