The Katrina Victims from New Orleans--IBD Op-ED - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

AVoiceOfReason · 10-01-2005, 06:20 AM

This from the Investor's Business Daily Op Ed Page of Sept 30, 2005. Anyone see a problem with the facts or disagree with the conclusions? I didn't.

___________________________
Un-Married With Children

Poverty: Post-Katrina critics constantly remind us that those who remained in New Orleans were largely black and poor. What they don’t tell us is that they were largely women and children.

Never mind that had Katrina roared through Appalachia, those stranded would have been largely white and poor. Race and poverty have been inextricably linked in the media and the Democratic caucus with the less-thanstellar post-Katrina effort.

Yet poverty is not a function of race, but of class. Common traits exist among the nonpoor — most are married and most got a good education. This is true regardless of race, and if those left behind in the Big Easy were largely poor and black, it is not because we haven’t thrown enough money at the problem. It may be because we have thrown too much.

More than $7 trillion has been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Poverty” four decades ago. The Washington Post reported recently that the federal government has more than 80 poverty-related programs on which it spends about $500 billion annually.

Critics of the war in Iraq are legion, but critics of the war on poverty are hard to find. On which war has our money been more effectively spent? Have we really fought poverty or merely subsidized it?

In 1960, before the war on poverty was declared, only 28% of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were never married, and the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 22%. Today, the never-married percentage has doubled to 56% and the illegitimacy rate has soared to around 70%.

Is this the result of racism and the legacy of slavery? No. What happened is that the war on poverty essentially destroyed the black family by replacing the adult male as the father figure and main provider in the family and then rewarding illegitimacy with a bigger check. If racism and discrimination were to vanish tomorrow, poverty would persist in direct proportion to the number of broken or single-parent families in our society. Of Americans of all races, only 6.4% of those living in married-couple families were below the poverty level in 2004, according to Census Bureau data. Among whites, only 6% of Americans in two-parent married households lived in poverty. Among blacks the figure was 6.9%. Among whites, 52% of children under the age of 5 in fatherless households were in poverty. Among blacks it was 58.1%. In the post-Katrina discussions, little attention was paid to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics that in 2003, 34.6% of all American births were to unmarried women, with the percentage among African-American women at 68.2%.

For Louisiana African-Americans the illegitimacy rate was 76%, and in inner-city New Orleans the figure was no doubt higher.

In a policy brief released by the Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, an examination of 23 studies dealing with family structure and crime found the obvious — that neighborhoods with a high rate of illegitimacy have a high rate of crime, something that might help explain the post-Katrina looting.

With a lower rate of intact nuclear families, and a higher rate of illegitimacy, it should be no surprise that only 30% to 40% of black males graduate from high school, and that if they do, they emerge with the reading and math skills of a white seventh- or eighth-grader, regardless of per-pupil expenditures.

Remove the growing social, judicial and governmental stigma against heterosexual marriage and give minorities the means to escape failing schools.

That would be a recovery effort that makes sense.
_____________________________

flstf · 10-01-2005, 08:47 AM

The statistic that stands out to me is the over 50% of children under the age of 5 in fatherless households living in poverty. It makes one wonder, where the hell are the fathers and why aren't they supporting their offspring?

The poverty rate will not go down as long as young men/boys and young women/girls continue to procreate with no means or intention of supporting their children. I find it hard to believe that the "War on Poverty" is the only reason for this. The fact that society today accepts this behaviour as normal has something to do with it.

I recall watching a Bill Moyer's (I think) special on PBS a few years ago where he interviewed teenaged boys and girls who had babies and questioned them as to why. Many of the boys bragged that it made them feel more like a man to impregnate multiple girls and many of the girls said that they just wanted someone (the baby) in this world who would love them unconditionally. The surprising part to me was that most of the girls interviewed were trying to get pregnant and did not consider marriage or abortion.

host · 10-01-2005, 09:39 AM

[QUOTE=AVoiceOfReason]This from the Investor's Business Daily Op Ed Page of Sept 30, 2005. Anyone see a problem with the facts or disagree with the conclusions? I didn't.

___________________________
I do.......

Quote:

http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekl...e.pl?20050919x

..........Reality check.

As I wrote in my New York Times letter to the editor regarding Kristof's article, the Left, particularly feminists, have been struggling for decades to ensure that women- including poor women-have everything they need to manage their sexuality without judgment. That includes family planning services, birth control, over-the-counter emergency contraception, early pregnancy termination and accurate sex education, as well as the schooling and job training that will enable them to find hope, value and respect in other ways besides childbearing.

It is the Right-the Republicans and this administration-that have been blocking these efforts at every turn, hiding behind a sanctimonious pro-life banner, refusing to accept their own culpability in all of these "out-of-wedlock" births.

More reality. What all women need to flourish, to be productive and responsible, is self-esteem and self-respect. Both are intimately connected to the way women feel about their sexuality.

Unfortunately, our culture deals with that sexuality schizophrenically. On one hand it encourages women and girls to be wildly sexual, as in all those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, a message that pervades our music, advertising, fashion, movies and television programs.

On the other hand, our culture unconscionably withholds from women the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies, from accurate information about condoms, to over-the-counter access to Plan B or even being able to get birth control pills at the local pharmacy.

The message is clear: Being sexy makes you powerful; having babies makes you good. Choosing to have sex but not have babies makes you very, very bad. It's an old song in a new tempo.

The notion that women who have children out of wedlock are the cause of their own poverty and therefore undeserving of empathy, sympathy or help is just one more American myth. It ensures that such women wind up in the bin with all those other non-deserving poor.

Our social welfare system has long been based on separating the deserving from the non-deserving. Social Security and Medicare are for the deserving. Those benefits are easy to get and you're not stigmatized for getting them. Welfare and Medicaid are for the non-deserving. They're hard to get and carry a deep stigma.

In this way, the rich elderly are separated from the poor elderly. The wealthy disabled are separated from the disabled with little money. The acceptable widows and orphans are separated from the never-married and their "illegitimate" offspring.

Until Katrina. Like a raging goddess, she has come in and scrambled the mix, erased the caste lines. We cannot tell, as our hearts break, who among the streams of suffering humanity before us are deserving, and who, the undeserving.

We see thousands going hungry, and we want them fed; thirsty, and we want them to have water. Those without housing we want sheltered. Those who are unsafe we want protected. Those without means, we want to have opportunity. Those without health insurance we want to receive care.

All this is bad news for the president, the slashers of social programs and those who blame women and the poor for their own poverty. Certainly, there are poor women who have children they can't care for. But we have a culture where women are badgered into believing their ultimate value lies in their willingness to reproduce. Or, in their willingness to be utterly and totally sexualized.

After all this time, we still need to learn to value women for who they are. To help women to realize that value, to find routes to self-esteem besides reproduction. Women need to be able to be sexual on their own terms, even to discover what those terms are. And they need freedom from judgment for being sexual, but choosing not to be mothers just yet.

All this will require dramatic changes in men, too-of all classes, races and cultural traditions-in the way they view women and in the seriousness with which they treat protecting a woman from an unwanted pregnancy. But even all that will not solve our basic problem: inequity and its consequences.

That problem requires a different kind of "grand bargain," a meeting of the Left and Right at the Mississippi Delta where we've seen with stark clarity what it means to be human in what we've witnessed and what we've felt.

It raises portentous questions: Why do the poor deserve all of this support after a natural disaster, but not in the normal, struggling course of their lives? What is a nation's responsibility to its people?

Along with the landscape, Katrina has shattered the mantle of our benign neglect, forcing us, literally, to rethink America.

Angela Bonavoglia, MSW, is a New York-based freelance journalist and the author of "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church" (Harper-Collins/ReganBooks, 2005) and "The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion" (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).

With double the average national per capita incarceration rate, (the nation's highest), there may be a few families where the "bread winner" has been removed from a financial support role under circumstances that are not the norm in other states.(The following is published on Louisiana's state website )

Quote:

http://www.dhh.state.la.us/medialibrary.asp?Detail=206

........Why the continued poor performance for the Bayou State? It's how the numbers -- regularly referenced, statistically legitimate, officially collected numbers -- stack up. On 10 of the 44 indicators considered for the rankings, Louisiana's performance is among the nation's four worst.

That includes things like median household income, percentage of population not covered by health insurance, low birth weight babies as a percentage of total births, and percentage of population that has graduated from high school. The state's most favorable ranking comes in the category of warmest daily mean temperature -- fourth behind Hawaii, Arizona and Florida. And by August that won't seem like a good thing after all.

In some categories, Louisiana's performance is the worst in the nation. It has the country's highest infant mortality rate -- more than double that of the overall "most livable" state, New Hampshire. Louisiana also has the highest percentage of its population receiving food stamps. At 16.4 percent that's approaching twice the national average.

One of the most startling rankings highlighted by Morgan Quitno is Louisiana's distinction as the state with the highest state prisoner incarceration rate -- nearly double the national average -- and this without the accompanying nation-leading crime rate. The national incarceration rate is 430 state prisoners per 100,000 people. But Louisiana's rate is 801 per 100,000. This raises serious questions about crime and punishment in Louisiana, issues which get too little attention in public policy discussions and media coverage and which certainly can't be separated from the state's troubled indigent defense system and growing record of overturned capital cases.

The bottom line is that while Louisiana leadership deems construction of reservoirs, hotels, and sugar mills responsible use of taxpayer money, the state remains deeply troubled in both relative and absolute terms. Increased opportunities to fish, to house phantom conventioneers and to process the product of an already struggling industry aren't likely to improve Louisiana's performance on the things that really matter.

Emily Metzgar is a free-lance writer who lives in Shreveport. Write her in care of The Times, P.O. Box 30222, Shreveport, LA 71130-0222. E-mail to shreveportopinion@gannett.com

The IBD article offers a one sided, simplistic assessment that is riddled with undertones of racial prejudice, conservatist moralisms, and sexism. NOLA does not exist in a vacuum, social and economic strata there are the result of many factors out of the control of it's poorest residents.

Manhattan, for example, has the largest per capita population of single households, along with one of the highest per capita income levels.

NOLA is infamous, in the past, for having a corrupt police force. New Hampshire has a one percent black population, yet half or it's state prisoners are black. Out of wedlock births to white mothers has also sky rocketed in the same time frame that it has for blacks.

Access to competent legal aid by the poor in NOLA is lacking, compared to what is available in other US metro areas. The high infant mortality rate suggests that health services are also below par.
Louisiana ranks among the ten states with lowest per capita annual income:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652.html

Could the following, zealous effort to restrict low income NOLA women from access to publicly subsidized abortion, be a mitigating factor ?

Quote:

http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=17559
.......Louisiana received high marks because in 2003 the state legislature appropriated $1.5 million in federal funds for services related to abortion alternatives for needy families. Also in Louisiana, a physician may not perform an abortion until at least 24 hours after a woman has been provided with information about the proposed procedure, the alternatives to abortion, the probable gestational age of the unborn child, the risks associated with abortion, and more.

Taxpayers in Louisiana are not required to fund abortions except when the procedure is necessary to preserve the woman's health or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. Additionally, Louisiana is one of only 12 states that define nonfatal assaults on an unborn child as a crime, the report card said.

Vermont received low marks because the Vermont constitution has been construed to provide a broader right to abortion than the U.S. Constitution. Vermont does not provide even rudimentary protection for women considering abortions, the report said, and the state does not have an informed consent law, parental involvement law for minors seeking abortions, abortion clinic regulations, ultrasound requirements or a prohibition on anyone other than a physician performing an abortion.

Taxpayers in Vermont fund most abortions for women receiving public assistance, and Vermont is one of only four states with no protection for the rights of conscience of healthcare workers. ...........

Sweden is a place with none of the obsession with abstinance and moralism and restriction of women's reproductive rights. STDS and abortion rates are much lower in Sweden than in the US. They have policies that promote the exact opposite of those forced on states like Louisiana by conservative christian politics, and the enjoy an opposite, and enviable result. Safe sex, low abortion rates, non-judgmental and healthier attitudes about sex.

This is not a simple problem. It is a national disgrace and conservatism sermonizing in a right wing financial publication does not provide a satisfactory or a fair explanation to inequality of wealth in America.

Ustwo · 10-01-2005, 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flstf

The statistic that stands out to me is the over 50% of children under the age of 5 in fatherless households living in poverty. It makes one wonder, where the hell are the fathers and why aren't they supporting their offspring?

The poverty rate will not go down as long as young men/boys and young women/girls continue to procreate with no means or intention of supporting their children. I find it hard to believe that the "War on Poverty" is the only reason for this. The fact that society today accepts this behaviour as normal has something to do with it.

I recall watching a Bill Moyer's (I think) special on PBS a few years ago where he interviewed teenaged boys and girls who had babies and questioned them as to why. Many of the boys bragged that it made them feel more like a man to impregnate multiple girls and many of the girls said that they just wanted someone (the baby) in this world who would love them unconditionally. The surprising part to me was that most of the girls interviewed were trying to get pregnant and did not consider marriage or abortion.

Maybe if we tax payers quit subsidizing this behavior, it wouldn't be such an issue.

flstf · 10-01-2005, 10:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

This is not a simple problem. It is a national disgrace and conservatism sermonizing in a right wing financial publication does not provide a satisfactory or a fair explanation to inequality of wealth in America.

The articles you reference have many good points. I think the following has a lot to do with the problem:

Quote:

After all this time, we still need to learn to value women for who they are. To help women to realize that value, to find routes to self-esteem besides reproduction. Women need to be able to be sexual on their own terms, even to discover what those terms are. And they need freedom from judgment for being sexual, but choosing not to be mothers just yet.

As long as young women and men continue to want to have babies with no way to support them the problem will continue. Access to abortion and birth control will have little effect if they want to reproduce. Somehow society has to try to convince/enable them to feel self-esteem and that having babies is not in their best interest.

What is it that makes young men/boys want to impregnate young women/girls when they have no intention of supporting their babies? What is it that makes young women/girls want to give birth under these circumstances?

Ustwo · 10-01-2005, 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

Sweden is a place with none of the obsession with abstinance and moralism and restriction of women's reproductive rights. STDS and abortion rates are much lower in Sweden than in the US. They have policies that promote the exact opposite of those forced on states like Louisiana by conservative christian politics, and the enjoy an opposite, and enviable result. Safe sex, low abortion rates, non-judgmental and healthier attitudes about sex.

This is not a simple problem. It is a national disgrace and conservatism sermonizing in a right wing financial publication does not provide a satisfactory or a fair explanation to inequality of wealth in America.

Ever wonder what happens to those figures when you take out the uneducated vote plantations created by liberals (you started the conservative name calling crap)?

White America does just fine. As a while male in chicago my chance of being murdered is lower than a white male in many major europan cities. Something BAD happened to black culture in the 70's which is when this war on poverty took off. Who wants to bet it has nothing to do with healthy attitudes about sex?

Seaver · 10-01-2005, 01:46 PM

Quote:

Something BAD happened to black culture in the 70's which is when this war on poverty took off.

I'm not blaming the war on poverty, it had many good benefits (one being my parents got a college education). What happened, in my opinion, is people stopped blaming people for their predicament, but blaming whitey.

Having an excuse for not going first to college, then to school in general, education plummeted. At the same time the multitude of militaristic movements (black panthers) took off, is when the statistics show unwed pregnancies and children skyrocketted. This blaming others for peoples own mistakes and bad judgements only grew to the problem it is now. Want an interesting perspective? Look up what Bill Cosbey said and how these same people (who blame the right for everything) 180'd on Bill and austricized him for goign against the "whitey's to blame" mentality that has not stopped.

Marvelous Marv · 10-01-2005, 05:58 PM

Never mind.

10-01-2005, 06:20 AM	#1 (permalink)
AVoiceOfReason Psycho Location: Greenwood, Arkansas	The Katrina Victims from New Orleans--IBD Op-ED This from the Investor's Business Daily Op Ed Page of Sept 30, 2005. Anyone see a problem with the facts or disagree with the conclusions? I didn't. ___________________________ Un-Married With Children Poverty: Post-Katrina critics constantly remind us that those who remained in New Orleans were largely black and poor. What they don’t tell us is that they were largely women and children. Never mind that had Katrina roared through Appalachia, those stranded would have been largely white and poor. Race and poverty have been inextricably linked in the media and the Democratic caucus with the less-thanstellar post-Katrina effort. Yet poverty is not a function of race, but of class. Common traits exist among the nonpoor — most are married and most got a good education. This is true regardless of race, and if those left behind in the Big Easy were largely poor and black, it is not because we haven’t thrown enough money at the problem. It may be because we have thrown too much. More than $7 trillion has been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Poverty” four decades ago. The Washington Post reported recently that the federal government has more than 80 poverty-related programs on which it spends about $500 billion annually. Critics of the war in Iraq are legion, but critics of the war on poverty are hard to find. On which war has our money been more effectively spent? Have we really fought poverty or merely subsidized it? In 1960, before the war on poverty was declared, only 28% of black females between the ages of 15 and 44 were never married, and the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 22%. Today, the never-married percentage has doubled to 56% and the illegitimacy rate has soared to around 70%. Is this the result of racism and the legacy of slavery? No. What happened is that the war on poverty essentially destroyed the black family by replacing the adult male as the father figure and main provider in the family and then rewarding illegitimacy with a bigger check. If racism and discrimination were to vanish tomorrow, poverty would persist in direct proportion to the number of broken or single-parent families in our society. Of Americans of all races, only 6.4% of those living in married-couple families were below the poverty level in 2004, according to Census Bureau data. Among whites, only 6% of Americans in two-parent married households lived in poverty. Among blacks the figure was 6.9%. Among whites, 52% of children under the age of 5 in fatherless households were in poverty. Among blacks it was 58.1%. In the post-Katrina discussions, little attention was paid to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics that in 2003, 34.6% of all American births were to unmarried women, with the percentage among African-American women at 68.2%. For Louisiana African-Americans the illegitimacy rate was 76%, and in inner-city New Orleans the figure was no doubt higher. In a policy brief released by the Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, an examination of 23 studies dealing with family structure and crime found the obvious — that neighborhoods with a high rate of illegitimacy have a high rate of crime, something that might help explain the post-Katrina looting. With a lower rate of intact nuclear families, and a higher rate of illegitimacy, it should be no surprise that only 30% to 40% of black males graduate from high school, and that if they do, they emerge with the reading and math skills of a white seventh- or eighth-grader, regardless of per-pupil expenditures. Remove the growing social, judicial and governmental stigma against heterosexual marriage and give minorities the means to escape failing schools. That would be a recovery effort that makes sense. _____________________________ __________________ AVOR A Voice Of Reason, not necessarily the ONLY one.

10-01-2005, 05:58 PM	#8 (permalink)
Marvelous Marv Cunning Runt Location: Taking a mulligan	Never mind. __________________ "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Margaret Thatcher Last edited by Marvelous Marv; 10-01-2005 at 06:02 PM..

10-01-2005, 08:47 AM	#2 (permalink)
flstf Easy Rider Location: Moscow on the Ohio	The statistic that stands out to me is the over 50% of children under the age of 5 in fatherless households living in poverty. It makes one wonder, where the hell are the fathers and why aren't they supporting their offspring? The poverty rate will not go down as long as young men/boys and young women/girls continue to procreate with no means or intention of supporting their children. I find it hard to believe that the "War on Poverty" is the only reason for this. The fact that society today accepts this behaviour as normal has something to do with it. I recall watching a Bill Moyer's (I think) special on PBS a few years ago where he interviewed teenaged boys and girls who had babies and questioned them as to why. Many of the boys bragged that it made them feel more like a man to impregnate multiple girls and many of the girls said that they just wanted someone (the baby) in this world who would love them unconditionally. The surprising part to me was that most of the girls interviewed were trying to get pregnant and did not consider marriage or abortion.