What Does Poverty Mean to Children? | Poor Kids | FRONTLINE | PBS

Child poverty has reached record levels with over 16 million children affected. One in 13 Americans are jobless, and many children are growing up with little hope for their future.

For Poor Kids, which premieres next Tuesday on PBS, FRONTLINE spent months following six children who are growing up against the backdrop of their families’ struggles against financial ruin. Filmmaker Jezza Neuman traveled to the Quad Cities, a great American crossroads along the border of Iowa and Illinois, to explore the lives of children living in the suburbs of the nation’s heartland. We asked the children what being poor in America really looks like through their eyes.

“I was surprised by how things can change so fast,” says 14-year-old Roger, one of the children profiled in the film. “You can go from doing OK, not having to go hungry, to this: going hungry and having to pay all your bills and not being able to [buy food], on the verge of being homeless again.”

(via socio-logic)

Source: sarahlee310

Capitalism has nothing to do with competition. You don’t enforce undemocratic minority control over resources and opportunities to foster competition or facilitate wealth creation by everyone. “Competition” is just a euphemism for economic divide and conquer, which is why it’s only for those at the bottom.

Also, greed is irrelevant. The greedy want people to think their greed is normal and widespread so they can indulge it without being challenged. The only reason greed is a factor is because it explains why some people reject a democratic and fair system like socialism and choose a system of exploitation and abuse like capitalism. It’s a sad and ineffectual attempt to rationalise their irrational decision to harm others for their own gain.

Socialism is about the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. Greedy people in the system don’t get to have more control than anyone else, so it doesn’t matter if they’re greedy or not. They can covet power and the ability to dominate others all they like, but other people are protected from them.

Likewise, I don’t think people would need much compelling to help each other in a socialist economy. For one thing, without capitalism people wouldn’t be shut out of the system and exploited, which reduces the welfare bill drastically. Second, these attitudes are encouraged by today’s elite who wouldn’t exist without their society enforcing their special privileges.

NewBunkle,
We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

How Do You Take Your Poison? by Chris Hedges

A nice critique of the two party system that isn’t filled with libertarians calling everyone ‘statist’.

(via anticapitalist)

The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, makes the observation that many lower class people identify most strongly with the upper classes and come off ideologically as conservatives.

There is more money in collaboration with the wealthy oppressors; and what better way is there to hide and deny your roots than to express indifference and hatred of them? It’s all about getting credible distance from a past that one associates with personal shame.

I know a few lower-class-originated conservatives, and for all their denunciations of the poor, they remain in fear of falling back in with those from whence they came.
From a comment by Glenn at AT&T: What Part of “Lunch Break” Do You Not Understand?

(via socio-logic)

Source: coreyrobin.com

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
Michel Foucault

(via socio-logic)

Source: iamnotaghost

Ads are not meant for conscious consumption. They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise a hypnotic spell… That is one of the most edifying aspects of the huge educational enterprise that we call advertising, whose twelve-billion-dollar annual budget approximates the national school budget.

Any expensive ad represents the toil, attention, testing, wit, art & skill of many people. Far more thought & care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features & editorials. Any expensive ad is as carefully built as on the tested foundations of public stereotypes or ‘sets’ of established attitudes, as any skyscraper is built on bedrock.

Since highly skilled & perceptive teams of talent cooperate in the making of an ad for any established line of goods whatever, it is obvious that any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience. No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering & processing of exploitable social data…

… It is true, of course, that ads use the most basic & tested human experience of a community in grotesque ways. They are as incongruous, if looked at consciously, as the playing of ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ as music for a striptease act. But ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frogmen of the mind for semiconscious exposure. Their mere existence is a testimony, as well as a contribution, to the somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis.

After World War II, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial, slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes & cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men.

In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics & worrying instead about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight & tired blood.

The army officer was probably right. Any community that wants to expedite & maximize the exchange of goods & services has simply got to homogenize its social life…

Marshall McLuhan

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

published in 1964

______

(via sexpropscr3am)

(via socio-logic)

Source: sexpropscr3am

ryking: Study: Super-rich use tax havens to hide $21 trillion A sum the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined is being hidden in tax havens by the world’s wealthiest individuals, a new study reveals… Former McKinsey & Co Chief Economist James Henry conducted the research for the Tax Justice Network, a coalition that campaigns against tax avoidance and tax havens. The study, entitled “The Price of Offshore Revisited” focused only on financial wealth rather than non-financial assets such as property, so the numbers are thought to be conservative.
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ryking:

Study: Super-rich use tax havens to hide $21 trillion

A sum the size of the United States and Japanese economies combined is being hidden in tax havens by the world’s wealthiest individuals, a new study reveals…

Former McKinsey & Co Chief Economist James Henry conducted the research for the Tax Justice Network, a coalition that campaigns against tax avoidance and tax havens.

The study, entitled “The Price of Offshore Revisited” focused only on financial wealth rather than non-financial assets such as property, so the numbers are thought to be conservative.

Damning account of how Bush & Obama handled bailouts, by the man whose job was to police the $700 billion TARP program

soupsoup:

He is Neil Barofsky. Remember him — the man whose job it was to police the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program? And his new account, a book titled “Bailout” (Free Press), to be published on Tuesday, is a must-read.

His story is illuminating, if deeply depressing. We tag along with Mr. Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor, as he walks into a political buzz saw as the special inspector general for TARP. Government officials, he says, eagerly served Wall Street interests at the public’s expense, and regulators were captured by the very industry they were supposed to be regulating. He says he was warned about being too aggressive in his work, lest he jeopardize his future career.

Question Everything: CAPITALISM’S BIG LIES

arielnietzsche:

1. Competition generates jobs. Right?

WRONG! Competition may initially create jobs but leads inevitably to over-production of the same commodities or over-provision of the same services by competing companies, resulting in takeovers, redundancies or export of jobs to…

Source: nationalpeoplesparty.wordpress.com

motherjones:

“Kids play T-ball, then baseball; they play games and have practice every week and, if they’re serious about it, pre-season and post-season too. We never think, “Let’s have kids play baseball for eight weeks in seventh grade,” and then expect that in five years they can join the majors or even be on a college team.
But for some reason we do this with civics. We say, “We’re going to have you do a penny harvest in fifth grade and a service learning project in tenth grade, and then we’ll teach you abstractly about government for a semester in twelfth grade.”
Then our students enter the major leagues of citizenship, and we give them the vote and expect them to keep our country going. And that’s just crazy!”

—

Meira Levinson talking about her new book No Citizen Left Behind. (via bostonreview)

Wow. Just, wow. Quote of the week.

Source: bostonreview

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