Punishing the Poor for Being 1
Barbara Ehrenreich, who spent a year living on minimum wage jobs and then wrote about it, sees things getting worse for those who have the least.
The Guardian excerpts the new afterword for her book. A nugget:
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
August 10, 2011 at 5:02 pm
[…] again, Frank at Pine View does the heavy lifting so I don’t have […]