Thank You, Citibank-Goldman Sachs-Crooks: You’ve Moved The Poverty Conversation

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:



Thank You, Citibank-Goldman Sachs-Crooks: You’ve Moved The Poverty Conversation
Posted on 20 June 2014


I’ve been looking long and hard, trying to find something, just one thing, to say positive about the crooks on Wall Street and in the banking industry. Maybe it’s the Summer Solstice–but, eureka! Those guys have helped moved the poverty conversation in the right direction.

Here’s a new poll (Wall Street Journal paywall):

Americans’ attitudes toward poverty have shifted dramatically over the last two decades.In 1995, Americans were twice as likely to believe poverty resulted from people not doing enough to help themselves out than to attribute it to external forces, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted in April that year. That helps explain why the then-new Republican majority in the House made welfare reform a top priority.

Fast forward 19 years, and those views have undergone a significant transformation. The latest Journal poll of 1,000 adults, conducted June 11-15, found Americans are now as likely to blame poverty on circumstances beyond people’s control than they are to believe the poor aren’t doing enough to dig themselves out of it, 46% to 44%.

With a big huge caveat that this is one poll and, god knows, polls shift back and forth depending on what the rhetoric is (for example, if there was all of a sudden a president who went soft on bankers and fundraised from Wall Street…), I think this is likely–possibly–a direct consequence of the financial crisis and the growing divide between rich and poor.

Like this:

While the richest Americans have generally recouped their losses from the recession and gained considerable new wealth during the recovery, the situation is bleaker for the poor and for low-wage workers than it was in 2007.As work dried up and wages stagnated, tens of millions of Americans took jobs with lower pay and fewer hours, many of them turning to the federal government for additional support to help make ends meet.

The number of people receiving food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program soared to 47.6 million in 2013 from 26.3 million in 2007. Incomes for the typical middle-income family have slipped, and the nation’s poverty rate remains above its prerecession level.

All of a sudden a lot of people realized, well, hell, it is the damn corrupt system, the so-called “free market”, that robs people and drives them into poverty, not because people don’t want to work or earn a decent living. Clearly, this is a culmination of a trend that has taken place over 2-3 decades (longer…), robbing people of fair wage increases and giving the country the highest poverty rate–46.2 million people in 2012–since that data began to be collected.Something to ponder. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/2014/06/20/thank-you-citibank-goldman-sachs-crooks-youve-moved-the-poverty-conversation/#sthash.R9lscJYg.dpuf

[etherealtruth]

1. It is much easier to vilify the poor than to address the root causes of poverty

If folk can believe that poverty is the result of personal /moral failings, we can (falsely) believe it can never happen to us. We are all one catastrophe (big or small) from poverty (excluding, of course the 1%/ 10 %); the false belief that this can never happen to us because "we" are hard working, moral .... whatever, helps perpetuate this. It is all by careful design that this anti-poor vs antipoverty attitude has entered the American public's psyche.

[sarcasmo]

2. Kick!

[Doctor_J]

3. but....what can we do about it?

Especially since ALL of the representatives, senators, president, and judges work for Goldman Sachs, etc?