My Trouble w/ the Lauryn Hill Reaction

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pop Culture, race

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"Ready or Not" (1996), Afrocentricity, Class Privilege, Criminal Justice System, Crying, Die Hard (1988), Federal Government, Hip-Hop, Income Tax Evasion, IRS, Lauryn Hill, Music and Politics, New Jersey, Newark New Jersey, Sentencing, Sobbing, Speaker John Boehner

House Speaker John Boehner sobbing in public (again), May 8, 2013. (http://www.goodbye-blue-monday.com/).

I am by no means a supporter of our slanted US justice system. It’s all too often slanted against the poor, of color and male. But I can’t sit around and watch folks gnash their teeth over the federal court in New Jersey sentencing her to three months in jail for over $1 million in income tax evasion.

Sure, it’s not fair. Perhaps even very unfair. We must keep in mind the simple fact that the IRS, et al. take years attempting to work with the rich (and yes, Lauryn Hill is a rich person) before putting a case together for the federal courts. It’s not as if the feds immediately swooped in, tasered Hill and then dragged her through the streets in chains on the way to court. After all, she didn’t file federal or state income tax returns on $2.3 million in income from ’05 through ’09 — for five years! Heck, if Willie Nelson could figure out a way to stay out of federal courts and prison while paying off $17 million in back taxes, then surely Hill could’ve done the same at some point.

Lauryn Hill in court for one of her sentencing hearings, April 22, 2013. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, given subject matter and public hearing.

Those who’ve compared drug-addled celebs like Lindsey Lohan to Lauryn Hill as a case of Black versus While and the criminal justice system are missing a couple of valuable points. One, Lohan’s cases have never been federal, with mandatory sentences included. Two, and this is way more important, the feds tend to be pretty unforgiving once they do bring a case against a rich person for income tax evasion (e.g., Al Capone, Wesley Snipes, Leona Helmsley).

As much as I like Lauryn Hill’s music, I may feel bad for her, but I’m not going to make a federal case out of her serving three months in a federal prison for tax evasion. She’s not Mumia Abu Jamal, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur or even Tupac Shakur. Maybe Hill should’ve heeded lyrics straight from The Fugees, adapted federal government-style: “Ready or not, here [they] come, you can’t hide (uhhhh-huhhh) /gonna find you, and take it slowly…” As for the “find you” part, I also have to misquote Die Hard (1988) here, courtesy of the character Hans Gruber: “when you steal $600, you can just disappear. When you steal [one] million, they will find you, unless they think you’re already dead.”

I’ll take crap for writing this I’m sure. But Hill will be breathing free air again before Columbus Day, if not sooner.

My Beef With Cory Booker’s Food Stamps Experiment

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Academy for Educational Development, C-Town, Cory Booker, Food Stamps, Food Stamps Experiment, hunger, Newark New Jersey, Nutrition, Omar Wasow, Poverty, Social Safety Net, Social Welfare, Stanford University, Welfare

Cory Booker at the 2011 Time 100 Gala, April 27, 2011. (David Shankbone via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

I like Cory Booker. I worked with someone at Academy for Educational Development in the mid-00s who told me stories about Booker while she knew him at Stanford and her contact with him over the years. I’ve admired his work in Newark, for the most part, and the fact that he’s been a personable, in-your-face Twitter-accessible mayor who has fought hard for his city over the past decade.

But this week-long “I feel your pain” publicity stunt through living on $30 in food stamps (the SNAP program) seems a bad idea at best, and just plain disingenuous otherwise. Booker’s argument has been the need to raise awareness of how difficult it is to live on food stamps for the most impoverished of us, in Newark or anywhere else in the US. After being critical of Booker’s slumming it via food stamps on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, I received this response from Booker through tech guru and Princeton doctoral candidate Omar Wasow:

“@decollins1969 @corybooker said you can’t love your neighbor if you don’t understand them & you can’t understand w/out shared experience”

Really? I didn’t know that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been homeless, old and sick and out of work before ramming through the Social Security Act of 1935! Or that Lyndon Johnson had been a sharecropper or beaten up for marching to Selma before pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965!

President Bill Clinton (in context of “I feel your pain” quote), July 23, 2009. (http://dailybail.com).

What worries me, though, more than anything else, is how messiah-like this tweet sounds. It would be a different story if so many politicians and journalists hadn’t run this experiment before (see my post “Slumming Lords Spinning Stories Out Of Suffering” from October ’10). It would be even more different if this experiment really opened up a dialogue on the paltry social safety net and deep poverty. Not to mention the working poor and the millions from the struggling middle class who have fallen into poverty since the start of the Great Recession more than four years ago.

But as someone who’s had way more than one week or one month’s worth of experience with poverty, WIC, welfare checks, case workers with Westchester County Department of Social Services, and of course, food stamps, I actually find these attempts to walk in the shoes of my youth — among millions of others who’ve lived in welfare poverty — insulting on so many levels (see my posts “The Five Sense of Poverty,” “Hunger,” and “Shopping at C-Town“).

Here’s what I lived with between ages twelve and seventeen (October ’82 through August ’87). As the second-oldest child and only other sane person in a household of six, then seven, then eight persons (including my four younger siblings, born between ’79 and ’84), I had many adult responsibilities. I negotiated over the phone with Con Edison and NYNEX/Bell Atlantic when we fell behind on the heat bill or the telephone bill. I walked my mom’s $275 rent check (often three weeks late in ’82 and ’83) over to the super’s office for payment, and usually was at the receiving end of verbal insults and threats for being late.

I went to Waldbaum’s, C-Town and other grocery stores almost every day after school, sometimes three times in one evening (because my mom often forgot items). I also washed clothes with my older brother Darren once a week, watched over my siblings, cooked about one out of every five meals from ’84 until I went off to college in ’87.

Lab mice “Avatars” implanted with cancer to treat cancer, October 5, 2012. (http://danisfoundation.org).

This is the short list. In doing all of this, especially once we went on welfare in April ’83 (after the birth of my now deceased sister Sarai), I learned a lot about how little Americans thought of the poor, and how little the federal government thought of people like me and my family. The average budget for my mom to raise a family of six kids with a consistently unemployed and wayward idiot (now late) stepfather was a monthly welfare check of $558, $75 in food stamps, and about $50 in WIC benefits.

Even in the best months, it meant a week to ten days with little or no food in the house. Great Northern beans and rice, $5 spaghetti and meat sauce dinners, and days without was a typical month. Unless, of course, my weekly weekend excursions to track down my father Jimme in Mount Vernon, the Bronx and sometimes in Midtown Manhattan at his favorite watering holes yielded enough extra funds to keep me, Darren and my family in food and clean clothes during the leaner times each month at 616.

So, you see Cory Booker, your publicity endeavor really teaches us little about the realities of poverty, hunger and nutrition for the poorest among us, whether in Newark, Mount Vernon, New York or the rest of the US. (Except that you have no experience stretching a dollar). Your food stamps experiment will do what it always does – get the media’s attention. But to understand the embarrassment, the cold stares, the harshness of what I went through and millions like me are going through now? One week and $30 isn’t even close to good enough.