Saturday, September 19
I get food stamps, and I’m not ashamed — I’m angry
Monday, March 16
Poverty and USA
quite an interesting if uncomfortable read about USA.
“
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
”
with the lack of a social safety net (well, compared to the European nations and look at how that turned out), and sclerotic legislature and executive, this is something that we all need to think about. And you can see echoes of this quote in the UK as well…
Wednesday, September 4
Pakistan’s polio war
This was a painful article to read.
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Just this bit was painful
This is especially true among Pashtun parents like Usman. A father of four living in the Karachi slum of Bhains Colony, he contracted polio as an infant in the early 1980s. It has left him visibly disabled, his loping gait the result of an almost useless right leg that he must lock out with a rigidly tensed right hand at every step. As a polio victim himself, he insisted that his eldest children be vaccinated. But by the time workers came to inoculate his youngest child, Musharaf, reports of Dr Afridi’s activities on behalf of the CIA had reached him.
“If the incident in Abbottabad did not happen,” he admitted ruefully, speaking of his fellow Pashtuns in general, “and these rumours didn’t spread to us, we would have continued the vaccinations as we had been.” But Usman refused the vaccine drops for Musharaf, and one morning in January the two-year-old woke crying and unable to move his leg. “I was trying to get him to sit and I remember what my mother told me: ‘When you were little I was trying to get you to stand and you couldn’t stand.’” His face is pained as he recounts the episode. “With my mother’s words in my mind I tried to make him stand, but he couldn’t and it hit me hard – that, God forbid, something has happened to him.” Just weeks after the deaths of those vaccination workers, the young child with a winning smile had become Pakistan’s first confirmed polio case of 2013.
“I know if I had given him the vaccine this wouldn’t have happened,” Usman confesses, admonishing himself. “You shouldn’t have been fooled by people.” I follow him as he clambers slowly down the rough concrete stairs out of his house and stops to watch a hobbling Musharaf join a group of children playing with a pink balloon.
What can you say? What can you do? just one of the little tragedies that we have to thank so many people from, ranging from Obama to Osama.
Monday, September 2
How Poverty Taxes the Brain
To paraphrase Maugham son, poverty is a dull dreary affair and my earnest advise is to have nothing to do with it. It's really soul destroying son. It does reduce brainpower and it really does pain the mind. Hunger ruins everything. Poverty removes any kind of rational decision making. Which is why I keep on telling you to learn to save and invest.
But I disagree that you can separate the poor out of the context. Both are entwined and both need to be addressed. A welfare state helps but too much can breed complacency and sloth as we have see. Do you know there are 3 million households in this country where nobody has a job? So you can say that it's because of a recession or rise of single households. Or that there are a million households where nobody ever held a job? Or hundreds of thousands of households where nobody in 3 generations ever held a job? Living in benefits? That's Jo life. That's a life for cattle.
Love
Baba
How Poverty Taxes the Brain
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/
Continue to the TheAtlanticCities.com 
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- Emily Badger
- Aug 29, 2013
Shutterstock
Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.
We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It’s a scarce resource.
This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.
The condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.
Wednesday, June 12
Resort Of Last Resort
Here's an example of where the bottom feeders live. People who are escaping Islam. Poverty. They are desperate to get away from the bastards who have ruined countries such as Pakistan Afghanistan and Iran. And more will come. The history of Islam tells us that Muslims kill more Muslims than any other religion. And this sad story has a long way to run. Till Muslims manage to box Islam into the civilised box rather than the shape fundamentalists have put it into.
Ironically you see one of the sets of idiots, Saudis, who are responsible for this desecration of Islam coming to Indonesia to get their rocks off. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The Saudis piss over their co religionists in India Bangladesh Pakistan Indonesia Egypt Lebanon and in return these guys fawn over the Saudis and lick their feet. Only place there where I faced in your face racism. Bah.
But there you go. It's a sad view of one of the sad spots of the world. As an economist you need to consider why nations hate and love immigration. Freedom of capital is allowed generally but of labour? Nope. Think about why this is so son.
Love
Baba
Resort Of Last Resort | The Global Mail
http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/resort-of-last-resort/585/Fear, corruption, boredom, smugglers, extortionists, Saudi sex tourists and temporary wives: such is life in the Indonesian resort town that has become limbo for asylum seekers.
Night is enveloping the hills of Cisarua, a resort town high outside Jakarta, and the area’s evening rituals are beginning. Rainwater thunders down from nearby mountaintops along hundreds of canals and rivulets that go whooshing on into the polluted sink that is Indonesia’s capital.
Across the bowl-shaped valley, dozens of mosques begin booming the call to prayer, all merging together into an asynchronous whine. In hillside villas, groups of men from Saudi Arabia — some in traditional white thawb robes, some in baggy track pants – load up on the evening’s stock of alcohol, which is banned in their home country. On motorbikes and in cars, pimps begin ferrying in the men’s other vice — Arabic-speaking Indonesian women.
(See the photos behind the story: Barat Ali Batoor’s series from Cisarua, In Between Persecution And Asylum.)
In other rented houses, hundreds of asylum seekers sit with little to do. Many have become near-nocturnal out of sheer boredom, and are just starting their day. Over the past decade, the town has become the unofficial haven for asylum seekers heading to Australia. For some, it is a brief stopover before they jump on a smuggler’s boat. For others, it is a limbo that can last for years.
Haider — not his real name — is sitting in a living room with half-a-dozen other men who, like him, are Hazaras from the Pakistani city of Quetta. All appear drawn and exhausted. One of the men, Ghulam Reza, sits with his foot extended because of an untreated, bloody gash.
Tuesday, May 7
The Weeklies
he Weeklies
http://prospect.org/article/weeklies
Poverty is hugely distressing son. It destroys your dignity, there is no love and you become the worst of the worst. Having lived though serious poverty which included your parents crying about money or rather the lack of it, it's not something that I would care to repeat.
You never know what may happen so always have emergency cash and good savings. I keep on telling you, save a third of your salary son. Cut down on outgoings. It may mean a few less luxuries or entertainment but as you can see from me, having fun doesn't mean you need to spend money.
See what happened to this family. Or families. Washed up in a hotel. But they will get out. That is what's creditable. They are fighting. And that's impressive Kannu.
Love
Baba
From the outside, it is hard to know that people live in the Ramada Inn. The parking lot is always empty. The hotel sits facing a wide suburban boulevard called Kipling Street, just off Interstate 70 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. The interchange where Kipling meets the freeway is packed mornings and evenings with daily commuters going to or coming from Denver and with skiers heading west into the Rockies. Hotels dot I-70 as it cuts through the 764-square-mile stretch of suburbia that runs from the city into the mountains, but at the intersection with Kipling is a cluster of seven budget-savers that travel websites warn tourists away from. The hotels advertise low prices—ranging from $36 to $89 a night—on neon signs next to gigantic flags that whip in the Front Range wind. Most offer even lower weekly or monthly rates. The Ramada is farther from the frontage road than the other hotels and is harder to notice, with its plain yellow stucco and dimly lit red sign.
Inside the lobby, which has wide windows and a clear view of a long, low mountain called Table Top and the snowy peaks beyond, are plenty of clues that the Ramada is more than just a hotel. Off the lobby sit two sets of washers and dryers that each take a dollar in quarters, and on weekends families use one of the bellhop carts kept in a back hall to roll out baskets of dirty laundry. In the late afternoon, schoolchildren do their homework on the dozen tables where guests have breakfast. Residents sit at the two computers with Internet connections. They wander around in sock-clad feet and chat with whomever they run into.
At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves “weeklies.” To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates.
Wednesday, January 25
Poverty in the USA
Dear Son,
We aren't poor. Actually, we are quite well off compared to earnings in the UK and much better off when you consider global incomes. But that wasnt always the case, when I was growing up, we were fairly poor and Dadu was even poorer, they came over from Bangladesh with literally the clothes on their back. I have done fairly well for a dirt poor and starving refugee's son, Dadu and Didu made sure that we were educated and fed and clothed as best as they could and its my duty to ensure that we do the best for you.
But never ever never assume that being rich or well off is given or you can take it for granted, son. I know you will do better than me and you will be much richer. But that doesnt mean that you dont take care of the possibility that you can become poor. This article below shows what happens to people who are poor in a rich country like USA. And you have to make sure you avoid this state, son. Being poor is soul destroying. It destroys your confidence, it destroys your love, your live, your family. It eats away inside you. As the quote goes, when poverty arrives at the door, love leaves by the window.
There are few ways you can do this.
1. Learn to save, mamma ensures that we save a shed load of our earnings. You should aim to save up to 1/3 of your earnings, that's the best possible target. If you can achieve this, then you will have the comfort that you have a backup pot of money, you have some dosh if any emergency comes up. I didnt save despite hearing entreaties from Dadu and even from your mamma, but I am now a convert. But we lost quite a lot of years. Still, better late than never son. But you can learn from my mistake, I know you are already saving and investing, that is good, keep doing it.
2. Always have a technical ability or skill son. It could be repairing cars, or planting or coding or welding, something technical. What do I mean by technical? I mean technical as in a skill for which somebody will pay you money even when you have become a manager or an entrepreneur. The skill depends upon what you like, but once you have this skill, then you will know that if your primary earning profession fails for whatever reason, you can always fall back on the skill. That is why i was asking you to understand coding. Ask yourself this question, if you do not have a job in your primary profession, how are you going to ensure that you get a regular source of income? And do NOT rely on benefits, that's not enough and as you can read below, you will be treated like shit if you have to go into welfare. I can think of alternative technical skills such as in the charity sector, writing articles, photography, project management, coding, academics, so make sure you are protected, son.
3. Never get too far away from poor people, son. The arrogance of the rich frequently means that they get disconnected from society and then the fall is bigger and faster. One of the richest men in the world, the Nizam of Hyderabad, had a poor room, where he would go and stay once a week or so. Wear cheap clothing and stuff. Just so that he would recognise and know that he can revert to poverty and to know his subjects. It could well be a myth, but that's one good thing to learn and follow. Be in touch with the poor people, try to help them, understand their pain. One of the things we do in the charities that we support is to help very poor people and being with them makes me know and appreciate what they are going through.
4. Reduce your spending, learn to do with less. I know, I spend a shed load but that's not good. There are so many things you can do which doesnt require money, every £ you save means that you have more savings. Plus you can retire earlier and use the money for a variety of purposes. This will also assist you in your savings. One quick way of doing this is to stop and ask yourself, do you really need it? Another way is to marry somebody like Mamma.
Well, hope this helps son,
in any case, read this article, its very interesting.
Love
baba
Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) | TomDispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175428/
Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again)
Posted by Barbara Ehrenreich at 7:05am, August 9, 2011.It was at lunch with the editor of Harper’s Magazine that the subject came up: How does anyone actually live “on the wages available to the unskilled”? And then Barbara Ehrenreich said something that altered her life and resulted, improbably enough, in a bestselling book with almost two million copies in print. “Someone,” she commented, “ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism — you know go out there and try it for themselves.” She meant, she hastened to point out on that book’s first page, “someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands.”
That was 1998 and, somewhat to her surprise, Ehrenreich soon found herself beginning the first of a whirl of unskilled “careers” as a waitress at a “family restaurant” attached to a big discount chain hotel in Key West, Florida, at $2.43 an hour plus tips. And the rest, of course, is history. The now famous book that resulted, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is just out in its tenth anniversary edition with a new afterword by Ehrenreich — perfectly timed for an American era in which the book’s subtitle might have to be changed to “On (Not) Getting a Job in America.” TomDispatch takes special pride in offering Ehrenreich’s new afterword, adapted and shortened, for a book that, in its latest edition, deserves to sell another million copies. Tom
Nickel and Dimed (2011 Version)
On Turning Poverty into an American Crime
By Barbara EhrenreichI completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then — down at the bottom — “Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought…” or “I hadn’t realized…”
To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn’t always an option. And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.
Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to — only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes — though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Post-Meltdown Poverty
When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book — the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans — you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.
In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed“experiment,” had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job.
For the last couple of years, I have attempted to find out what was happening to the working poor in a declining economy — this time using conventional reporting techniques like interviewing. I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed.
This wasn’t easy, because most of the addresses and phone numbers I had taken away with me had proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and suspensions of telephone service. I had kept in touch with “Melissa” over the years, who was still working at Wal-Mart, where her wages had risen from $7 to $10 an hour, but in the meantime her husband had lost his job. “Caroline,” now in her 50s and partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, had left her deadbeat husband and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recession, but only because they had already been living in what amounts to a permanent economic depression.
Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.
How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space — by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.
It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities.
In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that “people who’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.” According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia, the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by day laborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entire family of up to five people, plus an additional person laying claim to the couch.
No one could call suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide — or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families.
“Torture and Abuse of Needy Families”
We do of course have a collective way of ameliorating the hardships of individuals and families — a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitution. But its response to the economic emergency of the last few years has been spotty at best. The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels. But welfare — the traditional last resort for the down-and-out until it was “reformed” in 1996 — only expanded by about 6% in the first two years of the recession.
The difference between the two programs? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.
Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.” Their troubles began well before the recession, when Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs — only to find that those skills are no longer in demand. The obvious fallback was disability benefits, but — catch-22 — when Joe applied he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan. This would cost $800 to $900, which the Parentes do not have; nor has Joe, unlike the rest of the family, been able to qualify for Medicaid.
When they married as teenagers, the plan had been for Kristen to stay home with the children. But with Joe out of action and three children to support by the middle of this decade, Kristen went out and got waitressing jobs, ending up, in 2008, in a “pretty fancy place on the water.” Then the recession struck and she was laid off.
Kristen is bright, pretty, and to judge from her command of her own small kitchen, probably capable of holding down a dozen tables with precision and grace. In the past she’d always been able to land a new job within days; now there was nothing. Like 44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.
So the Parentes turned to what remains of welfare — TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.
After Kristen applied, nothing happened for six weeks — no money, no phone calls returned. At school, the Parentes’ seven-year-old’s class was asked to write out what wish they would present to a genie, should a genie appear. Brianna’s wish was for her mother to find a job because there was nothing to eat in the house, an aspiration that her teacher deemed too disturbing to be posted on the wall with the other children’s requests.
When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”
The Parentes discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting. In addition, Kristen had to drive 35 miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were “frankly a joke.”
Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.” There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.
How the Safety Net Became a Dragnet
The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.
Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.
Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges…”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.
The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities — the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando — but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.
That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.
He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one — for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.
“Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelterfor being homeless?”
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans.
One anti-sharing law was just overturned in Orlando, but the war on illicit generosity continues. Orlando is appealing the decision, and Middletown, Connecticut, is in the midst of a crackdown. More recently, Gainesville, Florida, began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day, and Phoenix, Arizona, has been using zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.
For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.
More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you’re in “contempt of the court.”
Or suppose you miss a payment and your car insurance lapses, and then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight (about $130 for the bulb alone). Now, depending on the state, you may have your car impounded and/or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible court summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” says Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”
The second — and by far the most reliable — way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”
In what has become a familiar pattern, the government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt. The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.
One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today, exactly the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents. The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
It is not clear whether economic hard times will finally force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment. With even the official level of poverty increasing — to over 14% in 2010 — some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.
So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list — a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.
Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.
Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty — though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recently Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books.
Excerpted from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, published August 2nd by Picador USA. New afterword © 2011 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Excerpted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Monday, January 16
Causes of Poverty, one reason is that people volunteer to be poor
A pithy statement, but interesting:
Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor. — Walter Williams
I look at poverty in India or the UK or many other countries and I see the truth of this statement. Yes, you can have a benefits regime which moves them up a bit more on the economic ladder or you can have a tax regime which moves some more dosh into their pockets, but the underlying causes remain the same. If they have to emerge out of poverty, then these 3 reasons hold true. In many cases, the benefits regime actively encourages them to remain in poverty.
But in countries such as India, they are actively hampered by the governments into staying poor, such as by the benefits regime, the labour laws, the food laws, etc. etc.
To improve the first reason, the poor need to be taught better, but the educational system in countries such as USA, India, UK etc. again fails them. Tell me, which educational system consistently tops the PISA regimes? Finland, Singapore, etc. Where brilliant teachers are taken and a medium amount of money is pumped into the schools and pushed ahead. Bad teachers are fired. But this doesnt happen in other countries because the educational system relies, either by omission or commission, to keep the students in a mess. Or else the rules and regulations on starting their own business is very difficult. The UK is 7th on the list. India is 132nd on the list. And then you wonder why India remains poor? Its because the government actively encourages and makes it so that they remain poor.
Finally people volunteering to be poor. Monks and such like. Good men, all power to them.
Incidentally, came across this fascinating story. I quote:
My name’s Ronnie Bryant, and I’m a mine operator…. I’ve been issued a [state] permit in the recent past for [waste water] discharge, and after standing in this room today listening to the comments being made by the people…. [pause] Nearly every day without fail — I have a different perspective — men stream to these [mining] operations looking for work in Walker County. They can’t pay their mortgage. They can’t pay their car note. They can’t feed their families. They don’t have health insurance. And as I stand here today, I just … you know … what’s the use? I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.
Wednesday, August 31
On the trail of George Orwell’s outcasts
Dear Kannu
Some very powerful images here of poverty in London and Paris. Poverty is something that you will need to handle and manage and oversee and discuss and debate. I cannot see poverty ending over the next century or even further onwards. While you arent poor and can indeed be said to be fairly well off, these poor people exist outside your existence. You havent seen them really. Yes, you have been to India and might have seen poor beggars outside the window of the air conditioned car or gaped at some of these on the platform, but generally you havent seen poverty, much less experienced it.
Poverty is fun – NOT, it is degrading, it reduces you to a quivering mess of jelly. You do anything to get out of it. Its horrible. I dont think you will ever face it either but if you are going to be all what you want to be, you will face poor people, this article gives a rather interesting overview of the poor. And yes, they also exist in the UK and France, the first world nations. Not to the extent of what we have seen in India! but still, interesting to check and read.
============
BBC News - On the trail of George Orwell’s outcasts
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14372195
6 August 2011 Last updated at 01:40 By Emma Jane Kirby BBC News, Paris and London
Orwell’s narration begins in the street he called the Rue du Coq d’Or, in the 5th Arrondissement, where he once lived
Some 80 years after George Orwell chronicled the lives of the hard-up and destitute in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, what has changed? Retracing the writer’s footsteps, Emma Jane Kirby finds the hallmarks of poverty identified by Orwell - addiction, exhaustion and, often, a quiet dignity - are as apparent now as they were then.
“Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing-orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse carts, made up the atmosphere of the street…. Poverty is what I’m writing about and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum.”
Such was George Orwell’s recollection of what he called the Rue du Coq d’Or in Paris, 1929 - the real-life Rue du Pot de Fer. Today it’s pleasure rather than poverty that defines the Latin Quarter that Orwell frequented 80-odd years ago. The chic pavement cafes are full of contented-looking people leisurely sipping their vin rose, and the air is perfumed by the sweet smell of crepes and tourists’ money.
But poverty hasn’t left Paris - she’s simply changed address. She may not look quite the same as she did in the 1920s but if Orwell were to meet her again on these streets, he’d know her straight away. And I doubt he’d find her greatly changed…
Poverty came knocking on Claudine’s door five years ago when she was made redundant. She leans in close to me as she talks, her right hand often rising to her mouth as if it wants to censor the words that her lips keep forming. “Tomber dans la misere” (falling into misery), is the phrase she whispers most and I notice her breath is sour like someone who diets or skips meals.
“We don’t eat lunch,” she tells me. “It’s just my little way of economising.” She nods down to her bulging shopping caddy. “It’s enough for my family’s dinner,” she says, “but not enough for two meals a day.”
Shame
Claudine and I are sitting in a big warehouse in the north of Paris, which serves as a food distribution centre for the city’s chronically poor. It reminds me of the sort of indoor market you find in the less salubrious quarters of former Soviet states - mountains of unbranded pasta and rice piled on tables, misshapen, anaemic-looking vegetables wilting in crates, biscuits and chocolate wrapped in such bland, stark white paper, that not even a child could be excited by its contents.
Continue reading the main story
We watch the steady line of people, Europeans, Maghrebians and West Africans, methodically trudging from table to table, collecting their rations and stuffing them quickly into a pram hood or caddy. Despite the animated cheerfulness of the staff, I notice not one of the customers meets their eye as they take the food parcels.
Shame, Claudine - who is French - tells me, is what links everyone here. She’s told no-one that her weekly shop is a hand-out and she doubts anyone else here has admitted it either.
The secrecy that’s attached to poverty is one of the first things that struck Orwell.
“From the start,” he wrote, “it tangles you in a net of lies and even with the lies you can hardly manage it.”
Milly is fighting poverty with a fierce, indignant energy. A bilingual secretary from Cameroon, she is immaculately dressed and has the practised deportment of a society debutante.
In the drop-in centre where I meet her, she looks decidedly out of place next to the dusty, weary figures that are slumped beside her. Appearances, she tells me, are everything if one is to cling on to one’s dignity. She agrees to talk to me but only in a private room so that the other people here won’t realise that her situation is as bad as theirs. When the door closes she tells me that she’s homeless and last night she slept on a veranda.
Milly is facing deportation. She came here legally but after she fell ill and had to stop working, her carte de sejour - the papers that allow her to stay and work in France - were revoked. She admits that she is homesick but is terrified to return to Cameroon empty-handed. I ask her if her family know she’s homeless and she throws her hands up in the air and rolls her eyes in horror.
“It would kill them,” she tells me. “They would drop down dead with shame.”
Aching all over
When I meet Modi from Mali, he looks as if he might drop down dead with fatigue. Like Orwell, Modi is a plongeur, a washer-upper in a big restaurant and he works six days a week, 12 hours a day cleaning pots and pans.
When we talk in the bar of a neighbouring restaurant, his head keeps drooping onto his folded arms and it seems to be such an effort for him to articulate his words that he either slurs them all together in a gluey, glottal jumble, or shoots out small phrases in tiny bursts of energy that fizzle out before the last word has been formed.
Orwell complained that when working as a plongeur he felt as if his back were broken and his head “filled with hot cinders”. Modi agrees that he aches all over and at the end of the day he cannot feel his feet.
Because rent in Paris is too expensive, he lives an hour’s train ride outside the city. Although after midnight the trains are slower so it takes two hours for Modi to get home. He gets up at 0700 and gets to bed at 0200. Most plongeurs in Paris these days are either Pakistani or West African. I stop asking myself why that is, when Modi tells me how much he is paid - just under 4 euros (£3.50) an hour. He’s working, of course, “on the black”.
“The last time I had a night out,” he says flicking through a virtual diary in his brain, “was… last year.”
Madame Jolivet can have as many nights out with friends as she wants to - her problem is she’s not allowed to have any nights in with them.
Madame Jolivet’s tiny B&B room costs 1,730 euros a month
The rules of her B&B state clearly that visitors are not permitted, but I have managed to frighten the landlady into admitting me by pretending to be an official from the local authority. Now I’m standing (albeit slightly stooped) in her fusty-smelling attic apartment.
I am Madame Jolivet’s first visitor in six years and she is laughing hysterically at having won this tiny victory over her hated landlady. I tell her that in Orwell’s day, the residents in his filthy hotel used to yell “Vache! Salope!” (“Cow! Bitch!”) at their landlady, and Madame Jolivet doubles up with mirth as she mimes the insults at the sky-light. Then, quite suddenly, she looks sick with fear and switches the TV on at a high volume, motioning to the door and telling me the landlady is probably listening at it. She’s right. We hear her tread softly back down the stairs.
Orwell’s hotel room was infested with bugs - Madame Jolivet’s is infested with mice. She’s tormented by their scratching at night. She’s caught them on camera during the day, and once she found one in her fridge. She complained to the landlady who warned her that if she mentions it again, she’ll kick her out - after all, she’s already been warned that her daughter’s voice is too loud.
Madame Jolivet is a large lady and she squeezes herself round the tiny space of her apartment. When she’s at the sink she’s jammed between the bed and the table, her body painfully curved sideways to avoid smacking her head on the sloped ceiling. The landlady charges 1,730 euros (£1,500) a month for this space which she rents out as a 16 sq m apartment. Recently the police did a spot check on Madame Jolivet’s apartment and recorded the actual habitable surface area as just 5 sq m - that’s the size of about six or seven beach towels.
Madame Jolivet lives here with her grown-up son and daughter. Until last year her other daughter lived with them, too, but she tried to kill herself twice and is now in psychiatric care.
Although it’s miles from the hostel where she’s staying tonight, Milly, the dignified lady from Cameroon offers to come with me in the taxi to the Gare du Nord where I’m catching my train home to London to make my next step of Orwell’s journey.
“In my country,” she smiles, “we never let a traveller start a journey alone.”
She’s very jolly in the cab, reminiscing about her family, her sister in London, the present she sent her nephew in America last year. By the time we get to the Eurostar terminal I’ve completely forgotten that Milly’s homeless and I realise with a real physical shock that this is exactly what she wanted, that she wanted me to see her as she was before poverty possessed her - a very proper, very animated, valuable woman.
She waves me off, her whole body swaying into the gesture, in that exaggerated way that small children say goodbye. Each time I turn, she’s still there, both arms in the air, her head following the rhythm.
Sitting in my seat on the train, my eyes closed, I can see her still. The last line from a Stevie Smith poem comes into my head:
Not Waving but Drowning…
Saturday, November 14
The Other face of Saudi Arabia
Have been to Saudi Arabia, the armpit of the world and the magic kingdom personified. But it did show riches and largely the population of the various cities that I visited showed the rich, middle class Saudi’s and the expatriates (whites and non white population, and yes, there is a reason why I am using racist terminology, they are treated in a racist manner). But poor Saudi's were not in sight. Take a look at this photo blog.
Friday, June 26
Why should vaccines be free?
I agree with this company, why on earth should the vaccines be free? Say I am a shareholder of GSK and Novartis (which I am not, btw), and I have invested my money in its stock. Why are you expecting ME to fund the vaccines? What's the solidarity in that? If my returns are lower, do you think anybody will be willing to top up my pension? in solidarity? I dont think so. I quote:
Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceuticals group, defied the World Health Organisation and some of its corporate peers by ruling out a donation to the poor of vaccines to counter the latest flu pandemic, and saying developing nations or donor nations should cover the costs.
Daniel Vasella, Novartis chief executive, told the Financial Times that he would consider offering discounted pricing to low-income nations, but unlike other drug companies, including GlaxoSmithKline, would not offer vaccines for free. He said: “If you want to make production sustainable, you have to create financial incentives.”
It definitely makes sense, the firm is not running as a bloody charity, you know? it has to pay its suppliers, its staff and its other commitment holders. If you take the argument to its logical conclusion, every medicine it makes will be expensive to the poor because in effect even a 1 cent/paise/pence cost will be quite high for the poor. So does that mean that in solidarity, this firm should be run as a charity? No way. So Margaret Chan, the WHO Director General, please note that you are saying complete bollocks.
Also remember what happens if you make things like this free, then no private firm produces them. Many of these instances have happened in our history, for example with measles and polio vaccines in the past. When will these idiots learn? This is not to say that the governments cannot step in and purchase sufficient vaccines for their populace or some international body does it for them, but asking something like this is forced charity, that’s not solidarity, that’s stupidity.
Saturday, May 31
Has the internet increased exports for firms from low and middle-income countries?
We know globalisation has always been driven by technology. Better technology, better communications. Whether we are talking about the bronze age to the telegraph to the internet, with each jump in technology, globalisation has improved and extended.
Globalisation can be defined as increased communications, increased trade, increased resource transfers, increased knowledge, etc. on a global basis. And people do complain about globalisation mucking up the poor. Is that true? One way of answering this question is to ask whether the internet has improved exports for lower and middle income countries. This is, of course, assuming that the internet drives globalisation, which I am saying it does.
This paper checks this hypothesis and finds "a strong correlation between exporting and internet access at the enterprise level. Moreover, this correlation remains after controlling factors that might affect both exports and internet connectivity and self-selectivity".
The authors check eastern European and central Asian republics as their sample countries and most importantly, use firm level data rather than country level data (as country level data can be skewed by few very larger firms). The authors found that the firms having internet connectivity export more than firms who did not. But before you get all excited and get everybody hooked up to the internet, the authors also found that non-internet firms which already exported did not show more exports when they did get connected to the net.
But conscious of the fact that correlation does not mean causality, they further generate regression models and determine that even after controlling for various factors, the link between exports and net access is strong thereby giving credence to the fact that if you get net access, your exports will start at worst and improve at best.
So overall, it does seem to be prudent for Governments interested in pushing for better export performance to improve internet access and penetration rates across the country. Also for globalisation opponents, it might be worthwhile for them to consider the plus's of their argument as well.
I was a bit disappointed with the selection of sample countries, I would have preferred if they had added some of the lesser developed countries from Latin America and Africa but I suppose data availability was the challenge.
George R.G. Clarke, Has the internet increased exports for firms from low and middle-income countries, Information Economics and PolicyVolume 20, Issue 1, , March 2008, Pages 16-37.
Many commentators have suggested that the internet is one of the forces driving globalization. This paper assesses one aspect of these claims, looking at whether internet access appears to affect the export performance using data from enterprises in low and middle-income economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The paper finds a strong correlation between exporting and internet access at the enterprise level. Moreover, this correlation remains after controlling factors that might affect both exports and internet connectivity and self-selectivity.
Keywords: Internet; Development; Exports
Sunday, April 27
Has the internet increased exports for firms from low and middle-income countries?
We know globalisation has always been driven by technology. Better technology, better communications. Whether we are talking about the bronze age to the telegraph to the internet, with each jump in technology, globalisation has improved and extended.
Globalisation can be defined as increased communications, increased trade, increased resource transfers, increased knowledge, etc. on a global basis. And people do complain about globalisation mucking up the poor. Is that true? One way of answering this question is to ask whether the internet has improved exports for lower and middle income countries. This is, of course, assuming that the internet drives globalisation, which I am saying it does.
This paper checks this hypothesis and finds "a strong correlation between exporting and internet access at the enterprise level. Moreover, this correlation remains after controlling factors that might affect both exports and internet connectivity and self-selectivity".
The authors check eastern European and central Asian republics as their sample countries and most importantly, use firm level data rather than country level data (as country level data can be skewed by few very larger firms). The authors found that the firms having internet connectivity export more than firms who did not. But before you get all excited and get everybody hooked up to the internet, the authors also found that non-internet firms which already exported did not show more exports when they did get connected to the net.
But conscious of the fact that correlation does not mean causality, they further generate regression models and determine that even after controlling for various factors, the link between exports and net access is strong thereby giving credence to the fact that if you get net access, your exports will start at worst and improve at best.
So overall, it does seem to be prudent for Governments interested in pushing for better export performance to improve internet access and penetration rates across the country. Also for globalisation opponents, it might be worthwhile for them to consider the plus's of their argument as well.
I was a bit disappointed with the selection of sample countries, I would have preferred if they had added some of the lesser developed countries from Latin America and Africa but I suppose data availability was the challenge.
George R.G. Clarke, Has the internet increased exports for firms from low and middle-income countries, Information Economics and PolicyVolume 20, Issue 1, , March 2008, Pages 16-37.
Many commentators have suggested that the internet is one of the forces driving globalization. This paper assesses one aspect of these claims, looking at whether internet access appears to affect the export performance using data from enterprises in low and middle-income economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The paper finds a strong correlation between exporting and internet access at the enterprise level. Moreover, this correlation remains after controlling factors that might affect both exports and internet connectivity and self-selectivity.
Keywords: Internet; Development; Exports
Monday, February 25
Poverty in the Middle East
Even as it enriches Arab rulers, the recent oil-price boom is helping to fuel an extraordinary rise in the cost of food and other basic goods that is squeezing this region’s middle class and setting off strikes, demonstrations and occasional riots from Morocco to the Persian Gulf.
Here in Jordan, the cost of maintaining fuel subsidies amid the surge in prices forced the government to remove almost all the subsidies this month, sending the price of some fuels up 76 percent overnight. In a devastating domino effect, the cost of basic foods like eggs, potatoes and cucumbers doubled or more.
In Saudi Arabia, where inflation had been virtually zero for a decade, it recently reached an official level of 6.5 percent, though unofficial estimates put it much higher. Public protests and boycotts have followed, and 19 prominent clerics posted an unusual statement on the Internet in December warning of a crisis that would cause “theft, cheating, armed robbery and resentment between rich and poor.”
In a few places the price increases have led to violence. In Yemen, prices for bread and other foods have nearly doubled in the past four months, setting off a string of demonstrations and riots in which at least a dozen people were killed. In Morocco, 34 people were sentenced to prison on Wednesday for participating in riots over food prices, the Moroccan state news service reported. Even tightly controlled Jordan has had nonviolent demonstrations and strikes.
The Middle East’s heavy reliance on food imports has made it especially vulnerable to the global rise in commodity prices over the past year
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!
Tuesday, November 20
Minorities and Poverty - a comment
So if a first or second generation immigrant is poor, it is the host government's fault. And they have to go about doing silly things like affirmative action and equal opportunity. Oh!, and have minimum wage which is supposed to be decent. Who defines decent? As for minimum wages, there is a very hot debate going on about whether minimum wages depress employment or not. Even if it did not, the idea that a government agency will tell me how much to pay my workers is anathema to me as a libertarian!
But to go back to the article. They seem to be saying that it is to do with race. What utter rot, to put it politely. And this made me laugh, apparently there are people now called as visible minorities. I presume it refers to skin colour, social habits or such like. I would be curious to see what or who are visible majorities? or invisible majorities? But besides this frankly spectacularly stupid terminology, here is something to think about.
The mother country to Canada, United Kingdom which has a somewhat similar ethnic, immigration and minority background gives these figures for education:
Can you see the 2 lines which are beyond 70%? those belong to visible minorities - the Indians and Chinese, who significantly over take the visible majority (the whites, I guess). I wonder where Jews fit in? or how about Polish? But I presume they are too white to be minorities, yes?
Now look at economic activity here.
Can you see the second set of bar's? that's whites. Where are Indians? just a tiny bit below them. And so are Blacks.
How about employment (full time, part time, employment rate and unemployment rate?) see page 15 of this report. More Indian extraction women are in employment than white women. The % of full time employment is the same for Indian men and White men. Here's another interesting study on relative earnings by minority status.
For those who refer to the test of sending cv applications with different names, has anybody tried the reverse experiment? (I haven't seen it, so would love to hear about it). Send Christian and Hindu name cv's to say Hindu employers and see the results. I dare say that you will find group behaviour, that people prefer to work with people of their own kinds.
A very good overview of this entire issue of ethnicity and poverty in the UK is in this paper. See Table 4.1 and try to tell me that it is clear that just being visibly different causes differences. How is that that % differences are more than 100% across minorities? Or take a look at Table 4.4 where you will see that the hourly pay for Indians is greater than that of the white British population? Or that more Indians and Pakistani's get their income from self employment than whites as given in Table 4.6? Or in table 4.7, Indians and other ethnic groups take less benefits than whites?
Public policy should not be driven by blunt instruments such as skin colour. And why aren't people trying to push these people to setup their own businesses rather than look to the government to support them? I am totally not convinced that it is skin colour or religion that is the cause of poverty or be a significant explaining factor in government public policy. If say the government starts off doling out cash, then why on earth would they dole it out to say Indians who are earning more than Whites anyway? But then you have to start defining what a minority is, etc. etc. Wouldnt it simply be better to give cash and benefits to poor people? irrespective?
Monday, November 19
Key to poverty alleviation is to give people a stake with assets!
Also look at Hernando de Soto's work. Very very interesting and controversial indeed.
Read and reflect!
Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
Cambridge, Mass.
LAST week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.
“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”
The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.
This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.
“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.
In 1965, when Moynihan published his report, suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot. Now we’d give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women.
How did this happen? As many theories flourish as pundits — from slavery and segregation to the decline of factory jobs, crack cocaine, draconian drug laws and outsourcing. But nobody knows for sure.
I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.
Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)
Sometimes the government helped: Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents received their land through the Southern Homestead Act. “So my family got its 40 acres and a mule,” she exclaimed when I showed her the deed, referring to the rumor that freed slaves would receive land that had been owned by their masters.
Well, perhaps not the mule, but 104 acres in Florida. If there is a meaningful correlation between the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors’ property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had “40 acres and a mule” really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing Mrs. Thatcher did, and perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook.
The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 — less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty — one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice — would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.
People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.
The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? Imagine Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson distributing free copies of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folktales “The People Could Fly” or Dr. Seuss, and demanding that black parents sign pledges to read to their children. What would it take to make inner-city schools havens of learning?
John Kenneth Galbraith once told me that the first step in reversing the economic inequalities that blacks face is greater voter participation, and I think he was right. Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively. If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as property.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “In Search of Our Roots.”
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!
Thursday, August 2
India climbs up the income ladder
Can you imagine that? 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in a mere 20 years!!!! that is like raising the WHOLE population of Europe up by a level of magnitude of income! And for all its faults, the increased trade, capitalism and increased opportunities are helping to do so. Look at the story referenced in this post, a poverty striken country like India is now moving into the middle of the income ladder of countries. For a billion population, that's a huge deal! But still a long way to go, check out the latest figures here.