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ON TURNING POVERTY INTO AN
AMERICAN CRIME
Barbara Ehrenreich, from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting by in America (Foreward, 2011 Version)
2
Post-meltdown poverty
• Around 2000, 29% of American families living in what could
be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they
earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child
care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes (EPI)
• After the 2008 financial meltdown, things are much worse:
• Formerly middle-class families who’ve lost jobs now the “nouveau poor”
• Brunt of recession borne by borne by blue-collar working class, which
had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization in the
1980s
• Low-wage blue-collar workers were especially hard hit because they
had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared
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Coping strategies
• Cutting back on health care, prescriptions, or dropping health
insurance altogether
• Food pantries, “food auctions,” “urban hunting”
• “Doubling up” in homes/apartments, renting to couch-surfers
• Another response to job loss and debt has been suicide
4
“Torture and Abuse of Needy Families”
• Besides food stamps, other forms of welfare are increasingly
difficult to access, psychologically abusive, and stigmatizing
“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.” (Kaaryn Gustafson, University of Connecticut Law)
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Criminalization of poverty
How the safety net became a dragnet
• The number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been
rising since 2006, along with harassment of the poor for more
“neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an
open container (Ntl Law Ctr on Poverty & Homelessness)
• Sleeping on the streets is considered “criminal trespassing” in many
cities
• Several cities have passed ordinances banning the sharing of food
• In Colorado, a city council is considering a ban on begging
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Criminalization of the not-yet homeless –
by debt and race
• Debt
• Failing to honor summons from creditor can result in “contempt of court”
charges, landing one in prison
• Driving with lapsed auto insurance can also result in a summons
• Race/racial profiling
• “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.”
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The answer?
• 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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“Debt, Slavery, and Our Idea of Freedom,”
Interview w/ David Graeber (author of Debt, 2011)
On Debt and Double Standards
DG: …there is an irony in thinking of a promise made by a state to
pay a debt as something absolutely sacred. After all, a debt is just a
promise, and politicians make all sorts of different promises. They
break most of them. So why are these promises the only ones that
they can’t break? It is considered completely normal for [a politician]
to say, ‘well of course we promised not to raise school fees. But
that’s unrealistic.’ ‘Unrealistic’ here means ‘obviously there’s no
possibility of breaking my promises to bankers, even those linked to
banks we bailed out and in some cases effectively own’. It’s striking
that no-one ever points that out. Why is a promise made by a
politician to the people who elected him considered made to be
broken – it isn’t “sacred” in any way – whereas a promise the same
politician makes to a financier is considered the “honor of our
nation”? Why isn’t the “honor of our nation” in any way entailed in
keeping our promises to people to provide healthcare and
education? And why does everyone just seem to accept that, that
this is just “reality”?
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The language of debt is not an economic
one; it’s a language of morality
DG: It has been used for thousands of years by people in situations of
vast inequalities of power. If you have a situation of complete
inequality, particularly violent inequality – if you’ve conquered
someone, or if you’re a mafioso extracting protection money – then
framing the relationship in terms of debt makes it seem as though the
extractors are magnanimous and the victims are to blame. “Well, you
owe me, but I’ll be a nice guy and let you off the hook this month…”
Before long the victims come to seem almost generically morally at
fault by the very terms of their existence. And that logic sticks in
people’s minds – it’s incredibly effective. Not universally effective,
because it’s also true that the vast majority of revolts, insurrections,
populist conspiracies and rebellions in world history have been about
debts. When it backfires, it blows up in a big way. But nonetheless,
that’s what people almost invariably do when they’re imposing a
situation of complete inequality.
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“Sacredness” depends on who owes whom
DG: The irony of course is that when dealing with each other,
rich and powerful people know that debts aren’t “sacred”, and
they rearrange things all the time. They are often incredibly
forgiving and generous when dealing with each other. The
idea of the sacredness of debt is chiefly applied when we are
talking about different sorts of people. Just as rich people will
come to the aid of other rich people, so poor people also will
bail each other out – they’ll make ‘loans’ that are really gifts,
and so on. But when you’re dealing with debts owed by
people without power to people with power, suddenly the debt
becomes sacred and you can’t even question it.