Category: Poverty

The world cup of economic and military warfare

By Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier

Bike Shop near Charikar, Afghanistan

June 2, 2010, Islamabad — “Our situation is like a football match. The superpower countries are the players, and we are just the ball to be kicked around.” This sentiment, expressed by a young man from North Waziristan, has been echoed throughout many of our conversations with ordinary people here in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Most are baffled that the United States, with the largest and most modern military in the world, can’t put a stop to a few thousand militants hiding out in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Just about everyone we have spoken with, Pashtuns included, has little to no sympathy for the Taliban or their tactics. Many people have lost limbs, homes and loved ones to the brutal assaults of suicide bombers or the indiscriminate violence of IEDs. Yet, people expressed frustrated confusion over uncertainties regarding U.S. government goals in relation to the Taliban. Some believe that the United States might be working with the ISI (Pakistani Intelligence Services) or at least not working against them, to enable continued Taliban resistance. If there is no resistance, according to this view, a military presence in the region cannot be justified. Nor can a so-called humanitarian presence further flood the Pakistani and Afghan economies with millions of dollars in aid that most often lines the pockets of the politicians, elite bureaucrats, and United States corporations involved in construction and security.

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Ill Fares The Land

By Tony Judt

—This essay is drawn from the opening chapter of Tony Judt’s new book, Ill Fares the Land (Penguin), first excerpted at NY Review of Books. A review of the book will follow shortly.

On the left, Marxism was attractive to generations of young people if only because it offered a way to take one’s distance from the status quo. Much the same was true of classical conservatism: a well-grounded distaste for over-hasty change gave a home to those reluctant to abandon long-established routines. Today, neither left nor right can find their footing.

For thirty years students have been complaining to me that “it was easy for you”: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. “We” (the children of the Eighties, the Nineties, the “Aughts”) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us—just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a “lost generation.”

If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: “we” know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?

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Let’s talk about America’s record on women’s rights

America's second-class citizens?

After Jasmin brought my attention to this story, I thought I would roll out a few more coincidentally timed reports that highlight the contradictions between America’s self-proclaimed equality and our astonishing contemporary failures in the area of women’s rights.

Firstly, Amnesty USA has released a new study on the quality of maternity care for American women. It notes:

The USA spends more than any other country on health care, and more on maternal health than any other type of hospital care. Despite this, women in the USA have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than those in 40 other countries. For example, the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the USA is five times greater than in Greece, four times greater than in Germany, and three times greater than in Spain.

Unsurprisingly, there is a tremendous racial disparity as an African American woman’s odds of dying as a result of child birth is four times greater than that of white American.

Secondly, Democracy Now! explored the disparity in median wealth for American women. The median for a single Black woman is $100, $120 for a single Hispanic woman, and $41,000 for a single white woman. Seriously.

If you’re playing along at home, you can check off both “post-racial” and “feminist” on the list of things we hear about America but know are not true. I will also give you a prize if you can tell me how many of America’s governors are women and explain how that reflects the country’s diversity.

Image by Maze Walker on Flickr.

In the Shadow of Power

Washington, DC is the most powerful capital city in the world. But it’s also a city that is deeply divided between a wealthy and extremely influential minority and an impoverished and largely disenfranchised African American majority. The seat of global power is also home to a population that remains largely invisible to the politicians, journalists, lawyers, lobbyists and contractors around Capitol Hill. This other Washington, DC maintains the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of child poverty, the highest mortality rate from HIV/AIDS, and the lowest life expectancy in the country.

Kike Arnal on his superb new book of photography, In the Shadow of Power, with an inroduction by Ralph Nader.

Decency and Strength

by Kathy Kelly

A fire hazard mars natural beauty at Fort Carson

Here in Colorado Springs, student and community organizers recently invited me to try and help promote their campaign against a proposed “No Camping” ordinance, a law to ban the homeless from sleeping on sidewalks or public lands within the city limits.  The organizers insist it’s wrongful to criminalize the most desperate and endangered among us, that it instead seems quite criminal to persecute people already in need of far more care and compassion than we’ve been willing to offer, especially during these bitterly cold winter months.  But others in the area are intent on eliminating the tent encampments near the Monument Creek and Shooks Run trails, complaining that the encampments mar natural beauty, deter tourists, create fire hazards, and degrade the environment by strewing heaps of trash and debris near the creek and even in it.

It seems important for both sides of the argument to acknowledge other local encampments that Colorado Springs is home to: Fort Carson Army base, both Peterson and Schriever (formerly Falcon) Air Force Bases, Norad and Cheyenne Air Force Stations, and the U.S. Air Force Academy.  It’s not lost on opponents of the “No Camping” ordinance that stop-loss policies prevent many of the young men and women at these institutions from returning to their homes, where many of them long to be after repeated tours of military duty outside the United States.  For every soldier intent on strengthening his or her country’s military option, how many more are taking a last-ditch option, signing up for the famed “poverty draft,” to sustain themselves and their families through an economic crisis felt throughout the country and the world?   Many, though not all, of these young people have been driven by poverty into their encampments as surely as the Monument Creek campers have been driven into theirs.

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URGENT APPEAL: Haiti 7.0 Magnitude Earthquake

Chaos after the earthquake in Haiti.Haiti, the Western hemisphere’s most destitute country, has just experienced a crippling blow in the form of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. The earthquake, centered just 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, has devastated sections of the city and knocked out important infrastructure, including telephone communications. It is the worst earthquake in 200+ years in the region.

Partners in Health is a reputable organization based out of Boston which has a long, established history promoting social equity and health in Haiti. It was originally founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist and infectious disease specialist from Harvard, who has dedicated much of his life to alleviating the social inequalities rampant in Haiti. PIH states clearly that its mission is a “preferential option for the poor in health care.”

Donate generously at PIH’s website. PIH is actively organizing a mission to provide medical necessities and supplies to the areas that have been hit the hardest. Every little bit counts at this point. Thousands of people lay trapped in the rubble tonight.  Natural disasters, like war, do not discriminate with victims.  Innocent men, women and children are suffering needlessly. Our heart goes out to them.

Imagining Radical Change with David Harvey & Alexander Cockburn

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David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and Alexander Cockburn, author of End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, don’t think small when it comes to change. They aren’t afraid to think about significant, even radical changes to the social order we’ve grown so used to, whether it’s requiring full employment, reimagining urban living, or repudiating credit card debt and abolishing Wall Street speculation.

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The Crooks Get Cash While the Poor Get Screwed

Justice for all in Freedom’s Land? Probably not if you are poor or black, certainly not if you are both. Read this heartbreaking story by Chris Hedges:

Children leave a Chicago homeless shelter on their way to school. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, more than half of children in low-income families have at least one parent who works full-time. (AP photo / Amy Sancetta)

Tearyan Brown became a father when he was 16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about $1,400 a week.

Brown, when he got out after three and a half years, was done with street life. He got a job as a security guard and then as a fork lift operator. He eventually made about $30,000 a year. He shepherded his son through high school, then college and a master’s degree. His boy, now 24, is a high school teacher in Texas. Brown would not leave the streets of Trenton but his son would. It made him proud. It gave him hope.

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A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world

https://i0.wp.com/www.tehrantimes.com/News/10620/07_PERUV.jpg

“The uprising in the Amazon is more urgent than Iran’s”, writes Johann Hari of The Independent – “it will determine the future of the planet.” Hyperboles aside, this is truly an excellent piece of journalism. The silence and lack of solidarity from the ‘left’ in the West for the heroic struggles for survival of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America in the face of brutal political and economic repression is “shaming” indeed. “These people had nothing” writes Hari “but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?” Let’s see how things shape up during this week’s G8 summit in Italy but the prospects for a revival of the faltering alter-globalisation movement seem rather bleak, according to Ben Trott. (Also, have a look at Belen’s excellent piece on recent events in Peru, if you haven’t already.)

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.

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South Africa: Balance shifts left, anger grows

Patrick Bond, South Africa’s leading  analyst and author of a number of excellent books on the country’s post-Apartheid neoliberal transformation, reports about rising class polarisation and the prospect of mass social unrest in the wake of the global economic recession.

(Durban, 28 June 2009) — With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township “service delivery protests”, rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa.
The big splits in society are clearer now. The 2005-09 dispute within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) between camps allied to former president Thabo Mbeki and President Jacob Zuma has resolved itself largely in Zuma’s favour.

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