Blue Notes from a Red Zone

The Blame Game

As has been noted by many others, it didn’t take long to move the national conversation from Katrina and poverty to energy costs and scandals. Apparently poverty was sufficiently ameliorated by allowing employers to pay less than the prevailing wage and by giving huge windfalls to oil companies and casinos. We can put aside the pictures of grief and hunger, and debate whether the right or the left is more troubled by Harriet Miers.

Unfortunately, I’m having a little trouble moving off the dime. For one thing, the prevailing wage of $9 an hour is nowhere close to being enough to ease the financial strains of our underclass. The Northwest Florida Gulf Coast Workforce Development Board produced a self-sufficiency report in May, 2005. According to their calculations, $14.36 per hour is the minimum wage necessary for a single adult to maintain a no-frills existence, a figure produced before the recent surge in housing and energy prices. Lowering the wages of persons engaged in construction trades to little more than half that is hardly a blow for the common man (30% of whom make less than $12 an hour in our little slice of paradise).

As to the no-bid contract giveaways and tax breaks for the casinos: how much evidence do we need before the right wing corporate cheerleaders finally understand that major stockholders and top executives do not share? The recent economic “boom” has resulted in an increase in worker productivity, and a decrease in worker income. Oil companies are already swimming in unseemly oceans of cash. If curtailed supplies and increased demands are making it necessary to build more refineries, the resources to do so can be found right there in the profit column. After all, we do believe in self-sufficiency, don’t we?

So, what can we do to address the issues of poverty and despair? If I am grasping conservative logic correctly, the answer to problems of race, poverty, and education must be found in the home, not in government “hand-outs.” If people don’t want to be poor, they should work harder and spend less. If they want better lives for their children, they should start insisting on better school performance.

In other words, the poor have no one but themselves to blame. The highly-educated upper class has earned its right to privilege and an 85% share of the nation's wealth, and bears no obligation to use its talent and gifts to make the world a better place. No, the rich did their bit by making their own nest better (using a whole lot of governmental and societal help), and no more can be asked. Instead, the solution for a better society is to thrust all responsibility onto single teenage mothers with marginal language and academic skills, who were raised by women who were teenagers themselves when they gave birth. And because all poor people need additional challenges, we will ensure that they get no “unearned” resources to help them do it.

Using the Gulf Coast catastrophes to plead governmental poverty, and cut back Medicaid, Section 8 housing, and other programs providing a thin edge between mere poverty and actual death, is brazen beyond belief. There is a war in Iraq, which has been a black hole for billions of unaccounted-for dollars. There are transportation and energy bills that are filled with corporate welfare, concentrating wealth into the hands of the few. Let’s raid those programs, not subsidized child care.

Now is the time to cut out government hand-outs to those few whose greed can never be satisfied anyway, and support the programs that make life bearable for the many. Instead of cutting back health care, make it universal. Instead of building ever more prisons to incarcerate ever growing numbers of young men, funnel the energy and funds to creating schools that address the serious academic deficiencies causing despair and teenage pregnancies among our youth. Instead of slashing Section 8 housing, make affordable housing a national priority.

It’s time to see if “trickle up” economics can be successful.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 12:06 AM