One Day ...

In the Indonesian village of Lamalera, a whale is enough to feed everyone there (pop. 2,500) for a couple of months, and they don't waste any of it.  They are among the last of the whaling communities.

Most of us in the developed world live with some consistency.  Ever noticed how, payday to payday, you can sort of settle into the routine.  You get paid, you eat and sleep and travel and work, and then you get paid again.

About a quarter of the adults in the world have a regular paying job, maybe 30+ hours a week. The rest of the world folks are perhaps like the Lamalera whale chasers who depend on catching a whale every couple of months so they and their children can eat.  Some years are better than others.

At the end of the day, poppa gives the kids a chance to play in the boat.

In the developed countries, you'll get paid more in one day than a family makes in a month in the developing world.

Folks who fish to feed their families are being put out of business by big industry. Kind of like when Walmart started putting an end to the mom and pop businesses.  Fishermen in western Africa have seen a 90% decline in pelagic fish populations due to overfishing by outsiders. It's mostly illegal.  Now local folks have to work harder, sail farther, and get less.

And sometimes, our friends (right) tell us, they come home at the end of the day with nothing at all. Rich countries fishing illegally did that to them.

Folks here are among the world's nicest, and it's as beautiful a place as
any in the world, but it's difficult to get an adequate diet for your kids.
About a quarter are undernourished.

They're doing their best to defend their territorial waters and put the illegal players out of business. We're helping with that; we work with navy and coast guard groups for training, international cooperation, and technology.  There's a lot to be done and meanwhile, they've got kids to feed and keep in school.

You can lend a hand, if you like.  Or better yet, you can go see for yourself.  And take your kids along.  It'll change the way you feel about being rich and perhaps give you some ideas for getting involved in the real world..  :)

The Hierarchy*

The academics among us have struggled with nature, nurture, natural and supernatural for centuries.  Among those who must understand everything in scientific terms, describing humanity and human behavior has been a difficult challenge.

• Art and music, literature, and philosophy make little scientific sense and remain beyond adequate explanation.  
• Class and conflict are perhaps just competition, like monkeys might do.  Or Wall Street.
• Free will is scientifically impossible, or so the scientists tell us, 

                  ... and the entertaining debate continues.

The rationalist prefers a 'self and survival' based reality.  For them, even charity and philanthropy are self-serving, and as Ayn Rand popularized, selfless sacrifice is a fiction.  Pursued further, such reasoning quickly descends to an end of meaning for existence, an end of value for life or labor.

In our hearts, we know better, and every time we touch the truth, we're reminded.  Our lives are filled with purpose and opportunity, with difficulty and challenges and transcendent experiences, all of which require us to grow and learn.  And, there's extraordinary joy along the way, not in satisfying our own selfishness, but in truly loving others as we love ourselves.  Funny how that works.




*Maslow's Hierarchy is one of many attempts to contain the human experience in a defined context.  Popular for years, it has been generally abandoned by academics in favor of even more narrowly specified behavioral mechanics.  Scientific rigor is everything, we're told.  Are they right?  Or is there even more beyond a life purpose of loving others?  

It's the ideology

Immediately following the Bastille Day incident, this meme

circulated on social media. Exactly who do they have in mind, I wonder?

An ideology isn't a religion, interestingly enough; it's "a system of ideas and ideals,

especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy."
Governance, position, influence ... I'm right and you're wrong.

If you've got a solution in mind, here's the root problem that has to be resolved.

Justifying the murder of innocents is based on a willingness to do harm to another, to reach your goal at the expense of another.

It's not a new idea.

Recent perpetrators include ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram.  And governments.

In the early 90's, 857 cartons kept by the Iraqi secret police surfaced.  They contained detailed files describing genocide against the Kurds.  Time reported, 1 June 1992: 200,000 to 300,000 killed (late 80s).

The years before gave us the Rwandan genocide, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Holocaust under the Nazi Reich, the Armenian massacres by the Ottomans, the Nanking massacre, the Holodomor ....  In each case, the slaughter of innocents was directed by political leadership and justified by some rhetoric of superiority.

The colonial era cost the lives of more than half the population of Africa and the Americas with similar justification by perpetrators.

Centuries have passed, and they've not yet recovered. Ask a Mijikenda what it's like to be driven from your own lands. He can tell you now, but prior to the new constitution (2010) he'd be arrested and imprisoned for speaking ill of the government. Most of the 2000+ African tribes spent a century or more without any voice in their own governance while their  cultures were systematically destroyed, their resources were stolen and shipped off to foreign lands. And then, of course, there was three hundred years of slavery.

Untold millions have died in the name of our way, our rule, our empire.  What we see today is nothing new although the demographics of both perpetrators and victims have changed.  The world's population has tripled in my lifetime, and population densities have changed the geography and rhetoric of conflict.  The rationale, however, is unchanged since Herod ordered the execution of male babies in Bethlehem.  It's a power play risen from selfishness, perceived vulnerability, and perhaps opportunity for advancement.

Contributing to the problem, oppression, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and injustice have provoked an extraordinary degree of frustration and violence in communities, cultural groupings, and the world.  Add the two together, the power players and the oppressed, and the result is perhaps predictable.

It's the ideology, but go to the root.  It's not politics or religion, it's conquest for power and position, the climbing up over the bodies of others for personal gain.

The willingness and intent to do harm to another, to reach your goal at the expense of another ...

If you've got a solution in mind, that's the root problem that has to be addressed.

Different

The Angalamman Festival is celebrated each year in a town called Kaveripattinam in Tamil Nadu.

Devotees, numbering in tens of thousands, converge in this town the day after Maha Shivratri to

worship the deity Angalamman, meaning 'The Guardian God'. During the festival some of the

worshippers paint their faces that personifies Goddess Kali. Other indulge in the ritual of

piercing iron rods through their cheeks.

Just how different might we be in our varied cultures? There are bizarre differences, of course, and then there are all the similarities.  We care about each other, we care about our children and hope to see them healthy and safe and well equipped; we hope for peace and a good life for all.

Breathtaking pictures by National Geographic contributors and others give us a brief look into a different world. How might we relate across such a divide?

And ... how many places and people are there that would be just stunning to see and know?

Perhaps an interesting question for us all, is our view of 'the world' big enough?  Does it include these who might be so different from us? And if God so loved 'the world', does that suggest we might need to do anything differently? 

Is the fact that we're different a problem?

I suspect we'd be surprised how many things we have in common with these interesting folks.

Look both ways ...

At the border, to the north is wealth, to the south is poverty.  Why?

In the case of Nogales, the difference between the two sides of the border is the governance under which they live. Everything else is pretty much the same, isn't it.  On Mexico's side of the equation, there's a distinct favoritism and an elite structure that limits competition and keeps the common folks from making any particular economic progress.  To the north, entrepreneurship, competition, patent rights, monopoly law, and property rights open the door for many. Minimum wage used to help; now not so much.

Life in Nogales, Mexico, 1999.  Little
has changed since then.

To be sure, there are wealthy people and poor people living on this planet. Some have mansions, others are homeless. Some have caviar for breakfast while others starve. Some avoid paying taxes, others die of curable diseases because they can’t afford medicine.

Agriculture in North Korea is inefficient and
vulnerable.  Half the country's population
 lives in extreme poverty.

North and South Korea are an interesting case.  One of the poorest and one of the wealthiest countries in the world; they come from the same history, geography, ancestry, language, and culture, yet the difference is stunning.  North of the border, famine kills people, and half the population lives in extreme poverty. Again the only difference between the two is governance.

The wealth of an honest man is different than the riches of an oppressor, or a usurper of rights.  Mubarak, for instance; he and his family were worth billions, all extracted from the Egyptian economy before he was driven from office.

We have governments and regulatory agencies that do or don't serve us well.  All of us.

That brings us back to our issue of inequality.  

In the U.S., inequality (the GAP) began accelerating in the 70's, and the wealthy have made extraordinary gains.  Note the household income chart here.  For the bottom economic half, gains are due to more household members in the workforce while wages have been stagnant.  Below the halfway mark, household income hasn't kept up with increases in cost of living.  Particularly, education and healthcare are less accessible.

For too many, there have been difficult choices between children's education, retirement savings, and owning a home.  Typically, households live payday to payday, and the only option for some is living in a high-density, high-turnover neighborhood, not the best place to raise children.

Both education and healthcare costs have been inflated by programmatics rather than by value.  The student loan initiative caused college costs to elevate well ahead of nominal inflation rates.  It was supposed to make it more available but has had a significant detrimental effect opposite to intent.  Health care costs have followed a similar path.

Inequality between countries is a result of governance, internal and international.  

Inequality inside a country is the result of preferential governance.  It's perhaps not intended to be abusive to the lower economic segment, but it's certainly as effective as if designed for that purpose.

A failed minimum wage policy gave us Walmart and an end to many local businesses. Originally intended to protect workers, the minimum wage has lagged behind cost of living increases until today, it is worth 20% less than in the 60's.  Households now can't survive on a minimum wage job, of course. Even two full-time minimum wage jobs don't get a family above the poverty line.  We pay for welfare and assistance programs for the underpaid workers, something their employers should be paying, but they don't.  

The wage policy and regulatory processes weren't intended to do harm, and early on, they helped significantly.  After years of inattention, however, it appears that they've detrimentally reshaped a large portion of our economy and culture.

College costs have increased about 800% since I enrolled at UT fifty years ago.  Household income has increased less than a twentieth of that for all but the wealthiest.  That means that every year, fewer regular folks can send their kids to college.  That didn't just happen, it was the result of governance and regulation.  It served the wealthy quite well, but we've seen an accelerating inequality that affects more and more of our citizens.  It's not an accident, and it's not something chosen by the less fortunate among us.

Poverty isn't something you choose.  It's done to you.  Do the research for yourself.

Today's troublesome issues:
Inequality
Discrimination
Oppression
Access
Education
Healthcare
Employment
Advancement
Fair treatment
Fair wages
Fair representation
Prejudice
Hatred
Injustice
Marginalization
Disenfranchisement
Religious extremism
Opportunity denied
Selfishness
Greed
Malice
and
Willingness to do harm to another


As if we didn't have enough to do. :)

Power depends on inequality

Supply-side economics proposes that tax decreases lead

to economic growth. Historical data, however, shows

no correlation between lower top marginal tax

rates and GDP growth rate.

There have been attempts at equal opportunity and mutual benefit, and at caring for those less fortunate.  Today in America, the wealthy have a great chance at a great education, a great career, and a great income, but the bottom 80% or so do not.  For fifty years, they've lost ground, and the gap has widened. Why might that be?  Was it deliberate?

"Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the African uprisings, even the anti-austerity stance of new political parties in Spain and Greece, all have one thing in common: a recognition that the only way for a tiny group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept chronically poor." ~JASON HICKEL, JOE BREWER, AND MARTIN KIRK 03.12.15

Supply-side policies favoring the wealthy make them

wealthier at the expense of everyone else.  No
surprise. That's what we've done for
 four decades.

Is this perhaps a good time to reopen the discussion? It's called 'economic inequality' or the GAP, and it has spread through our financial system and trade agreements to the world. When 'too big' is part of the conversation, there are needed adjustments that are perhaps unlikely to be easy.

'Supply-side economics' or 'trickle down' are a known disaster for everyone except the wealthy.

Tax decreases on high income earners (top 10%) are not correlated with employment growth, however, tax decreases on lower income earners (bottom 90%) are correlated with employment growth.  No surprise.

So the continuing favoritism shown by each administration to large corporations and the financial industry is despite the evidence that such policies serve only the wealthy and do so at the expense of the common citizen.  Yes, that's what we see.  Government regulation appears to be available for purchase if you're wealthy enough.