Suggested Answers to the Quiz

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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

Suggested Answers to the Quiz

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SLIGHT SHIFT IN FEB 19 POVERTY FOCUS

Although the success of the Jan 13 emergency e-mail campaign (though we can’t claim sole credit) means that the E-mail Campaign to the Mormon Church envisioned in our Jan 18 weekly e-mail is no longer necessary (for which we should be grateful to the Mormon Church!!!), THERE IS STILL MUCH THAT CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED IN THE ANTI-POVERTY FIELD!!!

For example, please note the “Six Degrees of Separation” E-mail Campaign suggested in Q&A-31 below.


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Short Quiz: American Poverty, The $15 Minimum Wage & The UN’s War on Modern Slavery

Question 1

Is Barbara Ehrenreich the author of our focus book for Feb 19?

Answer 1

Yes.

Question 2

Is her “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” the American-poverty “classic” counterpart to “Black Like Me” (Houghton Mifflin 1960) which chronicled the experiences 60 years ago of John Howard Griffin, a famous white journalist, who blackened his skin so that he could pass for black in America’s Deep South?

Answer 2

Yes.

Question 3

Although she did NOT blacken her skin to EXPERIENCE POVERTY the way Griffin had EXPERIENCED RACISM, did Ehrenreich have a PhD in Cellular Immunology before deciding on a career of writing more than a dozen public-policy bestsellers on healthcare, feminism and militarism before EXPERIENCING POVERTY?

Answer 3

Yes.

Question 4

Working from Florida to Maine to Minnesota as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing-home aide and Wal-Mart sales clerk, did she learn while living in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels that one job is NOT enough if you want to live indoors?

Answer 4

Yes.

Question 5

Did Ehrenreich undertake her project to assess the damage done by President Bill Clinton’s campaign “to end welfare as we know it”?

Answer 5

Yes.

Question 6

Had Bill Clinton managed to sneak into office in 1992 with 43.0% of the popular vote (with 18.9% for Ross Perot) by campaigning against “welfare as we know it”?

Answer 6

Yes.

Question 7

And did he sneak back into office in 1996 with less than 50% of the popular vote by fulfilling his 1992 campaign promise by signing in the middle of his re-election campaign 8/22/1996 the repeal of the “Aid to Families With Dependent Children” Program (AFDC)?

Answer 7

Yes.

Question 8

Was AFDC a main pillar (if not THE PRINCIPAL pillar) of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” when AFDC was enacted in 1935?

Answer 8

Yes.

Question 9

Was President Clinton’s AFDC repeal campaign passed in the House by a vote of only 256-170, which would have been sufficient to sustain a Presidential veto (a veto override requires a 2/3 vote)?

Answer 9

Yes.

Question 10

So did Ehrenreich’s UNDERCOVER RESEARCH take place in 1998, two years after the AFDC repeal?

Answer 10

Yes.

Question 11

For our 2/7/2018 meeting two years ago, was our focus book “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America” by Johns Hopkins Prof. Kathryn J. Edin and U/Mich Prof. H. Luke Shaefer (Houghton Mifflin 2015)?

Answer 11

Yes.

Question 12

Did Professors Edin and Shaefer document that there were 1.5 MILLION such households which included 3 MILLION CHILDREN??? And that such “households” reside in homeless shelters or out on the streets???

Answer 12

Yes.

Question 13

What is the source of the idea for a $15/hour minimum wage??? Do you think it might be Barbara Ehrenreich’s conclusion that MORE THAN ONE JOB is necessary for sleeping indoors??? Or that it might be the research of professors Edin and Shaefer that documented that 3 MILLION CHILDREN live in families surviving (OR NOT) on less than $2.00/day/person???

Answer 13

What do you think?

Question 14

BTW, did Prof. Edin have a Christian religious background and did she report that most academics in the anti-poverty field view Christians as NOT ONLY FAILING “to love their neighbors as themselves” BUT ACTUALLY as bigots who hate the poor???

Answer 14

Yes.

Question 15

After all, didn’t Christ say that there are TWO COMMANDMENTS “to inherit eternal life -- (1) Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, AND (2) thy neighbor as thyself” (!!!) [Luke 10: 25-28]???

Answer 15

Yes.

Question 16

And wasn’t Christ immediately asked “who is my neighbor” whereupon Christ told the Story of the Good Samaritan to drive home the point that EVERY HUMAN BEING IS YOUR NEIGHBOR!!! [Luke 10: 29-37]???

Answer 16

Yes.

Question 17

So in an age when Americans LIKE TO PRETEND that slavery no longer exists, would it be too much to ask that every worker be legally entitled to a minimum wage equal to the benchmark by which poverty is measured???

Answer 17

Normally the suggested answer to this kind of Q would be “What do you think?”

HOWEVER, it should be pointed out that BOTH BEFORE AND AFTER the American Civil War, it was argued that the American economy of that era could not accommodate SLAVES EARNING MORE THAN SLAVE WAGES (which, of course, was room/board & the whip!!!)!!!

THE MODERN-DAY COUNTERPART ARGUMENT???

The American economy can not accommodate MODERN-DAY SLAVES earning enough WITH ONE JOB to CLIMB UP TO THE POVERTY LEVEL THRESHOLD!!!

So now we’ll ask “What do you think?”

Question 18

Shifting gears momentarily, was the focus of our 9/18/2019 meeting the UN’s 20-year (and counting) War on Modern Slavery?

Answer 18

Yes.

Question 19

Does the UN report that international trafficking in slaves by organized crime rivals in size organized crime’s illegal-drugs business and its illegal-arms business?

Answer 19

Yes.

Question 20

Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that there are at least TWICE AS MANY people CURRENTLY TRAPPED in some form of slavery as were traded throughout the 350-plus years of the transatlantic slavery industry?

Answer 20

Yes.

Question 21

Does the UN itself report that the most frequent form of slavery in North America is sexual exploitation (vs. such things as forced labor, organ removal, pornography, sham marriages and benefit fraud)?

Answer 21

Yes.

Question 22

And does the UN report that the source of virtually all international trafficking in human beings is refugee camps because the conditions are so abysmal that the inhabitants are willing to believe the lies of organized crime about “a better life”?

Answer 22

Yes.

Question 23

Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that the average retail price of a “sex slave” in the U.S. (whom you can also require to clean your home, mow your lawn, work your farm/vineyard, etc., since they are “slaves” in every sense of the word) is only $5,250 – yielding an average profit to the trafficker of $2,400 – because organized crime’s supply of human beings from the refugee camps is so large?

[You can NOT YET order your own personal “sex slave” on Amazon.com – instead, you must still contact your local “sex slave” dealer.]

Answer 23

Yes, the average price of a SLAVE in the U.S. is only $5,250 of which Organized Crime pockets $2,400.

Question 24

Does the UN’s “Bible” on the subject report that because of the incredibly-large supply of human beings from the refugee camps, the average price of a sex act in North America is only $27.50 (which low price, itself, unleashes an incredibly-large demand for the low-p23riced sex)? And that the annual revenue per sex slave in North America is $90,648 of which the annual net profit, after deducting costs of only $32,633, is $58,015 (an annual net profit of more than 10 times the initial investment with no other up-front costs such as workforce training)?

[These figures are only for “sex slaves” of brothels, sex clubs, massage parlors, etc. They do NOT, of course, include the “sex slave” of the “pedophile next door.” Or the forced laborers on farms/vineyards who are also subject to sexual predators.]

Answer 24

Yes.

Question 25

Does the UN’s “Bible” report that the “sex slave” of a brothel, etc., performs an average of 3,296 sex acts/year (or 20 sex acts/day for the actual number of days/year the average “sex slave” is able to work) SO SURPRISE, SURPRISE, THE AVERAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A “SEX SLAVE” MEANS DEATH BY AGE 35?

Answer 25

Yes.

Question 26

Does the UN’s “Bible” report that “sex slaves” do not try to escape because (A) they have no money, (B) they typically do not speak English, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY (C) “OWNERS” INTIMIDATE THEIR “SLAVES” BY PERIODICALLY MURDERING ONE OF THEM AS AN EXAMPLE (TYPICALLY BY SLASHING THEIR THROATS IN FRONT OF THE OTHERS)???!!!

Answer 26

(A) Yes, they have no money.
(B) Yes, they typically do not speak English.
(C) AND YES AND PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANTLY, slave “owners” typically intimidate their “slaves” by periodically MURDERING one of them as an example – typically BY SLASHING THEIR THROATS IN FRONT OF THE OTHERS.

Question 27

Does either the UN or the author of the UN’s “Bible” (Harvard Prof. Siddharth Kara) have any real idea how many “sex slaves” there are in the U.S. -- because the only statistics available relate to criminal convictions of traffickers (between 150 and 200 per year) -- with no idea how many victims there were per convicted trafficker over how many years, much less how many traffickers are NOT detected/convicted?

[NB: It is A MIRACLE that there are any criminal convictions in the U.S. because the U.S. Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (originally enacted 10/18/2000 and renewed periodically ever since) -- (A) provides victims as the only incentive for testifying a T-Visa which is worthless because any illegal-alien can just disappear into the general population anyway, BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY (B) BECAUSE THE “OWNERS” HAVE INTIMIDATED THEIR “SLAVES” WITH PERIODIC BRUTAL MURDERS AS EXAMPLES OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THEM AND THEIR LOVED ONES BACK IN THE REFUGEE CAMPS IF THEY MISBEHAVE.]

Answer 27

No, they really have no idea.

Question 28

So back to American poverty, if America is going to espouse/tolerate a policy of “open borders,” doesn’t America have the same “love your neighbor as yourself” obligation regarding the plight of immigrants that it has regarding its impoverished citizens???

Answer 28

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 29

BTW, isn’t the problem of the poverty of the illegal immigrants compounded by the fact that their “slave owners” (United Nations terminology) can report them to ICE if they complain about intolerable conditions???

Answer 29

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

Question 30

And isn’t the problem of poverty of illegal immigrants that toil on American farms/vineyards compounded by the fact that even if they had the gall to complain about their working conditions, “minimum wage laws” do NOT apply as a practical matter because their “slave owners” (United Nations terminology) can deduct from the “minimum wage” whatever price they concoct for the squalid living quarters and abominable food that they provide???

Answer 30

Absolutely!!!

Question 31

Is there anything we should do such as advocating an increase in the national minimum wage??? AND ADVOCATING NO OFFSETS (OR MAXIMUM-ALLOWABLE OFFSETS) IN THE NATIONAL MINIMUM-WAGE REQUIREMENT FOR FOOD & BOARD???

Answer 31

What do you think??? Let’s discuss!!!

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