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The baffling thing about poverty, like other societal maladies, apparently, is that, despite the dry, old statistics showing incredible increases in poverty, the decline in median incomes, the rise in homelessness and the decline in public assistance, the increase in foreclosures and the plunge in property values – the gap widens – and the people in power really don’t seem to give a damn.

What is it going to take – a complete collapse (as if we’re not already witnessing one) of our economic infrastructure before middle-class suburbanites take up arms against The Man and find themselves in the same place as the poor and people of color have been for decades – on the business end of a police officer’s 9mm Glock or Billy-club, a pepper-spray can or tear-gas canister for their trouble?

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps, that will be the only time a march on the banks and politicians will yield some results and policies will change and wealth will be shared.

But, leave us not hold our breath.

Average citizens/residents are feeling the pinch created by people and institutions who literally could care less – because they seem to have no depths to their lack of caring.

Poverty is NOT one of those conditions that will get better by the pulling up of bootstraps. Poverty is a societal disease that needs a major injection and infusion of capital – real capital – money and other resources. Anything else is a punishment inflicted on people who have less than the people making the decisions and who spend much of their legislative or administrative time and capital denying others their fair share of a pie they keep shrinking.

How bad is it?

Cynthia Boyd of MinnPost.com wrote last Fall:

Nationally, the poverty rate is 15.1 percent, while Minnesota ranks 13th lowest in the nation in numbers of those living below the poverty line ($11,344 for an individual or $22,113 household income for a family of four), but the state's numbers have increased significantly from 2007-2008. The poverty rate then was 9.6 percent.  

The effects play out in the state in concrete ways. Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson told MinnPost last month that 104,000 more Minnesotans have signed on for food support this year compared to last.

And a September 2011 Minnesota Budget Project report comes this:

In 2009-2010, 560,000 Minnesotans lived in poverty, or roughly one out of ten state residents. That represents a 2.1 percentage point increase from 2006-07. Nationwide, 46.2 million people were in poverty in 2010.

Even more staggering, the preliminary numbers show that over the last decade, Minnesota’s median household income fell from $65,120 in 1999-2000 to $54,785 in 2009-2010, or by more than $10,000, after adjusting for inflation. Only Michigan experienced a larger decline in median income during the same period.

And, should anyone believe this is limited to the Metro – where many believe all “those people” live – this from Robb Murray of the Mankato Free Press:

John Woodwick, executive director of the Minnesota Valley Action Council in Mankato, said the number of people in the nine-county area served by MVAC rose from 16,292 in 2000 to 26,233 in 2009, an increase of 61 percent.

During the same period, federal and state funding for MVAC’s (poverty-related) services has decreased 21 percent on a per-person basis. In 2000, MVAC received a total of $793 in federal and state funds for every person living in poverty in the south-central Minnesota service area. By 2009, funding had decreased to $627 per person, according to MVAC’s annual budgets.

“We haven’t seen lately the massive layoffs we’ve seen in the last two years, but the new hires aren’t happening either,” Woodwick said. “And many people haven’t been able to locate work, especially not at what their previous wages were.”

The once-reliable Minnesota, Metro and regional foundations have cut their humans services funding, sometimes by half, even as many nonprofits and advocacy groups came to believe philanthropy would fill the gaps political types either created or refused to fill.

This year’s legislative session almost made a complete disaster of its humans services bill(s), but escaped some of the worst cuts tendered for passage by Republican bill sponsors, perhaps in the face of sure vetoes by Governor Mark Dayton. But, this is all relative, is it not?

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with just four of the many Minnesota advocates whose ulcer-ridden work continues to be a war against the disproportionate impact of rightwing politics and a struggling economy that gives the policymakers the excuse to cut further into the lives of the people they blame for being poor: the poor themselves.

GUESTS:

Katherine Wagoner, Executive Director, Affirmative Options Coalition

Angel Buechner -  Co-Chair, Welfare Rights Committee

Nancy Maeker - Executive Director, A Minnesota Without Poverty

ADDITIONAL STATS:

1 in 10 Minnesotans miss an average of 10 meals a month (that is 100 million missing meals every year).

1 in 4 women over 16 years of age is experiencing poverty in Minnesota

2010 food shelf visits in Minnesota: 3 million visits statewide.

37.2% of African Americans and 39.5% of American Indian Minnesotans are living in poverty.

599,000 individuals are experiencing poverty in Minnesota.(2010 US Census bureau)

A family of four living in greater Minnesota would need to make $12.56/hour per worker to meet basic needs.

Minnesota children living in poverty: 192,000 (15.2%) - this is a 62% increase since 2000.

Minnesota minimum wage is $6.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage is $7.25.

Number of homeless individuals in Minnesota: 13,100 on any given night (47% are age 5 and under).

Poverty rate among African Americans in Minnesota is the 3rd highest in the nation.

The 2011 Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four is $22,350.

MORE RESOURCES:

Legislative Commission to End Poverty in Minnesota by 2020 (Final Report)

THE RICH AND THE REST OF US - by Dr. Cornel West & Tavis Smiley:

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley said on "Face the Nation" Sunday that poverty in America "threatens our very democracy," and that it threatens our national security.

Smiley and Princeton Professor Cornel West, co-authors of the new book The Rich and the Rest of Us (Smiley Books), talked to host Bob Schieffer about how half of Americans - 150 million people - are poor, which they defined as living one or two paychecks away from poverty.

"There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in this town - and you know how hard that is to do - but a bipartisan consensus that the poor just don't matter, that poverty is just not an important issue," Smiley said. "We cannot abide another campaign for the White House where the issue of poverty isn't raised higher on the American agenda."

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Earth Day is upon us again.

Most previous Earth Days have attempted – often quite successfully – to raise awareness of our individual responsibility to protect the environment, to protect the planet from global warming and other climate change issues, reducing the carbon in our lives – our air and water and atmosphere.

We’ve seen efforts at encouraging energy audits of our homes and businesses toward conserving energy and work us away from fossil fuel consumption and on to use of solar and wind alternatives on massive and neighborhood scales.

We’ve seen local community groups zero in on urban and community gardening as another way of achieving organic dominance over processed farming and foods.

What we have likely not spent enough time on is advocating for, nay, demanding, polluting corporations and governments to stop fouling the air and water in the most poverty-stricken of our neighborhoods and communities, invariably dominated by families and businesses of color. That’s the American Way – and it has ever been thus. It has and always be a matter of environmental justice.

Dating to the beginnings of the industrial revolution – the mid-19^th Century – our cities’ and rural manufacturing might and energy production have been placed where they knew you’d find the least political power and organized resistance to the foul air and water created by their operations. This, of course, resulted in wide disparity in the health of families raised and reproduced in the shadow of those facilities pouring hundreds of killing chemicals into the essential elements of life: the air our children breathe and the water they need to survive and lead healthy lives.

Any wonder why there’s been a 600-700% increase in asthma rates among children over the last 30 years and an exacerbating rate of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among older people, who, for several generations were already on their way by smoking those oversold cigarettes. (Check out the maps - the industrial northeast has the highest rates of asthma.)

But these were often, nevertheless, the job-producers in many towns and cities. So, just as the mining initiatives and waste-burning facilities of today and yesterday hold the promise of employment, so did they more assuredly promise the highest of risks to the health of their workers and those community members and politicians who believed themselves tied to their success. They still do.

This year for Earth Day, we take on the subject of environmental justice and the manner in which official state, county and municipal government continue to ignore the effects of their environmentally dangerous decisions on their less-powerful constituents’ health and wellbeing and the will they lack to curtail the pollution destroying all of living matter in all of our rural and urban areas – in Minneapolis, currently, the Hennepin County garbage burner (HERC) and Northern Metals Recycling. We look, too, at the complicity of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) in either ignoring or actually aiding the permitting of such facilities to continue their deposits of dangerous chemicals into the air and/or waters of our urban and rural living venues.

Still, organizations concerned with our sustainability and safety are making some strides toward resolution at the community level as well as policy advocacy in lawmaking and rulemaking circles locally and statewide. An event celebrating the day and those efforts will be held on Earth Day itself, April 21^st(22nd in some places), at the Urban League in North Minneapolis, Its organizers and speakers join us Monday morning.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with several advocates taking our elected representatives and their corporate collaborators to task for the damage that never seems to end for those living in and around the worst of them.

GUESTS:

KAREN MONAHAN – Environmental Justice Community Organizer, Sierra Club North Star Chapter

LOUIS ALEMAYEHU – Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) officer; Board member, North American Water Office; Writer, educator, activist, poet, father, grandfather of African and Native American heritage

SAM GRANT – Principal, Ujima Consulting and Movement Center for Deep Democracy; Founder and consultant with Full Circle Community Institute and Afro Eco

He’s an unlikely radical. But his country’s hypocrisy, its lies about war and its clandestine destabilizing of democratically elected governments while propping up despots in others, when the conduct became as transparent as it did, drove Dick Bancroft round the bend back in the 1960s…and he’s seen no end of it in South America, in the Middle East, in Asia, Africa. This, after an affluent childhood in “old” St. Paul and an “iffy” education at the city’s primary private school – St. Paul Academy where his dyslexia contributed to less than stellar scholastics.

Bancroft has never wanted for the resources to support his family, but the resources that turn most affluent Americans into Republicans (he voted for Eisenhower in 1952) couldn’t prevent his radicalization after witnessing racism and exploitation in both his own and other countries. Where a few economic interests have enslaved the indigenous peoples of others, aided and abetted by the political class of the United States, controlled and manipulated by the economic aristocracy, Bancroft’s gift of chronicling and recording on film the history and historiography of the exploited classes everywhere put Bancroft front and center of international intrigue and domestic rebellion by our country’s own Natives – including the founding and fostering of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stokely Carmichael, William Kunstler, Dennis Banks

Thus did Dick Bancroft and his wife, Debbie dedicate these last 50 years to fighting the barbarism and subversion of justice here and abroad through his camera lens and financial resources, hoping to expose the lies perpetrated by our governments in pursuit of profits and power across the prairie and around the globe.

 Dick Bancroft continues our look into the history and work of protest and dissent in Minnesota and its export elsewhere to expose the violence and hypocrisy of a country whose founding documents say one thing about liberty, justice, peace and equality while its history and official decisions contradict all of them, year after year, decade after decade. (Listen to last week’s conversation with Historian Rhoda Gilman and African-American change agents of the 60s, Rose Mary Freeman Massey and Melvin Giles.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rigoberta Menchú

Bancroft has rubbed shoulders and noses with Nobel laureates, Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú and Ireland’s Mairead Corrigan Maguire, photographed them and been their friend. He has earned blood-brotherhood with the Ojibwe and Dakota peoples of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest with his work with AIM. And he has created a pictorial history of the joys and tragedies that accompany the lives of native peoples everywhere.

Here's a new addition: a 1970s photo of Dick Bancroft (with hair still dark) with L-R, Troubadour Larry Long (and still writing and singing), Painter Jan Attridge (another illustrator of nature and Native life in Minnesota and the Dakotas and still painting) and The Circle Native newspaper contributor, Mordecai Specktor (also Editor of the American Jewish World):

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI talk with Dick Bancroft, now nearly 85 years old, and reflect with him about the events that most marked his abandonment of his family’s political underpinnings and racial prejudices to create a world of peace and justice with Debbie and their children, which include polar explorer Anne Bancroft.

Dick will offer signed posters as membership premiums that feature his iconic photo of Rigoberta Menchú – symbol of Guatemala’s indigenous fight for independence and outspoken advocate for justice in the banana fields of her country.

 

 GUEST:

  RICHARD BANCROFT – Global Photographer; Peace Advocate

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Photo by Shekleton (Shekshots)

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Are we becoming California by a back door? California law is peppered with voter-passed initiatives and referenda. Is this true democracy? Or a denigration of representative government?

The Minnesota Constitution does not allow what California’s does: passing and repealing state statutes by IR&R – Initiative, Referendum and Recall. Not that Republicans haven’t tried to install that device in the Constitution (current House File 2562, King Banaian [R-St. Cloud] would do just that), claiming that true democracy is when citizens vote directly for state laws, bypassing the Legislature. This would be 7^th amendment offered up this year.

But to pass laws by popular vote right now, legislators can place them on the ballot only in the form of Constitutional amendments. (Referenda, or the repeal of existing state law, is not currently allowed at all. Recall of state office holders is allowed by a convoluted process involving the courts.)

So – this year and last – new but frustrated Republican majorities in both houses have found their rightwing agenda neutralized by the veto pen of DFL Governor Mark Dayton. In response they’re attempting to send their entire agenda to the ballot box – some bills already having been vetoed, others not. The issues already heading for the voters or possibly on the ballot thus far:

1. The Marriage Amendment – defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Placed on this year’s November ballot last session. (Vice Pres. Walter Mondale and fmr Chief Justice Kathleen Blatz just announced their opposition to this.)
2. Shoot First – Vetoed this session. So-called castle doctrine principle expanded to allow gun owners to shoot first much sooner – and ask questions later.
3. Voter ID – Vetoed last session, now on the docket for passage to the November ballot. Requires a photo ID before voting – never mind the millions with no access to such identification.
4. “Right-to-Work” – This may be floundering – but it would remove the requirement that a worker sign on to union membership in a union shop.
5. Tax Bill Supermajorities – This may be on the back burner as well. Would require a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to vote in the affirmative for any tax bill to pass.

DFL Rep. Phyllis Kahn (Mpls) has answered with little-discussed bill of her own (HF2175 – companion S.F. No. 2017 [Pappas, et al]) to place on the ballot a question requiring a two-thirds majority of the Legislature to place any Constitutional amendment on the ballot. The theory, perhaps, being that, if the Constitutional amending process placing questions before the electorate continues to bypass any role for the Governor, then it should only be done so by a supermajority of its own. Looks like thus far Kahn’s bill may have languished, like Banaian’s, in the Government Operations and Elections Committee. No action is likely on those two with committee deadlines passing.

Just Friday, MPR's Tim Pugmire reported this on the question of this all perhaps backfiring: "....But Gov. Mark Dayton and other Democrats argue that many of those same voters are offended by the idea of lawmakers governing through the constitution. Dayton said the process not only bypasses him, but bypasses the intent of the state's founders who wanted the executive branch and legislative branch to work together.

DFL legislators insist that when they controlled the House and Senate they held back on using constitutional amendments to get around then-Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican. They claim GOP leaders are now playing with fire. House Minority Leader Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said the stage is now set for even more amendments down the road.

'If we start going down this path, it creates a very dangerous precedent," Thissen said. "At the end of the day, I think the fundamental principle is we've got to keep our constitution as limited and as sacred as possible, and it should be about expanding people's rights and not contracting them.'"

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI put it to our guests about individual and collective issues around the flood of Constitutional amendments this session and last – in search for answers about both the wisdom and strategy of piling amendments on the ballot in such a crucial election as this year’s – what with redistricting forcing legislators and Congressmen and women in new territories and a ballot full of offices from President and US Senate on down through judicial races and – yes, Constitutional amendments and, perhaps, even other local ballot questions.

GUESTS:

SUSIE BROWN – Public Policy Director, Minnesota Council of Nonprofits

HEATHER MARTENS – President, Protect Minnesota

SHAR KNUTSON – President, MN AFL-CIO