Monday, December 23, 2019

Poor People Are Not "Cases"

But that doesn't stop the New York Times from archaically referring to them as such, as evidenced by its 108th annual holiday charity campaign still known as the Neediest Cases Fund.

Until the 1970s, the initiative was called The Hundred Neediest Cases, with all the stories of individual heartbreak and hard luck dumped into one special edition of the newspaper in a feast of what can only be called poverty porn. In subsequent years,  in an effort to be more respectful to the needy in light of the rising political right wing's demonization of the poor and welfare programs, the charity drive began spreading out its articles from November through January every year. And rather than administering the fund itself, the Times began farming out the selection process to various religious and secular social service agencies in the city.

Despite a surface attempt at enlightened sensitivity, the paper still refers to recipients as "cases" rather than as human beings. This term connotes both pathology and criminality, as in a case of tuberculosis or a court case - or at best, equates a human being with an academic exercise.

Attitudes toward the poor have not, in fact, changed, Here's what the great muckraker Upton Sinclair had to say about the Times's Neediest Cases a hundred years ago, during our previous Gilded Age of obscene wealth inequality:
The Times never goes into the question about the social system which produces these harrowing cases, nor does it allow anyone else to go into this question: what it does is to present a hundred victims of the system with enough money to preserve them until the following December, so that they may again enter into competition for mention in the list, and have their miseries exploited by the Times.
Of course, recipients of the fund did not and still do not receive anywhere near what they need to sustain themselves for another year. They don't receive any direct cash aid at all, in fact.  Upton Sinclair certainly didn't foresee the Neoliberal Project and philanthrocapitalism and tax dodges and corporate branding factoring in to the Neediest Cases fund the way they insidiously factor in to the newspaper's initiative today. Although individual and corporate donors are no longer listed by name, they very much remain integral characters in the newspaper's flashy profiles of its "needy cases."

For example, a piece ostensibly about a struggling single mother with three teenage daughters morphs into a plug for corporate giant Procter and Gamble's "End Period Poverty" program of donating pads and tampons to a measly 20 food banks in the United States. Another story , about the Jazzy Jumpers, a double dutch jump-roping team based in a Brooklyn housing project, points out that these deserving youths have appeared in TV commercials for Google and Madewell. The team was awarded $32,000 to pay for uniforms, coaching and tour expenses.

One common theme in the neoliberally-defined poverty industry is getting people off minimum wage jobs and food stamps - if not out of unhealthy overcrowded extended family living situations - into subsidized internships and STEM programs of study. One young woman received a $300 grant from the Neediest fund to "dress for success" while she networks. in hopes of one day landing a job in cybersecurity at the NSA. Her onerous $3,000 student debt from a year of community college, however, is still on her.

Other stories chronicle the Neediest Cases who have made it their life's work to "give back" to the same programs that once helped them. A mother of a child with autism was given a low-wage teaching assistant job at the preschool while she still shares a two-bedroom apartment with her daughter, her sister, her parents and two nephews. The Neediest Cases fund thus gave her a $200 Visa (plug!) gift card with which to buy her child sneakers and boots. Priceless! In exchange for this reward, the mom and child posed rather awkwardly for several stylized color New York Times photos.

In another heart-rending "case" described by the Times, there's a grandfather with kidney failure and heart trouble, a mom with high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes, and a bullied learning-disabled daughter all living in a rat-infested apartment with no working bathroom sink. However, since enrolling in a mentoring program and getting a $550 laptop computer from one of the paper's outsourced social service agencies, this lucky winner proclaims herself grateful for the opportunity to browse on the Internet in search of other opportunities.

As the Times's Neediest Cases drive goes into its third month, readers have donated a little over $3 million for struggling people living in the Income Disparity Capital of the country. This isn't very much at all, considering that there are now 112 billionaires living in New York City, up from 109 a year ago. One out of every seven billionaires calls the Big Apple home.

Nothing much has changed in the century since Upton Sinclair wrote his critique of the Neediest Cases initiative. On the same Sunday in 1919 that featured the hundred people in need of help, he noticed another article:
Young Mr. Vincent Astor was erecting his country estate at a cost of one million dollars. This building was for the use of Astor and his friends; it had no place for the public. It was devoted to tennis and swimming and gymnastics; it had no place for literature. music, art, science, or religion - it was a typical product of the private property regime. 
Astor, of course, would be a multibillionaire today and his estate would have risen in value to the hundreds of millions. The difference is that today's oligarchs have much more of a direct influence on politics than they did in the first age of the Robber Barons.

Juxtaposed with the Times's self-congratulatory, feel-good, lushly illustrated Neediest Cases series in 2019 is the saga of billionaire Democratic donor Craig Hill,trapped in his Swarovski crystal-infested wine cave in Napa Valley, California. He is incensed that he has been singled out by Elizabeth Warren as one of the corrupt political system's Greediest Cases -  just because he gave a lavish fundraiser for wealth-serving centrist presidential contender Pete Buttigieg. 

This poor mogul must feel every bit as exploited as the Times's "cases."

"I'm just a pawn here," he groused to the Times, which noted that he has given more than $2 million to such needy candidates as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. That's about two-thirds the amount raised thus far this season by the Times Neediest Cases drive. 

Something tells me that our priorities are as seriously screwed up as they ever were in the Land of the Free Market.

6 comments:

Jay–Ottawa said...


The account of how the NYT handles its needy cases follows to the 'T' the age-old activist parable.

Once upon a time a riverbank village began to notice bodies floating downstream. Natives paddled out to retrieve the bodies and bury them with respect. The bodies continued to come. Finally, a party was sent upstream to find out what the hell was going on. Presumably, they found the cause and did what they could to correct it.

Annually, the NYT retrieves 100 people from the midstream of poor housing, joblessness, inadequate schooling or bad health and the like needing help . That's nice. I had always assumed The Times gave these lucky few a big boost. Now I know that ain't so. The NYT refers the stricken to sneaker companies or gifts them with some other limited service.

Gray Dame Bounty then cuts them loose and they float right back to the midstream of the system where they suffer the usual want. As Sinclair Lewis and Karen point out, the Times––and no doubt many other "charities"––treat root problems like third rails. Anything but attack the root causes. Seems like much of the time it's the establishment itself that maintains the unending body count with sharply limited housing, jobs, education, healthcare....

The best shot we've got at lasting domestic economic correctives this election cycle is a free-for-all where the best player is Bernie the Meek.

But why be a downer and lay a guilt trip on the Times and the institutions it fronts for––or our affable revolutionaries––during this lovely time of year?

Erik Roth said...


“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
~ Arundhati Roy, "War Talk"


Jay–Ottawa said...


Roy is on the right track for sure. Boycott corporations to death, death by a million pin pricks. A chant taken from way-left unions by the cocktail party crowd was "Smash de bosses." Ought to be easy if you have the numbers. Was that for laughs or for real?

The crash of empire, when it happens, will be the cause of widespread suffering and confusion at home, inside the empire. The poodle nations that followed Uncle Sam won't fare much better. Supply networks we depend on will shut down. We'll so much miss the torn safety nets when hospitals are boarded up and social security goes missing. Millions will descend into hardship zones for the first time; others will simply sink deeper. All ages will be vulnerable. And what of crime statistics? The cops and military will use as much ammunition as necessary. The billionaires of New York will fly off like crows from a tree.

It's going to happen soon if you pay attention to the pessimists with charts in their hands. And it's got to happen for the sake of humanity as soon as possible. Bring it on, Roy. But I don't look forward to Americans, myself included, suddenly having to adapt to the same precarity as people in lands long insolvent.

Anonymous said...

For a bit more on Hill and how this billionaire has taken advantage of political influence, see: https://theintercept.com/2019/12/23/wine-cave-buttigieg-warren/

Posting anonymously, but not a bot . . . Honest, I live in Wyoming :)

The Joker said...

The 1% will do their best to prevent any popular uprising -- as they have throughout history. The difference now is that various more powerful structures and techniques to prevent and manage rebellion are in place not just in the outright tyrannies but even in many ostensibly democratic nations: highly "managed" news; boundless popular entertainment and diversion -- "circuses" that would make the Romans of antiquity envious; widespread surveillance, geolocation tracking, and associates linking via databases; secure enclaves for both homes and business of the well-to-do. And if those various structures fail, plenty of well-armed police, and a new willingness to use use the military domestically. So they expect to indeed be sufficiently insulated from the deprivation/rebellion/chaos that'll affect most of the populace.

Finally, if those measures fail to hold the line, they've long had their private airplanes capable of trans-ocean travel to whisk them away. And more recently, they've begun to plan a more stealthy escape, under the waves:

The luxury yacht that turns into a submarine:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/luxury-yacht-submarine-carapace/index.html

gregory said...

In The Czech Republic where the president is a plutocrat, shoppers with smartphones can get an app which will read barcodes and tell them if he owns the company. They can then avoid buying it. Is there something like that here in the US for the Koch plutocrats?