The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Mother guilty of felony poverty-loses kids, goes to jail

    By jollyroger on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 7:53pm |

    Faced with the policy conundrum that is posed by the choice of directing public funds towards free childcare or prison for mom and institutionalization for kids, Arizona makes the predictable and catastrophic choice.

    Most of you will have heard the devastatingly sad story of Shanesha Taylor, an unemployed and homeless single mother of two, who miraculously was granted an interview for that job that Bill Clinton decided was the answer to ending "welfare as we knew it."

    She had no place to leave her toddler and infant for the 45 minute interview, so she took a desperate chance.

    She left the kids in her Dodge Durango, with catastrophic consequences.  Not to their health, but to their welfare, as a passerby, seeing them, called the cops.  Now the kids are in the hands of the county child protective services, and the mother faces two felony counts.

    It is instructive to compare the way the richest country in the world allocates resources for the benefit of its children, with, say France.  It is also worth a moment's reflection on the message sent by this comparison.

    In France, government run nurseries provide subsidized care for all children from infancy forward. (3 months old.)  The care is provided by well paid, well trained and dedicated personnel.  They consider this to be an important job.

    Childcare in America, by comparison, while wildly more expensive to the parents, is shabby in quality, to the point of putting the cared for children in physical danger.

    We do not arrive at this situation by accident, but by design.  By budget decisions taken in cold blood by state and county governments.

    “It’s reasonable to turn the lens back on us,” Shahera Hyatt, Project Director for the California Homeless Youth Project, told ThinkProgress. “What did we do to not help her find childcare when she had that appointment?”

    Hyatt points to her own state, California, which has cut 110,000 subsidized child care slots, about a quarter of the total spots in the program, since 2008, leaving low-income parents with few feasible options for child care on short notice.

    Arizona’s child care situation for its low-income residents is, if anything, worse than California’s. In the past four years, the state has cut 40 percent of its total child care budget, $81 million, which led to an estimated 33,000 children who would otherwise be eligible for subsidized care to go without it. (By the numbers, that’s less than California — but Arizona’s population is about one fifth of the Golden State’s.) Between 2012 and 2013, there was a decrease in the number of children served for every single child care program in the stateexcept for Child Protective Services.

    It would be too facile to turn our guns on the Repugnants who run Arizona; California, after all, has a Democratic party legislative super majority and a Democratic (even, forward looking) Governor.

    And, of course, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who turned his back on one hundred years of policy directed at having mothers supported so they could raise their children at home rather than seek work.

    To put it simply we treat our children like shit, because that is how we see them.

    And we, in turn, are pieces of shit for so doing.

    Go here if you are not a piece of shit, and want to change this story.

    Comments

    Hilary Clinton, (ironically) and to her everlasting credit, has started a movement called "Too small to fail", directed at ameliorating some of these problems,. We really, really got the wrong candidate in 2008.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 8:02pm

    Shenesha Taylor is getting grassroots support. Hopefully, the money raised will enable legal and housing help. States have made dramatic cutbacks in childcare. To me, this looks more like a Scottsdale, Arizona action than federal. But we all know, It's Obama's fault.

    Too Small To Fail targets early childhood education. Obama has tried to get Governors on board for expanding preschool education to close the "word gap" found in children from impoverished families.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 9:22pm

    Actually, this particular atrocity is Bill Clinton's fault--he signed the bill destroying AFDC.


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 9:36pm

    You gave the 2008 date.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 9:51pm

    The end of "welfare as we knew it" is on Bill.

     

    Letting the ruling class get away to regroup and torment us to this day, when they were 

    ON THEIR FUCKIN' KNEES--that's on Barry.

     

    Look it's not like I didn't believe....once


    by jollyroger on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 10:20pm

    Strangely, no one seems to have commented on that post about chess and checkers.

    Besides which, it's basketball that he's playing.


    by Peter Schwartz on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 9:19am

    It was ported from TPM and I don't think I ported the comments before Josh wiped out the cafe...for some of my old posts I did, wish I had just gone thru and done the job at the tiime...

     

    Edit to add: That part about Fox deluding themselves as to Obama screwing the left?...the jokes on me...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 9:43am

    No, Clinton actually reformed AFDC during a boom, with minimal problems, turning a nightmare program into a more sustainable one.

    Bush Jr. came in and in 2002 ratcheted up all the extra requirements to make it really painful to be on AFDC. The clever thing is, he got the left to bitch about Clinton, and they all forgot about how W fucked up the program beyond use.

    This 1996 welfare reform law, known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), was considered revolutionary by many experts. With a strong economy and an unemployment rate that by the late 1990s was down to only 4 percent, states were more confident about making welfare reform work. By 2000, the economy began to slow down, and the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington further slowed economic growth. States that had once been flush with cash now faced deficits, some of them substantial. Meanwhile, the federal government's TANF funding was scheduled to end on October 1, 2002.

    On May 16, 2002, the House passed the Personal Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2002 (H.R. 4737) by a vote of 229 to 197. This bill would reauthorize TANF funding for an additional five years. It would also increase the minimum work requirement for recipients by 5 percent per year, so that states would have 70 percent of TANF families working or engaged in other job-preparation activities for 40 hours per week by fiscal year 2007. It would continue to fund childcare through a block grant, and it would also work to strengthen Child Support laws to increase money available to mothers and children. It would also provide up to $300 million each year for programs that encourage healthy and stable marriages, such as premarital education and counseling programs.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 11:34am

    pair o'deuces (or pair o'turkeys...) you've brought a cite from an authority whose credentials include unmatriculated (or at least, un-degreed) time at the University of Phoenix...when come back, bring real firepower, 

     

    edit to add: just putting block quotes around any old unattributed bullshit is not an argument, grasshopper.  worse still, one can reverse google the quote to unass the culprit...

     

    Further edit to add: Peracles Puh-leeze!


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 3:45pm

    Uh, lessee - the actual facts about the 1996 law you brought to this conversation were... crickets? Ipso facto wave my hands presto change-oh? Do you *NOT* believe that increasing the required work in this program in 2002 to 40 hours a week from 30 drastically changed the effectiveness and fairness of welfare reform? And how the fuck does the bit about Phoenix get in there? Tell me which bit of the actual citation you disagree with rather than playing the stupid guilty-by-reference game - I didn't give a jolly goddamn who wrote the summary of the 2 versions of the law - I simply Googled a summary that showed the difference. Fuck Phoenix.

    [and as an aside, would you say that a 15% long-term dependency on welfare might be a problem with an assistance program, or is simply a good indicator of structural makeup of poverty levels and need?]


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 5:15pm

    I'm in the middle of something, but the short answer is that there was nothing wrong with guaranteeing support with no work requirements in the first place...it was flawed because it didn't go far enough.  There should be a simple guaranteed national income--by keying it to the presence of dependent children (the dc in afdc...) we gave an incentive to game the system by having more children, but that was an artifact of a flawed class structure, not an artifact of a committent to support kids.  More to come, (if we are really going to deconstruct the pros and cons of the safety net.)

     

    Clinton bought into the neoliberal bullshit --oh, woe, the culture of dependency, etc.  fuck that shit.

     

    edit to add: since you have indicated a peripheral interest in the rules of the road for three-centered beings, let me refer you to the text: (the asterisks mark the annotative comments

    Move quicker

    Think faster

    Love sooner

    *(note the engagement of the centers--for extra credit, 4 & 5)

    Be truer

    **(life is short, tell the  truth ....because..."Lying destroys memory in essence," don't ya know)

    Watch out for each other, especially the kids

    ***("Only he can call himself a man, who, with his left hand, can provide for the support of ten people", Our Armenian Friend


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 6:02pm

    "There should be a simple guaranteed national income--by keying it to the presence of dependent children (the dc in afdc...)" - sure, there should be universal single-payer health care, the Dow should never dip below 20,000, and we should have hovercrafts to move us around Jetsons-style. Nevertheless, I'm not sure where that money goes for the more irresponsible af taking care of the possibly-not-receiving-any-money-at-all dc. After 5 years of such an arrangement, I'd imagine it's all fu beyond ar.

    More to the point, tying a preference into a solid right is rather dubious.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 7:36pm

    and we should have hovercrafts

     

    Well, there goes your credibility, pal, right out the window, if I may say, where even now my hovercraft is waiting to take me away...just let me lick this toad one more time, and it's off to work we go...


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 10:41pm

    There is the Eurostar, London St. Pancras to Paris 2 1/2 hours, $80 one way. Paris Gare Lyon to Nice TGV doubledecker 5 1/2 hours less than $90. Faster than hovercraft.

    We could never have transport like that, too busy investigating Benghazi..


    by Anonymous ncd (not verified) on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 11:17pm

    Ahh, European Rail Transport....you know how to hurt a (n American) guy...it was even better than our current standards decades ago when I took the Orient Express from London to Istanbul--complete with a roll on roll off one seat trip on the Channel Ferry, where, let me tell you, the wheat (those of strong stomach) separated themselves as far as they could from the chaff (the heavers).


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 11:32pm

     I fear that (not for the first time) you are marching a veritable brigade of straw men through the thread (ed note: mangled metaphor alert, ding ding ding).

     

    Why not simply focus on the major premise--ie, without arousing the neo fascist beast, and without empowering the dial for dollars womb, the French manage to direct real benefits to real children without going broke, because they choose to do so.

    Instead of embarrasing yourself with random google searches that land you in scholarly  purgatory, read the several citations which , oddly enough, actually deal with the topic at hand, and explain to me why we should, as a people , tolerate practices the metacommunication of which is that we don't give a fuck about kids?

     

    The piteous story adduced for emphasis, is merely an extreme example of the real world consequences, and the paradoxical outcome, of our ill considered policy.  It is replicated in less dramatic fashion a million times each morning in every venue where single parents struggle to keep their children healthy, happy, and thriving.

     

    Why aren't we helping them in that endeavor, if we are ought but shitheads?

     

     


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 11:41pm

    "Ill considered policy" - we had decades where the results of our welfare policy were rather unlivable projects and long-term poverty. The attempt in the 90's was to move people off the welfare rolls carefully during an economic boom, rather than our policy in 2001-2002 and since 2008, which is to cut government services during a recession. (black  unemployment hit a low of 7.6% in 2000 , 7.7% in Feb 2001; it just reached a 5 year low of 12% last month?)

    And instead of coming up with a real policy, we've just been left with the canard that that naughty Bill Clinton touched the 3rd rail of liberal politics and we all came away burned - Bad Bill, Bad Bill, Bad Bill. Who cares that high black unemployment over the last 5 years dwarfs any comparative negative effects of messing with AFDL up to Feb 2001 - we need a scalp, and Clinton's there.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 1:54am

    I want what YOU'RE smoking...you keep talking (inappositely) about afdc which was only peripherally the issue in a thread that seeks to examine CHILD CARE in USA compared to CHILD CARE in France.

     

    Is that any help?

     

    The "ill considered policy" to  which reference was made is our failure to fund child care adequately with public money.  

     

    Reference, 'millions of single parents, etc'.  This has NOTHING to do with afdc and everything to do with working parents needing to have their kids safe, happy, and stimulated

     

    I still feel as if you haven't read the cited articles...tant pis....


    by jollyroger on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 3:17am

    I want what YOU'RE smoking...you keep talking (inappositely) about afdc which was only peripherally the issue in a thread that seeks to examine CHILD CARE in USA

    Apparently you're already a few bong-hits in:

    And, of course, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who turned his back on one hundred years of policy directed at having mothers supported so they could raise their children at home rather than seek work.

    To put it simply we treat our children like shit, because that is how we see them.

    So next time, how about leaving out the peripheral issue (and unfair slam on our best Democratic president since the early 50's), and stick with whatever point you think I should harsh on. If you're not talking about Clinton and his welfare reform/changes to AFDC, then please inform what other one hundred years policy Clinton "turned his back on" rather than AFDC (which would seem to be the obvious takeaway from your snide reference to Clinton "ending welfare as we knew it." - did you forget you wrote this? Do you realize that Clinton vetoed part of this legislation until more support for childcare was added? How in the fuck does that relate to what you wrote, whether in your diary or the articles you cite? What responsibility does Bush carry for worsening the program, or if Obama's slashing of social programs in the 2010 compromise wasn't a worse attack than Clinton's attempt to revamp what was seen as a problem? What responsibility does California have in this specific case, as they've managed to go years with horrid budgets and no new taxes in a couple decades thanks to Prop whatever?

    If you want to toss in your asides that aren't part of your main point, be prepared that someone might answer, even if that's not the agenda you wanted.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 7:50am

    You sayin' I can't hijack my own thread in a comment?  And then I'm forever doomed to ignore the carefully constructed original post?  Gimme a break (and pass me that doobie, will ya'?)

     

    Apparently there is more appetite to discuss the end of welfare as we knew it than to deconstruct French child care...soit...


    by jollyroger on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 10:24am

    You didn't hijack your thread in a comment - you referred to Clinton & AFDC directly in your diary. Of course you can refer to whatever you want - in the diary or in the comments. I'm not sure how you "carefully constructed" this & missed your own references though. (puff...hack.... cough.... thanks....) 

    I'm happy to discuss the "end of welfare", but this stain on Clinton still gripes me - the guy who resigned from his administration as protest in 1996 is still complaining about it - but in a long interview with Amy wassername in Democratic Underground they don't mention Bush once, nor what's happened in the last 18 years.

    Enough - back to the future - and careful with that spleef, Eugene.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 11:34am

    I was just being bipartisan in my opprobrium.

     

    And he was a no-inhaling hypocrite, too; more germane than ever, as the Afghans prepare to vote not to invite us to stay (those ungrateful bastards...) don't bogart that joint, Habib !


    by jollyroger on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 1:08pm

    This is exactly right:

    "There should be a simple guaranteed national income--by keying it to the presence of dependent children (the dc in afdc...) we gave an incentive to game the system by having more children, but that was an artifact of a flawed class structure, not an artifact of a commitment to support kids."

    There should be a minimum standard of a living and it should be somewhat generous and available even to people who refuse to work.  Instead, we have fetishized work rather than standard of living, as our national goal.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 9:36pm

    With a strong economy and an unemployment rate that by the late 1990s was down to only 4 percent, states were more confident about making welfare reform work.

    To pick up on one of your comments below, perhaps this is part of the problem: Changing policy based on what one has to assume is a temporary change in the economy. Why assume this? Because economies ALWAYS go up and down.

    So the prudent thing would have been to say: "Okay, how does this work when unemployment jumps to 5, 6, 7 percent or higher?" After all, THAT is when these people, in particular, will need help the most.

    Maybe the right thing to have done would have been to keep the safety net in place and introduce other programs to help folks get back into the work force. Then, should things turn down, the safety net would've been there for them.

    (Removing incentives for having more and more children out of wedlock could probably have been changed or removed without revamping the whole thing.)

    Stepping back, a lot depends on your assumptions about poverty; why people are poor; why some stay poor. What factors influence poverty rates, and so on. Charles Murray's theses in Losing Ground gained ground in the 1980s and informed this debate about welfare policy. Some claim that HE ended welfare as we knew it. Here's an interesting analysis of it, which I've only partially read.

    http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc83a.pdf

    The basic point was that the War On Poverty increased and worsened poverty instead of ending, reducing, or ameliorating it.

    Of course, the lay version of this thesis was that black folk--for it's black people who are "the poor" in the public imagination--the Welfare Queen was black really resonated with folks--were just lazy.  They could work if they wanted to, but they don't want to because they get a hand-out every month. Who would work if they could just get free money and more money for having more babies? A subtle version of this idea could be found in at least one of Mitt Romney's ads which accused Obama of undoing reform by giving states some latitude in implementing work requirements. So the lay version is alive and well.


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 9:40am

    "Changing policy based on what one has to assume is a temporary change in the economy."

    Oh my, sure - these idiots just assumed the dot.com boom was permanent?

    No, it was considered an auspicious time to move people off welfare, when jobs were relatively plentiful so they'd have a reasonable chance of success. That's why black unemployment being ~7.6% at the end of Clinton's term and total unemployment around 3.5% means they were right. Clinton's Administration also hired a lot of blacks into federal jobs, which not only helped improve the jobs situation for blacks with typically less opportunity, but gave needed experience to better entrench middle-class gains.

    "for it's black people who are "the poor" in the public imagination" - well, it's poor blacks living in awful public housing projects with crack gangs and machine guns that's part of the "imagination" if you think someone dreamed the 80's, along with ghettos like Compton, Anacostia & E. St. Louis, Algiers LA, parts of Houston, etc. The Black poverty rate in the 1990's was cut by 2/3 - I'm not sure where I'm supposed to put your link to Murray's thesis from 10-15 years before - Clinton's effort against poverty helped.

    Since 2008, we've had especially entrenched long-term black unemployment as people stop looking for work. I've never used the word "lazy" in this situation, and know from personal experience that even with great credentials jobs can be tough to come by, and for a structurally disadvantaged situation, make that 10x. If you're a single mother raising kids by yourself, finding the time, money, energy to get by on everything from shopping, cleaning, cooking, teaching, shuttling, curing, et al is a lot of work, and then you're supposed to go get a 40-hour-a-week job (as per Bush's plan) to un-depend yourself from welfare while not dropping any of the needed daily tasks?


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 10:15am

    No, it was considered an auspicious time to move people off welfare, when jobs were relatively plentiful so they'd have a reasonable chance of success. That's why black unemployment being ~7.6% at the end of Clinton's term and total unemployment around 3.5% means they were right.

    No, it doesn't. It just means that when the sun shown, they made hay. That there are a lot more jobs for everyone when the economy is booming is not an anti-poverty program. I'm not throwing it out of bed for eating crackers, but it's not an anti-poverty program. And when the high tide of a booming economy subsides, those folks are left on the rocks.

    Edit to add: In absolute terms, there are many more poor white people than poor black people and yet the blackness of poverty persists and resonates with large swaths of the electorate.


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 1:30pm

    I don't know about how you view the other comments here...

    But I think you're getting hung up on a perceived critique of Clinton.

    That's not the point I'm making.

    Yes, I AM saying that perhaps they should've done things differently, but I don't gainsay the good things Clinton did or the poverty rates that went down. It would be interesting to know how many of those gains stuck, however.

    (It may be a little hard to tell because people who were NOT in poverty also did worse after the boom busted.)

    I do think that Clinton was part of a rightward shift in the country. A Democratic version of it. He triangulated in such a way that he robbed the GOP of its core issues, but moving rightward was part of what he sacrificed in the process.

    It's possible he couldn't have succeeded otherwise. As I recall, he got a nose drubbing when he tried to allow gays in the military and retreated to DADT. But as I remember it, DADT was a step forward at that time.

    Politics is the art of the possible, and nothing gets done unless you get elected, stay elected, and convince enough members of Congress to go along with you.


    by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 04/02/2014 - 7:43pm

    I think a lot of people thought the .dot boom was permanent.

    Remember all those articles on the "new economy" upending the rules of the old economy? How judging a company's values based on traditional metrics like "revenues" was just so old fashioned and out of touch with what was happening?

    If people, including the Administration, thought the boom was temporary to be followed, inevitably, by a downturn, they wouldn't have lost all that money in the market in the space of a few months. Clinton wouldn't have called Greenspan a genius or some such.

    This is the way it ALWAYS is in a bubble.

    During the housing bubble, "everyone" thought home prices would keep going up and up because they had never gone down (supposedly). Including people whose expertise should have told them otherwise.


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 1:47pm

    If people, including the Administration, thought the boom was temporary to be followed, inevitably, by a downturn, they wouldn't have lost all that money in the market in the space of a few months.

    That's absurd - people were talking about a housing bubble since say 1998 - it's just we didn't know when it would pop, and I was rather surprised it lasted till 2008.

    Everybody knows there are market corrections, that the economy works in cycles, and the best you can hope for is to beat the previous longest cycle.

    Still, people are out there investing and making money, some betting against the end of the boom, some betting for an early bust.

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 4:58pm

    Who's "people"?

    Allan Greenspan? Ben Bernanke?

    That's a silly first paragraph. Unless you act like it's a bubble, you don't know that it's a bubble. Or your knowing is meaningless.

    If everyone knows there are cycles, then they should have planned for the down cycle and not built a program whose "success" depended on the up cycle.

    That's my point.


    by Peter Schwartz on Wed, 04/02/2014 - 9:57am

    God you're tenacious.

    How about "The Economist" - http://www.economist.com/node/242138

    "Major Analysts" - http://mises.org/journals/scholar/thornton6.pdf [including a timeline of quotes at the end]

    Robert Shiller seems to be one known economist with a good track record who focused on this; Greenspan oracle-like tressed "irrational exhuberance" several times.

    Then your bullshit 2nd-to-last paragraph - they initiated this transition in 1996, which lasted 4 years. It more or less was successful. The lack of success you're intimating came with the next president who in 2002 changed the program. Sure, they should have designed the program to be bullet-proof against any motherfucker who takes office whatsoever, right? 

    Now, *when* is the problem with the program that you're suggesting? Why, you don't say. You don't even say what the problem is. You're happy to believe that Clinton started whatever problem we're supposedly discussing, but it's bad that I suggest Bush changed the playing field so we're talking about a new issue. I also point out that for example, the effect of the 2008 crash on unemployment and the duration of long-term unemployment especially among blacks is far harsher than any suggested negative effects between 1996 and 2001, but Congress and the President haven't actually reacted to do anything about it. So Clinton's guilty of not predicting the future to a time when all politicians are assholes and have given up any sort of social responsibility that even Richard fucking Nixon was capable of.

    I noted that Clinton vetoed the bill until it contained enough provisions for childcare to help with unemployed-to-working transitions - the point of JR's diary to begin with - and only required 30-hour-a-week workloads, not Bush's 40. Do you anywhere in all your comments bother to discuss MY basic premise? Or are speculative plaints all you do?

    [PS - maybe I somehow hinted that the Jews did it all - we can start another useless thread chasing that rabbit down the hole]


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 04/03/2014 - 2:40am

    Many liberals were making that point at the time, asking what happens when there's a downturn and unemployment goes up. And many members of the DLC  laughed that question away because they were sure they had the new economy figured out and there would be no more downturns. Most did think the dotcom boom and the housing bubble would just keep going on forever.

     


    by ocean-kat on Thu, 04/03/2014 - 3:49am

    "That there are a lot more jobs for everyone when the economy is booming is not an anti-poverty program." who said reforming welfare was an "anti-poverty program"? it was more billed as breaking significant dependence on welfare rather than getting back in the workforce.

    Re: poor whites vs poor blacks, consider this:


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 5:03pm

    breaking significant dependence on welfare rather than getting back in the workforce.

    What does this mean?

    I thought that breaking significant dependence on welfare meant getting back in the workforce. How do you break the dependence without getting back in the workforce?


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 8:15pm

    It's possible I was thinking about numbers on welfare, but take a look at this:

    10% of white children (4.2 million). In the 10 most populated states, rates of child poverty among white children range from 7% in Texas to 12% in Michigan.

    • 27% of Latino children (4 million). In the 10 most populated states, rates of child poverty among Latino children range from 19% in Florida to 35% in Pennsylvania.
    • 33% of black children (3.6 million). In the 10 most populated states, rates of child poverty among black children range from 29% in California and Florida to 47% in Ohio.
    • 12% of Asian children (400,000) and 40% of American Indian (200,000) Comparable state comparisons are not possible due to small sample sizes.

    http://www.nccp.org/media/releases/release_34.html

    It appears there are almost a million more white kids living in poverty than black kids, though a much higher percentage of black kids than white kids live in poverty.


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 9:02pm

    Well, this is nice.  In the two hours or so since I first looked at the fundraiser, it's gone up about 4,000, so that of the original 9000 bail needed, there has now been donated 

    Sixty two thousand  

    $69,000

     

    $75,000

    $82,000 !!!!

     


    by jollyroger on Wed, 04/02/2014 - 8:53pm

    You are right Jolly, most of this started with ending AFDC.  It is also a burden on grand parents.  Younger voters know that they have been treated badly by the policies of our government.   The ones I talk to intend to change that.  If democrats are smart they will harness that into a campaign.  Many of these kids have grown up in a environment that condemns them to being poor.  The GOP is going to be irrelevant some day in the near future because they have been pushing even worse policies.  

    The fact that so many have donated to help her says it all.  This country is shifting to the left. 


    by trkingmomoe on Sun, 03/30/2014 - 10:10pm

    Do you really think so?  I hope you're right but I don't see it. On NPR this am all they could say about the ACA was how unpopular it is. It's like everyone is reading from the GOP play book.  I'm feeling discouraged. I wish that dems who are running would embrace and be proud of giving everyone an opportunity to have health care. Instead they act like wimps who are afraid to be seen with the President who made this possible!  And don't get me started about the ridiculous cow-towing to the NRA. 

    Sorry for getting OT Jolly -- your point above about incarcerating her and putting her children in protective services as opposed to helping her out with child care is right on. (I do think it was powerfully bad parenting to leave kids in a car though.) She needed a friend to help out, which maybe she doesn't have. She probably should have brought her kids with her and said "I don't have any child care, and I really need a job."


    by CVille Dem on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 10:42am

    Yeah,  bringing the kids into the interview should have crossed her mind, but (she's 22) it's easy to imagine that she felt it was not an option...The bottom line is that people should not be put into this situation to begin with.  

     

    Personally, I thought it was just a fine idea to spend a few dollars (a shameful pittance, really) on AFDC to support parenting...Apparently the plutocrats just found themselves bolting upright at 4 am drenched in sweat through fear that some poor person might be getting money for their kids upkeep that could better go to reducing taxes...

     

    That said, and looking dispassionately at the  "welfare to work" paradigm, failing to provide child care is simply war on poor children...not unlike the cruel joke of section 8 programs that have decades long waiting lists to even apply for a lottery chance to get housing.


    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 10:51am

    The money that is going into a fund for her is coming from small donors.  People really are horrified by the direction the Republicans are trying to take us.  You see the news media doesn't talk to us poor people.  So our point of view or suffering is never taken in to consideration. This country has raise a generation of kids that 40 % languished in poverty.  They are adults now and more are coming in behind them.  This is going to have an impact and it is already showing in politics.  The UN came out with a report this week raking the US over the coals about human rights violations and how we mistreat our poor.  The GOP in their current form is going to be irrelevant in a few election cycles.  

    A week ago I was shopping at the local Goodwill and a women came up to me pan handling.  I recognized her but she didn't recognize me because my hair was cut. So I called her by her name and told her who I was.  Then we did some gossip about the local homeless to fill me in on what was going on.  She has lupus and is middle aged.  She told me she finally got her disability after I said she look good.  She told me she had her own doctor now and even showed me her teeth because she got dental work done.  Not all homeless have addiction problems or mental issues.  I know she has been on the street for the last 3 years.  She told me she was sharing a small place with some others and was not living in a camp.  But the sad part was, here she was still pan handling, so that told me her aid was still falling short of what was needed.  She gave her usual pan handling story about why she needed the money which I had herd several times in the past.  The red puffy skin color was almost gone, her light brown hair was shiny and she looked like she felt better.  There is no excuse for this country to allow disabled women with lupus to live on the street.  It is criminal for states to not expand Medicaid for these people.  She feels like one of the lucky ones now.  Yet she still has to take risks to survive.  

    When a story reaches the national media like the young mother who was jailed, it is only a tiny part of what is going on in this country right now.  I would like to know just what the stats are on how many mothers who have lost their kids because they were poor.  I know it is a lot more than the country realizes.  


    by trkingmomoe on Wed, 04/02/2014 - 4:40am

    Joe Arpaio's goons can 'cook' inmates in WW2 'Bridge on the River Kwai' type hotboxes until  they are dead with no charges filed.

    The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has declined to pursue criminal charges in the death of Marcia Powell, a state prison inmate who died of heat-related causes after being left in an outdoor cage for hours.

    In cool weather a homeless Mom gets arrested and charged with a felony for leaving kids at home. In the car. Justice, Republican style. GOP:  Exploiting racism, ignorance and rigging elections to secure the future for America's billionaires (...and themselves).


    by NCD on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 12:14pm

    Scary. The public and the legal system appear to be OK with the sheriif's actions. It is the federal system that has a problem.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 12:28pm

    Federal actions recently consisted of 'unhappiness' and 'scolding' of Sheriff Joe.

    Where politics ends and justice begins in America has always been shrouded in mystery.


    by NCD on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 1:32pm

    There is a vast difference between her getting the death penalty for prostitution versus how a victim of Afluenza was death with for pedophilia.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 2:21pm

    You mean the DuPont heir who admitted penetrating his 3 year old daughter with his finger as he was masturbating, but got probation because his lawyer successfully argued that he "...would not fare well in prison..."?  What a country!

    personally, I hope that neither he, nor the crazy judge "fare well" in society. 


    by CVille Dem on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 2:59pm

    sadly, noted at the time...

    by jollyroger on Mon, 03/31/2014 - 3:31pm

    And, of course, it was Democrat Bill Clinton who turned his back on one hundred years of policy directed at having mothers supported so they could raise their children at home rather than seek work.

    Which "100 years of policy" are you talking about?

    Or is this hyperbole?


    by Peter Schwartz on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 1:51pm

    Beats the fuck  outta me--it should read 60 years (starts in 1935 as part of FDR's social security program)  I'm pretty sure that I picked up the excessive number somewhere, but I can't find it now, so one suspects the drugs.

     

    OTOH, 60, 100, who's counting?  Lets redraw the parameter to "three generations of policy"


    by jollyroger on Tue, 04/01/2014 - 6:40pm