Greg Kaufmann | The Nation

Photo via Greg Kaufmann.

An update appears below.

Nearly 200 students, parents, community members and union leaders rallied at Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting in Newark, Delaware, yesterday. On the agenda: first, demand that the nation’s largest private student loan lender meet directly with students to discuss their crushing debt burden; and second, introduce a shareholder resolution calling for disclosure of the corporation’s lobbying practices and membership in groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Outside of Sallie Mae’s corporate headquarters, the activists were met by “dozens of police, blockades and K-9 units,” according to participants. Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice–American Rights at Work, urged the crowd to confront Sallie Mae executives and board members “about their role in America’s student debt crisis.”

More than 38 million people now owe over $1.1 trillion in student debt; Sallie Mae owns approximately 15 percent of that debt, or $162.5 billion. Students owe an average of $27,000 when they graduate from college and many have a debt load several times greater than that amount. Nearly one in ten will default on their loans within two years.

Gupta noted that Sallie Mae “spent $16 million on federal lobbying from 2008 to 2012 and has more than sixty state lobbyists.” The corporation has lobbied at the federal level “to block student loan reform,” and at the state level “for reduced public investment in higher education, forcing more students to rely on private student loans.”

“They’re in the business of condemning students to a lifetime of debt, not making education a reality,” said Sara Fitouri, a law student at the University of Denver, who owes $145,000 in student debt.

“They show that when we privatize something that used to be in the public realm it can lead to horrible results,” said Sam Nelson, a junior at George Washington University who expects to graduate with approximately $50,000 in student loan debt.

Sallie Mae was indeed created as a government-sponsored enterprise in 1972, and transitioned to a fully privatized bank lender between 1997 and 2004. Organizers say that as the largest lender it now sets the trends and standards for the industry.

Gupta spoke out against profit margins that continue to increase for Sallie Mae as “student debt and student loan defaults escalate at an unsustainable pace.” She noted that the senior management team of five executives made more than $20 million combined in 2011; the former CEO—who just announced his retirement—was paid $35 million from 2007 to 2011.

Twenty of the activists entered Sallie Mae headquarters as legal proxies for shareholders with a right to vote. The groups they represented included: the United States Student Association, the Student Labor Action Project, Common Cause, the Responsible Endowment Coalition, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Jobs with Justice–American Rights at Work. Sallie Mae personnel attempted to restrict these individuals to a holding area but the activists successfully negotiated their way into the meeting.

Prior to introducing the shareholders resolution, Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, whose members’ pension plans have more than $1 trillion in assets and are long-term shareholders of Sallie Mae, said, “As Sallie Mae profits from billions of dollars of student loans, it has an obligation to students, educators and shareholders to be transparent about its lobbying efforts, including on student loan reform.”

The resolution asked that the board disclose in an annual report the corporation’s policies, procedures and payments for direct and indirect lobbying; as well as its membership and payments to any tax-exempt organization “that writes and endorses model legislation.” (See: ALEC.) Although there has yet to be a tally of the vote, organizers hope that they received the support of approximately 30 percent of the shareholders.

Following the vote, the students won a long-fought-for victory: newly named Sallie Mae CEO Jack Remondi agreed to their demand to meet next month. His predecessor had been steadfast in his refusal to allow the students a seat at the table.

“We are going to work hard and be ready to give him a run for his money,” said Nelson. “We’ll get a lot of no’s, but if we organize enough we might get a few yes’s. Ultimately though, what’s going to bring the pressure to [get] the change we need is what’s worked in the past for other issues—organizing, direct action and taking the fight to them in their own backyard.”

The promise of privatization of the student loan industry was that there would be greater efficiency and therefore more opportunities for students to pay for college and thrive. That is clearly not what Sallie Mae and the big banks have delivered to students like Sam, Sara and their families—not to mention the millions of young people who are priced out of college.

“After we win this campaign against Sallie Mae, we are not going to stop until student debt is a thing of the past,” said Nelson. “We fundamentally believe that education is a right and it should be free and accessible to all people who wish to pursue it. We know that free education has worked in the past, and that the government and companies are choosing not to do it—and to fight against it—for their own political or profit-motivated reasons.”

UPDATE: The resolution has received over 35 percent of shareholder votes. (Importantly, this figure understates support for the resolution, as there were a large number of abstentions counted as no votes.) Student organizers say that they are very pleased with this result.

Another Great Infographic From Demos: On Student Debt

Click to enlarge

Losing Hope in Detroit

Cross-posted from my new weekly column on the impact of sequestration at BillMoyers.com.

Jobs. They are supposedly the foremost concern of every Democrat and every Republican, and they are certainly the greatest concern for the 20 percent of American workers who are unemployed or underemployed, and the millions of people who have dropped out of the labor force altogether.

But you wouldn’t know it from Congress’s lack of urgency to confront and end $85 billion in across-the-board sequester cuts this year, despite the fact that these cuts are already reducing employment and shrinking gross domestic product, and straining state budgets as a loss of federal grants makes it more difficult to fund vital services.

Even the very programs designed to prepare the American workforce for high demand jobs—another congressional favorite, at least rhetorically—are being squeezed.

Since 1968, Focus: HOPE has served the people of Detroit and its suburbs through career training, neighborhood revitalization and fighting hunger. The training programs have placed nearly 12,000 at-risk men and women in family-supporting careers, including machining, advanced manufacturing, information technology and engineering.

But according to Steve Ragan, chief development and external relations officer at Focus: HOPE, just as employers are ready to hire again in the Detroit metropolitan area, sequestration is limiting the organization’s ability to help those looking for work.

“We’re often contracting with regional or local Michigan workforce agencies, and they are very conscious of the impact of sequestration on their budgets, so it’s really slowed down funding at a time that is critical,” Ragan told me. “We’ve been waiting to see people hiring for a long time—now we have employers interested in hiring our students, a waiting list of people who want job training, but we can’t fund the programs as we have in the past.”

Ragan said that the information technology programs are being hit particularly hard, and the “Earn and Learn” program—focusing on jobs for at-risk minority youth and adults who have been incarcerated or are chronically unemployed—is expected to be discontinued. To date, Focus: HOPE is 35 percent behind budgeted revenue for workforce development, or approximately $800,000. The average job training cost per student is $5,000—though it varies greatly from program to program—which means that the organization is down 160 funded spots through two-thirds of its fiscal year. Ragan said at the current pace 250 to 350 students will miss out on job training and “the impact on personal lives and families is devastating.”

“Our capacity used to be limited not by money but by getting the students who could commit to the academic rigor of our programs,” said Ragan. “Now we are capped by money and it’s often a month-to-month challenge.”

These cuts are a serious blow to a community that is struggling. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate of African-Americans in Michigan is 18.7 percent, about two and a half times that of whites (7.5 percent) as it has been for much of the last five years. The national black unemployment rate is 14 percent, and of the twenty-four states with large enough African-American populations to track with federal Current Population Survey data, Michigan has the highest African-American unemployment rate.

Most Focus: HOPE students come from the Detroit public school system and many have what Ragan described as “very serious foundational education problems.”

“In recent months, we had a student with a high school diploma who was reading at a first grade level,” said Ragan. “We see lots of students with third, fifth or sixth grade reading and math levels—so our first task is usually bringing them up to a seventh or eighth grade level so they are prepared to study in our career training programs.”

Ragan said Focus: HOPE takes great pride in “maintaining a job placement rate in at least the high seventies for our graduates—and committing to lifetime assistance with job placement.” The organization also provides scholarships for graduates who want to pursue a bachelor’s or associate’s degree.

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“We have partnerships with most of the universities in the area that have engineering and technology programs,” said Ragan.

Ragan emphasized that sequestration is the latest chapter in a “persistent reduction” of public investment in skilled job training that is “especially difficult in a struggling community like Detroit.”

“It’s been a huge mistake,” he said. “This is an investment in our economic recovery, but we are spreading reduced money among more people in need. We’ve become a victim of hyperbole and the political battle.”

Online Actions

Tell Congress: Support the Half in Ten Act of 2013—Make Poverty Reduction a Priority

Deutsche Bank: Keep the Biggs Family in Their Home

Tell Congress: Take a stand against hunger in the Farm Bill

Publix: Join the Fair Food Program

Disability Programs—Taxes Matter

12 Things You Can Do to Fight Poverty

Action

Palermo Workers Union March from Milwaukee to Mequon (Saturday, June 1, 8 am–8  pm, 35th Street Bridge, Milwaukee). A year ago the owners of Palermo’s Pizza, brothers Angelo and Giacomo Fallucca, fired nearly 100 workers who came together to improve working conditions at the factory and to form the Palermo Workers Union (PWU). For the past year, the PWU and community allies have worked to get the Falluccas to meet with the workers, but they have refused. Now the workers will try to meet the Fallucas at their doorstep. For more information, click here.

Other Events

A Bold Approach to the Jobs Emergency (Tuesday, June 4, 8:30am–4 pm, 20 F Street NW Conference Center, Washington, DC.) We have a US jobs emergency. More than 11 million Americans are still out of work, and the austerity push is only making matters worse. States have been forced to implement deep cuts to emergency unemployment benefits even though almost 40 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six months. This conference features great panels—with great people—on how to create good jobs and raise labor standards. Among the participants: Dean Baker, Maya Wiley, Ellen Bravo, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Dorian Warren, Annette Bernhardt, Ai-Jen Poo, Gar Alperovitz, Joseph Geevarghese, Madeline Janis and Deepak Bhargava. Presented by the Roosevelt Institute. Register here.

2013 Mississippi on the Potomac Reception (Tuesday, June 4, 6:30 pm–8:30 pm, AFL-CIO, 815 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC.) The event marks the tenth anniversary of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a not-for-profit public interest legal organization that works against the odds to provide legal assistance to some of the most vulnerable and neglected communities in Mississippi, the poorest state in the country. For more information about the reception, contact Lauren Welford at 601-709-0859 or lwelford@mscenterforjustice.org, or click here to sponsor the event or purchase individual tickets.

Webinar: Why Community Colleges Should Care about Obamacare (Wednesday, June 19, 2–3:30 pm EDT.) “Obamacare” will expand health coverage to millions of Americans, including students. New forms of coverage are already available to many students, and millions more will be eligible for free or affordable health coverage starting in 2014. Please join the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) for a webinar and conversation with Enroll America and Young Invincibles, two leading organizations raising awareness about the potential impact of Obamacare on community college students across the country. Register here.

Audio Conference: Where You Live Matters—Addressing Concentrated Poverty Neighborhoods (Tuesday, June 25, 3–4 pm EDT.) “Location, location, location” has implications beyond real estate. For example, location influences test scores and health outcomes for children. In his just-released book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality, Patrick Starkey, associate professor of sociology at New York University, explores and explains why mobility is often an American myth for children who grow up in concentrated poverty neighborhoods, and how place-based disadvantages can be passed on from one generation to the next. Starkey reveals that 72 percent of black families living in concentrated poverty neighborhoods in the 1970’s are still living in similar neighborhoods some forty years later.
Join Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, along with PRRAC, the Furman Center and the Urban Institute for a national audio conference featuring a discussion with Patrick Starkey about his new research and potential solutions for an urban antipoverty agenda. RSVP here.

Building Adult Capabilities to Improve Child Outcomes: A Theory of Change (from Harvard Center on the Developing Child/Frontiers of Innovation)

Clips and other resources (compiled with James Cersonsky)

“Fighting Childhood Poverty,” American Pediatric Association Task Force on Childhood Poverty

“The Death and Life of Chicago,” Ben Austen

“Student Debt Is a Women’s Issue,” Sheila Bapat

“Group Calls Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Actions ‘Abusive Authority,’” Jacques Billeaud

“The Cost of Cutting SNAP,” Center for Hunger-Free Communities

“How do we solve poverty? Honor thy mother,” Mariana Chilton

“The case for food stamps,” Christopher D. Cook

“Disabled Are New Target for Charges of Cheating: NYT, NPR lead campaign to cut SSI,” Neil deMause

“Fast Food Workers Striking in Seattle,” Josh Eidelson

“Walmart Workers Launch First-Ever ‘Prolonged Strikes,’” Josh Eidelson

“pment (not kids),” Leslie T. Fenwick

“Ongoing joblessness: A national catastrophe for African American and Latino workers,” Mary Gable

“Ark. Families Fight Anti-Rural Bias—Through Action,” Lavina Grandon

“Homeowners protest banks they say are illegally stealing their homes,” Melissa Harris-Perry [VIDEO]

“Why won’t Publix join effort to help Florida’s farmworkers?” Lani Havens

“Poverty as a Childhood Disease,” Perri Klass, M.D.

“Disability, Social Security, and the missing context,” Trudy Lieberman

“,” Ylan Mui

“OSHA files eight violations against Palermo’s pizza firm,” Georgia Pabst

“Treating the disease of child poverty,” Susan Popkin

“The sequester, poverty and politics,” Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane [AUDIO]

“When Black Kids Want to Learn and the World Tells Them ‘No,’” Mychal Denzel Smith

“The California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program,” Aleta Sprague

“From Chicago to LA, Students Mass for Racial Justice,” StudentNation

“Good News and Serious Challenges in Brookings Report on Suburban Poverty,” Philip Tegeler

“What do current federal funding levels in the wake of sequestration mean for state budgets?” Rebecca Thiess

“Suburban poverty: let’s keep talking about it,” Margery Turner

“Good Consumers, Bad Citizens,” Michael Winship

Studies/Briefs (summaries written by James Cersonsky)

“The Facts on Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income for Workers with Disabilities,” Shawn Fremstad and Rebecca Vallas, Center for American Progress. Nearly one of every six working-age Americans, or 29.5 million people, has a disability. Some 12 million of this population receives Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income. This report breaks down the benefits of these programs and the issues that people with disabilities face in receiving them. For nonelderly adults, for example, nearly half of beneficiaries take in at least 90 percent of their income from Disability Insurance; for those receiving Supplemental Security, the average benefit is $525 per month, and most have no other source of income. To receive these benefits, however, people face a variety of barriers—which are higher in the US than almost all other countries in the OECD, and worsened by funding shortfalls for both programs. For example, workers need medical evidence from a licensed doctor or medical specialist, must wait five months before they can qualify and must have worked at least a quarter of their adult lifetime—and at least five of ten years before the onset of the disability. Between 2006 and 2008, only about 40 percent of applicants for Disability Insurance were approved. The report’s recommendations include increasing the allowed asset limit for Supplemental Security beneficiaries; reducing the share of earnings that those who return to work are required to put back into the system; simplifying work incentives for those receiving benefits; supporting benefits counseling; and strengthening administrative funding for the Social Security Administration so that benefits are processed faster.

“Bridging the Higher Education Divide,” key findings from the Century Foundation Report on Community Colleges. American community colleges enroll 11 million students, or 45 percent of the entire college population. This report reveals shocking figures on racial and class-based separation in college access and funding. Between 1982 and 2006, the share of community college students from the bottom two income quartiles grew, while the other two shrank, leaving a nearly 2 to 1 ratio of those in the lowest bracket to those in the highest. Between 1994 and 2006, the white share of community college students went from 73 to 58 percent, while the combined black and Latino share went from 21 to 33. These race-based figures partly reflect an increasingly diverse population—but relatively stable populations for what the report defines as “the most selective schools” suggest a more complicated story. Over the same period, the white population at these schools dropped only from 78 to 75 percent, while the black and Latino share squeaked from 11 to 12 percent. The most selective schools also have a whopping class bias: 70 percent of students come from the highest income quartile, fourteen times more than those from the lowest quartile. Funding disparities between community colleges—which require the most money per pupil, in part because students who attend them start the farthest behind—and other types of schools tell an even thornier story. Between 1999 and 2009, public research university budgets went up $4,000 per pupil; community college budgets went up only $1 per pupil. How to begin remedying these issues? The report proposes a slate of policies, including: adequate funding floors for community college students based on per pupil costs; tying higher education funding to students with the greatest needs; creating hybrid two- and four-year institutions; and requiring selective four-year colleges to accept more transfer students from community colleges.

“Ongoing Joblessness in Mississippi,” Mary Gable, Economic Policy Institute. As part of a series of briefs on racial disparities in unemployment in different states, this report utilizes Bureau of Labor Statistics data to depict the recession’s uneven toll on blacks and whites in Mississippi, the poorest state per capita. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Mississippi’s unemployment rate was 8.7, compared to a 7.8 nationally. For the state’s black population, unemployment was more than double that of whites—14.3 and 5.4 percent, respectively. The disparity reached its high point in the first quarter of 2010, when the black rate (19.8 percent) was more than triple the white rate (5.9 percent).

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children.

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million (program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty).

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half.

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Percentage of individuals and family members in poverty who either worked or lived with a working family member, 2011: 57 percent.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled, or working households: over 90 percent.

Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,065,794.

Annual cost of child poverty nationwide: $550 billion.

Federal expenditures on home ownership mortgage deductions, 2012: $131 billion.

Federal funding for low-income housing assistance programs, 2012: less than $50 billion.

Quote of the Week

“Toxic stress is the heavy hand of early poverty, scripting a child’s life not in the Horatio Alger scenario of determination and drive, but in the patterns of disappointment and deprivation that shape a life of limitations.”
      —Perri Klass, MD, from “Poverty as a Childhood Disease”

James Cersonsky wrote the “Studies/Briefs” and co-wrote the “Clips and other resources” sections in this blog.

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company and AlterNet. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

(Photo: Press Association via AP Images)

This year, I’ve been focused on how anti-poverty activists can move from a defensive battle defined by trying to save what needs to be saved during these budget debates, to an offensive one, laying out a vision that inspires ongoing, unified action and builds a vibrant movement that connects with people in their communities.

I offered one modest proposal for an “anti-poverty contract”—five issues that impact both low-income and middle class people—around which activists and groups could organize. The Western Center on Law & Poverty and a handful of other national and local groups are trying to build an effort around that idea.

However, when you consider the scale of the problems we face—and what inspires people to take action—clearly much, much more is needed. As I wrote previously, to build a new anti-poverty movement will require the kind of organizing and actions that are as creative, visible and gripping as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Enter Stephen Lerner.

Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers and other low-wage workers into unions. These efforts resulted in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days and other improvements on the job. The architect of the historic Justice for Janitors campaign, he is currently working with unions and community groups across the country to break Wall Street’s anti-democratic grip on our politics and our economy.

Lerner lays out a powerful case about the intersection between poverty and Wall Street accountability—and how a Wall Street accountability movement can transform an economy that offers so few pathways out of poverty, and so many ways to keep people impoverished.

Here is our conversation:

Greg Kaufmann: Why is the Wall Street accountability movement now the focus of your work, and what is the potential you see there?

Stephen Lerner: One of the challenges is that there are so many things wrong right now—that you can be involved in any of a thousand causes. The problem is if they are disconnected it doesn’t add up to anything. So, people who are opposed to poverty have a dozen different things they’d like to move on the Hill, none of which are likely to pass at this time.

So the focus on Wall Street is: How do you connect all of these different battles? And, in fact, are there core things in common that drive them together?

If you look at some of the biggest issues of the day—whether it’s the loss of wealth in communities of color, the housing crisis, the student debt crisis, local and state governments cutting jobs and services because of debt—you can connect all of these issues to the original economic crisis of 2008, and the growing and continued dominance of the Wall Street big banks.

The majority of people in this country are either impacted by student debt, the ongoing housing crisis or the crisis of the public sector. And you can trace so much of it to Wall Street. This means instead of having twenty separate campaigns, you can have one campaign, that says how do we rebalance and reorganize the economy so that it benefits everybody—not just a teeny elite at the top.

How does the effort to address these three issues intersect with the fight against poverty in particular?

Let’s start with housing. In this country, for many workers and people of color, wealth isn’t in the stock market, or the Cayman Islands—it’s in a home. And the banks first preyed on folks through subprime loans pre-crisis, making enormous profits while putting people in danger. Then when the bubble burst, millions of people lost their homes, and those who didn’t have had outrageous payments because the subprime loans exploded. Now you still have 13 million families that are underwater—owing more on their loans than their homes are worth.

In Latino communities, 66 percent of their wealth was lost, half as a result of housing. In the African-American community, it was 53 percent. Fifty years of the gains of the civil rights movement and the expansion of the economy were wiped out overnight, pushing millions into poverty. If you add to that the people who are unemployed as a result of the crashed economy—we just have this strange thing that happened: the banks created a disaster, and economists and politicians said, “That’s terrible for the economy, let’s give them trillions.” And then the folks who were actually hit the hardest were forced into poverty.

On student debt: funding to public education was dramatically cut, which obviously hurts poor people and workers the most. As it was cut, people had to take out loans. So 37 million people have now run up a trillion dollars in student debt. It’s a burden no matter what, but if you come from a family that doesn’t have means, you now graduate from school with a crushing debt burden, and then there aren’t jobs available. And there’s a vicious cycle: you cut the budget of public universities, to give tax breaks to banks and big companies, who respond by creating toxic loan packages for students that they make a profit on. And because public funding of universities has been cut—the schools need to borrow more money in order to operate and build, so the banks get a piece of that action, too. And now university endowments are investing in Sallie Mae—the largest private student loan lender—so students have to take out loans to go to school, and the university endowment profits off those loans.

There are much better ways to fund education—like by [publicly] funding education so people can actually afford it, instead of creating these twenty layers that let Wall Street suck money out at every step.

So individuals and families are getting crushed by housing and education debt, and then you say public debt completes a sort of perfect storm?

That’s right, what we call predatory public loans. So three things have happened: Wall Street has taken advantage of the desperation of cities and municipalities since the crisis; the deals are so complex that public entities don’t know what they are getting into; and third is that Wall Street gets its money at a subsidized, Too Big to Fail rate, and in the case of the discount window, almost for free. Banks get money at .075 percent interest from the Federal Reserve, and they then create all sorts of ways to make more and more money off the spread, from the public sector.

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Take interest rate swaps, for example. On the surface it sounds like not a bad idea—a bank says they will protect a city from a fluctuating interest rate by locking it in at, say, 4 percent. If it goes higher, they eat it. And if it goes lower, they make money. But they then add so many different formulas and traps, that all of a sudden when the whole thing blew up during the crisis and a city is hemorrhaging money, and they want to get out of it, it turns out that they have an exit fee that’s extraordinary and they can’t afford it. In Detroit, the city had to pay around $470 million on a series of bond and interrelated swap deals gone bad at the same time they were laying off police and firemen. So then you end up in fights like, “Do we help the poor, or do we take workers that are middle class and cut their wages so they’ll be poor?”

Describe what this movement looks like—what are some of the asks and how do you see it potentially playing out?

There are multiple levels of how Wall Street is impoverishing the country, and so different people can engage in different ways.

On housing, in Atlanta, Minneapolis, all over California—one piece is the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes. This involves physical encampments, blockading the police and saying you’re not going to take my home, or my neighbor’s home. It’s incredibly vibrant, street-level resistance—and it’s often successful. And as folks are successful, it grows. This is all nonviolent, and involves people who are willing to go to jail.

If you take it up a level, there is a simple policy demand, which is that banks should reduce principal on homes to current market value. That means if you’re paying a $300,000 mortgage on a home that’s worth $200,000, the bank should rewrite it to that value. If we did that, it would save $700 billion to $1 trillion—that’s how much people are underwater—and generate $101 billion in economic activity, create 1.5 million jobs, and the average underwater homeowner would save $7,700 a year.

There are cities all over the country that are now exploring using eminent domain to seize these underwater mortgages and rewrite them with principal reductions. For years eminent domain was the tool to take advantage of poor people—tear up a neighborhood, build a highway, build a stadium and tell people they will be paid what their homes are worth on the open market. They said it was for the public good, even as it devastated once stable neighborhoods. We’re saying let’s flip that on it’s head—for the public good, let’s seize these mortgages and rewrite them at current market value so people can stay in their homes.

On student debt, there is a gamut of activity ranging from student activism on campuses, to state and local legislation, to sit-ins at the Sallie Mae shareholders meeting, to challenging the Education Department on why they have as contractors like Sallie Mae that are profiting off this disaster. The movement includes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brilliant bill to give students loans at the same rate we give to banks. Why should banks get money cheap and student loans be more expensive? And it includes people on their college campuses—a movement around Big Banks Off Campus—because the banks shouldn’t be allowed to come on campus and sell their credit cards and figure out new ways to indebt students.

Finally, on public debt, people are fighting back. In the case of Oregon, SEIU Local 503 calculated that the state lost $110 million because of the LIBOR manipulations. So here’s what happens: the SEIU public sector union goes in to negotiate with the state representing public employees, and the state says we want to cut all of these services for poor people. And the workers themselves are often poor—homecare workers who haven’t had a raise in six years. The state says there is no money. And how do you argue if there’s no money? Except that the money was stolen! And so the movement is changing the debate. This is not about: Are public employees overpaid? Are their too many benefits for poor people? Should we have pre-K or not? There are incredible sums of money out there, but we’ve devised a system that drains it from the bottom to the top. Why don’t we cut out the middleman? Like let’s have an infrastructure bank and loan the money at cost. Let’s figure out a way so banks can’t make more than a certain amount of money on the spread. And I know that gives the free-market people heart attacks, because this is intervening in the market, but there is no market. Because five banks control it, and where they get their money is from taxpayers. It’s our money.

To what extent are these three threads—on student debt, housing debt and public debt—coalescing into a movement so they aren’t the kind of independent, divided struggles that you suggest hold us back from big victories?

As the campaigns develop, the overlap happens more and more. For example, people are seeing the relationship between housing debt and student debt—needing to take out student loans because your family’s house isn’t worth anything anymore so you can’t help finance an education through a second mortgage like you might have in the past. At the Wells Fargo meeting at Salt Lake City, folks campaigning about student debt showed up, and so did people campaigning on housing, and so did people about the environment. So, on an organic level on the street, people are seeing it more and more.

After I covered the actions at the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting, a progressive friend and writer told me, “The activists seem to think banks can’t ignore their message, that being heard is equivalent to making change.” How do you think a movement like this actually could make principal reduction, for example, a reality?

First, the enemy of change is the notion that if you are not winning at that moment then you are losing. These things never have an even flow. It’s not like you start one day, you have steady escalation—they go up and down. In Taylor Branch’s book At Canaan’s Edge, you read these transcripts of FBI wiretaps on civil rights leaders and it’s them saying, “We’re losing”… or “so and so was killed”… or “we have in-fighting, how will we win?” But when we look back at that period now, we see that the civil rights bill was going to pass, it was all going to happen. I think when you are in the middle of the battle, under siege, you can’t see the forest for the trees.

But your friend’s critique is fair in that we’ve been screaming about the banks for years, and they are more powerful than ever—the top six banks now control 73 percent of the total assets in the US banking sector. However, we’ve started to identify some levers that we think begin to level the playing field. Eminent domain is one example—if you’re not willing to reduce principal, then we’ll use the power of the city to force you to do it. On LIBOR, city after city is investigating whether they can sue to get their money back. Many are exploring, and some have passed, bills that say if banks don’t meet certain standards the cities won’t deal with them anymore. Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have all passed responsible banking ordinances recently.

Also, the banks’ greed and hubris is so great that [there are] new avenues to go after them. So if you look at the litigation that California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed: this is where the banks essentially did the same thing with credit card loans that they did with mortgages—they moved to litigation without accurate documentation to even show that people owed them money. We are seeing more opportunities for growing protest, more litigation and more public policy changes. You even now have Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter working together on a bill to break up the big banks.

Is there a role in this movement for people and organizations that are focused on the Hill?

Petitions can raise important issues and get people involved. Lobbying can be important—but I think what we need to do is connect all of this to an analysis of who the villains are and why the economy is unbalanced. This is not a problem of lack of policy—we have unlimited great policy ideas. This is not a problem of lack of money to fund anti-poverty programs. This is a problem of power. I think people need to accept that there is no real significant economic and political change as long as the finance sector is so dominant. The DC-centric stuff will be far more effective if there is something out there in the rest of the country brewing. If this is just an intellectual policy debate about who has the best idea and who has the best statistics, we’re doomed.

To win—to really make the kinds of structural changes you are talking about—does the public protest need to be as constant and visible, engaging and creative, as Occupy Wall Street?

Yes, we need to get to that. And there is an interesting myth about Occupy that somehow it just emerged out of nowhere. But many of the people who were engaged in it were part of other battles before Occupy Wall Street. The month before Occupy, community groups were doing rallies and sit-ins at banks all over the country. So you never know when things are going to take off. Why did the Vietnam protests take off when they did? Or the civil rights protests? You never know what triggers something to go from dedicated souls to a mass movement.

But your key point is right—the system is currently working for the banks and super-rich. And as long as they feel it’s working we won’t really achieve change. And so some combination of mass disruptive protest—nonviolent—of all sorts of local legislative activity; of a growing change in the narrative. Some mix and match of that has to put the kind of heat on them that makes them feel they have to negotiate over these issues—that they need, for example, to fix mortgages because the alternative is worse. We need to have a better system on student loans, because the alternative is worse. I think that’s really our challenge.

In a recent piece, you suggest that anger is insufficient to sustain a movement—that what keeps people going is love. Can you describe what you mean by that?

There are four things currently that are self-defeating for progressives and labor folks: one, the mantra of progressives is built on “we’re losing, there’s no hope, we’re getting clobbered.” That leads to the slogan of much of the progressive movement, which is “Let’s fight for small, incremental, not particularly important change now.” So what we largely talk about isn’t very inspiring. We talk about stopping cuts—stopping bad—not how we win good things.

The great movements—take the story of Exodus—they didn’t say, “Can the Egyptians whip us less often?” They said, “We’re leaving. We’re outta here. We’re gonna form a new country, a place where we can be free.” Gandhi, South Africa, the civil rights movement—all of these movements were based on this idea that there is something profoundly better that we can fight for. And I think for many of us in America we’ve lost that ability to say we’re engaged in this—not just because we care about principal reduction but because we believe in the richest country on earth we can transform society and redistribute wealth and power. So, we need to have a vision that’s inspiring and not be afraid to be called a little utopian.

Second, we need an analysis, a narrative, of who the bad guys are that are concentrating wealth and power. All of the organizing I was involved with—with the garment workers, the farmworkers and the janitors—they all had an analysis of who really had the power and could fix things, and I think we’ve forgotten how to do that.

Third, we need to think about the strategy and tactics that give us leverage, so this is not simply yelling and screaming. And fourth is about love—which is that people are involved both out of self-interest because they want to make their lives better; but also because they realize their life is better if they help make other lives better.

If you look at the great movements that’s what happens—some combination of vision, analysis, strategy and this deep, deep feeling that by supporting and sacrificing for others—in the labor movement we call it solidarity—you not only transform your own life, but you transform the lives of people around you and in doing that transform how society operates. That’s the roots of how we build what we have to build.

* * *

End “Too Big to Jail”: May 18–23, Washington, DC

If you think what Lerner has to say makes sense, here’s an immediate opportunity to get involved. Next week, families on the front lines of the foreclosure crisis are traveling from across the country to the nation’s capital to make their voices heard.

Their message is simple: five years into the financial crisis, Wall Street has still not been held accountable, and communities are still suffering. In fact, a new report from Alliance for a Just Society, the New Bottom Line and Home Defenders League shows that $192.6 billion in wealth was lost due to the foreclosure crisis in 2012, and this year another 13 million homes are at risk of foreclosure with $221 billion in wealth on the line. (See “Studies/Briefs” below for more information on this report.)

It’s long past time for the administration to prosecute those who violated the law and for the banks to repay individuals, families and communities that continue to suffer losses—beginning with reducing their mortgages to fair market value.

“We can’t have two systems of justice in this country: one for the rich and powerful, where Wall Street criminals are actually rewarded with bailouts and huge bonuses, and another for the rest of us,” said Vivian Richardson, who will be in DC next week after successfully defending her home from foreclosure with the help of members of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “These Wall Street banksters stole many homes, and are still committing crimes. It is time for them to be held accountable.”

There will be home-defense and nonviolent, civil disobedience trainings on May 18–19 and a rally and march to the Department of Justice on Monday, May 20. The activists will attempt to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder and are prepared to take direct action if that doesn’t happen—blocking entrances, setting up an Occupy-style encampment, getting arrested and staying in jail.

To participate in the Week of Action, you can RSVP here. To take part in the direct action on May 20, fill out this form.

Online Actions

Wendy’s: Support a fair deal for farmworkers

Tell the Senate to give students the same low interest rates the big banks get

Stand with Milwaukee’s low-wage workers

Young and Unemployed: Tell Bernie Sanders Your Story

End Sequestration Cuts

Tell Congress: Protect Federal Nutrition Programs

Event

Democratizing Wealth and a Sustainable Future—A Conversation with Gar Alperovitz (Wednesday, May 22, 12:15 pm–1:15 pm, New America Foundation, 1899 L Street NW Suite 400, Washington, DC). In his new book, Gar Alperovitz presents a case for democratizing wealth as a foundation for a new and sustainable economy. He offers specific policy ideas for how we might start with a transformation of the banking industry and health care sector. Join the New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program for a vibrant discussion, RSVP here.

DC Housing Authority and People with Disabilities

Jacqueline Young and Latheda Wilson both receive housing vouchers from the DC Housing Authority. Ms. Young’s apartment is too small for her to live with her child, and Ms. Wilson is in an apartment that she says is in substandard condition with mold- and insect-infestation.

Both women have hearing impairments and rely on American Sign Language to communicate—they have limited comprehension of written English. Unfortunately, they say, for years the DC Housing Authority failed to provide sign language interpreters at meetings where critical information regarding rules, regulations and requirements for the rental assistance program was provided, leaving the two women in their current predicaments.

A lawsuit was filed on their behalf by Relman, Dane & Colfax, which litigates civil rights cases in the areas of housing, lending, employment, public accommodations, education and police accountability, and the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. Deaf-REACH, a DC nonprofit advocacy organization, is also a plaintiff.

The complaint alleges that the Housing Authority engaged for years in a pattern of discrimination—promising but not providing interpreters, and canceling appointments due to a lack of interpreters or other effective means of communication.

“The law is very clear and well-established on this issue,” said attorney Megan Cacace of Relman, Dane & Colfax. “Entities like the DC Housing Authority must make their services and programs accessible to people with disabilities and provide sign language interpreters.”

Cacace said Young and Wilson were forced to sit through meetings or presentations without any way of understanding what was being said—or even were denied the opportunity to attend meetings at all—and that they were expected “to communicate through notes and gestures” despite repeated requests for interpreters.

“It’s appalling and unacceptable,” said Cacace.

Richard White, director of Public Affairs and Communications for the Housing Authority, wrote in an e-mail: “As a matter of policy, I’m not going to comment on active litigation. What I will tell you is that DCHA takes its obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act very seriously. We have policies and procedures in place to accommodate the needs of the disabled in all our operations. We will investigate the claims made and respond to the litigation, through our General Counsel office.”

I look forward to learning about the response and hope that it’s quick, thorough and just. This is the twenty-first century and our nation’s capital, after all. It’s bad enough that we are among the cities with the worst wealth inequality and highest child poverty rates in the country. Can we at least provide basic services for people with disabilities?

“Equality for people with disabilities is an important civil rights issue,” said Cacace. “People like Ms. Young and Ms. Wilson are entitled to, and deserve, equal treatment and respect. This lawsuit seeks to vindicate those rights.”

National Community Action Month

Community Action Agencies (CAAs) are nonprofit private and public organizations with their fingers on the pulse of poverty. They provide direct support for nearly 35 million of the 46.2 million people living in poverty in the United States today.

Each CAA is governed locally and offers programs and services designed to meet a community’s specific needs, including: emergency aid like food pantries and domestic violence counseling, education programs like Head Start and youth mentoring, daycare and job training programs, community economic development, services to military veterans, income management and housing assistance, healthcare clinics, WIC and more.

May is National Community Action Month, a public awareness campaign created by the Community Action Partnership in 1997 to highlight the agencies’ effectiveness in helping America’s low-income people and communities achieve economic security. The CAAs and the people they serve are currently getting hit by sequestration, budget cuts and rising hunger and unemployment, and will hold events to call attention to poverty and economic inequality, and to advocate for their programs as a way to help address these issues.

“While policymakers and hedge fund managers are trying to decide what to do with their Enron refrigerator magnets and their Merrill Lynch shot glasses, Community Action is approaching its fiftieth year of providing bona fide opportunities and economic security for millions of people and families,” said Don Mathis, president and CEO of the Community Action Partnership.

CAAs across the country are hosting poverty symposiums, town hall meetings and other events to raise awareness about poverty-related problems and solutions. Here are just a few of the events:

• Arizona Community Action Association and Community Action of Northeast Indiana are hosting screenings of A Place at the Table.

• TRI-CAP in Jasper, Indiana, is hosting a poverty simulation.

• North Hudson Community Action Corporation in Union City, New Jersey, is hosting a health fair with free dental, blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes screenings, along with nutrition and health information.

“Our network of more than 1,000 CAAs is focusing on the devastating effects that the severe income and wealth gaps are having on everyone in America, not just the poor,” said Mathis.

For more information, go to the National Community Action Month blog, the Partnership’s website, or follow @CAPartnership and #CommunityActionMonth.

Clips and other resources (compiled with James Cersonsky)

“Class Size & Funding Inequity in NY State & NY City,” Bruce Baker

“Fast Food Strikes Hitting Fifth City: Milwaukee,” Josh Eidelson

“In Wake of West, Texas Explosion, Safety Advocates Recommend Harsher Fines,” Mike Elk

“Mother’s Day Edition: Challenges Give Strength,” Equal Voice

“Unemployment From a Child’s Perspective,” Julia Isaacs

“Unions to Banks: Pay Up,” Sarah Jaffe

“The Link Between Mass Incarceration and Voter Turnout,” John Light

“Parents to Lawmakers: Protect Child Care, Social Services,” Michael Mello and Brad Wong

“Mending factory conditions after Bangladesh,” Harold Meyerson

“Welfare fraud investigations perpetuate fraudulent stereotypes,” Monica Peabody

“Lift the Millstone of Student Debt That’s Slowing the Economy,” Isaiah J. Poole

“The Facts on SNAP: SNAP Is Efficient,” Dottie Rosenbaum

“In D.C., parents miss work, lose jobs trying to get child-care subsidy,” Brigid Schulte

“Racism Remains Alive and Well,” Patricia Williams

“Leaning in With Child Care: A Discussion on Childcare Jobs and the Need for Quality, Affordable Care,” Workforce Strategies Initiative, Aspen Institute [VIDEO]

“Congress is Ready to Fight Over Deep Food Stamp Cuts,” George Zornick

Studies/Briefs (summaries written by James Cersonsky)

“Enhancing GED Instruction to Prepare Students for College and Careers,” Vanessa Martin and Joseph Broadus, MDRC. In many large cities, students face dropout/pushout rates upwards of 50 percent. Many who drop out pursue the GED, or General Educational Development credential, but too few pass the GED test, and even fewer are prepared to step into college or the workforce. This study assesses an initiative at LaGuardia Community College, the GED Bridge to Health and Business Program, which is designed to help students pass the GED while simultaneously preparing for college and careers. Students in the program receive intensive advising and spend more hours in class than typical GED students. In a randomized evaluation, MDRC finds encouraging results: compared with students who went through traditional GED prep, Bridge students were twice as likely to complete the semester of classes, more than twice as likely to pass the exam and more than three times as likely to enroll in a CUNY school.

“Wasted Wealth: How the Wall Street Crash Continues to Stall Economic Recovery and Deepen Racial Inequity in America,” Ben Henry, Jill Reese and Angel Torres, Alliance for a Just Society. The Great Recession took a racially uneven toll: whereas white median net worth fell by 16 percent between 2005 and 2009, net worth for Latinos dropped 66 percent and blacks 52 percent. As 2012 foreclosure data reveals, the foreclosure crisis has far from abated—particularly for people of color. Overall, foreclosures caused a $192.6 million aggregate drop in wealth in 2012—an average of $1,679 per household—and more than 13 million homes remain underwater and vulnerable to foreclosure. In zip codes with proportions of people of color above the national average (16 percent), the average lost wealth per household was $2,008, and in zip codes with majority people of color, the loss was $2,198. Why the ongoing crisis? While banks have received $8 trillion in federal bailouts and loans, the feds haven’t acted on principal reduction—which would save underwater homeowners an average of $7,710 and stimulate the economy to the tune of 1.5 million jobs. The report offers a slate of proposals for government and banks, including: ensuring that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prioritize keeping families in foreclosed homes through rental and buy-back programs; full legal accountability for Wall Street executive and bankers; legislation like the California Homeowner Bill of Rights that protects homeowners from abusive mortgage servicing; local foreclosure mediation programs; and public reporting from mortgage servicers on foreclosures, short sales and principal reductions by race and income.

“A Strategic Road-Map,” Academic Pediatric Association, Taskforce on Childhood Poverty. While there’s no vaccine to end child poverty, the APA says, there are clear strategies for combating its causes and effects. The APA’s road map focuses on four categories: raising children out of poverty through raising the minimum wage, increasing access to quality jobs and improving income and work supports such as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit; high-quality childcare and early childhood programs for low-income families; “place-based” initiatives, recognizing that poverty, crime, housing characteristics and lack of employment opportunities can all have negative impacts on poor children’s health and well-being; and a White House Conference on Children and Youth to elevate children’s needs and build public support for investments.

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children.

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million (program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty).

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half.

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Percentage of individuals and family members in poverty who either worked or lived with a working family member, 2011: 57 percent.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled, or working households: over 90 percent.

Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,065,794.

Annual cost of child poverty nationwide: $550 billion.

Federal expenditures on home ownership mortgage deductions, 2012: $131 billion.

Federal funding for low-income housing assistance programs, 2012: less than $50 billion.

Quote of the Week

“There is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. Money has to serve, not to rule.”
            —Pope Francis

James Cersonsky wrote the “Studies/Briefs” and co-wrote the “Clips and other resources” sections in this blog.

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

Workers march in front of a Miami-Dade courthouse under construction to protest stolen pay. (AP Photo/J. Pat Carter)

If the Florida House Republicans have their way, here is what the state’s workers would stand to lose: paid sick leave, a living wage, wage theft protections and equal opportunity benefits (for same sex couples, for example).

That’s because an assortment of bills—including one introduced by House Majority Leader Stephen Precourt that would nullify nearly all of these pro-worker policies—would pre-empt local ordinances and leave it up to the state to implement (or not) any of these measures. Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm writes that these bills were “ghost written by special-interest lobbyists.”

It would mean the end of the fourteen-year-old Miami-Dade County living wage ordinance. A new anti-wage theft law that passed just last month in Alachua County would be nixed. The paid sick leave initiative that 52,000 Orange County residents got onto the ballot for 2014—gone.

“What makes it all even more ridiculous is that we have no state-level Department of Labor,” said Jeanette Smith, director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice (SFIWJ). “So even if the legislature did pass any worker protection laws—which they aren’t—who is going to enforce them? All they are doing is lessening the rights that are currently there for workers.”

The timing of this smackdown on working Floridians couldn’t be worse. A new report from the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University indicates that more than 23 percent of the state’s residents live in poverty, with children 1.5 times more likely than adults to live below the poverty line of approximately $23,000 for a family of four.

How this all plays out in the legislature is still up in the air and might be determined today—the last day of the session. Bill authors have carved out exceptions to the wage theft pre-emption for Miami-Dade (which has recovered $600,000 in lost pay since 2010) and Broward counties, but not for Alachua County. This is especially strange since the companion bill in the Senate was introduced by freshman Senator Rob Bradley, who represents Alachua. Smith said that the Alachua County Commissioners and their staff have spoken out against the pre-emption—even in Senate hearings—but Bradley hasn’t backed down.

“I’m sure he’s representing someone in Alachua but it’s apparently not the county or the workers,” said Smith.

If Bradley’s bill clears the Senate, the pre-emption of local wage theft laws is a done deal—and that’s a big deal, because prior to the county ordinances, workers effectively had no place to turn for help.

“If the bill passes, we have to flood the small claims court system which would now be responsible for addressing this, and let them see the depth of the wage theft problem,” said Smith.

Majority Leader Precourt’s anti-worker bill was made a tad (but just a tad) less anti-worker in the Senate—with local ordinances for a living wage, paid sick leave and equal opportunity benefits permitted for government employees and contractors (tough luck for all other workers). Initially, Precourt insisted that the House wouldn’t pass the bill if it included the exceptions for these workers. According to Smith, the hope was that Precourt’s determination to keep the state from joining the twenty-first century might be Floridian workers’ best hope, as a number of Senate Republicans would be reluctant to follow his totally regressive path.

But late yesterday, the House passed the Senate’s version of the bill. That means, as of today, there is no possibility of local pro-worker laws for wages, paid leave and equal benefits except for government employees and contractors.

“This is a huge undermining of local control,” said Smith. “The House wanted to make it so local governments couldn’t even set standards for their own [employees and contractors], but at least we beat that. Now local governments just can’t say anything regarding the private companies in their areas—which is bad enough.”

The verdict is still out on the legislation pre-empting local wage theft laws. There is hope that the bill might be dead, but advocates won’t know for sure until the session ends today.

“No matter which way this goes, we need to band together and recognize that this is all about a voting process, and getting people in there who represent our interests,” said Smith. “Too many people still don’t recognize that, and they don’t know until the deed is done what’s been taken away from us.”

California’s Homeless Bill of Rights

Last week the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee passed AB 5, The Homeless Bill of Rights, by a vote of 7 to 2. At a time when homelessness is increasingly criminalized, this is an important step towards helping people instead of punishing them for not having a home. Advocates overcame strong opposition to the bill, in part through a grassroots movement of homeless and poor people that mobilized hundreds of people to rally and lobby the Democratic members of the committee.

There are now approximately 160,000 men, women and children who experience homelessness in California on a daily basis, about 20 percent of the nation’s total homeless population. The state ranks second worst in the number of homeless children, and third worst in the percentage of children who are homeless, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. A 2011 US Conference of Mayors report attributed the rise in homelessness across the nation—despite the recovering economy—primarily to unemployment and a lack of affordable housing, in that order.

Yet the response by political leaders in California and other states hasn’t been a sympathetic one—it’s largely been to prosecute those who are struggling.

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A report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty notes that criminalization of homelessness has taken many forms, including: enactment of laws that make it illegal to sleep, sit or store personal belongings in public spaces of cities without sufficient shelter or affordable housing; selective enforcement against homeless people for violating seemingly neutral laws like loitering, jaywalking or open container ordinances; sweeps to drive homeless people out of areas—which often results in the destruction of their personal property, including medications and personal documents; punishing people for begging or panhandling; and restricting groups from sharing food with homeless people in public areas.

“What cities and counties are doing right now to respond to homelessness isn’t helping, it’s making the problem worse,” said Jessica Bartholow, legislative advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, another cosponsor of the legislation.

In contrast, some of the measures proposed in the Homeless Bill of Rights include the creation of hygiene centers with bathrooms and showers; allowing people to rest, sit or sleep in public spaces; access to counsel during civil prosecutions; and protecting people who offer food in public places. It would also instruct local governments to track laws and arrests that target homeless people and report them to the district attorney.

“This bill is really about basic justice,” said Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who authored the bill. “People who are homeless not only have to struggle with life on the street, [but] the indignity of being treated like criminals because they have nowhere to eat, sit or sleep except in public.”

Bartholow was particularly moved by testimony from homeless people from Los Angeles who were woken up and arrested at 6:02 am due to a law against sleeping in public past 6. Another disabled woman in a wheelchair had lived on the same street corner for many years and been arrested more than a hundred times.

“Not for committing a crime, not for blocking a street or sidewalk—just for sitting there in her wheelchair,” said Bartholow.

Bartholow said that too many homeless people also end up in jail because they can’t pay the citations they receive for sitting in a public space. “So they have to spend time behind bars, because they sat peaceably in a public space, because they have no private space to sit in,” she said.

The bill now goes to the Appropriations Committee, where costs will be considered for measures such as the hygiene centers, legal representation and reporting requirements of local jurisdictions. Bartholow said that advocates will look for ways to “ameliorate costs,” but that this bill is a critical step in changing how we address homelessness and poverty as a society.

“The greatest misconception about this bill is that it somehow makes things more dangerous by allowing people to rest in public places,” she said. “But the bill in no way protects malicious or antagonistic behavior, or blocking doorways or pathways. It protects people’s right to rest—which is a human need. People who don’t have a private space to do that need to be able to do that somewhere. And sometimes the only place available is a public space.”

You can follow the campaign to pass this bill here.

Child Care and No-Win Decisions

Guest post by Carol Burnett

In a recent article in The New Republic (“The Hell of American Day Care”), reporter Jonathan Cohn investigates what he describes as the “barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children.” Lax regulation leading to unsafe child care is indeed a critical issue that needs to be addressed; and so is the huge unmet need for affordable child care options for low-wage working parents.

Cohn acknowledges that the tragic example used as the frame for his article—a child care fatality—is relatively rare. But what is not at all rare—and what really gets to the root of the problem—is the heartbreaking, no-win choice the mother was faced with in trying to find child care that she could afford on her low wage.

Mothers across the country face this dilemma constantly. They too often work in jobs that don’t pay enough to meet a family’s basic needs. Or they want to work, or go to college for a shot at a better career, but can’t afford child care. Or the welfare work requirement forces them into low-wage jobs where they can’t afford child care.

Mothers with young children make up our nation’s poorest families. If they earn the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that’s roughly $15,080 per year (though minimum wage jobs rarely provide full-time work because employers restrict hours to avoid paying benefits).

Wider Opportunities for Women developed the Self-Sufficiency Standard to calculate the wage a worker would need to earn in order to afford a family’s basic needs, based on the family’s size and geographic location. The tool shows that parents need to earn far more than a minimum wage, and if the family includes a young child or infant, the wage required is significantly higher due to the high cost of child care.

Our nation does have a child care assistance program that is supposed to help low-income working parents afford child care—the federal Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) block grant to states. This program is hugely helpful for the families it serves. Unfortunately, it only serves about 18 percent of eligible children, which means that 82 percent of eligible children do not receive the subsidy. Eligibility requires a parent to be both working and low-income. Waiting lists are swelling in every stat­­­­­­e—millions of parents wait for the child care they need in order to continue working.

What makes our lack of commitment to providing affordable quality child care for all families even more frustrating is that we know what children need for successful outcomes later in life. In fact, we know more than ever before about the kind of environment, interactions and experiences children need to support their cognitive, physical, social and emotional development.

We also know what working parents need. Other countries such as France provide examples of systems that provide quality care for children so their parents can work. And we have an example in our own country: the Military Child Care Act that transformed an abysmal child care system into a system that is the best in the nation.

If the need is so great, we know what to do, and the consequences of failing are so dire as illustrated by The New Republic article, then why haven’t we created a national system of quality child care for all working parents?

Polls show that Americans believe that child care is a parent’s personal responsibility and that there is no social obligation to help parents pay for it. The result of this prevailing opinion is that mothers buy the child care that they can afford: wealthier mothers are able to buy high quality care; poor mothers—mostly single mothers and women of color—usually cannot. Thus, a vicious cycle of inequity and inequitable outcomes continues.

In this country where all child care is financed with parent fees, child care providers struggle to cobble together resources to pay for their services. Where the ability of parents to pay is limited, providers barter with them, or serve families for free, or reduce rates. For the few families lucky enough to receive subsidies, the reimbursement rate to providers is low—four-fifths of states reimburse below the 75th percentile of the current market rate. Reimbursement is also unreliable—parents have to apply and re-apply frequently through an often cumbersome process. Even worse, states are whittling away at this already inadequate assistance. Erosions in payment are occurring at the same time that quality requirements are being ramped up, which might lead to even fewer affordable options for low-income families.

The child care subsidy program that is so critical to affordable services for working parents is bemoaned as lacking quality standards. But a system starved for revenue cannot enact quality improvements without more resources: increasing staff education levels requires increasing child care wages; enhancing the learning environment means buying more books and learning materials. Some states have initiated quality-rating systems, but in doing so they are often reducing the supply of direct child care services for low-income working parents in order to fund these efforts.

President Obama is proposing significant additional investments in our nation’s early childhood system: pre-k, Early Head Start, Head Start, the federal child care block grant to states, home visiting, 21st Century Learning Centers, etc. But these pieces of our system are like pieces of a puzzle: some parents qualify for some of these services, and some of these services are only available to serve some children some of the time. Parents and providers have to navigate all these fragments and try to piece them together into a seamless system of service.

While all of these investments are sorely needed—and President Obama should be commended for his proposal—if we truly want to solve the problems faced by low-income working parents, then we need a seamless system: one that provides the secure, quality care children need for good outcomes, at an affordable cost that allows parents to remain employed.

Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, has said, “No parent should have to choose between the child they love and the job they need.”

I couldn’t agree more. Until we build a system of affordable, quality child care for all families, we will continue to force parents into making no-win decisions.

Carol Burnett is the executive director of the Mississippi Low Income Child Care Initiative, a statewide organization of parents, providers and community leaders working together to improve the quality of child care for all of Mississippi’s low-income children.

Get Involved

Stand with Chicago fast food and retail workers!

Fix the Sequester Cuts for the Poor, Not Just Congressional Travel

Toolkit: #TalkPoverty & Take Action on Sequestration

Clips and other resources (compiled with James Cersonsky)

“NYT Uses News Story to Express Dislike of Danish Welfare State,” Dean Baker

“Workers Organize to Fight the ‘Part-Timeification’ Trend at Juicy Couture, Other Chains,” Sheila Bapat

“Why Women and People of Color Keep Getting Shafted in the Growing Restaurant Industry,” Sheila Bapat

“What Can Poverty Fighters Learn from Immigration Reform?” Deepak Bhagarva

“Rural Unemployment Surpasses Urban Rate,” Bill Bishop

“Farmworkers Dig Into the New ‘Blue Card’ Plan,” Michelle Chen

“Sequester Impact: April 26-May 2,” Coalition on Human Needs

“Amid ‘Obama Flight Delays’ And Deal Making, Sequestration’s Impact On The Poor Goes Ignored,” Bryce Covert

“The Sequestration Myth,” Daily Show with Jon Stewart [VIDEO]

“Courts’ Campaign to Squeeze Poor Debtors Goes Awry,” Daniel Denvir

“Norristown ordinance encourages landlords to evict domestic violence victims says ACLU,” Daniel Denvir

“Fast food walkout… in Chicago,” Josh Eidelson

“Homeless advocates seek restoration of funding,” Kate Giammarise

“The Bangladeshi Blood on America’s Hands,” William Greider

“Small donors could change imbalance of power,” Bob Herbert

“The Consequences of Long-term Unemployment for 4.6 Million Americans,” Richard Johnson

“NPR & disability: Who pays for ‘public’ radio, & what ethics govern an age of venture philanthropy?” Jennifer Kates

“How Pay Inequity Hurts Women of Color,” Sophia Kerby

“Hope, Love and Strategy in the Time of the Zombie Apocalypse,” Stephen Lerner

“Top 6 Policies to Help the Middle Class that Won’t Cost Taxpayers a Penny,” David Madland and Karla Walter

“Criminalization of homelessness—local impact, global issue,” National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty

“Losing Ground: A Profile of Florida’s Families in Poverty,” Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy

“City Report Shows More Were Near Poverty in 2011,” Sam Roberts

“In era when small-town lawyers are vanishing, South Dakota tries subsidies,” Karen Sloan

“All Work, No Pay,” Joseph Sorrentino

“The California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program,” Aleta Sprague

“Ohio and Macalester Sit-In, Chicago and Wittenberg Walk Out,” StudentNation

“A California Town Bleeds From Sequestration’s Cuts,” Gabriel Thompson

“The Coming Revolution in Public Education,” John Tierney

“Retail and Fast Food Workers Strike in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile,” Micah Uetricht

“Governor Cuomo and the Working Families Party: Eve of Destruction?” Katrina vanden Heuvel

“School closings traumatize vulnerable children,” Julie Woestehoff

“Building Health Communities With Fresh Produce,” Brad Wong

“House GOP Plans Even Deeper Food Stamp Cuts,” George Zornick

Studies/Briefs (summaries written by James Cersonsky)

“Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation,” Signe-Mary McKernan, Caroline Ratcliffe, Eugene Steuerle and Sisi Zhang, Urban Institute. Just how much has the racial wealth gap grown? For one, more than race-based income inequality. In 2010, the average income for whites was twice that of blacks and Latinos—roughly the same multiple as in 1983. Over that same period, the wealth gap has gone from five to six times more for whites than blacks and Latinos. One fault line in the persistent—and growing—wealth gap is age: in their early 30s, white families have 3.5 to 4 times the wealth of black families at the same age. In addition, the recession took an uneven toll: while white wealth declined by 11 percent from 2007 to 2010, it went down 31 percent for blacks and 40 percent for Latinos. For Latinos, this loss came largely from lower home values; for blacks, from shrinking retirement accounts.

“An Uneven Recovery, 2009-2011,” Pew Research Center. Between 2009 and 2011, US Census data reveals, the mean net worth of the top 7 percent of households increased by 28 percent—while dropping 4 percent for the rest of the population. While the total sum of household wealth increased a whopping $5 trillion over this period, the entirety of that gain went to the top 7 percent. The imbalanced recovery is due, in part, to class-based differences in asset-holdings: wealthier households often have their assets concentrated in stocks and other financial holdings—which have rebounded handsomely—while others’ assets are more concentrated in their homes. To make matters worse for less wealthy households, the first two recovery years saw a drop in ownership of stocks and mutual fund shares from 16 percent to 13 percent.

“Stuck: Young America’s Persistent Jobs Crisis,” Catherine Ruetschlin and Tamara Draut, Demos. For the younger population, the economic recovery has yet to arrive. Not only are 10.3 million 18 to 34-year olds currently unemployed or underemployed, but the economy would have to add 4.1 million jobs for young adults to return to pre-recession levels of employment. Youth unemployment is even more severe for people of color: 25 percent higher for Latino workers compared to white workers, and double for blacks compared to whites. Moreover, labor force participation for young workers was at its lowest point in 2012 in more than four decades. And 18- to 24-year olds who do have work languish in some of the lowest-paying industries: retail (20 percent of this population) and food service (also 20 percent). How even to begin remedying the youth jobs crisis? The report offers four proposals: a youth jobs corps; higher minimum wages; expansion of unionization and collective bargaining rights; and investment in community college and vocational training.

“Sequestering Meals on Wheels Could Cost the Nation $489 Million per Year,” Jessica Schieder and Patrick Lester, Center for Effective Government. Under sequestration, the Meals on Wheels program is expected to lose an estimated $10 million this year. However, the net loss of this cut could be much greater. One reason is that the program allows seniors to stay at home rather than moving to nursing homes, which require greater funding from Medicaid per person. (Care funded through Medicaid is nearly three times greater for people in nursing homes than for those who stay in their own homes.) In total, the authors calculate, cutting $10 million in Meals on Wheels would hit taxpayers on the order of $479 million for the duration of this fiscal year.

“Mandatory Drug Testing of Work First Applicants and Recipients Would Be Costly, Likely Illegal, and Ineffective at Identifying and Treating Drug Abuse,” Sabine Schoenbach and Tazra Mitchell, North Carolina Justice Center. North Carolina’s Work First program was started in 1996 to provide basic services, short-term training and small cash grants to low-income families. Not only is the program falling short on enrollment—between December 2007 and March 2013, state unemployment went up 4.2 percentage point, but Work First enrollment decreased by 17 percent—it’s now under attack from a new state bill that would require recipients to pass (and pay for) drug tests as a condition of applying. This brief details the policy’s wrongheadedness: the testing could cost the state upwards of $2.3 million; it likely violates the Fourth Amendment; and limitations common to blanket drug-testing mechanisms could render it ineffectual for its intended purpose.

“Expect More: How Target Chooses to Shortchange Minnesota’s Communities of Color,” TakeAction Minnesota, Centro de Trabajadores en Lucha-CTUL, SEIU Local 26, ISAIAH and Minnesotans for a Fair Economy. Target is the fourth largest employer in Minnesota—and proud of its Minnesotan roots. As these groups argue, though, “There is a tremendous opportunity for Target to have a more diverse workforce—one that is paid a living wage with safe working conditions which would more honestly align with the company’s carefully crafted public image of giving back to the communities it serves.” Target’s problems are many: contracting abusive janitorial companies that have stolen workers’ wages; hiring discrimination; and actively shirking promises of job creation, in exchange for millions in public subsidies in the Twin Cities alone—and exemptions from Minneapolis’s municipal living wage. The report calls on Target to hire responsible, law-abiding contractors; adopt fair hiring practices; and deliver on its promises to create jobs in the metro-area Brooklyn Park, where it has fallen notably short.

“Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality,” Elaine Weiss and Don Long, Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. There’s great promise for students in rating teachers according to student tests, expanding charter schools (and therefore parental “choice”) and closing “failing” or under-enrolled schools—if you believe the billionaires, politicians and so-called reformers who will booster these policies at all costs (often, to their own financial benefit). The authors of this report rip the prevailing reform logic to shreds. Analyzing reams of quantitative and qualitative data from New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, they find the following: despite reports of success, test scores have increased less in these “reform” cities than in other districts; school closures don’t funnel students to better schools—or bolster student outcomes; and the majority of students who leave district schools for charter schools land in lower-performing environments. Instead, the authors argue, school reform should revolve around initiatives that tackle poverty and inequality of opportunity head on—for example, comprehensive childhood education in DC, college financial aid counseling in Chicago, school-based health clinics in Cincinnati, and Montgomery County’s (MD) range of holistic approaches to rating teachers and developing student programs and coursework.

Vital Statistics

US poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children.

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million (program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty).

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: roughly half.

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Low-income families that were working in 2011: more than 70 percent.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled or working households: over 90 percent.

Food stamp recipients with no other cash income: 6.5 million people.

Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,065,794.

Annual cost of child poverty nationwide: $550 billion.

Mothers who are homeless as a direct result of domestic violence: 1 in 4.

Homeless mothers who will experience domestic violence at some point: over 90 percent.

Federal expenditures on home ownership mortgage deductions, 2012: $131 billion.

Federal funding for low-income housing assistance programs, 2012: less than $50 billion.

James Cersonsky wrote the “Studies/Briefs” and co-wrote the “Clips and other resources” sections in this blog.

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.

A homeless family at the DC Village shelter. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

More than one-third of Americans who use shelters annually are parents and their children. In 2011, that added up to more than 500,000 people.

According to Joe Volk, CEO of Community Advocates in Milwaukee, prevalent family homelessness is no accident.

“In 2000, we as a nation—and the Department of Housing and Urban Development—made the terrible decision to abandon homeless children and their families,” said Volk, speaking at a Congressional briefing on The American Almanac of Family Homelessness, authored by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness. “Families for a decade have been ignored.”

As the Almanac makes clear, federal attention and resources have focused instead on chronically homeless single adults—usually the most visible homeless people in communities across the country, most of whom have severe intellectual or physical disabilities. There was a recognition that it is far less expensive to place these men and women in their own apartments with access to social services—called the “Housing First” model—than to continue paying the long-term costs associated with jail time, and recurring treatment at emergency rooms and hospitals.

The federal government’s plan was to use the savings gained by reducing homelessness among single adults to fight family homelessness. But that hasn’t happened.

Since 2007, there has been a 19 percent decline in chronically homeless single adults. In contrast, family homelessness has increased by more than 13 percent over the same period. Matthew Adams, principal policy analyst for ICPH, noted that the number of homeless school-aged children surpassed 1 million for the first time during the 2011-12 school year—a 57 percent increase since 2006-07.

“This is basically all a result of focusing our fiscal and human capital solely on single adults,” said Adams. Despite a rise in extreme poverty, a decline in affordable housing, a shortage of rental subsidies, high unemployment and a foreclosure crisis, this strategy hasn’t changed—with the exception of provisions in the Recovery Act that are now expired.

While the long-term costs of family homelessness are more difficult to quantify than are those costs associated with single adult homelessness, they are nevertheless significant and real (costs to the nation’s character aside).

The Almanac explores the toll that housing instability, poor nutrition and lack of quality health care takes on homeless children: they experience twice the rate of chronic illnesses; twice the rate of learning disabilities; and three times the rate of emotional or behavioral problems as their peers who have stable housing. Homeless children have less than half the rate of proficiency in math and reading as their housed classmates. It’s not surprising that less than one in four homeless children graduates from high school—what’s surprising is that that one child manages to graduate at all.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvements Act is supposed to ensure that all homeless students have equal access to education. But despite the dramatic rise in homeless students since 2006, only one in five school districts receives education assistance grants to help them.

To the extent that family homelessness is on the federal government’s agenda at all—and there is a federal goal to end family homelessness by 2020 (the goal for ending single adult and veteran homelessness is 2015)—there is real concern among many advocates that HUD is attempting to use the “Housing First” approach to help homeless families. Although they agree that it has shown success with single adults, these advocates argue that it simply isn’t the right solution for many—or even most—homeless families.

“It’s a whole different dynamic for families,” said Volk, who operates shelters and permanent housing for both single adults and families.

Volk said that an intellectually or physically disabled homeless single adult is usually able to qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is $770 per month in Wisconsin. That stable income is sufficient to rent a fully furnished apartment with utilities paid in his state. 

In contrast, a single mother must apply for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which in Wisconsin is $653 per month no matter the size of the family. She then must meet a work requirement, arrange for child care, buy furniture and pay for utilities, among other challenges. If her child is sick and she stays home from work, she is sanctioned by the TANF program. She might lose her $653 assistance, consequently fall behind on rent and begin her slide towards homelessness again.

Dona Anderson, director of ICHP, said there is way too much emphasis on getting families out of shelters quickly, rather than making sure they don’t return to the shelter again.

“What could we do if we could serve families in a dedicated, serious fashion for 12 to 24 months? And really address those education barriers, employment barriers, really get these families stabilized so that once they leave a shelter we don’t see them coming back?” said Anderson. “Can we address those deeper-seeded needs rather than just the initial crisis that brought them to the shelter?”

Volk agreed.

“We’re moving people out of shelters too fast and then we wonder why they don’t succeed,” he said. “They don’t succeed because we didn’t give them enough time and enough support before they moved out. We need to rethink how we work with homeless families.”

Anderson spoke of a 16-year-old in New York City who was homeless in junior high school. He lived in a shelter “targeted for him” and was able to participate in a high quality after-school program, residential summer camp, and a youth employment program. He’s now a successful student who is looking at colleges. In contrast, she met a 4-year-old homeless child in Las Vegas who has no access to a shelter, and is bouncing between motels and hotels with his father, getting by on a fast food diet. He lacks the stable environment “that kids that age especially need in order to develop and grow and be ready for school.”

“I tell these stories to illustrate the differences in how children are served, and how they aren’t served, when they are experiencing homelessness,” said Anderson.

The Almanac includes recommendations for what the 113th Congress can do for homeless families now, including: converting the mortgage interest deduction into a tax credit—as proposed under the Common Sense Housing Investment Act—in order to permanently fund The National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF) and support Section 8 rental assistance. (The NHTF was enacted by Congress in 2008 to increase the supply of affordable housing units, but it has never been funded.) There are now just 3.7 million housing units for every 10 million extremely low-income renters. Another key recommendation is to implement the reforms laid out in the Improving Access to Child Care for Homeless Families Act—pretty fundamental for homeless parents to have access to child care if they are going to find stable housing and jobs.

But the first step—the big step—seems to be this: see the problem of family homelessness, admit it and commit to doing something about it. And don’t for a second believe that working with a single adult is the same thing as working with a family with so many moving parts. 

“We can solve the problem of people living on the street for both singles and families at the same time,” said Volk. “It doesn’t have to be an either/or, and it can’t be—as long as we have children that have to live out on the streets.”

TANF: A Good News Story From the States

Guest post by Elizabeth Lower-Basch

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—the program created by welfare reform in 1996—is a flexible block grant, meaning that while the federal government sets some general rules, states have been given an enormous amount of control, both over the ways that they spend the federal funds they receive and over the rules that they set for families receiving TANF cash assistance. This flexibility results in an enormous amount of variation from state to state.

Most of the time, when I see an article about a state legislative proposal that affects TANF cash assistance, it’s about something bad that is happening. Outrage drives people to forward the article to their friends, to press the share button or to retweet. This is helpful—for example, the public outrage over the Tennessee proposal to punish families for children’s failure at school by cutting benefits led to the sponsor withdrawing the bill. But the good things that some state legislators are trying to do in TANF don’t always get as much attention. So, this week, I’m highlighting some of the positive developments in the states.

Asset limits: Many states have rules denying cash assistance to families who have modest levels of savings. These rules are outdated, as the low benefit levels, stringent work requirements, and time limits on benefits are sufficient to ensure that families won’t apply for TANF unless they really need the help. Moreover, these rules add to administrative costs and discourage low-income families from developing the habit of saving. In recognition of this fact, Hawaii acted this legislative session to eliminate the TANF asset limit. A California bill to exclude the value of a car from the asset limit has cleared the Assembly Human Services committee.

Family caps: Early in welfare reform history, a number of states adopted “family cap” policies, under which children who are presumed to have been conceived while the parents were receiving cash assistance are denied benefits. These caps were created to eliminate the presumed “incentive” that some felt was driving families to have more children so their cash benefits would increase. This policy has never been shown to reduce family size, but does increase child poverty and hardship among some of the most vulnerable families. The California Assembly Human Services committee has cleared a bill to repeal the family cap (known as the “maximum family grant” in California) and provide benefits to currently excluded children. This legislation is supported by a partnership of anti-poverty organizations and groups that oppose abortions.

Employment and training: The most reliable way to help families escape poverty is through employment in good jobs. However, many states spend only a small fraction of their TANF funds on employment and training programs. Massachusetts is considering amendments to the budget bill that would create and provide $2 million in funding for a “Pathways to Family Economic Self-Sufficiency” Pilot program to support a range of education and training activities related to gainful employment, including paid work-study positions, plus supportive services such as case management, job placement assistance, career counseling and funding to help with emergency needs. The Nebraska legislature is considering a bill that would use existing TANF funds to create a subsidized employment program, modeled after those created under the TANF Emergency Fund that infused federal stimulus funds into TANF during the depths of the Great Recession. This would give employers opportunities to bring on additional employees to help their businesses grow, using wage subsidies that would phase out over time, following the model that Mississippi’s STEPS program used under the Emergency Fund. Low-income workers would earn wages while acquiring valuable real work experience.

We know that when negative bills related to TANF are passed in one state, the next year there are sure to be copycat bills in other states. Hopefully, there will be a new crop of positive bills springing up this year and next, and that many of them will become law and lead to cross-pollenization of similar positive bills in other states.

Elizabeth Lower-Basch is the Policy Coordinator at CLASP, the Center for Law and Social Policy. CLASP seeks to improve the lives of low-income people by developing and advocating for federal, state and local policies to strengthen families and create pathways to education and work.

Banks Got Nowhere to Run to, Baby: From Boise to Salt Lake City

You can’t really talk about poverty and rebuilding wealth without talking about the practices of the big banks—from predatory payday lending, to unnecessary or even illegal foreclosures, to borrowing money at zero percent interest from the Federal Reserve and then lending it to state and local governments at much higher rates, all while lobbying to avoid paying taxes.

That’s why I thought the alliance between activists from Idaho, Minnesota and Oregon—all coming together to challenge US Bank at its shareholder meeting in Boise this week—was so important. On Tuesday, they called on US Bank to pay its fair share in taxes; write-down mortgages to help stem the foreclosure and underwater mortgage crisis; and end payday loans with exorbitant interest rates. 

“We’re standing with the people of Idaho and folks across America who want US Bank to do the right thing,” said Rob Sisk, president of SEIU 503 and a groundskeeper at the Oregon State Capitol. “We want US Bank to stop predatory lending, whether it be to individuals or our state and local governments. US Bank needs to pay its fair share in taxes to fund critical services.”

Some of the activists who came from Oregon, Minnesota and Idaho to take action at the US Bank Shareholders Meeting in Boise. (Credit: SEIU 503)

Inside the shareholders meeting, a case was made for comprehensive foreclosure legislation that would: require banks to assign struggling homeowners a single point of contact; ban the practice of “dual tracking” where the bank is working with the homeowner on a solution while also pursuing a foreclosure; and create a mediation program to bring banks and homeowners together to discuss alternatives to foreclosure.

“A US Bank customer shouldn’t have to buy a share and drop everything to go to a shareholders meeting and demand to be treated fairly,” said Eric Fought, communications director of Minnesotans for a Fair Economy. “These banks hope that no one will fight back and for too long that was the case. In Minnesota and throughout the country, we’re making sure those days are over.”

US Bank had moved its shareholders meeting from Minneapolis—home of its corporate headquarters—to Boise, because activists dominated the meeting in Minnesota last year, too. This Tuesday, Wells Fargo will attempt to hide out in Salt Lake City after thousands of protesters descended upon its shareholders meeting in San Francisco last year.

The courageous people participating in these actions aren’t waiting on change to come from Washington—they're leading change and calling on us to join them.

How Does Congress Vote on Poverty?

Yesterday, the Sargent Shriver National Center of Poverty Law released its sixth annual Poverty Scorecard for the year 2012, grading every Member of Congress on his or her voting record in fighting poverty.

“Congress made few strides in reducing poverty last year,” said Dan Lesser, Director of Economic Justice at the Shriver Center. “It’s our hope that by sharing these grades and holding lawmakers accountable, the Shriver Center will help to spark a legislative environment that has low-income families’ best interests in mind.”

The Poverty Scorecard evaluates votes on legislation that would have had a strong impact on the US poverty level—which now stands at more than 46 million people living on less than about $18,000 for a family of three.

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According to the Shriver Center, in 2012 the only significant legislation from an anti-poverty perspective that was passed by Congress and signed into law were the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act and the American Taxpayer Relief Act. All other legislation that would have made a significant contribution in the fight against poverty was killed.

It is worth noting that members with worse grades in the fight against poverty tend to come from states with higher levels of poverty; members with good grades tend to come from states with lower levels of poverty.

700 Disability Advocates on the Hill

On Wednesday, nearly 700 disability advocates—including individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities—fanned out across Capitol Hill to meet with members of their congressional delegations. They spoke about issues that are vital to their security and well-being, and ability to participate in our economy and society, including: Medicaid and Community Living, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, employment and education, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the ABLE Act.

“As we continue our efforts to protect Medicaid, Social Security and other important programs for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, nothing is more powerful than the personal stories shared by our advocates on the Hill,” Marty Ford, director of The Arc’s Public Policy Office, told me. “They make a huge impact on their Members of Congress, and their efforts over the last two years have helped us save these lifeline programs.”

You can get involved helping to promote and protect the human rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities here.

Featured Campaign: Tell Wendy’s to Stop Profiting From Farmworker Poverty

Wendy’s seems content to continue profiting from farmworker poverty.

While five of the biggest fast food companies have signed onto the Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s (CIW) Fair Food Program—a historic partnership among farmworkers, tomato growers and eleven leading food corporations to advance the human rights and dignity of farmworkers—Wendy’s continues to refuse.

By adding a penny-per-pound to the price of tomatoes that they buy from Florida, participating companies have paid over $10 million since January of 2011 to help increase farmworkers’ incomes, and their commitment to buy Florida tomatoes only from growers who participate in the Fair Food Program has turned their immense purchasing power into a tool to eliminate human rights abuses in the fields.

Of the five largest fast-food corporations in the country—McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King, Taco Bell (Yum Brands) and Wendy’s—Wendy’s is the only one refusing to participate in the program.

The fast food chain claims that it doesn’t need to sign onto the Fair Food Program because it is part of an “independent non-profit purchasing cooperative.” Unfortunately, the corporation has run up against the investigative prowess of CIW—which has helped the US Department of Justice successfully prosecute six cases of farm labor servitude in Florida over the past 15 years. It’s clear that Wendy’s purchasing entity is neither “independent,” in any real sense of the word, nor even remotely adequate as an alternative to CIW’s Fair Food Program—which just last week was recognized by the White House as “one of the most successful and innovative programs” in the world to prevent and uncover modern-day slavery.

Tell Wendy’s that dealing squarely with farmworkers is far more important to you than eating square hamburgers—get involved here.

Get Involved

Demand a Higher Minimum Wage Now

New Revenues, Not Cuts, for Economic Growth

Week of Action: Confront the Corporate 1 Percent

#TalkPoverty & Take Action on Sequestration

Events

Ending Hunger Through Citizen Service: Free Training Conference (Saturday, April 20, 9:00 AM–1:30 PM, Barnard College, New York, NY). The New York City Coalition Against Hunger is working to fundamentally change the way people think about volunteering to fight hunger from once a year food drives around the holidays to long-term, skills-based, high-impact work. As part of that effort, it is co-sponsoring this conference with Community Impact at Columbia University to offer training to area nonprofits, businesses, civic groups, senior citizen groups, religious congregations, government agencies, student and youth groups and concerned individuals on how to implement structured high impact volunteer activities to better meet the long-term food needs of low-income people. Register here, free and open to the public.

Market-Oriented Education Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality (Wednesday, April 24, 9:00–10:30 AM, Economic Policy Institute, 1333 H St NW, Washington, DC). A new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education employs comparable, reliable data across three high-profile “reform” districts to gauge the impacts of these policies and compare them with other large urban districts. Overall, the results are not promising. A distinguished panel of education experts will discuss the report findings and their policy implications at the district, state and federal levels. RSVP here.

Leaning In With Child Care: A Discussion On Childcare Jobs And The Need For Quality, Affordable Care (Thursday, May 9, 12:00–1:30 PM, The Aspen Institute, One Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC). The next discussion in The Aspen Institute’s Working in America series, it will cover the challenges facing working parents in need of child care as well as ideas and policies for improving the quality of jobs in the early care and education industry. Moderated by New York Times economics reporter Catherine Rampell. RSVP here.

Featured Poverty Coverage: Yesterday’s Dropouts—Adult Education in DC

This five-part series by WAMU education reporter Kavitha Cardoza examines the struggles adults face long after they leave school without a diploma. Many This Week in Poverty readers might be particularly interested in the “Changes Coming To The GED Program” story, but all are worth taking the time to check out.

Clips and other resources (compiled with James Cersonsky)

“Resurrecting Brownsville,” Ginia Bellafante

“Questions and Concerns Over SEPTA’s Fare Hikes and New Payment Systems,” Jake Blumgart

“Working Across the Aisle to Make Affordable Housing a Reality,” Christopher “Kit” Bond and Nan Roman

“Bloomberg by the Numbers,” Alleen Brown

“Hundreds of Working Families Converge on Capitol,” California Labor Federation 

“Sequester Impact: April 10th-17th,” Coalition on Human Needs

“Poverty Drove Women Into Kermit Gosnell’s Clinic,” Bryce Covert

“Poll: Voters Back Paid Sick Days, Distrust Lawmakers,” David Damron

“U.S. Near Bottom of List for Child Well-Being,” Economic Hardship Reporting Project

“AFL-CIO’s Non-Union Worker Group Headed Into Workplaces in Fifty States,” Josh Eidelson

“Raising San Jose’s Minimum Wage: A Q&A With Marisela Castro,” Equal Voice News

“Pittsburgh nonprofits work to remove stigma attached to state ‘welfare’ agency,” Kate Giammarise

“Chicago student: ‘Violence will never cease until we find a way to make money out of peace', Melissa Harris-Perry [VIDEO]

“Reduce poverty to improve overall health,” Carly Hood

“The United States of Inequality,” Moyers & Company [VIDEO]

“The Gilded City: Struggling to Survive in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York,” The Nation

“Collaborating to Improve TANF Resources for Families Experiencing Homelessness,” The National Center on Family Homelessness

“VITA = tax simplicity = tax reform,” National Community Tax Coalition

“Sequestration Effects: Cuts Sting Communities Nationwide,” Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel

“Responsible Redevelopment: Protecting Renters in Changing Neighborhoods,” Margery Turner

“Market-Oriented Reforms' Rhetoric Trumps Reality,” Elaine Weiss and Don Long

“State employees say LePage pressured them to deny jobless benefits,” Christopher Williams

“Sequester Stalemate Cuts Legal Aid, Child Care, Housing,” Brian Wong

Studies/Briefs (summaries written by James Cersonsky)

“Depression in Low-Income Mothers of Young Children: Are They Getting the Treatment They Need?” Marla McDaniel and Christopher Lowenstein, Urban Institute. Maternal depression is linked to a host of children’s developmental issues. This report parses the relationship between depression and income. In the past year, 8.8 percent of low-income mothers with children ages 0 to 5 had a major depressive episode, compared to 6.8 percent of higher income mothers. Among those affected, 69.7 percent of low-income mothers experienced severe interference with their daily life, compared to 53.5 percent for their higher income counterparts. Disparities in treatment make matters worse: 37.3 percent of low-income mothers reported no treatment, compared to 25.3 percent of higher income mothers. Among low-income mothers, insurance status widened the gap further: 49.4 percent of uninsured mothers received no treatment, compared to 33.1 percent of those with insurance. Finally, even those who do receive treatment face a variety of barriers that could make the treatment less effective. Medicaid expansion and streamlining stipulated by the Affordable Care Act, the report argues, offer some hope.

“2013 Fair Housing Trends Report: Modernizing the Fair Housing Act for the 21^st Century,” National Fair Housing Alliance. This report explores the scope of ongoing housing discrimination. Forty-five years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, landlords can’t legally discriminate on the basis of race or sex, or against people with disabilities and families with children. Nonetheless, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is still legal in 29 states, and on gender identity in 34. Only 12 states have protections against discrimination on the basis of tenants’ source of income. In 2012, a total of 28,519 complaints were investigated by HUD, the Department of Justice, state and local government agencies or—in 69 percent of these cases—private, nonprofit fair housing organizations. The data reveal the need for a stronger, more inclusive Fair Housing Act: complaints on the basis of source of income went up 38 percent since 2011; sexual orientation, 43 percent; marital status, 63 percent; and gender identity and expression for the first time.

Vital statistics

US poverty (less than $17,916 for a family of three): 46.2 million people, 15.1 percent.

Children in poverty: 16.1 million, 22 percent of all children, including 39 percent of African-American children and 34 percent of Latino children. Poorest age group in country.

Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including more than 15 million women and children.

People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2011: 67.6 million (program kept 21.4 million people out of poverty).

People in the US experiencing poverty by age 65: Roughly half.

Gender gap, 2011: Women 34 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Gender gap, 2010: Women 29 percent more likely to be poor than men.

Twice the poverty level (less than $46,042 for a family of four): 106 million people, more than 1 in 3 Americans.

Jobs in the US paying less than $34,000 a year: 50 percent.

Jobs in the US paying below the poverty line for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually: 25 percent.

Poverty-level wages, 2011: 28 percent of workers.

Low-income families that were working in 2011: More than 70 percent.

Families receiving cash assistance, 1996: 68 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Families receiving cash assistance, 2010: 27 for every 100 families living in poverty.

Impact of public policy, 2010: without government assistance, poverty would have been twice as high—nearly 30 percent of population.

Percentage of entitlement benefits going to elderly, disabled or working households: over 90 percent.

Food stamp recipients with no other cash income: 6.5 million people.

Number of homeless children in US public schools: 1,065,794.

Annual cost of child poverty nationwide: $550 billion.

Mothers who are homeless as a direct result of domestic violence: 1 in 4.

Homeless mothers who will experience domestic violence at some point: over 90 percent.

Quote of the week

“In Columbia, [South Carolina] many of our shelters won’t accept males over age 13. So if a family has an older, male child, than shelter may not be an option. So maybe a mother decides to stay in the home and put up with the physical and emotional abuse a little bit longer until she can figure out some other strategy.”
—Deborah Boone, McKinney-Vento Coordinator, Richland County School District One, Parents and Students Succeed Project. 

James Cersonsky wrote the “Studies/Briefs” and co-wrote the “Clips and other resources” sections in this blog.

This Week in Poverty posts here on Friday mornings, and again on Sundays at Moyers & Company. You can e-mail me at WeekInPoverty@me.com and follow me on Twitter.