Neil deMause

There are some tentative signs that the recession may finally be able to do what Hurricane Katrina did not: Get the news media to pay attention to the 1 in 8 Americans — or more, depending on how you’re counting — who are living in poverty. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by Barbara Ehrenreich decrying the media focus on the “Nouveau Poor” and noting that while the economic hard times have been hardest on the already-poor, they’ve all but disappeared from the public debate in favor of laid-off stockbrokers forced to limit their vacation travel. (To be fair, the already-poor were mostly never there to begin with.) Notes Ehrenreich bitterly: “‘Low-Wage Worker Loses Job, Home’ is nobody’s idea of news.”

That’s certainly been the case, but could it be changing? Witness today’s Wall Street Journal, which takes a look at rising welfare rolls that actually manages to dig deeper than the usual recitation of stats, citing my former radio comrade Liz Schott to the effect that though welfare rolls are rising, they’re still lagging far behind food stamp enrollments, a sign that there are plenty of needy unable to meet the strict income and work requirements imposed by welfare reform. “But people in between have the hardest time,” one food stamp recipient (and non-Nouveau Poor person) told the Journal. “You don’t make enough money to get by but you make too much to get help.”

The real test, of course, is to see whether this is a trend: While it’s hopeful that the Times piece says “First in a series,” the rest could end up all being about former yacht salesmen who are forced to buy their steaks at Costco. Stay tuned.

A visit to a welfare-to-work program whose participants say it actually, like, works:

Say one thing for the women packing an airless classroom in East Harlem: They’ve mastered call-and-response. “You have skills and education, what else do you need?” asks Angelo Rivera, who is teaching this career development class to a group of about 30 public assistance recipients, all female. “Experience!” comes the answer.

A few minutes later, Rivera throws another one at them: “Ready for the question?” It’s actually a quote, and he wants to know – “Who said that?”

There’s silence, then someone ventures: “Abernathy?”… [read more]

I take a look at two recent reports on poverty in New York, and their widely divergent findings:

When elected officials and nonprofit advocates gathered on the steps of City Hall last Wednesday to announce the release of a new Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies report, “The State of New York’s Social Safety Net for Today’s Hard Times,” it marked the culmination of a season of reports criticizing the city’s policies toward the poor.

“Despite an increase in the need for public assistance a year into a deep recession,” declared FPWA executive director Fatima Goldman, “the welfare rolls in New York City have actually decreased in 2008 by nearly 70,000 recipients.”… [read more]

A look at some of the reasons the jobless report are blocking them from finding jobs that will lift them out of poverty:

Say you’re a New Yorker, and you’re poor. You’re hardly alone: The latest figures show that close to one in four people in this city live without enough cash to afford basic needs, and it’s only likely to get worse as “finding a job” begins to seem like a relic of a quaint era, like buggy whips or analog cell phones.

So what, then, does it take to get yourself back on your feet, and why are so many people unable to do so? In a report last week by the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, the jobless gave some answers… [read more]

If you missed my appearance on the WNYE-FM program “Communique” last Wednesday, I’ve uploaded a recording of the show here. Much talk about why New York’s welfare rolls haven’t risen amid the economic downturn, with myself and the excellent Liz Schott of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Late notice, but I’ll be on WNYE-FM in New York City, 91.5 on your radio dial, from 1 to 1:30 pm today talking about my recent article on falling welfare rolls amid rising need.

I can’t find a link for a web stream, but I’ll post a followup here if it’s archived anywhere. Meanwhile, if you’re local, tune in, then move two clicks back down the dial to check out the WFMU marathon, which is where my radio (okay, my iTunes) is tuned to all this week and next.

The news media is finally getting around to noticing poverty, but do only a certain class of needy qualify?

As the economy crumbles, issues of poverty and economic need have begun to make more frequent appearances in the news media. From October through December 2008, for example, the three nightly TV news shows ran 20 stories—about one every four or five days—addressing poverty or related issues such as homelessness or food stamps. A previous FAIR study of nightly news coverage (Extra!, 9–10/07), by comparison, found an average of one poverty story on the evening news every three weeks.

More coverage, though, does not necessarily mean better coverage. And while swelling food-stamp rolls and unemployment lines may become media staples as the economic downturn worsens, the way poverty issues are portrayed remains constrained by political biases and stereotypes.

If there’s one commonality to the recent surge in coverage of economic need, it’s that the focus is on the newly poor—-with particular attention to those who can claim a middle-class background… [read more]

Despite the worsening economy and rising unemployment, the number of people receiving welfare in New York City continues to fall. Do welfare applications just lag behind the economy, or is this a sign that the city needs to be doing more?

The graph from the Human Resources Administration is as remarkable as it is unmistakable: The number of New Yorkers receiving welfare, after peaking in 1995 at more than 1.1 million, plunged steadily to 343,000 at the end of 2008 – the lowest number in 45 years.

It’s a drop that the Bloomberg Administration has cited as a mark of the city’s success at moving people off the welfare rolls, mostly via “work first” policies geared toward getting individuals into paid employment. But as in other states, the falling caseload numbers come at a time of rising unemployment, record homelessness, and after years of soaring patronage of soup kitchens and food pantries… [read more]

The Congressional Democrats’ plan to boost food stamp spending as part of an economic stimulus bill is a giant step in the right direction. But two steps would be so much more valuable:

As soon as I heard that the economic stimulus bill proposed by Congress includes $20 billion in added spending for food stamps, I knew I had to call Joel Berg for his reaction.

To say that Berg has made hunger his obsession is an insult to obsessiveness. A former food stamp official under Clinton, he now runs the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, and penned “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?,” which documents how the U.S. has systematically underfunded its food programs. “Even I’m finally willing to concede $20 billion is pretty good,” Berg told me… [read more]

I review Joel Berg’s new book “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?”

If there’s anyone in America who knows more about the politics of hunger than Joel Berg, they’re well hidden. First as a top staffer in the Agriculture Department under Bill Clinton, and currently as director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Berg has been a tireless advocate for ensuring that all people have enough to eat.

After years of lecturing mostly to an audience of perplexed city officials, Berg has now set down his knowledge in book form with “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” Though dense with useful statistics, Berg’s trademark good-natured snarkiness makes this an eminently readable book that lays out the dimensions of the growing hunger epidemic…