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^^^ July 22, 2004         The Police State Comes Home

[asfo_del]
Over the past year alone, my boyfriend, who is 40 years old and white, has been stopped by police four times for absolutely no reason, while he was either walking down the street or waiting for the bus. The first time [of the four I mentioned, not the first time ever] he had just gotten off the bus from working at a construction job and was walking the two blocks to our house. His clothes were covered in plaster dust: he had clearly just come from work. The neighborhood where we lived, here on Staten Island, is crack-infested. There are groups of dealers hanging out on street corners most of the time. Police in plain clothes and an unmarked van routinely drive around the block and stop every person walking down the street. [Why they would use an unmarked vehicle when they are clearly not pretending not to be police, I don't know.] They put him up against the van and searched his pockets, without his consent, and told him that his utility knife, which has a blade less than one inch long, is an illegal weapon, which I believe is false. They said, "What are you, a construction worker?" Well, duh. Then they asked him where he was going and he said, "Home." They asked him where that was, even though one of them was holding his driver's license and the address listed on it was literally less than 100 yards from where they were standing. Then they let him go.

Another time we were walking together after having scored a dumpstered bathroom sink, and the cops pulled up next to us, again in their unmarked van, and asked us what we were carrying. Right, we stole this really scummy sink and are making our way home with our loot, on foot. They didn't get out of the van that time.

The third time he was waiting for a bus late at night, and cops in a marked patrol car, obviously looking for a reason to arrest him, asked to look in his plastic shopping bag, which contained two unopened beers [carrying an open container is illegal in New York City]. They were clearly annoyed that they had nothing on him. They ran his ID and held it for about 20 minutes. He missed the bus, which only runs once an hour at that time. Then he called them a name, [fascist cops, I think...] and they gave him a summons for disorderly conduct. The charge was dismissed by the judge, even after he admitted that he had called them fascist cops, but he had to take the time to make two court appearances, since the cops didn't show up at the first court date. [Aren't they equally obligated to appear?]

The fourth time was only a couple of days ago, in our new neighborhood, which is still working class but not a high drug area. He was walking to the post office to mail a letter. Plain clothes cops in an unmarked van stopped him, searched his pockets without his consent, ran his ID, and refused to identify themselves or show him their badges in spite of his repeated requests. One of them gave a name and precinct number, but when Mike called the precinct to complain, he was told there was no such cop, which presumably means the cop gave a false name. Then they let him go.

A friend of ours, who is in his sixties and has a health problem which sometimes makes it difficult to control his bladder, received a summons for both public urination, even though he had involuntarily peed in his pants and not out on the street, as well as disorderly conduct. The charges were dismissed by the judge.

Just yesterday, another friend, also on Staten Island, a white guy in his thirties, was handcuffed for an hour in front of his apartment. He was told that he matched the description of a car thief. This is someone who has never owned a car and doesn't know how to drive.

Many of the people in our old neighborhood were young and black. The degree of harassment and intimidation that they live with every day is of a much greater order of magnitude than what a middle aged white guy has to deal with.

For a while, the precinct was stationing two uniformed officers on the main drag of our old neighborhood every night. The street was deserted when they were out there, and the local bodegas and restaurants were starved for business. Clearly, the neighborhood people were more afraid of the cops than they were of the crack dealers.

I think it's difficult for people living in the suburbs to imagine the level of police state that we are living in. People may believe that the rights that we supposedly enjoy actually mean something when the cops are harassing you, but in practice they do not. When the cops do something illegal, there are no repercussions for them. If they search you, if they stop you without probable cause, even if they beat you, there are no significant consequences for them. Sure, if they arrest you illegally the chances are that a judge will throw out the charges, but in the meantime you could very well have spent the night in jail, been handcuffed and fingerprinted, and you will still have an arrest record.

Someone once wrote that cops only see three kinds of people: other cops, perps, and potential perps.

^^|^^|^^|^^|^^|^^|^^|^^

^^^ July 18, 2004         Consumption

[asfo_del]
"We might reconceptualize all economically productive activity as using up, as consuming, as degrading." – Princen 2001

Although I myself am not versed in these matters, I came across an academic paper called "Completing the Picture: The Challenges of Bringing 'Consumption' into the Population-Environment Equation" that was written only two months ago. [HTML cache, PDF. All quotations, except Juliet Schor's, are from this paper.] Apparently, since the 1960s, much of the research on the relationship between population and environment has been focused on the production side, partly because production seemed easier to measure and control through government intervention, but there is now a new emphasis on consumption as the major force behind environmental degradation. For instance, regulating and taxing the producers of goods in the U.S. has been fairly successful at improving energy efficiency, but "in the last decade all of the energy gains in the production sectors in the U.S. economy have been offset by households and individuals through the purchase of larger automobiles and larger houses. The result is that the United States is no better off in terms of per capita energy consumption than it was a decade ago."

We may be used to thinking of industry as the main architect of environmental degradation, but the consumption activity of households and individuals both drives the production side to generate needless goods and services, which are readily and greedily absorbed by the private sector, and directly consumes an excess of energy and products.

Ironically, while private citizens in the U.S. and Europe have become more aware and concerned about environmental destruction and have become more active in demanding political change to combat it, trends show that people are less willing than ever to make changes in their own lives to lessen their own environmental impact. "In post-modern cultures such as the United States and Europe, it seems at least plausible that there is an increasing disconnect between values and behavior, with individuals espousing many lofty 'universalistic' and 'benevolent' ideals that have little connection to their day-to-day behavior." People may be willing to purchase a fair-trade latte but not to give up going out for coffee altogether, or giving up their big car and big house. Why, I'm not exactly sure, but it seems that there are at least two important factors at work: one is the largely unacknowledged psychological need for status-seeking and climbing the socioeconomic ladder, which seems fairly prevalent throughout our society. It is not enough to make more money; in order to achieve a higher status, one also has to flaunt that money by exhibiting an affluent lifestyle. Juliet Schor has a more complex analysis of this phenomenon, whereby she places much of the blame for consumer behavior on the production side. She argues that corporations set up employees to work more and more hours in order to be able to afford consumer goods, while at the same time creating a society in which the only respite from work is the buying of products and services:

"My argument is that there are systemic pressures within the production process, coming from the profitability strategies of employers, which translate productivity growth into greater output and increased incomes rather than shorter hours of work. This "output bias" (as I and others have called it) is built into the very logic of capitalist market economies, and requires constantly escalating levels of consumption to absorb the expanding output of goods and services. Basically, this type of system funnels income to people without giving them the option to work less or consume less."

Human psychology is too complicated to follow predictable logic: "The Knowledge-Attitudes-Practice (KAP) 'gap' has been used in family planning research to explain why people express a desire to limit fertility but do not use contraceptives. Can this be a useful heuristic for understanding why people express concerns about the environment yet do not alter their purchasing patterns or environmentally damaging activities? " [I have never heard the word "heuristic" before.]

The other factor, I believe, lies in the makeup of the infrastructure. People in the U.S. simply don't have the option to opt out of suburban living or constant driving in any large numbers because that is the housing stock and infrastructure that is available. "If, as the household research suggests, the most environmentally significant behavior occurs at the 'core' (the daily commute, household heating, and eating patterns) rather than at the 'margin' (impulse buying, electronic gadgets), then it may be that the choice set is fundamentally constrained by factors that are difficult to change." I'm not personally ready to let suburban dwelling SUV drivers off the hook, though. Since our society is almost entirely driven by financial interests, we get the society that we are willing to pay for. If nobody bought into those sprawling developments that are popping up along highways everywhere like wild mushrooms, developers wouldn't build them.

There is a line of thought that believes that focusing on consumerism is an essentially liberal, ineffectual, and decidedly not revolutionary approach. The facts don't bear this out. Consuming by private individuals is the driving force behind environmental destruction, and it also is the essential means of support -- in terms of money changing hands and ending up in the coffers of corporations -- for the huge companies that increasingly control the lives of regular people worldwide, including in the U.S. Refusing to consume would be a profound act of resistance, and it may be that with companies and governments increasingly consolidating power so that they have to listen less and less to their constituencies, a grassroots campaign to convince our fellow humans to relinquish complicity in their own and others' oppression could possibly bear the most fruit.

The paper I mentioned earlier names three household consumption “clusters” that, put together, "account for nearly 70 percent of an economy’s material extraction and energy consumption, and more than 90 percent of land use." They are: housing, food, and transportation.

Housing:
When looking at data in terms of a consumer lifestyle model, "more than 80 percent of energy used and CO emitted in the US are a consequence of consumer demand." Since every household in a wealthier nation has about the same or similar appliances and mechanical systems, an increase in the number of households is a better predictor of an increase in consumption and pollution than overall population growth. "Research in California found that energy consumption for a one person household was only half that of four and five person households."

Food:
"The total energy consumption used in the production, processing, storage, preparation, and transportation of food range from 20-30 percent. Only 10 percent of the energy consumed is actually used to produce the food; the remainder is consumed in the processing-distribution chain. As societies develop, generally a higher proportion of the diet is made up of animal proteins which are much less efficient than plant proteins, and have higher environmental impacts."

Transportation:
"Private car use is increasing in almost every country, and the number of passengers per car is decreasing. And whereas the highest proportion of travel used to be for work, more than 50 percent of travel today is related to leisure time activities.... The highest income groups travel the largest distances (and a greater proportion of that distance is by car and airplane). Interestingly, each succeeding generation seems to have higher expectations in terms of personal mobility, which does not bode well for the sustainability of household transportation."

By 2020 the vehicle stock of OECD countries is expected to "grow by 32%, the total vehicle kilometers traveled will grow by 40%, and air travel will triple. Much of this is due to projected increases in tourism."

/=\=/=\=/=\=/=\=/=\

^^^ July 17, 2004         Adjusting to the U.S.A.

[asfo_del]
When I was six, my family moved from Italy to Brazil. I had always lived in Italy, and all of my family is Italian. My parents had briefly lived in Brazil before, for a couple of years, maybe. Brazil is a wonderful, laid back, beautiful tropical country. I don't even remember learning Portuguese because it seemed as if I had always known it. Adjusting to life in Brazil was not a culture shock. It was the U.S.A. that was hard to assimilate.

In part because the Brazilian school calendar runs from March to December [December is the beginning of summer there], my parents sent my sister and me to the local American school. I had never spoken English before, but within a matter of months English was my primary language. It was what I thought in, wrote fanciful tales in, and talked to my sister in. This in spite of the fact that it was not spoken at home, on TV, nor anywhere else in my environment except at school. Okay, so this may have had to do with the fact that English, since it was used at school, was the language in which I read and wrote: certainly literacy has a great effect on anyone's cognitive development. But I think it also had to do with the pervasiveness and self-perceived supremacy of American culture as it was passed on by my classmates and teachers.

I signed up to be in the Night of Music student show, which that year had an American theme. I loved to sing My Country Tis of Thee and This Land Is Your Land, which, until I learned, years later, about who Woody Guthrie was, I though of as a patriotic song, and about John Henry, Casey Jones and John Brown. I thought I was American. No one told me otherwise.

When you've never heard of baseball, a math word problem that makes baseball references is completely indecipherable. I had never seen yellow school buses, blue mailboxes, or suburban neighborhoods with lawns and picket fences, where kids could ride their bikes along leafy sidewalks to their friends' houses. I thought that all of these were literary conventions. The buses that our Brazilian American school had privately hired to take us to and from school were decrepit tour coaches. Wealthy Brazilian neighborhoods, though beautiful and lush with greenery, featured eight foot concrete walls topped with broken glass, or something similar, surrounding the perimeter of each home. There were no visible lawns and certainly no way to just stroll up to the front door.

We visited the U.S when I was nine. The first place we stayed, in Orlando, I think, was a Howard Johnson's. It was unthinkable that a building would have a day-glo orange roof. The menus were huge and plasticated, with leering photographs of obscene ice cream sundaes. The theme was blueberry ["very blueberry" was the slogan, which was disturbingly ungrammatical], and there were at least twenty different varieties of ice cream dishes, all involving blueberries. The benches in the restaurant were hard plastic in an extravagantly bright color, but alluringly curved and formed to resemble upholstered vinyl. Then of course there was Disney World, which was almost as intoxicating and unapologetically garish as the Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge.

The car we rented in Florida was a huge Gran Torino, which we got only because the agency had run out of compacts. My parents thought this was a very funny name for a luxury car, since Torino is a northern Italian city that is cold, landlocked and rainy.

A few years ago, when my aunt and her teenage granddaughter visited New York from Italy, I mentioned in passing to an activist friend that they did not speak English. He reacted with shock, as if not speaking English were automatically a sign of inferior intellect and lack of outward thinking. Frankly, if you live in Italy there really is not a pressing need to know English. Many Americans have been raised with a natural expectation that the world will adapt to them, not the other way around. So that sometimes even an American visiting a foreign country blames the country for not being more like them.

I had a friend in Brazil whose father worked for the state department. Everything in their home was imported from the U.S., including the cleaning supplies. They had American Hershey's cocoa, in a country that is one of the biggest cocoa exporters in the world. Their car was brought over from the U.S. too. Ironically, it was a Galaxy 500, a model that was also available in Brazil, manufactured by Ford in Brazil. The speedometer was in miles, which had to have been terribly inconvenient when all the road signs were in kilometers.

When an ad proclaims that four out of five Americans prefer a particular toothpaste, it is declaring as irrelevant the preferences of not only most people in the world, many of whom have the same brands to choose from and could therefore be counted on to make a similar distinction, but of how many people within the U.S. itself? I don't know how many of those living in the U.S. are recent immigrants, and I'm too tired to look it up right now, but by excluding them, advertisers are clearly creating the expectation that to be American is to be elevated, important, exalted. Being spared the advertising pitch is a welcome relief, but being treated as substandard as a matter of course is not. Xenophobia can be subtle -- unless it's directed toward the current foreign or foreign-looking scapegoats, in which case it can become murderous -- but it's an ever present reality of life in the U.S.A.

------

^^^ July 11, 2004         Be Rich and Be Happy

[asfo_del]
From The Autonomist:
"A while back I was watching C-SPAN and an author was giving a persuasive speech on the difference between violent societies and less violent ones. The nations with the worst street crime have (capitalist) cultures which place a high value on being rich, and yet provide few means and opportunities for getting rich legally: USA, Russia. The least violent ones don't place a high importance on being rich and provide the means and opportunities to acquire wealth: Scandinavia.
[...]
When is the last time you turned on the TV, opened a magazine, listened to FM radio, and a commercial told you that you don't need something to be happy, popular, beautiful? If it's not one product, it's a new substitute. The very aim in the game of capitalism is to sell mostly shit to accumulate money so as to be able to accumulate more money and the shit it buys.

So what do the majority of people do when they can't acquire all these "needs" in our economic system? Many go without. Some even manage to be happy and discover that beyond food and shelter, happyness is up to them."

I couldn't agree more.

We humans are like sponges when it comes to soaking up knowledge and ideas. Everything we come across, every person we talk to, every word we read, we take something from. That's a wonderful ability that we have. The problem is that a majority of our sensory input -- the hours a day every day that most of us, including myself, spend watching TV, listening to radio, and reading print media and billboards -- is from a source that has an unrelenting agenda. We take on the attitudes and the belief system that we are being constantly exposed to without even fully realizing it.

Not only has the saturation of media images in our daily lives created a collective desire to be more like celebrities, but it has created a skewed perception of what is normal. A normal, average lifestyle, according to what we see on TV, includes two brand new cars, a house in the suburbs, new clothes, gadgets, appliances, frequent entertainment.... No wonder the average American household is $8000 in credit card debt. It isn't by seeking an unattainable fantasy life that people fall into indebtedness, it's simply by trying to achieve what they believe to be the norm. [And, of course, many people end up in unmanageable debt just trying to survive.]

The Autonomist is right, of course, to point out that many people realize that as long as they have enough to survive in relative comfort, happiness does not come from acquiring material wealth. But the overwhelming tide that's urging us to buy and spend is a very difficult one to resist or refute, because how can anyone be heard over the billions of dollars touting the message that we exist to consume?

[o]=[o]=[o]=[o]=[o]=[o]=[o]

^^^ July 7, 2004         Radical or Not

[asfo_del]
There is a view among many radical activists that to discuss or even describe worldwide poverty without always bringing it back to poverty in the U.S. is somehow "liberal," milquetoast, even condescending. And that describing the deprivations of sub-Saharan Africans without also saying, "Oh, and by the way, the U.S. has terrible inequality and deprivation too," only encourages liberal guilt and engenders the notion that that poor unfortunates should be helped with charity rather than by addressing the root causes of their suffering.

I believe that the fact that by any accepted definition fully 80% of all people live in poverty -- and that most are so desperately poor that their daily existence is defined by the struggle to survive another day -- is the strongest possible indictment of the system of capitalism. Dire poverty is not, as the demagogues who control most of the flow of information would have us believe, an unfortunate side-effect of the current global economic system, which, they say, will be rectified in time by means of development strategies: abject poverty for the vast majority is the primary, overwhelming effect of capitalism. Not only does capitalism not deliver on its promise of prosperity and democracy for all, it does just the opposite.

I believe that telling the truth -- as well as one is able to -- is a radical act. Having said that, I don't consider myself a political radical. I won't accept a label that will pin me down like a frog on a dissecting table and will so easily make me a target for those who want to discredit what I believe to be fundamental human values. I believe that people of all persuasions would care, out of a sense of basic decency and humanity, about the desperate suffering of their fellow humans and want to learn what caused it and how it can be rectified -- if only they knew about it. Those in power have been very adept in creating divisions and fear when it comes to associating oneself with a given political stripe. Suggesting that caring about other human beings makes one a radical or a revolutionary is often very successful in turning people away from the struggle to make a better world. [I realize that these are fightin' words to many political activists.]

I'm very tired. I'm tired of being attacked. I'm tired of being blamed for having put myself out to try to do the right thing [this has nothing to do with the blog]. Because I believe in telling the truth, even about my own private life, I have to put up with hate comments on this web page. So be it, I guess. I've thought of quitting this blog several times because the internet is -- not frequently, but predictably -- a hateful place. I rarely open my email because it feels like a game of roulette, in which you don't know whether opening a given door will expose you to a sudden punch in the face. On the Collective Book web site, where we write about the power imbalances and cruelty that can arise in unequal collectives under the guise of consensus, there is no option for public comments. We briefly had a guest book, which garnered only three entries before we took it down, two of them hate messages. One of them read: "[My real first and last name] is a dangerous psychopath who throws furniture and disrupts the collective process."

The more you expose yourself as a vulnerable human beings with feelings and flaws, the more likely you are to attract attacks, like sharks smelling blood. I've probably just dumped a bucketful of smelly guts into the water by writing this. I rarely talk about my chronic illness, for instance, which is a daily reality for me, because I know from experience that it's an open invitation to cruelty and abuse. People are far kinder if they simply interpret a lack of activity or participation as laziness or selfishness.

"::"::"::"::"::"::"::"::"::"

^^^ July 6, 2004    Moving: a New Apartment...and a New Blog

[Richard]
I will be moving in a couple of ways over the next week or so. First of all, I will be moving to another apartment. My roommate and I have been kicked out of our present place because the house has been sold, so we will be relocating to a smaller space (keeping the same roommate arrangement, at least for the time being) on the street where Mike and asfo_del used to live.

This week, I also plan to move to a new place on the Internet. Living on Less was a very educational and rewarding experience for me, and I think that we collaborated very well on some things, doing some great work. But, for a variety of reasons, I feel it's time to move on to my own blog. I am thinking of using a blog program this time, though I might decide to stick with the old-fashioned HTML kind of page. I'll be looking into options and would welcome any suggestions.

My blog will (tentatively) be called No More Big Wheels. (The line came to me from an old David Bowie song, "Future Legend.") This title might seem somewhat humorous and offbeat, and I hope to maintain a sense of humor about this blog. However, in composing this blog, I will keep some serious principles in mind. These principles are mostly connected to the social and political focus, which I'd like to spell out in a preliminary sort of way:

The blog will be written mostly from a libertarian socialist/anti-authoritarian perspective (which many people might call "anarchist," if they like). As always, I'll be open to some ideas and campaigns from people of slightly different political orientations who may be fellow travelers in many situations.

In my blog, I would like to place at least some emphasis on class struggle in various forms. I would like to talk now and then about concrete ways that people engage in struggle with bosses, landlords, corporate and government bureaucrats, poverty pimps, etc. I'd also like to spend more time on environmental struggles, which often are very much related to economics, class, and the capitalist system in general (thus I don't accept much-exaggerated divisons between "red" and "green").

I hope to focus much more on discussion of different kinds of collective action.

Of course, I will also continue to write lots about "culture," especially rock 'n' roll...and all its offshoots and offspring.

I hope that asfo_del will continue at Living on Less, with her excellent writing and research, and her undeniable commitment to social justice and equality.

Hopefully, in the near future we will work a little more on the Collective Book again.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

^^^ July 6, 2004         How I Look at the World

[asfo_del]
I was born in Italy. My parents and all of my relatives were born and raised in Italy. All of my relatives, other than my parents and my sister, and my sister's American husband and child, still live in Italy. I grew up in Italy and Brazil, where I attended mostly American schools and, briefly, Italian schools. I have been living in the United States since 1980. When we lived in Brazil, we flew back to Italy every summer, sometimes stopping to visit other countries, including Peru, Paraguay, and the United States. Recently, I have not traveled abroad. The last time I was in Italy was in 1989, at which time I also visited England, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, and the last time I was in Brazil was in 1988.

The American schools I went to in Milan, Italy, and Sao Paulo, Brazil were attended by students from all over the world. In my eighth grade class in Italy, which comprised a total of only 30 students, there was a kid form Iran, a girl from Lebanon, a boy from Greece, someone from Japan, a few Italian students, and American, Canadian, and European kids who had each lived in multiple countries around the world. When our French class took a day trip to Switzerland, which was only a couple of hours away, my Lebanese friend had to obtain a visa in order to enter Switzerland. All of us were so accustomed to having to contend with the requirements of crossing international borders that we did not find this strange, although it was kind of absurdist to need a visa for a school field trip.

I have always been a person without a country that I consider my own. I grew up with the notion that countryhood or nationality, when it is used as a demarcation to assign a person as fundamentally belonging within a particular state border, is an abstract and artificial construct. I consider myself to be a citizen of the world, and that is how I consider everyone to be. I understand of course that people are not free to move across borders. The world would be radically different, and, in my view, much more equal and just, if they were. [Wages would have to be brought in line, internationally, if workers were able to go seek out the best wage wherever it could be found, and a worldwide labor movement would have enormous clout as a result.] Many state boundaries were arbitrarily assigned, at various moments in history, by those in power, often outsiders to the region itself, and they frequently cut across ancestral tribal relationships or lump ancient enemies together.

Looking at particular issues only as they relate to the United States is not something that interests me greatly. Of course there are many, many areas that need to be addressed in order to try to create a more just and better global society, and some of those, to deal with them in any practical or useful way, have to be looked at within a particular political context. The absence of universal health care in the U.S., for example, has to be corrected as a national, American issue, because, I believe, the only way that problem can be resolved is by creating a single-payer system, administered by the U.S government. But the larger issue of staggering inequality and concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few affects everyone, internationally.

I don't consider someone who lives very far away geographically as being any less of a fellow traveler in this life than the person who lives down the street. Therefore I don't subscribe to the notion that my or anyone's concern for the struggle for survival taking place half a world away arises out of a kind of paternalistic impulse for charity toward the unfortunate and downtrodden. It's just an accident of birth that I am here with my computer and my supermarket foods and hot and cold running water. I could just as easily have been born in a shantytown and have to get by scavenging for metal scraps and go to bed hungry as often as not.

The anti-globalization mobilization has been very effective as an international movement. But the United States remains extremely insular. And, to my surprise, sometimes even political activists who are involved in the struggle against corporate globalization are unaware of basic facts about living conditions among the majority of the world's people. I myself am hungry for facts and personal narratives describing the state of the world, and sometimes post what I learn here. I have had several American activists say to me that they believe that there are pockets of poverty in the U.S. that are just as bad or even worse than the conditions found around the world. Yes, there is terrible poverty in America. It is horrendous and depraved that there are people who have to sleep on the street in cardboard boxes and parents who have to struggle tremendously, and sometimes don't succeed, to adequately feed their children. What is even more deplorable is that these conditions, just like poverty worldwide, are the direct result of the greed and overwhelming power of the few. But the facts are that fully half of all people in the world live on less than $2 a day. That's about $700 a year. I have been unable to find any statistics on whether there are people in the U.S. who live on $700 a year. That would have to include any help from family or friends, any government assistance, any goods or services received, income from panhandling and scavenging, and charity. There may be some, I don't know. But is seems like a terrific stretch to want to draw that comparison.

And why does it matter to point out that that particular comparison cannot be made? I think it matters very much to know the truth. It matters to me to understand that abject poverty is the reality that the majority of all people exist in every day. Desperate poverty does not pertain to the unfortunate few. It is, shockingly, the world standard. It also matters to me to recognize that my own life, and that of many of the people around me, while far from perfect, is a life of privilege. I live on about $600 a month, [Actually that was when I was paying $237.50 a month in rent, which I don't pay now, although I have higher utility bills. I haven't figured out my monthly expenditures since I've moved.], which is considered a low standard for the United States, but I want for nothing. I am unable to work due to illness, and my family supports me and bought me a house. I am incredibly lucky. I don't say this because I think I should feel guilty or burdened by my privilege. I say it because I am interested in knowing and telling the truth as clearly as I am able to discern it. I don't think it's possible to work on making a better world without first acquiring an understanding of the world's situation as it exists. It is a fact, I believe, that my own privilege is enjoyed at the expense of others. [Like many in this country, I am both privileged and oppressed, to varying degrees, and I certainly don't have access to the power and wealth that would allow me to change the conditions that create suffering and poverty.] I try to live relatively simply, but I could do much more to opt out of the system that oppresses most of humanity. I believe that radical social change begins in our own lives. If large numbers of the relatively privileged refused to consume and produce, both of which place money in the hands of corporations and the powerful individuals who control them, the impact could be tremendous.

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^^^ July 4, 2004         Poverty Stats

[asfo_del]
--The individual median income in the U.S. is $22,000 a year. [11]
--The median household income in the U.S. is $42,400 a year.
--The official poverty line in the U.S. is $18,104 a year for a family of four (roughly $12 a day per person). [7]
--33 million Americans, or 1 in 11 families, 1 in 9 Americans, and 1 in 6 children are officially poor. [7]
--Extreme poverty in the U.S. is defined as income that is one half of the official poverty line (or, extrapolating, roughly $6 a day per person). [12]
--By this definition, 4.6% of American women and 3.3% of men live in extreme poverty. [12]
--And 932,000 black children, 733,000 Latino children and 1.8 million white children in the U.S. live in extreme poverty. [13]
--In the countries of the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe and central Asia, 147 million people, or one person in three, live on or below the poverty line, defined in the region as $4 a day. [1]
--1 in 4 children worldwide lives on less than $1 a day. [3]
--1.3 billion of the world's people live on less than $1 a day. [6]
--3 billion, or about half of the world's population, live on less than $2 a day. [6]
--1.3 billion have no access to clean water. [6]
--3 billion have no access to sanitation. [6]
--2 billion have no access to electricity. [6]
--99% of the world's people have an annual income below $25,000. [8]
--90% have an annual income below $9000. [8]
--75% have an annual income below $3000. [8]
--80% live below what countries in North America and Europe consider the poverty line. [5]
--The poorest 10% of Americans are better off than two-thirds of the world population. [5]
--About 21,600 people die every day due to chronic malnutrition, and there are over 800 million chronically hungry people around the world.
-- In the 29 African Least Developed Countries, 87.5% live on less than $2 a day and 65% live on less than $1 a day. [4]
--31.6% of urban residents live in shantytowns or squatter settlements, totaling 924 million people. [9]
--The living standards of Sierra Leone are roughly equivalent to those in the west 600 years ago: average income per person is $130 a year. [2]
--In Indonesia, 80 to 100 million people, or 40 to 50% of the population, live on $1 a day. [1]
--In the former Soviet Union, a million and a half children are living in public care because their families are unable to provide for them. [3]
--Thirty-six million people are living with HIV/Aids, and nearly 22 million have already died. [3]
--More than 13 million children have been orphaned by Aids, 95% of them in Africa. [3]
--Three in every 10 children die before their fifth birthday in Sierra Leone, while infant mortality rates are higher than in England in 1820. [2]
--Every day 30,000 children under five die, mostly from preventable causes. [3]
--1 in 3 children suffer malnutrition in the first five years. [3]
--1 in 6 will never go to school. [3]
--Worldwide, there are over 200 million children working.[10]
--Between 50 and 60 million children do what the International Labor Organization considers "intolerable kinds of work". [3]
--1 million children a year are trapped in sex work. [3]
--300,000 children are soldiers. [3]
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Sources:
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,293909,00.html
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldsummit2002/earth/story/0,12342,777663,00.html
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,709824,00.html
[4] http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/africa/2002/09ldcs.htm
[5] http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/inequal/2002/0118wider.htm
[6] http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp
[7] http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,825131,00.html
[8] From: "True world income distribution, 1988 and 1993: First calculation based on household surveys alone," by Branko Milanovic
[9] http://www.busmgt.ulst.ac.uk/scorus/potsdam/013.pdf
[10] http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inf/pr/2004/28.htm
[11] http://ferret.bls.census.gov/macro/032002/perinc/new01_001.htm
[12] http://www.nowldef.org/html/issues/wel/womenspoverty2001.pdf
[13] http://www.progressive.org/mediaproject03/mpmm603.html

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^^^ July 1, 2004         Life in Rural Africa vs. Life in the U.S.A.

[asfo_del]
I just finished reading a wonderful and slightly terrifying book called Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier [as in, "Curiosity scribbled the cat,"] by Alexandra Fuller, a white woman who grew up in Africa and whose parents still live in rural Zambia. The book is about the horror and depravity of wars fought on the African continent in the name of imperialism, as experienced by one man, with whom the author spent considerable time. She is unsparing in accepting her own complicity in the slaughter, even as a little girl waving a flag, which is what she was during Rhodesia's bloody civil war.

But what I want to quote here is the stark comparison she draws between modern-day rural Africa and modern-day America.

Africa:
"Down here [in Zambia's Sole valley], even those who don't go looking for trouble are scarred from the accidents of Life that stagger the otherwise uninterrupted tedium of heat and low-grade fever: boils, guns, bandit attacks, crocodiles, insect bites. No ripped edge of skin seems to close properly in this climate. Babies die too young and with unseemly haste."

And later on:
"Places have their own peculiar smells, and here in Murewa [Zimbabwe] the smell was sun on hot rocks...; it was the nose-stung scent of goats...; it was the smell of Africans, which is soil-on-skin, sun-on-skin, wood smoke, and the tinny smell of fresh sweat; it was the smell of home-brewed beer and burned chicken feathers and kicked-up dust.

"It is not a romantic smell. It is not the smell of free people, living as they would choose. Rather, it is the smell of people who labor, strain, and toil for every drop of sustenance their body receives from the earth. It is the smell of people who have been marginalized and disempowered and forgotten. It is the smell of people without a voice in a world where only the loud are fed. It is the smell of people who are alive only because they are cunning, ingenious, and endlessly resourceful. In theory they are 'peasants.' In practice they are brilliantly versed in the skill of surviving.

"Dad once said to me, 'When the world goes tits up and we're back to square one, I'd bet my money on these buggers surviving. Your bally [bloody] Wall Street fundi [expert] would last about half a day out here before he stubbed a toe and keeled over.'"

America:
"In late December I went home to my husband and to my children and to the post-Christmas chaos of a resort town, but instead of feeling glad to be back, I was dislocated and depressed. It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days.... The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should ... gradually ... assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States, ... maybe touring up through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave.

"Because now the real, wonderful world around me ... felt suddenly pointless and trivial and almost insultingly frivolous. The shops were crappy with a Christmas hangover, too loud and brash. Everything was 50 percent off. There was nothing challenging about being here, at least not on the surface. The new year's party I attended was bloated with people complaining about the weight they had put on over Christmas. I feigned malaria and went home to bed for a week.

"It wasn't that I didn't want to join in the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that goes with living in such a fat, sweet country. I did. But I couldn't. And confining myself to the house didn't help. Now I felt like a trespasser in my own home with all its factory-load of gadgets and machines and the ease of the push-button life I was living....

"Then gradually the winter seeped into spring and I resumed the habits of entitlement that most of us don't even know we have.... I drank coffee at the cafe on the creek without imagining K asking me how I could pay three times the average Zambian's daily salary for the privilege...."

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