[Comment] Katrina uncovers poverty states away

From The Taipei Times

WIDENING DIVIDE: It has taken a catastrophe to rekindle debate, but after barely registering as an issue for a decade, poverty is back on the political agenda

THE GUARDIAN , DETROIT, MICHIGAN

It is a little past noon on a sweltering day a short ride from downtown Detroit, one of the last gasps of summer before the brutal Michigan winter settles in. Already the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, run by friars from a nearby monastery, is winding down.

This is a rough neighborhood. Alison Costello, the former fine-dining chef who manages the kitchen, keeps her eyes fixed ahead of her on her way home to avoid looking too hard at the drug houses that line the street. Many of the people at the tables have low-paying jobs and simply struggle to make ends meet, part of a swelling class of the working poor.

"I drove in here yesterday and I saw all these people streaming in to the soup kitchen, and I thought `there is so much suffering in this city.'" said Brother Jerry Smith, who runs the soup kitchen.

This is the US most don't see. It has taken a catastrophe to rekindle the national debate on poverty in the US. The wretched images of the poor left to struggle on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with no means of escape, provoked widespread shock. But the conditions exposed by the hurricane are not confined to the south. After barely registering as an issue for a decade, poverty is back on the political agenda.

We had all seen the evidence of "deep, persistent poverty" on television, US President George W. Bush said in an address after the hurricane struck; poverty that "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America."

According to the US census bureau, poverty has been on the rise for the past four years, despite a robust economy. The number of people living in poverty increased last year to 12.7 percent of the population, some 37 million people, the highest percentage in the developed world. Since Bush took office an additional 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. In 1970, the rate was 11.1 percent. Almost 8 percent of white people are classified as below the poverty line and almost 25 percent of African Americans.

"Katrina merely blew the mask off the face of poverty," says Agostinho Fernandes, president of the Gleaners Food Bank, which supplies food to soup kitchens and emergency food services in the Detroit area.

"Why did it take a disaster for our leaders to respond?" he said.

In Detroit, 34 percent of the population live in poverty, including almost half the children under 17. In the neighborhood of Highland Park, once the home of Chrysler and now all but abandoned, shops are boarded up and the bones of burnt out buildings haunt the streets. Local community workers are fighting contractors from other parts of the city using its streets to dump rubbish.

Detroit's population has plummeted from two million to 950,000 in the past 50 years, largely because of white flight to the suburbs after race riots in the 1960s. There have been cuts in police and fire departments, the city is crime-ridden and schools are a shambles. The Capuchin Soup Kitchen has become accustomed to dealing with the mentally ill after budget cuts caused the closure of local mental health facilities.

Community workers are skeptical about whether US will see another "war on poverty."

"What the president says doesn't mean much to me," says Genevieve Clark at the Hunger Action Coalition in Detroit. "He is speaking for the moment to make people feel warm and fuzzy today and then he will move on to something else."

There is perhaps good reason for cynicism. Items on the agenda in Washington include the extension of tax cuts on investment income and repealing the estate tax, both aimed at the wealthy. Also proposed are tens of billions of dollars of cuts to services like food stamps, federal student loans and Medicaid, the health insurance for low-income Americans.

Bush's vow to pay for reconstruction in New Orleans without raising taxes means further services are likely to be cut.

Democrats have also attacked the government for suspending the minimum wage requirement for companies working in the hurricane-hit region. The minimum wage of US$5.15 an hour has not in any case been increased since 1997; adjusted for inflation it is at its lowest level since 1956.

Rarely, if ever, has poverty continued to rise so long after the end of a recession. The median household income in the US has stagnated for the past five years at around US$44,400, the longest period on record. Globalization is forcing US companies to keep prices low to compete and many manufacturers are closing factories and shifting production overseas: 2.7 million industrial jobs have been lost since 2001. Many of those workers are moving into lower-paid service jobs. Unions are weak.

The pressure on wages at the bottom is creating a new class of the working poor.

Valerie Bland, 33, a single mother, fills a supermarket trolley at a food pantry in Detroit run by a local community group called Focus:Hope, which also provides training to get people back to work. Her job as a nursing assistant doesn't pay enough to cover the bills and buy food for her infant son.

"I would be struggling without this program," she says. "I am still penny-pinching but this takes some of the stress away."

Welfare to work reform in the 1990s tilted benefits in favor of people with jobs, leaving a less effective safety net. Healthcare costs continue to rise at double-digit rates.

Yet the rich continue to get richer. For the first time in the census, the top 20 percent of earners in the US took over half the total income. The bottom 20 percent took just 3.4 percent. Only the top 5 percent of households enjoyed real income growth during the year.

A recent survey released by market research firm TNS said the number of millionaires in the US has reached a record 8.9 million, rising for the third successive year.

"With the Bush re-election, it's hard to make a case that there is a high political cost to ignoring or even exacerbating our poverty problem. Inequality promotes greater inequality because once you have disenfranchised a generation then their progeny is facing ever higher barriers and it's that much tougher to get out," one researcher says.

The question for many is how long poverty will remain a topic in Washington. Katrina made New Orleans a magnet for charity.

"It slammed the door shut on us," Fernandes says. "Organizations like ours were feeding the impoverished in the south before the storm; we were feeding them through the storm; and we are feeding them after the storm."