The GAP - Part VII

We've not yet recovered.  Today, more than twenty million previously employed are unemployed or in part-time work as a survival option.  Actual recovery will take decades, it appears.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is doing quite well in the aftermath of the Great Recession.  Salaries and bonuses are good.  Attempts to reign in the 'too big to fail' institutions have stalled; you can ask your congressman why.  Indictments for causing the worldwide economic collapse remain at zero.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, "Nonfarm payrolls fell by more than 8.7 million, or 6.3 percent, and the number of unemployed climbed to 14.7 million over the course of the recession, peaking at 10 percent of the nation’s labor force in October 2009. Further, many workers faced extended bouts of unemployment or left the labor force altogether. The ranks of the underemployed (those who want a job but can only find part-time work) and frustrated job seekers (those who become discouraged and give up looking for work) rose to 12 million, a 94 percent increase. In July 2013, four years after the recession is deemed to have ended, labor underutilization remains intractably high: 11.5 million people are unemployed and an additional 10.6 million are underemployed or frustrated."

The GAP between rich and poor continues to grow.  It affects everything from academic performance of children to employment, health, and life expectancy.

While this inequality is now quite clear in the U.S., it is strongly evidenced in countries around the world as well.

The Impact on Education?

The inequality GAP self-perpetuates through many factors but perhaps most troublingly via the impact it has on the quality of available education.

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

Food Fight!

The world's war today includes food ... among other things related to money.

In places where people go hungry, it's the money makers and power players that channel the food available to the highest bidder. There is no food shortage.

It's not a new tactic.  In the six year 'Potato Famine', a million Irish poor died unnecessarily and another million fled the country because business and government consciously chose against them in their time of need.  There was plenty of food.

Sixty years before, "... Ireland had a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government overrode their protests.^[76] No such export ban happened in the 1840s.^[77]

Throughout the six years of the Potato Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. ... "Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with."^[78]

... Almost 4,000 ships carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847 alone, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. ,,, exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the Famine. ...  peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey... 822,681 imperial gallons of butter ... The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.^[80]"

Now as the food business continues to pursue the money, for the first time in human history the number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people, according to a report from the Worldwatch Institute. While the world's underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.

Both the overweight and the underweight suffer from malnutrition, a deficiency or excess of what is needed for healthy living.

The public health impact is stunning.  More than half of the world's disease burden - measured in "years of healthy life lost"- is attributable to hunger, overeating, and dietary imbalance. "The century with the greatest potential to eliminate malnutrition instead saw it boosted to record levels," according to recent research.

In a world without any food shortage, it's still hard to get a healthy meal for many folks.

In the developed world, folks are barely aware of the differences between processed food and natural, and little emphasis is placed on balance. 

In the developing world, access to the right foods for a balanced diet is perhaps the greatest challenge.

Again, in places where people go hungry, it's the money makers and power players that channel the food available to the greatest return instead of the greatest need.  The same applies at the far end of the availability spectrum where sales are more important than health.  Eating is marketed as recreational and the end product is unhealthy overweight.  The 'healthy eaters' among us and the 'health food stores' are a miniscule minority.

All in all, today's marketplace is orchestrated to sell rather than to serve well. 

Among our family friends in east and west Africa, many of the children are under height for age and under weight for height due to a lack of protein.  It wasn't a problem for the coastal villages until the fish populations were destroyed by illegal commercial fishing.  My fishermen friends tell me they remember catching tuna regularly within a mile or so of the shore.  These days, they go out 10-20 kilometers in their sailing dugouts and often come home with nothing.  Sometimes, they don't come back.

These are just normal, hardworking folks who can pretty much take care of themselves, except they're being robbed by the rich countries illegally fishing in their territorial waters.

In the world of food, there's something missing if the only driver is money, it seems.  I wonder how things might best be adjusted at the personal and national level.

See more of the story here.

The Strangest of Creatures

The Relationship Monster!

There is a strange creature, born in an instant, that grows and evolves forever.  It's genuinely bizarre.


Before the creature exists, the two gametes circle each other briefly, but when they finally touch ... they connect, and birth is almost instantaneous.

From the first moment, the mutual hosts begin to make connections.  They nervously select a potential connection point to try from a list of thousands.  Each success gives them courage to attempt another.  With deliberate choice and time, the connections will become a structural bond, strong beyond imagining, continually forming and reaching for more.

Each connection succeeds or fails.  Some are more important than others.  If too many important ones fail, the creature dies.

That's the way our heart works, and this strange creature ... is the relationship between two; two friends, two strangers, two soldiers at the front, or a pair of high school teens falling in love.  A meaningful relationship begins with a connection or two, perhaps a shared interest or common circumstance.  Being in the same foxhole is a good start for some.

The strength of a relationship grows by choices, values, and actions over time.  The one who labors to understand you and who works with you rather than in competition against you will be the durable friend, the long-term relationship.

The relationship that fails doesn't do so suddenly. Most often, it's many issues of disconnect, different values, priorities, concerns long left unresolved. We talk about having a different heart than they ... or maybe no 'chemistry'.   Perhaps it's my choices rather than our choices along the way.

The workings of relationship are beautifully visible in families.  Husbands - wives - children - extended family, the quality of each relationship will reflect the choices to connect and endure.

The teen transition years are an (almost) humorous look at how relationships evolve.  It's a furiously high-speed change from dependent child to independent adult, and all the connections have to be carefully disassembled and reassembled. Both parent and teen have difficulties to work through.

Why evolve?  Children have decisions made for them. Pre-teens and teens have to make so, so many decisions, but the coach on the sidelines still has a say.  Making the change while preserving the relationship can be difficult for all involved.  Tense times.

A few among many well-worn phrases that come to mind:

• The relationship is more important than the issue (when disagreements happen)
• Don't burn your bridges (when one pulls away)
• Listen a lot (rather than talk louder)
• Understand the goals, and that winning the argument isn't one of them!
• It takes two, and how can two walk together unless they be agreed ...
• Two are better than one for when one falls, the other will pick them up ...

The connections are what binds one to another.  It seems that each connection is important and each failed connection carries a measure of risk.

It's a natural process that just happens but it includes deliberate awareness and choice.  You can hear the details in the narrative provided by children or adults as they describe their time with another.  Things that drew them closer or pushed them apart, connections made or broken.

Now we can perhaps begin to see what 'two becoming one' is about.  Shared goals, shared values, shared priorities, all are established and agreed deliberately, not by chance.  There isn't any chance that any two will have all those things at the beginning.  The connections are established and maintained by deliberate agreement and choice, day after day, issue after issue, walking ever closer together through life.

Every relationship is important.  Every chance to graciously include someone else in your world is worth the price. With family, and especially when it comes to our children, it is perhaps the best opportunity we have for a meaningful life. Among such lofty goals, a husband and wife who love so genuinely as to become one, well, that's perhaps the best of it all.

That's the way it works; hope you like it.

Not Mentioned in History Class - Pt. II

Herbert Hoover shares the distinction with a very short list of folks who by their life's work have saved millions of lives. 

It was a choice he made at great personal cost. An interesting fellow indeed.

Refugees fleeing Antwerp, 1914.

Herbert Hoover and the War Years

World War I destruction

in Louvain, Belgium

"Trapped between German bayonets and a British blockade, Belgium in the fall of 1914 faced imminent starvation."

My classes covering WWI focused on politics and leaders, battles and numbers. Real life for the millions of families caught up in the maelstrom received little commentary.  Herbert Hoover wasn't mentioned at all.

Hoover's food relief efforts during World War I

saved between 15 and 20 million European

children.  (unknown copyright)

 
Here's the rest of the story beginning with Belgium.

"Hoover was asked to undertake an unprecedented relief effort for the tiny kingdom dependent on imports for 80 percent of its food. This would mean abandoning his successful career as the world's foremost mining engineer. For several days he pondered the request, finally telling a friend, "Let the fortune go to hell." He would assume the immense task on two conditions-- that he receive no salary, and that he be given a free hand in organizing and administering what became known as the Commission for the Relief of Belgium." 

Throughout the war, Herbert Hoover orchestrated supplies for the displaced peoples.  At the peak of his effort, 10.5 million people were fed every day.

"War inflicts a special terror upon children," and Hoover being himself an orphan, "made their needs his top priority-- first in Belgium and northern France, where he fed an estimated 11 million youngsters between 1914-18, and later throughout the ravaged continent of Europe. When children in the war zone showed signs of rickets and tuberculosis, cocoa was added to their diet, along with an extra "Hoover lunch" of white bread and thick vegetable soup."

The organization which he chaired, the Commission for Relief in Belgium, grew to include a fleet of ships, the dedicated production of factories and mills, and even railroads.  A monthly budget of $11 million which Hoover raised moved over two million tons of food and supplies during the war.

Belgian refugees in London.

Hoover had become an established businessman by the time the war began in 1914. With successes in mining and industry, he had proved himself an extraordinary corporate leader in several countries.

At the request of the U.S. Ambassador to the U.K., Hoover began his humanitarian efforts in Belgium, crossing the North Sea forty times to meet with German military authorities to persuade them to allow the relief efforts.  He met regularly with representatives of British, French, German, Dutch, and Belgian governments to protect the work during the war years and after.

At war's end, like most of Europe in 1918, Germany was devastated.  The economy had collapsed, their currency was worthless, farms were dead, livestock had been eaten by soldiers, and people were starving.  Hoover orchestrated extraordinary humanitarian aid to the defeated Germany, Europe, and Russia after the war.

Cologne, Germany, 1945

In the years that followed and leading up to WWII, Hoover was a well-known hero in Germany and was revered by children as the great American humanitarian.  

Following WWII, Hoover joined in yet again to assist the recovery. 

From the Hoover Archives:

... Hoover frowned on receiving medals--what he called "toys"--even from Belgium. Eventually King Albert persuaded him to accept a unique title on condition that it would lapse upon his death. And so Hoover became "Friend of the Belgian People," with a passport stamped "Perpetual."

Official honors aside, countless gifts of appreciation were sent to Hoover for his fifty years of relief work. These included honorary degrees and beautifully decorated albums, embroidered and woven hangings, books and letters, sculpture and artwork ranging from a child's crayon drawing to richly illuminated testimonials. 

Hoover's personal favorites were the letters and drawing from children in many countries, including those from German youngsters who in the wake of World War II thanked him for their daily "Hoover Speisung," or Hoover lunch, and addressed simply to "Onkel Hoover, New York, New York."

Herbert Hoover shares the distinction with a very short list of folks who by their life's work have saved millions of lives.  It was a choice he made at great personal cost.  An interesting fellow indeed.

Henry Ford, on the other hand, ... see Not Mentioned in History Class - Pt. I

Going into government or politics ...

~ Humans of New York

I was thinking of going into government ...

There is little vision among younger Americans for pursuing a political career, and little expectation they'd accomplish much worthwhile if they did.  Public trust in the government isn't what it used to be.

So, what might we do to improve things?
Does voting change things now?  Does writing to Congress?
How about public protest?  Consider the lessons on that from history.
Not everything is bad, of course.  Government is not the center of the universe.  So, where are the good efforts, the right things, and are we invested appropriately, personally?  Got a plan?

Your taxes subsidize Walmart operating costs

Workers at Walmart have protested the fact that they have to hold food drives for their own employees, and that they are having to work two or three jobs in order to survive. 

Walmart has been under scrutiny lately for costing taxpayers $6+ billion a year in social assistance because of low wages and the carefully limited hours they give employees.  

“A single Walmart Supercenter cost area taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year," according to The Americans for Tax Fairness.  (That's  $3000 to $5,800 on average for each of 300 workers).”

Walmart is the nation's largest retailer, accounting for ~10% of U.S. retail sales.

CEO Doug McMillon has made a first change, a $9/hr minimum wage. We'll see if anything more of substance appears. For now, working at Walmart means you can qualify for SNAP, EITC, and housing assistance programs if that employment is the larger part of your family income.  

Competitors Costco and Kroger are doing well; their stocks out-performed Walmart, rising 2-3 times higher. Both Costco (COST) and Kroger (KR) already pay higher wages and provide better hours & benefits for their employees.

"The Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, controls a fortune equal to the wealth of the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined."  The six heirs took about $6.32 billion in dividends from their ownership share of Walmart last year.  The new employee minimum wage could cost them about 8% of their profits.  Poor things, their life is so hard!

Neither Walmart nor the minimum wage are the problem or the solution, of course.

UPDATE APR 2015: McDonald's CEO announced enhanced benefits for employees at its company-owned restaurants, including a wage increase and paid time-off for full and part-time crew employees. Education benefits include free high school completion and college tuition assistance.