“Economic policymakers, as well as the media, often convey
the impression that the poor passively accept their economic circumstances, or
are in poverty because they somehow lack initiative. Missing from these conceptions is the
consideration of how the poor and unemployed adapt by tapping into the informal
or underground economy and surviving on income that never appears in any
government accounts.”
Robbins,
175
“…a focus on structures often obscures the fact that humans
are active agents of their own history, rather than passive victims. Ethnographic method allows the “pawns” of
larger structural forces to emerge as real human beings who shape their own
futures.”
Bourgois,
17
"America's much-ballyhood liberty is largely
fictional. Three million of
us are [in prisons or on parole]...The rest of us are captives of
credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest
for a decent retirement fund."
Joe Bageant—Deer
Hunting with Jesus
Story
of poverty and culture in America is connected with existing of specific agency
in this
country.
Part of that agency is misconception of poor people themselves, especially the
reasons that got them to poverty. Keynesian economy- (also known as “American
capitalism”) teaches us that competitive and free market is the only way of
success and you can either be in two
groups- the one who is making profit based on that market.. or the one who is
not. Poor people are considered to be poor for various reasons. General public
opinion , within the opinion of
policymakers is that you cant be poor if you are able to work. But inside that
opinion, agency and social structures are doing their own deeds. American
economy at this point is all about solving unemployment , creating more jobs,
etc.. So, why people believe that poor people are passive about their
economical and cultural condition, when there are jobs opportunities
everywhere? Keynesian market offers possibility to everyone. But does it
really?
Maybe
because you need an education for good job, and poor people cant afford it. So
they settle for minimum paid jobs, or low wage jobs, often taking several of
them so they can pay for housing, food and basic necessities. Its not that they
lack initiative- they go along with the system , so they can survive. And what
pushes them into the battlefield is an example of cultural agency – “stories we
tell ourselves about ourselves.” They do everything they can to survive. Yet,
to the policymakers they are often invisible. Statistics had shown serious
misconception about poverty and (non)existing of the middle class in the
American society.
At a time when Republicans on Capitol Hill are expressing outrage
for bad politics created by democrats -something more deserving of outrage is
taking place: tens of millions of the nation's most vulnerable are taking hits
on all sides. The nation's poverty rate is frozen at
a high of 15 percent. And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, for the most
part, aren't even talking about it.
"Missing
in action," Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), the chairwoman of the
Congressional Black Caucus, said of Congress' record on poverty. It has been a
topic of discussion among Washington lawmakers in fleeting moments. Language
about making poverty a national priority found its way into the Democratic
Party platform last year and into President Barack Obama's State of the Union
address in February. Democrats tucked a line into their budget proposals this year calling for a strategy to cut poverty in half
in 10 years. Yet the issue has all but
disappeared from the legislative agenda in Congress as lawmakers focus squarely
on deficit reduction. Obama, too, has been largely silent on the issue, and has
even proposed cutting Social Security -- a key tool for combating poverty. Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a leading voice for the poor in the Senate, has fumed
that Obama is caving to Republicans on the issue at the expense of
"millions of working people, seniors, disabled veterans, those who have
lost a loved one in combat, and women." The statistics are
staggering. According to the Census Bureau, the nation's
poverty rate is at its highest level in decades. More than 46
million people -- one in seven Americans -- are living below the poverty line,
16.4 million of them children. Another 30
million Americans are just a lost job or serious illness away
from joining them. And in the last six years alone, more than 20
million people have joined the ranks of those relying on food
stamps to get by.
Meanwhile, the rich are
only getting richer. Income inequality in the United States is
greater now than at any time since 1929.
It has gotten so severe that, according to a report by
the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, low-earning workers in the United
States are actually worse off than low-earning workers in all but seven
similarly developed countries.
Given
these figures, it is "unfathomable" that poverty is not "at the
top of everybody's priority list,".
Many economists
agree that the most effective thing Congress has done for poor
people in recent years was passing the stimulus package in 2009. It was one of
the first bills Obama signed into law as president, and it included substantial
benefits for the poor, including an expansion of the child tax credit and new
funds for child care, job training and the Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families program, the nation's principal welfare program.
The
package is credited with
saving or creating 2.5 million jobs, growing the economy by up to 3.8 percent
and keeping the unemployment rate from hitting 12 percent. As bad as things are
now, they could have been much worse, economists say.
Still,
does that really solve the nations problem? Lets look at some other problems.
Given
the subpar unemployment rate -- it's been hovering just below 8 percent for
months -- and the worsening conditions for the poor, some say the obvious
response from Congress should be another stimulus.
Why people cant change this? And why passing
couple of bills doesn’t improve the state of well being in America? Because
capitalism created structural inequalities and not just in the terms of income.
It divides people on racial, gender and
ethnical origin, creating the phenomenon of “rich white Americans” and everyone
else.
As a classical example of structural
inequalities strongly encouraged racially by policy makers we can look at Los
Angeles. L.A. used to be great , prosperous , industrial place. Today it is
certainly most attractive to tourists. But if you get lost from shining lights of
Beverly Hills, and by any accident you end up in south L.A. , bloody and sad
reality waits for you. “A gang is an
interstitial group, originally formed spontaneously, and then integrated
through conflict. It is characterized by the following types of behavior:
meeting face to face, milling, movement through space as a unit, conflict, and
planning. The result of this collective behavior is the development of
tradition, unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity,
morale, group awareness, and attachment to a local territory"
African-American gangs began to emerge in the Los Angeles area during the
1920's, which was in concordance with the large black population in the city.
The gangs in existence at this particular time in history were not territorial.
On the other hand, they were "loose associations, unorganized, and rarely
violent" Moreover, they did not employ monikers, graffiti, or various
other gang characteristics to identify themselves. Gangs of the 1920's and
1930's were composed mainly of family members and friends, and they were
involved only in very limited criminal actions. In fact, the main purpose of
these criminal activities was to transmit a " 'tough guy' image and to
provide an easy means of obtaining money.” During the early 1970's, several other
African-American gangs emerged in an effort to protect themselves from the many
Crip gangs forming in the area. One of the most well known of these particular
gangs is the Bloods, which came to be one of the other most violent and unlawful
African-American gangs in Los Angeles. The Bloods established themselves around
the West Piru Street area in the Compton section of Los Angeles. Sylvester
Scott and Vincent Owens were the founders of the Bloods, and this certain gang
actually started out as the "Compton Pirus." The swift expansion of
the Bloods was aided by a severe conflict between the "Compton Crips"
and the "Compton Pirus ," in which the Pirus were greatly outnumbered
and brutally crushed. This conflict brought several sets of the Pirus together,
and the Pirus subsequently joined forces with the "Laurdes Park
Hustlers" and the "LA Brims." During the latter half of the
1970's, the Crips and the Bloods began to divide into smaller sets, and as they
disseminated throughout the Los Angeles area, they "began to claim certain
neighborhoods as their territory. Their gang rivalry became vicious and
bloody". The Bloods and the Crips were extremely territorial and quite
ardent in protecting their neighborhood against invasion by one another as well
as other rival gangs. Due to the large number of gang members occupying a
relatively small area of Los Angeles, the gangs devised a method of identifying
one another. This system of identification would allow gang members to avoid
assaulting members of different sets who belonged to the same gang.. Prior to
the 1980's, the Crips and the Bloods had limited active participation in
narcotics trafficking. "However, by 1983, African-American Los Angeles
gangs seized upon the availability of narcotics, particularly crack, as a means
of income" Many of the gang members
who became involved in the buying and selling of narcotics came from the inner
city areas where poverty and unemployment are a way of life. Gangsters could
make anywhere from three hundred to five hundred dollars per day selling crack
cocaine. Thus, the money involved was a main component which drew gangsters to
this particular line of work. Crips and Bloods control crack cocaine
distribution in many cities around the country. Members of these gangs will
migrate to other cities, ascertain the narcotics demand in that city, identify
the dealers in the city, and figure out the established operations for narcotic
sales. Gang involvement in the drug market has led to an extraordinary amount
of violence throughout certain cities due to the members fighting over
"profitable narcotics trade"
So, as members of the Bloods and Crips migrate to various cities
throughout the United States, they bring with th6m the sale of narcotics and
the violence associated with it. Gang members often relocate to other cities
based on established family ties within a particular city and the enticement of
quick profits from the buying and selling of narcotics. The Crips and the
Bloods "have migrated throughout the country and are seen in most states
and their prison populations. There are literally hundreds of sets or
individual gangs under the main Blood and Crip names" Eastern coast-based gangs including People
Nation and Folk Nation have become so well known that the Crips and the Bloods
have formed allies with them. Bloods have formed an alliance with the People
Nation, and the Crips have formed an alliance with the Folk Nation. The Crips
and the Bloods began nearly thirty years ago in a small section of Los Angeles,
and today, there are over thirty-three states and one hundred twenty-three
cities which are occupied by Crips and Bloods gang members. New York City is
one of the major cities in the U.S. engulfed with Crips and Bloods, and its
prisons are the home for many of these gang members. And acceleration is a new
problem itself.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades
is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about
two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand
Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one.
No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that
states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher
education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of
Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who
right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an
old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a
conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a
conservative who’s in one. The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the
moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full
house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax”
prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see
no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for
an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you
have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the
experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are
raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the
punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an
uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented,
every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing.
The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching
men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as
chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought
themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep
obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy
jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality
of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
Reasons for this are many-
racial structure stands behind everything. This country had opened its door for
so many people, forgetting the one who belonged here, who were oppressed and
who built this country. People have no choice – incarceration, crime and low
wage jobs are a magical circle , and once you get in, you are trapped. And
change will not come from one of the shinning posters that scream “CHANGE”
“FORWARD” “AMERICA for JOBS”. It must come in peoples mind first- when we try
to help and redeem ourselves for people being marginalized based on their
gender and race. Or when America stops being huge on international issue, and
maybe help the one who are really in need- poor people, homeless, black,
immigrants.
Or find another Marx, or
someone who will call for social revolution. Because desperate times like
these, are calling for desperate measures.
