Poverty must emerge from the shadows

Bill Knight column for 2-24, 25 or 26, 2020             

The word poverty can conjure thoughts of Ethiopia, Appalachia or urban ghettos, but the reality of the needy isn’t Them.

It’s Us.

Last week, as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot held a “poverty summit” there, we must note the problem throughout Illinois and the country. The poor are too often marginalized, sadly accustomed to being snubbed.

But it’s a vast problem. Poverty increased in almost one-third of U.S. counties since 2016, according to Stateline, a nonpartisan news service funded by Pew Charitable Trusts.

“Most of the biggest increases were in areas both rural and Southern,” reported Tim Henderson. “Those areas generally had residents who lacked job training and skills, and industries that suffered downturns.”

Poverty’s measured by the “poverty rate,” the percentage of people in households earning less than the “poverty threshold,” now $21,330 for a family of three.

The Census Bureau’s most recent Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) program says the nation’s median (or mid-point) household income is $61,937; in Illinois, it’s $65,063, and 41,852,315 Americans live in poverty (12.8% of us); in Illinois, 1,509,348 are in poverty: 12.1%.

Another startling detail: The Census Bureau says 12.9 million American kids are in poverty (17.8%), and in Illinois, there are 457,282 poor kids (16.2%).

The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) cites data from the Institute for Policy Studies that from 1979 to 2012, 99% of Americans had incomes decline by 2% while the country’s top 1% saw incomes grow by 177%. And PPC expresses disappointment in elected officials and candidates mostly ignoring poverty.

“We’ve had nearly 30 debates since 2016, and not one of them has focused on poverty,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, PPC co-chair.

If politicians don’t discuss poverty much – more often talking about the middle class – maybe that’s because Americans are uncomfortable with matters of economic class, or perhaps too few politicians spend much time in poor areas. Thankfully, Mayor Lightfoot boldly told the City Club of Chicago last week, “Facing these hard truths is not easy. The process is painful. But face it we must.”

Downstate, a Township Supervisor in a city in Illinois’ top 10 by population speculates that too many politicians ignore the issue because addressing economic needs isn’t quick or simple.

“Poverty is a huge issue,” he says. “There’s no easy solution. [So] it stays off the debate and campaign trails.”

Indeed, factors contributing to poverty range from access to education and to jobs that pay adequately, to living in areas with real economic opportunities and decent qualities of life.

“When 250,000 people die every year from poverty, it is time for the presidential candidates to make good on the promises they made … to push for a debate on poverty,” Barber said. “We are calling on both sides of the aisle to have a debate on poverty in both the primary and general elections.”

In a smaller Illinois community, a Salvation Army leader agrees that the poor have become “a forgotten population, and working people are hit hard. That’s the part of our population that is hidden.”

The working poor makes too much for some help but not enough to make ends meet, she continues.

“Government uses your gross income to see if you qualify, but after taxes and child care and so on, people just can’t live off what’s left – their net income,” she adds. “And if something unforeseen happens, a car accident or miscarriage or whatever, they’re in more [financial] trouble. More and more people have jobs but live from paycheck to paycheck.”

Assistance exists, of course. Programs from the federal government or the Illinois Department of Human Services include Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), housing assistance, Social Security’s Supplemental Security Income, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Low Income Home Energy Assistance, plus township relief.

However, too few people are fully aware of such assistance or criteria, according to the township official. For example, to qualify for Township General Assistance, people must be 18 years old or older, live in the township where they’re applying, have no dependent children, and with zero income for at least 30 days.

Non-government help can also play a role, from clothing and furniture to rent assistance and food pantries, but too many families still have unmet needs.

Greater awareness could mean better attention to less-fortunate neighbors, fellow citizens overlooked rather than part of the conversation. Awareness should include the people aspiring to lead the nation publicly discussing poverty, and existing agencies in and beyond government reaching out to others.

Ellis was most prolific diarist in U.S. history

Bill Knight column for 2-20, 21 or 22, 2020 

When Edward Robb Ellis died in 1998, the 87-year-old Kewanee native had flourished with the printed word, yet decades ago recognized and regretted changes in media.

Ellis had written countless newspaper articles, a few books, and one 40,000-page journal – 20 million words condensed into the 1995 title, “A Diary of The Century.”

Born this week in 1911, Ellis’ achievements, life and even world view should be fondly recalled.

“The world is a madhouse ruled by madmen,” he once said, adding, “Madness is spreading through the world and the Typhoid Mary is television.”

Ellis began writing his diary in 1927, when he was 16 and bet two buddies that he could keep a journal longer than they could. One did it for a few weeks; the other a few months; Ellis kept at it until a few days before he died.

But Ellis wasn't obsessive; he wanted to write. In fact, 10 days after starting his diary, he told a teacher that he wanted to be a reporter and then an author.

He got started writing feature stories for the Kewanee Star-Courier, and in 1931 interviewed renowned poet Vachel Lindsay. After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1934, Ellis was hired by the Associated Press, then the New Orleans Item newspaper. After two years he left to join the Oklahoma City Times, where he interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt and covered the Dust Bowl.

“Fired in a third wave of retrenchment,” Ellis wrote, recalling the economic effects of the Great Depression on newsrooms, he returned to Illinois and was hired by the Peoria Journal-Transcript for $32.50 a week. It was the late ’30s, and for more than three years he wrote features about celebrities passing through downstate Illinois including tenor Allan Jones, historian Will Durant, and the Archduke of Austria, plus regular people. His weekly pay increased to $45.

(“One young reporter is paid only $25 a week,” his dairy notes. “The janitor gets $27.50.”)

In 1942, Ellis began working for United Press International in Chicago, then edited a Navy newspaper in Okinawa during World War II, and after the war was named Chicago's best feature writer by the Chicago Newspaper Guild labor union.

He joined the New York World-Telegram in 1947, writing about world leaders, celebrities and Nobel Prize winners until 1962, when he wrote a 640-page local history titled “The Epic of New York City.”

It was in that and another, “A Nation in Torment: A History of the Great Depression,” and in his journalism, in his diary – that Ellis lived, it seems.

Newspaperman Pete Hamill in his introduction to “A Diary of The Century,” writes, “The diarist has one essential goal: to freeze time. With each entry, he or she says that on this day, a day that will never again occur in the history of the world, I lived.”

Indeed, Ellis remains alive in his writings, either published or in the dozens of his journals kept by Letts of London, Ltd. When Letts approached Ellis about buying his life's work -- appraised at more than $1 million – Ellis offered them a deal: $80,000 a year for the rest of his life.

“I'm a 77-year-old man with emphysema who smoked heavily until five years ago and only stopped drinking nine years ago,” he said in 1988. “How long can an alcoholic, bookaholic workaholic live?”

If Ellis lived now, finishing stories in quieter, less-crowded newsrooms, he’d probably for the personal contact and collegiality of his era than the atmosphere that exists here and there in papers owned by private-equity and hedge-fund operators. In fact, in 1993, Ellis’ diary reads:

“Last night I dreamed a sad dream. It seemed that, at my present age of 81, I had joined the staff of a newspaper rich in the latest technology, such as computers and the like. Everything was mechanized, everyone dehumanized. … I was trying to find the city editor so that he might give me an assignment and thus enable me to earn my pay, but my wanderings failed to reveal him anywhere. I felt old-fashioned. I also felt annoyed, saying to myself that if they would just let me go out into the city by myself, I could find and report an interesting story.

“In reality, I could do this very thing. Well, the dream told the truth, because I would feel out of place in a modern city room.”

The economic system is broken for most of us

Bill Knight column for 2-17, 18 or 19, 2020

On a riverbank, a scorpion that can’t swim asks a frog to carry it across a river on the frog's back. The frog pauses because he’s concerned the scorpion will sting him. But the scorpion convinces him that if that happened, they’d both drown, so the frog agrees. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung him despite certain death, and the scorpion says, “I couldn't stop; it's my nature.”

Last week, the stock market surged, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 both setting record highs and the Dow Jones Industrial Average still topping 29,000 a month after breaching that level for the first time.

It meant big gains on Wall Street gains but little on Main Street.

Corporations and Trump’s Republican Party brag that such performances show prosperity, but the economy isn’t working for most of us. Actually, it’s become so obvious and threatening that the country’s richest businesspeople are publicly expressing concerns.

This month’s federal economic report also showed mixed news, with 225,000 new jobs, but 139,000 new unemployed Americans, plus a gain of 44,000 construction jobs (thanks to mild January weather) but a loss of 12,000 manufacturing jobs, nominal earnings increasing 3.1% from a year earlier, but that’s not adjusted for the cost of living.

The real story: Some 10 percent of Americans own 85% of all corporate stocks. The economy is broken for most of us.

“Far from representing a ‘blue collar boom,’ as the president put it in his State of the Union address –

 real, inflation-adjusted data show most U.S. workers have not benefited from the growing economy,” said David Salkever a University of Maryland professor emeritus of public policy.

Economist Thomas Palley, author of “Financialization: The Economics of Finance Capital Domination,” agreed, saying Wall Street doesn’t show economic health.

“Our addiction to stock-price inflation is politically and economically toxic,” he said. “It is rooted in an illusion promoted by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and mainstream economists that conflates the stock market and shared prosperity. A stock market boom is not the basis of shared prosperity.

“Though each new boom ameliorates, it does not recuperate, the prior damage done to income distribution and shared prosperity,” Palley continued. “Now, that cycle is in full swing again, clouding understanding of the economic problem and giving voters reason not to rock the boat for fear of losing what little they have.”

Marjorie Kelly, co-author of “The Making of a Democratic Economy,” in January said, “In fact, there’s really two economies. Forty-five percent of jobs today are insecure. They’re part-time, contract, ‘Uber-ized’ jobs, and wages have been stagnant for decades.”

Now, even titans of capital concede problems, from JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and BlackRock’s Larry Fink to the Business Roundtable (BR). Writing for BR – the nation’s main lobby for 180+ big corporations – Alex Gorsky said that corporations’ fundamental commitment shouldn’t exclusively be maximizing shareholder value, but to benefit workers, vendors, customers and communities, and to reduce inequality and protect the environment.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose,” his statement said, “we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.”

Similar corporate voices agree: PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, Ray Dalio, billionaire co-chair of Bridgewater Associates investments, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

But the best of the “activist capitalists” may be Peter Georgescu in his book “Capitalists Arise!” There, he notes that after the 1970s, stakeholder capitalism serving customers, workers, shareholders and society surrendered to short-term, shareholder-only capitalism. Profits soared – at the expense of everything else.

However, business elites seemingly want to just tweak the system, and one wonders whether corporations will really change policies and actions on workers’ rights, money’s influence in politics, monopoly power, etc.

It’s unwise to expect some benevolent billionaire to ride to the rescue of hollowed-out towns, households and billfolds, says a labor leader who used another animal comparison in reacting to the surprise corporate reformers, but with an unsurprising recommendation: Organize.

“Trusting corporations to hold themselves accountable is like trusting the fox to guard the henhouse,” commented Communications Workers of America vice president Richard Honeycutt. “True accountability comes from workers who join together to fight for fairness, respect and dignity for themselves and their communities.”