John (a false name) stands at the street corner that I pass by every morning in Oakland, when I walk my dog. An elder black man in his late sixties, John wears the same brown jacket each day, through summer heat and fall chill, and a weathered baseball hat. He shuffles up to cars that line up to caravan over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco and asks, “Do you have fifty cents?” John is also a mobile storefront for “loosies”—or, individually sold cigarettes—hawking them to neighborhood residents for a quarter a piece. On a good day, John pockets $20, a helpful supplement to his monthly Social Security payments, which he says are his only source of income otherwise.

Robert Neuwirth, author of the new book “The Stealth of Nations,” would say that John is a member of System D, an informal economy involving 1.8 billion people (that’s half of the workers in the world) who make their money doing jobs “that fly under the radar, that don’t get registered, incorporated, or licensed, that are not paying taxes (or may be paying less than they should), and are somehow camouflaging their operations.” Neuwirth stresses that his definition “rules out criminal enterprises—those businesses that commit a crime, regarding what they do, and not how they do it.” Excluding activities like drug smuggling, for example, from the informal economy, it still accounts for $10 trillion in global trade annually.

In this country, Neuwirth told me, the informal economy makes up a deceptively small slice of our gross domestic product, 8 to 9 percent, but that translates into $1 trillion in economic activity. And that number is growing. “[There’s] no question that in hard times, when people are desperate for extra income, moonlighting and other forms of cash-only work become important survival mechanisms,” explained Neuwirth.

This can take the form of a teacher, who lost her job and is now running a childcare center out of her home. Or, my friend Marites (also a false name), an Asian-American woman in her mid-thirties who quit her white-collar job only to find reemployment difficult. She survives on the cash tips she earns when volunteering for an LGBT jitney service. These sorts of off-the-books hustles are keeping many families afloat these days, because not much else is forthcoming from the public or private sector.

President Obama’s $447 billion jobs pitch has fizzled in the Senate, even as Majority Leader Harry Reid tries to revive pieces of it (like a $60 billion measure to strengthen transportation infrastructure), a Sisyphean task. The House, on the other hand, agreed to pass a tax measure, with both parties celebrating this transcendence over party politics. But as Jennifer Steinhauer notes for the New York Times, legislators merely repealed a tax measure that hadn’t even been implemented yet. That’s what passes for job creation these days. And as an employer, the government shed 34,000 workers in September, the bulk due to austerity measures in cities and counties.

Meanwhile, in September, the private sector created about 100,000 new jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a mere 7 percent of jobs needed to meaningfully reduce the 14 million people now unemployed, or 4 percent if you count the 25 million unemployed and underemployed. A recent new National Employment Law Project report, “Filling the Good Jobs Deficit,” estimated that we’re running an 11 million-job deficit, when you count both the jobs we lost in the Great Recession and those needed to keep up with population growth. The report goes on to say that any growth in employment that we have experienced has been in bad jobs, paying lower wages.

What score would the informal economy earn, I wonder? Neuwirth agreed with me that informal economies may offer more opportunities at present for people of color and Native Americans than the formal sector. “[Poor] people and people of color have historically been ignored and redlined by financial institutions. At the same time, governments are also hard-up, so they are raising the costs of licenses and inspections,” he expalined. “This double-bind makes it impossible for people to start businesses through approved channels.”

Opportunities created in the informal sector also stay within the communities where they’re launched, Neuwirth added. “A local vendor who is your neighbor tends to spend money in the neighborhood. This means that the money he or she earns circulates in the community and doesn’t leave the area to feed corporate profits. Street vendors buy in small quantities, so they also tend to buy from other local merchants. So the informal economy is actually an important tool for community economic empowerment and autonomous development.”

Perhaps a better frame for thinking about exchanges outside of state intervention and capitalism is the community economy, also known as solidarity economy, where members of the community collectively own and operate the means of production, so to speak. This is a better catch-all term because it’s not defined by what it’s not—the formal capitalist economy—but by what it’s for—the needs of the community. (Anthropologist Keith Hart, credited with coining the term informal economy in the 1970s, has similar issues with it.) A community economy collectivizes the struggle we all share to sustain ourselves during this endless recession; that’s unlike the informal economy, in which each individual hustles to get by.

Pockets of community economies are flourishing across the nation, as people decide to take their economic resilience into their own hands. Alliance to Develop Power, for instance, in western Massachusetts, is an example I’ve written about previously. They own and operate a community economy worth over $80 million, diversified in tenant housing cooperatives and a worker-owned contracting firm, creating 60 jobs for its members. Similar projects are afoot in New York City, some showcased in a series of film shorts called “Portraits of the Solidarity Economy.” The film will premiere Nov. 12 in New York, details here.

Activist Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez once wrote in an essay that “there is no separating my life from history.” And it’s true: her life is like a thread weaving through the movements for self-determination and justice.  Born in 1925, she has lived more than nine lives: as a member of New York’s heady literati in the 1940s and 50s, a link between the Black Power and Chicano movements in the 1960s, a feminist critic of the sexism and homophobia within Third World solidarity groups here in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, and a respected public intellectual in the left throughout her entire career.

In March 2000, Betita authored an essay for Colorlines that asked “Where Was the Color in Seattle?” engaging a new generation of organizers of color, wanting to make the link between global capitalism abroad and austerity measures impacting communities of color, here at home.  Connections, wrote Betita, “absolutely crucial if we are to make Seattle’s promise of a new, international movement against imperialist globalization come true.”  It was through this essay that I first came into contact with Betita and her ideas, as a young organizer of color both influenced by the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), yet also critical of a movement that was largely comprised of white, middle class males.  Her words helped me think about how inclusion figured in other struggles, such as the antiwar movement and, more recently, Occupy Wall Street.

It was with these questions in mind that I had the privilege to engage both Betita and her old friend Olga Talamante in dialogue this past Sunday.  The two have a friendship going back more than 35 years. They first met when Olga was released from prison in Argentina, where she was incarcerated for one year as a political prisoner, and was tortured the hands of the right-wing Peronist dictatorship.  Now, Olga heads the Chicana/Latina Foundation, which develops the leadership of young Latinas, and is active with local LGBT advocacy groups.

Olga and I visited Betita in an assisted living home in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury area, where she was recently moved, bearing ice cream and chocolate (she has a sweet tooth).  Betita suffered from a stroke three years ago.  Since then, her cognitive functions and memory have been slipping away, a tragedy for a life so rich with experiences.  Her friends have rallied to support her, starting a Betita Martinez Fan Club, to organize support and monetary contributions for her care.

But here are snippets of the conversation we got to have:

Colorlines.com: I want to preface this by saying that we at Colorlines approached you to honor as a part of Latino heritage month.  But, we also have complicated feelings about it and my colleagues and I thought that you would too. So, my first question to you is what do you think of Latino heritage month?

Olga Talamante: The media and corporations celebrate one month as Latino heritage month.  But, it’s much more complicated than that.

Betita Martinez: Frozen symbols.  Even Latina heritage is a frozen symbol already, frozen in its definition of what Latina means and what heritage means.  We have to be careful of encouraging it, the symbolization, this point cannot be emphasized enough.

CL: You have played an important role at the intersections of many important movements. [For example, you ran the New York office of SNCC in the 1960s as a Latina.] How did you develop this intersectional analysis?

BM: That has been a wonderful opportunity, to be at those intersections.  The intersections have always been there, people were waiting to see that the intersections were being made.  I was just lucky, I happened to come along during those moments.

OT: You articulated what many of us felt in those times.  You said it.

BM: That’s a big honor.  I am happy when people saw the connections before I even made them.  I didn’t want to be ahead, I wanted to be with the people in the moment.  But, you end up being ahead because you’re different.  That’s the irony of it.

CL: What made you different?  Why did you change your name from Liz Sutherland [an Anglicized version, using your mother’s maiden name] to Betita Martinez?

BM: My mother played a role in that, even indirectly, because her mother’s name is Phillips.  And, she was a very Phillips kind of person born from Tacoma Park, Maryland.  She married my father who worked at the Mexican embassy, while she worked at the Swedish embassy.  So, her mind was already working in multi-directions.  So, it helped me to have a multiple sense of reality and identity, right there.  It made a lot of difference to me: I couldn’t be a simple two-dimensions; I had to be multi-dimensional.

CL: What inspired you to link the Black Panthers with the UFW [who were organizing migrant farmworkers]?

BM: The connections between people and their cultures are very important.  When we make those links, we strengthen those capacities to be human, in the best sense.  [She started to cry with emotion.]  It’s always there, hiding in the rocks, we have to give it a chance to grow.  A big chance.

OT: That’s what the occupiers of Wall Street are doing right now. Lots of people, workers and students, the young and the old.  It’s an evolving movement, changing every day.  New ones are springing up in cities across the country.

BM: [Occupy] is a real place for people to talk, to blossom.  How beautiful, how exciting!

CL: Your essay Where’s the Color in Seattle is inspiring many organizers of color to ask similar questions about the #Occupy movement: Where are the people of color?

OT: I’m excited some people of color are participating, but we should be the majority.  [Occupy] should be led by people of color. We’re the ones suffering from unemployment, from the recession, and from banks being bailed out.

BM: I hope that I’ve been an inspiration for young women and young women of color activists.  I don’t think about my work in the way that you talked about.  It’s an honor, it’s a legacy to maintain.

CL: What advice would you give to young women of color organizers today, on how to sustain themselves in the movement, as mothers?  [Betita wrote in her essay Neither Black nor White in a Black-White World that she “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”]

BM: We don’t think about this.  It’s an issue we have to think about.  Women do both, raise a family and participate in the struggle, we have to make them connect.

OT: It’s an issue when you were doing this work and continues today.  I work with young Latina college students.  This is a key issue because many of them work and go to school.  Many are activists; many are mothers.  They are doing all three things.  I don’t have one formula except to say that it has to be part of the discussion, otherwise it’s your problem, you have to balance everything, you have to be superwoman.  We have to make it not the individual’s problem, but the movement’s.  We have to setup time and resources that can help women be a part of the movement, because if being a mother or working prevents you from being part of the movement, then it’s not working.

BM: Amen.

To read more about Betita’s life and work, see Tony Platt’s essay The Heart Just Insists.

Gwai Boonkeut suffers from severe heart disease.  He doesn’t smoke, has no family history of diabetes or heart problems, and he’s in his mid 50s — about 10 years younger than the average age for men who suffer from their first heart attack.  A doctor told Boonkeut that his heart operated at a third of the capacity of a normal heart.  Boonkeut, who supports his family by working as a school janitor, had to cut back his hours because of his health.

Boonkeut moved his family to Richmond, California in 1980 from Laos to escape the violence of the Vietnam War, where he lost his mother, two brothers, and a niece.  However, life in Richmond wasn’t any better.  In 2004, his 15-year-old daughter Chan was mistakenly targeted by gang members and killed at the family’s front door. Boonkeut’s older son was caught up drug use.

The city is dominated by the Chevron corporation, which operates massive oil refineries, spewing hazardous toxins in the air. Boonkeut is a member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a community based group advocating for the health and livelihoods of members such as Boonkeut.

Richmond’s residents, mostly black, Latino, and South Asian, suffer from higher rates of death from heart disease and cancer than surrounding communities, according to the documentary ”Unnatural Causes“ by the California Newsreel.  Children are hospitalized for asthma at twice the rate than surrounding counties.

Now, residents are teaming up with community groups like APEN to paint their own vision of a healthy, sustainable future.

In March 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tenn. to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers who toiled for poverty wages in horrendous working conditions. Following King’s assassination there on April 4, the workers won legal recognition for their union.

Their victory was a landmark in the struggle of Blacks to reap the economic benefits of the civil rights movement. However, the modest gains that followed in the ensuing decades for some middle and working-class Blacks have been dramatically eroded in the past decade by a wave of home foreclosures and an official unemployment rate of 16.7 percent — a trend made worse by recent attacks on public sector workers and the services they provide.

Such is the case in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council reached a budget deal in June that included layoffs of a thousand city workers. Most belong to District Council 37 whose membership is majority Black and Latino. The layoffs of school aides, parent coordinators and other non-teaching personnel, some of whom earn as little as $11,000 a year, are slated to begin Oct. 7.

The hardest-hit schools will be in poor, predominantly people-of-color neighborhoods like Washington Heights, Harlem, East New York and East Flatbush while middle class neighborhoods in South Brooklyn and Staten Island will be barely affected, according to a report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.

Similar developments have unfolded across the country as politicians and the media blame teachers, nurses, bus drivers, letter carriers, social workers and other public servants earning living wages and pensions for budget shortfalls.

The undertone of this slash-and-burn approach is racialized. As my colleague at Colorlines.com, Kai Wright, wrote earlier this year, the widespread images of public employees as lazy and overpaid have “the faint outline of familiar caricatures — welfare queens, Cadillacs in the projects, Mexican freeloaders.”

Of course, not all 21 million public employees are equal. The United States has a vast repressive apparatus composed of hundreds of thousands of federal, state, county and local police and prison guards, most of whom are white and male. They have endured far fewer layoffs and have not been vilified like public workers who provide social services. This is because the right opposes downward redistribution of wealth and power but sees the repressive work of the police as a vital legitimate public function.

Equal Opportunities

The public sector has historically bolstered families of color, in particular Black workers, both through social services and as a source of employment. UC Berkeley labor policy analyst Steven Pitts found in a recent study that the public sector was “the single most important source of employment” for Blacks, who were 30 percent more likely to be employed as a government worker than any other race. Black workers in the public sector also earn wages comparable to what white workers earn, reducing the racial wage gap that plagues most occupations.

Equal employment opportunity guidelines and affirmative action mandates ensure that government employers seek out qualified people of color for the public sector. This offers a level of accountability not possible in the private sector. When the public sector swelled under programs created during the New Deal and the Great Society, so did employment of workers of color. By the 1960s unions recognized the demographic change in the public sector and embraced Blacks as members, ensuring that they earned living wages and supporting benefits.

With an unionization rate that hovered just above 35 percent, the public sector continued to be a source of good, union jobs in the last few decades even as manufacturing jobs moved abroad and union density in the private sector fell below 10 percent by 1997. Now, that is changing. In 2010, state and local governments slashed over 230,000 jobs. Expect more in 2011 and 2012.

War on the Poor

This is a far cry from Dr. King’s vision of bringing “colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect.” In fact, negotiations over the next decade of budgeting amount to a war on people of color. The congressional debt ceiling “crisis” that was resolved in August was a manufactured affair that allowed both parties to justify almost $1 trillion in spending cuts in the next 10 years. This will devastate millions dependent on a tattered social safety net. The budget deal also created a bipartisan super committee tasked with reaching a so-called “grand bargain” that could exact trillions more dollars in cuts to social spending during the next decade.

The often mystifying numbers tossed around in the deficit reduction debate become clearer when translated in terms of the people who will be impacted. This year, the Coalition on Human Needs estimated the cuts would result in:

• 290,000 low-income families losing rental vouchers
• 300,000 to 450,000 low-income mothers and children losing Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food subsidies
• 3.5 million low-income households
losing assistance for heating their homes
• 1.4 million students won’t receive Pell grants.

Census data shows that the past 10 years have been a “lost decade” in terms of livelihood and gains for working families. More than 46 million families live in poverty in this country now, a disproportionate number of them Black. Black families in poverty increased to almost 30 percent and over one-third of Black and Latino children are impoverished. We are further than ever from the “promised land” King spoke of on the last night of his life. But, we have the means to do something about it.

The percentage of taxes paid by corporations and the super-rich are at their lowest in decades while income inequality has soared to levels not seen since the 1920s. That hoarded wealth should be taxed in order to rebuild the public sector and create a 21st century equivalent of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps to give work to millions who need it. Even the International Monetary Fund now acknowledges that austerity measures exacerbate the recession while government spending provides stimulus.

Redistribution of wealth is the starting point for any real solution to the recession and for bridging the racial economic divide that grows more extreme each day.

Yvonne Yen Liu is a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center and a contributing writer at Colorlines.com.

As a follower of debates around health care policy, I often feel as if I’m watching three blind mice fumble about, trying to identify this enormous behemoth in their midst.

“It’s all about expansion of insurance coverage!” shrieks one, “We need to make sure that everyone has coverage under an insurance plan, one purchased in the marketplace. Punishing them if they don’t, just like car insurance.”

“No,” screams another mouse, “What good is insurance if it only buys you shoddy care? We need to invest in community health clinics, so that everyone has access to the primary care that they need!”

“Au contraire,” the third mouse spoke up, “The problem is rising costs, because people are not paying into the system, taxpayers end up bearing the brunt. Society should just let the uninsured die.”*

All three mice, like the back and forth between the President, Democrats and Republicans, bicker furiously to extend their particular perspective to the whole. But, one thing they can all agree on: something has to give. And, because the word of the day, post-Labor Day, has been about jobs after the summer’s craze for deficit reduction, even Democrats are cozying up to cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, in a manner previously unthinkable, ostensibly, to fund job creation.

Obama, in his jobs speech to Congress last week, said spending cuts would fund his $47 billion plan to resuscitate the U.S. economy, including “modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid.” He added, “We have to reform Medicare to strengthen it.” What that means exactly is still unclear, but he hinted, ominously, that the cuts will be deeper even than the $1.5 trillion that the Congressional Supercommittee is charged with slashing.

Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare would be devastating to communities of color. People of color comprise more than half of the 50 million Medicaid recipients. As Amara Nwosu wrote previously, a report released last month by the Alliance for a Just Society found that existing disparities in health care access and quality of care would be exacerbated if Medicaid was slashed.

What Obama and Congress don’t acknowledge is the beast in the room: the increasing number of people losing coverage or any recourse to health care because of being jobless, most of them people of color. A new report by the Commonwealth Fund found that the number of underinsured adults increased by 80 percent, from 16 to 29 million, since the start of the Great Recession. Lacking or having inadequate coverage is often due to the loss of a job, because most in this country get our health insurance through our employer. Moreover, one out of every two adults, that’s 81 million people, were either underinsured or uninsured in 2010.

Shocking, but not surprising. We know more people of color are unemployed than whites and for longer periods of time. Being jobless leads not only to economic woes, but also emotional and physical ones. I wrote previously about how incidents of chronic health conditions increase dramatically for those who lose their jobs. We also know that neighborhoods with the highest foreclosure rates, mostly residents of color, correlate with poor health outcomes.

And, this monster is growing, despite itself, in dimensions unthinkable by the blinded mice. The Affordable Care Act changed health care financing by moving pots of money previously allocated to safety net hospitals, to cover their debt incurred by treating uninsured patients, towards expansion of private insurance coverage. As a result, across the nation, hospitals and emergency room departments, places of last resort care for the millions of jobless and uninsured as well as recent and undocumented immigrants, are closing their doors. Guess where most of these hospitals are located? You got it: urban communities of color, mostly of those living in poverty.

If we’re talking about jobs, we know that investment in health care creates more opportunities, particularly for workers of color who can’t find work in our shrinking manufacturing base. Numbers crunched by our friends at the Health Rights Organizing Project and the Political Economy Research Institute found that Medicaid spending actually creates jobs and stimulates the economy.

So, let’s address the elephant in the room: Medicaid + Medicare + increased support for community clinics, as well as safety net hospitals = a healthy, happy and prosperous populace. Take away any of the factors of the equation and you get the ugly monster that we’re looking at now, a Congress with blinders on, and a President too mousy to speak up.

* A popular opinion, apparently, among attendees of last night’s GOP debate.