Help from and for Incoming Wounded
&
Info on Places To Be Avoided

Stories and discoveries from
comrades, about shady characters, bad deals,
especially unfriendly corporations,
places where the climate
-- environmental, economic or social --
is becoming hostile,
news from the old front.

The Route out of Poverty...

Undoing the Ehrenreich Curse

Normally, I´m a fan of Barbara Ehrenreich´s work but her latest book, Nickel and Dimed, though fascinating reading, is propaganda and lays a curse on the poor, which no one needs who´s struggling with that adversity.

Ehrenreich´s points are multiple but the one about there being no way out of the dilemmas she faced was the major one she´s promoting. Precisely the one that I think her book/experience doesn´t validate...

I think when we promote the idea that people´s situations are grindingly unending, we do them no service... instead of contending, along with Ehrenreich, that their lives are hopeless she, and we, should be pointing out the routes to escape as well as the deadends, the appalling injustices and the stupid prejudices...

So where were the escape routes she denies existed?

First of all, she was very close to getting on her feet in each location in spite of herself. Specifically she threw away opportunities to share accommodations in Key West and Minneapolis/StPaul with co-workers she liked or with friends she made.. This, in spite of her recognition of the viability of such a shortterm strategy to the benefit of each, splitting and saving half the rent til each could afford the deposit on an apartment of their own, whenever they wished later, probably within a couple months...

She made other choices as well that revealed her inability or unwillingness to think "working class"... Some were patently questionable but swept aside as journalistically motivated, like always renting a car because to ride public transit was "uninteresting"... Imagine that! Others were unrecognized, or as in the case of the food budget, were actually bragged about as being savvy and streetsmart, relying on her workingclass ancestry to give her claims undeserved credibility.

Case in point: food budgets... Let´s be specific... Ehrenreich boasted that she managed to live on a food budget of $9/day, part of a ridiculous claim to an pseudo-academic B+... There´s an unthinking mindset that seems to accept the propaganda -- advertising -- of the companies that sell packaged foods as "products" being *the way* to eat... It´s quite easy and very healthful to manage on $2-$3/day per person if you do your research...

Basically eat raw, fresh, unprocessed produce, strictly in season and on special; buy bulk dry goods like beans of all varieties, rice, potatoes, nuts and milk; rely on crockpot, simplicity, creative children´s recipes, and yogurt making. Gradually expand your pantry of canned, out-of-season foods, stocking up on specials, especially the most useful favorites. You can manage very comfortably by shopping in any large decent grocery, especially if you have a car as she did, with only 2 or 3 trips a year to a warehouse store for bulk items though some groceries will, or are beginning to, stock these too. These things cost, still insisting on quality, in the vicinity of 3-13cents an ounce (16cents/oz for cheese and another level for a couple main spices) will provide a 2000calorie diet for just under $2/day accounting for peels, pits and such.

She apparently way overspent on foods, paper, soaps and plastic... yet she repeatedly claimed she had mastered this area of her experiment... and used it to conclude that "making it out" was simply not doable, emphasized right in the subtitle... On (Not) Making It In America... But, if her contention is that she missed the boat because she was busy writing then that completely undoes her conclusion that there´s no way out...

Other hints also suggest that she couldn´t seem to shed a middle class bias, ranging from her laundry standards (no Dundee in her ancestry) to her dependence on vending machines and excesses in clothing budget such as buying a $9 belt instead of shopping at Walmart. When you´re working class, trying to escape the bottoms, you must stay on target, not throw away all your progress on an impulse to splurge like her dinner at Applebees that cost the equivalent of a week´s food budget...

Not that you won´t entertain yourself but your pampering will be aimed more squarely at feeling good without hurting yourself!... Sharing your food with a little stray in the park, sampling the beautiful resources in the library... The idea that *spending* is the way to solve problems is so middle-upperclass, and even for them it´s erroneous and empty...

What the middleclass sees as appropriate is simply not the same benchmark as the issue of whether you can make it out of the bottoms... Ehrenreich only proved that you should not attempt to fake living like you´re middleclass when you´re making minimum wages, not that you can´t make it out of grinding poverty, yet she claimed to have proved the latter...

As long as people don´t know there´s a genuinely accessible way out, then they´ll settle for bread and circuses or other forms of numbing... and now with welfare reform, even the bread is gone... yes, dear, we´re from the govt and we´re here to help you... not... and never was... our hierarchy requires the presence of "losers" but if the "losers" find the way out, then what will the "winners" do?

I lived for a while in the mountains around Charlottesville and met families there who had a pretty decent life on one income that didn´t break the 5 digit barrier... so obviously these families have learned something that seems a secret to those who think like B.Ehrenreich.

BTW, the families with the secret? they were all unschoolers... in getting free of the education establishment, they have learned to be creative, to think their way around problems, and to put their energies where they get solutions... they lived on the fringes in many ways but they were anything but backward... they may have kept a few chickens and done kitchen gardening, maybe a goat, but they had computers and competed in ethnic dance, road dirt bikes and hiked the hills to learn the nature of their part of the world... their homes were unique and their children played with other homeschoolers, ran their own theatre events and learned their parents´ skills as well as pursuing their own dreams... nor were those dreams limited.. the homeschooled kids I know who are at the career stage have amazingly varied skills and work... from museum curator (costume specialty) to musicians to dogsled/wilderness experts to bomb defusing to sushi chef to midwifery... no numb ones here... many do retain direct ties to siblings and parents, very extended family, with stints on the road, but each is pursuing their own dreams... and usually their parents eventually do too...

Ok, so let´s do look at the numbers and see if we can find the path out of poverty, even beyond Ehrenreich´s goal of survival.... suppose you started as Ehrenreich did, on $500/month, spending $9/day/person on food and living paycheck to paycheck... then that effort spent -- initially taking persistence til habits change -- on a reduction to $3/day/person (once you know that it´s possible and a few basics of the scheme) would save you, our hypothetical single woman (who shared her apartment with a co-worker she felt safe with) about $180 per month, as if you´d received a 33% pay raise for your extra effort... try getting that from the folks Ehrenreich worked for...

This strategy is even more powerful for families... In such a case, that said hypothetical family man (4 in the house?) saved almost $180 per week, every week... Where´s he going to get that kind of overtime at depressed, maybe even minimum wages... let´s see, time-and-a-half starting from say $6/hour, that´s nearly 20 hours of overtime a week... you just liberated the man!! now he can get out of debt with no overtime, which was unavailable anyway on a regular basis and he would have way more time to do his own things and the overtime would have been taxable besides...

As best we can, with creativity of all sorts, we´re suggesting making do with what we have til we´ve worked out the details... this is no half-cocked scheme, we take each step thoughtfully.. it may seem too mundane but the fact that continually emerges is how wasteful this society is, so there are opportunities all around us involving little or no cost... we are so mesmerized by salaries that we´ve totally lost sight of the importance of daily living so the collusion of power and greed has our poor fellow running pillar-to-post trying to make a bad blueprint work...

While he and his family are making these lifestyle changes, he now has a bit of time to think and plan... believe me, at this point it will become an obsession... having "met" those who "made it" in our books and videos instead of Ehrenreich´s, he should be beginning to get his resources lined up... he has a lot of experimenting with structural improvements and energy efficiency to do next...

First we show him construction techniques that most of the building industry in this country has no clue about... ferrocement and rammed earth are first on the list... no more leaky house, when they get that far... a group here in town shows women in small classes how to handle basic plumbing, carpentry and electrical skills in 6nights (1/week) of hands-on-classes... add that little bit to his/her list, good in their apartments or homes...

Suppose we now show him how to cut his heating, cooling and energy bills by another $30-$40/month, almost another 10% raise... Simply setting the thermostat 5degF lower in winter and higher in summer (with appropriate clothing), cycling the water heater if it´s electric, gradually switching to compact fluorescents, and more... he´s now getting the hang of what space and resource requirements his unique home-to-be must provide...

As for transportation, a little time spent with consumer reports will show that there are models and makes that you want and unless you like suffering you would prefer to get a 10 year old *right* one than an economy model of any other year or type... Get a decent mechanic to check it out... you´ll need him/her longterm so this search is worth your time... Read a manual to do the simple routine monitoring and tasks, like oil, radiator check and fuses, battery and tire pressure.. As for the feasibility of a couple sharing the car for work, that´s not necessarily as difficult as some seem to think... we´ve done it for years at a stretch, at various times, including living out in the boonies... some of us use the strategy of two older cars so if one´s not running the other one will serve but we very nearly are driving one at a time...

If our hypothetical family has young children, is new to the homeschooling process, has a difficult district, or needs to experiment with resources, look for a cyber charter school or join one of the many unschooling groups in the area... The benchmark cybercharter in Ohio is OHDELA and they provide computer with internet resources, support, and a choice of curricula, then get to know the homeschoolers and what they do locally... in addition to the learning advantages for the children, many seem to have members who run co-ops or would join one that you organize...

And children who are older are surely important too, for exactly the benefits that clans have enjoyed before the corporate world seduced people with their brass rings and their demands for mobility... with a multi-generational household, with multi-hands to help, things are more manageable....

The problem here is the notion that this return of older children to their parents´ is undesirable and should be only temporary... I´ll bet matriarchs and patriarchs of a few generations ago would have looked at the social and economic structures that were making things pillar-to-post through no fault of his or her family and said let´s look somewhere new together...

For example, the workingclass families I know in the rural area where I´m planning on building engage in a sort of communal planning, very clan like... the families pool resources... among the things I´ve seen that worked would be to progressively move the family out of the citylife to a new more promising area, probably very rural...

Parents or grandparents with homes of their own paid off could look for bigger homes way out, maybe even in need of fixing, since there are now hands available... the ones who are younger and less fortunate could apply for the self-build programs under the dept of agriculture... those programs form teams of home-needy families and guide them through the process of building their own home by handling the more technical parts and arranging very favorable mortgages... the families do about 60% or more of the work cutting the cost, but it will be standard construction so you will need to be alert to ways to augment their design, likely by using that research that led to ferrocement and rammed earth... although the dept of agriculture´s self-build program is a way to get started, you will need improvements such as those in one or more of the books -- Rob Roy´s or Ken Kern´s -- which will show you myriad ways to use what´s at hand, at your hand...

Later, out in the country after that smaller mortgage is paid off, elderly parents could offer to sell the house to their children while living there, taking back the mortgage so that the young family can get decent rates -- less than the bank charges -- and the parents would have a better income because the rates could still be higher than they could get from the banks had they deposited the money from selling the house without taking the mortgage back... check the tax impacts for the individual situation... but this version of the scheme is only a detour because there´s an important ultimate home in their future...

Meanwhile, by brainstorming together the family can also help one another avoid those predators that prey on the desperate and the unfamiliar... that sort of solidarity seems almost too clanlike for our "upwardly mobile" society clinging to corporate propaganda and school´s alienating effects on families... their little household is starting to learn kitchen gardening and will be supplying a significant increment of their food, further reducing that $3/person/day... the goal is not "income" but "net income" and the key is mobilizing their growing family solidarity...

The other factor that makes this more doable is another effect of lifestyle changes that makes you less dependent on clinging to the highest paying job available... so moves to more free and hospitable areas are more doable, whether the problem was in work environment or in home/neighborhood... for example, a $7/hr job that requires an unpaid extra 1/2hr drive each way is really only worth a $6.50/hr local job, just on gas, insurance and taxes, not to mention added wear and tear on your car and you... making an apparent 7% paycut more than worth it... remember it´s the *net income* that counts... those nickel and dime jobs are not quite that difficult to arrange if you´re clear about your goals... remember we´re going somewhere... not just out to the country? Not that your choices shouldn´t reflect a relationship to your interests and needs but most people are not one dimensional...

The first home in the country is temporary... Though resources are accumulating fairly healthily now, they definitely do not want to become middleclass and fall back into the same errors that make them vulnerable to plant shutdowns, the increasingly frequent job "re-engineering", the health crisis, the accident, nor do they want to be shackled to the ratwheel for all their natural life... the house, though modified to be economically better, is still too vulnerable to problems, from maintenance expenses to being an albatross in times of adversity...

No they can´t just go buy their way into standard housing and expect to make it anywhere, city or rural... to do things better, it´s DIY -- do-it-yourself-- for a lot of these techniques because the industry has no equivalent... hence these techniques are best done by the homeowner... industry doesn´t like those techniques, calls them "labor intensive" because they don´t want to really work on getting you a home that performs so well you won´t need another, nor maintenance either... but you, the homeowner-to-be can build, for example, an underground, rammed earth home for under $20 a sqft and completely eliminate the need for hvac so your heating/cooling energy bills as well as your mortgage are gone! and that´s not exactly spartan (indoor spa and greenhouse, 3 baths and computer room)... as another benchmark to grasp the implications of that price, consider the modest size 1000sqft 2bedroom/2bath ranch would cost a welcomingly achievable $20,000 total, which all the intervening savings has finally now put into reach...

When they learned rammed earth and ferrocement, the potential of an ultimately liberating home, DIY and wonderfully supportive of their family´s security became a possibility... in addition, they´re not going to build on some teeth-grinding schedule like the construction industry because they´re less constrained by borrowed money...

The opportunity in the country is land that´s not encumbered by outmoded building codes and other forms of the heavy hand of govt... but you can´t do these things by listening to authorities in the business world nor academia and certainly not the govt... nor can you just go do it tomorrow, with minimal prep... it takes experimenting and sharing ideas with those who are also working on these targets.

With no mortgage, no hvac bill and around $700-1100/person/year for food, there´s no fears, no threats, no screw-ups.. and no taxes to fund warmongering, bottomfeeding govt... not Ehrenreich´s $500 per MONTH per person with no hope...

When people are so miserable that they require numbing for all the foreseeable future, there´s something you have to ask when you know that others have escaped... where´s the jackbooted prison guard with the barbed wire fence... it´s just a big shellgame, with the con artists labeling their victims as hopeless welfare cheats... I´m not saying the solution is quick, far from it... nor is it ready made, but it´s out there... it´s possible but not if you constantly think "hopeless"... if the people, we want to help, knew others make it to a better place and some of that history, examples and details so they know that the tricks are not hollywood nor lottery nor social climbing nor fast-money schemes, I happen to believe they will find their way.. the only change in attitude we´re after is to foster a sense of possibility... would you deny them even that? Certainly not when we can see actual paths available...

As for what many misguided activists would like to see, namely environmental reforms and ownership reforms and development of innercity communities and even tax reforms... well now those are pipe dreams because they depend on govts and corporations doing what´s best for us... when was the last time that happened? talk about zero probability, guaranteed not in a distorted 2-tier society of haves and havenots... in fact our poor hypothetical family has more latitude our way than the fantasy of reforms the activists -- (and the politicians who encourage them when it´s campaign time) -- are imagining.... (oh yes, did I mention that those nonstandard construction methods are "green" -- environmentally friendly so the next generation won´t regret the choice)

As for whether escape in our one-size-fits-all being too confining that´s dismissible on multiple bases, the most obvious of which is the custom designed home that they live in.. and add to that the now massively independent financial freedom they enjoy... they have no mortgage, minimal taxes, no heating/cooling, very low food bills... they are intimately acquainted with libraries, near and far... they have time, free time, and the creativity to pursue their individual interests, sans education establishment dictating their learning, taking whatever courses, one place or another, not for a piece of paper but to accomplish their own personal goals... low income is not the issue, substantive net discretionary income is their solution...

Meanwhile your hypothetical city dwellers left behind with their standard issue lives, are still working from January thru August just to pay their mortgage, and their taxes, getting angrier... according to Rob Roy, even the medieval serfs had it better, only owing their services to the established local tyrant for something like 3-4 months a year in exchange for tenancy and protection, their equivalent of mortgage and taxes...

A living wage is an interesting concept but as we´ve just demonstrated you can live very well on a whole lot less than the amount defined by your favored city dwelling serfs... that lifestyle is, simply put, unsustainable and the solution is to get a life not a wage...

© JHR.

The Importance of Not Spending

Simplicity and Feigning Weakness

Now more than ever the most potent vote you have for directing your future is each and every purchase you make. With each spending decision you are reinforcing what businesses and industries will be strengthened and which will be reduced in this vulnerable transition period. Energy efficiency, thrift store treasures, upping your diet-percentage of raw, unprocessed food, -- all offer major leverage on your net wellbeing as well as making every other purchase count extra.

Strategically, we´re feigning weakness while building our strength and directing the economy toward sustainable existence on this planet. By carefully choosing exclusively those products and services that fit with our longterm goal of sustainable living, we´re leaning our weight over the side of the ship and tightening the turning circle to steer the ship clear of the shoals, boosting our solidarity with those for whom simplicity is already a necessity. What an amazing good fortune to have such total congruence between goals and means, to magnify the effectiveness of our group of socio-economic sailors.

© JHR. Horizontal Bar

LastStraw Revolution, LSR, a feature of bergerac.tv

	As a service to our online readers, we will send you an e-mail notification of new additions, if you wish. Simply write us. or subscribe to LSR_e to join our discussion. Always free and the signup is quick and easy.
	Your messages, your ´dispatches from the front´ happily accepted via email. Please indicate whether your message and/or name may be used for publication as we would like these pages to be a collaborative venture, an exchange between and among experimenters.

< More Coming Soon >

Help from and for Incoming Wounded & Info on Places To Be Avoided

Stories and discoveries from comrades, about shady characters, bad deals, especially unfriendly corporations,places where the climate -- environmental, economic or social -- is becoming hostile,news from the old front.

The Route out of Poverty...

Undoing the Ehrenreich Curse

The Importance of Not Spending

Simplicity and Feigning Weakness

As a service to our online readers, we will send you an e-mail notification of new additions, if you wish. Simply write us. or subscribe to LSR_e to join our discussion. Always free and the signup is quick and easy.

Your messages, your ´dispatches from the front´ happily accepted via email. Please indicate whether your message and/or name may be used for publication as we would like these pages to be a collaborative venture, an exchange between and among experimenters.

Help from and for Incoming Wounded
&
Info on Places To Be Avoided

Stories and discoveries from
comrades, about shady characters, bad deals,
especially unfriendly corporations,
places where the climate
-- environmental, economic or social --
is becoming hostile,
news from the old front.

As a service to our online readers, we will send you an e-mail notification of new additions, if you wish. Simply write us. or subscribe to LSR_e to join our discussion.
Always free and the signup is quick and easy.

Your messages, your ´dispatches from the front´ happily accepted via email.

Please indicate whether your message and/or name may be used for
publication as we would like these pages to be a collaborative
venture, an exchange between and among experimenters.