08.10.11
Grapes of Wrath, II
Except you don’t go to California. You stay wherever you are and get destroyed in place.
Once again, Frank at Pine View does the heavy lifting so I don’t have to.
I’m betting he follows TomDispatch.
In any case, the link is to a piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, syndicated from TD to the Guardian, and from a new piece added to her ten-year-old book, Nickel & Dimed, on not making it in America.
Ehrenreich (with link to the Guardian where, because it’s England, they spell it “criminalise”):
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalised in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
True.
It no longer makes you blink to read stories about the homeless being chased around in SoCal for being unsightly or people in Vegas being punished for giving out food. (The covering rationalization is that such a thing is unregulated and could lead to food poisoning cases. Which, as a practice, is even more evil than just admitting you don’t wish to let any beggars have food.)
Afflicting the afflicted is part of the national genetic character. In the last decades we’ve selectively bred for it.
It’s reinforced by economic collapse, the fear that if you don’t kick down on the person below you, you’re next, and the natural tendency of frightened people to scapegoat.
The Tea Party is the apotheosis of this. The party is made up of classic kick-downers and I’ve expressed admiration for their capability at unified rage. Rage motivates. It’s something Dems can’t do. Ever.
If you watched MSNBC for the last couple months, between Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, you’d have thought the GOP was on the run, headed for a good head-cutting session for attacking labor in Wisconsin.
And so when MSNBC put all their effort into covering the Wisconsin state legislator recall like it was raising the flag on top of Suribachi and got the losing side in the Battle of the Bulge instead, it was a big reverse. Very Republican districts stayed very Republican, the guy from the Nation magazine explained today.
The Dem labor protests really didn’t move the border that much.
And there’s no way to tell if they won’t be in for another 2010 nasty shock in 2012.
When rage is afoot over the economy and jobs, you’re for the fool’s hall of fame to think it can be used just because all GOP presidential hopefuls are defined in the narrow dark spaces between the categories of “odious reptile,” “white power Christian mullah” and “weird numskull.”
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions”, which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled”. In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space – by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers …
Whether households wanted to acknowledge overcrowding or not in 2010 census was immaterial The census-takers worked it out.
(At least here we did.)
From my standpoint as an enumerator in downtown Pasadena, overcrowding was obvious. And very frequently it took the form of big old houses, abodes which looked fine on the tree-lined streets off Colorado Street, but which hid a practice of cutting the interior rooms into stealth apartments.
You walked into these once fine homes and you were in the equivalent of a flop house with single bedrooms and large closets employed as rentals. Conditions ranged from poor to plain abominable.
In these, the kitchen and bathrooms were all common use. And these modern flophouses — while not in the mansion district near the Rose Bowl — were right beside the upscale condos inhabited by the lowers in the upper class. Grinding poverty was in spitting distance of wealth, made easy to overlook by silence, neatly cut lawns and painted exteriors.
Ehrenreich discusses one family on food assistance, even that made inhospitable by requirements, put in place to drive people away under the assumption that those who need the assistance are probably parasites.
“[They] discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting,” writes Ehrenreich. “In addition, [one family member] had to drive 35 miles a day to attend ‘job readiness; classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were ‘frankly a joke'”.
The entire piece is here. Read.
A few months after I moved to California I met Barbara Ehrenreich at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Nice lady. I was so in awe she probably thought I was a stalker.
Krugman, in one of today’s later blog posts at the NY Times:
And now it turns out that what really terrifies the markets, let alone the suffering unemployed, is the prospect of a second Great Depression — a prospect that has become much more likely thanks to the utter wrongness of elite policy priorities.
Great work, guys.
As an aside, with regards to eating squirrel or raccoon meat, there are good reasons why we got away from it.
It’s called — zoonoses.
Many decades ago, trichinosis was a problem in Pennsylvania because of the local predilection for eating their own pork sausage. Modern hog farming, while causing other problems, put an end to it.
On the other hand, raccoons can carry the enzootic disease, rabies. And the incidence of rabies appears thankfully rare in Michigan.
The state of Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources happily reports:
Rabies in wildlife (raccoons) has been successfully controlled in some parts of the United States through the use of oral rabies vaccination programs. In these programs packets of vaccine are distributed for consumption by these terrestrial rabies vector species.
So eat raccoon if you must. But be careful out there and encourage and reward diligence in your local bushmeat butcher.