(via ColorLines):
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Friday, November 26, 2010
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
WaPo makes shocking discovery: Being poor costs money and time!
Poor? Pay up. Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices.
It seems like this fact should be common knowledge, but it isn't, apparently, or it wouldn't be in the Washington Post. Until it is common knowledge, I have no problem with articles like this being in major national newspapers.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Some good news about the economy
Via the NY Times.
That's some comforting news, for those of us who were panicked about the dipping salaries of Wall Street billionaires.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
U.S. Digital TV Transition and Telecom Distribution
For those of us living in the United States, it has probably been hard to miss the recent publicity blitz on the FCC's move to switch all TV transmission to digital, which means millions of Americans who receive their television broadcast through free, analog transmission (you know, the bunny ears on those old tv sets?), will be forced to either buy new TVs or to get a hold of digital-converter boxes in order to continue receiving this feed.
The transition was originally set to take place at the first of the year, but shortages of converter boxes and the complete training of the federal money in place to help low-income families purchase the boxes forced the congress to reconsider the switch. Now congress is considering moving it back to June 12. I'm something of an advocate for telecom equality, as I established in a previous post on broadband access, and I think delaying the transition is a serious necessity for the sake of underprivileged Americans. For an illustration of how difficult the information about the transition has been to convey to those who still rely on analog signals, and then how difficult it has been for them to prepare for it, check out this September NPR story.
You can imagine what an easy issue it is to dismiss, especially in communities where the only valid service projects seem to concern basic living needs.
Luckily, I'm not alone in seeing this problem. On Monday I received this press release from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.
Washington, DC – During the weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund teamed with local partners in seven cities to reach help local residents prepare for the February 17 analog to digital television transition through service activities, community events, and volunteer outreach.News and emergency information aside, having an affordable link into even popular culture becomes a real factor in education and in economic class. I think it's difficult to deny that advanced technology accessibility and education illustrates privilege in a capitalist society more than almost any resource. This fact might contribute to an impression that leftists are anti-technology, or that there is some direct correlation between technology utilization and a committment to a market economy. I don't think that has to be so. Most images of Utopia in the popular imagination might not include every citizen with a laptop and a digital tv, and likewise it's easy to think of images of distopia that do include technology. But communications technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to mass-distribute information, and I don't think those benefits can be overstated.
Local groups in Atlanta, GA; Detroit, MI; Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN; Portland, OR; San Antonio, TX; San Francisco-San Jose-Oakland CA; and Seattle-Tacoma, WA are holding coupon application and donation drives, conduct trainings about the converter box options and installation, and answer questions about the transition.
The DTV Transition will require millions of Americans to take action in order to maintain access to free over-the-air television for crucial emergency information and news about their communities. Many of the households affected include low-income families, elders, communities of color, and individuals with disabilities.
It's nice to have an administration that cares at all about telecom equality for a change, but this is an issue that is still too quickly overlooked by social justice activists, and too quickly dismissed by their opponents.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Millions in New Delhi slums being displaced
Though I think the real shocking news might be that the American press has actually covered it.
Via CNN:
Millions of Indians have been displaced for the causes of economic and cultural development over the past decade. (I wonder if a recent widely acclaimed film about these slums had anything to do with this random piece of coverage on the matter.)Bulldozers razed the makeshift home and hundreds of others earlier this month as the Indian government moves to improve New Delhi for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Officials say the land is for a road and the demolitions are simply part of a master plan to clean up the city and move slum-dwellers to proper housing.
But, the government says, there will be no relocation for families like Hanso Devi's because they do not meet relocation requirements.
The government says they are squatting too close to the road, and are located in a major development zone.
"You see they have encroached on the specific project lengths -- there will be no notice, no relocation projects for them," said New Delhi Mayor Arti Mehra, who says she and the city are worried about those who have been left homeless.
About 3 million people live in New Delhi's slums, the government estimates. Mehra says New Delhi is slated to build 100,000 new apartments, though only 6,800 are under construction.
As for the razing of slums for an international sporting event, it's nothing new. It happened most recently in China, for the Olympic games, and is happening right now in South Africa in preparation for the 2010 World Cup. Ah, isn't "development" a beautiful thing to watch unfold?
Monday, January 12, 2009
Economic crisis leads to conservative budget hysteria
One of the most conservative-dominated states in the nation, Utah, is planning to cut its budget by 15% for the coming year, despite the fact that even the Republican governor recommended only about a 7% cut. And where is this 15% coming from?
Meals on Wheels and a host of support programs for at-risk teenagers and seniors. As the Salt Lake Tribune reports:
Salt Lake County prevention programs -- which help immigrants, teens in juvenile court and others -- stand to lose as much as 38 percent in state dollars, or $811,872, under one scenario. An estimated 17 employees at different community groups would likely lose their jobs due to reduced contracts.
Of the 3,200 students who participated in Cornerstone Counseling programs in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, about 1,300 could no longer be served. That would mean a significant reduction in the teaching of practical life skills that studies link to a drop in drug and alcohol use.
The day the [Governor John] Huntsman scenario was announced in December, Salt Lake County served 1,084 meals to seniors in their homes, a number that could drop by half if the dollars aren't replaced.
"These are people who are very frail, very sick, and we're taking food away from them," said Shauna O'Neil, Salt Lake County's director of aging. Though the governor has proposed backfilling those and other dollars, many community groups and local officials are skeptical the dollars will be found.
Acute needs, particularly those involving youth, have been prioritized at the state level. For example, programs for treating substance abuse were protected while many programs preventing alcoholism were suggested as cuts.
"This is at the point where there aren't a lot of good choices," said Lisa-Michele Church, executive director of the Department of Human Services. She hopes her agency will have some safeguards, because of its mission.
What's being overlooked, advocates say, is how much money prevention programs can save the state in the long run.
A huge chunk of money was cut by eliminating $4.7 million from DORA, a substance abuse program set up by the Drug Offender Reform Act. Its closure ends treatment for 1,400 and could lead to the need for more jails. But without a long track record of outcomes, it was more vulnerable to cuts.
An economic crisis does not mean it's time to stop spending government money. In fact, as pretty much every economist who isn't a libertarian ideologue has told us recently, it's the time to spend, not only to help support those suffering from economic decline in the markets, but because it's the only way to stimulate the markets back into productivity. Beyond this alone, however, it's difficult to see anything but conservative exploitation of the economic crisis to get out of the mandatory welfare programs they have long resisted.
These programs are life-saving programs. Cutting the budget itself is unnecessary, and cutting it at these places is morally repugnant. These calculated political moves demonstrate a marked animosity toward the under-privileged.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire: Mixing raw reality and fantastic fiction
Today I had the chance to a see a new movie in an actual movie theater, the first one in a long time. My indie loving family and I deliberated between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, before finally deciding Milk might be too tortured to watch on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well, that might be true, but the first 30 seconds of Slumdog Millionaire let us know we'd made a mistake if we'd been hoping for something light and nice.
While I'd heard a lot of hype about the movie, I hadn't heard any detail about the plot other than it centered around a poor Indian man trying to win a million dollars on the Hindi equivalent of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Jamal, our "slumdog," tells us the story of his life, with all its violence and disappointment, as he grew up in the slums of post-colonial Mumbai.
The soundtrack is wonderful, the acting superb, the romance lovely and endearing. The poverty is raw and (for the most part) inescapable, the injustices of modern India obvious. But I think it's the general premise of the movie, the skeletons of the plot, that left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. For 100 minutes or more, this movie illustrates in a most heartbreaking and gritty way, the slums. The poverty, the violence, the broken system of India feels so raw, and then suddenly the wordly angst of the first-world viewer is distracted, when something completely fantastic happens: (SPOILER ALERT) Jamal wins the million dollars, and the girl, mostly because he got lucky, because as Jamal himself says, his destiny was simply written this way. After the money and the girl are safe in his arms, the end credits literally roll amid scenes from a Bollywood-inspired finale, complete with Jamal, his lady, and a train station full of celebrating slumdogs dancing and singing.
The fact that Jamal's success, after all his pain and loss, is one in a billion (one in a billion in India alone, let's not even try to consider the entire globe here), is a moot point. So where does the movie leave us? We feel really good for Jamal. He's beaten the odds. He has found happiness even though the world around him is chaos. But what about the world? They're left singing and dancing like in some of the most feel-good fictions we can create for ourselves. The directors (Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and Monsoon Wedding's Loveleen Tandan) make no apologies for this resignation to unreality to tie up the all too real loose ends of the movie. Are we really supposed to buy it? Can't art do any better than that? Is it a matter of deciding on a ridiculously unrealistic conclusion that makes us happy or a realistic, depressing, frustrating ending? Is there no in-between? I'm honestly not sure right now. It may be that question that has left me so restless and not the movie itself.
Trailer, if you're interested:
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