Web Letters: The Growing Clout of the Nouveau Poor

Ehrenreich is dead on. And a "right to life" program for the living, breathing poor and middle class? Exactly! And, as for the "old rich" who have no more cake to eat, let them eat bread!

Janice Wendel

Bailey, CO

I have always enjoyed Barbara Ehrenreich's work on this issue; I gave her Nickled and Dimed to my teenaged daughter to read when it came out. I also enjoy this analysis, but wonder at BE's optimism--what clout, exactly, does BE believe the nouveau poor will have? And who is giving them this clout? I am dubious that the powers-that-be care a fig about the nouveau poor; they will be left to sink or swim on their own, as we bail out rich idiots who couldn't run a business if their life depended on it.

Ann Amberly

Greenbelt, MD

Barbara Ehrenreich implirs that the right is hardhearted, but that is only half the story. The other half is about how hardhearted the left is. When gas was $4/gallon last summer, only leftists wanted it to go up to $9/gallon. How the poor would deal with that was never explained. Face it, the left these days is more interested in helping polar bears than in helping poor people.

As for Wall Street bailouts, which are welfare for the rich conservative, they have their mirror image in all the federal money given to academia, which is welfare for the rich liberal.

John Pepple

Mount Vernon, OH

The purpose of "free trade" is to drive down wages by having the workers of the world "compete" in a race to the bottom. Class warfare, from the top, has already started, and ordinary people are beginning to understand that they are being pre-emptively attacked by wealth and multinational corporations. In America, we are seeing the elimination of the "working" middle class, along with the development of a two-class system consisting of the very wealthy and the working poor. Since the upper class owns both of the major parties, more radical political activity will become more commonplace. It may become revolutionary. These people are really stupid! When they destroy the "working" middle class they are destroying the American market and their wealth. Major companies are going out of business because the disposable income of the middle class is disappearing. Their greed will destroy them!

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA

This will not happen for several reasons.

What we have seen with each economic downturn since 1980 is that the "newly poor" consider themselves entirely separate--certainly superior and more deserving--from the "already poor," not quite grasping that the majority of those who fell into poverty over the past thirty years were solidly middle-class people: those who "worked hard, played by all the rules," and ended up screwed anyway. Progressive media today no longer recognize the existence of anyone below "working poor," not grasping the fact that not everyone is employable, and that there aren't nearly enough jobs (especially family-supporting jobs) for all those who can work. When it comes to socioeconomic issues, even progressives have been Reaganized, and fail to see how (for example) President Clinton's welfare "reform" has kept the poor in poverty while serving a powerful role in suppressing wages, breaking unions, etc.

When (if) the economy improves, a chunk of the newly poor will find jobs, and another chunk will join the permanently impoverished, and the cycle will start all over again. No matter. Obama might throw a few new shingles on the roof, and we'll continue to ignore the fact that the foundation of this house, the US, is crumbling.

Diane H. Fabian

Fort Atkinson, WI

We can climb out of this mess if we stop being parochial and simply admit that we will all need a new paradigm of thinking about free markets, globalism, classes and economics for this century. We need the thinking of people like Sheila Bair and Paul; Krugman, (i.e., no BS, people).

We will need to avoid the false experts who simply blow smoke and want to continue on the same idiotic path that we have been on for fifteen years. Value-adding labor is the only real long-term solution, but we will have to borrow from the Chinese to do it, they have all our money.

When I was a kid during the thirties and forties, we had to borrow money to climb out of the massive bank failures and the great Dust Bowl, but we could borrow from one another. Now our debt is held by the Marxist Chinese, and I don't think they like us very much. Is there an irony of some sort here? These guys are not very kind, they executed 10,000 people last year, and their labor works at subhuman wages. I still hear the stories of the kids that toured the colleges after Tiananmen Square.

Maybe we can borrow some money from Gates and Buffit, ya think?

JAMES PINETTE

Caribou, ME