[statecom-discuss] Re: [statecom] on the word poor

[Mike Heichman]

Excellent article, Gary.

I suggest that continued discussion take place on the state comm 
discussion list for 2 reasons:

1. We can free the statecom list for announcements, and have discussions 
on the discussion list, which are the purposes of the 2 lists.

2. There are non-members of the state comm, who are on the discuss list, 
who could join us for discussions.

Mike Heichman


gary hicks wrote:

>"We weren't poor, just broke." --- Dick Gregory
>
>That being said, the following popped up in Monthly
>Review, current issue [Volume 58, Number 3--- August
>2006 --- a special issue on CLASS].
>=======================================================
>
>Six Points on Class
>by Michael Zweig
>
>Michael Zweig teaches economics and is director of the
>Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State
>University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the
>author of The Working Class Majority: America’s Best
>Kept Secret (Cornell University Press, 2000) and
>editor of What’s Class Got to Do with It? American
>Society in the Twenty-first Century (Cornell
>University Press, 2004). Thanks to Denis Da Puzzo for
>research assistance.
>	
>
>1. We need to change the understanding of class in the
>United States, going from the division of “rich and
>poor” to the division of “worker and capitalist.”
>
>When we popularize this more accurate and useful
>terminology, we will convey a better grasp of class
>dynamics and make it easier to address the continuing
>operation of racism and sexism in American society. We
>will also contribute to the construction of political
>movements capable of reversing the decades-old trend
>towards ever-more-consolidated corporate power at the
>expense of working people, regardless of race and
>gender.
>
>We should identify the class divisions as between the
>working class, 62 percent of the U.S. labor force—a
>substantial majority of the American people—and the
>corporate elite (or capitalist class), who make up
>only 2 percent. In between these classes is the middle
>class (36 percent of the U.S. labor force).1
>
>The “Two Americas” John Edwards identified in 2004 and
>the “Two New Yorks” Fernando Ferrer identified in his
>2005 mayoral bid refer to crucial realities that
>should be front and center in our political
>conversations and social policy. But these divisions
>are not best understood as simply the difference
>between “rich and poor.”
>
>“Class” must be understood in terms of power rather
>than income, wealth, or life style, although these do
>vary by class. Using power as the starting point
>allows us to see class as a dynamic relationship
>rather than as a static set of characteristics.
>Investigating class as a question of power also makes
>it possible to find the organic links among class,
>race, and gender. Looking at class in terms of income,
>wealth, life style, or education separates it from
>race and gender, which are best understood as power
>relationships rather than inherent characteristics
>individuals possess.
>
>The working class are those people with relatively
>little power at work—white-collar bank tellers,
>call-center workers, and cashiers; blue-collar
>machinists, construction workers, and assembly-line
>workers; pink-collar secretaries, nurses, and
>home-health-care workers—skilled and unskilled, men
>and women of all races, nationalities, and sexual
>preferences. The working class are those with little
>personal control over the pace or content of their
>work and without supervisory control over the work
>lives of others. There are nearly 90 million
>working-class people in the U.S. labor force today.
>The United States has a substantial working-class
>majority.
>
>The capitalist class are the corporate elite, senior
>executives, and directors of large corporations, whose
>job it is to give strategic direction to the company,
>who interact with government agencies and other
>corporate executives while leaving the day-to-day
>operation of their company to intermediate levels of
>management and the workforce. In this they are
>different from small business owners, who tend to work
>beside their relatively few employees and manage them
>directly. These small business owners, while literally
>capitalists in that they employ wage labor, are better
>understood to be in the middle class, as will be
>discussed below.
>
>The ruling class is considerably smaller than the full
>capitalist class and includes non-capitalists as well.
>If we think of the ruling class as those who give
>strategic direction to the country as a whole,
>extending beyond their own business or institution, we
>can identify those corporate directors who sit on
>multiple boards, thus having an opportunity to
>coordinate capitalist activity across enterprises, and
>add to them the political elites of the three branches
>of national government and cultural and educational
>leaders who contribute to the furtherance of corporate
>interests. The entire U.S. ruling class could fit into
>the seats at Yankee Stadium (capacity: 54,000).
>
>The middle class are professionals, small-business
>owners, and managerial and supervisory employees. They
>are best understood not as the middle of an income
>distribution but as living in the middle of the two
>polar classes in capitalist society. Their experiences
>have some aspects shared with the working class and
>some associated with the corporate elite.
>
>Small business owners, for example, share with
>capitalists an interest in private property in
>business assets, defeated unions, and weak labor
>regulations. But they share with workers the work
>itself, great vulnerability to the capitalist market
>and government power, and difficulty securing adequate
>health insurance and retirement security.
>
>Professionals are also caught in the middle of the
>cross fire in the principal class conflict between
>labor and capital. If we look at the experience over
>the last thirty years of professionals whose lives are
>closely intertwined with the working class—community
>college teachers, lawyers in public defender offices
>or with small general practices, doctors practicing in
>working-class neighborhoods, and public school
>teachers—their economic and social standing have
>deteriorated, along with the class they serve. But if
>we look at those whose lives are more fully involved
>in serving the capitalist class—corporate lawyers,
>financial service professionals, Big-Four CPAs, and
>doctors who practice beyond the reach of HMOs and
>insurance company oversight—these professionals have
>risen in fortune with the class they serve, albeit to
>a lesser extent, absolutely and proportionately.
>
>Professionals in most parts of the academic community
>(especially in colleges closely linked to
>working-class constituencies) are experiencing the
>pain of corporate pressure as working-class people do.
>In the process many academic jobs have been degraded.
>They are no longer relatively secure tenure-track
>middle-class positions, but adjunct and visitor
>positions staffed by a growing second tier of people
>working at will with virtually no professional
>standing, a new academic working class.2
>
>“Working class” is best understood differently from
>the Department of Labor (DOL) category “production and
>non-supervisory” employee. This DOL category includes
>every employee who is not a supervisor, like most
>professors and other middle-class professionals
>working for a salary. However, lumping all employees
>who have no supervisory power over others into the
>working class masks the real differences in social
>position that professional people enjoy, beleaguered
>as they may be. Appreciating the contradictory
>location of professional and other middle-class
>employees helps to understand the political
>vicissitudes characteristic of this section of the
>population and suggests ways of approaching them as
>allies to working-class politics.
>
>2. The usual talk of a mass middle class with some
>rich and poor at the fringes around it is deeply
>misleading and contributes to two central problems in
>American politics.
>
>A. We get trapped in confusions about race and lose
>sight of class. In the popular imagination and in
>political campaign speeches “the poor” usually stands
>for “black and Hispanic” or “minority.” In fact, in
>the United States two-thirds of all poor people are
>white and three-quarters of all black people are not
>poor. Racism continues to operate and accounts for the
>fact that poverty is experienced disproportionately
>among blacks and Hispanics (and among women because of
>sexism). But we should not allow their comparatively
>heavy burden to blind us to the full realities of
>poverty in America.
>
>Poverty is something that, in fact, happens to the
>working class. Most poor people in the United States
>are in families where the adults experience periodic
>spells of unemployment or work only part-time or at
>low wages. A family with two wage earners, one
>year-round full-time and one year-round half-time,
>each earning minimum wage, does not make enough to
>bring a family of three out of poverty. To address and
>reverse poverty we need to improve the conditions
>working-class people experience. The
>“underclass”—people entirely marginalized from the
>legal economy—is only a small fraction of the poor and
>does not characterize most poor people. The
>“underclass” has special needs which must be
>understood and addressed, but a majority of the poor
>are not in this “underclass”; they are working-class
>people experiencing hard times.
>
>B. The political target gets confused between the
>false choices of “blame the poor, fix their character,
>and give them job skills” and “take down the rich a
>notch or two.”
>
>It is a mistake to identify “the rich” as the source
>of America’s political misdirection and the target of
>our political organizing. When Al Gore challenged
>George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign by dismissing
>Bush’s plan for tax cuts as a benefit for the richest
>1 percent only, polls showed, astonishingly, that 19
>percent of Americans believed themselves to be in that
>top 1 percent, and another 21 percent believed they
>would be there in the next ten years. When we attack
>“the rich” too many people think we are attacking them
>and their future.
>
>The real source of the political and economic
>misdirection in this country is the increasingly
>unbridled power of the capitalist class and their
>arrogant pursuit of profit for the few at the expense
>of the vast majority of Americans and peoples of the
>world. This should be the target of our politics.
>Being rich is not the key point—winning $380 million
>in the Power Ball Lottery makes a person rich but not
>part of the corporate elite. The people Dick Cheney
>met with in early 2001 to set energy policy were rich,
>but much more to the point they were captains of
>industry, senior executives of U.S. energy
>corporations.
>
>Conservatives have convinced too many Americans that
>their problems stem from government coddling the poor.
>We need to redirect this anger, not towards “the rich”
>but towards the corporate elite. Such an approach
>could not be twisted into “threats to rob working
>people of their future.”
>
>Targeting “the rich” may, however, have some
>legitimate role in the environmental movement, not in
>the usual sense but in the sense that the people of
>industrial countries, especially the rich, need to
>limit their consumption. Unrestricted consumption is
>more a question of income than it is of class power,
>although one can be sure that the capitalist class,
>eager for expanding markets, will resist any
>challenges to unlimited consumption.
>
>3. The reality of race and class in the
>Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast is dramatically
>different from the “lessons of race and class” the
>media touted immediately after the catastrophe.
>
>Headlines and news analysis across the country
>following Katrina announced the “rediscovery of race
>and class in America.” But even as the U.S. media and
>an attentive public reawakened to the reality of hard
>lives long quietly and privately endured by millions
>of people, old confusions continued to obscure the
>facts of race and class in America. In typical media
>coverage “race” meant “black” and “class” meant
>“poverty,” both joining in the common identity of the
>African Americans trapped at the New Orleans Superdome
>and Convention Center.
>
>Looking at the situation through the lens of class
>brings important new information into focus. Of the
>total labor force in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area
>(including seven parishes in southeast Louisiana) 70
>percent are in working-class occupations.3 Taking the
>entire metropolitan area before Katrina, 37 percent of
>the labor force is minority, almost all of that black,
>a fraction that varies widely across the three largest
>parishes (which together account for 85 percent of the
>total metropolitan area): Jefferson Parish (the
>largest), 26 percent minority; Orleans Parish, 66
>percent minority; and St. Tammany Parish, 11 percent
>minority.4
>
>One white worker in four is employed in a job that
>pays at or near official poverty wages. This is
>equally true in both predominately black Orleans
>Parish and predominately white Jefferson Parish. They
>are in low-paid working-class jobs (health-support
>occupations, food preparation, building maintenance,
>personal care, and sales), occupations that pay from
>$12,000 to around $18,000 a year—at best not enough to
>bring a family of four out of poverty. Eighty-five
>thousand whites are among the working poor in the New
>Orleans-area labor force. By contrast, there are about
>sixty-five thousand minorities (almost all black) in
>this situation (30 percent of minority employment in
>the area).
>
>Looking at the other end of the employment picture,
>managerial and professional employment, blacks are by
>no means absent even though they are proportionately
>underrepresented. Minorities held over 47,000 (or 26
>percent) of all such jobs in the New Orleans
>metropolitan area in 2004 (but were 37 percent of the
>labor force), while in the city of New Orleans
>(Orleans Parish) minorities held 45 percent of the
>managerial and professional jobs (compared with their
>66 percent share of the overall labor force).
>
>In the construction trades, blacks and whites hold
>jobs in just about equal proportion to their numbers
>in the area, minorities holding 11,000 out of a total
>29,000 such relatively well-paying jobs. President
>Bush’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act—which
>requires federally financed construction projects to
>pay union-scale wages—for Gulf-area reconstruction hit
>equally hard at black and white communities of
>construction workers. Similarly, Federal Section 8
>housing programs are designed for the families of the
>working poor. The refusal by the Bush administration
>to use this program in the aftermath of Katrina has
>affected white as well as black working-class
>families.
>
>If we look at Katrina and see and speak of black
>victims only we make a terrible mistake. Without
>neglecting or underplaying the disproportionate
>suffering of the African American community, it is
>essential—for moral as well as political reasons—to
>recognize the devastation that hit tens of thousands
>of white families, almost all in the working class,
>along with their African American neighbors.
>Neglecting white suffering only contributes to racial
>resentment and undermines the development of political
>unity that both black and white, working- and
>middle-class residents will need to rescue the
>reconstruction for the common good.
>
>4. Identifying class forces accurately is an essential
>starting point for more effective politics to turn
>back the right-wing tide that has swept across the
>United States with growing power for nearly forty
>years.
>
>We need to reevaluate the constituent base of
>progressive politics and reformulate our work with
>class as an important component. A New York Times news
>story evaluating the 2005 New York City mayoral race
>reported: “[Bloomberg’s] wide support among minority
>voters is a sign that the strategy of the Democrat,
>Fernando Ferrer, to build a dependable base of black
>and Hispanic voters fell victim to emerging political
>realities: that blacks and Hispanics no longer vote
>reflexively as a bloc, and that a middle-class
>coalition can trump traditional ethnic-based
>appeals.”5
>
>Class differences now divide ethnic and racial
>populations in ever-more-important ways. Although
>blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately found more
>often in the working class and less often in the
>middle and capitalist classes, compared with their
>shares of the labor force (and in lower-paying jobs in
>all classes compared with whites), there are
>nevertheless millions of black and Hispanic
>professionals, managers, and small business owners,
>and growing numbers in the corporate elite as well.
>Each class is divided by race and ethnicity; each race
>and ethnic group is divided by class.
>
>Recombining forces within this mosaic of class and
>race into a progressive coalition requires a direct
>appeal to class interests and identity, while
>continuing to address the problems of racism and
>sexism that remain important sources of suffering
>across class lines. Only a class-based politics that
>is attuned to issues of race and gender can produce
>the social force necessary to turn back and limit the
>corporate power that has gotten so destructively out
>of control in recent decades.
>
>The closest recent experience in this direction was
>Jesse Jackson’s presidential races in 1984 and 1988,
>in which he got significant numbers of white male
>working-class votes by tirelessly championing working
>people’s aspirations, unions, strikes, and other
>worker campaigns, while never neglecting the
>continuing significance of race and gender.
>
>Asserting the interests of working people can be the
>basis of political alliances that benefit large
>sections of the middle class as well. As noted above,
>over the past thirty years, as working-class lives
>have become more difficult, millions of professionals,
>lower-level supervisors, and small-business
>owners—those in the middle class whose lives are most
>closely linked to working people—have also suffered
>setbacks. At the same time, those in the middle class
>most closely associated with serving the corporate
>elite have done very well. Class-based politics can
>link working- and middle-class people in their common
>interest to limit the power of the corporate elite. A
>politics for the vast majority of Americans is hard to
>dismiss as “special interest business as usual.”
>
>Class should play an important part in the evaluation
>of Supreme Court and other federal court nominees, a
>point the corporate community already well
>understands. When John Roberts was nominated in July
>2005, the Wall Street Journal reported his corporate
>bona fides in his experience as a successful and
>effective corporate lawyer, notably defending Toyota
>against a worker’s compensation claim.6
>
>The New York Times reported that the Bush
>administration had worked behind the scenes for a year
>preparing the religious right to accept the Roberts
>nomination. This was accompanied by an organized
>corporate lobbying effort on federal court
>appointments, to ensure that nominees backed by the
>religious right would also be sensitive to business
>interests. Similar reports followed the nomination of
>Samuel Alito, who, in the midst of many articles about
>his views on abortion, was in one story said to have
>“sided with employers over employees.”7
>
>The protection of reproductive rights for women is an
>integral part of a progressive political agenda, but
>it should not be pursued without close attention to
>the working-class dimensions of the agenda as well.
>For instance, access to abortions will be much more
>severely restricted for working-class women than for
>middle- and capitalist-class women should abortion
>become illegal. Highlighting the anti-labor stand of
>anti-abortion judges and their political backers will
>help expose the contours of power at play in the
>country and broaden the coalition opposed to
>right-wing court nominees and committed to progressive
>policies for women and working people alike.
>
>The conventional wisdom has it that most Americans
>identify themselves as members of the middle class so
>political appeals to the middle class are appropriate
>for building winning messages. It is true that large
>majorities say they are in the middle class when the
>choices given are “upper, middle, lower” or “rich,
>middle, poor.” But when “working class” is given as a
>choice, 45 percent to 55 percent of Americans put
>themselves in the working class.8
>
>We do not yet know just what people mean when they
>identify themselves as working class. We do not know
>who else they think is in that class with them, and
>who is not. Nor do we know the strength of that
>identity in comparison with other identities, whether
>racial or in terms of particular interests such as
>being a hunter, a volunteer firefighter, a little
>league coach, or a “pink lady” hospital volunteer. But
>it may well be that Americans are ready to hear and
>identify with class talk when it illuminates the
>realities of their lives and points to political
>practice that will improve their and their children’s
>lives.
>
>Eight or ten years ago it seemed that class categories
>expressed in terms of power, a working class, a
>capitalist class, were so far out of polite
>conversation that they were useless for constructive
>political debate. But today even mainstream
>commentators are increasingly referring to the working
>class, class warfare, and in general framing their
>writing in class terms. The New York Times series on
>class in America, published as a book in 2005, is a
>prominent example.9 Jeff Faux’s book The Global Class
>War is another.10 Serious class talk is again possible
>and should be pursued with rigor, subtlety, and
>confidence.
>
>Back in 1981, after the first destructive round of
>concession bargaining in the auto industry, UAW
>President Douglas Fraser characterized the process as
>“one-sided class warfare,” in which labor was
>unprepared. The corporate elite—with a thorough
>understanding of its class interests—has continued
>these attacks on labor ever since. It is past time for
>progressive people to call this class warfare out for
>what it is and create a political vision and policies
>squarely in the interests of working people and all
>whose interests are turned aside by corporate power.
>
>5. Class operates on a global scale.
>
>The global economy is not separate from the domestic.
>The common view that globalization refers to what is
>“out there” while the domestic economy is “here”—with
>the “out there” threatening the “here” with job loss,
>cheap labor, and capital flight—fails to see how
>capital accumulation operates in all of its dynamics,
>both nationally and globally.11
>
>The global accumulation process under the neoliberal
>regime of the past thirty years has generated robust
>capitalist classes in many developing countries
>(Brazil, China, and India are principal examples) and
>has also begun to integrate these into a coherent
>international capitalist class operating on a global
>scale.12 At the same time, the global reach of the
>accumulation process is bringing into existence a
>global working class which already has implications
>for cross-border labor organizing and within-country
>responses to immigration.13
>
>The introduction of class analysis based on power
>rather than income reorients our view of WTO and IMF
>dynamics. Rather than seeing the conflict as one
>between the poor global south and the rich global
>north, we can see that class divisions divide both
>north and south and recombine the people of each into
>international, as well as national, groupings. While
>national interests certainly continue to operate, as
>long as the national aspirations of the south are
>articulated by capitalists there, who lead the
>political representation of those interests, working
>people will be disadvantaged in both the south and the
>north. Broad acceptance of the idea that the south is
>progressive while the north is oppressive empties the
>global playing field of the working class in the north
>as a progressive force and turns a blind eye to
>murderous southern elites.
>
>Integrating domestic and international aspects of the
>single economic system in which we live also makes it
>easier to build movements among working people for
>just foreign policy and against the Iraq war and
>occupation.14 A class analysis allows us to see beyond
>the financial costs and lost public services resulting
>from the enormous military budget. It helps make clear
>that the war and U.S. foreign policy seek to empower
>globally the same corporate capitalist class that
>challenges working people on virtually every economic
>and social issue at home.
>
>6. Class is an idea for a movement of ideas.
>
>If there is any hope of a progressive revival of the
>Democratic Party, or the rise of a third party that
>seeks to represent working people, it must become a
>party of broad vision, not just a party of
>interest-based policy proposals. The same is true of
>social movements that hope to influence public policy
>and political outcomes.
>
>Policy is essential but it must be placed in the
>context of the broadest understanding of how the world
>works, how our life prospects are shaped, and how we
>create and use our great capacity for wealth and
>community involvement. Introducing class into the
>national conversation can invigorate the political
>process and bring new energy and understanding to a
>broad range of questions, including the continued
>importance of race and gender as points of tension and
>needed progress.
>
>Class talk allows us to recall the language of
>economic and social justice and to revive calls for
>economic democracy that have been the foundation of
>progressive social movements for over a hundred years.
>The corporate agenda has stripped all reference to
>morality from economic affairs. For the right,
>unrestricted markets are all that is relevant in
>economic matters. This is a core question that
>progressives must address directly. Class
>understanding will help us to illuminate and ground
>the ethical dimensions of our politics and help us
>imagine and create organizations, coalitions, and
>social forces capable of turning back the destructive
>power of capital and replacing it with values and
>policies that relieve human suffering and promote the
>social good.
>
>Notes
>
>   1. See Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority:
>America’s Best Kept Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
>University Press, 2000) for details.
>   2. Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (New York:
>Monthly Review Press, 2005).
>   3. U.S. Department of Labor, “May 2004 Metropolitan
>Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates: New
>Orleans, LA MSA,”
>http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrcma.htm.
>   4. Louisiana Department of Labor, “Louisiana Labor
>Force Diversity Data: 2004,” http://www.laworks.net/.
>   5. Sam Roberts, “Mayor Crossed Ethnic Barriers for
>Big Victory: Democrats Now Facing New Political
>Reality,” New York Times, November 10, 2005.
>   6. Jess Blavin & Jeanne Cummings, “Bush Taps
>Roberts for Supreme Court: Conservative Nominee, 50,
>Is Viewed as Pro-Business; Doubts from Some
>Democrats,” Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2005.
>   7. Stephen Labaton, “Court Nominee Has Paper Trail
>Businesses Like,” New York Times, November 5, 2005.
>   8. Poll results reported in Zweig, The Working
>Class Majority, 57–59.
>   9. Correspondents of the New York Times, Class
>Matters (New York: Times Books, 2005)
>  10. Jeff Faux, The Global Class War (Hoboken, NJ:
>Wiley, 2006).
>  11. See, for example, William K. Tabb, The Amoral
>Elephant (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001) and
>Jeff Faux, The Global Class War
>  12. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist
>Class, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
>  13. Katie Quan, “Global strategies for workers: how
>class analysis clarifies ‘us’ and ‘them’ and what we
>need to do,” in Michael Zweig (ed), What’s Class Got
>to Do with It? American Society in the Twenty-First
>Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
>  14. Michael Zweig, “Labor and the War: The
>Remarkable Story of USLAW,” New Labor Forum (Fall
>2005).
>
>| Top |
>
>All material © copyright 2006 Monthly Review
>
>=======================================================
>
>
>--- gracegrnrnbw at aol.com wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Okay, assuming that not everyone is following this
>>whole thread.  the 
>>issue here is that folks who are low-income and have
>>been activists - 
>>fighting to end poverty - which is legitimized by
>>the same thinking 
>>that folks used against those fighting to end
>>slavery - "it's always 
>>been with us", "the bible says it is the normal way
>>of things", "People 
>>in poverty are happy", "it's your fault - you've
>>done 'poorly'" - have 
>>learned some things.
>>
>>Just like when Malcolm X was taken under the wings
>>of a couple of 
>>Muslim guys and he went and read the dictionary and
>>they told him to 
>>look up everything the word black was associated
>>with (everything bad 
>>pretty much) and then look up the word white
>>(everything good pretty 
>>much)- he understood how engrained race and race
>>based values were in 
>>our society.  If you do the same thing and look up
>>"poor" and "rich" - 
>>you find the same thing.
>>
>>SO, the experts, most of the folks on the cutting
>>edge of the movement 
>>to abolish poverty, who have dealt with prejudice
>>and fighting media 
>>bias, etc, for years, have chosen a different, more
>>accurate word to 
>>describe their situation and that of people like
>>them - the word folks 
>>use is low-income.  Because rich people (who have
>>everything while 
>>their sister- and brother-human beings starve) are
>>"poor", not the 
>>people who don't have money.
>>
>>So if you still, after all this back and forth,
>>cannot personally feel 
>>why not to use the word "poor" when you are only
>>talking about how much 
>>cash someone has - perhaps you could try it on
>>because those whose 
>>lives it is, who are developing the politics to
>>create this piece of 
>>the change are telling you it will most move forward
>>their/our struggle.
>>
>>I know having come from some money that listening to
>>those with less 
>>privilege and following their lead challenges the
>>messages inside me 
>>that having more money means you are smarter, that
>>somehow you must 
>>deserve it (otherwise you'd have to deal with the
>>immorality of it and 
>>consider sharing it with others!) - but practice it
>>- there is much 
>>wonderful to learn and see by listening and trying
>>on the perspective 
>>of those with more direct experience who have also
>>bothered to analyze 
>>it, understand it and are figuring out how to change
>>it-
>>
>>Love, Grace
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: anniembutler at hotmail.com
>>To: etwee at earthlink.net; statecom at green-rainbow.org
>>Sent: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 8:42 PM
>>Subject: Re: Re: [statecom] on the word poor
>>
>>    don't know what the issue is but how about "poor
>>and working class". 
>>some poor people are working two jobs, some poor
>>people are poor by 
>>choice, some working class people make alot of money
>>and can not by any 
>>stretch of the imagination be called poor. (some
>>union guys who worked 
>>the big dig bought a second home on their pay checks
>>and yes it was a 
>>union guy who told me this about his friends. yes, i
>>support unions) 
>>some working class people work two jobs and are
>>still poor. aha, a ven 
>>diagram. ( i used to be a teachers aid. but still i
>>had to keep the 
>>cleaning jobs until i married up.) 
>> 
>>  i have always considered myself, money- wise to be
>>amoung the 
>>wealthiest in the world.rich, rich, rich . hot
>>water, toilet, 
>>refrigerator, car......the things money can buy.
>>(fyi: i grew up on 
>>canned gov. food, orphanage food and foster care
>>food. i lived on afdc 
>>for about 4 years, in '92 i married a guy who was
>>working at the photo 
>>shop but had graduated from harvard. eventually,
>>when he got a career 
>>in computers, i co- owned two houses. two years ago
>>he left. my income 
>>dropped 93K, 
>> 
>>  so now i am back to being poor in money. still i
>>am rolling in it 
>>compared to most people of the world. as for class,
>>my father was a 
>>union guy who worked on the docks, my mom the
>>daughter of a bus driver, 
>>the orphanage was catholic so i learned to love
>>school. learning was an 
>>escape. i went to universitiy on a state
>>scholarship, because i was a 
>>state ward, in the town i grew up in. i am still,
>>the only women in my 
>>family to get a degree...whoops my niece just
>>graduated from my school, 
>>university of minnesota, duluth ) 
>> 
>>  but also, like melissa, i think the best things in
>>life aren't things. 
>>i have everything money can't buy. 
>> 
>>  my story is not that unusual. that is why i use
>>"poor and working 
>>class". it may not be politically correct but after
>>all i am a green. 
>> 
>> annie butler 
>> 
>> 66666666666666666666666666666666666666 
>> "...the road wil bend, the war will end and love
>>will win" g. brooks 
>> 
>>  
>> ----Original Message Follows---- 
>> From: BillCunningham <etwee at earthlink.net> 
>>  Reply-To: BillCunningham
>><etwee at earthlink.net>,State Committee 
>>Official Business <statecom at green-rainbow.org> 
>>  To: State Committee Official Business 
>><statecom at green-rainbow.org>,State Committee
>>Official Business 
>><statecom at green-rainbow.org> 
>> Subject: Re: Re: [statecom] Green Pages Call for
>>Op-Eds 
>> Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 19:27:44 -0400 (GMT-04:00) 
>> 
>>  Hey John and Melissa, I guess if I get on this
>>thread I can get your 
>>attention! When are we getting together to get this
>>retreat thing 
>>going? It seems to me next weekend would be a good
>>time for retreat.... 
>> 
>> -----Original Message----- 
>> >From: John Walsh <jvwalshmd at gmail.com> 
>> >Sent: Aug 14, 2006 12:52 PM 
>> >To: State Committee Official Business
>><statecom at green-rainbow.org> 
>> >Subject: Re: Re: [statecom] Green Pages Call for
>>Op-Eds 
>> > 
>> >It is a good discussion. 
>> >But as we used to say on the CPPAX board, the
>>amount of time spent on 
>> >an item is inversely proportional to its
>>importance. 
>> >jw 
>> > 
>> >On 8/14/06, Melissa Harrell <lissagrp at gmail.com>
>>wrote: 
>> >> I'd rather go with low-budget and I personally
>>am low budget but 
>> >> definately am not poor. I have everything that
>>money can't buy. 
>> >> 
>> >> -Melissa 
>> >> 
>> >> John Walsh wrote: 
>>  >> > I prefer "poor," since I am a great admirer
>>of Robert Fisk who 
>>uses it. 
>> >> > But this is my last word on this. 
>> >> > jw 
>> >> > 
>> >> > On 8/14/06, Colby E. Peterson
>><saphron at verizon.net> wrote: 
>>  >> >> In the film industry we call productions
>>with no cash "low/no 
>>budget" 
>> >> >> or just "low/no." We're just a low-budget
>>party. 
>>
>>    
>>
>=== message truncated ===
>
>
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