Some months ago, Denis Huey and I were up in Madison doing some outreach with folks in the area. We came across William's home here and I shot some video of his place, then went to work with Denis to see if there was something else we could do.
Meanwhile, John Partipilo, a friend and photog w the Tennessean, contacted me about someone else and I suggested he get in touch with Denis to get this guy's story, as it's a damned heartbreaking one to see someone living in a doghouse.
It took John and Denis a bit to hook up, but I was beyond pleased to see the story and this GREAT photo by John Partipilo posted in the Tennessean recently!
Great teamwork gentlemen, wonderful collaborative effort to raise awareness, and many thanks for sharing such a powerful story with so many!
Homeless man who lives in doghouse behind shop told to move on
William Craig will have to move his doghouse soon. / JOHN PARTIPILO / THE TENNESSEAN
William Craig, 52, is homeless. He has lived in a doghouse behind a beauty salon in Madison for nearly a year. "It's tough being homeless in Nashville," Craig said. "It's rough out here in the street." Craig has no family. "They are all dead, and I am all alone."
He is among the estimated 6,000 homeless in Nashville. "That is a staggering figure," said Laurie Green, an advocate for the homeless. That count includes "only the ones we know about," she said.
Craig will have to move his doghouse soon. The beauty parlor changed owners, and the new owner wants him to move on. "I can't believe that in America people like Billy are living in a doghouse," said Dennis Huey, who works for Operation Stand Down, a group that helps homeless vets, in Nashville. "It's just unbelievable."
Like many homeless in Nashville, Craig treks to the food bank every morning to get food for the day. After that he looks for work, which he says has been hard to find during the recession.
As most of you who read this blog with any regularity know, I've been a long-term methadone maintenance client who got my start on the road to opiate addiction by abusing prescription opiates during the early 70s. It started innocently enough with a Uno card game and a bottle of Tussionex cough syrup, which I was to learn later contained the ever-popular pea-shooter narcotic, hydrocodone (Vicodin, Lortab, etc). One of my friends had snuck the bottle out of his parents' medicine cabinet and we took turns sipping on it as we played through the game. I vaguely recall the colors on the cards all gradually losing their brilliance and eventually greying out, and found that for whatever the reason, I enjoyed immensely - far too much - the buzz that came with that cough syrup. Even through all the years of other opiate choices, I always enjoyed a Tussionex high.
It didn't take me long to move into the bigger guns tho, and Percodan (not Percocet, as Percodan had an additional oxycodone derivative that made it more potent, and it dissolved easily in water, making it injectable), became my favorite, although just about all the others that were available at the time, including Demerol, morphine, Diluadid, and Talwin, all wound up on my "favorites" list.
I dabbled with Fentanyl when it hit the scene but mostly used it by either slapping on a patch or cutting the top off the patch and sloshing it into a large glass of Mountain Dew, then sipping that down over the course of an hour or so.
I didn't use injectable Fentanyl or Sufentanyl because, surprise surprise, clear and public education on the drug itself informed me - without trying to also scare me half to death with ridiculously exaggerated stories or examples- that the overdose potential was high due to the high potency of the drug (take note, policy-makers, we addicts aren't brain-dead and we do indeed benefit from raising awareness campaigns).
I was fortunate in that I was in a methadone program by the time OxyContin arrived big-time as a party-for-one on the streets. As such, I can't speak much about that drug in particular, but given what I know in general about using narcotics, I'm not missing anything new in the world of opiates, just another way to drool on myself, sleep my life away and wake up sick every six hours or so.
The leap to heroin was more of a...small sidestep. As prescription drug availability began to dry up, thanks in part to zealous prosecution of physicians who prescribed painkillers, the cost skyrocketed and the quantities shriveled.
Digressing slightly here, I was a panel member for a day-long expert pharmacology conference sponsored by SAMHSA and NIDA yesterday, and Dr. Wesley Clark was talking about one of the guiding principles we were constructing for the treatment of opiate addiction and PTSD. He wanted us to be careful about possible "unintended consequences" of a particular policy or regulation, and this my friends, is I suspect exactly what he was talking about.
Because of the reduction in pharmaceuticals on the street, it soon became much cheaper to purchase heroin than pills Vicodin, Percodan or any other opiate pill on the market at the time. At about the same period, Mexico began delivering very high grade "black tar" heroin to multiple distribution spots throughout the West.
I was living in California at the time and could purchase extremely potent tar for around $50 a gram. That is dirt cheap folks, and it was on every damned corner. I didn't need a script, didn't have to worry about my name circulating through some DEA prescription task force goon's file folder, didn't have to bring a song and dance to some suspicious doctor, and didn't have to deal with the dirty looks and often rude treatment from pharmacists who knew exactly what I was up to with my hand in their cookie jar.
The one thing that probably keeps more people from taking that pain pill to heroin step is the need to inject heroin. Many folks draw the line at jamming needles into their skin, but the black tar that was available on the streets was so powerful many of the people i knew had taken to smoking or snorting it. I was always leery of that, since tar is often crawling with Hepatitis A and God knows what else, so I always felt safer cooking it to a rapid boil.
Sounds incredibly stupid today when I think about it, but back then I really thought I was doing myself a favor and protecting myself as good as I possibly could when I engaged in...."risky" behaviors. Maybe my diligence paid off, since I am still pretty healthy today at 51, and the typical heroin addict dies by the age of 47.
I open the door to my closet of skeletons because I know that there are lots and lots of people out there who think they can handle those pills. They think that because they've not moved up to more potent narcotics they are somehow "more in control" of their destiny with those little bastages. If you're taking opiates for just about any reason and you find yourself watching and cheering the clock as it ticks down to your next dose, or are counting your pills to make sure you've got enough to last until your next refill, you're in trouble already.
The truth of the matter is that opiate abuse and addiction is probably far more widespread than any of us imagine, and it's an insidious addiction, indeed. No one is immune and some very responsible, respectable and important people in the world have become addicted to opiates. The "shit" sneaks up on ya, becomes a habit before you know it and is damned hard to beat once that god-dammed monkey has attached itself to your back.
But don't take my word for it, just ask Lt. Gen. David Fridovich.....
General's story a warning about use of painkillers
Lt. Gen. David Fridovich talks about dependency on pain meds following injuries associated with his post in special forces, and his rehab and recovery.
Standing before a packed hall of 700 military doctors and medics here, the deputy commander of the nation's elite special operations forces warned about an epidemic of chronic pain sweeping through the U.S. military after a decade of continuous war.
Be careful about handing out narcotic pain relievers, Lt. Gen. David Fridovich told the audience last month. "What we don't want is that next generation of veterans coming out with some bad habits."
What Fridovich didn't say was that he was talking as much about himself as anyone.
For nearly five years, the Green Beret general quietly has been hooked on narcotics he has taken for chronic pain — a reflection of an addiction problem that is spreading across the military.
Hospitalizations and diagnoses for substance abuse doubled among members of U.S. forces in recent years. This week, nurses and case managers at Army wounded care units reported that one in three of their patients are addicted or dependent on drugs.
In going public about his drug dependency during interviews with USA TODAY, Fridovich, 59, echoes the findings of an Army surgeon general task force last year that said doctors too often rely on handing out addictive narcotics to quell pain.
An internal Army investigation report released Tuesday revealed that 25% to 35% of about 10,000 soldiers assigned to special units for the wounded, ill or injured are addicted to or dependent on drugs, according to their nurses and case managers. Doctors in those care units told investigators they need training in other ways to manage pain besides only using narcotics.
"I was amazed at how easy it was for me or almost anybody to have access and to get medication, without really an owner's manual," says Fridovich, deputy commander of the nation's roughly 60,000 Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALS and secretive Delta Force teams.
For such a high-ranking military officer, publicly acknowledging drug dependency was unprecedented.
Retired Army major general Paul Eaton, a former commander in Iraq, says Fridovich has now joined a small cadre of senior military leaders willing to discuss publicly personal struggles, such as living with post-traumatic stress disorder. Such admissions are difficult professional decisions, Eaton says.
"Nobody wants to show weaknesses. You want to be perceived as perfection," he says. "But sometimes moral courage kicks in where moral courage is demanded."
Fridovich agreed in recent weeks to talk openly about his reliance on drugs as part of what he says is a personal commitment to push the Army into better addressing pain management and drug addiction.
"Here's my story," he says. "I feel like there is some real value — maybe cathartic, don't know — but really, more than anything else, how can you help people?"
His own experiences are his bona fides on the issue, Fridovich says, and others agree.
"This is huge for Fridovich to be willing to talk about this as a three-star general," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army four-star vice chief of staff. "We're finally coming clean and admitting at all levels this is an issue."
Fridovich says narcotics altered his personality, darkened his mood and management style and strained his 35-year marriage.
When Fridovich finally went through treatment and detoxification to reduce his drug reliance in 2008 — he still relies on weaker doses of narcotics to combat pain — his wife, Kathy, hid or destroyed more potent pain pills so he could not use them.
"I was fighting the pain. And I was fighting the injury. And I was fighting the
narcotics," he says. "We have an obligation to the soldiers to look them in the eye and say, 'I know what you're going through. You don't want to be like this for the rest of your life. You don't have to be.' "
Pentagon statistics show the number of pain-relief prescriptions given to troops, including narcotics, growing 86% from 2001 to 2009, when 3.7 million doses were handed out. That dipped last year to 3.5 million prescriptions, the data reveal, but is still more than any year prior to 2009.
From 2005 to 2009, the number of troops diagnosed each year with substance abuse disorders jumped 50% to nearly 40,000, the Pentagon says. And substance abuse hospitalizations increased from 100 troops per month in 2003 to more than 250 per month in 2009.
"The abuse is getting higher and higher and more and more," Fridovich says, "and that leads to a very dark, deadly, dangerous place."
An unrelenting pain
Narcotics entered Fridovich's life in May 2006, after he severely injured his back exercising between trips to war zones. At the time he was a two-star general in command of all special operations forces — Green Berets, Navy Seals and Army Rangers — operating in the Pacific.
Fresh from a trip to Iraq and slated to go to the Philippines, he was in a Marine base gymnasium on Oahu leg-pressing 400 pounds when lower vertebrae shattered.
Doctors later said his back was brittle from decades of soldiering and scores of parachute drops.
He said he felt a twinge at the time and worked through it, continuing a regimen of weight-lifting, handball and racquetball for several days.
But by Memorial Day, he awoke barely able to stand. "All I could do was just lie in bed and writhe," Fridovich recalls, describing pain radiating from his lower back down his left leg.
"It felt like someone had taken a baseball bat from here to here," Fridovich says, gesturing from waist to kneecap.
In the emergency room at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, X-rays showed shattered bones and pinched nerves. Motrin and morphine were the first medications, followed by fistfuls of fast-acting roxicet and longer-lasting Oxycontin, both listed by the federal government as highly addictive with significant potential for abuse.
Doctors wanted him to wait on surgery to gauge progress. "That was a little bit more than wishful thinking," Fridovich says now.
Eager to quell pain and resume command, Fridovich during one 24-hour period swallowed five dozen Oxycontin pills. His calculus was simple, he says: If the drugs were for pain relief, more drugs must equal more relief.
But the price was a disturbing fogginess of mind and dark, frightening thoughts. Fridovich recalls contemplating, almost irrationally, whether he should simply have his stricken left leg amputated and be done with it.
He says he pulled out the written warnings about narcotics and realized he was in treacherous territory. "That scared the hell out of me, (the) anxiety, depression, real bad thoughts," he recalls. "I got scared so bad that I stopped."
Fridovich says he immediately cut his consumption of pills drastically — but not entirely. Instead, Fridovich fell into a lifestyle he now concedes was a mistake — ingesting two to four pain pills daily, even as he continued commanding troops and moving up through the ranks.
The demands of his job, the need to travel by plane and helicopter around the globe and stay functional, meant that the roxicet and Oxycontin pills would be part of his daily diet.
"Somebody should have challenged me," he says. "I should have challenged myself and said, "Wow, I'm on this stuff way too long. What's the deal?' "
'I knew he was taking a lot'
His wife, Kathy, the college sweetheart he married on the eve of joining the Army in 1976 — the couple have one child, a daughter — found herself in a dilemma. She could see her husband was in chronic pain, but she hated the medication.
"I don't like the drugs," says Kathy Fridovich. "I knew he was taking a lot. I read all the little fine print. Drugs are scary."
She became her husband's conscience, urging him to find a way off the drugs.
For a time in Hawaii, Fridovich sought out acupuncture and managed to reduce his intake of narcotics.
He received his third star in July 2007, and an assignment asdirector of the Center for Special Operations. He and Kathy moved to Tampa, where Special Operations Command headquarters are located and the acupuncture treatment ended. Special Operations troops have played a central role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since 9/11 and the pressure on Fridovich to remain fully functional meant that the pain had to be kept in check. The easiest way was the pills, he says.
"Starting a new job and wanting to do well, he just worked as hard as he could, and they helped him get through," Kathy Fridovich says. "(But) I kind of wondered about the quality of what he was doing."
"I did, too," echoes Fridovich.
The drugs were altering his personality. Fridovich found himself becoming cross with colleagues and less tolerant of new ideas. "I found myself being, in some ways, very isolated, very combative," he says. "It's not what I wanted to be known for. I wanted to build teams. I wanted to bring people together."
Doctors at Walter Reed Army Center in Washington, D.C., finally decided to operate on Fridovich's back in January 2008. The surgery removed shattered bone and fused vertebrae. It would provide some long-term relief, but for a while the pain intensified.
Oxycontin and roxicet no longer were enough. He was given morphine.
Within a few weeks back in Tampa, doctors finally advised the three-star general that he had a long-standing dependency on narcotics. He needed some way of managing his pain without relying only on drugs.
At the time, Special Operations doctors were facing the same issues with soldiers suffering chronic pain, dependency or addiction. They found the Andrews Institute for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine, a Pensacola-based center that provides an array of services including surgery, rehabilitation and pain management.
Fridovich would be the test subject.
For four weeks, doctors, therapists and rehab specialists worked with Fridovich through physical training, psychological counseling and nutrition to train his body in more natural ways to deal with pain. They also put him through detoxification.
He was placed on a weaker narcotic, buprenorphrine, less amenable to abuse.
Detoxification left Fridovich physically and emotionally wrung out, he says, suffering the shakes, sweats, aches and nausea. "It's the most sickening feeling that racks your entire body," he says.
Fridovich — who was named deputy commander of Special Operations Forces in May 2010 — says the therapy, detox and reduction in narcotics cleared his head, eased his temperament and brightened his outlook on life. "I should probably take an ad out in a national newspaper apologizing for everything I've said or done, because I'm a different person," he says with a grin.
He hopes one day to leave narcotics behind entirely.
When the Army's surgeon general office developed a plan last year to institute service-wide some of the same holistic methods that helped Fridovich, the general was part of the campaign.
"I want to be involved," Fridovich says. "I want to listen to where this is going and see if my playing a part would lend any sense of urgency or importance — get it moving in a way that we start getting things done."
He says Army medicine must be better prepared to treat pain with aggressive monitoring of medication, drug education, acupuncture, nutrition and proper exercise. "We ask great things of (soldiers). Don't we owe them great things as well?" Fridovich says. "It's about the human expense."
Subject: Alert from the US Dept of Veterans Affairs
WARNING TO VETERANS– Please Forward
Forwarded by Kevin Secor, VSO Liaison, Office of the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
An organization called Veterans Affairs Services (VAS) is providing benefit and general information on VA and gathering personal information on veterans. This organization is not affiliated with VA in any way.
[Websites with the name "vaservices" immediately after the "www" ARE NOT part of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the US Government agency. Do not go to them or if approached or called, do not offer them any information concerning yourself or data on other veterans.
Keep in mind that the real VA website ends in .gov. Also, be aware that the Department of Veterans Affairs does not randomly call veterans, nor does it ask veterans for information which it does not already have--like Social Security Numbers. In particular, if you have not dealt with the VA previously--and in person--and all of a sudden, you receive a call from someone saying they are with the VA or something similar sounding, hang up the phone. Also, do not respond to emails which suggest that they are from the VA. The VA never conducts official business nor asks for personal information by email.]
VAS may be gaining access to military personnel through their close resemblance to the VA name and seal. Our Legal Counsel has requested that we coordinate with DoD to inform military installations, particularly mobilization sites, of this group and their lack of affiliation or endorsement by VA to provide any services.
In addition, The General Counsel requests that if you have any examples of VAS acts that violate chapter 59 of Title 38 United States Code, such as VAS employees assisting veterans in the preparation and presentation of claims for benefits, please pass any additional information to Mr.Daugherty at the address below.
For as long as I can remember, I've had a dream that if I ever hit the lottery or came into a large sum of money, the first thing I would do is to establish a large farm where people could go recover, work in any capacity they were able to and in the process regain their dignity, sense of self worth, and inclusion in a real, loving and tolerant community.
Based on my persona experiences while living on the street, I knew that a model like Moltrup would work, and it's such a beautiful thing to witness a real model in action that is thriving over the long-term.
For many of us, the greatest loss we suffer when we are plunged into abject poverty - for whatever the reason - is the loss of dignity, self-respect and belonging to the larger community. In an age of specialized and divided labor, skilled trade and nuclear family models that isolate us all from one another, the loss of a job and/or family can quickly throw us into despair, loneliness and isolation and marginalization. We are essentially "kicked to the curb" as useless, worthless societal detritus and the climb back is such a difficult and barrier-filled one that many simply give up and resign themselves to a short, brutal and painful life on the streets.
Moltrup gives us another option and builds upon the collective efforts of all. It provides a powerful sense of inclusion, belonging, collegiality, mutual respect, and inspiration.
Keep your fingers crossed that I hit the lottery soon, and watch for another Moltrup to spring up shortly thereafter!
A Model of Interdependence: Denmark’s Moltrup Farm
The Moltrup Community is a farm in Denmark that has been serving men experiencing homelessness since 1912. It provides a place for men to live, work, and get back on their feet. Some men stay for just a few months and others stay the rest of their lives. On the farm, everyone helps to contribute to the self-sufficient community.
“Men experiencing homelessness in Denmark have been coming to the Moltrup Community since 1912,” says Ebbe Larsen, “And they just keep on coming.”
Ebbe is Director of the Moltrup Community, a place where men can get back on their feet. It is built around a 300-acre farm near the town of Herning in West Jutland, and is administered by the Moltrup Foundation. Moltrup is a family effort, and the foundation’s board includes the great-grandchildren of Johannes Munck, the founder.
Johannes Munck was a minister in the Danish prison system who worked to help men understand that each one has power, potential, and value. He created Moltrup to give men a place where they could rediscover their own value. Moltrup is a model of interdependence. Without everyone’s contribution, the place wouldn’t survive. Survive it has: through two world wars and into the new millennium. Some 8,000 men have lived at Moltrup since it opened the doors. (Cont at the Homelessness Resource Center)
Spoke w Ben Griffith from Oasis Center yesterday and he and some folks are putting together a memorial service for David Ross on this Saturday, at 1pm. Also according to Ben, the body of JFK has been released to his family in Arkansas and he's on his way...home.
The local service will take place at Riverfront park in downtown Nashville, an area JFK spent a whole lotta time at, and seems to me as fitting a place as there ever was for those of us in Nashville to say goodbye to him for the last time.
I just got off the phone w one of my long-time friends on the street who was at Room In The Inn last night when police arrived looking for an individual they suspect was involved in the stabbing death of JFK (David Ross).
A lot of peeps know JFK and while he was frequently struggling to overcome challenges, he was a likable guy with a great sense of humor. He had his issues, as some folks who are living or have lived on the street do, but I think most people who have worked or played w JFK will tell you that they like him and enjoyed the time they spent interacting with him.
Folks may recall this bit of fun I had one day with JFK from an old video posted on Stone Soup Videos a couple of years ago:
According to my source, JFK was hanging out with Scooby-Do (Ed Wise) when an argument erupted over a card game. The story given was that it was JFK who supposedly pulled a knife out and one of the men in the card game then pushed him. He stumbled and fell onto the knife, cut his leg badly and he bled to death shortly afterwards. It ain't a real believable tale, but hey, it's his story so I'm just relaying what I've been told, and we all know how the gossip mill can distort...
The other individual, who will be well known to readers of this blog and who has been a client of mine for some time, tried to clean up the blood. After several hours, the man who pushed JFK "got to feeling bad about what he'd done" and contacted police. The second individual ran and is being sought now by local police.
UPDATE:
It's all confirmed, JFK has indeed been killed and here are the two stories on the web addressing it (big thanks to Tasha for getting me the Channel 5 link):
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Metro Police have charge Edward Wise with criminal homicide after a deadly stabbing behind a South Nashville home. It happened just before 2 a.m. Wednesday in a building along Franklin Limestone Road.
Police said Wise, the victim and another man went to the barn Tuesday night to visit a homeless man who was staying there with the owner's consent.
They said at some point the situation turned violent and 37-year-old David Ross was stabbed to death by Wise after they began wrestling on a mattress.
Ross suffered a laceration to his leg and had significant blood loss. Officials said he died at the scene.
Wise fled the scene, but police found him walking down the road with bloody clothing and a bloody knife.
He is being held on a $1 million bond.
Neighbors told NewsChannel 5 they are not surprised. They said police have been called to that building before for other disturbances.
A suspect has been charged in this morning’s stabbing death inside a barn behind 232 Franklin Limestone Road in South Nashville.
Edward W. Wise (pictured on right), 45, is charged with criminal homicide. The victim, David Ross, 37, suffered a laceration to his leg and significant blood loss. He died at the scene.
Police believe Wise, Ross and another individual came to the barn Tuesday to visit a homeless man staying there with the property owner’s consent.
At approximately 1:30 a.m. today, police believe Wise and Ross got into an argument and began wrestling on a mattress.
Wise allegedly stabbed Ross in the leg. Wise fled the scene, but was taken into custody a short time later walking on Franklin Limestone Road. Police say there was blood on Wise’s clothing and on a pocket knife in his possession.
Wise, 45, is being held in lieu of a $1 million bond pending a hearing.
Sorry to see you go, bro. I hope your new place keeps a roof over your head, a warm meal in your belly, and a smile on your face for the rest of eternity. You certainly earned it...
All of us are the potential victims of scams, from those who believe it when the big moneyed peeps tell them their investments are "safe with me," to the poor sod who buys a used car that's been restored after a serious wreck.
None of us like it when we've discovered we're the victim of a scam or ripoff, but for many of us, we can overcome the loss and move on, a little lighter in the wallet but a little smarter in the head about what to watch out for in the game of life.
For those of us who're barely hanging on to the bottom rung of the poverty ladder however, a scam can devastate us so completely by the time we figure it out, we not only don't have a pot to piss in, we don't have a window to throw it out of, either.
And whenever the economy takes a turn for the worse, scammers get busy. 2010 was a banner year for thieves who prey on the poor and when you're poor, you're often tempted beyond what your common sense might protect you from in ordinary circumstances. Call it greed if you want, I prefer to call it the desire to have a little of the American Pie we're constantly enticed with on a daily basis through advertising and promotion.
When a deal "too good to be true" came along, I forgot all about Caveat emptor and hoped that maybe this time, I would actually be able to get a little farther ahead than normal.
I'm just glad as hell I'm able today to resist the temptation of a well thought out scam, and am smart enough today to check out anything I might be asked to give, spend, donate, or use money for.
Here are the biggies that took the food out of the mouths of folks who are poor, that threw them further into darkness, homelessness, despair, and hopelessness in 2010.
It used to be that folks who were over-qualified for positions were passed over pretty quickly because employers figured the person would leave just as soon as better job, more commensurate with his/her experience and career goals, was found.
But as employment gets tougher to find, folks with higher levels of education and work experience are often selected for jobs far below their skill level because employers know that finding a better job could be a long time in coming.
They figure they can get a premium worker who brings some strong skillsets into the workplace, and they're betting the odds that another job offer won't come along fast enough to end up offsetting the costs of replacing that experienced worker.
Looks like employers are making wise choices, given this latest news.
The bummer however, is that folks who might once have had a shot at getting a job like this now find themselves waaaayyy down the hiring ladder, making it even tougher to find work for those with little education or training.
Today, if you're not holding a Bachelor's degree and your mommy or daddy doesn't own a company that's still afloat, hasn't shipped the bulk of their work to a foreign country and is still using American workers, chances are very good that you'll find landing a job beyond minimum wage tougher than you've ever seen it before....
Sue Bires, 60, was laid off from a job managing homeowners’ associations in Orlando, Fla. She eventually filed for bankruptcy and took a job at a call center.
A new study of American workers displaced by the recession sheds light on the sacrifices a large number have made to find work. Many, it turns out, had to switch careers and significantly reduce their living standards.
“In many cases, these people are not very happy,” said Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the study. “They’re the winners who got new jobs, but they’re not really what they want, and not where they want to be.”
The study, conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, was based on a survey of Americans around the country who were unemployed as of August 2009 and re-interviewed about their job status twice over the next 15 months.
As of November 2010, only about one-third had found replacement jobs, either as full-time workers (26 percent) or as part-time workers not wanting a full-time job (8 percent).
And of those who successfully found work, 41 percent had switched into a new career or field.
Some of these may have been workers who retrained for new fields they wished to enter, but many seem to have taken their new jobs out of desperation. Only a minority of those displaced workers changing careers — 22 percent — said they had taken a class or a training course before finding their new job.
“Look, I am really happy to have a job — that’s the main thing,” said Sue Bires, 60, who was laid off from a job managing homeowners’ associations in Orlando, Fla., in September 2008. She initially had another job lined up with a different realty association in Orlando, but when that fell through, she moved to Austin, Tex., to stay with a friend. She filed for bankruptcy and took a job at a call center.
But she now earns $30,000, far below the $45,000 she was paid when she was managing properties.
“It’s competitive out there, even for the lower paying jobs, especially when you’re 60 looking for a job in a young town,” Ms. Bires said. “So I’m grateful to have a job where the people are nice and I have a little bit of flexibility in my hours. That’s especially important now, since retirement is looking like a long way off.”
Like Ms. Bires, most of those forced to switch careers generally seemed to downgrade their job status.
Nearly 7 in 10 of the survey’s respondents who took jobs in new fields say they had to take a cut in pay, compared with just 45 percent of workers who successfully found work in their original field.
Of all the newly re-employed tracked by the Heldrich Center, 29 percent took a reduction in fringe benefits in their new job. Again, those switching careers had to sacrifice more: Nearly half of these workers (46 percent) suffered a benefits cut, compared with just 29 percent who stayed in the same career.
Many of those who found work in a different field say they have come to terms with the limited opportunities, but they are reluctant to see their new job as a calling.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve switched careers, since I’m not exactly sure this is a career, but I’m definitely doing something different,” said Adam Kowal, 30, of Royal Oak, Mich.
After being laid off from a job as a quality control supervisor at a department store warehouse and losing his house, he moved his family across the state to live with his mother. Unable to find similar work, he initially took a “soul-sucking” temporary job on an assembly line making auto parts, and is now working in a kitchen at a high school.
His hourly wage has fallen from $15 an hour at the warehouse to $10.50 an hour washing dishes and preparing food, and he has gone from having health insurance coverage for his whole family to no benefits. He, his pregnant wife and their 4-year-old son are now on Medicaid.
“I’d love to go back to what I was doing,” he said, or even into what he described as his true passion, full-time screenwriting. “But when I talk with the unemployment office here in Michigan, they tell me the chances of going back and using the same skill set I had before are pretty farfetched.”
Won't get any argument from me on Wolff's statement above, and I doubt you'll get much disagreement from anyone earning less than $100K a year, either. I don't know how folks earning the average annual amount ($32,708 and some change) of wages in this country even manage to survive without doubling, tripling, quadrupling up with others who earn the same amount.
Frankly, this "average wage" seems exorbitant when compared with the earnings of folks I speak and work with in many fields. In the behavioral health field; case managers would be smiling to earn this much money here in Nashville, Tennessee, and most support staff would think they'd died and gone to heaven to see this amount broken down into 26 checks each year!
Those of us on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder in this country have watched over the past 30 years or so as we've been squeezed, pinched and swindled out of middle class status and manacled into the ranks of the working poor.
The corporate onslaught against trade unions and against the minimum wage, which began with the Nixon administration in 1968, combined with so-called “free-trade” deals that allowed US companies to shift production overseas and then to freely import the products of their overseas production facilities back for sale to Americans at home, by weakening the power of workers to demand higher wages, has led to a situation where companies can just pocket all the profits from productivity gains, leaving wages stagnant, or even driving them down.
Meanwhile, we're stuck spinning our wheels as we run faster and faster on the poverty-wheel to keep our meager possessions and ourselves from calling the closest freeway overpass we can drag them and our tired bodies to home.
So forgive us all down here if we say "Bullshit" to those who claim the economy is "recovering."
It might be for those who continue enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but for the vast majority - the backbone of this country - we ain't seen none of it, we're tired of being lied to, and we're damned sure tired of getting shafted at every turn by people who don't have to follow the same rules they establish for the rest of us.
Senators and Congressmen and women, are you listening???
I hate to be a gloom and doomer here, but people are pissed and disillusioned in a way I've never seen before. If a fairer distribution of wealth doesn't happen soon, don't be surprised at what happens next, kiddies. People will take only so much before the rise up against perceived tyranny....
Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!
The end of 2010 brought renewed Washington rhetoric, media hype and academic me-too declarations about the US economy "recovering". We've heard them before since the crisis hit in 2007. They always proved wrong.
But recovery noises are useful for some. Republicans claim that government should do less since recovery is underway (of course, for them, government action is always counterproductive). Likewise, Republicans and many centrist Democrats claim that income redistribution policies are no longer needed because recovery means growth, which means everyone gets a bigger piece of an expanding economic pie. Recovery hype also helps the Obama administration to claim that its policies succeeded.
Yet, this is more fantasy than reality. After all, the nearly 20% of the US labour force that became unemployed or underemployed in 2009 remains so as we enter 2011. No recovery there. Worse still, a quarter of those who found work since the crisis began only got temp jobs without benefits. Second, foreclosure actions by banks – including those who got most of the government's bailouts – continue to eject millions from their homes. No recovery there, either (except for the bigger banks).
Third, consider why the Federal Reserve decided last month to create another $600bn of new money, and why Congress and the president agreed in December on an additional fiscal stimulus (extending Bush's tax cuts, reducing social security withholding for 2011, etc). They took those steps because all the previous bailouts, monetary easing, tax cuts and government fiscal stimulus expenditures had failed to end this crisis. Those immune to hype recognise that more of the same policies that failed before might do so again.
More importantly, the recovery noise distracts from a more basic failure of our economic system: its fundamental instability. Recurring "downturns" – which neither private nor government actions have ever managed to prevent – impose massive costs on society. They plunge millions of effective, productive workers into unemployment and resulting personal, family and community disasters. Governments tap the collective purses of their nations chiefly to rescue just those private capitalists who were major contributors to the crisis and whose wealth insulates them from the crisis' worst effects.
Then, governments turn on their people to impose austerities (cutbacks in social programmes, social security, etc) needed to restore government budgets busted by that rescue's huge costs. Like someone convicted of murdering his parents who demands leniency as an orphan, corporate America demands conservative government and austerity on the grounds of excessive budget deficits. Mainstream media and politicians take those corporate demands seriously, reminding us who controls whom.
The last half-century suggests a very different analysis of the crisis and a correspondingly different response for 2011. Since the early 1970s, workers' wage increases came to an end, their benefits and job security shrank and government supports for average people came under conservative attack. These increasing burdens were justified as absolutely necessary to enable more investment and, therefore, greater economic growth. A bigger economic pie would then provide more for everyone including workers.
In fact, growth in the US and Europe steadily slowed over those years (see graph below by University of Rome Professor Pasquale Tridico):
While workers' conditions deteriorated, capitalist surpluses and profits soared and stock markets boomed. Income and wealth were redistributed from poor and middle to the rich. But the promised results never materialised: neither more investment, nor greater economic growth. As the graph shows, growth actually slowed and then the whole system imploded into a catastrophic crisis.
Today's recovery noises accompany government actions that will repeat in 2011 more of the bailouts, monetary easing and fiscal stimuli that have proved insufficient since 2007. None of those actions dare to question, let alone address, how capitalism redistributed income and wealth in the decades leading to the crisis or how that redistribution contributed to the crisis.
The recovery being planned and hyped aims at a return to the US economy before it crashed. However, that capitalism was like a train hurtling toward the stone wall of crisis. To return to a pre-crisis capitalism risks resuming our places on a similar train heading for a similar crash.
Republican and Democratic politicians alike dare not link this crisis to an economic system that has never stopped producing those "downturns" that regularly cost so many millions of jobs, wasted resources, lost outputs and injured lives. For them, the economic system is beyond questioning. They bow before the unspoken taboo: never criticise the system upon which your careers depend.
Thus, this crisis and its burdens will continue until capitalists see sufficiently attractive opportunities for profit to resume investing and hiring people in the US as well as elsewhere. The freedoms of US capitalists to gain immense government supports as needed, and yet to invest only when, where and how they can maximise their private profits are paramount: the first obligations of government. The freedoms from want and insecurity for the US people remain a distant second priority – until mass political action changes that.
In good times, as in bad, capitalism is a system that places a small minority of people with one set of goals (profits, disproportionally high incomes, dominant political power, etc) in the positions to receive and distribute enormous wealth. Those people include the boards of directors that gather the net revenues of business into their hands and decide, together with the major shareholders in those businesses, how to distribute that wealth. Not surprisingly, they use it to achieve their goals and to make sure government secures their positions.
No Keynesian monetary or fiscal policies address, let alone change, how that system works and who uses its wealth to what ends. No reforms or regulations passed or even proposed under Obama would do that either. To avoid the instability of capitalism and its huge social costs requires changing the system. That remains the basic issue for a new year and a new generation. Will they break today's version of a dangerous old taboo: never question the existing system?
I awoke around 3am last night. This has been happening quite frequently to me lately, and while I'm an early riser by nature as I grow older, 3 in the morning is a bit on the ridiculous side.
What awakens me, often in a mildly depressive panic, is the knowledge that I've wasted a good portion of my life.
I guess I'm wise enough today to know that lamenting or rehashing events in the past is pretty much a moot point, not to mention a complete waste of time. I can hear the voices of friends, family, counselors, peers, colleagues and ghostly whispers of countless faceless authors of self-help books whispering to me that I should let go of what's long ago done, stop worrying about the "if onlys," the 'woulda, shoulda couldas," etc, etc, etc.
Most of the time I'm good with letting the sleeping wolves lie, but those 3am moments of reflective clarity, when most of the rest of the world is asleep and I'm left with a VIP hotline to the collective conscience of the universe, I can't help but feel that I've squandered a damned big portion of the most precious gift any of us ever receive in our entire time here on planet earth.
There is some small consolation that I don't have to accept full and complete responsibility for the wastefulness.
Don't misunderstand me here, I take mega-responsibility, to be sure, and it's what flings me awake at o'dark-hundred in the wee hours of the morn, tripping on the stupidity of tossing away not just years, but decades of the only life I'll get to experience here on Ma Earth.
I get away with saying that I don't have to accept complete responsibility because, contrary to the wonderful dream they taught us in school about us being able to be "anything we want to be in the good ol U S of A," I've learned over the years that this is true only for a very small portion of the people who hear it.
For the rest of "We The People" who are lucky enough to find jobs, we're stuck with dead-end employment that borders on involuntary servitude. We're locked into these jobs because they keep us just barely afloat and we know to miss even one day of work could mean we're out on the street.
We're compelled to decide each month between paying the rent and feeding ourselves, which often entails buying the cheapest - and often most unhealthy - groceries we can find. As it stands today, there is not one county in the entire United States where a person earning minimum wage can afford a one bedroom apartment.
The garbage we're forced to eat as a direct result of our budget is loaded with fat, preservatives and chemicals, which then causes us health problems we don't have insurance for. We work ourselves to death all day, then hammer a few more nails into our coffins at night with the junk-food that sustains us. If our kids are forced to eat it, we now know lousy nutrition causes a host of issues that affect their physical, mental and emotional growth.
We don't have the time or energy to try and exercise because we're too busy working as much as possible to add a couple of extra bucks to the paycheck. We eat the worst food imaginable for our bodies because it's often the cheapest available to us, and we live under the constant stress poverty places on us.
Many of us turn to the cheap form of medicine for our anxiety, frustration, worry and stress; alcohol and/or drugs. This self-medication often causes its own health issues, both physical and mental, and exacerbates some of the chronic stuff we're already dealing with because of our lifestyle and food mandates. I'd like to say "choices" here, but the fact is, we're really forced into what we're able to select because of our limited budget.
Because we can't afford - or have been denied - health insurance by companies more concerned about their bottom line than our overall health, we're then forced to use emergency rooms for non-emergency needs because no one else will serve us without that plastic card. In one study done back in the 90s, it was found that "charges for all non-urgent ER care in the United States is $5 to $7 billion (Baker & Baker, 1994). And you can bet that this amount has risen substantially since the 90s.
Hmmm, forgive my digression here, but maybe hospitals ought to just take that $5 billion and use it to increase the minimum wage a bit, then subsidize some health insurance for those of us who can't afford it. I'd wager they'd more than make up the difference in savings on health care expenditures with fewer ER visits by those of us who currently have no other alternative. Ah, but what do I know, anyway.
Many of us can't begin to pay the bills associated with our health care. Since we can't afford preventative or corrective health care, by the time we buy the medicines we're prescribed by the ER docs to band-aid our chronic illnesses, we're left with damned near nothing for everything else. Most of us simply go without the meds in order to feed the self and the family and try to keep the lights on. Meanwhile, the bills come in from the ER visits, we can't pay them so we ignore them, and we end up putting the final nail into the credit coffin.
Now the fun really begins for us.
With bad credit, things folks take for granted, like getting utilities turned on, having a phone, or obtaining a bank account, become off-limits to us. If we've got jobs, we're forced to use check-cashing services - with hefty fees for the service - to get the white paper turned into green paper.
We can't rent many motel rooms, forget about renting a car, and we leave ourselves open to losing everything from a robbery because we're forced to carry cash everywhere we go.
Those of us with lousy or nonexistent credit know that we pay premium prices for everything we want, and most of the stuff we are allowed to buy is crap. Most folks with credit would never consider spending the criminally ridiculous cost to"rent to own" furniture, appliances or vehicles from one of those joints or the "buy here, finance here" car lots, yet for those without credit, this is about the only viable option available to us. Often the merchandise is substandard and the final cost, after all the "interest" is paid, would make a loan-shark green with envy.
The life of the poor is hard, damned hard, and one of the biggest bummers is that most folks don't realize they're on the trajectory to abject poverty until its waaaayyyy too late to do anything about it.
By the time we members of the "hairnet and nametag" crowd figure out we should have stayed in school and gone to college, we're so locked into the "poverty-wheel" of working every available minute in order to keep our heads above water that we literally have no time left to try and learn a trade or obtain a degree from a college.
Many of us, having been out of school for years, sometimes decades, can't even imagine ourselves returning to school and are terrified at the prospect. Frankly, most of us wouldn't know where to begin even if we could somehow manage to find the time - and the money - to take a class for a trade or a degree.
So we resign ourselves to the lives we're living and keep pushing pushing pushing ourselves into an early grave in order to keep a roof over our heads and enough food in our bellies to keep us from starving. We keep our fingers crossed that we'll be one of the lucky ones who hit the poor man's retirement fund - the lottery - and pray to God, Allah, Shiva, Buddha, the Higher Power and anything else we think might help change our destiny.
In the blink of an eye, you're living under a bridge somewhere, hitting the soup kitchens in donated clothes and wondering what the hell happened to your life....
The saddest part of this is the fact that there are actually some who wish they were never even born into life because things have been so bad for them for so long, they don't recall - and frankly may never have had - a life worth living.
I know this existence well. Not only have I lived it, I've been working with hundreds, thousands of folks who're living it now.
It's why I lay awake at night thinking I've wasted such a big portion of my life. I wonder, during those late-night hours, whether I could have made a bigger difference in my life, the lives of my family members and of those I work with every day. Would it have made a difference if I had gotten some direction, some guidance, some mentoring, some real help, back when I needed it the most; before I made decisions that forked me again and again down treacherous roads instead of jumping on the Easy-Street highway?
I'll never know the answer to that, but I do know that today, I understand the woulda, shoulda couldas in a way that allows me some peace. This lived experience, while hard to cope with on a personal level, provides me with an opportunity to tell my brothers what I saw.
In the end, if I can do that and help just one other person along my life's path, I've found redemption from a life wasted....
