The GAP - Part II - nice try Mr. President

Barack Obama thoughtfully opened discussion on the widening gap between rich and poor in America in 2013, intending to focus on the issue for the remainder of his presidency. In describing the “relentless decades-long trend” of a “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility,” Obama acknowledged that his administration has not arrested two stubborn trends: widening income inequality and declining mobility, where lower-income people have a harder time finding a path to the middle class.  

“The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough, but the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care or a community that views her future as their own — that should offend all of us.”

“Some of the social patterns that contribute to declining mobility, that were once attributed to the urban poor . . . it turns out now we're seeing that pop up everywhere.  Government can’t stand on the sidelines in our efforts, because government is us. It can and should reflect our deepest values and commitments.”  ~Barack Obama

The bitter truth is that poverty and income inequality have always been a political football. The reason is perhaps simple. The poor don't have an active and viable political lobby to fight for their interests.


Both democrats and republicans turned a predictable deaf ear in favor of more politically palatable subjects. House Speaker John Boehner lashed out that whatever poverty and income inequality there is can be blamed on Obama's programs.  That's nonsense, of course, just uninformed rhetoric and lacking substance; the gap has been growing for decades. With such words, the parties contend for position rather than solutions. Neither party has offered a coherent view nor a course of action; their various talking points would be laughed out of a freshman Economics 101 class.

Government is us, as Obama says.  And it does in fact reflect our collective values and commitments.

In the U.S., the southern states in particular have been bludgeoned by economic policy, economic decline, and an increase in the number of folks living in poverty. North Carolina and a handful of other Southern U.S. states saw the biggest increases in the number of people living in what are known as "poverty areas" between 2000 and 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Today, 25.7 percent of all Americans live in such areas, up from 18.1 percent in 2000, according to the report. Having a quarter of the nation living this way is a problem: Poverty areas are typically marked by "higher crime rates, poor housing conditions, and fewer job opportunities," the report points out.

See The GAP - Part I for additional information.  In the U.S., the gap is growing faster than in other developed countries.

See Class and the absence thereof for a look at underlying cultural issues.

The only way for a small group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept quite poor.

Furious Freedom

Freedom is uncommon.

It's worth remembering on this Independence Day...

However inalienable and proper freedom might be, oppression, bondage, and involuntary servitude persist today more so than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

The freedom to choose what you say and believe, where you go to live and work, to pursue knowledge, where you choose to call home and whom you will serve ... these are uncommon today. Uncommon, as in not available to most people.  Today.

Freedom's story is about more than taxes on tea or people in chains. 

Our American Revolution included twenty years of political upheaval and eight years of bloody war that ended in 1783, but there was more.

The French Revolution followed in the same decade, and the western world was born.  Personal freedom and inalienable rights were recognized in 1791 by the first amendments to our constitution, but it was well into the next century before such rights began to emerge for blacks, even later for women, and another century before segregation began to rot away.  There's more.

Humanity and the world were explosively changed by the freedom these few in the New World had won, but they and their predecessors had been fighting for such freedom since the Bronze Age.  It is a perpetual fire that has burned in every heart since the beginning.

At the other end of the spectrum from freedom is enslavement, perhaps.  Slavery is broad-reaching and not confined to the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the new world.  Slavery existed thousands of years before in ancient China, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, India, Rome, Greece, Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

Slavery in antiquity may have begun simply.  From year to year, there might be a good harvest, a successful season, or a dry spell lasting years; success wasn't guaranteed.  A family or a community might have plenty for generations or be driven out when the rains failed or the nearby forests were exhausted.  Having lost their livelihood, they might offer themselves as laborers in a more fruitful region to those who had good land for crops or nets for fishing.  Problems arose when those who 'had' took advantage of those who 'had not', and varying degrees of indenture and servitude were imposed.  In distress, a family might sell a child in hopes of saving the child and themselves as well.  A successful herdsman might offer a cow or two for a pretty wife.  Or servant.  Slavery by class, by birth, by conquest, by desperate choice ...

Beyond self-indenture, we find capture and forced service. Forced enslavement has a long history and persists today as human trafficking.

Only recently having returned to worldwide public attention, the slave trade affects perhaps millions.  There are 10,000+ per year that we know about. Actual (undetected) numbers will be much higher.

Children are still being bought and sold. Women and girls make up about 70% of trafficking victims.  

To continue bringing the issue forward, take a look at indentured servitude.

Indentured service was a labor system, most common in the 18th century British colonies, where young folks would sell themselves for a period of years as laborers.  They began by first selling themselves to a European sea captain who transported them and in turn sold their indenture to employers in the colonies who needed labor.

Indenture was a way for the poor youth of Britain and Germany to try for a new life in the New World.  Their plan was to work for a period of years and then be released.

During the late 17th and early 18th centuries poor children from England and France were kidnapped and sold into indentured labor in the Caribbean for a minimum of five years, but most times their contracts were bought and sold repeatedly and some laborers never attained their freedom.

Our modern version has several elements, particularly since the industrial age began.

Indebtedness is a bondage, encouraged and enforced by western culture.  Particularly for students, the legally enforced obligation of debt confines the individual to a narrow path of employment and availability in the workforce, usually for decades.  (Student debt tops $1.2 trillion, more than all credit card and auto loans combined.)  When you're dealing with millions of workers, the averages play out pretty impressively for the finance industry and the wealthy.

Wages were tied to productivity for 25 years following WWII.  In college economics, we
were taught that the two were tied by economic law, and that if they deviated, marketplace
response would force them back together.  They couldn't separate.  All that ended by the 70's
when corporations began to extract wealth specifically for the benefit of the few.  Executive
wages increased radically while labor pay rates stalled for the next half-century.  The financial
industry was turned loose to continue the wealth extraction.  Deregulation made the theft legal,
and Wall Street has extracted trillions from the economy's productivity without a penny going
 to the workers who provide it all.

Minimum wage traps unskilled workers in poor working conditions and inadequate support for a healthy life.  At first, after the plague in Europe had decimated the population and labor was in short supply, maximum wages were set to control costs for the benefit of the wealthy.  Later minimum wages were set to provide a 'living wage'.  If the U.S. minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be more than double the current rate.

Poverty, we know, is not something anyone chooses; it's done to you.

The big players these days are the 0.01% richest folks.  Economic warfare, rather poorly disguised in the west as free market capitalism, has formalized the process by which the super-rich advance at the expense of the indentured many.  The war is now global as financial institutions extract the wealth of developing nations.  Governments serve the wealthy and the gap widens.

Freedom is not the power to rise on the backs of others.
Freedom is not the chance to get ahead and leave others behind.
The full declaration is a world-changer.

"THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD IS UPON ME, BECAUSE HE ANOINTED ME TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. HE HAS SENT ME TO PROCLAIM RELEASE TO THE CAPTIVES, AND RECOVERY OF SIGHT TO THE BLIND, TO SET FREE THOSE WHO ARE OPPRESSED, TO PROCLAIM THE FAVORABLE YEAR OF THE LORD." 

The triumph of freedom is not a war's victory of one people or ideology over another ... that which we have isn't real freedom.  It's just a taste, and there's more to come.

The Myth of the Corporate Soul

Corporations are people, or at least the legal equivalent thereof.  The world changed on January 21, 2010.   With little fanfare, corporations became people.  On that date the Supreme Court of the United States decided that corporations, be they American or foreign, are afforded the same rights as a single individual when it comes to contributing money to a political cause or candidate.  The same applies to corporations speaking their mind through lobbyists.  

There are many discussions that might follow, but a perhaps interesting inquiry considers the moral and ethical choices a 'corporation' might make.  Does a corporation have a guiding conscience?  Is there a 'knowing what's right' apart from any other criteria that constrains the decision-making process and guides the whole of the organization?

Of course not.  Despite the legal word-play, corporations are not people.  

Corporate governance is primarily a matter of state law. There are thousands of businesses incorporated in Delaware simply because laws there are more lenient regarding the obligations that directors have to shareholders.

Within that constraint of law (or not), the business model governs the corporation, and the goal is profit.

Examples of corporations taking advantage of laborers and consumers are many. Enron bragged of how they cheated grandmothers who depended on them for electricity in California and cheated their own employees by recommending they buy more stock in their pension funds as company executives were selling. Tyco's top officers used millions of investor dollars for their own personal expenses. American Airlines' former chairman secretly took huge pay increases while negotiating pay cuts for the company's pilots, flight attendants and mechanics.   ~The Global Policy Forum

Wall Street and the banking industry have illustrated the consciencelessness of the corporation. Lacking an ethical governance and oversight, the corporation is just a hungry animal in violent competition for its food.

A mild surprise in the inquiry:  it isn't just the corporations; investors behave much the same way.

"When we looked at the investors, we ran a series of very interesting studies on how people would invest in pension funds. We literally gave them pension fund opportunities where there were social issues embedded in the portfolios they could invest in. What we found is they underinvested in social investment funds, even when it was quite irrational for them to do so – they seemed to discount those funds relative to funds that didn’t have these components.

When we queried people and we asked them, “Well, why are you doing this?” they were fundamentally looking not at the current returns, but basically believing that ultimately they would be forced to make sacrifices in their dividends and the payouts they would receive in the future ...."  Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail

There are people of genuine conscience.  Our difficulties arise as we attempt to regulate such things as morality in the business realm.  Those with Hobby Lobby went to court on the issue of abortifacient contraceptives.  It's a valid point that they could not in good conscience support or endorse or provide the means of abortion.  But those are people speaking on how they choose to live and do business. A corporation itself has no thoughts on the subject.

The narrow focus on the contraceptive question is unfortunate.  The issues of conscience in business go far beyond.  Questions of fair labor practices and wages, ethical suppliers and manufacturers, and even to the utility of offered products compared to pointless luxury.  Can government regulation resolve these?  Perhaps not.

Our well-intended efforts to legislate morality in the business world must walk a narrow line.  On one side, it's free enterprise; on the other it's government oppression.  Elements of socialism hover in the wings.  Ideas?  What's the underlying problem?

Independence Day

"This is the only country where you can come with just $100 in your pocket and get a PhD in nuclear engineering," she said with a great smile as she prepared for her citizenship ceremony.

"When a boy is born," an Asian mother tells us, "there is celebration. But when a girl is born, nothing."

"When I was a child," a young lady tells us, "all my dreams were taken from me just because I was a girl born in Iran."

"I saw a fellow walking his dog, and the dog had socks on his feet," one fellow remembers.  "Why, I asked."
   "Because the pavement is hot."
"I was amazed, people here care about such things, even a dog's feelings.  Humans are not treated like that in Iraq.  People in Iraq would wish be an animal in America."

Each of these folks were interviewed on the day they became U.S. citizens.  They, and a million more every year, come to America, hoping for a chance to be free.  And not to America alone, for there are many countries who share the vision.

Tahrir Square during the Cairo Revolution

So much is discoverable in the realm of human rights, the inalienable rights which many of us perhaps take for granted.  The stories of escape to freedom are almost endless, and all are deeply moving.  It helps our perspective to remember.

"The great struggle is not for power and dominance, but for the precious life and freedom of each and every individual."  

Happy 4th of July!

Truth Costs

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University, one of America’s leading institutions, candidly wrote, "I want atheism to be true. And I’m made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t that I don’t believe in God and naturally hope that I’m right in my beliefs, it’s that I hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want the universe to be like that."¹

Aldous Huxley is even more candid in exposing that his personal biases - even more than the evidence - influenced his rejection of God. In Ends and Means, he writes, "I wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because I believed it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions."²

Huxley, an intelligent and erudite thinker, did not embrace evolution because of the evidence.  Nor did he reject God for the lack of it.  Rather, he wanted to rid himself of the burden of trying to find meaning. He wanted no sexual restrictions.  In other words, he did not want to pay the cost associated with belief in God. For Huxley, disbelief was not a matter of the mind, but a matter of the heart and will.

~Abdu Murray, What Truth Costs

Nagel and Huxley, how much like these two are we in our leanings?  Do we choose our worldview and personal convictions from knowledge or from preference?  Or from fear of the implications?  Troublesome questions on every side of the issue.

“Until the heart is open, the ears remain closed.”

________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130, emphasis added. Interestingly, Nagel has recently released a book in which he concedes to some degree the credibility of the evidence for a non-material cause of the universe. See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
² Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatt & Windus, 1946), 310.

Water, no ice

"The findings are striking," NOAA's Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator, says. "Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place."

Scientists are reluctant to point directly to the cause of the changes in our climate, but the annual reports are typically used by the federal government to prepare for the future, and in June president Obama used his climate address to direct government agencies to begin planning for decades of warming atmosphere and rising seas.

Go to the NOAA dashboard for updated information

The biggest changes in the climate in 2012 were in the Arctic and in Greenland. According to the report, the Arctic warmed at about twice the rate of lower latitudes. By June 2012, snow cover had fallen to its lowest levels since the record began. By September 2012, sea-ice cover had retreated to its lowest levels since the beginning of satellite records, falling to 1.32 million square miles.

That was, the report noted, 18% lower than the previous low set in 2007, and 54% lower than the mark for 1980.

The changes were widespread on land as well with record warm permafrost temperatures in Alaska and in the Canadian Arctic. In July last year, Greenland experienced surface melting on 97% of the ice sheet. The record-breaking events indicate an era of "new normal" for the climate, the researchers said.

"The record or near-records being reported from year to year in the Arctic are no longer anomalies or exceptions," said Jackie Richter-Menge, a civil engineer with the US army corps of engineers. "Really they have become the rule for us, for the norm that we see in the Arctic and that we expect to see for the foreseeable future."

The Arctic ice sheet has shrunk so much that National Geographic is having to make what it calls “drastic” changes to its atlas.

That ice melt was also a major cause of sea-level rise, the report found. Global sea levels rose to record highs last year, after being depressed during the first half of 2011 because of the effects of La Niña. The average global sea level last year was 1.4 inches above the 1993-2010 average.
"Over the past seven years or so, it appears that the ice melt is contributing more than twice as much to the global sea level rise compared with warming waters," said Jessica Blunden, a climatologist at NOAA's national climatic data center.


And for those persistent naysayers regarding climate change, just put the ice back and we'll call it even.

(Did we cause the warming trend with our use of fossil fuels?  The cause of warming is a continuing question, but the fact that it is happening appears to be rather well established.)