[Peace-discuss] Articles on Poverty, Race, and the Economy

[David Green]

Cosby and me: Why we don't see eye-to-eye

By Michael Eric Dyson, the author of "Is Bill Cosby
Right?" and a professor of humanities at the
University of Pennsylvania
Published August 29, 2006

For more than a year, I've been embroiled in a public
debate with Bill Cosby about poor blacks. Cosby has
been harshly critical of the poor, blaming them for
their plight and arguing that personal responsibility
is the key to their success. Cosby has dismissed both
social forces and the legacy of racism in berating the
poor for their many failures--bad parenting, bad
language and bad behavior.

I have acknowledged that personal responsibility is an
important element in all people's flourishing. I have
also argued that it is naive and irresponsible to
ignore the negative impact of low wages, poor health
care, persistent prejudice and conservative public
policies on the lives of the black poor.

Recently, civil rights leader (and my dear friend)
Rev. Jesse Jackson and columnist Clarence Page have
entered the fray. I'm afraid they've both missed the
point of my criticism of Cosby's beliefs.

In an open letter, Jackson contends that my "attacks
on Dr. Bill Cosby are too harsh," and that it is "one
thing to disagree with his views, but quite another to
personally denigrate him to make one's point." Instead
of saying how this is the case, Jackson defends Cosby
by chronicling his generosity to Jackson's
organizations. Jackson also points to Cosby's
pioneering role in defeating racial stereotypes as a
reason to admire him.

True, but that has little to do with the legitimacy of
my criticism of Cosby's stern rebuke to the poor. In
the absence of any supporting evidence, it might
appear that Jackson is arguing that the very act of my
disagreeing with Cosby is to denigrate him. But that
would mean that kowtowing to the rich and mighty had
replaced the role of social criticism and, presumably,
strong black leadership: to speak truth to power and
defend the vulnerable.

Jackson is justly famous for doing both. Renowned
scholar John Hope Franklin reminded him of it recently
in a public forum. When Jackson asked Franklin about
Cosby's comments about poor black folk, Franklin said
that too many influential blacks have been "co-opted
by white people" and have "betrayed their own race."
Franklin urged Jackson to keep up his fight for the
voiceless.

In a profile of Jackson by Don Terry in the Tribune
Sunday magazine last year, Jackson said that while he
agreed with much that Cosby had to say, he thought the
comedian's words were too harsh and lacked context. I
agree with Jackson's assessment, one that I think he
should have repeated in his open letter to me. Jackson
calls for a balanced approach to our problems: Black
folk must exercise personal responsibility as we fight
"institutional inequality and injustice." I agree. But
Cosby's stark insistence on personal responsibility
while slighting institutional impediments is a gross
distortion of the situation of the black poor.

Jackson knows better. He has criticized others for
holding such out-of-kilter views. He must summon the
courage to confront Cosby.

Clarence Page's arguments about my take on Cosby are
rooted in celebrity worship more than persuasive
reasoning. Page appears to have reneged on his
journalistic duty to maintain at least the semblance
of fairness, even for a columnist, when he gushes over
a call from Cosby that includes saying hello to Page's
son, "scoring some rare cool points for me in the
process." Page's "heart pounded" as he wondered what
Cosby wanted with him.

Cosby wanted to complain about the media and me,
especially my insistence that behavioral modification,
while intrinsically appealing, would not clear the
path to social prosperity for the poor. Page also took
issue with me, saying that my argument is "wrong,
dangerously wrong in the disrespect it pays to the
value of good behavior," and that many blacks could
attest that it "beats drugs, crime, abuse, child
neglect and other forms of destructive behavior."

My beef, however, is not with behavior; it is with
those who exaggerate its influence to sting the poor
for their troubles while overlooking the unjust
arrangements that reinforce their poverty, something
that good behavior doesn't have the power to remove.
If it did, poor black folk who behaved well in slavery
would have been freed.

Page insists that I "must be delighted" by all the
controversy, since "overreaction helps book sales." It
helps stand-up gigs even more so, especially since
they are largely subscribed by the same white audience
Cosby refuses to publicly scorn or alienate.

Unlike his colorblind comedy, Cosby's harsh criticisms
of the poor are curiously segregated. That ought to
leave Jackson and Page, champions of integration, more
than a little dismayed. Unless, of course, Cosby gets
another pass. 

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune 


___________________________

Clarence Page 
Let's finish job in conquering poverty in U.S.


Published September 3, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Has poverty fallen to a glass floor?
After a decade of declining welfare dependency and
building employment rolls, poverty stubbornly refuses
to be further reduced.

Census Bureau officials accentuated the positive in
their latest data released last week: The number and
percentage of people living below the poverty line did
not grow between 2004 and 2005. In 2005, the poor
accounted for 12.6 percent of the population, roughly
the same as in 2004. Hooray.

Unfortunately, poverty did grow between 2000 and 2004,
despite a growing economy overall. Poverty rose to
12.7 percent in 2004 from a 26-year low of 11.3
percent in 2000. That translates to 37 million poor
people in 2004, 5.4 million more than in 2000.

Economic recovery survived mightily through the
dot-com boom and bust, through a brief economic
downturn in 2000, through the economic aftershock of
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and various
corporate scandals. Unfortunately poverty has managed
to stubbornly persist.

Does that mean that welfare-reform measures enacted
10years ago failed? Not quite. Welfare dependency has
been sharply reduced. Millions of single mothers have
been put to work and, despite slippage since 2000,
child poverty still is lower than it was a decade ago.
But, despite juggling jobs and kids, many of these
moms have not been able to earn enough income to lift
their families above the federal poverty line, now at
$19,971 for a family of four.

Worse, while overall poverty held steady, there was a
sharp increase of families living in extreme poverty.
Some 43 percent of the poor earned less than half of
the poverty line, according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank.

By race, the only group that improved its poverty rate
was non-Hispanic whites, of whom 8.3 percent were
below the poverty line in 2005, down from 8.7percent a
year earlier.

It is worth noting that non-Hispanic whites still
outnumber blacks and Hispanics above and below the
poverty line. But because the percentage of non-white
communities is greater, poverty has a more damaging
impact.

Remember the saying that "a rising tide lifts all
boats"? President John F. Kennedy coined that phrase
almost a half-century ago to beat back criticism of
his tax cuts. President Bush has used the same
argument to fight mightily against the same charge.
Unfortunately, to continue the metaphor, the latest
figures show that the yachts have been rising a lot
faster than the other boats, many of which are sinking
or drifting in the water.

Yet, it is not true to say, as Ronald Reagan did in
the 1980s, that we fought a war on poverty and poverty
won. We've scored many victories. More important, the
working men and women who have lifted themselves out
of poverty, whether with the help of welfare reform
measures or other means, have scored victories.

But, in many ways, welfare reform brought the greatest
benefits to those recipients who were ready, willing
and able to work. The sad numbers of those who remain
in poverty, working or unemployed, mark the cases that
require more attention, often because these people
have more problems in their personal lives than just a
mere lack of a job. Illness, disability, family trauma
or other obstacles can hinder those who want to free
themselves from a lifetime of dependency.

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina refocused government
and public attention on the nation's poor. We have
made progress in helping the poor help themselves. But
we seem to have hit a glass bottom. We have yet to
break through to reach those most isolated from the
progress others already are beginning to make.

----------

HEADLINE: The Big Disconnect

BYLINE: By PAUL KRUGMAN. 

Sept. 1. 2006

There are still some pundits out there lecturing
people about how great the economy is. But most
analysts seem to finally realize that Americans have
good reasons to be unhappy with the state of the
economy: although G.D.P. growth has been pretty good
for the last few years, most workers have seen their
wages lag behind inflation and their benefits
deteriorate.

The disconnect between overall economic growth and the
growing squeeze on many working Americans will
probably play a big role this November, partly because
President Bush seems so out of touch: the more he
insists that it's a great economy, the angrier voters
seem to get. But the disconnect didn't begin with Mr.
Bush, and it won't end with him, unless we have a
major change in policies. 

The stagnation of real wages -- wages adjusted for
inflation -- actually goes back more than 30 years.
The real wage of nonsupervisory workers reached a peak
in the early 1970's, at the end of the postwar boom.
Since then workers have sometimes gained ground,
sometimes lost it, but they have never earned as much
per hour as they did in 1973. 

Meanwhile, the decline of employer benefits began in
the Reagan years, although there was a temporary
improvement during the Clinton-era boom. The most
crucial benefit, employment-based health insurance,
has been in rapid decline since 2000.

Ordinary American workers seem to understand the
long-term disconnect between economic growth and their
own fortunes better than most political analysts.
Consider, for example, the results of a new poll of
American workers by the Pew Research Center.

The center finds that workers perceive a long-term
downward trend in their economic status. A majority
say that it's harder to earn a decent living than it
was 20 or 30 years ago, and a plurality say that job
benefits are worse too. 

Are workers simply viewing the past through
rose-colored glasses? The report seems to imply that
they are: a section pointing out that workers surveyed
in 1997 also said that it had gotten harder to make a
decent living is titled, ''As usual, people say things
were better in the good old days.'' 

But as we've seen, real wages have been declining
since the 1970's, so it makes sense that workers have
consistently said that it's harder to make a living
today than it was a generation ago. 

On the other side, workers' concern about worsening
benefits is new. In 1997, a plurality of workers said
that employment benefits were better than they used to
be. That made sense: in 1997, the health care crisis,
which had been a big political issue a few years
earlier, seemed to have gone into remission. Medical
costs were relatively stable, and in a tight labor
market, employers were competing to offer improved
benefits. Workers felt, rightly, that benefits were
pretty good by historical standards.

But now the health care crisis is back, both because
medical costs are rising rapidly and because we're
living in an increasingly Wal-Martized economy, in
which even big, highly profitable employers offer
minimal benefits. Employment-based insurance began a
steep decline with the 2001 recession, and the decline
has continued in spite of economic recovery. 

The latest Census report on incomes, poverty and
health insurance, released this week, shows that in
2005, four years into the economic expansion, the
percentage of Americans with private insurance of any
kind reached its lowest level since 1987. And
Americans feel, again correctly, that benefits are
worse than they used to be.

Why have workers done so badly in a rich nation that
keeps getting richer? That's a matter of dispute,
although I believe there's a large political
component: what we see today is the result of a
quarter-century of policies that have systematically
reduced workers' bargaining power.

The important question now, however, is whether we're
finally going to try to do something about the big
disconnect. Wages may be difficult to raise, but we
won't know until we try. And as for declining benefits
-- well, every other advanced country manages to
provide everyone with health insurance, while spending
less on health care than we do.

The big disconnect, in other words, provides as good
an argument as you could possibly want for a smart,
bold populism. All we need now are some smart, bold
populist politicians.

_____________________

Sept. 1, 2006

HEADLINE: Rendezvous With Oblivion

BYLINE: By THOMAS FRANK. 

Thomas Frank, a guest columnist, is the author, most
recently, of ''What's the Matter With Kansas?''

Over the last month I have tried to describe
conservative power in Washington, but with a small
change of emphasis I could just as well have been
describing the failure of liberalism: the
center-left's inability to comprehend the current
political situation or to draw upon what is most vital
in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have
argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political
form, with free-market economics understood as the
state of nature, plutocracy as the default social
condition, and, enthroned as the nation's necessary
vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing
anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is
missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to
Christianize the Philippines. 

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to
precisely these conditions. Look through the
foundational texts of American liberalism and you can
find everything you need to derail the conservative
juggernaut. But don't expect liberal leaders in
Washington to use those things. They are ''New
Democrats'' now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and
barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let
alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian
stemwinder against ''economic royalists.'' 

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much
sense to the typical Washington liberal as would
circulating a petition against gravity. What our
modernized liberal leaders offer -- that is, when
they're not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos
-- is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for
those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they
counsel us to accept the inevitability of the
situation and to try to understand how we might
retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in
better next time. 

This last point was a priority for the Clinton
administration. But in ''The Disposable American,'' a
disturbing history of job security, Louis Uchitelle
points out that the New Democrats' emphasis on
retraining (as opposed to broader solutions that Old
Democrats used to favor) is merely a kinder version of
the 19th-century view of unemployment, in which
economic dislocation always boils down to the fitness
of the unemployed person himself.

Or take the ''inevitability'' of recent economic
changes, a word that the centrist liberals of the
Washington school like to pair with ''globalization.''
We are told to regard the ''free-trade'' deals that
have hammered the working class almost as acts of
nature. As the economist Dean Baker points out,
however, we could just as easily have crafted
''free-trade'' agreements that protected manufacturing
while exposing professions like law, journalism and
even medicine to ruinous foreign competition, losing
nothing in quality but saving consumers far more than
Nafta did. 

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of
Washington -- a place where lawyers outnumber
machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties
rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation -- the
fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect
sense. The reign of the ''knowledge workers'' seems
noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are
lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the
productivity of workers has increased, the ones
reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data
tells us that the only reason family income is keeping
up with inflation is that more family members are
working. 

Everything I have written about in this space points
to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn
to talk about class issues again. But they won't on
their own. So pressure must come from traditional
liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the
much-vilified bloggers. Liberalism also needs strong,
well-funded institutions fighting the rhetorical
battle. Laying out policy objectives is all well and
good, but the reason the right has prevailed is its
army of journalists and public intellectuals. Moving
the economic debate to the right are dozens if not
hundreds of well-funded Washington think tanks,
lobbying outfits and news media outlets. Pushing the
other way are perhaps 10.

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to
maintain their present course, gaming out each
election with political science and a little
triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as
memories of the middle-class republic fade.

___________________

HEADLINE: Getting Past Katrina

BYLINE: By Juan Williams. 

Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a
political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author
of ''Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and
Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black
America.''

Sept. 1, 2006

A YEAR ago this week, the entire nation caught a
chilling look in the mirror. We watched as the
citizens of New Orleans, clutching their essential
belongings in plastic trash bags, struggled through
fetid flood waters in search of shelter. But even with
all that's been said and written on this painful
anniversary, one of the real issues remains
unaddressed.

The shock of Hurricane Katrina awoke many of us to the
reality that poverty persists, especially among
African-Americans. It persists even after the go-go
1990's, the welfare-to-work reform of the Clinton
years and the passage of earned-income tax credits to
put more money in the pockets of the working poor. 

In fact, poverty in the United States has been on the
rise since the start of the new century. The number of
Americans in poverty is now 12.6 percent overall,
essentially holding steady after having risen for four
years. The number of the nation's children in poverty
-- also climbing until last year -- is even more
alarming, at close to 18 percent. But even before the
great storm, New Orleans was a city of concentrated
poverty: nearly a quarter of the population, about
double the national average. And the poverty rate
among New Orleans blacks (nearly 70 percent of the
city's population) was a sky-high 35 percent. 

For a brief time our guilt and shame seemed to put
America on the political edge of a new try at
something like a 1960's-era Great Society program. But
that newfound energy was squandered amid racial and
political arguments. 

First, the left made the case that the reason the
government was failing to help the desperate,
bedraggled poor people left behind in New Orleans was
that the faces on television were black -- and a
Republican administration ruled in Washington. The
power of that argument failed when it became apparent
that poor white people, both in New Orleans and
throughout the Gulf Coast, had also suffered because
of FEMA's incompetence. 

The right, meanwhile, depicted the poor -- that is to
say the black poor, because TV cameras focused on the
big city -- as looters, rapists and criminals. But
when those claims turned out not to be true, there was
no return to the core issue of how to help the poor
escape poverty. 

A year later, the best the national political class
can do with American poverty is to renew stalemated
conversations about increasing the minimum wage. The
will to create innovative programs is missing because
of a national consensus few people dare to say out
loud: Americans believe that the poor can help
themselves. 

A Pew Research Center poll (conducted the week after
Hurricane Katrina) found that two-thirds of black
Americans and three-quarters of white Americans
believe that too many poor people are overly dependent
on government aid. Inside those numbers is the sense
that welfare programs meant to help the poor create a
dependency on handouts, draining people of the
confidence, will to work and values that are crucial
to success. 

This is telling, because people of color and
especially black Americans are more likely than whites
to know someone who is struggling with poverty.
According to the Census Bureau, 24.7 percent of black
Americans and 21.9 percent of Hispanics lived in
poverty in 2004, as compared to 8.6 percent of whites.
Interestingly, the same proportion of black Americans
who say the black poor need to do more to help
themselves also told pollsters that they felt the
government would have done more to aid victims of
Hurricane Katrina had those victims been white. But
it's clear that even with a strong racial
consciousness, black people believe that the poor bear
some responsibility for their troubles. 

There is good reason for a majority of Americans to
hold that belief. For anyone who wants to get out of
poverty, the prescription is clear. 

Finish high school, at least. Wait until your 20's
before marrying, and wait until you're married before
having children. Once you're in the work force, stay
in: take any job, because building on the experience
will prepare you for a better job. Any American who
follows that prescription will be at almost no risk of
falling into extreme poverty. Statistics show it.

The suspicion that the poor cause problems for
themselves was at the heart of President Clinton's
effort to ''end welfare as we know it.'' It is also
the guiding principle in the latest wave of poverty
programs. Backed by private dollars from nonprofits
and foundations, these programs encourage individual
responsibility by rewarding the poor for getting high
school diplomas, finding jobs and being good parents.
There are programs to help determined inner-city
residents find good jobs in the suburbs, where they
can live in neighborhoods that haven't been defined
for generations by the bad schools and rampant crime
that breed poverty. The emphasis is on nurturing a
will to do better. 

Bill Cosby's controversial appeal, in 2004, for the
poor to see -- and seize -- the opportunities
available to them is in line with the inspiring
African-American tradition of self-help and reliance
on strong families and neighbors. There were
complaints that he was blaming the victim, minimizing
the power of racism, and failing to understand that
larger social forces keep the poor -- especially black
poor -- at the bottom of the economic ladder. But Mr.
Cosby's critics ignored some sound advice: getting
those in need to recognize that there is a way out,
and that it's in their power to find it, is the best
anti-poverty program. 

The crisis in New Orleans has now been reduced to a
matter of government financing for rebuilding homes
while reviving the business community. But the real
rebuilding project on the Gulf Coast requires bringing
new energy to confronting the poverty of spirit.
Because that's what was tearing down the city, long
before Hurricane Katrina.

 


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