Alternet, Aug. 13, 2013

By Thom Hartmann

What does America do when she no longer needs her slaves or surplus workers?

The 1880’s reconstruction era was the first time in our history that America had seen a large surplus of non-white labor.

In the 1870’s many former slaves were integrated into the labor force, but white backlash in the 1880’s and 1890’s led to a permanent underclass through nearly a century of “separate but equal.”

For very different reasons, there was a similar surplus of white labor in the early 1930’s.

Regardless of race, capitalism runs in cycles: It’s called “the business cycle.” There are uptimes when there are jobs for everybody, the labor market is tight, and pay rises.

Then there are downtimes when the economy has a surplus of workers, falling wages, and a high level of unemployment.

We saw this cycle during the boom-and-bust of the roaring 20’s and the stock market crash and Great Depression of the 1930’s. After the crash, nearly a third of American workers couldn’t find a job, and the numbers were even worse in minority communities.

Our economy couldn’t put them to work, because capitalism failed.

So what do you do with all of those extra workers who can’t find a job?

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, that very question was the subject of a clear and open disagreement between Democrats and Republicans.

Herbert Hoover and the Republicans believed that when capitalism fails and you have high unemployment, you do nothing. You wait for the “free market” to magically fix things, and for capitalism to right the ship.

FDR and the Democrats believed that the Republican’s benign indifference was the completely wrong approach. Instead, FDR said that it’s the responsibility of government to put people back to work during times of high unemployment.

He enacted his New Deal. He put Americans back to work planting trees and forests, building schools, and improving the nation’s infrastructure. Twelve million Americans who’d been unemployed for years went back to work, and capitalism was rebooted in America.

For much of the 20th century, Hoover’s and FDR’s approaches represented the two sides of the debate about what to do with surplus workers.

Up until 1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used the powers of government to put Americans back to work.

But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.

When Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always and only did whatever made them the most money, that would magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.

He fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers. Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to work, there was now a third option.

Make a profit off of them.

There are a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own” furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them into prisoners.

That latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most profitable for America’s capitalists.

It’s almost elegant in its simplicity.

Turn unemployed Americans into criminals. Track them, punish them for any crime possible, take away their rights and throw them into for-profit prisons.

Once thrown inside a for-profit prison, an inmate needs food, housing, healthcare and other services. This means huge profits for capitalists. They’re raking in tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year – hundreds of percent more than Roosevelt paid to simply put them back to work.

And turning unemployed Americans into very profitable prisoners is a booming business.

From the beginning of America until 1980, the incarceration rate in America remained fairly steady. While Nixon declaring his war on drugs in 1971 did slightly increase incarceration in the United States, the increase was nothing drastic.

But then Reagan came to Washington, and his buddies realized they could make a buck off of unemployed Americans.

The nation’s incarceration rate took off like a rocket.

Thanks to Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009, the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by over 700 percent.

Since the for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into for-profit prisons has exploded.

And Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very profitable, slave-like labor force.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR wage is $1.15 an hour.

Across all state prisons, the average minimum wage for prisoners for non-industrial work is 93 cents per hour.

And some states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to prisoners.

Because the Reagan Revolution changed America’s value system, we stopped asking, “What’s the best way to deal with surplus workers?”

Instead, we started asking, “How can we make the most money off surplus workers?”

The logical answer was a return to slavery, and it has been embraced by capitalists with a vengeance.

And that is insane brutality.

N.Y. Times, Aug. 13, 2013

By David Firestone

Hillary Clinton seized upon exactly the right issues in her return to political life this week, issuing a firm defense of voting rights Monday in a speech to the American Bar Association. The danger is that she will see this as a box that’s been checked, an obligation addressed, and will then move on to other subjects in a policy parade.

That would be a mistake, because there is no graver issue at the moment than the ability of one political party to diminish the voting power of another, through outright abuse or through financial domination. Underlying all the gridlock holding back progress on the economy, on education, on the environment and so many other matters are abuses of the electoral system: The gerrymandering of districts to create safe seats for incumbents, which vastly magnifies the power of the right. The use of unlimited, undisclosed money to give an outsized voice to corporations and the rich of both parties. And the systematic reduction in ballot access for minorities, the poor, students, and the elderly, all designed to reduce Democratic turnout.

Ms. Clinton talked mostly about the latter issue, condemning the Supreme Court for overturning part of the Voting Rights Act and criticizing state governments (largely dominated by Republicans) that have imposed unnecessary voter ID laws and cut back on programs that made it easier for a wider variety of people to vote.

“Anyone who says racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention,” she said, adding: “Our government cannot fully represent the people unless it has been fairly elected by them.”

She attacked what she called the “phantom epidemic of voter ID fraud,” and did so on the same day that the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against what may be the harshest anti-voter law in the country, signed into law a few hours earlier by Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina.

But there is so much more to say, and so many other abuses. Kansas, for example, is refusing to register thousands of people who have not complied with a blatantly illegal proof-of-citizenship requirement that goes far beyond federal standards for registration. (The ACLU will probably have to file suit there, too, assuming the federal government does not.) Campaign finance issues deserve a speech just as impassioned as the one on voting rights, and it will be interesting to see if Ms. Clinton devotes more time to the subject than President Obama has.

Building a campaign around these kinds of issues particularly non-partisan redistricting and easy registration — has always been seen as too narrow and too wonky for a major candidate. But Ms. Clinton’s political future, not to mention the health of her party and her country, depend on someone taking them on and not letting go. And should Ms. Clinton succeed Mr. Obama, she will encounter precisely the same kind of blanket opposition in the House unless she starts trying to change it now.

She can start by using her popularity to urge greater turnout in next year’s midterm elections and in off-year state elections. The North Carolina law would never have passed if more people had paid attention and turned out in state elections. And once people begin fighting ballot restrictions and exercising their power at the state level, voting might just become a habit.

© 2013 The New York Times

N.Y. Times, Aug. 13, 2013

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Washington — John Lewis was the 23-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers and already a veteran of the civil rights movement when he came to the capital 50 years ago this month to deliver a fiery call for justice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mr. Lewis’s urgent cry — “We want our freedom, and we want it now!” — was eclipsed on the steps that day by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But two years later, after Alabama State Police officers beat him and fractured his skull while he led a march in Selma, he was back in Washington to witness President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Today Mr. Lewis is a congressman from Georgia and the sole surviving speaker from the March on Washington in August 1963. His history makes him the closest thing to a moral voice in the divided Congress. At 73, he is still battling a half-century later.

With the Voting Rights Act in jeopardy now that the Supreme Court has invalidated one of its central provisions, Mr. Lewis, a Democrat, is fighting an uphill battle to reauthorize it. He is using his stature as a civil rights icon to prod colleagues like the Republican leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, to get on board. He has also met with the mother of Trayvon Martin and compared his shooting to the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Slide Show | John Lewis 50 Years After the March on Washington The sole surviving speaker from the 1963 march, Mr. Lewis is taking on the Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights.
Mr. Lewis has an answer for those who say the election of a black president was a fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream: It was only “a down payment,” he said in an interview.

“There’s a lot of pain, a lot of hurt in America,” Mr. Lewis said in his office on Capitol Hill, which resembles a museum with wall-to-wall black-and-white photographs of the civil rights movement. Current events, he said, “remind us of our dark past.”

But Mr. Lewis, a longtime practitioner of civil disobedience (he has been arrested four times since joining Congress), is also encouraged. He said he found it gratifying to see peaceful throngs “protesting in a nonviolent fashion” after George Zimmerman was acquitted in Mr. Martin’s killing. Last week, he created a minor dust-up by telling Britain’s Guardian newspaper that Edward J. Snowden, the national security contractor who leaked classified documents, could argue that he was “appealing to a higher law,” but later condemned the leaks.

Now Mr. Lewis is introducing himself to a new generation by telling the story of his life as a Freedom Rider in “March,” a graphic novel that he wrote with a young aide, Andrew Aydin. The book, released this week, is modeled on a 1958 comic about Dr. King, which inspired early sit-ins.

Mr. Lewis remains a link to that past. At a National Urban League convention in Philadelphia last month, he was on fire as he told the crowd how his parents reacted when he asked about colored-only signs a lifetime ago in the Deep South.

“They would say, ‘That’s the way it is, don’t get in the way, don’t get in trouble,’ ” Mr. Lewis thundered in a preacher’s cadence. “But one day, I was inspired to get in the way, to get in trouble. And for more than 50 years, I’ve been getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble! And it’s time for all of us to get in trouble again!”

Last month, the congressman made a splash at Comic-Con in San Diego, where Lou Ferrigno, the original “Incredible Hulk,” was among the fans who lined up to see him. But it was serious business, a way for him to reach young people, Mr. Lewis said, and fulfill his duty to “bear witness.”

Each year, Mr. Lewis leads an emotional re-enactment in Selma of the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the brutal police response horrified the nation. Mr. Cantor participated this year, bringing his college-age son, and said he came away “very moved” — a sentiment that Mr. Lewis will play on during negotiations over a new bill.

“John is what I call a gentle spirit,” said Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor, recalling a visit by Mr. Lewis in 2001 when he was wrestling with removing the Confederate emblem from the state flag.

“He said, ‘Right before I lost consciousness, I looked up and saw an Alabama state trooper beating me on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and all I could see was a Confederate flag on his helmet,’ ” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to remember that.’ ”

At the Urban League conference, a pantheon of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, mingled backstage, but all eyes were on Mr. Lewis. Convention workers asked for pictures. Benjamin Crump, the Martin family lawyer, clutched a copy of “March,” hoping for an autograph. Strangers asked for hugs.

It is often this way for Mr. Lewis. He seems sheepish about the attention, and his speeches hint at survivor’s guilt. “All I did was give a little blood on that bridge,” he often says. Pointing to old photos, he refers to himself as “young John Lewis,” as if he were seeing someone else.

It is a long way from dusty Troy, Ala., where Mr. Lewis, one of 10 children, picked cotton and preached the Gospel to his chickens. His life took a turn when, at 18, he wrote to Dr. King. Mr. Lewis was studying at a Baptist seminary in Nashville, but was thinking about trying to integrate his hometown college, Troy State, now Troy University. Dr. King sent bus fare for Mr. Lewis to meet him in nearby Montgomery.

His parents, he has written, were “deathly afraid” that his integration dream would bring the family harm. So he returned to Nashville, where he organized lunch counter sit-ins, got arrested and met a theologian, Jim Lawson, whose teachings about Gandhian nonviolence had a profound effect on him. In his quest to build what Dr. King called “the beloved community” — a world without poverty, racism or war — Mr. Lewis routinely votes against military spending.

“For most of us, nonviolence was a tool we used to achieve an end,” said another movement veteran, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. “John Lewis internalized that.”

In 1963, as the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Mr. Lewis helped organize the Washington march. His prepared remarks were so bold — he branded President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights efforts “too little, too late” — that older leaders persuaded him to tone them down.

He went on to settle in Atlanta, won a seat on the City Council, and in 1986 challenged Julian Bond, a state lawmaker and a close friend from their movement days, for Congress.

Mr. Bond, handsome and erudite, was the favorite, but Mr. Lewis, with a speaking style that some describe as an impediment, fought hard and brought up Mr. Bond’s refusal to take a drug test. Mr. Bond later became chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. It took years for them to repair the breach. “He did what it took to win,” Mr. Bond said, “as you would expect a hard-knuckled politician to do.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Lewis and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, recently testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the voting bill. “It’s hard to look John Lewis in the eye and say, ‘We don’t need this,’ ” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman.

On Aug. 24, at an anniversary march on Washington, Mr. Lewis will speak again at the Lincoln Memorial. He goes there every so often to reflect. A few weeks ago, he walked there alone from the Capitol, wearing a ball cap and workout clothes. It was peaceful. No one recognized him.

© 2013 New York Times

NJ Spotlight, Aug. 13, 2013

By Tom Johnson

Environmentalists charge Sandy reconstruction ignores science in rush to rebuild Jersey Shore

There will be warmer summers and winters. The state will see a significant increase in precipitation, but more intensive rain and less snowfall. Rising sea levels will threaten a majority of New Jersey’s coastline. Be prepared for more extreme storms.

Those projections are detailed in the latest trend report put together by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on the impact of global climate change on the state. (Report available here:
http://www.nj.gov/dep/dsr/trends/pdfs/climate-change.pdf) But is anyone paying any attention to its conclusions?

At least that’s the question posed by the New Jersey Sierra Club, which yesterday argued that the science in the report, put up on the DEP’s website in June without any fanfare, is being ignored by policymakers as they rush to rebuild the Jersey Shore and other flood-prone areas in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

“We should be building on sound science — not on sand that will be washed away,’’ said Jeff Tittel, director of the environmental organization. “When you look at what’s happening in rebuilding, we’re making the same mistakes that we made in the past.’’

Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the agency, disputed that assessment, saying that the document is a trend report routinely updated by the agency.

“It’s not a DEP study,’’ he said. “The Sierra Club obviously is playing politics to make it seem that DEP is hiding something. That is not the case.’’

Hajna said the administration has been taking extraordinary measures to make sure that reconstruction efforts focus on safety and resilience, through things like the state elevation standard, the $300 million buyout program, financing to protect water and wastewater infrastructure and working, with the Army Corps of Engineers to reconstruct beaches.

Tittel and other environmentalists questioned some of those actions, saying the new standards adopted by the state based on Federal Emergency Management Agency models do not reflect increases in sea-level rise, a huge issue for New Jersey over the next century.

Hajna said that would be almost impossible to do. “We can’t see into the future and just make it up,’’ he said.

The report does cite prior research from other organizations, including the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (July 2007), New Jersey Office of Climatologist, and Rutgers University.

Not only is precipitation in the Northeast likely to increase in both winter and spring, according the DEP study, but runoff from storms is likely to grow. While there may be more precipitation, however, the growing season will probably be drier, with much of the rain falling in more intense storms.

The DEP trend report seems to confirm that projection. Major floods in the state occurred in 1999, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011, it said. The report apparently was completed too soon to include the flooding that occurred during Hurricane Sandy, when much of Hoboken was underwater and floods knocked dozens of utility substations off line, causing hundreds of thousands of electric customers to lose power.

In addition, eight of the 10 worst storms in New Jersey history have occurred since 1999, the report noted, and more such events are likely in the future. The year 2011 was the wettest year on record, according to the report.

The report also included research from Rutgers University projecting how much global climate change will cause a rise in sea levels during the next century. According to researchers’ best estimates, the rise in sea level will approach 16 inches by 2050 and 44 inches by the turn of the century in 2100.

Those effects will be magnified during major storms, the report said. “Atlantic City is predicted to experience floods today that happen only once a century every year or two by the end of century,’’ the report said.

“It shows we may be wasting a lot of money in rebuilding,’’ Tittel said.

N.Y. Times, Aug. 11, 2013
By Lizette Alvarez

Tallahassee, Fla. — The college and high school students arranged themselves in the colonial-style chairs and on the green carpet, a portrait of the state’s Old Capitol building above them, as they exchanged stories about their lives and the travails of the “black and brown youth” in Florida.

One young woman whose parents were both drug addicts spoke about how she had defied the odds; she will graduate from college next year. A young man mentioned that he was one of the few in his family who had not ended up in prison. Another talked about his years in and out of homeless shelters while he was growing up in Miami.

Only a stone’s throw away, beyond the two receptionists in front of them and behind an imposing white door, was the office of the person they hoped would hear them and respond with action: Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott.

On July 16, three days after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Dream Defenders, as they are called, streamed into the governor’s suite to hold a sit-in. Encamped there since then, they are demanding changes to Florida’s self-defense laws, specifically the Stand Your Ground provision, and to the way minorities are treated in the state’s schools and on the streets. They have vowed to stay until a special legislative session is called on their issues.

Shamacus Carr, left, and other protesters listening to a speaker recently in the lobby of the governor’s office.

Mark Wallheiser for The New York Times

Their goal is a long shot: the governor and the Republican-controlled Legislature strongly support the self-defense law, and polls have shown that many Floridians favor it.

But the students are staying the course, encouraged that their mission has already gained some ground.

“I’ve had it going through the normal routes because it doesn’t work,” said Ciara Taylor, 24, a Florida A&M University political science graduate who helped lobby lawmakers as a student and is now the Dream Defenders’ political director. “People tell us that certain things aren’t possible, but they are coming through every day. We are proving them wrong every minute.”

So far, the Dream Defenders, which formed last year to fight for social change after Mr. Martin’s death, have scored a few victories. The first was when Governor Scott, who initially ignored the protesters, agreed to sit down with them. The governor listened for more than an hour but did not agree to call a special session.

The group persisted, growing larger and attracting high-profile figures like the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who angered the governor by calling Florida an “apartheid state”; the entertainer and social activist Harry Belafonte; and the rapper Talib Kweli.

Most recently, the speaker of the Florida House, Will Weatherford, announced that he would ask a House subcommittee to conduct a hearing on the Stand Your Ground law this fall — an important first step, the students feel.

“We have a plan, a plan to persevere,” said Phillip Agnew, the leader of the Dream Defenders and the only one who is being paid. The Service Employees International Union is paying his small salary.

But the students may have to persevere for a long time. Besides the stiff resistance from the governor and the Legislature, State Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican who will lead the House subcommittee hearing, said recently that he did not want to alter “one damn comma of Stand Your Ground.”

“I think you have protesters in the Capitol today who are protesting without a whole lot of knowledge about the fact patterns associated with Stand Your Ground,” Mr. Gaetz said in an interview. “They are protesting for the sake of protesting, and we shouldn’t capitulate to that.”

Mr. Gaetz said he would ensure a “fair debate” on the issue and would work with Democrats to help them air their agenda. But he was critical of the protesters, saying they were capitalizing on Mr. Martin’s death to “begin their own movement.”

“Do you really think that there would be this great push to repeal the Stand Your Ground law if Zimmerman had been convicted?” Mr. Gaetz asked.

Don Gaetz, Mr. Gaetz’s father and the president of the State Senate, called the protesters cooperative and respectful. But he recently declined a request by the Senate Democratic leader to convene a select committee to review the law.

Florida was the first state to pass a Stand Your Ground law. It did so in 2005, with strong support from the National Rifle Association. The law allows people who fear serious injury or death to defend themselves, even if they have the opportunity to retreat and are in a public place.

Last year, the governor created a task force to examine the law in the wake of Mr. Martin’s death. The panel concluded that no changes were needed, but left open the possibility that the law could be amended. Prosecutors and police officers have long disliked the law, which they say is vague, gives judges too much power to decide cases and has been misused by criminals to avoid prosecution.

The law was not a factor in Mr. Zimmerman’s defense. His lawyers built his case around classic self-defense. But the law was part of the jury’s instructions and played a role in the way the police approached the initial investigation of Mr. Martin’s shooting.

Despite that, state Democrats said the law created a Wild West atmosphere in Florida, where some people feel that they can kill with impunity.

“This is not about gun control, it’s about self-control,” said State Representative Alan B. Williams, a Democrat.

Self-defense laws are at the forefront of the Dream Defenders’ campaign, but they have set their sights on other issues as well. They are hoping to pressure the Legislature and local school districts to do away with zero-tolerance policies in schools that lead to a high number of suspensions and expulsions. This policy has helped push out black teenagers, creating a “pipeline to prison,” they said.

As they clustered outside the governor’s office last week, the students said they might lack financing for their cause but not patience, drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement.

Mr. Martin’s death has inspired a new generation and a new protest movement, they said. It has also set off a new realization: minorities have come far, but not nearly far enough. As connected as people are today, the gap between black and white and rich and poor is vast, they said.

Brittany Claybrooks, 22, who was born in Detroit to a mother addicted to drugs, said she had seen both sides of the divide. After being suspended and expelled for pushing a teacher, she had an epiphany, she told the gathered students. She straightened herself out and focused, with laserlike vision, on getting back into the private school that had kicked her out. The public schools in her area had failed most of her friends, she said.

If she had not done so, she risked looking like “someone who wouldn’t make it, someone who would do as expected: not graduate, go on welfare, have two or three kids,” said Ms. Claybrooks, a senior at Florida A&M.

But epiphanies are rare, she said, which is why she joined Dream Defenders. The students snapped their fingers in agreement.

As night approached, more than three dozen people hauled out foam mattresses and sleeping bags, setting them up in the rotunda down the corridor from the governor’s office. At 5 p.m., the doors were locked, and they were alone. Their ritual began. They chanted and jumped and got charged up for the next day. “I believe that we will win!” they shouted. “I believe that we will win!”

Reinforcements would arrive soon in this college town — students streaming back after the summer break.

“We are a movement,” said Curtis Hierro, the Dream Defenders’ field director, “for a new generation.”

Christine Jordan Sexton contributed reporting.

And it isn’t only true about labor. It’s true for all social justice. Cross-issue solidarity is the only way to win. We outnumber our opponents, but they have perfected “Divide and conquer.”

By Hope Yen

Washington (AP) — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it’s going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

"It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not.

"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

___

Nationwide, the count of America’s poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation’s destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America’s heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation’s most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County’s inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers’ daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend’s disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn’t even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.

Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."

"It’s pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."

___

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they’re only a temporary snapshot that doesn’t capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.

In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.

The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.

By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.

By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.

"Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them’, it’s an issue of ‘us’," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."

The numbers come from Rank’s analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.

The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.

___

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.

The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for ‘the middle class’ and ‘average Americans,’" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.

"They don’t trust big government, but it doesn’t mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.

"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

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AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.

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Online:

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

Science Daily, Aug. 11, 2013

Smart people are just as racist as their less intelligent peers — they’re just better at concealing their prejudice, according to a University of Michigan study.

"High-ability whites are less likely to report prejudiced attitudes and more likely to say they support racial integration in principle," said Geoffrey Wodtke, a doctoral candidate in sociology. "But they are no more likely than lower-ability whites to support open housing laws and are less likely to support school busing and affirmative action programs."

Wodtke will present his findings at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health, supported his research.

He analyzed data on the racial attitudes of more than 20,000 white respondents from the nationally representative General Social Survey. He examined how their cognitive ability, as measured by a widely used test of verbal intelligence, was linked with their attitudes about African-Americans, and about different policies designed to redress racial segregation and discrimination.

Respondents were about 47 years old at the time of the interview, on average, and had completed 12.9 years of education. They correctly answered an average of about six of the 10 cognitive ability test questions.

Among Wodtke’s findings:

Win a Lottery Jackpot? Not Much Chance of That

N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By Tara Siegel Bernard

When those exceedingly lucky people come forward to claim this week’s Powerball lottery jackpot, which swelled to $448 million on Wednesday, it’s hard not to think: Somebody is winning these things, right? It could be me.

This is exactly the sort of logic that, over the last year, led millions of people to spend $5.9 billion of their hard-earned dollars on Powerball alone. They spent nearly $69 billion on all lottery games in 2012, according to two lottery trade groups.

It is also precisely the kind of mental trap the Powerball people want you to fall in; they tweaked the game rules last year, doubling the price of tickets to $2 to raise more revenue and create more eye-catching jackpots.

And the state agencies running the games advertise heavily that it could be you making off with millions of dollars.

The odds of winning, however, remain infinitesimal: Powerball players, for instance, have a 1 in 175 million chance of winning. You have roughly the same chance of getting hit by lightning on your birthday.

Even though some people may be able to intellectually grasp what that means, the Multi-State Lottery Association can predict with clocklike certainty that on Saturday night, with a jackpot worth about $40 million, 13 million to 15 million people will buy tickets. Those ticket buyers are all thinking they have a shot of defying the odds.

That is why the lottery is called a tax on people who don’t understand math. Lower-income individuals who play but don’t win are hurt the most because they’re wasting a greater share of their income on the games. That’s also why the lottery is often called a regressive tax on the poor.

Sure, last year the games returned $19.41 billion to the states that sponsored them, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, which represents 52 lottery groups. But that’s not why anyone plays them.

What’s the big motivation to volunteer to pay this tax? Psychologists say it has more to do with our all-too-human propensity to run with the dreamlike possibilities it creates in our minds.

“For emotionally significant events, the size of the probability simply doesn’t matter,” said Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize winning psychologist. “What matters is the possibility of winning. People are excited by the image in their mind. The excitement grows with the size of the prize, but it doesn’t diminish with the size of the probability.”

So ticket buyers allow themselves some momentary escapism since it costs only $2, thinking about what they would do with all that money. And they’ll ignore all of the well-known horrors and pitfalls that many lottery winners encounter, whether it’s a severe depression or blowing through all of the money in a form of self-sabotage that ends with them living in a trailer down by the river. This phenomenon of feeling anxious and undeserving, among other things, is what some experts call “sudden wealth syndrome.” It may afflict people who benefit from all sorts of success or windfalls, whether from the sale of a valuable business, signing an N.F.L. contract or inheriting a huge sum from a maiden aunt.

“Money that is much more than you’re used to sounds unlimited,” said Susan Bradley, a financial planner and founder of the Sudden Money Institute, who has worked with several lottery winners. “If you don’t have someone to help you, yes, you can go through extraordinarily large amounts of money, and, even worse, you can be in debt. It can really happen.”

Plugging some numbers into this dream provides some perspective. Winners wanting to be able to safely spend $1 million a year for 55 years (adjusted for inflation) would need about $36 million, after taxes, to invest, according to calculations by Northern Trust. (Those numbers also factor in annual taxes and investment expenses.) They would need to set aside nearly $15 million in high-quality bonds to know they would always have 15 years of spending in stable investments. To cover the remaining 40 years, they would need to put another $21 million in a diversified stock portfolio.

So in thinking about it, it’s not even worth playing unless the jackpot is more than $75 million, because the state and federal government take about half in taxes.

Part of that fantasy is that winners would start buying fast cars and big homes, not to mention stuff for all of your family members along with their children’s education. It’s easy to see how they could run through the money, as hard as that may seem to believe with $36 million in hand. Of course, if you want to live even larger — more homes, more cars, more ex-spouses, servants, accountants, lawyers, other lawyers to watch the lawyers — you’ll need far more. Probably more like $100 million, after taxes.

“If they make it to the fifth year with enough money to securely handle their life going forward and all of their relationships are intact, they are probably going to make it long term,” Ms. Bradley said.

So let’s get back to the probability of all of this ever even happening.

Buying more tickets improves your odds, but not by much. So if you want the fantasy, just buy one. Buying more doesn’t make the fantasy any richer.

It would take centuries of ticket buying before you even make a dent. If you purchased roughly 126,000 tickets a month for the next 80 years, for example, you could improve your odds to 50 percent, explained Gary A. Lorden, emeritus professor of math at California Institute of Technology (who, for the record, has bought a single ticket three times over the last decade; he split the last one with his grandson).

“The difference is like moving from a big house to a small house to make it less likely a meteor will strike your roof,” he said.

Good luck with that.

© 2013 New York Times

N.Y. Times, Aug. 9, 2013

By David Firestone

Earlier this year, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, announced plans to rebrand the Republican Party, improving “health, happiness and prosperity for more Americans and their families.” In case you took any of that seriously, take a good look at the food stamp proposal Mr. Cantor unveiled a few days ago, one of the more brutal actions Republicans have taken against the poor since they took over the House in 2011.

In June, the Republican plan to cut food stamps by $2 billion a year led to the failure of the farm bill — because House conservatives wanted even bigger cuts. House leaders then revived the bill to provide $196 billion to big agriculture, dropping the food stamp program entirely and promising to bring it back “later.”

Later has arrived, and the plan is worse than ever. Mr. Cantor wants to cut $4 billion a year, double the earlier cut, by removing up to 4 million people from the food stamp program. His method of kicking all those people off is particularly diabolical, considering the Republican refusal to stimulate the economy: he wants to punish those unable to find a job. Anyone who is unemployed and not raising children will be limited to three months of food stamps every three years.

This requirement has been on the books since 1996, but it was routinely waived by most states during and after the recession, as high unemployment caused widespread suffering. Mr. Cantor wants to eliminate those waivers, with no exceptions. Under Mr. Cantor’s plan, it won’t matter how hard people are looking for work, or how high unemployment might be in their state.

Mr. Cantor’s plan would slash benefits for many of the poorest people in the United States, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Their average annual income is $2,500; many are desperate for work but cannot find any. Joblessness may have been reduced in the last two years but it is still far too high, particularly among those with the least skills.

“As a result of the proposed cuts, many of these individuals would fall deeper into destitution,” according to an analysis by the center issued on Wednesday. “Some would likely experience hunger as well as homelessness; money spent on food isn’t available to pay the rent, and with income this low, it can be very difficult to do both.”

As David Rogers explained in Politico this morning, the 1996 proposal to take away food stamps from the jobless assumed that most states would offer workfare programs in exchange for the benefits. But Washington never provided enough money to allow states to create those programs. Only five states offered workfare or job training programs last year.

The House Republicans’ pointless and heartless demands for more austerity are holding back economic growth. Now they want to strip government relief for those who are left behind.