---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: SchwartzReport <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 1:17 PM Subject: SchwartzReport To: [email protected] <https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=6ZQXERTX4RKJE> <http://www.facebook.com/schwartzreport> <http://twitter.com/schwartzreport1> *Wednesday, September 14, 2011* *Airbrushing History, American Style*<http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/airbrushing_history/> SCOTT ALTHAUS and KALEV LEETARU - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign *I am an historian, and this sort of thing is really vile. These are the acts of Orwellian cowards who know they have screwed-up in a major way, and want to hide it from history, while self-righteously and piously flaunting around history's stage. There is a constant lack of moral and ethical awareness in these people. You can see a perfect example of it in Dick Cheney's book. This is not a new document and we now see with better hindsight confirming its findings and expanding on them. This is geopolitics at a psychiatric level. Scott Althaus is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a faculty affiliate of the Cline Center for Democracy. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between media coverage of war and public support for war. Kalev Leetaru is Coordinator of Information Technology and Research at the Cline Center for Democracy; Chief Technology Advisor to the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science; Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and affiliated with the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He has worked extensively with web and data mining and recently completed a book manuscript titled Content Analysis: A Data Mining and Intelligence Approach. * Key Findings There are at least five documents taking the form of White House press releases that detail the number and names of countries in the "Coalition of the Willing" that publicly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At one time, all five of these documents were archived on the White House web site. Today, only three of these five documents can still be accessed in the White House archives. One of the missing lists was removed from the White House web site at some point in late 2004, and the other was removed between late 2005 and early 2006. These two "missing" lists represent earlier and smaller lists of coalition members. The text of three of these five documents was altered at some point after their initial release, even though in most cases the documents still retained their original release dates and were presented as unaltered originals. These alterations to the public record changed the apparent number of countries making up the coalition, as well as the names of countries in the coalition. Some of these alterations appear to have been made as long as two years after the document's purported release date. Of the five documents, only two appear to have remained unaltered after the date of their initial release. These are the only two of the five that could be authentic originals. However, we find no evidence that either of these press releases was distributed broadly to the media through normal electronic channels. Two versions of the coalition list dated March 27, 2003 can be currently accessed on the White House web site. Both claim that there were 49 countries in the coalition, but one lists only 48 by name, omitting Costa Rica. The revision history of this document shows that Costa Rica's name was removed retroactively at some point in late 2004, after the Costa Rican Supreme Court ruled that continued use of its name on the list was a violation of Costa Rica's constitution. Taken together, these findings suggest a pattern of revision and removal from the public record that spans several years, from 2003 through at least 2005. Instead of issuing a series of revised lists with new dates, or maintaining an updated master list while preserving copies of the old ones, the White House removed original documents, altered them, and replaced them with backdated modifications that only appear to be originals. AIRBRUSHING HISTORY, AMERICAN STYLE Legacies are in the air as President Bush prepares to leave the White House. How future historians will judge the president remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: future historians won't have all the facts needed to make that judgment. One legacy at risk of being forgotten is the way the Bush White House has quietly deleted or modified key documents in the public record that are maintained under its direct control. Remember the "Coalition of the Willing" that sided with the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq? If you search the White House web site today you'll find a press release dated March 27, 2003 listing 49 countries forming the coalition. A key piece of evidence in the historical record, but also a troubling one. It is an impostor. And although there were only 45 coalition members on the eve of the Iraq invasion, later deletions and revisions to key documents make it seem that there were always 49. The Bush White House seems to have systematically airbrushed parts of the official record regarding its own history. How extensively White House documents have been rewritten is anyone's guess, but in the case of the coalition list, the evidence is clear that extensive revision of the historical record has occurred. Deletions of original documents are easy to spot if you know where the originals were supposed to be. But we would never know about the revision history of documents presented by the White House as originals were it not for the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization devoted to documenting the changing face of the Internet. By taking broad snapshots of Web content every few weeks or months and then noting when documents have been modified or deleted, the Internet Archive allows us to retrace the history of revisions and deletions that were made to the various documents purporting to record the official coalition list. Modifications to the historical record by the Bush White House began in the opening days of the Iraq invasion and continued through at least the end of 2005. Many of these changes involve adding or deleting countries from the coalition list and then presenting the latest change as if it were the original list. One of the lists issued by the White House on March 21, 2003, identified 46 countries in the coalition, including the United States. At some point between April 7 and April 29, 2003, this list was updated to add Angola and Ukraine, bringing the total number of coalition countries up to 48. But instead of issuing a new list with a new date, the White House took the unusual step of retroactively revising the original March 21 press release, without indicating that the document had been modified from its original form. The "new" March 21st list of 48 coalition countries was still available on the White House web site as recently as August 2005, but by April 2006 its URL yielded only an empty page. Not a missing page: the document remains in the White House archive. Only its contents have been deleted. Today, no official press release mentioning fewer than 48 coalition countries appears in any publicly-searchable website maintained by the White House. Another list of 49 coalition countries - which adds the country of Tonga to the previous list of 48 - was issued by the White House at some point on or before April 13, 2003. This list remained unchanged in the White House archive until 2004, when it was temporarily removed from public view. By November 3, 2004 the list had been restored to the archive, but with two important changes. The revised list now included only 48 countries. Costa Rica, which had objected that its original inclusion was a mistake on the part of the Bush White House, no longer appears on this revised coalition list. The revised list also carried a new publication date: March 27, 2003, more than a year and a half before the revisions were made. At some later point, this revised and backdated list was modified once again by changing the number of coalition countries back to 49, even though the document lists only 48 by name. Two versions of what appear on first glance to be the same document now reside in the White House web archive, both dated March 27, 2003. One version claims 49 countries and names 49, including Costa Rica; the other claims 49 countries but names only 48, omitting any reference to Costa Rica. Updating lists to keep up with the times is one thing. Deleting original documents from the White House archives is another. Back-dating later documents and using them to replace the originals goes beyond irresponsible stewardship of the public record. It is rewriting history. The confusion caused by these documents is so great that even popular websites like Wikipedia are now promoting this "revised" history. Wikipedia's discussion of the coalition includes a screen capture of the March 21st, 2003 press release [2] after it had been revised to increase the number of members from 46 to 48. Since the date was not changed when the number of countries was revised, Wikipedia's entry for the document claims it is the original March 21st release. Thus, in many ways the White House's revised version of history has already begun propagating across the Internet. Our evidence suggests the troubling conclusion that major changes to the public record of the United States were not isolated events. We see instead a pattern of revision and removal from the public record that spans several years, from 2003 through at least 2005 in the case of the coalition lists. More troubling is that these changes were made in secret. Instead of issuing a series of revised lists with new dates, or maintaining an updated master list while preserving copies of the old ones, the White House removed original documents, altered them, and replaced them with backdated modifications that only appear to be originals. We are not suggesting that these deletions and revisions are the result of official policy decisions by senior officials in the Bush administration. The pattern we uncovered might be evidence of a whitewashing campaign to intentionally alter the documentary record, or of inappropriate archival practices that treat electronic documents as placeholders rather than historically specific elements of the governmental record. But whether by design or neglect, the result is the same: the removals and revisions of White House documents distort the historical record of what our government has said and done. We cannot tell how extensive was the White House effort to erase traces of recent American history. We cannot know whether changes are being made in these final weeks of the Bush administration that might forever alter the documentary trail of our nation's past. But this much is clear: Key documents for understanding American history have been quietly revised and deleted, at the hand of our own government. If there is a silver lining, it is how difficult it has become in the digital age to remove traces of what used to be called a "paper trail". The original coalition lists were distributed so widely and stored in so many locations that changing the "originals" housed in White House archives only affects those who rely on the official records. If the official records prove unreliable, then scholars and journalists may have an increasingly difficult time confirming the government's version of reality. One sad legacy of this outgoing administration is that it may have shifted the public burden of preserving our nation's history onto the shoulders of private citizens. WHY SMALL CHANGES TO AN OLD LIST ARE IMPORTANT TODAY One might ask why seemingly minor changes to a five-year-old list are so important: Why does the changing of a few countries and numbers warrant our attention? The list itself is only part of the story. Of greater concern is the extensive effort over a period of years that reshaped the historical record of the Iraq invasion, and removed from public view evidence that might be used to piece together the original facts. Since the coalition list was originally issued more than five years ago, it is important to clarify its historical importance at the time of the Iraq invasion. Five years ago, the United States found itself facing international resistance to the idea of preemptively invading a sovereign state. By detailing the countries making up the "Coalition of the Willing," this list was an important part of the Bush administration's argument for the invasion. It suggested that there were numerous other nations supporting the American military action: not the United States acting alone, but a coalition of nations from around the globe forming together to defeat an enemy purported to threaten the world. The list of coalition members figured prominently in discussions of the invasion as it was underway. It remained an important topic throughout the early post-invasion period of the Iraq War, and was at the center of a disagreement between John Edwards and Dick Cheney during the! 2004 Vice-Presidential debate. In this way, the number and names of coalition allies played an outsized role in helping to vindicate the American military action against Iraq. The evidence in our analysis does not tell us why the White House went to such effort to modify seemingly innocuous information contained in the coalition list documents. But the extent of White House effort to alter the contents of this list suggests greater cause for concern beyond the five documents in our analysis. If so much energy was focused on reshaping the names and number of coalition countries, one can only imagine what might have been done to higher-profile or more sensitive content on the White House web site. Our study is the first to demonstrate that the factual content of press releases was revised and backdated in ways that made the revised documents appear original. But our study is not the first to note unusual content changes to the White House web site. In December 2003, the Washington Post noted that the U.S. Agency for International Development had removed from its website the transcript of an interview with its head, Andrew S. Natsios, in which he told ABC's Nightline that the total cost to the American public of the Iraq war would be only $1.7 billion. The same article noted that the headline of one of President Bush's speeches had been revised after the fact to insert "Major" into the title "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." It also detailed a wide range of redactions and changes on other agency sites under the administration's control. Eleven months later one of the coalition lists was removed from the White House website after a controversial exchange between Dick Cheney and John Edwards in the Vice-Presidential Debate on October 5, 2004. A few news reports noted the disappearance of the list (these are discussed later in our analysis) but failed to follow up when the list was finally restored to the site. Our analysis shows that the replacement list was a country lighter and backdated more than a year earlier. In years since, occasional attention has been given to edits in other portions of the White House web site. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics noted late last year that during a discussion of whether the White House Office of Administration was subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the corresponding White House page was suddenly changed from saying the agency was subject to FOIA to stating that it was exempt. Unlike the lists in our analysis, the text in question came from an informational web page that did not purport to be an original document. Until now, each of these incidents appeared to be a one-time edit or deletion. Seen in isolation, each of these incidents could have a reasonable explanation. But the pattern we find has not been noticed before, and it is much harder to explain away. We find clear evidence that the White House not only altered informational web pages, but altered important documents in the public record. The trail of edits, deletions, and backdated revisions spanned a period of at least two years. All were focused on the contents of an historically important list used by the Bush White House to vindicate its decision to invade Iraq. In this way, our analysis is not the story of small changes to an old list. It is more importantly the story of how key facts from the historical record of the Iraq invasion were reshaped, an effort that continued for years after the invasion had ended. If the same sort of reshaping was also done to other parts of the public record maintained on the White House web site, then the scope of the problem could be much larger. *Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9330>* *Census: US Poverty Rate Swells to Nearly 1 in 6*<http://news.yahoo.com/census-us-poverty-rate-swells-nearly-1-6-142639972.html> HOPE YEN - The Associated Press *Twenty two per cent of children in the United States live in poverty; the largest percentage of any industrialized nation in the world. How can anybody live with that? The economic and war policies we have followed in the post-Clinton years, Republican and Democrat alike, have proven a disaster. You have to be enthrall to ideology to want to continue them. They are a nightmare that will never end until we change to rational humane national and international policies and programs. We are suffering from a national bout of insanity, and self-destruction. The election of 2012 is going to determine whether we return to being a country or continue as an asylum. I cannot get over these figures, and what they say about our national character. I guess I should not be surprised given the cheering the other night when it was noted that Gov. Perry had put to death 234 people. Those cheering I hope to God do not represent America. Because if they do, we're not a society, we're a mob. * WASHINGTON -- The ranks of U.S. poor swelled to nearly 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over two decades. The Census Bureau's annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged in the midst of his re-election fight that the unemployment rate could persist at high levels through next year. The overall poverty rate climbed to 15.1 percent, or 46.2 million, up from 14.3 percent in 2009. Reflecting the lingering impact of the recession, the U.S. poverty rate from 2007-2010 has now risen faster than any three-year period since the early 1980s, when a crippling energy crisis amid government cutbacks contributed to inflation, spiraling interest rates and unemployment. Measured by total numbers, the 46 million now living in poverty is the largest on record dating back to when the census began tracking poverty in 1959. Based on percentages, it tied the poverty level in 1993 and was the highest since 1983. The share of Americans without health coverage rose from 16.1 percent to 16.3 percent - or 49.9 million people - after the Census Bureau made revisions to numbers of the uninsured. That is due mostly because of continued losses of employer-provided health insurance in the weakened economy. Congress passed a health overhaul last year to address rising numbers of the uninsured. While the main provisions don't take effect until 2014, one aspect taking effect in late 2010 allowed young adults 26 and younger to be covered under their parents' health insurance. Brett O'Hara, chief of the Health and Disability Statistics branch at the Census Bureau, noted that the uninsured rate declined - from 29.3 percent to 27.2 percent - for adults ages 18 to 24 compared to some other age groups. The median - or midpoint - household income was $49,445, down 2.3 percent from 2009. Bruce Meyer, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, cautioned that the worst may yet to come in poverty levels, citing in part continued rising demand for food stamps this year as well as "staggeringly high" numbers in those unemployed for more than 26 weeks. He noted that more than 6 million people now represent the so-called long-term unemployed, who are more likely to fall into poverty, accounting for than two out of five currently out of work. Other census findings: -Poverty rose among all race and ethnic groups except Asians. The number of Hispanics in poverty increased from 25.3 percent to 26.6 percent; for blacks it increased from 25.8 percent to 27.4 percent, and Asians it was flat at 12.1 percent. The number of whites in poverty rose from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent. *-Child poverty rose from 20.7 percent to 22 percent.* -Poverty among people 65 and older was statistically unchanged at 9 percent, after hitting a record low of 8.9 percent in 2009. *Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9331>* *College Grads Behind Increase in Bankruptcy Filings*<http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/09/13/institute_for_financial_literacy_college_grads_behind_increase_i.html> GREG HOWARD - Slate *This is the hard evidence of the increasingly desperate plight of the American middle-class.* College graduates represent the fastest growing demographic of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy over the past five years, according to a new report out Tuesday. Wait, really? Our high school guidance counselors always told us that a college degree guaranteed financial success down the road. Not necessarily so, according to the survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, which found that wealthier, more educated households are driving the recent spike in bankruptcy filings. 'We’re told that if you do go and get advanced education, you’re going to be almost guaranteed this economic success,” Leslie Linfield, the group’s executive director, told the Washington Post, which got an early look at the report. Linfield added that the recession proved that 'higher education was no guarantee that you weren’t going to be at risk.” The percentage of debtors with bachelor’s degrees rose from 11.2 percent to 13.6 percent between 2006 and 2010, and debtors with graduate degrees increased from 4.9 percent to 6.7 percent. In the same span, there was a decline in the percentage of bankruptcy filers who didn’t finish college, though they still accounted for about a third of all bankruptcies, the Post reports. The Institute for Financial Literacy also found sharp changes in the ages of consumers filing for bankruptcy. While the number of consumers between 18 and 34 who have filed since 2006 has fallen 31 percent, the amount of people 55 and older who have filed has increased 25 percent. Linfield said that although credit cards and unsecured loans are generally what cause most people to file, hefty mortgages and falling home values are also contributing to the current rise in bankruptcies. More than 70 percent of bankrupted consumers blame their current troubles on being overextended in credit. Still, Linfield thinks we may have seen the worst of it as the number of bankruptcies across the board is beginning to drop. Research from the American Bankruptcy Institute supports Linfield’s hunch, reporting an 11-percent drop in August bankruptcies from a year ago as consumers are learning to embrace the shock, slowing down their spending to balance their personal funds. *Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9332>* *Fox News' Paranoid Alternate Universe*<http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/fox-news-paranoid-alternate> ADAM SERWER - Mother Jones *This is how effective the disinformation campaign on the Right has become. This truly is a parallel universe.* Two-thirds of viewers who say Fox News is the news source they trust most believe discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups, according to a study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution and the Public Religion Research Institute. The number, 68 percent, is an exact reversal of the percentage of black people in the same poll who say that discrimination against whites is not as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. The study was based on polling conducted by PRRI.* The Brookings/PRRI study uses "reverse discrimination"-an unfortunate term that suggests a difference in kind, not in degree-to describe anti-white discrimination. Nevertheless, the revelations about the views of consumers who most trust Fox News are disturbing: Among Americans who say they most trust Fox News, 26 percent say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, nearly twice as many as say discrimination against minority groups is a critical issue (14 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, only 8 percent of Americans who most trust public television say reverse discrimination is a critical issue, compared to 27 percent who say discrimination against minorities is a critical issue. The financial crisis wiped out 20 years of minority wealth gains, and minority incarceration and unemployment rates are far higher than those of whites, but white Americans have nevertheless become more receptive to the idea that whites face as much discrimination as minorities. While the numbers for those who trust Fox News are much higher, a majority of whites in the study, 51 percent, also say they believe discrimination against whites is as big of a problem as discrimination against minorities. That's despite relatively low levels of interaction between whites and minorities. According to the study, "More than 8-in-10 Americans report having a conversation with an African-American person at least once a day (43 percent) or occasionally (40 percent)." Most of these exchanges, apparently, involve black people callously turning down whites applying for jobs or home loans. Nevertheless, while opinions of Muslims and immigrants vary by age and political perspectiv! e, demographic groups surveyed expressed positive impressions of African Americans across the board. (Otherwise, they might be racist or something.) When it comes to Muslims, the study shows that the funders of the more than $40 million Shariah panic industry are getting their money's worth. Although two-thirds of Americans say that Muslims are not trying to establish Shariah law in the US, "[o]ver the last 8 months agreement with this question has increased by 7 points, from 23 percent in February 2011 to 30 percent today." The number of Republicans who buy that Muslims are trying to establish Shariah law in the US is up 14 points since August 2011, from 31 percent to 45 percent. Fox News is a crucial outlet for fomenting Shariah panic. According to the study, "There is a strong correlation between trusting Fox News and negative views of Islam and Muslims," as "[n]early 6-in-10 Republicans who most trust Fox News believe that American Muslims are trying to establish Shari'a law in the U.S.," and 72 percent of "Fox News Republicans" agree that Islam is "at odds with American values." If you're a Republican, you're more likely to think that white people are as discriminated against as minorities and that American Muslims represent a fifth column trying to subvert the Constitution. But if you're a Republican who watches Fox News, then you're far more likely to believe those things, thanks to a steady media diet of racial resentment and Muslim-baiting paranoia. *Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9333>* *Since When Is It a Crime to Be Poor?*<http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/nickel-and-dimed-afterword> BARBARA EHRENREICH - Mother Jones *This is how to create social revolution. * I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some high-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, "Make love not war," and then-down at the bottom-"Screw it, just make money." When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, "I never thought…" or "I hadn't realized…" To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she'd always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn't always an option. And if I had a quarter for every person who's told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation. Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer. At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn't sure how many people it directly applied to-only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, issued a report entitled "Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families," which found an astounding 29 percent of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a bare-bones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes-though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures. The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008. Post-Meltdown Poverty When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book-the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans-you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful. In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed "experiment," had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job. For the last couple of years, I have attempted to find out what was happening to the working poor in a declining economy-this time using conventional reporting techniques like interviewing. I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed. This wasn't easy, because most of the addresses and phone numbers I had taken away with me had proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and suspensions of telephone service. I had kept in touch with "Melissa" over the years, who was still working at Walmart, where her wages had risen from $7 to $10 an hour, but in the meantime her husband had lost his job. "Caroline," now in her 50s and partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, had left her deadbeat husband and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recession, but only because they had already been living in what amounts to a permanent economic depression. Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the "nouveau poor"-formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since deindustrialization began in the 1980s. In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared. How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance. Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to "food auctions," which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there's the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled." In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices. The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space-by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers. It's hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities. In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that "people who've lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent." According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia, the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entire family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch. No one could call suicide a "coping strategy," but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide-or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families. "Torture and Abuse of Needy Families" We do of course have a collective way of ameliorating the hardships of individuals and families-a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitution. But its response to the economic emergency of the last few years has been spotty at best. The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30 percent from prerecession levels. But welfare-the traditional last resort for the down-and-out until it was "reformed" in 1996-only expanded by about 6 percent in the first two years of the recession. The difference between the two programs? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no. Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if "they didn't want to work." Their troubles began well before the recession, when Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs-only to find that those skills are no longer in demand. The obvious fallback was disability benefits, but-catch-22-when Joe applied he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan. This would cost $800 to $900, which the Parentes do not have; nor has Joe, unlike the rest of the family, been able to qualify for Medicaid. When they married as teenagers, the plan had been for Kristen to stay home with the children. But with Joe out of action and three children to support by the middle of this decade, Kristen went out and got waitressing jobs, ending up, in 2008, in a "pretty fancy place on the water." Then the recession struck and she was laid off. Kristen is bright, pretty, and to judge from her command of her own small kitchen, probably capable of holding down a dozen tables with precision and grace. In the past she'd always been able to land a new job within days; now there was nothing. Like 44 percent of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart. So the Parentes turned to what remains of welfare-TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It's an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them. After Kristen applied, nothing happened for six weeks-no money, no phone calls returned. At school, the Parentes' seven-year-old's class was asked to write out what wish they would present to a genie, should a genie appear. Brianna's wish was for her mother to find a job because there was nothing to eat in the house, an aspiration that her teacher deemed too disturbing to be posted on the wall with the other children's requests. When the Parentes finally got into "the system" and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF "Torture and Abuse of Needy Families." From the start, the TANF experience was "humiliating," Kristen says. The caseworkers "treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks." The Parentes discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting. In addition, Kristen had to drive 35 miles a day to attend "job readiness" classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were "frankly a joke." Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School, "applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police." There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one's children's true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime. How the Safety Net Became a Dragnet The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America. Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation. Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: "If you're lying on a sidewalk, whether you're homeless or a millionaire, you're in violation of the ordinance," a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France's immortal observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges…" In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more "neutral" infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container. The report lists America's 10 "meanest" cities-the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando-but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction's city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, "an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance. That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it's definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, DC-the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one-for "criminal trespassing," as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. "Can you imagine?" asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. "They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?" The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans. One anti-sharing law was just overturned in Orlando, but the war on illicit generosity continues. Orlando is appealing the decision, and Middletown, Connecticut, is in the midst of a crackdown. More recently, Gainesville, Florida, began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day, and Phoenix has been using zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people. For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors' prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can't pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to "sit out their tickets" in jail. More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you're in "contempt of the court." Or suppose you miss a payment and your car insurance lapses, and then you're stopped for something like a broken headlight (about $130 for the bulb alone). Now, depending on the state, you may have your car impounded and/or face a steep fine-again, exposing you to a possible court summons. "There's just no end to it once the cycle starts," says Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. "It just keeps accelerating." The second-and by far the most reliable-way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively "profiled" for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you're "littering"; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you're displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don't get grumpy about it or you could be "resisting arrest." In what has become a familiar pattern, the government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt. The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it's "gotcha" all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today, exactly the same number of Americans-2.3 million-reside in prison as in public housing. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents. The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet. It is not clear whether economic hard times will finally force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment. With even the official level of poverty increasing-to over 14 percent in 2010-some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of "crimes," but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they'll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt. So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America's working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list-a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do. Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: If we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions. Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty-though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down. *Post Comment » <http://www.schwartzreport.net/addcomment.php?id=9334>* *The SchwartzReport is a daily publication provided free of charge by schwartzreport.net Portions Copyright 2001 - 2011 by Nemoseen Media * -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens