Barry Graham
Scottish author and journalist based in Portland, OR. Noir, horror, politics, culture, class issues, urbanism, Zen.
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Posts tagged "poverty"
Daily Kos says being poor is becoming a criminal offense, and debtor’s prisons are making a comeback.
This should be no surprise. It is only the latest in the U.S.A.’s war of enslavement on poor people.
As I’ve written before, the most cruel reality of poverty in America is that it’s expensive. In fact, it is so expensive that, in order to afford to be poor, you would have to be quite rich.
On his blog at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum compares Obama’s requirement that everyone buy health care to the law that requires car owners to buy airbags and insurance. He writes:
When I bought my last car, for example, I was forced by federal law to also buy seat belts and air bags — and as far as I know, no court has ever suggested the federal government lacks this power. Why?
Technically, of course, the government isn’t forcing me to buy these things. I could, if I wanted, forego the purchase of a car. This isn’t very practical where I live, serviced as I am by a single bus line that comes by once an hour, but I could do it. I could also move someplace with better transit. I’m not absolutely mandated to own seat belts and airbags.
But in real life, the fact is that most of us need a car. It’s only an option in the most hyperlegalistic sense, which means that for all practical purposes the federal government has mandated that I buy seat belts and airbags. And they’ve done that on the theory that even if I don’t care about my own safety, other people might ride in my car and they deserve protection. What’s more, taxpayers could end up on the hook for medical care if I injure myself and my passengers. So seat belts and airbags are the law.
Practically speaking, then, what’s the difference between this and an insurance mandate? In both cases the federal government is forcing me to buy something I might not want. The cost of complying with both mandates is substantial. You can be fined for disabling airbags or removing seat belts, just as Obamacare fines you for not buying health insurance. They’re pretty damn similar.
I suggest that Drum’s argument comes from the same unthinking assumption of privilege that Obama’s health care law does. Drum doesn’t mention the many people in the U.S. who don’t have cars because they can’t afford to buy one. Would requiring them by law to buy cars work? Similarly, if a person doesn’t have the money to buy health insurance, where will they find the money to pay a fine?
Obama’s law makes about as much sense as it would make to legally require homeless people to rent apartments, and to try to fine them if they don’t.
In order for any community, anywhere, truly to thrive it must possess five different kinds of capital: 1. Human; 2. Social; 3. Political; 4. Intellectual, and, 5. Financial.
No single form of capital can be dominant; unrestrained by the others, each can create its own types of imbalance, and concomitant problems. Conversely, none can be absent either. The five capitals are to a healthy human community what vital organs are to a healthy human body – both completely necessary and necessarily in balance. Without the five capitals in balance, we will continue to have the static poor – neither upwardly mobile, nor downwardly mobile, just constantly and generationally poor. In that circumstance, we all suffer – though we may not all realize it.
An examination of each capital separately and then collectively follows.
- The development of Human Capital is an investment in the capacity and talents of individuals. It entails systematic education and skill development (in adults, for purposes of this discussion). It would include adult literacy, teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), and job training, among other programs.
- Social Capital, a term popularized by Harvard professor Robert Putnam, means simply our social “glue,” the ties of neighborhood and community. In poor neighborhoods, there has often been a decline in the prevalence and power of mediating institutions – voluntary associations where people gather. Poor people often struggle alone with their problems, now more than ever as government institutions face increasingly severe budget constraints. The need for new institutions to rise to fill the gap is great.
- The British political philosopher Bernard Crick writes that “the absence of politics begets violence.” This is as true on the streets of South or East Los Angeles as it is in Afghanistan or in the Sudanese desert. Members of a community must have “public lives” (as well as private lives), and must participate in “politics” – not only at the ballot box, but – even more importantly – in their own neighborhoods, from the living room to the school auditorium to the office of the local City Council member. Political Capital is the ability to act in concert for the good of the whole. It is often in short supply in distressed areas, but that must change.
- Intellectual Capital is harnessed brainpower. Many people in the United States and abroad are paid to think. Very few, however, are paid to think about, with and for the poor. Poor people do not have lobbyists, spin doctors, or endowed University chairs. Yet many poor people are smart. What is needed is a concerted effort to link up the resources of schools, universities, and think thanks, to develop pragmatic ideas not ivory tower theories, and to marry such intellectual resources to the creative spirit and entrepreneurial energies of low income neighborhoods, creating an environment of experimentation, well-founded optimism and mutual respect across diverse communities.
- Financial Capital is not hand-outs or government programs, though both may be necessary in the short-run. In a given community, money takes on two primary forms for social purposes – investments made and credits extended. The status of these two sides of the coin is woeful in most low income neighborhoods. Banks are scarce; high cost check cashing outlets abound. Business and jobs have fled. In order to strengthen families, we must explore opportunities for job creation and wealth creation. Poor neighborhoods need strategic investment that focuses on a community’s assets – chiefly its residents.
Only an organized five capital strategy can restore equal opportunity and social justice to America’s forgotten neighborhoods. As government and industry alike abandon the poor, tear down the already-flimsy safety net, and continuously turn a blind eye, it will be the people themselves who will pick up the fight and organize for power and change. Fortunately, History tells us it is only a matter of time.
Larry Fondation is an internationally-published fiction writer, journalist and community organizer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of Angry Nights, Common Criminals, Fish, Soap and Bonds and Unintended Consequences.
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I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.
So it was for me. Books saved my life, and gave me a life. I grew up in Maryhill, Glasgow, a Third World hidden within the First. The only physical contact I knew was violence, and most days the best I could hope for was not to be hungry. It was in books that I learned about something called love. Books became my parents and my friends. In a world that told me I did not matter, T.S. Eliot, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson told me that I did. Ancient Chinese poets taught me that the moon and stars viewed by the Buddha were the same ones I could see from the window of a rat-infested cold-water tenement. While those around me could see only the next drink, Edwin Morgan’s From Glasgow to Saturn revealed geography - physical, psychological, spiritual - to me. Most of us knew we were being treated like vermin, but I knew how and why, because Karl Marx and George Orwell told me. And the books, all of them, told me that I wasn’t alone, that there was a conversation, and I could join it, and I did.
Without books, I think I would be in prison or on the street, if I was even still breathing. If you think books are not essential to survival, you have never had to survive.
William Carlos Williams knew:
Without books, I think I would be in prison or on the street, if I was even still breathing. If you think books are not essential to survival, you have never had to survive.
William Carlos Williams knew:
It is difficultto get the news from poemsyet men die miserably every dayfor lackof what is found there.
Here is an ignorant, arrogant and blinkered piece in The New York Times, by Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting. Apparently only bourgeois, recreational shoplifters are worthy of discussion.
Where I come from, there are two reasons why people shoplift:
1. They are hungry.
2. They have no money, no way of obtaining money, and stores are full of things that advertisements tell them are desirable.
Shteir writes:
Now that psychopharmacology has replaced psychoanalysis as the therapy du jour, researchers have tried to locate the origin of the urge to steal in order to chemically quiet it. Kleptomania is grouped with other compulsive disorders like gambling, drinking and sex addiction. So far, only Naltrexone, best known for helping alcoholics stop drinking, has been found to be significantly helpful in reducing the urge to shoplift.
Here’s something that might be “helpful in reducing the urge to shoplift:” End poverty.
Even if shoplifting were motivated by kleptomania, and pharmacology could cure it, most people I know couldn’t afford the meds. They’d have to steal them.
Written by Don Ferrarone and directed by Ami Canaan Mann, and co-produced by her famous (but less talented) father Michael Mann, it has attracted much less attention than it deserves. I went to a screening a few weeks ago, but had not heard of it before and have not heard of it since, though it opens in Phoenix today, and has been open elsewhere since last week.
Set in a town that we might call Anyshithole, U.S.A., this is a pitch-dark police procedural centered around a series of murdered young women’s bodies being dumped in the eponymous marshland that has such a fearful local reputation that even the cops are afraid to go there. The investigating officers are a middle-aged, Bible-thumping transplant from New York (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an angry young thug (Sam Worthington) who grew up locally and is still trying to recover from the brutalities of his childhood, and his equally-thuggish ex-wife (Jessica Chastain). They are surrounded by people so desperate and so wounded that almost any one of them could be the killer.
But the emotional center of the story is a child, played with powerful conviction and understatement by Chloe Grace Moretz, who is trying to maintain her sanity and decency while living with her abusive, trick-turning mother and her gaggle of customers.
Ferrarone’s writing and Mann’s directing are compassionate but devoid of sentimentality, and harshly honest without being judgmental. The cops are well-intentioned but arrogant and incompetent, the criminals range from terrifying to pitiful, and everyone is too caught up in their own desperation to see what is going on. There is little hope, and no redemption, offered, but if Morgan’s character’s favorite book is right in saying that the truth shall set us free, then there might be a painful liberation.
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| A solution to the financial crisis |
We are conditioned to think of diamonds as rare gems, but they are not. They are plentiful, and only sell for high prices because the De Beers corporation has a monopoly on them.
We are conditioned to think that there is a shortage of resources in the world, but there is not. Even with the gross overpopulation (the world population has doubled in the last 50 years), there is enough for everyone. The problem is that, like diamonds, most of the wealth is “owned” by a tiny minority.
From Spinetingler magazine:
Barry Graham is a bit intimidating to sit down with.Maybe it’s the Scottish burr or the fierce intelligence which radiates from him or maybe it’s the long string of hard as nails characters he’s been writing about for the past 20 years?Who knows?But without question Graham has hit his stride as a storyteller with his latest effort, The Wrong Thing. (PM Press)… READ THE REST
Martin Luther King called riots “the language of the unheard.”
The violence and looting in England right now, and the stupidity of poor people’s destroying their own neighborhoods and attacking the small businesses that serve them (the same thing happened in Los Angeles two decades ago) make it easy to blame the riots on greed and criminality rather than protest.
This is a red herring. There is always greed and there is always criminality. There is not always rioting and there is not always looting.
No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity.
This brings home to me the reason why, as a child, I was compelled by Chaplin, but never found him funny, nor even understood that he was supposed to be funny. Living in a coldwater tenement in Maryhill, Glasgow, I recognized in Chaplin’s films the alienation, humiliation and cruel absurdity of that life, and I realize now that the power of his art comes from its realism.
