WHO ARE THE AMERICAN POOR?
WHO BELONGS TO THE LOWEST CLASS? ETHNICS?

It's easy to believe only Blacks and Latinos are locked out these days
But no. Today, there's a WHITE UNDERCLASS.

http://socialistreview.org.uk/352/joe-bageant-champion-forgotten-underclass

"White underclass" is a term journalists do not use much as they have rare occasion to. SOCIOLOGISTS may use the term 'poverty'  but  nobody in social science seems to agree on who belongs under the term. Who does it apply to? Jobless blacks? TRAILER TRASH? OAKIES? APPALACHIAN SCOT-IRISH? Or What southerners used to refer to as POOR WHITE TRASH?

Or is the dividing line at that place where white Folks work minimum wage, entry level jobs flipping burgers or cleaning motel rooms even though they're adults? Is it workers who can't afford to buy a house ergo own trailers?  Or is it High school drop outs? Or all of the above?

See, it gets confusing because some whites are incredibly poor but nobody can agree if such a thing as a white underclass exists. You know why that is? Because any white family in America can graduate a child from high school, and if that kid speaks English, isn't mentally impaired, doesn't have slurred speech or drool, he can get a white collar job and earn three times the legal wage minimum at the gitgo.

So who's poor now? Just black men and latinos, right? Well I know Latino gardeners with 350,000$ homes in San Fernando Valley. As much of their earnings come as cash, they're not underclass. IRS may think so but as I walk by feeding feral cats in the nabe, I see fruit rotting on the ground in their orchard.

I guess Latino gardeners who started early did well and held on to their clients. Recent arrivals came over the border and found a huge recession. My gardener from HONDURAS (landslide over his cattle brought him here,)... returned after a year of occasional hard hat work, but white bosses who stiffed him.

That '3 times minimum wage' earning thing is not happening for ethnics today unless they are --like Obama, super well educated, gorgeous to die, tall, elegantly dressed.  Without the accoutrements, they will graduate school  and face the prejudice barrier.

First of all --the potential employer sees a really black man and immediately wonders if he speaks EBONICS or can read and speak the King's English. For that reason the ethnic must be overqualified. He/she must type 100 wpm with no errors. He must speak with no trace of a regional accent or in case of a Musim, no foreign accent.

Now, these aren't hard things to do. TV is in our faces. Anyone can talk like a news anchor. I often wonder why people from Boston and Brooklyn don't learn to speak English.. With the accent of a top news anchor. NEXT, Getting A's and B's is easy as Typing is easy. In junior high school, (now called Middle school,) one can  learn to type 100 words per minute in a week with one class a day. An hour each time. So I would say that anyone who is not dyslexic can learn to type in a week. FREE TYPING SOFTWARE exists on line. Google the term "download free typing instruction software". Then high schools give all kinds of Computer classes. Go to school, you can get a pretty good job.Go to library you get a book that STANDS UP ON ITS OWN with typing lessons. FREE.

So there are A's for poor kids,scholarships and JOBS  waiting. Still, ethnics have a right to belly ache. They know that any white can get a great job straight out of the classifieds in the newspaper and tuck themselves right up into the underbelly of the white middle class, earn a salary for a few years and then buy real estate. Even if they drool. Yep,  if they have credit cards and a year of paying taxes, the average white guy can even buy a house though a Condo would be a jest fine starter kit in real estate. Only 5% of the ethnics can do that.

There truly barely IS a black middle class and if it exists, it exists because of the sixties, seventies and eighties being so prosperous that smart blacks climbed out of poverty to own property but the recession is kicking their children right back into the jobless mire. And the foreclosure debacle kicking them back into homelessness. That should Read "THE FED, THE BANKERS, THE IMF"

Being a member of The Middle Class has implications of PROFESSIONAL occupations, usually white collar occupations, though it also includes government work, bureaucrats, the Law/ Cop / Court industry, prison industry and blue-collar workers who had solid, union jobs. But this comes down to describing human beings solely in terms of their jobs in the capitalist labor marketplace, and assumptions about income and whether one takes their daily shower before they go to work or after they come home. By that definition, anyone of working age who doesn't have a steady job of the right type, for whatever reason, is in some sort of "economic underclass." In other words, they are the people that middle class folks feel should damned well be working, if they are over age 18 and have a pulse. ("If I gotta do time in this meaningless workhouse of a nation, you do too!") This underclass includes any people of color seen on the street at midday during the week, single mothers, and paraplegics too, now that the middle class is paying taxes for SSI checks, handicap parking spaces and wheelchair access to the public toilets.

Another way we define the underclass is that they are "losers:" people who cannot talk, think, or act like middle class professional and managerial workers, people who cannot even be posers. There is absolutely no excuse for these people. We've got television 24/7 to show 'em how to behave. They could learn to act like the hearty blue collar workers we see on the endless reruns of The King of Queens (an American sitcom about a parcel service delivery truck driver.). This cute couple owns a house and has a relaxed, wonderful life.

From reading the studies, I can see that social scientists dislike plural nouns, and thus shun the word losers. So they call this the "educational underclass." Either way, it comes down to folks too wooly and uncurried for office water cooler society. Nobody is denying that they all should have jobs, of course, just nowhere near the water cooler.

Yes, eight to eighty, crippled blind or crazy, Americans generally agree that every man or woman in America should have a full time job, except those women who manage to snag a wealthy man. They are exempt, as are the middle class commissariat's own beer guzzling spawn keeping the pizza delivery and the all-night video arcade businesses thriving in college towns across the republic.

Then you've got your moral underclass. Like the rest of us, they come in two major varieties -- male and female. Females who don't bother to get married before they have babies (the non-technical term is "welfare sluts"), and men who have things more serious on their national police state blotters than a parking ticket. "Non-mainstreamers," in socio-demographic speak. Many of these are men who say, "Screw it, I ain't gonna even bother to work my ass off and be treated like dirt for six bucks an hour. I'd rather shoot pool." Me too.

The unwed mothers come in two varieties. There are those who decide they want children, but are choosy about the husband that traditionally comes with the deal. And there are those who are so young and naïve due to cultural circumstance and environment they do not know what this country does to, not for, single mothers. They often find themselves working at least part time (workfare), yet permanently institutionalized into poverty by our social services industry, instead of being lifted out of it. More than 45 percent of U.S. single mothers are poor, compared to five percent in Sweden and Finland, where no stigma is attached and substantial public resources are applied to child health and development. But research done in Europe shows that even if U.S. women had a zero rate of single motherhood, poverty among American women would still be higher than in European and other socially advanced nations.

Armchair sociologist that I am, I have a theory about this: Millions of American women are in poverty because they are paid poverty wages. I could be wrong, I often am, but there seems to be a connection between poverty and money. I started developing this theory last year when I was in a Melbourne, Australia hotel and learned from a single mother hotel housekeeper there that she made $19 an hour, had government assisted childcare and was going to college at night toward becoming a medical technician. Hmmm… Over here we tell single mothers, "Get a six dollar an hour job or get married bitch! Workfare, baby, workfare." Then too, contrary to the American middle class belief system, out-of-wedlock babies are increasing at all levels of white American society. Even more contrary to popularly held notions, as many of these children turn out to be as well adjusted people as do children of the middle class. But for damned sure poorer in most cases.

And finally we have simple snottiness as a line of underclass demarcation -- one's manner of physical gesture or accent. Believe me from personal experience, a Southern accent in America is no ticket to the top. But even with a Southern accent, if you talk like a college grad, don't wear bib overhauls or gang banger gear, and appear to know where South America is on a map, Americans will deem you middle class. Actually, if you smile a lot, and sound like any sort of white customer service type, it will fly. It's called having the appropriate social and cultural skill set. Yeah, right, appropriate to be hired as a telemarketer so you can piss people off by interrupting their dinner hour.

But even if you gather aluminum cans from dumpsters for a living, with effort, you can "pass" like light skinned black folks used to do in this country. As testimony to this, I, who am a college dropout  have successfully rented homes in West Los Angeles by doign astrology and palmistry for a living. (The secret is getting out, being charming, pretty and having nerve.) If I'd been black or Hispanic though, I'd have been distributing the urinal cakes in the rest rooms at night. So yes, there is a slight edge to whiteness, though not nearly as much as minorities assume. Still, you gotta make the most of that little edge.

In the end, race, gender or sexual preference are just moving parts of the class machine, with middle class perceptions setting the standard. You can indeed be black or queer, but with the properly buffed patina of white middle class mojo you can make it to the top, or near to the top of the heap (in America, proximity to the top of our cultural garbage heap is everything). All the rest of us are mere consumer refuse, as the Michael Jackson Morbidity Festival demonstrated. You can even be celebrated as an icon of diversity if you act white and middle class enough. Obama is Harvard white guy enough, Ellen DeGeneres is going strong ten years after coming out, gay Congressman Barney Franks convicted pedophile, still gets reelected. They've all got white middle class mojo. I think his constituents don't read newspapers though. What black homosexual would get re-elected?

When it comes to the underclass, there is no arguing that some people are members because they are so damned uneducated they cannot count their toes or read well enough to fill out a job app, the causes of which are too deep and tangled to go into at the moment. Others just don't care to do the smiling grammatically correct wimp assed customer service zombie thing. They prefer swinging a bigger hammer than that -- doing real work, like America used to do. And doing it without kissing ass, which is why they are called the "permanently jobless." As sociologist Christopher Jencks points out, "There is no absolute standard dictating what people need to know in order to get along in society. There is however, an absolute rule that you get along better if you know what the elite knows than if you do not." He also cautions that "the term underclass combines so many different meanings that social scientists must use it with extreme care."

Which is fine. But I'm no social scientist. If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans are being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70-year-old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-Mart as a "greeter" so he can pay at least something on last winter's heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter's type joint so her crotch won't show, she's part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences. Lifelong criminal class, like London in the l9th century.

We're finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We've got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won't be the first. Some people believe that anecdotal evidence is relevant. Most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly  and what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who's drinking himself to death because, "I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I'm all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I'll never have another one and I've got four more years to go before Social Security." He doesn't need scientific proof. He doesn't need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness. I don't think the recessionary budget has room for him.

And furthermore,  we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people's scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you're jobless, homeless, you know it. You don't need scientific verification.

"The world wishes to be deceived." - Sebastian Franck, (1499-c.1543) German preacher, author, humanist reformer.

Know any journalists who write about the POOR? Steve Lopez in LA at the LA TIMES  is California's Charismatic Caring Reporter and he will write about stiffed segments of society. I know of few others. Lately they graduate to expose non fiction books. If you know of any please communicate to this POSTER, ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ at ASTROLOGY AT EARTHLINK DOT NET

If you google "JOURNALIST" with "WRITES ABOUT POVERTY"  or "writes about disenfranchised," you may find a handful.  (POSTER ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ wants you to let her know where, what newspaper. OR cut and paste and mail to me at ASTROLOGY AT EARTHLINK DOT NET

Also Try googling "HUNGER IN AMERICA"  Then turn activist journalist, Report on poverty in your city. Befriend the homeless and forgotten.  Write it up. blog.

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Our POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Researcher, mother of 4 and career Astrologer. Catch up with her websites  TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS,  HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate career reading out there!

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