Open thread for night owls: 'Hard Times USA' looks at how the poor are punished for being poor

On Monday, Alternet executive editor Don Hazen (the former publisher of Mother Jones magazine) announced the beginning of a new series, "Hard Times USA." Despite how grim much of this series is guaranteed to be, I have to say that I'm excited. I come from hard times myself, and although I've been fortunate in many, many ways, I've never forgotten where I came from or the plight of those who weren't so lucky. The series isn't just about what the situation is but makes suggestions on what we can do about it. Us. Not somebody else.

Many middle-class people who thought they had escaped hard times, or who never knew them, have in the past few years discovered otherwise. Some of these newly impoverished folks had looked with disdain on people they had viewed as losers or lazies. They discovered that much of the nation is, as Laura Clawson recently wrote, just one crisis and 90 days away from poverty: "[W]hat's particularly scary about these numbers is the realization of how fragile the middle-class lives of so many middle-class people are..."

The Alternet series began with two pieces. Part 1, Hazen says, "looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better."

Here is an excerpt from Part 2:

The ability of the U.S. to deal with problems of money, housing, healthcare, food and the basics of life for many millions of people, is pretty damn rotten. The problem is getting worse. Increasingly, as the gap between rich and poor keeps growing, more people may be less interested in and have less empathy for the people who are left out. That is what I am wondering about. Don Hazen Some of us were lucky, some privileged, and some of us have been able to achieve a level of economic security where we never have to worry about the necessities for the rest of our lives. But a very large number of Americans, a shocking number really, feel vulnerable every day of every week. Their future is unknown. They don't even how they are going to get through tomorrow. And it is quite a range of people. More than 100 million are teetering on the edge in the working/middle-class and more than a million, depending on how you count (812,000 people live in the entire city of San Francisco), are homeless for some part of the year, living on the streets, in cars, or bouncing from street to shelter, barely surviving. [...] I know it may seem outlandish, but there is very little chance things will change unless we take matters into our own hands. Everyone can do something constructive, but especially the 40 million people in our country who are the 'mass affluent" ' and the 1 percent who are the super-wealthy. We all got where we are for many reasons, but most of the reasons for success have to do with being born into a class and families with resources; we were able to go to college, often to good schools; we network with our friends and get more power, money and influence. Or we got lucky in other ways: sports, a special talent, or where we lived. I know, this isn't the way we normally think. We say: damn, the government is taking 35-40 percent of my money already, and I'm supposed to use more of it to help others? Well, yes, that is what I mean. A key way we can really help is to give parts of ourselves to the cause ' our time, our money, stuff we don't need, jobs we can give poor people, even temporary or part time. [...]

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