Made Visible: Women, Children and Poverty

[Starry Messenger]

http://washingtoninformer.com/index.php/financial-literacy/item/6079-made-visible-women-children-and-poverty

Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West deserve high props for their summer poverty tour. They started on an Indian reservation, hit the inner city, and looked at poverty, in all of its manifestations. While many dismissed their high-profile tour as a political ploy, I am absolutely convinced of their sincerity. In addition, these two men are among the few who have dared utter the "p" word in public.

Think about it – Vice President has a Middle Class Task Force, but there has been no focus on the poor or the extremely poor (those who have less than half of the poverty line in income). The Heritage Foundation posits that if you have a cell phone, television, or microwave oven then you really aren't that poor. Newt Gingrich derisively called President Obama the "food stamps President, even though, thanks to the Great Recession, 15.2 percent of all Americans are poor, and 14 percent (20 percent in Mississippi) receive food stamps. That's more than 50 million Americans on food stamps, half of them white. Why and how should someone decide to make food stamps a divider?

We have turned poverty into a personal problem, not a social problem. People are ashamed and embarrassed to be poor, yet poverty has increased thanks to our economic failings – the financial meltdown of 2008, the mortgage crisis, high unemployment, and other matters. Millions of people, especially women and children, are hanging on by a shredded shoestring.

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Talk about fast and furious conversation, talk about passion for justice, talk about women who care about our images in music videos, our position in the economy, our access to health care, including reproductive health, the state of education and the ways some young people are getting the short end of the stick in our schools, and the extreme importance of financial literacy and money savvy in preventing poverty, and the poverty of women around the globe. Underlying the conversation – why are people so passive about poverty, why are women so complacent about inequality, where is the movement to improve the status of women?

[niyad]

1. k and r