#322 – Terri Ashmore: "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide"

/in , , /by

Terri Ashmore recently wrote the below column for the Basilica of St. Mary (Minneapolis MN) Church Bulletin.
A discussion of this book will be held at the Basilica on Sunday, January 30, at 1 p.m. in the Mother Teresa Hall. Panelists include experts from the Humphrey Institute, Human Rights Watch, and Advocates for Human Rights. It promises to be a rich conversation about an important book on an important issue.
Terri Ashmore
Do you like to read? “Seattle Reads” was an experiment tried in cities around the country. Seattle chose a book and encouraged everyone to read it. As we explore Global Stewardship, we’d like to challenge you to our own version of “The Basilica Reads.”
Our global team volunteers selected and read the book – “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” written by Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn, the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for their coverage of China as New York Times correspondents.
Once I started reading Half the Sky, I could hardly put it down, and I still can’t get some of the stories out of my mind. The title is from a Chinese proverb – “Women hold up half the sky.” The book jacket describes the authors as “our guides as we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there.”
Half the Sky is an easy read, because it is a book of stories. We meet Ann and Angeline, Saima and Roashaneh and many other women and girls. The authors share facts and figures, and go on to put names and faces together with the stories of women and girls impacted by incredible poverty, oppression and violence. They honestly describe successes and failures. I read the newspaper and watch the news, but really hadn’t absorbed the magnitude of the impacts of poverty and violence around the world until I read Half the Sky. The book doesn’t pull punches about the violence and despair, but what I walked away with was a sense of hope. Things can change. Remarkably, a microloan of $25 or even a $65 really can change the lives of women, their families and their communities. I learned about the difference a uniform can make for a girl to stay in school and how staying in school can positively change the entire course of a girl’s life. Simple things to us . . . but life changing in some parts of the world.
Please join the Global Stewardship Team asks to explore issues the difference microfinance and education can make in changing lives of women, girls and communities. Read Half the Sky, and if not the whole book, take a look at Chapter 10, Investing in Education, and Chapter 11, Microcredit – the Financial Revolution. If this captures your imagination, Chapter 14 offers some practical suggestions about what you can do.
In the busyness of everyday life, please take a moment to open you minds, open your hearts, and consider what our Catholic faith calls us to as we think about women and children around the world.
Half the Sky – Book Discussion with Expert Panel
1:00 pm, Sunday, Jan. 30th – Basilica’s Lower Level

#305 – Dick Bernard: "Happy New Year"?

/in , , , /by

Last night, New Years Eve, we had the final Christmas gathering of a few family members who’d missed the earlier get-together. When they left for home, the 2010 Christmas season was officially concluded, and New Years Eve was winding down to the New Year. I suppose it was about the stroke of midnight in Iceland, perhaps, when my day ended. Cathy was on the phone with a friend. That is how the season is for we older people.
Happy New Year.
One of the guests last night was a 46 year old. His 11 year old son was out of town with his former wife. This family member is unemployed with no prospects other than an hourly part-time job with no benefits which he now has. I would guess that in the statistics he counts as one of the 10% or so who are unemployed as this New Year begins since he qualifies for unemployment, and likely for the extension which passed in the cliff-hanger of last minute legislation in Congress. He is a worker, like most of us, identifying himself through his job. After a month or two unemployment last spring, until about Thanksgiving time he had a temporary full-time job with benefits, but one day he was let go for some unexplained reason. Reasons don’t need to be given, and besides there was no due process protection. I gathered the job was a very stressful one for him so perhaps in one sense it was a small loss.
Christmas Day my wife invited a lady friend, in her 50s, who’s unmarried and now unemployed for over a year, to attend Christmas Day Mass with us. She, too, will benefit from the unemployment extension. Through the friend we see the difficult realities of unemployment. She’s had a knee replacement so can’t do a job that requires long-term standing. She is too poor to afford or keep up an automobile, so any job she gets needs to be accessible by bus. She recently interviewed for a job which, if she had gotten it, would have required a bus trip with five transfers each way. Last Wednesday Cathy took her to a work force office which is not on any bus line, and a very expensive cab ride. She is actively looking for full time job.
Through these two folks, I see the reality of unemployment in this country. The male is obviously emotionally down – what should have been a festive occasion for him was not. He went home by himself last night. The female seems more at peace with her situation, though I know that she wants to work and she has a long history of doing good work. It is easy to say to both of them, “buck up, and keep on looking – good things will happen”. It is not quite so easy in their shoes.
Both want to work, but there are barriers.
It has occurred to me that this unemployment is a difficult issue for our country to gets its emotions around. If there is 10% unemployment, that means there is 90% employment, and most of the employed people are making more or less what they think is a fair wage and have some kinds of benefits. Similarly, retirees like we are generally are not poor; many are, in fact, very well off due to pensions, investments, and social security and medicare. Unemployment is not our problem, unless we happen to have it within our own family – as my wife and I do.
On the other hand, American big business is flush with wealth, profit obsessed, and a major news report earlier this week suggested that a major dent in the unemployment could have been made if that business had hired domestically in this country, rather than opting for cheaper job markets overseas. American business has little if any loyalty to its own countries citizens. In too many ways they are considered a cost to be controlled, rather than a benefit. The corporate ethic has loyalty only to the bottom line….
For business and the already wealthy, I think the “piper will be paid” down the road. It is the poor, and the increasingly stretched middle class, who produce, by buying goods and services, the profit margins lusted after by companies and the rich. The continuation of the tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans further increases the national deficit, and the extra money they retain is normally not part of the national income stream: it is saved, often in off-shore tax shelters, whereas the poor and the middle class keep the money in circulation.
It is not easy to convince the already well off that spreading the wealth is helpful to them, too.
They may have to learn the hard lesson, along with the rest of us.

#296 – Dick Bernard: the Metrodome vs the Blizzard (it lost)

/in , , , , /by

UPDATE JANUARY 13: Minneapolis Star Tribune front page article, etc.
Enroute to church this morning I passed within blocks, as always, the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. It usually stands out when viewed from Interstate 94, but today it was hard to pick it out: overnight the roof collapsed from the weight of the snow from yesterday’s blizzard. The absence of a roof made it hard to see.
At church, my fellow-usher friend commented that the Dome was just expressing its feelings, let-down that today’s game had been postponed. If so, it must now be downright depressed. The game has been moved to Detroit tomorrow night. That’ll show the Grand Dame of the Twin Cities.
I don’t know how the Dome is insured against such calamities. There are often clauses which in one way or another consider “acts of God”, of which weather is one of the obvious ones.
So, why did God pick on the Dome? (It’s a fair question, because people are constantly suggesting God’s intercession, a preference or disgust for this or that; that God’ll get you, or got you, because you weren’t listening.)
Perhaps, I thought, God was cutting Bret Favre some slack, allowing him one more day to heal so that his game-starting streak could remain intact. Maybe the intent was to lobby the Minnesota legislature: you folks need to give those Vikings new digs…or maybe it was the opposite “so, you want a new stadium without a roof. See what will happen?” (As I write, Chicago and New England are having a snowball fight in their game.)
Full disclosure: I have very little investment in professional sports, interest or otherwise. Till yesterday, when the Giants were stranded in Kansas City, unable to get to Minneapolis, I didn’t even realize there was a game here. Still, pro sports is a roost-ruler in this and many other markets.
Pro-sports is a big business, that is all that it is.
The Metrodome, unsightly and elderly as it is, has been a very functional place since its completion 28 years ago, in 1982. There is an interesting history of the structure here. It was completed on time, and under budget – something unheard of even then. I took a ten year old to a game early in the first season at the Dome. I recall the night vividly: there were four home runs in the first inning. What a start.
Now it is in tatters, till stitched back together.
Those with an interest in a new stadium – or not – are already talking about how to ‘spin’ this spectacular incident earlier today. Talking points are being developed ‘as we speak’.

#291 – Dick Bernard: Looking at ourselves through "rose-colored glasses"

/in , /by

My daily hangout for morning coffee is a very busy place, more or less the ‘crossroads’ for the commuting class in my community – a community which would be considered fairly prosperous and definitely middle class.
I am at my station during drive time every morning, next to the front door, so I can see the comings and goings for perhaps two hours every day. Often I’ll drop by in the afternoon for awhile as well. I’m just a creature of habit, I guess.
It occurs to me that, except for the panic days at the end of 2008, the normal clientele of the coffee shop has scarcely missed a beat. It is impossible to tell that there is major concern about unemployment or the like. Sure, a guy I used to see – a small builder who built higher-end homes one at a time – no longer shows up, and I heard he went bankrupt, but people still come through the doors, order their designer drinks, chat a bit, and are pleasantly on their way to wherever.
Life seems good, if viewed through the coffee shop “lens”.
In the same town, between the coffee shop and my house, is a homeowner I know well. He is, in fact, my son-in-law.
He was laid off last March from a corporate job, then was lucky enough to get a state job which, while was to last a year, at least provided some wages and benefits. Before Thanksgiving he was angling to refinance his house to get lower interest and thus lower payments, and things looked promising.
Tuesday before Thanksgiving he was laid off again – his work was not quite up to standards, and there’s plenty of people to replace him. Exactly what he didn’t do right, I don’t know, so I can’t judge. I don’t think he knows, either. His job was taking phone calls from unemployed people and redirecting them. Somebody who listened in (“this phone call may be monitored for quality assurance”) apparently was less than fully satisfied. He wasn’t fired, just let go.
There is no appeal process.
So, he’s back on layoff and unemployment again.
The refinance has now fallen through. He has no job, and thus is of no interest to the people who would have refinanced his house.
The homeowner is in the minority of us – they say roughly 10% are unemployed. The unemployed have no clout, but they are the soft underbelly of our economy and if the country goes down, their lack of work and thus lack of money to spend in this economy will be a big contributing factor.
There needs to be a better way.
***
After writing the previous words, we stopped at a newly opened Dollar store in our town (we are not a Dollar store kind of town – another story). While my wife shopped, I waited.
I overheard one lady ask a manager about jobs at the store – there was a Hiring sign posted outside.
The manager said, no openings. Corporate said no new hires. The woman walked away, sadly.
One of those little dramas repeated thousands and thousands of times each and every day.
Now, apparently, the rich will get the tax cuts they don’t need continued. Those same tax cuts didn’t help the economy earlier in this decade. Why should we expect differently now? But we, “the American people”, apparently don’t want to discriminate against the rich…. Best we clobber our own ‘kind’.

#274 – Dick Bernard: The State of the States, and the People Who Live in Them.

/in , , , , /by

Yesterday’s New York Times headline hit me when it showed up on my computer screen “Now in Power, G.O.P. vows cuts in State Budgets“.
Who can do anything but love trimming the fat of bloated, hated, “Government”?
It will be an interesting process as a new Minnesota G.O.P. majority in both House and Senate take meat axes to to try to eliminate a huge deficit created by assorted budget tricks the last several years of stalemate between the Democratic majority in House and Senate and G.O.P. Governor Tim Pawlenty. (Minnesota State Law requires balanced budgets, so to get around this little technicality, bookkeeping strategies, like ‘borrowing’ money from school aid to local school districts, were used in the brutal sausage making of legislating in a “veto” environment. Now, just in time for Christmas 2010, the bill comes due. Probably there will be a Democrat Governor in 2011, though when remains a question, as there will probably be a recount and a promised aggressive defense by the challenger G.O.P. The current Governor, G.O.P. and contender for Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, may well occupy the office well into the New Year, the new term.)
“Trimming fat” is an abstract thing, if one chooses not to notice the personal dimensions.
I have a personal example.
In the family constellation of my wife and I are eleven adults. The youngest is Down Syndrome, age 35, and thus not part of the work force. The other ten (including one former daughter-in-law) are all employable at the present time, and all working. So, technically, in our family there is full employment, and no unemployment.
One of the ten was laid off from a corporate job nine months ago, and went on unemployment.
He was only unemployed for a couple of months when he was offered a full-time State job for a maximum duration of a year. It paid far less than his former position, but it was a job and it had benefits, so he took the position.
What he does all day, every day, is receive and process phone calls from fellow Minnesotans who are unemployed. It is his job to redirect them to the appropriate agencies within the State of Minnesota system. The work is not fun. Neither is it in the specific trade he trained for.
Because the State job doesn’t provide adequate income, he works a part-time job, several nights a week.
Because he works during the day, he cannot do the requisite networking to find jobs in his area of expertise, and his expertise is rapidly going stale.
At the end of the twelve months, perhaps sooner if the meat ax reaches him, he will be unemployed again, struggling to find something, anything to survive.
Historically, getting a state job has been an entree into other State jobs. But that is a very unlikely scenario for this family member in this slash and burn time in our history.
There is an 11-year old boy in this scenario. Mom and Dad are divorced. Grandma does a great deal of heavy-lifting.
Oh, how easy to trim the fat of bloated government.
Oh, how easy….

#259 – Dick Bernard: "Capitalism saved the day in Chile"?

/in , , /by

Previous post on the rescue of the Chilean miners here.
Saturday’s Minneapolis-Star Tribune carried a column by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled “Capitalism saved the day in Chile”. The column is here, though WSJ rules say it is available for only seven days from the October 14, 2010, publication date.
The column speaks for itself, as does a critical analysis of the column by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in the Media).
Personally, the WSJ column, predictable as it is, in companion with another point of view, from FAIR, is that single dimension arguments are effective only when they are conveyed in an ‘echo chamber’ accepting only a single point of view. There is always another side to the story. As FAIR points out, Henninger focuses on a single contribution of Capitalism to the rescue, essentially without comment on anything else.

#247 – Dick Bernard: Musing about Taxes

/in , , , , /by

I’d consider Gerald Harris, editor/publisher of the LaMoure Chronicle and a couple of other North Dakota weekly newspapers, a friend, even though I have only met him in person one time, and then briefly, and even though we may well walk different paths ideologically.
But when I get to his town to visit my relatives, one of my must-buys is his newspaper, and I buy it so that I can read his opinion.
He tells it as he sees it. Dammit! And he seems willing to share other points of view.
So, I bought his newspaper on Saturday, and read his column, which was about re-doing the U.S. tax system – an ever popular coffee shop topic, whether in bib-overalls and seed caps, or business suits.
Gerald’s scheme was three tiered: 1) get rid of all deductions for anything, making a tax department unnecessary; 2) apply a Value Added Tax to all goods produced; 3) make some kinds of Sales Tax universal on everything. To deal with the vexing problem of people with nothing, he proposed an allotment of $600 per month per person, payable in two lump sums each year. The lucky poor would get $3600 checks twice a year, to steward carefully or squander…their choice.
The other culprits in his scheme: those evil politicians – always the easy ones to kick around, even though they are doing our collective bidding…so they can be elected or reelected.
I sent this reponse to Mr. Harris, which he may or may not reprint this week:
“Saturday afternoon after Mass I was standing outside Holy Rosary Church chatting with a couple of LaMoure friends. A young woman, dressed in summer clothes with a couple of small inexpensive backpacks, approached us and asked how to get to ______, a North Dakota town we knew was five or six driving hours away. She had been put out of where she’d been staying in LaMoure, and told to walk home. She didn’t even know the direction to walk. My friends helped as they could, staying with the young woman until they were comfortable she had the help she needed.
I learned the next day that the young lady – she said she was 21 – probably was taken to Jamestown for the late bus, and delivered to relatives in Bismarck. Perhaps this will show up in the police report in this weeks Chronicle. It was a quiet drama – one which most of the churchgoers probably weren’t aware was even happening, though they were milling around nearby.
After this unanticipated encounter, back in my room, I read your musings on reforming the tax system in this country, including the quotation provided by “a banker”** and your suggestion that each person get $600 a month, paid in lump sums twice a year.
Opinion intersected with harsh reality.
Taxes is easy to kick around, especially by those who are expected to pay it. The scheme always seems to be how to avoid as much taxes as possible, and switch the remaining tax burden to somebody else. The rich have platoons of lawyers and lobbyists to skew the law in their favor. Unlike Corporations, who are now, legally, “persons”, people like that young woman have no clout, no knowledge, no voice….
Greed is always a silent player in these conversations about individual rights versus community responsibility. The richer one is, it seems, the more that person feels entitled to their riches, as if he or she really “earned” them.
North Dakota is, I have heard, one of the wealthier states in the U.S. Why is it that there seems an inverse relationship between wealth and true generosity?
I wonder what has happened to that young woman I saw last Saturday; I wonder if anybody much cares.”
I sent the editor a link to this recent column on the issue of the rich and taxes.
A e-friend reminded me that Richard Nixon, long ago, had once thought of a yearly stipend of $25,000 per family to stimulate the American Economy….
** From a banker: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of the people.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802.

#241 – Dick Bernard: The Tyranny of the Minority; and the (theoretical) Power of the Majority

/in , , , , , /by

Last night on the national news of one of the Big Three (CBS, NBC, ABC) I watched a reporter contextualize for viewers the conflict over allowing 2000-era federal tax cuts to sunset (expire) for those earning over $250,000 a year. The over-$250,000 group is said to represent about 2% of American taxpayers. For the rest of us, the holiday would continue.
In order to be “fair and balanced” (I suppose), the perhaps-three minute report focused on the negative impact on “small business”, and employment, if the two percent over $250,000 small businesses would lose their tax break in 2011. Two business owners were interviewed, and of course, said that they’d have to cut some jobs if they had to pay more taxes.
At the end of the segment, the reporter took pen to white board, and gave his interpretation of reality: as I recall the numbers, he said that 2 1/2% of small businesses are in the $250,000+ category. BUT this represents almost 900,000 small businesses.
Segment over, back to the news…. Those poor business owners.
One might feel sympathy for these entrepreneur small business owners, and especially for the employees they say they’ll have to let go, but there is a “wait a minute” aspect to this – an aspect not touched (intentionally, I believe) by the news program.
What was not stated was that 97 1/2% of American small business, apparently nearly 24,000,000 of these businesses, the overwhelming vast majority, would not, under the Presidents plan, be faced with the possibility of going back to 2000 era tax rates. Only the two or so percent who are the wealthiest among us would have to wear the hair shirt of the additional tax, which means only going back to the rates prevailing at the time the ill-advised tax cuts were made.
We should feel sorry for those over $250,000 folks for having to help the lessers among us recover from near catastrophe?
Sorry.
(I don’t think the break point of $250,000 is nearly low enough. But that’s for another conversation.)
I think back to my own work experience. I worked an entire career, and within my constellation of relatives and friends, I would probably be considered to have made a really good living.
In my working years, it would take several YEARS of earnings to equal $250,000. I never got close to reaching a six figure annual income. Nonetheless, I lived well (by my standards). By no measure could I be considered “poor”…or “wealthy” either.
The ‘tax holiday’ between 2001 and the present was good for me. I have all my old tax records so can retrace all of those steps, and do an essentially ‘apples to apples’ comparison. Federal tax went down; state tax stayed pretty constant; property tax went up, but not by a lot.
I had ‘more jingle in my pocket’ those tax-holiday years, but I can’t really say that it did me any good at all. And when I compare it against the catastrophe it spawned in huge federal debt to pay for a war; and all of the credit card debt we all incurred living outside our means, it certainly wasn’t worth it.
I’m within the 98% of Americans who will indirectly benefit if the tax holiday is lifted for the top 2%.
Why, then, can the top 2% high-income folks count on the rest of us fighting their anti-tax battle for them, which is exactly what they are counting on?
Tables-turned, they’ve generally never been in the corner of the least among us.
It’s very simple: we have been taught to fight amongst ourselves, and to want what is unhealthy. To be rich is a positive value….
Have we learned anything? I’ll see how election day 2010 plays out.
If we choose to go back to the days of the 2000s that almost killed us, it’s our fault…and it will be our problem.
COMMENT received from Michelle Witte September 9 2010
Dick – what has become of facts? If I were in charge of the DNC
communication machine I would run 24 hour ads about what the facts really
are around these initiatives. For example – when we in Minnesota had the
transportation/gas tax bill in the state in 2008… there were dire reports
of businesses closing, the evils of taxes, etc. I then calculated what the
FACTS were and how it would affect our family. I figured that based on our
Honda minivan driving about 12,000 miles a year at 16MPG we would pay
perhaps $38 dollars A YEAR extra. And for $38 I would get…. an amazing
array of infrastructure improvements. $38. I can’t even fill a hole on my
driveway for that. Get a grip people – taxes allow you to access resources
for a much lower cost than you could if we just all got our cash and then
hand to build our own roads, levies, social security system, food protection
system, schools, ambulance, fire… on and on.
So, let’s look at the sunset of the Bush Tax Cuts – first of all – they are
not RAISING taxes. They are putting back in place a tax structure which
COMPLEMENTED the highest economic growth in the last 30 years during the
Clinton Administration. Those soaring profits we all once enjoyed came on
the back of those taxes being in place. So, we’re now talking about simply
restoring those taxes.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a family with income of
$300,000 per year would be paying approximately $3,995 more in taxes under
Obama’s plan. That sucks. But it’s certainly not crippling. AND… looked at
the way it should be – those families got 10 years of a tax BREAK while the
rest of us did not.
My neighbor is an accountant and actually voted for Dems after seeing the
effects of the Bush tax cuts on her wealthy clients. They got huge
$10-20,000 checks back from the government after doing their taxes that
first year – they didn’t need it, weren’t expecting it, and clearly, it did
NOT lead to a robust economy where all those people who were business owners
were hiring employees, etc. Instead, people simply extended their credit and
greed and put the economy in the tank. Why would we repeat that again?

#239 – Dick Bernard: Reflections on Labor Day

/in , , , /by

Most Sundays the patrons of “my” local coffee shop will hear a somewhat odd trio in conversation along the east (street side) wall. Commanding one table is a retired middle manager of a major international corporation, someone who was fairly high up in the food chain in an important division of his company. At the middle table is a union guy who comes in most every weekend and is, by every indication, a very gifted “key” employee of his corporation, and (perhaps) sometimes a curmudgeon in his own union. Then there’s me, a retired Union organizer – one of “those” people – someone who spent 27 years trying to make sense out of nonsense – “the man in the middle” of assorted disputes and conflicts between working people and their managers.
After the usual bantering back and forth, when the conversation wanders back to the more reflective and serious, we three tend to agree much more than we disagree. The specifics of what we talk about are not as important as the fact that we are not as odd a bunch as we might seem to be. We might see problems and their solutions a little bit differently, but not as differently as one might imagine. We talk about things most people might talk about these days: work, workers, money in (or not in) the economy, how the national organism needs everyone to thrive to survive….
Sunday, as usual, I left coffee, went home, got set for the trip to my Church, the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.
Driving out of our town home development, we saw some cut firewood on a lawn, with a little sign – “Firewood, $5”. It was a small deal; somebody had been cleaning up a neighboring tree lot. My spouse, who’s President of our Homeowners Association, noted that somebody would complain about this little neighborhood enterprise – our Association has rules against that sort of thing. Then she said that the guy had lost his job recently, making the neighborhood enterprise make more sense – even if it was against the rules.
At Church, I picked up the Sunday bulletin. The front page commentary was by Janice Andersen, whose full-time job with us might well translate as “Social Justice”. The headline of her column: “Imagine being able to move out of homelessness with absolutely no furniture“. She then succinctly summarized the story of three anonymous people who had benefited from our Church’s St. Vincent de Paul Thrift store “gently used furniture” program: #1 – “Bill” finally has an entry level job after being out of work for some time…He makes enough money to pay for his rent and food….”; #2 – “Mary”…who lived in her car for two years…participating in a program that teaches interview skills and is looking for work”; #3 – “Ann” is a disabled senior who recently received custody of her grandson. She had no furniture other than a mattress on the floor….”
The visiting Priest, Fr. Greg Miller from St. John’s Abbey, pulled it all together for this Labor Day weekend, basing his comments on Luke 14:25-33, a key section of which says “anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”
Using a symbol familiar to all Catholics – a Rosary – Fr. Greg demonstrated the difference between Grasping (Greed) and Receiving (Generosity). In the first instance, a clenched down-turned fist, holding and hiding that Rosary; in the second, an open up-turned hand, receiving, then giving. Pretty dramatic.
“What we love is what we become“, he said. And he asked us to be especially cognizant, this Labor Day, of those who are “Unemployed, underemployed, and those who have given up looking for work.”
Good messages.
As a nation, we become together, exactly what we are individually. Period. Our “community” is much, much broader than what most of us might define it.

#225 – Dick Bernard: Social Security celebrates a birthday

/in , , , , /by

Sunday, August 15, 2010, is the 75th birthday of the signing of the Social Security Act. Actually the day was a Wednesday, and there is more than ample history available at the Social Security website.
As a veteran recipient of the benefits of Social Security, and as a contributor to the program for many years as an employee, I have an obvious interest in the act.
As a person, I most often think of the Act in the context of my Grandfather Bernard, my Dad’s Dad. In his story is the story of both the history of and the need for a national system of income security.
Grandpa turned 65 on February 26, 1937. This happened to be virtually coincidental with the first actual payouts to Social Security recipients. Since this was a brand new program, he had likely contributed nothing to it. A heckuva deal. But life is a bit more complicated than that.
For many years, Grandpa was chief engineer in the flour mill in Grafton ND. He had a first-grade education, was a self-made and hard-working man, the “bread-winner” of the family, and proud of it. In context of the times, he was middle class. They owned a house, car, and were thrifty, saving money in the local bank. In 1925, he and Grandma took their only vacation that I know of: they spent a month back in the Quebec of his birth.
Life was going along well, that summer of 1925, when he was 53, and Grandma 44. These were the good old days, when heroic men fed their families and didn’t rely on the dole. Women stayed at home and raised the kids, and if you weren’t shiftless you worked for a living: no unemployment insurance or the like.
But then as now, unbeknownst to them, a curve ball was to deliver a strikeout to their best laid plans.
In the month of May, 1927, a couple of weeks before my Dad graduated from high school, two events happened within the same week in Grafton ND: the flour mill closed its doors forever; and the bank which held all of the family savings went under, leaving the family with no livelihood or savings. Dad had planned to go to college that fall, but those plans were delayed. Grandpa was 55, not the expected retirement age.
The Great Depression is usually marked as beginning in 1929. Theirs started two years earlier. Their youngest son, Frank, was still at home, 12 years old.
There is little historical record of how they survived the first half of the 1930s. Grandpa is said to have gotten some income from being a night watchman at the closed mill. He possibly received some income from a small pension resulting from service in the Spanish-American War in 1898-99 – a promise long-delayed by Congressional inertia. They probably got some assistance from relatives in the area, and they took in a couple of farm kids as boarders during some of the winter months. Some of the bank savings finally came back to them at about 10 cents on the dollar.
But when Grandpa qualified for Social Security in ’35, it was undoubtedly a god-send to the family, and it made possible a tiny house which they bought in Grafton, and lived in till they died in 1957 and 1963 respectively.
Today Grandpa’s generation is gone, and Dad’s is rapidly departing. Social Security has been a welcome reality in their lives.
I’m in the lucky generation to have the full benefits of Social Security.
The next generation – my kids – is much more vulnerable, and seems unaware of its vulnerability, and is courted to reject Social Security in favor of rugged individualism once again.
Ironically, the coalition to privatize social security seems to be some of the the youngers and the elders, for opposing reasons.
I hope they both wake up before the youngers experience the consequences of short-sightedness.
Grandpa thought he was secure, too.