The
Responsibility of Poverty
Child
and Family Advocacy
November
5, 2014
Poverty
expands the globe and stretches over time through economic changes and
historical eras. There has always been poverty, and we can assume that there
always will be poverty. Attempts to cure
poverty that are documented in our legislation seem to only prolong it with a
bit of reluctant temporary relief for some of the needy. The United States’
social programs provide career spaces for intervention. Media taboo at covering
the truth of poverty’s effects on families serves to keep the majority ignorant
and distracted while covering for behind the scenes pocket-lining. As a result,
our societal support for public policy that aids poor is met by loathing of the
so-called sloths.
The
exploration of what it is like to be poor tends to bring pity, but the action
to solve poverty has a different character. The dominant decide the fate of the
dominated without fully understanding the affected poor person’s struggle. The
foundation for public attitude towards poverty begins with the government
policy, with media that is created by the political and economically elite, and
then it goes into the minds of the average person. Those living in poverty are
the bottom class status, with a narrowed version of quality of life and limited
capability—the hopeless who survive but not thrive. Poverty creates the desperate
gleaners of society: ultimately they get what is left over, if even.
Following
the War of 1812, America began to grow due to immigration and trade. In New York
this marked the beginning of the tenement housing. This lifestyle is documented
in the Jacob Riis classic, How the Other
Half Lives. The first tenement house was called the “rear house” and was a
home that used to belong to the wealthy aristocratic Manhattan family, the
Knickerbockers (Riis, 2010). All of the
homes along the river were once inhabited by the wealthier crowd, but were now
rented out to the poor as tenement-housing. Tenement houses were once a
blessing for a hard-working poor family to have a home, and that was the case
until the corruption of the landlord losing sight of healthy living conditions
and tolerance of misbehavior of the tenants (Riis, 2010). Around 1857 (when the
Republican Party began) these homes were remodeled by their real-estate and
boarding-house agents, to accommodate for more families per home. This required
drastic partitioning of rooms into smaller rooms (sometimes window-less). The
wealthier were taking an opportunity to make the most money on the poor. The
conditions of these homes were dilapidated and the landlords blamed the
conditions on the tenants’ destructive behavior which went without
accountability (Riis, 2010). The landlords were only after the rent and
overlooked the needs of the people. Poverty creates a vulnerable group of
people based on the desperate fashion of survival and their lowered
expectations of their own treatment.
At
the end of the 1800’s, the Settlement House movement began. “Inspired by the
efforts of Canon Samuel Barnett’s Toynbee Hall in London to bring the
privileged and underprivileged together to overcome the effects of spiritual
and social disintegration, Stanton Coit and Charles B Stover founded the
Neighborhood Guild of New York City in 1887” (Stern & Axinn, 2012, p. 107).
The plan was to help integrate the immigrants by living with them in a
settlement house. These educated people felt that society would benefit from
their efforts. Then in 1889, came Jane Addams with her Chicagoan-established Hull
House (Stern & Axinn, 2012). The success of Jane Addams was not just the
historical initiation of social work as a profession. She also balanced her
protection of them by ensuring their autonomy and dignity. In her book, Twenty Years at Hull House, Addams
writes about how “heart-breaking” unemployment was for the neighborhood that
she worked with. Addams (1910) describes how these people were taken advantage
of and became victims of the “padrone who fleeced them unmercifully” (p. 221),
or how they became the “mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies”
(Addams, 1910).
Hull-House
made an investigation both of the padrone and of the agencies in our immediate
vicinity, and the outcome confirming what we already suspected, we eagerly
threw ourselves into a movement to procure free employment bureaus under State
control until a law authorizing such bureaus and giving the officials intrusted
with their management power to regulate private employment agencies, passed the
Illinois Legislature in 1899. (Addams, 1910)
Addams (1910) references
Tolstoy’s story “What to Do,” which
describes his efforts to “relieve the unspeakable distress in the Moscow winter
of 1881” (p. 260). His conviction was that “only he who literally shares his
own shelter and food with the needy, can claim to have served them” (Addams,
1910). Addams (1910) discusses her point of view that the resident “social
workers” at the Settlement House were impatient with the cooperation and
methods of society for dealing with the problems of poverty, but through the
twenty years, they saw the “charitable people, through their very knowledge of
the poor, constantly approach nearer to those methods formerly designated as
radical” (p. 306). This real solution for poverty has the benefits of accountability
of the poor, guidance, and exact resource links alleviating the guesswork.
Addams approached legislation without hesitation because she knew exactly what
is genuinely needed to happen for those without a voice.
In
the worst of environments today the poor suffer poverty-stricken conditions in
a nation of a wealth of resources. In a long-term study by author Jonathan
Kozol, A Fire in the Ashes, he
describes people living in appalling poverty. This was a twenty-five year study
of tenement housing in New York by documenting the lives and struggles of the
tenants and their children. Many of the tenants were displaced by broken
marriages, due to death, divorce, abuse or other causes. The story of Alice
Washington, for example, a 42 year old woman with positive outlook even in her
hopeless condition, offers a sense of stability to those around her. She ended
up in the deplorable tenement houses due to an abusive husband and was somewhat
of a mother figure for many of the young mothers in the same living conditions
of filth and poverty. Her healthcare was limited and available only when she
was near death, which occurred several times over the years. She suffered from many
ailments, but in the end died from a combination of cancer and HIV/AIDS (Kozol,
2012). There were problems in these tenement houses that were mainly a result
of the lack of aid. There was no one responsible or accountable for these
people’s existence. Drug-use and crime went without consequence. Health care
and health maintaining resources were not offered. There was nothing but the
use of raw survival skills among these people. Some of the children, like
Silvio, another character in Fire in the Ashes,
didn’t fare so well in the tenement houses due to the pressures of gangs, street-life,
inequality of opportunity, lack of resources, and other issues related to
poverty that caused him to have a violent death at a young age (Kozol, 2010).
The experiences show are so traumatic in cases of extreme poverty that the
people involved seem to lose hope in the system.
Within
these two books, Jacob Riis’ How the
Other Half Lives, and Jonathan Kozol’s Fire
in the Ashes, there are several similarities, yet one documentation is in
the 1800’s and the other is in modern-day times. The similarities are the
decrepit housing conditions, the unavailable aid and links to valuable,
operational resources, and most important, someone responsible overseeing the
entire program. Jane Addam’s Hull-House, however, is a success. The
hopelessness of eradicating poverty is a reality, deterring people from
becoming radical about the issue because of the common sense that wealth is not
evenly distributed, so why bother? There will always be poverty.
The
stereotypes of families living in poverty are substance abuse, domestic
violence, child neglect, lack of goals, and, the eugenicist’s favorite, lesser
intelligence of those who are raised in poor areas. “Strong families have
troubled lives also. To be a strong family is not to be without troubles, it is
much more: it is the presence in the family of important guidelines for living
and the ability as a family to surmount life’s inevitable challenges when they
arise” (Stinnett & DeFrain, 1985). America has some people who feel that they are
more deserving and have a need to have their own people separated from the
poor. The Bell Curve is based on a Social Darwinist type of eugenicist
view. The main point of the book is to promote the idea that “the isolation of
the cognitive elite is compounded by its choices of where to live, shop, play,
worship, and send its children to school” (Herrnstein & Murray).
The
Census determines who is considered to be poor by the material possessions that
a family has, such as an X-box, a microwave, or cable TV (Smiley & West, 2012).
What this implies is that possessing material items, even if those things are
used or dug from the garbage of another’s house, constitutes a level of wealth.
The rich are not going to be willing to give up the fight against paying taxes
to help the poor when the Census suggests that being poor is what one makes of
it. Compare America’s poverty situation with Brazil’s. At the turn of the
century when all of the immigrants were flooding into the Americas, European
immigrants were encouraged to settle to increase the white vote over the black
natives, and slowly the black natives were pushed to the Northeast of Brazil
where it was already economically declining anyway (Penn, 2005). Today, Brazil
is home to some of the world’s poorest children, even though their country is
in the upper third percent of the world’s per capita income (Penn, 2005). This
shameful inequality among the people in Brazil is due to the same factors as
the United States and every other country have—the social and political elite,
who only care about their own. The conclusion then would be that there will
always be people living in poverty.
There
need to be relief efforts set into place that are significantly stronger than past
attempts. Past failures need to be examined to prioritize how modern concepts
are formulated. United States must strive to make its safety nets for families
better than those of other nations. A study in the American Journal of Public Health determined that any inequality in
income distribution of a country causes the life expectancy to be lowered. The
rich do not want to put any tax money into valued community efforts for public
services like hospitals and schools (In Ore, 2011). This does not hurt them,
but it hurts the rest of the country. There is lack of funds to attribute to
what the majority of the country needs to maintain health, but the inequality
of income distribution creates lower life expectancy for the entire country.
Throughout
the 1800’s power and control of America’s wealthiest over the poor created problems
in the society of poverty. Solutions to social issues were experimental. The
Orphan Train, founded by Charles Loring Brace, was a back-up plan to place children
when their parents were financially ruined. This was done instead of just
ensuring family unity with financial aid. Jane Addams brought harmony to the
immigrant poor population by establishing the Hull House in Chicago, as well as
legislation initiatives for those poor. The Charity Organization Society made
their best attempts at setting fine examples of moral behavior as they visited
the poor. In the 1800’s, the rich were getting richer with industry and paid
their workers the poor wages (Smitha, 2014). Their rationalization was that the
workers could work hard enough if they wanted to change the way that they lived
(Smitha, 2014). The bottom line of the relationship between the rich and poor
in the 1800’s was that there was no responsibility to aid made into law, so
that was it. The rich were not made to do it, so they did not.
The
wealthy have maintained those same basic characteristics in attitude towards
the poor over the generations; however, there has been great progress in
awareness of poverty’s needs too. In A New Framework for the Study of Power,
Lowi describes the antecedents of progress, such as the Sixteenth Amendment
that authorized income tax in 1913 when World War I began. Then in 1933, Franklin
D Roosevelt introduced the New Deal to raise individual taxes and formed
several programs to initiate some wealth redistribution (Lowi, 1970). “The
poverty line was first set by the government in 1964, when it was determined
that an income of $3,000 for the year was considered adequate to meet the needs
of an urban family of four” and that salary was divided up into expected
expenditures, accounting for a third of it to go towards food (Burton, 1992).
Taxes were a way of accommodating the deficiencies in the lives of the poor. In
1986 however the Tax Reform Act enabled the rich to achieve loopholes (Lowi,
1970). By the time Clinton was put into office in the early 1990’s, the
technology boom produced an economic spirit. In 1994, when the Republicans
captured congress with their anti-Clinton initiative, the White House became
conservative and measures like the 1996 Welfare Reform were passed. Meanwhile,
back on Wall Street, the rich were collecting all of the money (Phillips, 2002).
By the end of the twentieth century, the gap was established between the rich
and the poor as the infamous 1% began. At every milestone of the poor people in
need, the wealthy population was using their position in society to make the
decisions about the poor’s survival. In an interview with Frank Norris, the
author of Octopus, he says:
When a new road penetrates a new country or a new locality it is
necessarily in itself a trust. That community through which the solitary road
runs takes on new life. But in time, if another road does not penetrate the
same locality, the original road, the trust, will get the better of the shippers
in that community. If a second road enters the locality, however, and competes
with the first road then there is a war and the farmer benefits thereby. As
soon as the farmer begins to get prosperous at the expense of the competing
roads the latter combine and the farmer or shipper gets the worst. (Norris,
1901)
In other
words, the poor have the power to accept or reject the power of the wealthy,
but instead they trust them because those wealthy bring opportunity due to the
potential inherent in their resources. The problem, or the resulting
maltreatment of the poor, is that the power that the wealthy accumulate
attracts conflict for them from competitors who want the same power. The end
result is the poor get railroaded, literally. The wealthy find ways of keeping
their seat safe from the competition. This can be done by promoting the needs
of other wealthy to create their own safety net. Then the wealthy are one
moving system running over the needs of the poor who originally gave the
wealthy their power in trust and in hope. Power and control over another human
inevitably leads to abuse, unless someone accepts responsibility for the needs
of the powerless.
The
media has shown bias in the favor of the wealthy, white, Republican men and
their opinions (Peck, 2012). The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was pushed
through Congress from the lobbyists represented by the wealthy station owners.
Those wealthy owners increased their control. As the local programmers lost
control, broadcast came under control of the wealthy (Missmollyana, 2011). What
used to be fifty corporations dominating the media are now only six
corporations who control what America is exposed to in the media (Snyder, 2010).
One of those corporations is owned by Mr. Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant from
Australia. Murdoch’s media empire includes Fox Television, the Dow Jones (Parent
Corporation of The Wall Street Journal),
The Boston Herald, The London Times, The New York Post, and
more. “Mr. Murdoch may be best known in this country
as the man who created Fox News as a counterweight to what he saw as a liberal
bias in the news media” (Becker, 2007). Murdoch pays out eleven-million dollars
to his army of lobbyists (Becker, 2007). An article written in a business
magazine captures the drama surrounding the results of the Nielsen Media
Research showing sharp drops in ratings by minority viewers for Fox Television
programs. Murdoch did not want to hear that, so he launched a smear campaign on
the Nielsen Research and their CEO, Susan Whiting. In the end, Nielsen’s
research only concluded that the drop in ratings for Fox channels was due to
the fact that the minorities chose to watch local channels instead (Bianco
& Grover, 2004). Murdoch gets his own way by force, almost bullying, his
way through corporate America. His anti-liberal media goals reek of power. Among the biggest fans of Fox Television are
the Tea Baggers, a group that identify themselves as Conservative Republicans.
“In this iteration of conservative mobilization, Republican elites [and Tea
Baggers] have been able to rely on powerful conservative media sources, led by
Fox News” (Williamson, Skucpol, Coggin, 2001). According to the article The Tea
Party and the remaking of Republican Conservatism, the Tea Baggers rely on Fox
News for support and for connection to their conservative topics. The majority
of the group is white, high-income men with a primary concern in America of
government spending on social welfare (except for their own Social Security,
the highest amount of expenditure dispersed in social welfare). “Opposition is concentrated on resentment of
perceived federal government ‘handouts’ to ‘undeserving’ groups, the definition
of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes . . .
particularly ‘welfare’ mothers” (Williamson, Skucpol, Coggin, 2001). The entire
topic becomes ironic when the total amount of government subsidies that News
Corp, owned by Murdoch, accumulated since 2005, was found to reach $33,090,399 (Good Jobs First, 2014). An Alternet article
describes how Mr. Murdoch successfully found loopholes to escape 2 out of 4
years of taxes with the other two years being incomplete payments, with
domestic pretax profits topping $9.4 billion. The article also makes the point
that Murdoch’s empire advertises for corporations like General Motors that have
had government bail-outs with tax-payer money (Howard, 2011). In America those
that are against assisting the poor in surviving, apparently are not ashamed to
admit it—even on television and media, which they actually use as a tool to
emphasize that perspective.
Throughout the history of the United States there have
been both the greed of the rich and oppression of the poor. Iniquities come
with rewards of power, and someone has to lose.
Recommendations
The
greed and power of wealth have found ways of keeping their seat in society over
time using the oppression of the poor. The resolution in this conflict is
obvious if historical failures and successes are explored. Finding loopholes
and weaving socioeconomic webs produce individual power, but harm the overall
economy for the majority.
I
recommend that legislation to end loopholes be held accountable by a dedicated
task force. During the 1990’s the government passed several reform acts
affecting population segments (in particular 1996) allowing the wealthy to excel.
It also caused those who value equality to be distracted by the detail of the
many reforms for socioeconomic and social welfare which allowed for backdoor
economic corruption.
I
recommend responsibility for poverty at the legislative level in form of special,
unnegotiable taxes for those individuals who have used their financial wizardry
to accumulate most of our country’s money. This responsibility holds the
population accountable as a whole system and eliminates the abusive powers
associated with economic monopoly.
I
recommend tenement housing for those who live in poverty. Past failures must be
examined to avoid deplorable conditions. The success of Jane Addams can be
taken as an example. Tenement housing with guidelines could benefit a family
better than the current TANF system of welfare. The barriers associated with
tenement housing are only in circumstances of neglect and irresponsibility. The
National Social Worker Association should be given control of this rather than
the direct control of government agencies working alone because they obviously
are acting on behalf of another population.
Providing
protection with tenement housing offers a person direction for their
independence if done correctly. A program formed that categorized a person’s
position using formulas would then place them in a track to achievement while
providing guidance and accountability. Categories can be accessed by using a
formula that included racial disparities, education level, sex, dependent
children, legal barriers and other types of barriers to create a plan for
individual potential to be maximized. House laundry, childcare, classes,
training and planning exercises could be programmed with parent-like guidance
over planned time-lines. The working would have to save their money and turn in
weekly bank statements proving they are not spending their money (unless
authorized to do so). At the end of the time-line of the program, the saved
money is used for the next step to independence. A person is not released from
the program until all barriers are relinquished such as educational and
training so that a stable future is possible. Social workers will live on site
and oversee all activity, including curfews, drug free zones, daily room
checks, and weekly paperwork turned in from the tenants. A weekly grocery trip
with their social worker present will assure nutrition to each member and
accountability to the funding for food subsidy.
Inequality is a part of the cons of having
freedom, but there is at least an expectation of the dignity and worth of
everyone. If equality is not available, demonstrate what has been learned by
history and create legislation requiring the top percentage of wealthy to give
back to the poor. As the wealthy have fully displayed their skill at acquiring
the wealth of our country, they need to expect to be required to support those
people that have been subjects of their financial and social brilliance.
References:
Addams,
J. (1910). Twenty years at Hull-House: with
autobiographical notes. New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco: The
Macmillan Company.
Becker,
Jo. (2007, June 25). Murdoch, ruler
of a vast empire, reaches out for even more: The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/business/media/25murdoch.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&
Burton,
C.E. (1992). The poverty debate: Politics
and the poor in America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press
Good
Jobs First. (2014).Accountable
development and smart growth for working families. Retrieved from
http://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=news-corp
Herrnstien,
Richard J. & Murray, Charles. (1994). The
Bell Curve: Intelligence and class structure in American Life. New York,
NY: The Free Press.
Howard,
M. (2011, March). How you end up bankrolling Fox News: News Corp and Rupert
Murdoch weasel out of paying taxes: When gain, prosperous, multinational corporations
get out of their tax obligations, ordinary citizens are the ones who are forced
to make up the shortfall. Alter Net Retrieved
from
http://www.alternet.org/story/150327/how_you_end_up_bankrolling_fox_news%3A_news_corp._and_rupert_murdoch_weasel_out_of_paying_taxes
Kozol,
Jonathon. (2012). Fire in the ashes:
Twenty-five years among the poorest children in America. New York: Broadway
Books/Random House, Inc.;
Lowi,
T. (1970). The power elite in America.
Ed. Crockett. USA: D.C Health and Company.
Norris, F. (1901). Nader, J. M.(2009). A Recovered
Interview with Frank Norris. American Literary Realism 42(1), 79-82.
University of Illinois Press. Retrieved November 4, 2014, from Project MUSE
database.
Penn,
Helen. (2005). Unequal childhoods: Young
children’s lives in poor countries. New York, NY: Routledge
Phillips,
K. (2002). Wealth and democracy: A
political history of the American rich. New York, NY: Broadway Books
Ore,
Tracy E. (2011). The social construction
of difference and inequality: Race, class, gender, and sexuality. 5th
ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Peck,
Adam. (2012, April). If its Sunday, its meet the Republican white men. Think Progress. Retrieved from
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/04/19/467647/sunday-shows-white-men-gop/
Riis,
Jacob. (2010). How the other half lives:
A Jacob Riis classic, (including photography). USA: Readaclass.com
Smiley,
Travis. & West, Cornel. (2012). The
rich and the rest of us: A poverty manifesto. New York, NY: Smileybooks.
Snyder,
Michale. (2010, Oct). Who owns the media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations that
control almost everything we watch, hear, and read. The Economic Collapse. Retrieved from http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/who-owns-the-media-the-6-monolithic-corporations-that-control-almost-everything-we-watch-hear-and-readhttp://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/who-owns-the-media-the-6-monolithic-corporations-that-control-almost-everything-we-watch-hear-and-read
Stern,
M.J. & Axinn, J. (2012). Social
Welfare: A history of the American
response to need. 8th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Stinnett,
Nick. & DeFrain, John. (1985). Secrets
of strong families. Canada: Little, Brown & Company.
Williamson,
V., Skucpol, T., & Coggin, J. (2001, Mar). The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican Conservatism. Retrieved
from scholar.harvard.edu/files/…/files/tea_party_pop.pdf
