Too Poor to Make the News - NYT OpED- Something NOT to be ignored

[Badgerman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14ehrenreich.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=print

THE human side of the recession, in the new media genre that’s been called “recession porn,” is the story of an incremental descent from excess to frugality, from ease to austerity. The super-rich give up their personal jets; the upper middle class cut back on private Pilates classes; the merely middle class forgo vacations and evenings at Applebee’s. In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler,” smudging the dizzying levels of inequality that characterized the last couple of decades and squeezing everyone into a single great class, the Nouveau Poor, in which we will all drive tiny fuel-efficient cars and grow tomatoes on our porches.

But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.
...
The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.

So when you read of the poor unfortunate yuppy who is now working in a pizza joint, and renting an apartment...stop and thick just for a second or two about those who would consider a pizza hawker job as a huge step up the economic ladder. Too often of late the estimated 1/4 of the population who live at or below the poverty line perpetually are forgotten completely as we feel so sorry fro those formerly middle-class who are now two rungs down from their lofty condos.

The very last line of the article is the telling one...you want to look for danger? Don't look to the disease du jour, or the wing-nuts with the bazookas...look downward, there you will find desperation.