One wonders: Where can we, as an advocate community, most productively devote scarce time and resources?
I humbly submit: we should eliminate poverty.
I want to slay the dragon.
Poverty Kills
Even beyond its effect on civil rights, poverty is a killer worthy of eliminating.
In Texas, every fifth adult lives in poverty. 1-in-3 children live in poverty. In America as a whole, 1% of the population controls 40% of the nation's wealth; Texas is near the top of the worst culprits, with massive divides between the rich and everyone else.
And what does it mean to be poor?
Hunger: In Texas, 1-in-4 households (and 1-in-3 children) are "food insecure," meaning they make difficult decisions between paying for food or other necessities like rent, utilities or medicine. This is not a Charles Dickens novel, it's Texas in 2013.
Illness: In 2010, 1-in-4 Texans was insured. Have you ever been without health insurance? It means living with a tooth ache; it means hoping your nagging cough will go away instead of becoming worse; it means having nowhere to go if you find a lump that could be cancer.
Hopelessness: If you're poor, you might not have any way to deal with rats in your home. You might not be able to replace your child's tattered shoes. You might not be able to afford heat in winter or AC in summer.
Access to Justice: excluded from the courts
America still suffers from discrimination and hate; cheating and extortion; violence and tragedy. But you can often fight back, if you have the financial means.
Whenever I volunteer at a free legal clinic, I meet people who have fallen victim to blatant wrongdoing -- blatant violations of the law. The bad actor might be a bank, or a landlord, or a bureaucrat, but the common thread is someone blatantly violated the law. And yet, no matter how blatant, the person in front of me often has little recourse because he or she is poor.
Poverty effectively denies a person basic legal rights because the rights you have on paper are meaningless if you have no way to enforce them. If you can't hire an attorney, you're left up a creek if you fall victim to domestic violence, wrongful foreclosure, identity theft, or interference with custody of your children.... and the list goes on.
Democracy: ignored at the city dias and on the legislature's floor
The premise of democracy is that sovereignty flows from the people. Each person has inherent value; each person is entitled to liberty; and government only exists because we, as participants, want it. We are each supposed to have an equal say in how it operates. One person, one vote.
But that isn't reality. In the real world, wealthier people have more control over government. And that control allows wealthy people to keep and increase their wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Government dictates how money is raised -- either regressively (sales tax) or progressively (income tax). Government chooses how to distribute public money -- to help the wealthy (corporate welfare) or help the community (education, infrastructure). And it passes laws that give people power over others: such as patents that make medicine more expensive to inflate a drug company's profits at the expense of the sick. It can give sweetheart deals to Halliburton, while constraining or removing the legal rights of the average, injured person (tort reform).
The government has phenomenal power in our lives, and as long as we have wealth and poverty, the wealthy will have greater control of government. This alone is enough reason to attack inequality.
BUT HOW?
What should we fight for?
Public Education: Education is the best ticket to better paying jobs, and public education is the cornerstone of democracy, but Texas chronically underfunds its schools. Even within individual school districts, where you might naively expect evenhanded treatment, you find funding inequities and policy decisions that hurt schools in minority and low-income communities
Fair Housing: People living in concentrations of poverty (poor neighborhoods) have to overcome greater obstacles to rising out of poverty, because they have less access to good-paying jobs and to high-quality education. And in the mean time, they suffer from worse housing stock, lack of health care, and more expensive transportation. We should be challenging counties and municipalities reluctant to remedy our history of segregation by furthering fair housing.
Workers' Rights: We will always have a tiered society until workers' rights are protected. Even the sparse set of rights guaranteed to workers under Texas law are routinely violated in many industries, such as construction and the service sector. No one can disagree a boss should pay an employee what he or she was promised for a day's labor, but wage theft is endemic, exceeding $750 million annually in Houston alone, sinking whole communities further into poverty. We have to work as a community to hold unscrupulous employers accountable.
Voting Rights: Politicians in the 21st century are still working to disenfranchise voters, and roll back the progress of the last century. The state of Texas is among the worst perpetrators, drawing political boundaries specifically to dilute minority voting power and a Voter ID law to bar voters from the ballot box -- all to protect the rich, white, conservative political establishment in a minority-majority state. We must fight disenfranchisement of the poor because it will only perpetuate the massive wealth inequities that are the product of state-level decisions on taxing and spending.
What strategies can we use?
1. Impact Litigation: We, as attorneys, should be focusing our legal work in fields and for clients that attack the institutional structures that perpetuate poverty. This means lawsuits challenging Voter ID laws, inadequate school funding, misguided public housing policies, or discriminatory hiring practices.
2. Public participation in democracy: Democracy requires transparent decisionmaking and an opportunity to make your voice heard. We can further transparency by enforcing laws that govern open meetings, public information, and disclosures of campaign contributions and lobbying. We can help communities make their voices heard by helping with public complaint procedures; and by collecting, organizing, and disseminating the community's hardships to decisionmakers and the wider public.
3. Supporting community organizations: Perhaps most importantly, we should nurture and protect community organizations that teach low-income people how to bridge the limitations of poverty and understand the reality of their own political power. Community organizations bring more people into the struggle; engage those most affected, who understand the evils they're facing in a way no one else can; and have a lifespan beyond that of a single, charismatic leader. Attorneys should not be in the vanguard of genuine, community organizations, but we can and should protect their flanks and help them overcome legal obstacles.
