Poverty in America: Worlds within Worlds by Samina Masood

They say the earth is not made of atoms, it is made of tales. Tales of humanity, and  the struggle implied therein.  In an essay by author Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote “Nickle and Dimed” in  2001, she gives insights into some tales worth analyzing.

She analyses the period of the rapid rise in industrial fortunes of the 80s, to the tanking of the economy by 2008.  During the dot come explosion, many middle class Americans were able to take advantage of the capitalists fortune making markets. Ehrenreich quotes how in San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, "Make love not war," and then,  down at the bottom, the fine print read:  "Screw it, just make money."

Today, many lower middle class Americans who used to get by on a bare budget, are the new disenfranchised class, many of them having lost their minimum wage jobs, their homes, and any means of supporting themselves.

The author writes vociferously about real tales of “ those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. She researched  living conditions of many a lower middle class American family. She writes about “the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book – the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans.”

To one’s unpleasant surprise, she opines that this occurred not in the worst of times, but when there were still jobs to be found. In 20001, she was able to walk the streets with job postings in many businesses. In less than a decade even these low paying jobs disappeared, with stiff competition for those that remain. She goes on to tell many a horror story of the working poor in a declining economy.

"Caroline", a woman in  her 50s, partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, left her deadbeat husband, taking on occasional cleaning and catering jobs, which did not afford her basic health care.

She labels this class of worker as the "nouveau poor,"  formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008.

She talks about the struggle of the lower working class, the blue-collar worker, who failed to make it due to the rise of unemployment. The rise of blue collar joblessness was according to the author, “three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers.”

The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to "food auctions", which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.

In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by "shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked and grilled".

In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

Particularly shocking to read was the story of  Al Szekeley,  a grizzled 62-year-old, who inhabits a wheelchair and was often found on G Street in Washington DC,  the city ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Vietnam, in 1972.

He was living in a homeless shelter after having been cited for living in public places in 2008. The police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister, with no history of alcohol, drugs or behavioral disorders , had an outstanding warrant for "criminal trespassing", as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless!

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans.

Housing analyst Peter Dreier  wrote that in areas such as Los Angeles,  "people who've lost their jobs, began doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70% of their incomes in rent".

Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente. Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs – only to find that those skills are no longer in demand.  When he tried to apply for  disability  he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan, a cost of $900. He could not qualify for Medicaid.

The author makes a disturbing statement that her research taught her that the, “fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America”.