Turning Hustlers into Entrepreneurs - America can reduce poverty by enabling underground businesses

[BridgeTheGap]

Loretta Harrison is a born hustler.

“I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old,” says the 45-year-old unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan—balloons, socks, scarves, you name it—then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She’s peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for a dollar at stoplights, and organized “passion parties” where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. “I love sales,” she says. “For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just—it’s like a high to me.”

Harrison hasn’t worked a traditional full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. “After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” she says. “He’d think he didn’t have enough sugar in his cereal, and he’d run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff.” So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. “That whole year,” she says, “my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going.”

http://www.utne.com/Politics/Turning-Hustlers-into-Entrepreneurs.aspx?utm_content=04.28.10+Sci-Tech&utm_campaign=Emerging+Ideas-Every+Day&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

[leveymg]

1. Crack was President George H.W. Bush's anti-poverty program.

Introduce something marketable to a community, capture the market, eliminate the most enterprising elements among the proles. Just as Opium was Britain's gift to China.

[Name removed]

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[earcandle]

3. Great! Keep bringing those sales in and maintaining your independence girl, because

no one will ever employ you and you don't need them. 

The best revenge in life is to live well.