Lesson: The Way of Poverty
Unit: Reflective Writing
Unit: Reflective Writing
Grade Level: 11th grade English
Time Frame: 90 minutes
Time Frame: 90 minutes
Unit essential questions:
1. Who are the working poor?
2. How does a growing income inequity gap affect members of society?
Materials needed:
Laptop, projector and screen, Internet, Democracy Now! transcripts/ handouts and video access. Find readings at the bottom of this page.
Laptop, projector and screen, Internet, Democracy Now! transcripts/ handouts and video access. Find readings at the bottom of this page.
- www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/30/video_on_strike_fast_food_workers_in_nyc_call_for_right_to_unionize
- www.democracynow.org/2012/6/12/bloomberg_cuts_threaten_thousands_with_eviction
- www.democracynow.org/2013/9/12/the_american_way_of_poverty_as
- www.democracynow.org/2013/1/31/redemption_oscar_nominated_doc_follows_the
- www.democracynow.org/2012/4/19/tavis_smiley_cornel_west_on_the
Objective:
Students will be able to:
- Define key terms: poverty level, living wage
- Evaluate the causes of poverty
- Evaluate the pathways to working class status
- Identify and analyze solutions or pathways to economic mobility
Do Now/Warm up (15 min):
1. Describe your ideal lifestyle at 28 years old. What kinds of things do you possess?
2. Introduce sample budget to students and definition of poverty line. Ask students to consider being 28 years old and having a family of four (a
spouse and two children).
Your Expenses:
Your Expenses:
- Rent -2 br apt in Queens -$1,500.00/month $18,000
- Cable and Internet 100.00/month $1,200
- Cell Phones (2) – 150.00/month $1,800
- Food – 600.00/month $7,200
Total Yearly Expense: $28,200
*According to 2013 Federal Poverty Guidelines for a 4 person family- $23,550.00
*According to 2013 Federal Poverty Guidelines for a 4 person family- $23,550.00
is the poverty line. ($29,440.00 in Alaska; $27,090.00 in Hawaii)
3. Ask students what has been left out -- Answers should include: clothes, utilities, child care, car insurance, health care, entertainment.
4. Define living wage with students as the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet needs that are considered basic.
Procedure:
1. (5 min) Introduce students to the following questions:
1. (5 min) Introduce students to the following questions:
- Have Mayor Bloomberg’s policies helped or hurt the working poor?
- What are some causes of income inequality?
- Why are Walmart and fast food industry employees protesting? What do they want? What are the dangers of taking this action?
- What are some solutions or pathways to economic mobility?
- How did Martin Luther King perceive the problem of the working poor?
2. (35 min) Students will be divided into five teams.
Each team will have to address one of the questions listed above and post answers on chart paper based on respective Democracy Now! clips.
- Students should try to obtain 5-7 important details/quotes in response to their team question.
- Students will also be encouraged to jot down any other interesting facts, details or observations that speak to their personal interest.
- While it is expected that students will jot down notes while the video is playing, five minutes will be given to jot down notes on their handout after viewing the clip. Students will be encouraged to use the transcripts to quote specific details.
2. (20 min) Each group will share the clip they watched and orally present their answers to the rest of the class. They will post their chart in one of the five stations around the
room.
3. (10 min) Wrap Up: After all teams have presented, a
discussion will ensue based on student thoughts, interesting comments/quotes
heard from each clip.
- Students will respond to: How much money must you earn yearly to life the lifestyle of your choice?
Extension:
Students will write a reflective paper answering one of the following questions:
Students will write a reflective paper answering one of the following questions:
1. How does
growing income inequality affect members of the working poor?
2. What did you discover about the causes of
poverty or the ways one might become a part of the working poor class?
Common Core State Standards:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.2a
Introduce a topic; organize complex ideas, concepts, and information so that
each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole;
include formatting (e.g., headings), graphics (e.g., figures, tables), and
multimedia when useful to aiding comprehension.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.2b
Develop the topic thoroughly by selecting the most significant and relevant
facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations, or other information
and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.2c
Use appropriate and varied transitions and syntax to link the major sections of
the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas
and concepts.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1c
Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning
and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or
issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote
divergent and creative perspectives.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1d
Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and
evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when possible;
and determine what additional information or research is required to deepen the
investigation or complete the task.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.1
Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text
says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including
determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.2
Determine two or more central ideas of a text and analyze their development
over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one
another to provide a complex analysis; provide an objective summary of the
text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.3
Analyze a complex set of ideas or sequence of events and explain how specific
individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop over the course of the text.
Name __________________________________ Date
_________________
Handout-
Income Inequality Per.
_______
Team
Question #
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Team
Answers:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
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My
Thoughts:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
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Transcript #1 –
November 30, 2012 www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/11/30/video_on_strike_fast_food_workers_in_nyc_call_for_right_to_unionize
November 30, 2012 VIDEO: On Strike! Fast-Food Workers in NYC
Call for Right to Unionize
Democracy Now! was there when workers at dozens of restaurants owned by
McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell and others went
on strike Thursday and rallied in a bid for fair pay and union recognition.
[includes rush transcript]JONATHAN WESTIN: We’re at the Burger King in front of Penn Station—community groups, clergy, workers, unions—that we’re out here to support the workers at Burger King who walked out.
RAYMOND LOPEZ: [echoed by the People’s Mic] My name is Raymond Lopez. I’ve been on strike since 5:30 a.m. I strongly believe that when the people on the bottom move, the people on the top fall. The reason—the reason you’re on the top, because we’re holding you up. Might as well appreciate us.
JONATHAN WESTIN: My name is Jonathan Westin. I work with New York Communities for Change. And we’ve been organizing fast-food workers in the city for a few months now. And today, hundreds of fast-food workers walked out of dozens of fast-food restaurants all over the city to protest the poverty wages that people are being paid.
SAVEEDRA JANTUAH: My name is Saveedra Jantuah, and I work for Burger King on 255 West 34th Street. I’m supporting this action because it’s not fair how we’re being treated, and we need a better raise, $15 an hour, and a union to survive in New York. I work morning, noons and nights, and my schedule is flexible. You know, my challenges is, I go to school, have my son to take care of, so I have to go back and forth, run around for school, then go to work, get my son, and it’s just a lot of stress. We get a lot of stress, headaches. Managers tell us we can’t do it, we don’t have no power, we don’t have no right; it’s what they say goes. And that’s not what they say goes. They’re acting like we’re the—like they’re our masters, and we’re slaves. That—those days are over.
JONATHAN WESTIN: For many, you know, I think the assumption was that fast-food workers are teenagers working after-school jobs. I don’t think that was the case before the recession, and it’s definitely not the case after the recession. There’s a lot of mothers and fathers and people raising families, that, you know, fell out of employment during the recession, that are now working fast-food, low-wage jobs, that just can’t get by. And a lot of these folks rely on public assistance and public healthcare to get by, so taxpayers are footing the bill for what corporations like Burger King and McDonald’s aren’t paying.
PAMELA WALDRON: My name is Pamela Waldron. I work at KFC in Penn Station, 34th Street. The reason why I came out here, the pay are lousy. The working condition is bad. We don’t have no respect, no voice in the workplace. Twice, I was pregnant on my job. In the summertime, there were no AC. They had one fan. And they said the fan is for the customer. At my job, they are threatening us that if we do join the union, they could fire us.
ALEXANDER THOMPSON: My name is Alex Thompson, and I work—I’m an organizer for New York Communities for Change, NYCC. The workers at these fast-food restaurants are making $7.25 starting out, and this is the most expensive city in America. The McDonald’s, for instance, last year had $5.5 billion profit, so that’s after they paid their actors, paid their bills, paid everything. They $5.5 billion left over. So to say that they can’t afford to pay a worker $15 is ludicrous. Some of the challenges are, you know, fear, fear people—people make $7.25, but they don’t want to lose that.
PAMELA WALDRON: What inspired me to do this is the Wal-Mart strike. Wal-Mart has been around too long for them not to have a union. It’s ridiculous. Wal-Mart is one of the biggest stores, and they do not have a union, and now they’re fighting for the same thing that we are fighting for. I’d rather be fired than quit, because at least when I’m fired, I know I’m fired for doing what I believe and what is right.
Transcript #2 —June 6, 2012
Bloomberg Cuts
Threaten Thousands with Eviction as NYC Homeless
Population Hits Record 43,000
AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with a look at homelessness here in New York City. The number of people living in city shelters has reached an all-time high according to a new report issued Monday by the Coalition for the Homeless. This spring, more than 43,000 people, including a record 17,000 children, slept each night in municipal shelters. The Coalition’s analysis also showed the average length of a family’s stay in city shelters has increased to nearly a year.
Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, the homeless shelter population has increased by 39 percent. The Coalition for the Homeless attributes the spike in homelessness to the Bloomberg administration’s alleged failure to help move homeless families into permanent affordable housing. Housing advocates say the problem was exacerbated by city’s cancellation of the "Advantage" apartment rental subsidy. Since then, the city has lacked a program to help shelter residents attain permanent housing. Now as many as 8,000 former aid recipients are facing eviction.
For more, we turn to a report by Democracy Now! fellow Chantal Berman. She spoke with several recipients of the program’s housing subsidies who could lose their homes.
KATRICE BRYSON: Basically, I’ve been in this apartment for almost two years. I’m hoping and praying I can stay here a little bit longer, pending on the outcome of what’s going to happen, I guess, when I receive housing court papers.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Katrice Bryson is a medical receptionist and a single mother living in West Harlem. Her daughter Hadenliz was born into a New York City shelter, but grew up in this one-bedroom apartment thanks to the city’s Advantage program, a rent subsidy system that helped homeless people move out of shelters. Despite an all-time high in homelessness, the Bloomberg administration defunded the program three months ago, leaving 8,000 people like Katrice stranded in apartments they can’t afford. With city help, Katrice payed $50 per month on her apartment. Now she’s responsible for more than $1,000 per month—money she doesn’t have.
KATRICE BRYSON: I’ve been trying to look for another job, maybe on top of the job that I have, to try to see if I can work two jobs. It’s been very stressful, because, you know, trying to figure out what’s more important, like making sure that I have food in the refrigerator, making sure that I have lights on, you know. And then I do see homeless people out here in the streets, and I think to myself, I wonder, you know, I hope that’s not going to be me and my daughter in the next month or so, you know, being out on the streets, because of the fact, you know, I tried my best. I work. You know, it’s not like I don’t work. And I try to do what I have to do for me and my daughter, but it’s not enough.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Despite the prospect of sending thousands back to shelter and the streets, Bloomberg officials claim the city can no longer afford to spend $140 million per year on rent subsidies. But critics note that the city spent more than four times that amount last year on commercial and industrial subsidies. Advocates like Patrick Markee at Coalition for the Homeless say that when it comes to fighting homelessness in New York City, fiscal responsibility isn’t the real issue.
PATRICK MARKEE: Mayor Bloomberg and top Bloomberg administration officials continue to view the problem of homelessness as a behavioral problem. They keep thinking that if you try and implement punitive policies against homeless children and families, against homeless individuals, that you’re somehow going to address the problem of homelessness.
CHANTAL BERMAN: The end of the Advantage program is the story of a budget squabble between New York City and New York state. The state canceled its share of Advantage funding in March 2011, and the Bloomberg administration countered by closing off the program to new families. Then, in February this year, a state court ruled that New York City could legally stop payment to all Advantage recipients.
PATRICK MARKEE: For the first time since modern homelessness began in New York City more than 30 years ago, we have a situation where homeless kids and families in New York City shelters have no housing assistance to help them move out of shelter. More than 3,100 families who were in the Advantage program have already ended up back in the shelter system. More than 5,000 families who were in the Advantage program have already come back to apply for shelter. We now have essentially a revolving door back into shelter for thousands of children and families.
CHANTAL BERMAN: For decades, New York has used a combination of city, state and federal housing resources to help homeless people transition out from shelter. But since 2005, when Mayor Bloomberg won his second term, city policies have moved away from the idea that housing assistance is the solution to homelessness. This is Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond speaking at the New School.
SETH DIAMOND: We must reject the misconception that a rental subsidy is the only ticket out of shelter. The evidence is clear. Most families can work and want to work.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Many recipients of the Advantage subsidy were working families. But another section of the program also served fixed-income, disabled people, whose unique medical needs prevent them from working. Michelle Martin and her friends Sharon, Rosemary and Anita met in a shelter two years ago. Thanks to the Advantage program, they moved to this accessible housing complex in Far Rockaway, Queens. These women all appeared in housing court last week, where a judge gave them 30 days to come up with all of the rent that they owe since the Advantage subsidy ended. If not, they will be locked out of their apartments.
MICHELLE MARTIN: Then, next thing I know, I get a—like everybody else, a three-day notice, 30-day notice, then eviction notice. I open up, and when I see where it said "civil court," my whole body shook. I got nervous, and I have a weak stomach. So I—it’s like I had pains all in my stomach. I dropped the paper on the floor, and I sat there, and I’m going in tears. I said, "Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m going to be evicted. I’m going to be evicted. What are they going to say?" "You have to be out, such-and-such a time. We’re going to come and put your things out." So I’m worried about that.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Moving women like Michelle to shelters often means jeopardizing their access to medicine and doctors. Michelle’s close friend and neighbor, Catherine Mobley, is already suffering adverse health effects.
CATHERINE MOBLEY: I have some serious problems. I sleep with machines at night in order for me to get a good night’s rest. I have so much medication I have to take. And this, what are we going through, not knowing if we’re going to have a place to live by the end of the month, I’m getting sick. My sugars have gone up, my blood pressure has gone up, and it’s getting me very emotionally crazy. Everybody says, "Calm down. Don’t worry about it. Let God handle it." You can’t do that when you don’t know where you’re going to go.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Catherine will probably end up back in the shelter, because her monthly check from disabilities services won’t cover the cost of an apartment in New York, where the disparity between wage levels and housing costs is one of the worst in the country. This is Patrick Markee at Coalition for the Homeless.
PATRICK MARKEE: Fundamentally, homelessness is a problem of housing affordability. And what we’ve seen in New York City and what we’ve seen across the United States for the past decade has been a widening of the affordability gap, a widening of the gap between the incomes of low-income and working-class people and the housing costs and rents. In New York City, you see that, again, more starkly than in most other places.
CHANTAL BERMAN: Right now, a higher court is reconsidering whether the city acted illegally by defunding the Advantage program, so there’s a small chance that the city will be forced to resume sending out rent checks. But by the time the court reaches a decision, Michelle, Catherine and Katrice will almost certainly be back in the shelter system where they started—this time with no way out. For Democracy Now!, this is Chantal Berman.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, and we are joined by Patrick Markee, the senior policy
analyst at Coalition for the Homeless in New York City.
Patrick, welcome to Democracy Now! The figures
are astounding. The largest number of homeless people in the city since the
Depression? And then, our top headline today, new figures show the recession
brought on by the financial crisis has wiped out two decades of wealth for the
average U.S. household, and this is largely due to housing issues.
PATRICK MARKEE: Absolutely. I mean, in New
York City now, we’ve got more than 43,000 people a night in shelter, including
an all-time record 17,000 children. It’s a 10 percent increase from last year.
It’s a 40 percent increase from when Mayor Bloomberg took office 10 years ago.
And across the country, we’re seeing rising family homelessness. The
fastest-growing segment of the homeless population in the United States is
families with kids. And it’s very much against the stereotype that I think many
Americans still have. They still picture a homeless person being an older man
who’s panhandling on a street corner. Well, in New York City, it’s much more likely
to be a mom and her kids.
AMY GOODMAN: And you have a situation
where, in this particular program, the Advantage program, when they’re put back
into shelters, the amount of money that is spent on sheltering them in shelters
is more than if they had subsidies for their apartments.
PATRICK MARKEE: Absolutely. I mean, we have a
situation where it costs $36,000 a year to shelter a homeless family in New
York City. In comparison, a rental voucher would be $10,000 a year. And this
has really been the fundamental kind of lunacy of New York City homeless
policy, and even homeless policy around the rest of the country, for many
years. Here you have a situation where it costs more to do the wrong thing. We
are now facing a situation where Mayor Bloomberg has refused, for years now, to
utilize federal housing programs, which we know work to reduce homelessness,
which worked under previous New York City mayors. Even Rudy Giuliani himself
utilized federal housing programs to help families get up and out of shelter and
secure permanent housing. And here you’ve got Mayor Bloomberg refusing to do
something—
AMY GOODMAN: And here you have a mayor
who himself is a billionaire, one of the wealthiest men in this country.
PATRICK MARKEE: Yeah, and it just—I just
think it comes from a mindset that we’ve seen in this administration. They
refuse to see that this is not a problem of behavior, of people making bad
choices, all of these things. It’s a problem of a widening gap between rents
and incomes, where working-class and low-income people are simply being priced
out of the housing market, and a situation where we know government has
solutions to this problem. If you provide affordable housing assistance to help
homeless kids and families escape shelter, they will stay out of shelter. And
it’s something that has worked in New York City under previous mayors. It’s
worked around the country. And certainly, we see it in western European
countries, in Canada, in other, you know, democracies and other industrialized
countries where they have a stronger affordable housing system for low-income
people.
AMY GOODMAN: Which states are hardest hit
by homelessness in this country?
PATRICK MARKEE: Well, certainly New York
has—New York City has an enormous homeless shelter population and street homeless
population. California and Florida, other states that were hard hit by the
mortgage foreclosure crisis, have also been very hard hit by homelessness. In
some of the Southern states, I think we’ve seen increases that are, if
anything, even more startling, because there you’ve got local and state
governments that don’t step in to help.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 20 seconds. We
almost never hear the word "poverty" mentioned by the presidential
candidates. What is the single most important way we could deal with
homelessness in this country?
PATRICK MARKEE: Clearly, we need to do more
to provide affordable housing assistance to low-income people and to shore up
the programs that are there. It’s very dangerous, the proposals that Governor
Romney has made to block grant federal housing programs, which would
essentially decimate them. But we certainly need to see more leadership from
the president and Congress, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very
much, Patrick Markee, for joining us, senior policy analyst at Coalition for
the Homeless here in New York City. We’ll link to their report
that came out today.
Transcript #3- September 12, 2013 www.democracynow.org/2013/9/12/the_american_way_of_poverty_as
A new study shows that income inequality in America is at a record high. According to an analysis of tax filings, the income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the other 99 percent widened to unprecedented levels in 2012. The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected more than 19 percent of household income, breaking a record previously set in 1927. Income inequality in the United States has been growing for almost three decades. We speak to Sasha Abramsky, author of the new book, "The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives." It is written in the spirit of Michael Harrington’s groundbreaking 1962 book, "The Other America," in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the "age of affluence." Harrington’s book went on to inspire President Lyndon B. Johnson’s subsequent "war on poverty."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A new study shows that income inequality in America is at a record high. According to an analysis of tax filings, the income gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the other 99 percent widened to unprecedented levels in 2012. The top 1 percent of U.S. earners collected over 19 percent of household income, breaking a record previously set in 1927. Income inequality in the U.S. has been growing for almost three decades.
AMY GOODMAN: We spend the rest of the hour with a journalist who has covered poverty in America for the last two decades. His name is Sasha Abramsky. His new book is The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. It’s written in the spirit of Michael Harrington’s groundbreaking 1962 book, The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from "the age of affluence." Harrington’s book went on to inspire President Johnson’s subsequent war on poverty. This is an excerpt of Johnson’s State of the Union address January 8th, 1964.
PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs. Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools and better health and better homes and better training and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, nearly half a century later, poverty in America continues to haunt tens of millions of Americans. Census data shows nearly one in two Americans have fallen into poverty or could be classified as low-income. Meanwhile, more than a third of African-American and Latino children live in poverty.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, our next guest, Sasha Abramsky, chronicles the stories of those struggling with poverty in America today, much like Michael Harrington did 50 years ago. His new book is called The Other American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. Abramsky’s reporting on poverty is funded by a grant from the Open Society Foundation’s Special Fund for Poverty Alleviation.
Sasha Abramsky, welcome to Democracy Now!
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Good morning.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
Tell us about—we just, as I was mentioning, had a mayoral race where the main
candidate on the Democratic side was talking about income inequality, the 47
percent of New Yorkers who live at or near the poverty level. Talk about what
you found is going across the country.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Well, the inspiration for
my book was this idea that, even before 2008, something was going wrong with the
economy and the way it was functioning for most ordinary Americans. So, if you
go back to the middle Bush years, by some measures, the economy was doing very
well. Unemployment was quite low. The stock market was quite high. Real estate
values were going up. But even then, if you started talking to people on the
ground in New York, in Philadelphia or in Los Angeles, in rural communities all
around the country, what you’d find was that increasingly people were juggling
bills to make ends meet. So, maybe they’d be able to pay their rent or their
mortgage one month, but they’d have to forgo a car payment. Maybe they’d be
able to buy clothes for their kids, but it meant that they were missing meals
at the end of the week, or they were having to rely on food pantries and
charity.
Now, obviously, after 2008, all of those crises got
magnified, because you suddenly had an unemployment crisis on top of everything
else. You had people burning through their life savings trying just to survive,
just to make sure they had a roof over their head. You had families routinely
going into bankruptcy when they had a healthcare emergency. You had low-income
workers in rural areas; when gas prices went up a dollar a gallon, as they did,
that was enough to collapse their financial security. And I went around the
country, and I started talking to people. And it seemed to me that much as with
Harrington about half a century ago, there was a story that was being missed
here, that we were talking about affluence before 2008, or we were talking
about the struggling middle classes after 2008, but what we weren’t talking
about was poverty. We were leaving out of the American story tens of millions
of Americans who on a daily basis just weren’t making ends meet. And that’s the
story that I chronicle in my book.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your assessment of
President Obama’s record on poverty?
SASHA ABRAMSKY: You know, when Obama came
in, I was so optimistic, because this is a man who had done community
organizing. He clearly understood the complexities of poverty, and he clearly
knew how to tell a story. And all of that’s important, because we’re talking
about real people, not stereotypes. And I think conservatives very often get
away with labeling the poor as undeserving or labeling the poor as dysfunctional
or labeling the poor as somehow blameworthy for their poverty. And you can only
do that if you’re not talking about real individuals, if you’re not talking
about the man like Matthew Joseph, steelworker I met in Stockton, church
deacon. He loses his job, and he then spends months and months and months
trying to stay in his house, trying to make sure that he and his wife don’t end
up on the streets. You can only stereotype if you’re not talking about someone
like Megan Roberts, 31-year-old woman I met in Albuquerque. She had been on
Medicaid. Her family had been on Medicaid. And then her husband gets a
one-dollar-an-hour pay raise, and it’s enough to kick them off of Medicaid and
various other government assistance. She has a healthcare emergency, and she
goes bankrupt. So I came in—when Obama came in, I was so optimistic he
understood these stories.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go for one minute
to Megan Roberts, to a clip of one of these—
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —women that you profile.
MEGAN ROBERTS:
I stressed, stressed out. The dollar pay raise knocked us off housing. We went
from $612 rent to a $1,030 rent. Knocked us off food stamps, so we didn’t get
any food assistance whatsoever. We didn’t qualify for any of that. We had no
Medicaid at that point, because that dollar pay raise knocked us off that. Left
us hanging. He was only going to get private health insurance through his work.
It would have taken effect January 1st of ’06, but I got sick December 10th of
’05. So we were left with this bill, and we ended up having to eventually—I
believe it was April 16th, we filed for bankruptcy.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is an amazing
story. When Roberts’ husband received a one-dollar-an-hour pay raise at his
diesel mechanic job, the family was suddenly deemed too affluent for Medicaid,
food stamps and housing assistance. And then you hear how it impacts their
lives.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, and, unfortunately,
these are the kind of stories that I encountered around the country. I
interviewed hundreds of people for this in dozens of states, and you hear these
stories all the time. And what it made me realize is that poverty is immensely
complex in America. You can’t reduce it to one set of factors. You can’t reduce
it to one group of people. You can’t reduce it to one part of the country. It
could be your neighbor. It could be your family member. It could be you,
yourself, if you lose your job or your hours are cut at your work.
Now, coming back to what I was saying about Obama,
I—when he came in, I thought this is a man who understands the stories, like
Megan Roberts’ stories. I think he’s got a very mixed record when it comes to
implementing anti-poverty measures. I think his administration did a pretty
good job of stemming the worst collapse, of stopping the worst hemorrhaging
since the 1930s. They did a far less good job in thinking through creative,
holistic anti-poverty approaches. And what they haven’t done yet—and maybe
Obama’s speech a couple weeks ago at the Lincoln Memorial, maybe that marks a turning
point. But so far, what they haven’t done is put the podium of the president
behind a war on poverty in the way that Lyndon Johnson did half a century ago.
And that, I think, we’re waiting still to see.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
I’m a little less optimistic about what may happen in the next few years,
because a report that came out just yesterday that said that we have—the stock
market has doubled in value since the collapse of 2008. Businesses have cash,
huge amounts of cash that they’re holding in their bank accounts. And yet, this
report says that 95 percent of all of the gain in income since 2008, since the
collapse, has gone to 1 percent of the population.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: That’s absolutely right.
And when you look at this, this is a trend that goes back all the way to the
Reagan period, and maybe even before the Reagan period, that year in, year out,
if you’re at the top of the economy, you’re going to benefit
disproportionately. If you’re at the bottom of the economy, not only are you
not going to benefit, but from the 1970s onwards, real income in the bottom
quintile, the bottom 20 percent of the economy, has gone down. So if you’re a
young, working-class adult in America today, there’s a very good chance that
you’re earning less in real terms than your father and your grandfather did.
Now that’s stunning. That’s never happened before, that kind of downward
mobility in America.
AMY GOODMAN: How can the cycle be broken,
Sasha?
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Well, I think you have to
look at creative policy. So, in the—the first part of my book is all about the
stories of people in poverty. The second part of my book details what a new war
on poverty could look like. So it involves thinking creatively around, let’s
say, taxes. Because we have the money in our system to generate pools of money
to be used on anti-poverty initiatives. The fact that we don’t do it is a
political choice, not an economic necessity. We’re self-starving our public
infrastructure. So I advocate significant reforms in the way we do taxes.
I talk about major reforms in the way we fund
education. I advocate something called an educational opportunity fund, which
would essentially be a social insurance system, much like Social Security, to
render higher education universally affordable.
I talk about things like the earned income tax
credit—quite an effective anti-poverty measure. But a lot of states have
resisted putting in place their own state versions of the policy. I talk about
things like what Alaska did. Alaska, which is by no means a left-wing, radical
state—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: —implemented an oil profits
dividend. Everybody in Alaska gets money from the oil industry. We could do the
same all over the country. That we don’t is a lack of political will, and I
think we need to change the discussion on poverty.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very
much. Sasha Abramsky’s book is called The American Way of Poverty: How the
Other Half Still Lives
Transcript #4-- 1/31/2013 www.democracynow.org/2013/1/31/redemption_oscar_nominated_doc_follows_the
Redemption: Oscar-Nominated Doc Follows the Working
Poor Who Survive on Collecting Bottles and Cans
The HBO documentary "Redemption" examines New York City’s canners — the largely invisible people who survive by redeeming bottles and cans they collect from curbs, garbage cans and apartment complexes. Many have quietly slipped into poverty after losing their jobs, now living on the margins of society. The film has been nominated in the documentary shorts category at this year’s Academy Awards. We’re joined by co-directors Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, both of the Downtown Community Television Center, a community media center based in NYC’s Chinatown. [includes rush transcript]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with a new documentary that looks at those who have quietly slipped into poverty and now live on the margins of society. The film is called Redemption, and it’s nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary shorts category this year. It’s about New York City’s canners, the largely invisible people who survive by redeeming bottles and cans they collect from curbs, garbage cans and apartment complexes. This is a clip from the film.
CANNER: I’m not against the rich; I’m against injustice, greed and injustice. That’s what I’m against. There are more people here than ever before. They’re all over the place, all over the place, trying to make a dollar, you know? This is like everybody is down on their luck, man, just about, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: A clip from the film Redemption.
Well, for more, we’re joined by the film’s directors, our colleagues, Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill. In 2010, they were nominated for an Academy Award for their film China’s Unnatural Disaster. They won four Emmys for the 2006 film Baghdad ER and were on the Oscar short list last year for In Tahrir Square. They work together at Downtown Community Television Center; that’s DCTV, a community media center based in New York City’s Chinatown, where Democracy Now! used to broadcast. Jon Alpert is the founder and executive director of the organization, which has won 15 Emmys, three Columbia-duPont Awards and a Peabody Award, among many other accolades.
Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill, both, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us about Redemption, Jon.
JON ALPERT: Well, you live in New York City. I think we all tend to walk on the street, and the people who are going through our garbage sort of blend in, and we don’t look them in the eye, we don’t talk to them. And one day, Sheila Nevins of HBO was walking past her garbage and saw—really early in the morning, and saw somebody who was up earlier than she was, working harder than she was, and she wondered who these people were.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, you know, it is amazing, because where the Daily News used to be on 33rd Street, it’s almost like a—around 11th Avenue, is a Grand Central for the redeemers. They all get together. There’s huge numbers of people every day are there. And it’s—you’re right: Most New Yorkers never really pay much attention at all to the lives of the people involved or how they got there.
JON ALPERT: But it’s growing every day. I mean, it’s an army on our streets, because all the jobs that they used to have—remember when you were down in our firehouse, all the surrounding buildings in Chinatown were full of sweatshops, and people made things. All those factories are gone.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to one of the can collectors you feature in your film. Her name is Susan. She’s a former computer sales executive with a college degree. She explains how she was once one of IBM’s top salespeople. Well, that was in 1990.
SUSAN: I’m slow at this. When I first started, I hoped that nobody saw me that I knew.
Hey, how you doing?
In this area, there’s a lot of young people, young people with good jobs. They’re the guys with the money. I received a bachelor of science, and then I got into the computer industry. I’ve worked with Microsoft. I’ve worked with Compaq. I won what was considered the most prestigious award in the industry at the time. In 1990, I won the—I was one of the winners of the IBM Winner’s Circle, which was given to 20 of the top sales and marketing people in the country. And now I’m helping keep the city clean.
AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Redemption,
an Oscar-nominated short documentary. Matt O’Neill, tell us where Susan is
today and some of the other people you profile?
MATTHEW O’NEILL:
Sure. Most of the redeemers are still working on the street collecting cans.
Susan is lucky enough to be living in Atlantic City right now. She’s in housing
down there. That was her goal. She just got priced out of New York, a New
Yorker all her life. And without some sort of subsidy, she wasn’t able to
afford to stay here.
You know, you earlier played a clip from President
Obama saying, "Before we were "us," we were "them,"
and I think that’s something we have to pay attention to in this film, is
recognizing that the men and women collecting bottles and cans are just like
you and me. And they slip through the cracks. Juan, you said they were
invisible. As we were making this film, and you see it, the men and women on
the street who aren’t collecting cans never make eye contact with the men and
women collecting cans, walk right by, time after time, in every shot. They
never engage. And these are our fellow New Yorkers. These are our fellow
citizens. And it’s not just happening here; it’s happening all around the
country. And we have to pay attention to it.
AMY GOODMAN: And there are a lot of
immigrants, as well, that you profile. Families are collecting bottles. And
talk about the whole process, the stage, and also where people live.
MATTHEW O’NEILL:
So, when I started this, I thought that it was mostly going to be homeless
people who were working on the streets. And it turns out that most of our can
collectors have homes. They are the working poor. So you have Nuve, who is
supporting four kids in Sunnyside, Queens, with her can collecting. And she’s
dropping the kids off at school before she heads out to collect cans, picking
them up, and then spending the entire night sorting cans with her husband.
You have Lilly, who used to have a job in Chinatown.
And Chinatown is still suffering from the effects of the World Trade Center.
All those restaurant jobs are still gone. Lilly used to work in a restaurant.
Now Lilly is on the street 20 hours a day working. I think that you couldn’t
find a boss in this country who wouldn’t love to have an employee like Lilly
who’s willing to put in that sort of work ethic and those sorts of hours. I
mean, she never stops. She outran Jon and I consistently when we were trying to
film her.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s a science how
you balance—how the bags of massive number, hundreds of cans, are balanced on
shopping carts as they walk through the streets. And then, where do they bring
them to, Jon?
JON ALPERT: Well, they bring them to
recycling centers. Any place that sells a bottle is supposed to redeem them.
But a lot of places aren’t happy to have lots of people dragging clinking,
clanking bags through there while other people are trying to buy toothpaste,
and so it’s very difficult for people to redeem. That’s actually the hardest
part of their job. And the main redemption center in Chinatown got destroyed by
Hurricane Sandy, and it’s really put a lot of pressure on these very marginal,
vulnerable people, and some of them have become homeless as a result of it.
They don’t have any place to bring their cans.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:
And the—and their viewpoint of how the rest of the city treats them, especially
the owners of these buildings, and when they go into—in front of private—it’s
one thing, a public can, but when you go into the trash of a private building,
sometimes you can end up with conflicts with the landowners or the supers.
JON ALPERT: You can, and so there’s a
diplomatic aspect, too. They have to be very friendly, especially with the
supers, because if you can basically score a big building and get access to
that before the other canners can, that’s money in your pocket. So that’s also
part of their job. It’s competitive, too. You have to protect your route. If
they’re collecting cans from Democracy Now!, and they’re sick one day,
somebody else is coming to take those cans away.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised
about?
JON ALPERT: What was really surprising to
me is that—as a documentary filmmaker, I’ve gone all over the world. And one of
the first places—it’s almost a cliché—where we go and where reporters go is you
head to the dump. And there’s the documentary, Garbage Dreams, that’s
been made about the dump in Egypt; it’s a really great documentary. I went to
Smokey Mountain in the Philippines, and those reports were part of the pushing
of the Marcos regime out, because of inequities that they showed. And to see
this in my own country shocked me, that we have an army of people who glean through
the garbage. I still get chills when I think about them.
AMY GOODMAN: Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill,
we want to thank you very much for being with us, the award-winning directing
duo. Their latest film, Redemption, is Academy Award-nominated in the
documentary short division.
Transcript #5—April 19, 2012
Part 2: Tavis
Smiley & Cornel West on Growing Up Poor, Occupy Wall Street and Trayvon
Martin Case
In part two of our interview, Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West discuss
growing up in working-class households and compare the amount of money spent on
war and the 2012 presidential campaign to funding for programs that assist the
one in two Americans who are now poor. They also discuss the Trayvon Martin
case and Ted Nugent’s potentially threatening comments about President Obama at
the recent National Rifle Association meeting. [includes rush transcript]AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, as we continue with our conversation with PBS broadcaster, NPR broadcaster, Tavis Smiley, and Princeton University professor and preacher, Cornel West. They have written their first book together, though they have written many books separately, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. You know, this is your first book together, and I was wondering if you could each talk about your own lives, because you talk about each other’s lives in the beginning of the book. But Tavis, talk about where you grew up and the circumstances, your family.
TAVIS SMILEY: Let me just say, given that I regard Dr. West as the leading public intellectual in our nation, that I regard him as a Du Bois of our time. For all the good work we’ve done together for 25 years, nothing has delighted me more than to have my name on the cover of a book next to his name, because I so love and respect and revere Cornel West and his contributions to this great nation and the world, for that matter. So, to get a chance to sit and write a book with him, where we bring our shared experiences and individual experiences to bear on a topic like poverty, was just an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
And our upbringings are very different. We are brothers connected at the heart. We grew up in very different environments. He can speak about his own. But I grew up as one of 10 kids. I’m the eldest of 10 kids, grew up in a three-bedroom trailer, my seven brothers and me in one bedroom, my two sisters and my maternal grandmother, Big Mama, in the second bedroom, and my mother and father, Joyce and Emory Smiley, in the third bedroom—13 people in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom trailer. That’s how I was raised, in a trailer park with all white people. We were the only black family for miles around in this white trailer park. The good—
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
TAVIS SMILEY: In Indiana, North Central Indiana. The good news about that is I learned at an early age that we can get along, if I could take Rodney King’s question and answer it: yes, we can get along. America is a nation where black and white and red and brown and yellow can come together for the sake of making America a greater democracy. So I’ve always believed in the best of America. In that sense, I resonate with Martin’s dream, rooted in the American Dream. I resonate with Dr. King in that regard.
On the other hand, though, I saw so much poverty growing up, because I lived that story growing up. And I’ve been fortunate, and I’ve been blessed. And the short answer is, I know that, even when we can’t be optimistic—and Doc makes this point all the time—even when we can’t be optimistic, we can always be hopeful. And I’m a witness, I’m an example, that you can build an entire life on hope. As I’ve gotten older, though, I realize, though, that hope needs help. And those of us who have the platform and have the opportunity to speak for those who don’t have a voice, Doc and I believe and argue in the book, that is, the telling of truth that allows suffering to speak, so that the suffering is never heard, much less addressed, if those of us who have platforms, like Democracy Now!, don’t raise our voices to speak out on their behalf. That’s why I celebrate what you do and celebrate the opportunity to do this book with Dr. West.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Cornel West, the amazing thing about this is that poverty is no stranger to either of you. Talk about your upbringing.
CORNEL WEST: Well, I didn’t grow up in the same kind of poverty this brother did, though. He was broke as the Ten Commandments financially. We had some flow of resources, you know what I mean? It was more working class, lower middle class. But most importantly, we were spiritually rich. We were morally rich. Irene and Clifton, my parents, my brother Cliff, my sisters Cynthia and Cheryl. I’m the father of Zeytun and Cliff and grandfather of Kalen. I’ve lived an extremely blessed life, even though I come out of that—both stable working class, lower middle class. When I met this brother, we decided—what, 25 years ago?
AMY GOODMAN: You grew up in Sacramento.
CORNEL WEST: Sacramento, California, yeah. It was 25 years ago, I say, "We are going to live and die to keep alive the legacy of Martin King and Fannie Lou and [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN: You were fighting from when you were in school. You were what? President of your class, but fighting to include African-American studies?
CORNEL WEST: Yeah, we had a general strike, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: What year was it?
CORNEL WEST: That was 1969. We shut the whole—
AMY GOODMAN: And why did you strike?
CORNEL WEST: —city down to make sure they had black studies in every high school, who wanted it. We weren’t authoritarian or coercive about it, you know. But already, you know, we had been set on fire by not just Martin King, but I was working closely with the Black Panther Party, as a Christian, of course. We had wonderful tensions, but I was working the breakfast program, working with them every day trying to ensure they had black studies. And so, when Tavis and I come together, he’s from Kokomo, Indiana—Sacramento, California—boom! King legacy 2012, in our own feeble way. I mean, you know, we’re just doing what we could do before we die.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And we’ve been covering extensively on Democracy Now!, when you talk about fighting for black studies in the schools, the battle in Arizona in Tucson over the state legislature passing a law—
CORNEL WEST: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
JUAN GONZALEZ: —that essentially bans Latino studies in the city of Tucson in the public schools there.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: And the books that are the heart of the curriculum.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, and they banned the books that are the curriculum.
CORNEL WEST: As you point out in your magisterial text, old brother, in some ways, that’s a compliment, because when the powers that be want to suppress the truth, we know truth crushed to earth shall rise again. The truth is dangerous.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Right.
CORNEL WEST: The truth is—pushes people against the wall.
AMY GOODMAN: You both, in your book, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto, refer to Dr. King. I wanted to play a clip of Dr. King. You talk about his campaign against poverty. This was the speech he gave not far from here, Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans. That is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. King, April 4th, 1967. Tavis Smiley, it’s not the speech we usually hear when referring to Dr. King.
TAVIS SMILEY: It is the most courageous speech that Martin King ever gave in his life. And for giving that speech, he was demonized. We talk about this in our work. King, in the last poll taken in his life about his acceptance in popularity in the country, 55 percent of black had turned against black people because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. Seventy-two percent of Americans across the board had turned against Dr. King because of his opposition to the war.
JUAN GONZALEZ: New York Times and the Washington Post editorialized against him.
CORNEL WEST: Oh, man.
TAVIS SMILEY: They killed him.
CORNEL WEST: Basically him a communist, basically called him a communist.
TAVIS SMILEY: They absolutely did. They did. That speech is, again, the most courageous speech he ever gave. And there’s one line in that speech—many lines, but one that always resonates with Dr. West and myself, and we talk about it in this book, we quote him in this text: "War is the enemy of the poor." That’s Martin King. "War is the enemy of the poor." And the two of you, given the fine work you do here on this Peace Report every day, you understand that. All the resources, the trillion-plus dollars we’ve spent in these military excursions—you can’t even call them "excursions" now, because we’re now—this is the longest war in the history of this country; it’s not an excursion anymore.
CORNEL WEST: Invasion, occupation.
TAVIS SMILEY: Exactly, without, obviously, an exit strategy. But think of all the money spent there that could have been spent on programs here for the poor, number one. Number two, now that we’re no longer in Iraq, as we once were, at least, how will that money be spent domestically that was being spent in Iraq? And since I’m talking about money, and we’re talking about this campaign for the White House, if Mitt Romney is going to raise, as the papers suggest, about $600 million this time around, Barack Obama last time raised $750 million and will raise more now that he’s an incumbent—I’m no math major—you put those two together, you’re talking a billion-plus dollars. Think of how much money—what that money could be used for vis-à-vis programs in this country. But there’s so much money in our politics, both parties beholden to big business and to corporate America, and that’s not even mentioning all the money now being activated by these super PACs. But just think about all that money to run a campaign for the White House and what that money could be used for. It’s sickening to me, quite frankly.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, the amazing thing to me also is, in the midst of this crisis, all of these governments, both the federal government and the state governments, talking about cutting back expenditures, all aiming at the pension funds, the pension funds of city workers, of teachers, of other folks, a way to actually accelerate the move toward poverty, not to pull it back.
CORNEL WEST: That’s right, because then we’ve got to think we know that the austerity cuts just reinforce recession, reinforce depression, make it more difficult to generate demand on the part of working people, having resources to spend even. So this is even within the capitalist framework, it reinforces the race to the bottom, without any serious consideration of not just taxes on the wealthy, but attempts to restructure the economy in such a way that something called "public interest" has real small substance.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, what about the crackdown on dissent in this country?
CORNEL WEST: Oh, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we see the report just came out of UC Davis, the—very critical of the administration for the in-the-face pepper-spraying of these students who were protesting tuition hikes.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: You see the encampments of Occupy wiped out around the country. You see police forces in this country—you talk about the war abroad and the billions that go into that—police forces in this country that are getting millions of dollars. They’ve got drones. They’ve got tanks. And then you—
JUAN GONZALEZ: The surveillance of the Muslim community, right? By the New York Police Department.
CORNEL WEST: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s right, the Associated Press just winning the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the monitoring of the Muslim community.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. You know, I’m very blessed to stand with Brother Christopher Hedges and Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg and others against the U.S. government in terms of this National Defense Authorization Act. We were just in court here, 500 Pearl Street, a few weeks ago, and we’ll come back. Meaning what? Section 1021, 1022: U.S. government has the right to detain persons without trial, without due process, without judicial process, if you are in some way associated with associate forces of terrorist groups or have some connection with terrorist groups. Which means, in the '80s, I'm going straight to jail, because nobody is going to stop me from being in contact with Nelson Mandela, and he’s on the terrorist list for 20-some years. That’s sponsored by the U.S. government. So that is part of the criminalizing of dissent. And we always know, in the middle of these kinds of cultural and political and outright military wars, truth is always the first casualty.
AMY GOODMAN: We have been covering a case that happened on November 19th. This whole country knows about Trayvon Martin, not because in Florida they decided to prosecute the shooter, George Zimmerman, but because, first, people rose up all over the country.
TAVIS SMILEY: That’s right.
CORNEL WEST: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: And although the special prosecutor, when she said, you know, "This is not because of outcry; this is because we’ve looked at the facts" — that’s clearly the case, they looked at the facts, but what got it into the hands and the purview of a special prosecutor, what it takes in this country—Juan and I have been looking at this case of a man named Kenneth Chamberlain in White Plains, New York, not far from here, lived in a public housing project, 68 years old. He was a corrections guard, before that a Marine. He was also a heart patient, and he wore a medical alert pendant. He rolled over on it, apparently, or something triggered it at 5:00 in the morning on November 19th. It alerted the life alert company. They couldn’t reach him on the little box in the dining room that, you know, speaks to the person who’s in the room, so they called police, said, "Not a criminal issue. It’s a medical emergency. Get over there." They got over there. They started slamming on the door, and then they really started slamming. Yes, Chamberlain got up. He said, "I’m OK. I’m OK." Life alert company called the police, said, "Hey, cancel the call. He’s OK. We are talking to him." He’s telling the police, "I’m OK. I’m OK." He’s saying "Semper fi, Semper fi, I’m OK." They take the door off its hinges. They take a taser gun, and you see the video of the taser gun that the DA now has, and it shows him in his boxer shorts, according to his lawyers and his son. And they tase him. But that was not enough. They then shot him dead, this heart patient. Within an hour, this happened. And this is a case that’s now before a grand jury in White Plains. It hasn’t got as much—
JUAN GONZALEZ: It happened in November.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, and it finally got to the grand jury many months later. It’s not clear what will happen. Juan, reporting for the New York Daily News, found the name of the police officer who shot him dead, Anthony Carelli.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Who also happened to have already a federal case against him for beating up two Muslim brothers in another arrest case, and he’s about to go to trial on that case.
CORNEL WEST: Wow.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And meanwhile, he’s the one who shot—
AMY GOODMAN: And this was very embarrassing to the police, when Juan found the name of the police officer, because it just so happens, on April 23rd, they have sued him. He was calling them "rag head." We have pictures of their faces beaten. This is the same officer who shoots him dead. And you hear on the tape—by the way, LifeAid was recording everything in the room, because that’s what they do, because they’ve got a patient on their hands.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But again, it was only the public uproar—once the family was able to see the tapes, the public uproar that developed afterwards, that even, you know, got to the point now where a grand jury is sitting hearing the evidence, but no guarantee of what’s going to happen.
CORNEL WEST: But also, it’s the crucial role of the courageous investigation that the three of you represent. We’ve got three of the most progressive journalists willing to tell the truth, and then allows the information to come to light, then the public outrage. Then the status quo has to respond in some way. And you hope then that rule of law will not be arbitrary, but actually be fair.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Trayvon Martin and what this case signifies?
TAVIS SMILEY: The case you’re referencing now, though, let me just say that—and I’ve been thinking a lot about this over the last few months, of course—I’m always looking for that proverbial, you know, silver lining inside the dark cloud. And I hope that the Trayvon Martin case, the case that you’ve just referenced now, Occupy movement, reminds the American people that we do have agency, that we do have access and the opportunity to raise our voices, to exercise our right to vote, to take to the streets. And we’re in a moment, as Doc says all the time—and we, again, talk about this in the book—that this really is a moment of fightback. We are in a moment of fightback in this country. And that’s why we said earlier in this conversation that we are on the precipice of losing our democracy. When you start seeing people’s civil liberties sacrificed in the way they are, being sacrificed, to your point earlier, Amy, when you see this kind of dissent, when you see poverty run amok, and half of us are in or near poverty—this democracy is very fragile. It’s very fragile. Doc says all the time, we’ve grown older, and we have grown wiser, but we’ve not grown up, after all the years of being in this democracy.
And so, I hope that this moment at least underscores and reminds us that we do have a role to play here, that we do have to raise our voices, again, that we do some agency here. My read of history suggests to me that there’s no empire in the history of the world that at some point did not falter or fail. And for whatever reason, call it American exceptionalism, we don’t even want to think about the fact that we, as a nation, as a democracy, could be right at the edge, could be on the precipice of something very dangerous. But all these examples that we’re talking about right now and the wonderful work that you do here on The War and Peace Report, on Democracy Now!, underscores that our democracy is very, very fragile. And the Trayvon Martin case is just another example. Twenty years after the Rodney King riots in L.A.—I live in L.A., as you know. We’re on that anniversary now. Twenty years ago, our city burned, because we couldn’t get justice with those officers in the Rodney King beating. And we learned from that, apparently. We learned nothing from O.J. And God knows what and if we’ll learn anything from Trayvon Martin. But this democracy is in trouble. And those of us of conscience have got to start—got to start speaking up.
AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Ted Nugent, Romney supporter, NRA activist—this weekend, the Secret Service is investigating him for making potentially threatening comments about President Obama at this recent NRA meeting.
TED NUGENT: If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. You’re—why are you laughing? You think that’s funny? That’s not funny at all! I’m serious as a heart attack. Isn’t the enemy that ruined America, it’s good people who bent over and let the enemy in. If the coyotes in your living room [expletive] on your couch, it’s not the coyotes’ fault; it’s your fault for not shooting him. So, it’s an important time. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Am I—any questions?
AMY GOODMAN: That is NRA activist, Mitt Romney supporter, Ted Nugent. Professor Cornel West?
CORNEL WEST: Well, I mean, you know, he’s just—he’s a right-wing crusader, full of a lot of hate, full of a lot of venom, a lot of vitriol. I think even back to Trayvon Martin. We look at the parents, Sister Sybrina, Brother Tracy, dignity. In the face of hatred, love and justice. Nugent, full of a lot of hate. It’s cowardly. It’s spiritually immature. It’s morally backward. It reflects his own insecurity. And yet, that’s very much part what we’re up against.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Professor Cornel West and Tavis Smiley—
CORNEL WEST: Thank you. We salute both of you, salute both of you.
AMY GOODMAN: —have written a book together for the first time, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. Thanks so much.
TAVIS SMILEY: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: I know you are busily going on your tour, so thanks so much for stopping by. TAVIS SMILEY: Our pleasure.
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