Paula Deen's Real Mistake

Facebook is the parking lot for "anonymous opinions" or at least that's what people think.  I decided to make this blog to bring my Facebook page back to low key.  Still hasn't happened, but sometimes there is information that I just don't need to say out loud in writing to friends.  I need to say out loud in person.  This is one of those time.  So to get this off of my chest, I come to my blog.

I have never been a Paula Deen fan.  When I started seeing information about the N-bomb I really just shook my head.  Read pieces of her disposition and thought well, she didn't do her or her brother justice.  I pretty much moved past this star who has dug a hole for herself.  It reopens conversation that needs to be had, but she isn't someone I care about rallying for or against.  She likes butter, I like people who want to make the world a better place.

What gets me is seeing friends of mine taking a piece of the controversy and running with it.  You have an opinion "If 'they' can use it, why can't 'we' ?".  That's an old conversation to me.  Has no one actually looked up why Paula Deen is "on trial"?  All this was talked about in the first place because her brother admittedly discriminated against women and people of color in the business he ran.  From the disposition, she knew about it, talked with him and moved on, letting it fester into a lawsuit.  All this is body of proof to why she would do something like that.  Does anyone have a problem with that?

Should we be mad at Walmart because they dropped Deen from their payroll for the n-word while still selling rap with the n-word, or should we be mad, because they are double dipping by getting tax breaks and making the work place as such that many, many of their employees have to be on public assistance.  Many of them women.  They've been slapped for discriminating against women and locking the glass ceiling on many.  They provide jobs that turn the jobless poor into the working poor.

Christian Student Cheered for Prayer, Native Student Snubbed for Feather

And this is why I have issue with religion in school processes. Not that someone has beliefs and practices them, but that one belief supersedes another. It's one thing to practice your religion, it's another thing to demand others to and punish those who don't.

See the difference to me is one felt that a conversation between him and his god need to be publicized and required all to partake.  The other student quietly included his custom, not requiring anything of anyone else, but was made to pay for it.  I've always been told that religion is a personal walk with the person and the god that they believe in.  Sometimes this stuff seems like a who is on stage next exhibition.

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Christian Student Cheered for Prayer, Native Student Snubbed for Feather

ICTMN Staff

June 07, 2013

Valedictorian Roy Costner IV of Liberty High School in South Carolina rips up his speech before reciting the Lord's Prayer instead.

While a Native American student from Alabama could still face a copy,000 fine and has yet to receive her diploma for wearing a single eagle feather on her graduation cap May 23, the Christian Valedictorian of a South Carolina school was cheered for reciting the Lord’s Prayer during his graduation speech.

When Roy Costner IV took the stage June 1 to recite his speech to the graduating class of Liberty High School in Liberty, South Carolina, he ripped up his speech and instead recited the Lord’s Prayer.

As soon as he begins, the crowd erupts in cheers because the Pickens County School District had recently decided to no longer include prayer in graduation ceremonies. In the video you can see no visible reaction from the teachers seated behind him. According to reports on MSN and Yahoo News he was not disciplined for breaking the new rules.

“The bottom line is: We’re not going to punish students for expressing their religious faiths,” John Eby, a spokesperson for the Pickens County School District, told Yahoo News.

Chelsey Ramer, Poarch Creek Band of Indians, wore an eagle feather to her May 23 graduation from Escambia Academy in Alabama. (Chelsey Ramer)

Chelsey Ramer, a member of the Poarch Creek Band of Indians, wore an eagle feather in her cap at her May 23 graduation from Escambia Academy in Atmore, Alabama. Before the ceremony the school board wanted all the students to sign a contract forbidding any “extraneous items during graduation exercises.”

Ramer never signed the contract but still faces disciplinary action for expressing her Native heritage during the ceremony. (Related story: “Poarch Creek Student Fined for Wearing Eagle Feather at Graduation”)

So a white student decides to stand up and demonstrate his religious beliefs and gets cheered. A Native student does the same and can’t get her diploma and gets fined? A juxtaposition that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the online community.

A user-generated post titled “So a Native American girl gets no diploma and a copy000 fine for putting a feather in her cap, while a Christian valedictorian disobeys rules by reciting prayer and gets standing ovation” on Reddit has been pushed to the front page of the site by other users with more than 15,000 upvotes and 1,630 comments. And those numbers are steadily increasing. 

The original poster on Reddit says, “It’s just frustrating to me that when reading these two stories side by side, it comes across as ‘Hey you Indian, stop expressing your culture! This is no place for your savagery. No diploma for you, and now you owe me money for some reason! Oh, hey Christian kid, you weren’t supposed to be inciting prayer at this event. Ahh well, whattya gonna do? You little skamp, hehehe.’”

User Azbug on Reddit says, “What kills me is she worked for four years to get those grades and walk with her class. Somehow, showing one small bit of honor and pride in her ancestry automatically erases her four years of achievement... The other sad commentary is that young man had the opportunity to speak directly to his class, faculty, and the families of the graduates. Instead of saying something interesting or profound, he chose to cough up something that shows no introspection on growing up... On the other hand, the native girl merely whispers deep personal convictions, and is mercilessly stepped on.”

Ramer’s family is currently not commenting on the events and Escambia Academy is closed until Monday. Maybe next week we will find out if and when Ramer will get her diploma and if the school board will in fact make her family pay the fine. At least she won’t have to pay the fine out of her college fund.

An indiegogo fund started by Dan Morrison, communications director at First Peoples Worldwide, raised the full amount to pay the fine in just five days. As of today, the fund has copy,070 in it. If the family does not have to pay the fine, the money will go toward her education. (Related story: “Poarch Creek Student’s Fine Raised by Online Donations”)

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/07/christian-student-cheered-prayer-native-student-snubbed-feather-149772

University of Montana Strives for Diversity, Meet Some Tenure-Track Native Faculty

University of Montana Strives for Diversity, Meet Some Tenure-Track Native Faculty

Alysa Landry

March 17, 2013

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Kurt Wilson/Missoulian

Pictured, from left, are Aaron Thomas, Annie Belcourt-Dittloff and Rosalyn LaPier, three of the four tenure-track Native American professors at the University of Montana.

The Native student population at the University of Montana has more than doubled in the last decade, a trend that has prompted university officials to seek a more diverse faculty.
When David Beck, chairman of the Native American Studies program, arrived at the Missoula campus in the year 2000, about 300 Native students were enrolled, he said. That population has increased to about 800, with Native students enrolled in 88 different programs. The increase more closely aligns the university with the demographics of Montana, home to 12 recognized tribes and seven reservations, and where about 10 percent of the total population reports American Indian heritage.
“As the student population more closely resembles the state population, the university realized it needed the faculty to reflect that as well,” Beck said. “Administrators, faculty and students started realizing that it would be important to have Native faculty in a variety of fields.”
The university supports more than 750 faculty members, but the number of Native, tenure-track professors was disproportionate, Beck said. He estimated fewer than 10 Native professors held tenure-track positions prior to 2010.
Since 2010, the university has hired four new Native, tenure-track professors, including Rosalyn LaPier, an environmental studies professor and the first Blackfeet Indian to receive a tenure-track position in the university’s 120-year history. The other new hires are journalism professor Jason Begay and chemistry professor Aaron Thomas, both of whom are Navajo, and assistant professor of pharmacy Annie Belcourt-Dittloff, who is Blackfeet, Mandan, Hidatsa and Chippewa.
Jason Begay
The University of Montana recruited Jason Begay twice. The first time was in 1998 when journalism professor Dennis McAuliffe encouraged Begay to enroll as a student.

Jason Begay is a journalism professor at the university. (Photo courtesy Jason Begay)

Begay graduated with a degree in journalism in 2002, and went on to work at the New York Times and the Oregonian before returning to the Navajo Nation, where he worked for six years as a government and education reporter at the Navajo Times.
He never thought he’d be a journalism professor at his alma mater.
“I never once considered going into teaching,” he said. “I don’t like standing in front of people and talking.”
That all changed when McAuliffe left his post at the university for a job at the Washington Post. The university then recruited Begay a second time, to take McAuliffe’s place as a tenure-track professor. He started during the fall semester of 2010.
McAuliffe “changed my life when he brought me here as a student,” Begay said. “The idea of doing what he did for me, for someone else, was more appealing than anything else.”
Begay directs American Indian journalism projects at the university, including work with Reznet News, an online site designed to give Native college students journalism experience. He also tries to recruit Native students to the journalism program, a job he calls a “tough sell.”
Prospective journalism students must apply to the program during their sophomore years and get accepted, Begay said. Between 350 and 400 students are in the program; only about 10 are Native.
“It’s hard enough to convince people to come to school here,” Begay said. “It’s even harder to get them into journalism.”
Part of the problem comes from students wanting to return home to work after college, Begay said. All seven of Montana’s reservations have newspapers, but most are owned and controlled by the tribes, so students don’t get excited about watchdog journalism.
“Writing about news in Indian country is important when it comes to how money is spent and all that,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s an abstract idea because most students haven’t seen how independent newspapers operate.”
On top of everything Begay does as a professor, he also is taking classes toward a master’s degree in business administration. He’s hoping to use that degree to help propel American Indian-owned media outlets forward.
That might include another stint at the Navajo Times, but in a business leadership position, Begay said.
“For the foreseeable future, I’m here, teaching in Montana,” he said, “but I definitely at some point want to go back to the Navajo Times.”
Annie Belcourt-Dittloff
Annie Belcourt-Dittloff has spent most of her time during the last two decades at the University of Montana.

Annie Belcourt-Dittloff is an assistant professor of pharmacy and public health at the university. (Photo courtesy Annie Belcourt-Dittloff)

A 1992 graduate of Browning High School, located on the Blackfeet Reservation, Belcourt-Dittloff went straight to the University of Montana, where she earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in clinical psychology. She did post-doctorate work for four years at the University of Colorado before returning to Montana in 2010 when she was hired as assistant professor of pharmacy and public health.
Tenure-track professors have to balance three roles, Belcourt-Dittloff said. They are expected to teach classes, conduct research and perform service.
“In order to become successfully tenured, you have to show productivity,” she said. “It’s a lot to juggle.”
As one of only a few Native professors at the university, Belcourt-Dittloff has added a fourth goal in her journey to become tenured: supporting Native students and the Native community on campus.
“What I hope to continue doing is what I’m doing now,” she said. “Continuing to teach, continuing to do outreach to communities and support Native students.”
Belcourt-Dittloff is using her passion for psychology and public health to teach students about trauma, violence and mental health on Indian reservations. She simultaneously is using research to tackle some of the tough issues that plague American Indians.
“My background being in clinical psychology, I am really interested in mental health as it relates to Native Americans,” she said. “I want to do advanced research, working with communities, tribes throughout the state, to promote research and to build our overall capacity to reduce mental health disparities.”
Natives experience greater exposure to traumatic events and violence than non-Natives, which leads to higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, depression and substance abuse. Those rates are even higher among Montana tribes, said Belcourt-Dittloff, who wants to use her research to develop prevention and outreach programs.
She is particularly interested in resiliency or the ability for individuals and communities to bounce back after traumatic events, she said.
“I look at how people recover from stress or trauma,” she said. “A big part of that is culture and community.”
The number of Native students has quadrupled since Belcourt-Dittloff started school as a freshman in 1992, she said. The increase in Native students and professors is a testament to the university’s dedication to diversity, she said.
“My primary feeling is one of gratitude to the institution in growing Native faculty and to the mentors I have had through the years,” she said. “I hope other universities can look at us and see the long-term picture of diversifying academia.”
Rosalyn LaPier
One of Rosalyn LaPier’s goals as a professor of environmental studies is to grow the number of students enrolled in the program.

Rosalyn LaPier is a professor of environmental studies at the university. (Photo courtesy Rosalyn LaPier)

Tribes are more closely tied to the environment than many other communities are, she said. LaPier wants to see more Native students taking active roles in protecting the environment and advocating on behalf of the earth and Native rights.
“Because I’m interested in the environment, I think there needs to be more Native people who are involved and have degrees in environmental studies,” she said, “then working back at home, in different agencies, promoting Native concerns in relation to environmental issues.”
But introducing more Native students into the discipline is only half the battle, LaPier said.
“The other half of this equation is to educate non-Native people about environmental issues in Native communities,” she said.
LaPier, a doctorate student at the University of Montana, was hired as a tenure-track professor last year and began teaching during the fall semester. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in religion. She plans to earn her doctorate degree in environmental history this spring and work to recruit more Native students to the program, which historically has not attracted many Natives.
“Right now, a very small handful of Natives get a degree in environmental studies,” she said. “It’s difficult for a lot of reasons, institutional reasons.”
Native students are at a disadvantage when it comes to science degrees, LaPier said. Students pursuing bachelor’s degrees in environmental science must take 21-40 science credits, including biology, soils, ecology and physics—a course load that can be daunting for students coming from reservation schools.
“Some of the students who come here, especially from reservation schools, they don’t have that math or science background,” she said. “You want those students to come here, but they’re already at a disadvantage, and that’s something within those communities that needs to be fixed.”
LaPier believes a stronger Native presence among the faculty may lead to better recruitment, retention and success of Native students.
“As Native faculty, we can advocate for Native students in the administration, when it comes to things like class size and how money is spent,” LaPier said. “Personal experience is something Native faculty can give to the university, and Native students then feel there are more people that are advocating on their behalf, people they can go and talk to, even if it has nothing to do with the discipline they’re in.”
Aaron Thomas
Aaron Thomas, associate professor of chemistry, also has concerns about the lack of Native students in science programs.
One of his primary goals is to encourage Native students to earn advanced degrees in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Aaron Thomas is associate professor of chemistry at the university. (Photo courtesy Aaron Thomas)

“Because there’s not too many students entering STEM research, I want to start looking at education in grade school, middle school, high school, on up, so they will be prepared and excited to enter fields like chemistry,” he said. “I’ve watched the transition in Native students, in being a freshman in college, away from high school on the reservation, and that’s a challenge.”
Low enrollment in science and math is not just a Native problem, Thomas said.
“It’s a nationwide problem, not just for Native students,” he said. “There’s a nationwide call for more students in science, engineering, math. It’s even more disproportionate for Native students, but it’s important that we get them studying science.”
Thomas believes an increase in Native students studying in the STEM fields can have a direct influence on Native communities. He wants to see Native students receive advanced degrees in science, engineering or math then return home to work in their communities.
“I look at it as economic development for reservations,” he said.
Thomas, who has a doctorate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Florida, was hired last year as a tenured professor and director of the Native American Research Laboratory. He started the job in January.
The Native American Research Laboratory is a microbiology and biochemistry lab for Native students studying the natural sciences. Thomas uses the laboratory to link Native students with advisors and give them space for their research. He also uses his position to link research with tribes.
“The idea is that tribes will have specific research questions and send students to get graduate degrees doing research on those questions,” he said. “For example, ground water studies. Things are happening on or near the reservations, having to do with ground water. A Native student can get a graduate degree looking at this kind of question.”
On top of his responsibilities as a professor, Thomas has taken on the task of being a mentor to Native students on campus.
“One of our roles as Native faculty, we have a little bit more responsibility to reach out to our Native people and help them attain the degree in whatever they choose,” he said. “We have a little bit more responsibility to reach out to tribal communities.”

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/17/university-montana-strives-diversity-meet-some-tenure-track-native-faculty-148189

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/17/university-montana-strives-diversity-meet-some-tenure-track-native-faculty-148189

STOP RAPE

STOP RAPE

1)      Don’t put drugs in a woman’s drink.

2)      When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3)      If you pull over to help a woman whose care has broken down, remember not to rape her.

4)      If you are in a lift and a woman gets in don’t rape her.

5)      Never creep into a woman’s home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or rape her.

6)      USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM!

If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

7)      Don’t forget: It’s not sex with someone who’s asleep or unconscious – it’s RAPE!

8)      Carry a whistle!  If you are worried you might assault someone ‘by accident’ you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.

9)      Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy.  If you have every intention of having sex later on with the woman you’re dating regardless of how she feel about it, tell her directly that there is every chance you will rape her.  If you don’t communicate your intentions, she may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her and inadvertently feel safe.

10)  Don’t rape.

Looking for information and ideas on how to campaign against rape?

Check out the following websites:

www.thisisnotaninvitationtorapeme.co.uk

www.notever.co.uk

Will the Sequester Affect You, Kentucky?

During the Presidential elections many people pay so much attention to their president of choice and less to their local government.  What is your city council doing?  How are they helping your mayor bring job to your city.  Do they support fairness in education, housing, and jobs?  What about your state government?  How are the laws that your state representatives are voting on affecting you?  Now lets take a look at our federal government and the affect it has on us locally. I received this document, Kentucky factsheet from the White House,  in an email from Kentucky Youth Advocates.  The document itemizes the issues that the sequester affects and how it will affect Kentucky.  If you are worried about children and families then it's time to take action.  Time to point out how Kentucky families will be affected.

The Impact of the Sequester on Communities Across America

Lets get down to the facts.  People have a tendency to spend time listening to politicians on the news complaining about what the other side is not doing to prevent the sequester.  It's time to look at the datasheet on the sequester and see how it will affect our nation.  I received this information from Kentucky Youth Advocates.

Check out how the sequester will affect the state here.

Think You Have the Right to Vote? Think Again. | BillBoard, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Think You Have the Right to Vote? Think Again.

March 30, 2012

by Bill Moyers

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 1965. (AP Photo)

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I was there. To this day I remember the electricity in the room — the thrill that everyone at the ceremony shared as the descendants of slaves finally gained the political agency that should have been their birthright. The Act said simply that states could no longer “deny or abridge the right of any citizens of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Now they would have power at the ballot box. All these years later I am saddened and sickened at the efforts to deny anyone the right to vote. Yet it happens, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 still requires vigilance to fulfill in the face of calculated political efforts made during every election year to suppress voter turnout.
I just came across an encouraging tool for combatting those efforts.
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has produced a new infographic on his CraigConnects website that details how voter suppression is happening across the U.S. as restrictive voting laws are being both introduced and passed — approximately 164 laws to restrict U.S. citizens from voting in the 2012 election. Check it out — and note the list of organizations you can join to fight back.
Think You Have the Right to Vote? Think Again. | BillBoard, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS - SAME LOVE feat. MARY LAMBERT (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

February 19, 2013

by John Light

In the latest installment of his excellent New York Times series, Time and Punishment, John Tierney writes that mass incarceration trends of the past 30 years may have done more to harm crime-ridden communities and their residents than help them. As the number of prisoners has risen and the length of sentences has grown, Tierney writes:

The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities.
“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”
Among African Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.

According to a report from the Sentencing Project, a justice reform group, 75 percent of black males in Washington, D.C. can expect to go to prison or jail during their lifetime. Longer sentences mean many spend decades behind bars — well into middle and old age — even though studies have shown that the likelihood of committing a crime drops steeply once a man enters his 30s.

Mass incarceration also has a strong negative effect on an inmate’s family. Tierney follows one family that became homeless when the father began a twenty-year prison term at the age of 24. “Basically, I was locked up with him,” his wife told Tierney. “My mind was locked up. My life was locked up. Our daughters grew up without their father.”
As Donald Braman, an anthropologist at The George Washington University Law School, noted, “The social deprivation and draining of capital from these communities may well be the greatest contribution our state makes to income inequality. There is no social institution I can think of that comes close to matching it.”
In 2010, legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the book The New Jim Crow, explained on Bill Moyers Journal that the overtly racist policies of the past have been replaced with racially coded policies that still hurt minority communities and have lead to America having the highest incarceration rate in the world.
This clip is from that discussion, in which Alexander, Bill Moyers and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson discuss the state of racial and economic justice on the 42nd anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.



Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow | BillBoard, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

4 Bogus Right-Wing Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet (Hard Times USA) | Alternet

4 Bogus Right-Wing Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet (Hard Times USA)

We have an economic crisis that is kept out of sight and out of mind.

January 22, 2013  |  

 When is a secret not at all secret? Consider the fact that one in three Americans are poor, if we define it as struggling to cover the basic necessities of life. That's according to a Census Bureau analysis, and it was reported in the New York Times, but I have yet to hear a politician or pundit make reference to this eye-opening reality of our vaunted “new economy.”

In 2011, the Census Bureau took a new look at the “near-poor” – Americans with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty line. They found that this group, most of whom earn paychecks and pay taxes, represented a whopping one in six U.S. households – a figure that was almost twice as high as had previously been thought.

When those under the poverty line are added, Census found that a stunning 33 percent of the population was struggling to make ends meet in 2010. Analyzing the Census data, the Working Poor Project suggested that the number of near-poor, which they define as those making between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty line, continued to inch up in 2011 as many returning to work in this sluggish recovery have been forced to settle for lower-paying service jobs.

Nearly four years after economists tell us the “recovery” began, almost half of all American households lack enough savings to stay above the poverty line for three months or more if they should find themselves out of work. Another third are living paycheck to paycheck, teetering on the brink with no savings at all.

It would require a lengthy sociological treatise to fully explain why this isn't considered a huge national crisis. But one part of the equation is the existence of a long-standing and ideologically informed project by the right to portray the burden of living in or near poverty as a liberal delusion. In these narratives, which come in a variety of forms, the poor have it pretty darn good – good enough that we really shouldn't spend much time thinking about them.

For these conservative think-tankers, pundits and politicians, obscuring America's grinding poverty and spiraling inequality is an exercise in service of a status quo that works pretty well for them, but not for most families.

1. But the poor have color TVs.
Consider the boilerplate conservative column about how many wondrous household appliances the average low-income household owns. Back in the 1930s, this argument goes, poor people didn't have running water, but now they have color TVs, so life is good.

As I write this, my local Craigslist offers multiple televisions, a dining set, several treadmills, a mountain bike, an oven (with hood), a blender, a coffeemaker, a slew of couches and beds, a piano, a hot-tub (needs repair) and a complete stereo system, all free to anyone who will pick them up. We live in a consumer economy that creates an abundance of surplus and rapidly obsolete goods, and people who struggle to put food on the table can nonetheless get their hands on all manner of electronics for nothing.

2. The poor have lots of room to enjoy poverty.
A similar argument holds that in the United States, poor people have more living space, on average, than low-income households in other developed nations. As the Wall Street Journal was eager to point out, “The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.”

Perhaps that's true, but it's also divorced from context. There is a simple matter of population density at work: in the core states of the European Union, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And the average is a bit misleading as it includes the rural poor – low-income households in tightly packed urban centers don't tend to have 1,200-square-foot apartments.

3. The poor are actually rolling in money.
A new and equally distorted argument entered the conservative discourse just recently. It holds that poor families receive $168 per day in government benefits – more than the median weekly income in this country. If that were true, low-income households in the United States would enjoy quite comfortable living standards.

But as I noted last month, that number is inflated by around eight-fold. The claim originated with Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation and then underwent some revisions on its journey to Republican congressional staffers, and finally to the conservative media. It gets to that number by counting things like federal aid to rebuild communities after natural disasters as “welfare,” including programs that assist the middle class and the wealthy and then dividing the costs of all these programs by the number of households under the poverty line, despite the fact that many more families benefit from them.

4. It’s just how they are.
And then there are the ever-popular cultural explanations for poverty. This is a storyline based on confusing correlation with causation – a rookie mistake in any introductory college class.

The Heritage Foundation, for example (it's Robert Rector again), sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe that “the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.”

But this gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s, more than doubling, yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is like claiming the rooster causes the sun to rise.

As I've noted in the past, this is an essential piece of the “culture of poverty” narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: they “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around.

In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here’s the key finding: for every dollar that a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000.
Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself “seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.” As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.”

Why People Are Really Poor
During a period of less than 20 years beginning in the early 1980s, the American economy underwent dramatic changes. It was a period of policy-driven de-unionization and the offshoring of millions of decent manufacturing jobs. The tax code underwent dramatic changes, as CEO pay sky-rocketed and the financial sector came to represent a much larger share of our economic output than it had during the four decades or so following World War II.

And our distribution of income changed dramatically as well. During the 35 years prior to Ronald Reagan's election, the top one percent of U.S. households had taken in an average of 10 percent of the nation's income. When Reagan left office in 1988, those at the top were grabbing 15.5 percent of the pie, and by the time George W. Bush took office in 2000, they were taking over 20 percent of the nation's income.
We can either believe that this shift was a result of changes in public policy (combined with new technologies), or that in just two decades there was some sort of rapid cultural decline among everyone but those at the top of the economic heap.

All of the false narratives are intended to distract from the structural causes of poverty and inequality, and they ignore two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don't all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the United States today, the best predictor of a newborn baby's economic future is how much money her parents make.

It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right – study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean – but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you're forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children – innocents who aren't even old enough to work for themselves – are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance.
The reality, despite the spin from the conservative movement, is that poverty in America is very real, and it's anything but fun.

4 Bogus Right-Wing Theories About Poverty, and the Real Reason Americans Can’t Make Ends Meet (Hard Times USA) | Alternet