The title of author Sasha Abramsky’s new book, “The American Way of Poverty,”
Nonetheless, he explores the issue with critical eyes. His describes what he calls the scandal of poverty in the world’s wealthiest nation. While that might not be news on the face of it, Abramsky dives into understanding the machinery of how we got here and, more importantly, what we can do about it. It’s not as hopeless as it might seem if people agree to change, and the United States has a proud legacy of making that change. The book’s foundation are the interviews with people experiencing poverty, and the circumstances surrounding their situation, making each tragedy both highly personal and sadly universal. (Many of the interviews on which this book is based are accessible on the audio archive, www.thevoicesofpoverty.org
Demos Jay Thiemeyer: How did this book come about? Sasha Abramsky: I’d been doing an awful lot of reporting, going all over the country, driving, flying, going to these out of the way communities and talking to people about their everyday lives, and about the ways in which they were making ends meet or not making ends meet. And I became fascinated by the fact that in the middle of boon times, when the stock market was going up, when housing prices were going up, when unemployment was fairly low, a huge number of men, women and kids that I spoke who were finding they couldn’t feed themselves. I would see families waiting in line for free food. And when I talked to them, it wasn’t just that they couldn’t feed themselves, it was that everything was becoming precarious. People were finding it harder to pay mortgages or rents. They were finding it harder and harder to pay for insurance, or buy medicines if they had no insurance. And at every level, their daily lives were becoming more of a challenge, more of a sense of daily instability.
And then, after 2008, all of those things that had already been going on during the boon years. They magnified, so you started seeing a level of poverty spread all over this country that we haven’t seen for years. It wasn’t that it was concentrated in one area, it was everywhere. You could find it in the cities, but you also found it in suburban track housing.
It seemed to me we were witnessing an emergence of a new shape of society. That the America that was emerging was something that looked unfamiliar. J.T.: Your book has been called a successor to Michael Harrington’s “The Other America.” S.A.: I’m very honored by the comparison. Michael Harrington has always been one of my journalistic heroes because he did something extraordinary. He took the narrative that America had entered the age of affluence; that everyone was participating in this extraordinary growth, and the country was becoming almost 100 percent middle class. Harrington had worked for years with people who were homeless, who lived in slums, who didn’t have enough money to buy food for their kids. He knew that the story was incomplete, that millions of Americans were being rendered invisible, that their voices were going unheard. The challenge to himself was how to make visible the invisible. And the broader challenge was to hold up a mirror to America, because here is a country that is espousing great ideals about opportunity, aspirations and freedom. Wonderful ideals but they aren’t always lived up to.
Harrington holds up a mirror and says, look, this is part of our image that we don’t like looking at. What are we going to do about it? And it triggered a huge national conversation. It resulted on the War on Poverty, so when Lyndon Johnson gets up and delivers his state of the union address in 1964, he turns the War on Poverty into a moral challenge. The defining moral challenge.
One of the things I write about is that from the 1980s onward, we lost that moral energy, and there are many reasons for it. As a society we began to move away from a commitment to limit inequality and limit poverty. The two are very much part of the same story. Over the past 35 years what you see is at the top of the economy, things have never been so good. We have more billionaires than we ever had. We have more people with extraordinary luxury in their lives on a daily basis.
But on the other end, on the bottom of the economy, people are increasingly unstable, increasingly precarious. J.T.: You underline in your book the lack of empathy today compared to 1962, especially with the Civil Rights movement sort of cueing people to the fact that there was a great deal of injustice. Talk about that difference, between now and then? S.A.: One of things I always tell my students is to be careful not to put rose-colored glasses on. Don’t romanticize the past. I think it’s too easy to say everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket today, and things used to be so much better, because the past was by no means rosy. There were tremendous problems in the structure of our society of the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was endemic racism. There was an extraordinary sexual hierarchy. There were all kinds of unpleasant hierarchies and poverty was very prevalent in the early 1960s. But I do think that there was a moment, a period in the 1960s, when as a culture, we were willing to confront a lot of the problems in society and look for very creative solutions. And that partly came from the bottom up, from tremendous grassroots organizing projects, from Cesar Chavez organizing farmworkers to Stonewall in the late 1960s defining gay rights. So there was this moment where the language of empathy was allowed to flower from the grassroots up. But we also had a political leadership who really thought the sky was the limit, that anything that America set its mind to do, it could accomplish. That went all the way from the moonwalk to the War on Poverty, where Johnson could use the moral platform of the presidency to say we are going to end poverty in America. Not just limit it, but end it.
In hindsight, I think that was a mistake, because I think it set in motion the backlash. It’s very hard to end poverty. All societies are going to have a level of poverty; it’s a question of how much.
The War on Poverty did a tremendous amount of good. It took millions and millions of Americans who were poor at the start of 1960s, and by the mid '70s, they’d been raised out of poverty. By many measures, what happened in the '60s and '70s was a tremendous success, but because it was overambitious in the language, it set the stage for backlash.
So by the '80s, a politician like (Ronald) Reagan could use public anxiety about the amount of money that had been spent on the War on Poverty and use it to carve a very reactionary political rhetoric.
One of ways Reagan built a coalition in 1980 was by bashing welfare.J.T.: Nixon had done the same thing. S.A.: Nixon had talked the talk into wedge issues. When it actually came to poverty, Nixon was actually fairly good. Nixon proposed universal health care. At one point, Nixon embraced Milton Friedman’s idea for a basic income guarantee. No president before or since has embraced that idea. It didn’t go anywhere, but in many ways, Nixon was a continuum of Johnson. He expanded food stamps, he expanded the free breakfast and lunch program for low-income kids at school. But once Reagan comes to power in the '80s, there really is a dismantling of most of the safety-net infrastructure. J.T.: And Welfare to Work requires that there are jobs. S.A.: One of the things we saw in the worst recession since the Great Depression, in 2008 and the years following, in many, many states, the number of people on welfare actually declined. That didn’t mean that single women and kids were suddenly getting affluent. It meant that the state was rolling back its responsibilities. I talked to people all over the country who weren’t eligible for benefits and their lives were extraordinary. They had literally no access to cash. People were surviving on food stamps, which is noncash benefit, or on charity, people scavenging anything they could. I talked to a family who literally had nothing. Nothing. They didn’t have bank accounts. They didn’t have savings. They didn’t have money in their wallet and they didn’t have food in their fridge. They lived lives entirely on or outside the margins. And I think that that happens gradually.
You don’t suddenly go from a war on poverty to the kind of extraordinary lack of empathy that we see across the spectrum. It took years and years in which the political rhetoric shifted and the understanding of poverty in a sense was dumbed down. We came to think of it almost as an individual disease. If you were poor, you were poor because you had done something wrong or you were somehow morally unworthy. In some ways it’s a very 19th-century understanding of poverty: the idea of an undeserving underclass.
One of the consequences is that as a society views it as a tragedy, but not as something we can do anything about. I concluded that calling it a tragedy is too easy. That what it is, is a scandal. This is the most affluent country in the world. This is a country with more resources than any other country in human history. And yet, one in four of our kids lives below the poverty line. Fifty million Americans live below the poverty line. And many, many millions live below half the poverty line. We have a level of poverty and a level of inequality that no other first world democracy comes anywhere near matching. And to my mind that becomes a scandal. It seems to me that we’ve made a series of political choices and economic choices that have built up this well of poverty at the bottom of the economy.
And it isn’t just the unemployment. It’s also the working poor. These are working families. They’re playing by the rules. They’re doing what they can to get ahead. And they’re getting swept backwards.
Over the course of the years while I was doing this book, I meant so many people who had these stories that were just extraordinary. People who were told they were ineligible for Medicaid because they bought themselves a burial plot for when they finally died. I spoke to people who bought houses that were massively underwater, and then they lost their jobs in the recession. And these guys were doing everything they could to get ahead and instead they were swept back. They were selling their household possessions in garage sales so that they could just enough to pay their next bill.J.T.: The thing that scares me, with the Tea Party mentality, is that poverty is worthwhile: That it’s a means of social control, that the poor are not deserving and they deserve to be dismissed. S.A.: We’ve always been far more than one coherent country. We’ve always been at the very least two distinct cultures, and that goes all the way back to the pre-Civil War years. The aspirational North and the institutionalized immobility of the South. Everything about the Southern structure was designed to create a group at the bottom that was immobile. In many ways the Southern model has begun to percolate more generally into the national economic model and political culture. So today the language around food stamps and the language around welfare, in which conservatives are going off on a nutritional supplement as a something that breeds laziness. That in my mind, historically comes out of the South. I think it’s an extremely dangerous development. Putting things like food stamps in the crosshairs; that used to be immune. In the conversation about welfare, they usually kept silent about food stamps. Now you see a significant part of the political process trying to find ways to not just marginally cut food stamps but to massively cut them. We’re not talking about abstract numbers. We’re talking about real people.
Real people like a woman I met in L.A. She had worked for the state and then she was laid off. She had three kids, and the only thing that was keeping her and her kids fed was food stamps. I met another women whose husband ran a business, and he died of cancer, and even though they had medical insurance, the bills bankrupted them. She was now a widow and on food stamps and she had nothing. When we talk about cutting food stamps, there are real people who get hurt when that happens. I think it’s an extraordinary indictment that we’re even at that point where we can have so many people living so precariously, and yet the conversation is about how to cut their benefits. J.T.: Did you get a sense that the inside-the-beltway mentality makes people indifferent to the needs of people? S.A.: One of the things that I find encouraging in the past few months is this series of labor actions at Walmarts and fast food outlets around the country. These are workers making 7 or 8 dollars an hour. These are usually part-time workers with almost no benefits for their work.
MacDonalds, KFC, all of these fast-food places have been seeing walk-offs. And it actually gives me hope, even though this political culture is beset by this lack of empathy. If you actually get people one-on-one, and you start talking with them, most people will sympathize with someone if they’re making pizzas or flipping burgers or standing on their feet all day long. At the very least they should be able to buy their own food in the evening, or put gas in their car or buy a bus pass. For me, this actually gives me tremendous hope, that even though there’s a stalemate federally, on the ground that’s a precursor from any activity in D.C. It’s not going to come from the top down. J.T.: We recently celebrated the Poor People’s March of 1963, and that was a case of people from the ground up, pushing Kennedy and the administration to acknowledge the needs of black folks. S.A.: You saw hundreds of thousands of people coming into Washington to push for social justice. They made a tremendous impact, first on John Kennedy, and then on Lyndon Johnson, and then later in the decade on Bobby Kennedy. I think it is a huge part of the American story, that notion of pushing for change. I do think we’re going to see that over the coming decade, because if we don’t, we’re witnessing such a transformation of what it means to be America and be American. That’s a huge thing to just stand by and watch.J.T.: I know you write from time to time in The Nation Magazine, and recently wrote about the woman in Seattle’s City Council who is a socialist. She’s called for a $15 minimum wage. (See our story here S.A.: I do think that locally we’re starting to see interesting political movements and ideas emerge, and that goes from the $15 living wage movement, but also to local initiatives to try to create better health care delivery systems. There are all kinds of experiments going on, new ways of doing business.
That’s all to the good, but there’s no organizing or institution with the muscle of the federal government. It’s a unique institution. Even though I think it’s great that these things are happening locally, ultimately, there also has to be action at the federal level. There has to be things like the creation of a higher federal minimum wage. There has to be a massive investment in public infrastructure. There has to be a massive national conversation about taxation. Because one of the things that has happened in recent years is that an extraordinary amount of money has been lost to the federal treasury by under taxing wealthy individuals, corporations, wealthy estates and so on. And there are all kinds of solutions out there.
You could create a financial transaction tax, for example, and because hedge funds and other investors are doing so many transactions, by sheer volume you could raise tens, and by some measure hundreds of billions of dollars by an almost invisibly small transaction tax. And that money could be used to reinvest — in schools, in public workers’ programs, job training. It could be used to build up public transport, used to subsidize the purchase of gas where there is no public transport and people are going bankrupt just driving to and from work. We could reinvest in the commons. We’re going to have to but it’s going to have to come from the federal government.J.T.: I think that there’s intervention called for in the financial industry. You talk about student debt, and for vets coming back and getting aid. How might the federal government intervene? S.A.: One of the solutions that I advocate for is an educational opportunity fund.
With Social Security, we essentially created a social insurance for the back end of people’s lives. Do the same thing with higher education. If you leave it purely to individuals, with more and more of them going into debt just to finance higher education, you build up massive levels of debt. There’s more student debt in the country now then there is credit card debt. What if we socialized the risk? We create a line-item tax, like we do with Medicare and Social Security, for education. It could be one quarter of 1 percent. That would generate enough money so that every individual, at birth, would have $5,000 invested into an education account. By the time they were of college age, it would be nearer to $20,000 by most measures. That’s not going to pay for higher education, but it will do a lot to reduce debt. Move it up to one percent, and that’s $20,000 for every child at birth.
That’s one idea. There are many other ideas. There is absolutely no reason that we have to accept the status quo on this. That also goes to the level of debt we accept around health care. There are other models being talked about in America.J.T.: Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation: Medicare for all, is a good way to describe it. S.A.: I think Republicans fought so hard against the Affordable Care Act from the beginning because they realized that if it actually became a success, it would be something that would actually motivate people to get out and vote to maintain it.
But it’s still trying to patch together universal coverage from an extremely messy system. In the coming years, however, we will come to expect that the vast majority of Americans will be covered with health insurance through the various exchanges or through the other parts of the patchwork. So I think it will become part of the debate in the coming years in election cycles. J.T.: It’s the norm in so many other industrialized countries. S.A.: Exactly. When it comes to poverty, when it comes to things that trigger poverty like unequal access to health care, we do a whole bunch worse than most of the nations we like to compare ourselves with, and we have a lot to learn. When you realize the unique scale of not just American poverty, but American inequality in the 21st century, the fact that France doesn’t have it, Germany doesn’t have it, Canada doesn’t, Australia doesn’t. Even England, which is the closest to us in terms of economic models. Even the United Kingdom doesn’t have the levels of inequality and social immobility that America has.J.T.: I think one of the ironic things is when people are struggling to survive, working as hard as they can, they don’t have the time or energy to listen to really good news coverage and they get the shock jocks. The news is just to shock and manipulate. To me that is very scary. S.A.: I think the current way the media functions — there are areas where it’s literally Fox News or nothing, or Rush Limbaugh or nothing — where basically the shriller you are, the louder you are, the more your message reverberates. Noise carries in this media culture. It’s very destructive of a common political language or of understanding our community. It’s a language of division. It’s a language that sells by being divisive.
It isn’t only a conservative issue. There are plenty of very shrill commentators on the left as well. I think one of the problems in the modern moment is we’ve lost our ability to think outside of our bubble. We’re so saturated by media that we basically gravitate to someone who’s going to say something we’ve already agreed with. I think increasingly readers are looking to be reaffirmed rather than be challenged. J.T.: You had a terrifying piece in your book mentioning the English political philosopher Stephen Lucas and writing about power. Could you describe that? S.A.: It’s the idea that there are different ways of manipulating a society or an individual. That power is expressed at its most basic level with brute force. And then there are progressive levels of subtlety. You can get someone to do something by shifting the kind of information they have available to them. And at its most sophisticated level, you create a framework that’s so uber-pervasive that it becomes invisible. It just becomes the backdrop and you no longer realize you’re being manipulated; that the way you understand events or respond to authority has in a sense been predetermined. You think you’re absolutely free to make decisions because you don’t really understand where those decisions are coming from. The more sophisticated a machinery of propaganda becomes, the harder it is to see that machinery at work.
This interview originally aired on KBOO radio
