What can poor people do right now to have a better economic future?

Are you asking about in practice or in theory?

As Franklin put it, in unity is strength.

The most effective thing they can do is organize. As individuals, they have no power at all; as an organized group, they can have great power, whether they organize within communities, in unions, as political movements, etc.

But most of them have been convinced that organizing is "un-American". They want to do it all on their own.

Also, many of them don't want to associate with "them". The union organizers in Chicago worked hand-in-hand with the community organizers and the civil-rights organizers. But then the unions started taking off and having some power so they cut themselves off from the other organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

One reason for the low rate of union membership is the Republican administrations recently and their support for management against the unions; another has been the poor recruiting practices of the major unions; but a major factor has been the antipathy of the working poor in the Southern states to the unions. (That, of course, was one reason so many companies moved to the South.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_U...