Poverty, South of the Border

It has become increasingly difficult to work at small-town food banks because often one knows the client not as a beggar from beneath the bridge, but as a neighbor or colleague.  Food banks today cater increasingly -- and a sociologist’s survey of our town bore this out -- to people who are employed, the class we now call the working poor.

These people earn so little they barely get by.  Catastrophic medical bills or Missoula’s escalating housing costs can chew up their inadequate paychecks so that by the end of the month there is no money left for food.

If we are to really do anything about the shameful matter of hunger in our town, we must address these larger issues.  What at first looked like a little hole to plug now appears to be a bottomless chasm, ever widening.

There is something fundamental buried in all of this: where these people work. Many of them, report the food bank people, work full time for minimum wage and no health insurance at the ring of chain stores that has suburbanized this once unique mountain town.  The big-box retail business has exploded in Missoula, making us a regional market center, part of the cause of our prosperity.  That is, hunger is increasing in our town not in spite of our healthy economy, but because of it.

Hunger in America is no longer a matter of falling through the cracks, of happenstance and misfortune. Hunger has been institutionalized as a part of the economic fabric, including especially the business of selling food.

For those who "fell through the cracks," of course, hunger was never a happenstance matter.  A system in which a few have a lot and the many have little requires that some go without anything to maintain hierarchy and discipline.

Manning goes on to mention supermarket chains  across Latin America, often owned by the same corporations that own U.S., Canadian, and European supermarkets, which are shutting out small farms destroying the local markets that used to sell the farmers’ products.

(Two of my big hopes for the not-yet-existent organization People Who Give a Damn are to argue economic issues from the perspective of fairness, including the unfair advantages bestowed on large corporations that have nothing to do with skill or service or quality or any legitimate competitive edge, and to redirect our donated social-welfare resources to radical service organizations where a bag of groceries comes with a critique of the economic system that's got you going to a food pantry and a plan of action to change it.)

since the late 1940s, increased real income levels among First World countries have been accompanied by rising levels of alcoholism and drug addiction, depression, and crime  -- an indication of a growing gap between trends in income and happiness.

And:

Measured income has much less impact on subjective happiness than many other determinants of happiness --  especially employment, job security, family status,  and health.

The idea that income no matter who has it – the per capita gross domestic product – is the determinant of the public good is a creation of (you guessed it) neoliberal economics.  (I've got a half-started college thesis arguing that unequal incomes even hurt straight GDP, and certainly the neoliberal policies imposed on other nations hurts economic growth, but the larger truth is the one captured by Robert Kennedy above: the GDP doesn't measure the most important determinants of quality of life.)  The sad news about happiness from the Henry's article is how a lot of reported happiness is based on having, if not a lot, more: more than your neighbors or countrymen, more than you had a little while ago.

But to come down off the data, there are a lot of people in my area working two or three jobs to get by.  Many are immigrants, most are not.  This is in the wealthy northeast United States, within the economic sphere of Boston.  Sears, which made Martha Stewart richer again by buying K-Mart, works my friend Ian – who makes good money (on commission) 'selling people stuff they think they need because their neighbors have it' – 37 to 39 hours a week so as to not to have to give him full time status and health insurance.  He doesn't have the cash to go to the dentist for impacted molars.  Another high school friend who graduated from Harvard went over a year before finding work in his field, computer science.  Much of the top of my high school class had similar experiences.  If we have it the best, starting out with high grades and SAT scores from a suburban town with a desired school system, what the hell does this system do to everybody else?  The inefficiency and greed of the global economy, even in the most productive city regions of the first world, in wasting people's skills and energy, results directly in less satisfied people.

And my computer science degree friend would have been happy as a teacher, but his dad paid for Harvard and wouldn't accept his son working for that money.  By and large, capitalism rewards people best for directly increasing capital.  With extreme inequality, that means doing tasks that add to the wealth of a tiny minority more than doing things that help your friends, neighbors, yourself, or people in general.  The work is likely to be the most disconnected from our fellow human beings, the least fulfilling for those of us with souls.

I'm not saying people in the U.S. don't have it better than people in the rest of the Americas.  I'm just saying it's bad here, too.

"I remember a gardener. An indian. I tried to show him how to assemble a puzzle. He forced pieces of differing colors and patterns where they would not fit. No matter how I tried, I could not teach him this concept, for he had missed out. Not one nutritious meal, but nearly all of them. Not one day in school, but an entire education.

"There were many others like him down there, without a clue of the way this modern world works. They serve as fodder for this thing called a new world economy. Democracy is useless to them. They can't make sound decisions on their own behalf..."

Al comments:

Have you ever met someone who could put together a puzzle? Or someone who could put together an entire computer system? (That is something I, for one, cannot do.) Have you met a technical wizard who nonetheless has no skills for relating to other humans, who has no common sense, whose politics are narrow and ignorant and hapless?

The world is full of such people.

Likewise, have you ever met someone who could not read or write, who never went to school, who was often hungry, or who suffered from a debilitating physical condition or handicap, but who nonetheless was kind, empathetic, and who had street smarts?

Our world is also full of such people.

I just do not make the leap between "unable to do a puzzle" and "unable to do democracy."

Every day, "educated" people complete the very difficult New York Times crossword puzzle. Many of them believe that Iraq had WMDs, or was responsible for 9/11, and that a war of occupation is justified.

How are they any better able to practice democracy than your guy in Ecuador who didn't understand a puzzle?

The truth is, they're not.

I was talking last night with a young Mexican woman who accompanied a caravan through Central America last year and interviewed more than 70 citizens at length about the complicated megaproject called "Plan Puebla Panama," which is basically a project aimed at more efficient looting of natural and human resources in the farmlands, mines, and jungles of the region, and bringing those products more efficiently and cheaply to the North.

She observed, based on these interviews, that the rural, indigenous, "uneducated" (by U.S. standards) people displayed a much better understanding, in general, of the megaproject and what it would do to them than the university professors and students in the college towns and cities where the caravan also stopped to conduct interviews.

I myself have had similar experiences hundreds of times. I remember one day in Chiapas years ago, conversing with a peasant farmer who could not read or write, who suffered from a curable parasite infection without access to basic medicine, and listening to him explain brilliantly how his community had organized to create an alternative government to that offered by the Mexican state. At one point a parasite worm crawled out of his mouth as he was speaking. It came out of his mouth with words that revealed a better understanding of democracy than I have heard from most "educated" and "healthy" people.

So, based on my experience, I reject the idea that if someone is sick, if someone is hungry, if someone can't read or write or do a puzzle, that he or she is less able to practice democracy than those who can do all those things and more.

In Ecuador, in particular, as Narco News has reported, the indigenous and social movements took down a corrupt government just a few years ago, and elected their own choice as president. That choice soon became corrupted, sold out his country to foreign interests, and the indigenous groups were the first to withdraw from his government and now lead the battle to take back their country. I bet not many have ever seen a puzzle or could figure other such things out that are so foreign to their native experience.  But they sure know how to practice democracy! And they so far do it better than their "educated" neighbors near and far.

When I saw that no one had rated it yet, I felt I had to do so, because the description of poverty and need and apparent powerlessness is an important counterbalance to my own descriptions, from my experiences, of how life in the priveleged north has significant problems of its own.

I also felt I would need to comment on it, but fortunately  Al Giordano already had (and he has direct experiences of his own to tell, in some of the most powerful writing I've read on this site (and that's saying a lot).

I just want to add one more thing, in the equating of power with parity in weaponry.  No, throwing spears at fighter jets won't work.  But sometimes, if we the people create the right conditions, [http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1084.html throwing paper airplanes into an air force base just might.  Yes, the murderous machinery of modern war is a grave threat, but it's not one we the poor will ever hope to meet on its terms, and it is far, far from the only thing determining power.

In Colombia where the leftist guerillas have weapons and years of experience in waging battle against the government and its paramilitaries, toxic mixes of herbicides are sprayed from the air and peasants are displaced en masse.

In Bolivia, where the people on the front lines of the gas, water, and coca wars often said their only weapons were their bodies, eradication is carried out by hand and the legal cultivation of coca on their lands has been won and re-won.  "The drug war in Bolivia has hit a brick wall," Reed Lindsay wrote for Narco News in early 2003.  It's started up and all but stopped again since then.  This on-the-ground eradication can still have a awful human cost, but the difference in scale of oppression and suffering from Colombia is breathtaking.

The reason for this is that the social movements in Bolivia have greater power, even as they have less weaponry.  The reason for this greater power is what I want to fully understand.

We have everything to learn from the indigineous.  But as Don Henry points out, we in the north also have a terrifying responsibility to use our position of relative privelege to help the poor of the south.  But we must listen and help them on their terms.

When I saw that no one had rated it yet, I felt I had to do so, because the description of poverty and need and apparent powerlessness is an important counterbalance to my own descriptions, from my experiences, of how life in the priveleged north has significant problems of its own.

I also felt I would need to comment on it, but fortunately  Al Giordano already had (above), and he has direct experiences of his own to tell, in some of the most powerful writing I've read on this site (and that's saying a lot).

I just want to add one more thing, in the equating of power with parity in weaponry.  No, throwing spears at fighter jets won't work.  But sometimes, if we the people create the right conditions, throwing paper airplanes into an air force base just might.  Yes, the murderous machinery of modern war is a grave threat, but it's not one we the poor will ever hope to meet on its terms, and it is far, far from the only thing determining power.

In Colombia where the leftist guerillas have weapons and years of experience in waging battle against the government and its paramilitaries, toxic mixes of herbicides are sprayed from the air and peasants are displaced en masse.

In Bolivia, where the people on the front lines of the gas, water, and coca wars often said their only weapons were their bodies, eradication is carried out by hand and the legal cultivation of coca on their lands has been won and re-won.  "The drug war in Bolivia has hit a brick wall," Reed Lindsay wrote for Narco News in early 2003.  It's started up and all but stopped again since then.  This on-the-ground eradication can still have a awful human cost, but the difference in scale of oppression and suffering from Colombia is breathtaking.

The reason for this is that the social movements in Bolivia have greater power, even as they have less weaponry.  The reason for this greater power is what I want to fully understand.

We have everything to learn from the indigineous.  But as Don Henry points out, we in the north also have a terrifying responsibility to use our position of relative privelege to help the poor of the south.  But we must listen and help them on their terms.

The pessimistic view is that when people's needs are met, they stop caring about anything.  Many have argued, if not taking Maslow's hierarchy as their foil, that this stagnation has taken place in the United States.  This may have in part to do with the "creation of needs" by advertising, but the forces that keeps the workers of the wealthy countries running on the treadmill are a lot more than consumer playthings.

I still believe the optimistic view, that people raise their horizons to what they can build and do for each other as they meet ever-higher-level needs, but with a big proviso.  I think the needs must be met with our own communal hand or fully won.  Needs met only by participation in the system -- the radical labor organizers call it wage slavery -- mean all our energies must stay on staying in and supporting the system.

The fact remains that there seem to be people in the global south and especially Latin America who -- whether because their need is greater or their foundations firmer -- are better able to envision and even build democracy than my neighbors in the north.  What is democracy if not first ensuring the security, justice, and liberty of "fire and a little food for their plate"?

Two points on the statement above and on the prior posts concerning teaching someone how to put a puzzle together.

First, don’t confuse intelligence with education. I can tell you firsthand they are very different. A Spanish-only speaker moves to the states. He’s the next Einstein, but because of cultural biases, he is forced to do all of his math work in English – never mind that math is the same whether instructions are given in English or Spanish. As a result, the kid’s genius is never recognized and he is held back and thereafter tracked by the school system into programs for slow learners. He loses interest in school and drops out before finishing high school. It happens. I will tell you on a personal note that all my “education” meant jack squat this summer when I went to Bolivia and couldn’t speak the language. I had to rely on my intelligence to survive the experience – and the good graces of many friends.

On a broader scale, white Europeans “conquered” North America in less than a century because of superior weapons intelligence. However, a little more than a century later, the white man had wiped out entire species of animals, polluted the lakes and rivers, and fouled the air to the point where people get sick and die. However, Native Americans, using a different form of intelligence more in harmony with the Earth, had previously sustained themselves on the land for thousands of years in North America without bringing the wrath of nature upon them. Who is really the more “intelligent” people?

Maybe the individual who couldn’t put the puzzle together had something to teach that you, too, couldn’t figure out?

On the other point, concerning “it will take more than the right to vote.”  I agree, but then democracy isn’t just about voting; it’s also about making sure your vote, your voice, counts – that’s the struggle.

Think about what history teaches us. All empires fall, which is a fact the elite oligarchs know well and fear most. Egypt, Greece, Rome, England, to name a few, all built empires that have since crumbled. And ironically, in many cases, it was the so-called “inferior people,” or “barbarians” who drove the final stake into the empire's heart and then stepped in to rebuild the fallen empire. (What would you call the soldiers of the U.S. Revolution if they had lost the war?)

So I would suggest that the elite have far more to fear from the barbarians than they do from democracy. Democracy is the one trend emerging in recent empires – albeit far from perfected in any – that offers a glimmer of hope that the next empire might not be built by an elite caste on the backs of the masses, that it might not be an empire at all, but rather a participatory society.

In any event, the existing empire is now crumbling; you can feel the ground quake and hear the whistle coming down the tracks if you pay close attention. It is crumbling from within because of mounting economic, social and cultural fractures that are producing extreme paranoia and polarization (enabled by greedy, corrupt leadership); it is crumbling due to a militaristic policy that, left unchecked, will eventually bankrupt the empire financially and spiritually; it is crumbling from the outside under pressure from the new barbarians – terrorists being only the tip of that spear.

Imperialism is doomed to die a death of a thousand cuts.

The only hope the elite have is to embrace democracy and accept their new plight in that course of life -- which will be far better course than suppressing real democracy and ending up buried in the rubble of their fallen empire. Many will be too stupid to realize this (in the intelligence sense of the word); but some will see the light.

Because you know what happens to royalty when they no longer are deemed royal … history is littered with their corpses.

I’m not talking about some kind of fundamentalist Christian-wigged apocalypse here; I’m talking about the normal course of history -- the fact that this too shall pass, and something new will come this way. I may not live to see it happen, but I suspect my kids will, or their kids, so that’s why I wage the fight. That “Indian with the worm coming out of his mouth” is a metaphor for all of this, you know. That parasite may well kill him, but it will only kill a man; it can never kill his ideas. Ask the spirit of Che Guevera about that when you bump into one of his ideas down the road….

Like I said previously, it is just another system easily exploited by the predators that run this world.

I believe there are people born to be leaders, those of extraordinary vision. Democracy has on occasion identified these people and placed them in a postion of leadership, but it also has placed cruel scoundrels in the same halls. Don't forget--Hitler was elected. And a few others I can think of more recently.

We created a system, for instance that does not allow a president to serve over two terms, for fear that he might gain too much control. But what we get instead is a man that does not know how to do the job, and once we get a good one and he learns and is the most qualified, we get rid of him and replace him with another that doesn't know the job or isn't worth his own salt.

I remember benevolent kings or dictators, like the former king of Jordan for intance (Hussein?). And I wonder where our country would be today had Bill Clinton stayed in office. (Spare me the eggs. Clinton was a mixed bag. But a mixed bag is better than a bag full of...)

Also, it is possible for a group to practice democracy and do what is right for themselves and in the case of some small Indian tribe. They do know what they need.

The problem is that other groups come in and override them with larger numbers and overwhelming force, depriving them of the right to rule themselves.

So the problems isn't that Indians are incapable of making decisions for themselves. It is we that are not making good decisions on their behalf, being the more powerful and larger force. We are not corraling our own leaders who exploit them and their resources. And it is we who must confront our leaders and demand better treatment of these people.

What I am saying is that the probelm is us not them.