The New American Poverty
Marciniak, Ed
The other America, part two THE NEW AMERICAN POVERTY Michael Harrington Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $17.95, 271 pp. Ed Narciniak THE NAGGING enigma that "the poor are still here" in the 1980s...
...Once again he has challenged the nation's conscience to debate solutions...
...With one exception, Harrington's anti-poverty program in 1984 echoes the nostalgic 1960s...
...His other recommendations include national health insurance...
...technology to these continents, he argues, would expand their buying power for durable goods manufactured in the United States...
...Harrington singles out "deindustri-alization'' as the newest structure of misery...
...The new poverty is very much on public display, unlike Harrington's invisible poor of the 1960s when suburbanization distanced the middle class from daily contact with poverty and when the Appalachian poor were hidden in mountain hollows...
...Harrington scants the issue...
...Three such structures of misery are the "feminization" of poverty, the "deinstitutionalization" of mental patients, and the rise of a social underclass...
...The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill resulted in their being dumped on the sidewalks of New York, Chicago, and other cities...
...But that is a small fault...
...new incentives for greater participation by the poor as voters...
...Ensuring the persistence of such poverty are young black males who have not found a place in today's economy...
...Consider the irony in Harrington's account of his visit to Pennsylvania during the winter of 1983: I had gone to McKeesport to talk to unemployed steel workers...
...Additional goals are needed...
...Such "democratic planning," which terrifies the "simplistic left" and the "shamefaced right," would weigh not only the profit and loss of plant closings but also their social cost...
...The majority of all black children are being raised by single women...
...These structures, it seems are not being dismantled by traditional strategies to rout poverty...
...Around 1970, the United States joined the global economy for the first time and the American poor began to suffer from the international division of labor...
...Is there a connection, for example, between the enduring unemployment of young blacks striving to enter the labor force and the unprecedented inundation of the labor market by married women ever since 1960...
...Harrington's most intriguing proposal weds self-interest to moral principle: expand U.S...
...There is, he says, "hope for the American poor if this nation would make a serious commitment to abolish the much greater poverty of the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America...
...He is most convincing when he argues that the Office of Economic Opportunity, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and similar federal initiatives succeeded in reducing the old poverty, but he is far less persuasive in explaining why such measures failed to prevent the epidemic of "new American poverty...
...And I was told that when the last of the three commercial networks arrived to shoot their footage, it had been necessary to call a special picket line to give them something to cover...
...Why would the goal of full employment abolish the new poverty...
...The new poverty is generated by "new structures of misery," not foreseen by Harrington and other anti-poverty warriors in the early 1960s...
...He connects their joblessness to modem steel mills in Japan and South Korea...
...Unemployed steel workers and auto workers, he claims, are in "limbo, a place in-between...
...Is it taboo...
...Today, the middle class meets the homeless on city streets or can view, via television, the unemployed in the smokestack industries...
...We are in his debt...
...Still another structure of misery produces the growing underclass "made up of the longterm welfare recipients, the drifters and drug addicts, and the relatively non-violent hustlers of the underground economy...
...Harrington now defends that "war" and seeks to rebut its contemporary critics...
...At one point I interviewed a woman, whom I took to be a local militant, for ten or so minutes before I discovered that she was a reporter...
...in 1979 there were 146,000...
...In 1955 public mental hospitals housed 559,000 patients...
...Between 1970 and 1984, the ranks of U.S...
...employed rose by m;ore than 25 million...
...These, along with the female heads of households, are the poor found in high-rise public housing projects across the country...
...That book supplied the intellectual foundations for the federal "war against poverty" set in motion by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...The transfer of U.S...
...Unfortunately, this proposal is given sketchy treatment...
...Is he really saying that New York's homeless formerly held jobs in the shoe, steel, and auto industries...
...Ed Narciniak THE NAGGING enigma that "the poor are still here" in the 1980s has prompted Harrington to return to the topic of his 1962 classic, The Other America...
...Harrington's assessment of the reasons U.S...
...His chief goal is planning for full employment, to be realized through a coalition among "trade unionists (20 percent of the work force) . . .blacks (12 percent of the population) . . . [and] all of the poor (15 to 20 percent of the nation...
...poverty decreased in the early 1970s leaves vital questions unanswered: • He never mi es clear the precise nature of the link he asserts between an overcrowded municipal shelter in New York City and, for example, the growth of shoemaking in Brazil for export...
...If his proposals are implemented, a $ 100 billion estimate of their cost is modest...
...The feminization of social misery and the simultaneous rise in violent crime are conspicuously present in the black community...
...technical assistance and other aid to developing countries in order to boost employment here in the states...
...This poverty it different from all 8 March 1985: 153 those that preceded it, he insists...
...and a federal tax system to redistribute wealth and income, for example, by ending tax benefits for vacation homes and using these dollars for subsidies to house the poor...
...Yet during the same period the number of poor began to rise dramatically...
...In the 1980s seventy percent of the nation's black households in poverty are headed by a woman...
...Fifty-five percent of the births to black women occur out of wedlock...
...In the face of gigantic budget deficits, volatile interest rates, huge defense expenditures, and ever-threatening inflation, Harrington's answers are occasionally glib...
...A bank, mistaking this reenactment for a new demonstration, closed early...
...These unemployed are not yet poor and may well rejoin the economic mainstream, but "a significant number of them," he says, "could become poor, particularly the ones forty or older...
...How is his new crusade against poverty to be financed...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
