[US] Post Katrina, US forgetting about poverty again

from The Taipei Times

Don't tell the Reverend Randall Mitchell that Hurricane Katrina somehow opened people's eyes to the depth of poverty in this nation. Americans knew the extent of the problem long before the storm, he said.

They'd just learned to live with it.

"They've come into acceptance of it," the preacher said from the apartment he evacuated to, in Dayton, Texas, 480km west of New Orleans.

No, rather than revealing poverty to Americans, he says, the storm "exposed ... the people who maintain it. That's all."

When Katrina struck on Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless. To taste hunger and feel thirst. To go without medical care or even toilets.

And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. The desperate, angry masses stranded at the Superdome and convention center. The rampant looting. The floating bodies.

With much of New Orleans still under water, US President George W. Bush declared the nation had "a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." It didn't happen, many say.

"From my perspective, it's kind of like one hand clapping," said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. "We'd love to have a dialogue, but there needs to be someone to have a dialogue with."

Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than 37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level (defined as an income of US$19,00 for a family of four), including 12 million children.

Five million of those children live in families that earn less than half the poverty level.

Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina "unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality," decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect.

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, said they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he said, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he said, "just doesn't pass muster."