Greg Kaufmann

This Week in Poverty: ‘Beating the Drum About Poverty’ (and Obama’s Nomination Speech)

Greg Kaufmann on September 7, 2012 - 9:01 AM ET

In a recent column, Bill Moyers and Michael Winship wrote, “When it comes to our ‘out of sight, out of mind’ population of the poor, you have to think we can help reduce their number, ease the suffering, and speak out, with whatever means at hand, on their behalf and against those who would prefer they remain invisible. Speak out: that means you and me, and yes, Mr. President, you, too.”

In the past year, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have done more on the national stage to seek out and speak out on behalf of people living in poverty than broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. Next week, September 12–15, they will go on the road for their second poverty tour in a year, which they have dubbed “Poverty Tour 2.0.”

In August 2011, Smiley and West embarked on an eleven-state, eighteen-city “Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience”; that was followed in October by a week-long series about the tour broadcasted on both the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Public Radio International (PRI). In January 2012, they collaborated with Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs on a study examining the impact of the recession on people living in or near-poverty; the next day, Smiley moderated a panel live on C-SPAN—“Remaking America: from Poverty to Prosperity”—which included Dr. West, author and Nation contributor Barbara Ehrenreich, filmmaker Michael Moore and others. In March, Smiley moderated a nationally broadcasted panel of women who talked about the impact of poverty on women and children in America. Finally, Smiley and West co-authored The Rich and The Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. It was released in April and peaked at #7 on the New York Times Best Sellers List.

Talk About Poverty (#TalkPoverty): Jessica Bartholow's Questions for Obama and Romney

Greg Kaufmann on August 31, 2012 - 9:01 AM ET

This is the third post in TheNation.com’s #TalkPoverty series—an effort to push a deeper conversation about poverty into the mainstream political debate. The series profiles people working on poverty-related issues, and lays out the questions they want President Obama and Governor Romney to answer. You can read the first posts here and here.

In 1967, five years before Jessica Bartholow was born, her father returned home from the Vietnam War a broken man. Although Richard Bartholow had survived a battle lasting several days right next to a network of underground tunnels, the experience severely traumatized him. An Army psychiatrist prescribed lithium shortly before he was discharged.

When he arrived back in the United States, military personnel simply dropped Richard off at the Oakland Commissary.

Talk About Poverty: Mariana Chilton's Questions for Obama and Romney

Greg Kaufmann on August 24, 2012 - 9:34 AM ET

This is the second post in TheNation.com’s #TalkPoverty series—an effort to push a deeper conversation about poverty into the mainstream political debate. The series profiles people working on poverty-related issues, and lays out the questions they want president Obama and Governor Romney to answer. You can read the first post here.

In 1989, when Dr. Mariana Chilton was a junior in college, she lived in Chile for a year working as an interpreter for a US reporter doing a story on “Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared.” It was just after Augusto Pinochet had been voted out of office.

Chilton traveled the Atacama Desert with “wives and daughters and sisters” who were searching for hundreds of loved ones who had been murdered and buried in mass graves.

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This Week in Poverty: Here's to the Houston Janitors

Greg Kaufmann on August 17, 2012 - 9:36 AM ET

Last week, more than 3,200 janitors in Houston called an end to their five-week strike.

The cleaning contractors initially offered a total wage increase of $.50 an hour phased in over five years—so in 2016 the janitors would earn $8.85 an hour. The janitors asked for a raise to $10 an hour over three years.

In the end, the janitors accepted $9.35 an hour over four years, a 12 percent increase over their current pay. They also fought off an effort by the contractors that would have allowed them to underbid the union wage when competing against non-union shops.

Talk About Poverty (#TalkPoverty): Peter Edelman's Questions for Obama and Romney

Greg Kaufmann on August 10, 2012 - 8:35 AM ET

TheNation.com created This Week in Poverty to keep the struggles of the poor and near-poor front and center for its readers every week. Now, as we enter the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, we are launching a new effort to help push the issue of poverty into the mainstream political debate.

Each Talk About Poverty (#TalkPoverty*) post will feature three to five questions for President Obama and Governor Mitt Romney from experts who know antipoverty policy inside-out. I will profile the individuals asking the questions so you get a sense of why they know what they are talking about; offer background on why these particular questions are being asked; and then lay the questions out for the candidates.

In the next month or so, when we’ve completed the #TalkPoverty series, The Nation will compile the best questions into a single questionnaire and hound the presidential campaigns for answers. You can offer your own questions on Twitter using the hashtag #TalkPoverty—some might be included in the final questionnaire.

This Week in Poverty: 'Respect the Worker'

Greg Kaufmann on August 3, 2012 - 9:02 AM ET

Palermo’s Factory Workers in Milwaukee

In 2007, Cesar was operating the Multivac machine that wraps frozen pizzas produced at Palermo’s Pizza factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Like most of the others in the factory, he worked seven days a week—the 9 pm to 7 am shift, earning $7.25 an hour—for one of the largest frozen pizza manufacturers in the nation.

According to Cesar, he had complained to his supervisor for a week that the equipment wasn’t functioning properly—it wasn’t sealing correctly and he also needed to pull the plastic out of the machine by hand. He told me the company’s lack of responsiveness was par for the course.

This Week in Poverty: TANF, VAWA and Playing Politics with the Lives of Low-Income People

Greg Kaufmann on July 27, 2012 - 10:35 AM ET

“A partisan disgrace,” declared Speaker John Boehner.

“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Governor Mitt Romney charged.

“The end of welfare reform as we know it,” warned Robert “You Aren’t Poor If You Have Air Conditioning” Rector, of the Heritage Foundation.

This Week in Poverty

Greg Kaufmann on July 20, 2012 - 9:21 AM ET

No post today due to illness. This Week in Poverty will return in full next Friday. In the meantime, check out the latest from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. And here is the latest excellent infographic from Demos reflecting some vital statistics about poverty:

This Week in Poverty: Houston Janitors' Strike Goes Citywide

Greg Kaufmann on July 13, 2012 - 9:31 AM ET

Governor Mitt Romney got all the press at the NAACP convention in Houston on Wednesday, but janitor Alice McAfee got a standing-o. She spoke to a packed auditorium about her plight and that of over 3,000 fellow janitors in the city.

The Houston janitors are currently paid an hourly wage of $8.35 and earn an average of $8,684 annually, despite cleaning the offices of some of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo, Shell Oil, JPMorgan Chase and others in the “City of Millionaires.” They are asking building owners and cleaning contractors for a raise to $10 an hour over the next three years; the counter offer is a $0.50 pay raise phased in over five years, virtually guaranteeing that the janitors continue to live in poverty.

On Tuesday, following a month of protests and one-day strikes, 250 janitors in nine buildings walked off the job to begin a citywide strike. By today, janitors from eighteen buildings will have joined the picket line. They are protesting employer harassment—including potential stripping of healthcare benefits and workplace intimidation—in response to the workers’ attempt to improve wages and benefits. The workers won’t return to their jobs until the cleaning contractors return to the bargaining table.

This Week in Poverty: The Soul Sisters

Greg Kaufmann on July 6, 2012 - 9:13 AM ET

I’ve long been told by a lot of smart people that the nuns who taught them growing up are among the best teachers they ever had. As a Jewish man who attended secular and Quaker schools, I never had the privilege of experiencing that. But I have now.

Like millions of other Americans, I’ve followed the Nuns on the Bus over the last couple of weeks as they went on an inspiring 2,700 mile drive across the country to educate people on the House Republican-passed Ryan budget and the damaging effects it would have on poor, vulnerable and struggling people throughout America.

I was in Washington, DC, where the tour ended—right at the United Methodist Building where The Nation ’s DC bureau is located, in fact. There were about 400 people there—mostly boisterous fans, religious and non-religious alike—and a nice turnout by the press too.