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[Michel Bauwens]

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 *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.
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