The reality that you don’t hear about…

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…that the folks on food stamps can also be adjunct professors.  This has got to be one of the most sobering stories I’ve heard yet.  What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that college educated WORKING people are also in dire straits because the top 1% are taking it all for themselves, as we see in this case.

Note the comment where some administrator in a hospital gave herself a 90k bonus while paying low wages.

And other comments are blasting the university for her extremely low un-livable wages.   Good God.

Many ask why she didn’t have Medicare/Soc. Security at her age?  The article doesn’t tell us, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say she was probably making too much money as a professor for Social Security.  I don’t know about Medicare, but assuming they also have limits on how much they will pay for certain conditions, and if this was the second time that Margaret Mary had cancer, she had probably reached those limits.

They also ask the question of her being on assistance (food stamps, I presume?) .  Ooookay.  Um, let me explain something to those who think that food stamps are some sort of panacea–they’re NOT.  Even if she got food stamps, which we don’t know by this article, it still would not be enough.   Jaysus H., $10,000 a year?  That is less than a $1,000 per month, before taxes.    Who can survive on that??

Here’s the op-ed from Daniel Kovalik, who may have been the last person to talk to her.  What huge indignity for her (and anyone else who has to beg for food or medical care).

And here again we have the fight against unions for teachers…and a glaring point of why we need unionized teachers, because the administrators have their priorities in the wrong places (themselves and athletics):

While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

This would be news to Georgetown University — one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report’s list of top 25 universities — which just recognized its adjunct professors’ union, citing the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

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What is truly, truly, incredible was the heartless act of the university in calling the police after it was discovered she was sleeping in her office because her electricity was shut off.  Yeah, because Jesus would have tossed her out on her ass, too. /very snarky.
Lastly, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that Margaret Mary was a woman….women are more likely to be in poverty than men.

Statistically, women in America are more likely to be poor than men in all racial and ethnic backgrounds. With over 37 million people living in poverty, over half of them are adult single women. Surprisingly so, women in the U.S. are further behind in comparison to women in other areas of the world. This could be all connected to the gender wage gap, with women earning less money than their male counterparts, and the often expensive responsibility of raising children.

In a report entitled Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families, lead authors Shawn McMahon and Jessica Horning found that 45 percent of American families live on incomes that fail to provide the basic economic security required to support their basic needs. In just four years, the overall financial insecurity rate rose from 38 percent to 45 percent with an increase in poverty of White children and unmarried couples. Children of color were also found at risk of economic security with more than three-quarters of Black children and three-quarters of Hispanic children facing poverty in their households.

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