The Antichrist of North Carolina

[donsu]

http://www.progressive.org/sept03/ehr0903.html

This article is about Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed that is the the Univ. of N.C. at Chapel Hill's reading for the incoming students.
and the debate the repugs have caused over it.

But what got to me was the last two paragraphs:

But I was being distracted and diverted. The real issue, I've decided, isn't just the campus and its workers, but the state. According to the North Carolina Justice and Economic Development Center, 60 percent of North Carolina families with children do not earn enough to meet basic, bare-bone, needs. Nationwide, when last measured in 2000, 29 percent of families were in the same straits, giving North Carolina twice the level of economic misery as the country as a whole.

My former husband, who was a union organizer in the state for several years, said he'd never seen such poverty anywhere. At a union organizing meeting held in a motel meeting room, for example, he noticed the workers covertly pocketing packets of Saltines left from a previous event.
It's not a pretty picture: Well-fed suits engaging in chest-thumping attacks on an exposé about poverty while at least some of their constituents are basing their meal plans around soda crackers. I don't know much about pornography--and am eager to hear from any reader who has detected it in Nickel and Dimed--but I do know obscenity when I see it.
-----------------------------

I didn't know it was this bad. Did you?

[DealsGapRider]

1. That's strange, because...

I go to North Carolina all the time and I have always been struck by how affluent it is. North Carolina is full of absolutely lovely places...Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Durham. The area around the Research Triangle is booming.

I have seen real poverty in rural Virginia, West Virginia, etc. but North Carolina has always struck me as a dynamic, rapidly growing state where the quality of life is high.

[KoKo]

3. Yes, if you visit those cities you wouldn't know what lurks around them.

Any of the outlying areas where the farms used to grow tobacco...real poverty....job layoffs from textile plants, funiture factories gone along with the upholstering jobs.....small farms gone to agribusiness......and people who just never had much of anything to start with. Some of those folks have moved to the big cities to get work...but most of the work is done by Mexicans, Haitians and South Americans who have come in through loose immigration policies to fill the gags in construction needed by the boom in housing and landscape maintenance and other odd jobs.

But, many of the people in those rural towns can't or won't leave because of their sense of heritage and the lack of education for skills outside the little towns. There is terrible poverty in the South (just as there is terrible poverty all over America in the little towns which have nothing to fall back on, but the booming cities have covered it over.

On Edit: Someone has a post about the "Dollar Stores" holding up America. They do in the "other America."

Without the "Dollar Stores" and the food banks.......these folks would look like the pictures from the Depression era.

[LearnedHand]

4. DealsGapRider:

Motorcycle or bicycle?

And, how many curves in 11 miles?


On edit: Sorry folks, my reply is off-topic. It's a question about DealsGapRider's screenname.

[DealsGapRider]

9. Motorcycle -- who could do it on a bike?!

318 curves in 11 miles.

You a rider?

[Brian Sweat]

11. Um, Lance Armstrong wouldn't even work up a sweat.

[DealsGapRider]

14. I should have said...

...what mortal human being could do it on a bike. Armstrong does not qualify.

[LearnedHand]

15. Bicycle rider [off-topic alert]

I've never ridden it, but many of my cycling friends do. I also know lots of motorcycle riders who ride it on weekends; know one guy who augered in and who-knows-what speed -- trashed his bike and his body.

I always hated driving the friggin' place, but had to to get to some of the mtn. bike riding around there.

On edit: added to subject line

[Brian Sweat]

10. It's 318 curves in 11 miles.

A more appropriate name would be Dragon rider, because the section of road is called "The Dragon." Deal's Gap is just a place the Dragon passes through.


I have an Toyota MR2 Spyder and I have slain the dragon many times.

[DealsGapRider]

13. I thought about that, but...

...DragonRider seemed too cheesy...the kind of screen name someone would choose who played Dungeons and Dragons and lived in his parents' basement.

I just slew (is that a word?) the Dragon for the first time a few weeks ago, so it was on my mind when I joined DU.

[Brian Sweat]

17. Have you been able to wipe the grin of your face yet?

[carolinayellowdog]

5. VA is much wealthier than NC, but...

Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and Charlotte are more prosperous than Richmond/Petersburg or Hampton Roads. Still, thanks to DC suburbs, VA ranks 10th in median family income. NC was 30th last time I looked. Raleigh-Durham is deceptive; in 1999 its median family income was $48,845 compared to a statewide median of $39,184. It had 6.7 percent of families under the poverty level compared to a state level of 9.0 percent. (That's *families*-- more *individuals* are below the poverty line.)

The poorest part of NC is where I live, the Roanoke Valley. Every county that borders the Roanoke River is among the state's poorest, although the poorest of all, Tyrell, is further east on Albemarle Sound.

[LearnedHand]

7. Yes, there's lots of money in the Research Triangle area...

...but it doesn't follow folks over to the Appalachian area. Their living there is just as hardscrabble as "Nickled and Dimed" described it.

[Brian Sweat]

8. It all depends on where you go.

If you stick to the major population centers, you will see working class to middle class people, but if you get out into the country, you will see some really poor people. The same is true throughout the south.

[CRK7376]

18. Go east or west of

Raleigh and the other places you mentioned and you will see the poverty of my state. THe factories and mills are all but shut down, tobacco farming is declining. I love my state and its natural beauty, but it hurts to see and experience the poverty we have too. Teaching in rural NC is not a pretty thing, especially in these days of less and less money for school budgets. Still I don't want to live anywhere else but my NC mountains.

[LoneStarLiberal]

2. Class Warfare!

"Oh look at the Democrats engaging in class warfare" the Republican leadership and media crow, tut-tut-ing all the time.

Hell yes it is class warfare. It's all of us against them and the only way that they are going to win is if we don't reclaim the rhetoric of class warfare and shine the light on the foul rape of the working poor in this country by their policies and their corporate cronies.

Ehrenreich's book is a great one. Good for UNC that they had it on their summer reading list. More fire under the fairy-tale that is compassionate conservatism.

[DBoon]

12. Class Warfare?

It's only warfare when people fight back. Otherwise it's "class slaughter".

Repubs only object to people fighting back.

[Rooktoven]

22. Beautiful quote...

nm

[AntiLempa]

6. This is the Issue.

This is the issue that Democrats ned to pick up and run on. Ehrenreich's analysis is right on. This is what's happening throughout the country.

[jafap]

19. My qualms with Ehrenreich

I guess I am kinda split about it. On the one hand, I have direct sympathy for those at the bottom. On the other, I reject the whole notion that "this is not a liveable wage". America is sick with materialism and consumerism from top to bottom, and even asking for more money for those at the bottom seems to be part of it. What I would like to see is more solidarity within classes and between classes. An outlook on life that would ask for more time off before it asks for more money. My original response to Ehrenreich was:

I kinda dislike the notion of "more money" - like only the rich can have a good life, or that it is impossible to live on low incomes. My gross income last year was $18,236.71, but I managed to save about $2500 and paid an extra $2611 on my mortgage. I would have saved more except that I spent about $2000 on computers this year (including a laptop), plus my water heater had to be replaced due to my and my ex-plumbers incompetence and to the tune of about $1000. Plus, there is the fact that $757.09 of my income was from interest on the money I have saved from my previous years of low and no wages (my social security earnings report says $94,000 for 15 years
through 1999 (but it does not include the $12,000 I made in graduate school, my interest income, nor my gross income from my business (which only covered my housing and utilities)) I also made $433.03 in tax deferred interest on my IRA. Plus, I own not one, but two dogs, so I have some share of unnecessary expenses.
Not that I have much to brag about, or want to compare fortunes, but only to raise the only example of which I have detailed knowledge, and say that it is demonstrably possible to make very little and still do much better than just scrape by.
What is aggravating is the lack of R-E-S-P-ECT that my employer has for my work or my person. The fact that I would be doing about $6,000 better right now if some a-hole of a human resources moron had decided to hire me last year. The fact that it is absolutely beyond my power to get a better job. The fact that I am stuck here in Iowa unable to make friends because of their backwards-assed provincialism and my own eccentricity - stuck here because I made a very bad real estate purchase about three years ago. Okay, I have my share of aggravations, and I would guess that a general rise in wages would not go very far at all towards solving them. It is very unsolidaristic but true that my own personal finances are only improved if my own wages go up and everyone else's stay the same.
My own story cannot tell me general truths and I am probably blind to the ways I have been blessed - with helpful family, generally good health except for mental and dental, and avoidance of serious accidents or disasters which can absolutely level a person. I very much feel that "if there is a lower class, I am in it" and for it, but I also would deny that we cannot do anything for ourselves - that a Wal-mart type job dooms us to misery and soullessness. I also remember from my brother's K-mart job that some of his main complaint was about the bickering, griping, and back-biting ladies that he worked with. I refuse to blame all of their behaviour on management, nor do I feel that an increase in their wages and benefits is
going to make them better people. Their lack of solidarity and social
consciousness is partly their responsibility, there are books they could read, but they are probably more interested in watching a mindless TV show, and their only interest in a union would be in order to fatten their own wallets (okay I am over-generalising and tired, and I too have some interest in fattening my wallet, but also in furthering the interests of the working class, but said class has to want to change - to want something more than a bigger piece of the American pie).

[markus]

20. Violently disagree

Ok, not violently. But very strongly.

Are you suggesting that average working people should be happy to spend their day off trying to find school clothes for their kids at garage sales? Are you suggesting that health care is a luxury? How about having to take vacation days (or lie and take sick days) to do you own repairs are an older car (and risk getting busted at Pep Boys when you're supposed to be in bed with a fever?

We're not talking about people replacing their VCRs with DVD-Recordables. We are talking about people making ends meet and possibly having something left at the end of the month.

I am amazed that in our last gubernatorial election, the Democratic candidate didn't make a toss-away line from the debates the center piece of her campaign: North Dakota leads the nation in people working two jobs.

It's not just that they don't have anything better to do. They can't pay their bills on one job.

I agree not everyone needs broadband internet acccess, a nation-wide unlimited long distance calling plan cell phone, satellite TV, and al of the other ridiculous things people manage to spend money on.

But there is significant and substantial earning inequity in this country, and it's time people got angry and put an end to it.

[oneighty]

23. Probably more interested

in watching a mindless TV show. Only interest in a union would be

in order to fatten their own wallets.

Some people presume much.

180

[renie408]

16. No, and I live in NC.

60% of families in 'bare-bones poverty'?

I live about 30 minutes outside of Charlotte, NC and this is just not my experience. Maybe western and eastern NC have a larger population of poor than we do here in the middle.

[Clark Can WIN]

21. The Antichrist of North Carolina

is not this lady at all........... It's my husbands psycho freeper ditto-head ex-wife. I swear it is.