Public Employee Press

Book review
They didn't profit but they pay the price

The national dialog is focused on the decline of what is called the "middle class," but this framework hides the growing numbers and deteriorating conditions of those who are already poor.

High unemployment persists, with more workers losing unemployment benefits and new jobs increasingly paying poverty wages. The U.S. Census Bureau tells us that that 15 percent of Americans (46 million people) are living below the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of 4). But the rise of poverty receives little mention by politicians or the mainstream media.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have given us "The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto," a book that could move masses of people and political leaders to confront our nation's systemic poverty, just as socialist Michael Harrington's "The Other America" did in the 1960s.

They point out that there are nearly 150 million poor and nearly poor Americans. They were not responsible for the damage done by the Great Recession, yet they are paying the price. They didn't shut down American industry and send jobs abroad. They didn't live in luxury on the take from corporate profiteering and greed, they didn't profit from over a decade of foreign wars and tax giveaways to the wealthy, but they were the victims as the housing and jobs crises created by Wall Street fostered poverty that now crosses race, age and gender lines at a level unseen in generations.

West and Smiley place eradicating poverty in the context of the nation's greatest social transformations - abolishing slavery, women's suffrage, and the labor and civil rights movements - as the defining civil rights struggle of America's 21st century.

Building on the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., they challenge us to confront our fear and complacency, re-examine our assumptions about poverty in America and work to end it by redistributing the wealth and changing the social system that thrives on inequality.

—Ken Nash,
Librarian,
DC 37 Education Fund