by Greg Hanscom, via Grist
In the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, longtime education writer Paul Tough has an insightful treatise on President Obama’s policies regarding poverty — the issue that, more than any other, holds American cities down, and one that we seem incapable of addressing in any rational, lasting way.
Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes, a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone, a trailblazing program that offers poor kids a web of services designed to carry them out of the ’hood and into the middle class. On the campaign trail in 2007, Obama promised to pour a few billion dollars a year into creating Children’s Zones in cities across the country. Here he is in a speech at the community center in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.:
We know this works. And if we know it works, there’s no reason this program should stop at the end of those blocks in Harlem. It’s time to change the odds for neighborhoods all across America.
The proposal, which Obama later dubbed Promise Neighborhoods, sent waves of excitement through American cities. In 2009, dozens of communities hastily compiled proposals to be one of the first 20 test cases.
At the time, I was writing for a magazine in Baltimore, a city that has suffered the whole stew of urban ills, from soaring dropout rates to drug abuse and crime. When Tough came to town to speak about his book, people packed a local synagogue to see him.
After Tough’s talk, representatives of community groups stood to ask for his advice on how to win the Promise Neighborhood funding and to make the impassioned case that their proposal outshone all the others. Tough, of course, had no say in who won the government money, but the tone that night said volumes about the desperation people felt in inner-city neighborhoods — and the hope they put in the new president. (I wrote a story about Baltimore’s Promise Neighborhood efforts here. The city was not among those selected for the pilot program.)
But as Tough writes in his Times Magazine piece, the billions that Obama promised have never materialized. Instead, the program doled out just $40 million to a handful of cities in its first two years, while another $60 million will be distributed later this year. Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod told Tough that the administration had to practice “economic triage” to prevent a second Great Depression, and Promise Neighborhoods was one program that was left on the battlefield.
But the money isn’t the only thing that disappeared. Tough writes that the entire conversation seems to have vanished:
The big question — how do you help young people growing up in poverty to succeed? — was not too long ago a major focus of public debate in the United States. During the Johnson administration, the place to be for smart, ambitious young people in Washington was the Office of Economic Opportunity, the command center for the War on Poverty. In the 1990s, Washington once again saw a robust public discussion of poverty, much of it centered on the issue of welfare reform. But not today … As a political issue, especially during this presidential campaign season, poverty has receded almost to silence.
Obama has arguably done more for poor Americans than any other president, Tough says, but it’s largely been through traditional programs such as food stamps. While these moves may have helped stave off another Great Depression, Tough writes, Obama “is missing an important opportunity to change and elevate the national conversation on poverty.”
Why the silence? Tough surmises that with millions of Americans on the economic ropes, Obama is hesitant to single out the urban poor. Never mind that one in 10 American children live in households that make less than about $11,000 a year — what the government deems “deep poverty.” Any mention of helping poor people is essentially verboten in mixed company.
Of course this has everything to do with election-year politics. Obama once talked openly about fighting climate change, too, but now mentions it only rarely. Yet this particular pathology is not limited to politicians seeking re-election. Whether it is race or health care or climate change, Americans seem to be tongue-tied when it comes to our most pressing problems.
This summer, Grist has been running a series of videos called Slow Ride Stories, produced by Erik Fyfe and Albert Thrower, who are traveling the Northeast by motorcycle, talking to people about extreme weather and climate change. What strikes you about these videos is not the different opinions about global warming, but the fact that, almost without exception, people squirm when Fyfe and Thrower raise the subject.
Connecticut farmer Art Talmadge put it this way:
We know what we’re dealing with — that the climate is changing — but we don’t really talk about it as climate change … When I talk to other guys that are growing, it’ll just be, “Man, it was hot,” or “Man, it was cold,” … but that’s the end of the conversation and nobody ever talks about why … maybe because most of the people I know are so involved in right now — “What have I got to get done today?”
With climate change, as with poverty, the problem is clear, the solutions are at hand — and yet we are either too preoccupied with day-to-day survival, or just too damned polite, to talk about it. On both issues, we’ve essentially forfeited the whole conversation to the wacko fringe — climate deniers and people like Newt Gingrich, who suggested in January that inner-city kids be put to work as janitors.
Many of us hoped that Obama would bring a voice of reason to these discussions in Washington, but like the rest of us, he’s apparently been too focused on putting out fires to think much about innovative, long-term solutions. (I’ve written more about Obama’s record on urban policy here.)
Tough said it well in an interview about his new article:
Working on this story, I thought a lot about that Rahm Emanuel quote from the early days of the administration: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” There were a lot of Democrats thinking that way right after the inauguration — that this was a great opportunity, and that the crisis would let them do a lot of the stuff they’d always wanted to do. But in fact, inheriting a crisis like that is no fun at all. You spend all your time staving off terrible disasters and spending money on programs that by definition don’t have a lot of long-term impact. One thing I took away from this piece was that for a president, this kind of financial crisis really doesn’t have a silver lining.
Of course, we weren’t making a whole lot of progress before the economy went kaplooey, either. But then, that’s probably not something I should bring up in polite company.
Or maybe it’s time that more of us force the issue and demand more of our political leaders, who ought to be looking out for our long-term well-being. Until we find a way to talk about these problems, we’ll be hard-pressed to solve them.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Please, please leave Washington or Seattle or whatever big northern city you’re writing from and take a road trip to the midwest, or west or south. Stop in at the local McDonalds to eat and listen in to the conversations. I don’t care if you just get a glass of water to drink, but sit down and do what most of the U.S. does every day. Watch FOX news damn near every waking hour not spent working and have your mind sucked out into oblivion. Most every adult and child in the country are fed a steady diet of George Orwellian bull that’ll have them crawling in the gutters and licking the boots of the wealthy who are funding the Republican and climate change denial machines.
A recent article in the local paper about striking janitors who were demanding $10 and hour instead of $8 was met with a storm of local opinion calling them ungrateful, lazy complainers who didn’t deserve the job. Despite that the janitors were asking for more hours and that most worked two or three jobs and were still below the poverty level. I wanted to write in and ask “Are there no work houses?” for these people but it would have been met with agreement.
Stop your thinking that our politicians can change this without first changing who we’ve become.
Viewership of Fox News averages about 1 million, a bit higher during prime time.
Rupert Murdoch will get a special place in the Rogues (I can think of more apt, but less polite terms)Gallery of those who drove humanity over the cliff.
1 million watch Fox? Add listenership (audience size) to Alex Jones (just heard in car recently – shudder), Limbaugh, Dr. Laura…let’s see:
http://www.talkers.com/top-talk-radio-audiences/
try almost 15 million for Rush alone…you can’t add all those number
up, without subtracting overlap, but clearly well over 15M, no doubt into the tens of millions, Brain-Orwellianized…we ain’t talkin’ just 1 million total here.. Andy makes a good point: unless we can get 10s of millions of ordinary Americans to open eyes, change from politicians ain’t coming (in fact, reduction of the rate of worsening might not come, unless we do it]
#2 – wish the article pointed out that Rural poverty is also under-discussed. We progressives have to embrace that, otherwise the race-baiting rightwingers will use a wedege between the (often) white rural poor and the urban poor..
#3 wish I had your writing/oratory skills and your book to help with those is apotentially very powerful tool in hands of progressives. That’s not the *only* think the rightwingers have though..they also have the fact that their audience *wants* to reach the conclusions they do, so even horrible oratory gets applause since so many like the “free” market answers…we need to make it cool to have our answers. Would be great to have posts on those issues. Recent decade focus on phrases and ideas like The Commons (not just “government”) or how about “Our Common Natural Heritage”? etc..
“With climate change, as with poverty, the problem is clear, the solutions are at hand . . . ” A big part of the problem is that the solutions are not right at hand. This should be obvious, since the problems have been with us for so long. Until we acknowledge that reality we won’t understand the problems (climate and poverty, as well as many others); this blocks our ability to address them.
I think the solutions have been available, but there hasn’t been the will to implement them. And why would there be, since it would harm the vested interests that control our society? It wouldn’t help the rich and powerful to fix climate change or poverty – it would help the poor, who are largely powerless.
As is, with the increasing rate of climate change (not the loss of ice in the Arctic and likely near future effects on agriculture) more and more people stand to be plunged into the same battle of survival already experienced by the poorest – that of merely finding food to stay alive.
Any time in the last forty years, and maybe, just maybe, in the next five or ten, humanity could have saved itself, by acting together and investing trillions in combating this and all the other ecological disasters. However, the assassins of humanity, the hyper-rich, hyper-greedy, hyper-aggressive capitalist elite, refused to allow it to happen. And they rule us, absolutely, yet.
The physical, technical, solutions to climate change caused by the extra heat trapped in a process we call “global warming” are easily at hand. They can be summed up in one phrase: “Cut greenhouse pollution to zero as quickly as is humanly possible.”
What is not “at hand” is the political leadership to organize and make real in the world that solution. The problem is not that the individuals do not exist, but that the weight of traditional approaches and inertia dampens momentum the spirit of change like a sour rag thrown over a torch.
Poor People First may be one of the most important polices addressing climate change considering the design philosophy:
Intense integration with natural capital where human capital is the most important component.
Indeed fj. A hundred watts to a third world person is more valuable that 2kW to most westerners. Make that green X a billion and you got some real $$$ to spur job growth, pollution reduction, education, health, national security. (theirs and ours), etc. Compliments of the sun and science. In short a path out out of the abyss.
We must all become ‘Poor People’-poor but alive. The rich most particularly. Working for their supper will be character forming.
What an opportunity!! Global mitigation success has to begin in the US. Extreme weather has caught the attention of the local/selfish/consumption orientated American and there should be as clear a contrast between the oil bought GOP and the Dems on what should be by far the most important issue in an election year given the scale of death and damage predicted.
But no, and it’s not a conspiracy. Oil money flows to Dems too; Dems can be just as dumb as GOP; it is the economy stupid!: in our particular consumer based socio-economy what gov’t does is very important to the always insecure.
And there is “the process by which individuals collectively distance themselves from information because of norms of emotion, conversation, and attention and by which they use an existing cultural repertoire of strategies in the process” so that this touchy subject never has to be taken seriously.
But still an opportunity. Maybe if the hurricane really slams Florida somebody will make the point about how a couple of hanging chads (and politically captured legal systems) cost us REAL ACTION against extreme weather at the CRUCIAL millenial opportunity.
The problems of global warming and poverty — both manmade problems — are clear. As is what we can and ought to do about them. Clear to scientists and all of us who think more or less reasonably.
Our voices are drowned in the thundering voice of money.
The enormous imbalance of today cannot survive, and at some point humankind will wake up from a bad dream.
Unfortunately global warming is a planetary process now — it will not wait for us to wake up.
Anyone interested in why people choose to ignore climate change must watch George Marshall’s talk on the subject:
http://climatedenial.org/2011/01/10/the-ingenious-ways-we-avoid-believing-in-climate-change-a-video-presentation/
Besides the individual denial, societies agree to make the subject outside our “norms of attention”.
I am absolutely gobsmacked at this reaction to global warming. We are quite selfish, programmed beings.
Disheartened that I have not seemed to be able to stir any of my family or peers to a level of awearness where they agree that it’s an alarming problem, much less are driven to act.
Still some evolving to occur… Hopefully it will be able to happen.
the planet and its warming will self correct, with or without our help. About 5 billion of us will be wiped out in the process, but future generations will look back on our deceased billions with the same disinterested acceptance as we look on the victims of the black death in the 14th century.
as to poverty, that’s the result of fossil fuels providing a 200 year illusion of wealth for everybody. Oil coal and gas are now getting too expensive to burn to provide that wealth, so humankind is returning to its pre-industrial lifestyle, which was grinding poverty for the majority and ostentatious wealth for the few.