World Hunger and Poverty

My younger brother has been training for months to run the Boston Marathon in April. In addition to running a sum of more than 900 miles in training, he has pledged to raise over $5,000 for Harvard’s Summer Urban Program. Neither of these are easy tasks.

What is the Summer Urban Program? “The Summer Urban Program is one very busy summer camp or, technically, 12 camps spread out through Boston and Cambridge. Together, these Harvard student-run programs teach some 800 school children a variety of subjects: science, English, history, music, and visual arts. Harvard students also take their campers on field trips to museums, parks, forests, and more in pursuit of building a truly rewarding and enriching summer experience. To tap into the youth perspective, local high school students help with curriculum development and direct activities for the campers. In addition to the 12 day camps, the Summer Urban Program also includes an evening English as a Second Language program.”

You can help my brother and support the Summer Urban Program by donating at: crowdrise.com/hcmc12/fundraiser/BrianHughes — Anyone who donates $26 dollars or more before the 20th of February has a chance to win an iPad2.

What is Martin Luther King Day? If a child asked you this question, you might respond confidently, ‘This is a day we remember a great man, Martin Luther King.’ But is it? Sure the day is named after King, but do we remember him on it? Do we really remember him at all?

Considering the overwhelming santaclausification of King into some jolly impotent figure from long past history, I would say that the fearless radical anti-war activist criminal alive just a few decades ago who the FBI called “the most dangerous man in America” is hardly really remembered. Misremembered, yes. Truly remembered, no.

As Professor Cornel West said back in 2010, “We have to resist the ‘santaclausification’ of Martin Luther King. I don’t want to sanitize Martin Luther King. I don’t want to deodorize Dr. Martin Luther King. I don’t want to disinfect Dr. Martin Luther King, and we’re not gonna domesticate Dr. King!”

We misremember King as an unreal impotent, PC black Santa Claus politely asking if his friend Rosa can sit down when what makes him worth remembering is quite the opposite: He was a fiery, controversial, unresting activist arrested multiple times whose powerful, radical challenges to the war, economic inequality and of course segregation scared the living hell out of not only the average white conservative but the governmental powers that be. His commitment to non-violent methods and focus on love only made it harder for his enemies to undermine him and undermine his powerful criticisms in the eye of the public. While arguably most of his grand, vast, radical vision was shot to death with him in 1968, much of the hard progress that was made then and since then is thanks to him.

Although racial equality and non-racism in America is still far off, and although King’s unrelenting, vociferous attack on the Vietnam war may have garnered him the most dangerous enemies, this is after all a blog about poverty. The adamant, revolutionary critic of poverty demanding economic equality has been greatly forgotten not remembered. The man who was brought to tears upon seeing schoolchildren in Mississippi fed their meager lunch of a slice of apple and some crackers is generally not remembered.

“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization,” Dr. King said. “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Of course he was more revolutionary than one just asking for more charity and handouts: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring,” Dr. King said.

Unfortunately, Martin Luther King’s “Poor People’s Campaign” was unsuccessful after his assassination. Globally, 18,000 children die every single day from world hunger. In the United States, millions suffer in poverty including millions of children as well as millions of working poor. Like his dreams of a colorblind society and an end to American militarism, Dr. King’s dream of abolishing poverty has also gone unfulfilled and its creator misremembered.

I have already made many posts about taxes on this blog. The most stunning point to me in those posts is that the rich pay less taxes than the working class in terms of percentage of income–at least in the USA.

I didn’t want to make yet another post about taxes on a blog that is supposed to be about poverty, but I read an article this morning that got my blood boiling. In part, the Buffalo News Editorial says:

Congressional Republicans, who seem to have sworn some kind of blood oath to the preposterously unfair Bush tax cuts–regardless of the damage they do to the economy–now want to eliminate the reduction of the payroll tax they helped to enact last year. The reduction in payroll taxes, while it puts additional stress on Social Security, which it funds, is of greatest benefit to the middle class and working poor.

That’s because it’s a “regressive” tax, taking the same percentage of everyone’s pay, regardless of income level. The amount of income subject to the tax is also capped, meaning a portion of the income of higher earners—sometimes a very large portion—goes untaxed.

In other words, these politicians want to keep the regressive tax system we already have but also make it even more regressive! This is done by simultaneously lowering taxes disproportionately for the rich while increasing government spending and disproportionately increasing taxes on the working poor and middle class.

I understand the psychological complications of a two-party pseudo-democratic system that enable politicians from both parties to get away with a lot of selling out the many to the wealthy special interest few, but I am still surprised these politicians who openly try to make a regressive tax system even more regressive are not overtaken and tarred and feathered or some such by a stampede of angry masses fighting not only for what they think is fair but for what is clearly in their own self-interest. Maybe what gets my blood boiling with this issue is not so much the politicians who I personally have been long convinced are all—that includes both parties—special interest bought self serving liars. Rather what really gets my blood boiling about this kind of issue may be that the masses of people who have the real power in terms both of sheer numbers and productive ability just let themselves get so blatantly exploited.

What do you think? Please comment on this post, comment on any other posts about taxation or discuss the relationship between poverty and taxation in this thread about taxation and poverty in the forums.

Today I want to feature a book by New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason DeParle. American Dream is a classic of literary journalism. It tells the story of the millions of women sent to work as a result of Bill Clinton’s drive to “end welfare.” The stories in the book speak to the question: If as the American dream goes we live in a country where anyone can make it, why generation after generation don’t some families make it?

And here is a quote about poverty from page 328 of the book that I find particularly poignant: “At $5.15 an hour, the real value of the minimum wage is lower than in 1950 when Hattie Mae was still picking cotton.”

I was recently contacted by Santo Purnama of CultureUnplugged.com about their non-profit film and documentary archive for social impact. I looked through their hunger and poverty section, finding many interesting videos. This one about micro-finance stood out to me in particular since micro-finance has intrigued me for a while:

Here are a few older posts from this blog about microfinance:

• Fighting Poverty $1 at a Time
• Gates Awards 15 Million to Grameen
• Nobel Laureate Says that Poverty Fight is Essential

Sheila Nix, the U.S. Executive Director of ONE, emailed me some information about the crisis in the horn of Africa.

Yesterday, the United Nations declared a famine in south Somalia. There are more than 11 million people in the Horn of Africa–more than the combined population of NYC and Huston–who desperately need food, clean water and basic sanitation.

ONE is a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.

I recently received an email from David Orr of the World Food Programme about a refugee

camp at Dadaab in Kenya that he just visited. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve talked to some of the newly-arrived families at Dadaab. I’ve seen and heard about their suffering, how they have lost their crops and their animals.

Many stories are similar to that of Adan Kulo, who watched his livestock starve to death. “I realized my family would soon follow,” he says. He took his pregnant wife and children on a grueling three-week journey through the desert to Dadaab. They were robbed by bandits; food ran out; one child fell ill and his parents feared for his life.

Within hours of arrival at the camp, Adan received 21 days’ worth of food from the World Food Programme. “Now that we have food,” he says, “I’m looking for a spot where I can build a shelter for my family.”

WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger. They are 100% voluntarily funded, which means they rely on donors’ generosity to expand their operations.

For years CT has been dealing with a budget crisis. Spending is greater than revenue, and revenue is down as a result of the recession. In terms of poverty this is dangerous because government spending cuts need to be made and are being made, and that means many of the government sponsored-programs that are struggling to keep this state’s poor afloat are are a risk of being cut away leaving the people to sink into poverty.

Worse yet, the alternative–increasing taxes–can be just as harmful. One new tax attempt severely hurts local online retailers many of which are small businesses including many financially struggling entrepreneurs. Here’s the issue: States cannot collect sales taxes from out-of-state businesses. By absurdly claiming online referrers, who independently contract as advertisers for companies like Amazon and happen to live in-state, are a physical presence of the business in the state. In other words, the state intends to claim that paying an independent contractor a commission for advertising is tantamount to opening up shop in the state, even though neither the advertising nor the sales resulting from the advertising are actually happening in the state. If that sounds complicated it’s because it is so absurd a rationalization for collecting an illegal tax. Being such an absurd rationalization, there is a good a chance of the new tax attempt not bringing any new tax revenue. But what is simple is that this tax hurts CT businesses and struggling entrepreneurs.

This new tax means companies like Amazon will end their affiliate programs with any and all CT businesses and entrepreneurs. This is a painful loss of revenue for many of these CT businesses. Ironically, that means the state will be collecting less income taxes from these local businesses and yet will still not be collecting taxes from the out-of-state Amazon. I know this first-hand because I was an affiliate with Amazon until June 10th when they terminated me and all other CT affiliate advertisers. Now my income has gone down as a result of a failed attempt by the CT government to collect sales taxes on a Seattle-based company.

A well-written July 1st editorial from Investors Business Daily explains the way history repeats in regards to this failed tax attempt:

There’s a bigger issue at stake here, though. Ever since the catalog was invented, states have tried to force out-of-state retailers to pay their sales taxes. The matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1992 ruled that doing so violated the interstate commerce clause.

Now states think they’ve found a way around this restriction by vastly expanding the definition of “presence” in a state to include online marketing affiliates.

Also a New Haven Register editorial from May 27th summarizes the issue well in my opinion:

The budget counts on this new tax raising $9.4 million in the next year, although those following the battle over the tax, which is strongly opposed by online retailers, don’t expect it to yield any revenue next year[...] The likely loss of $9.4 million in tax revenue next year is minor in comparison to a state budget of $19 billion. Its impact, however, will be far larger on the small Connecticut companies that counted on the referral fees from Internet sales.

To balance the budget spending cuts and new taxes may both be needed. But we cannot let most of the burden of these spending cuts and taxes fall on small businesses, the poor and the struggling, who are already unfairly burdened, especially if the burden is from an ill-conceived tax or cut that doesn’t even work and won’t even provide the claimed balance to the budget.

An article on AOL News reports that Debbie Clark, known as “Storm” from the early 90s show “American Gladiator,” is homeless. Like many women and children, her son and her have been homeless since they escaped a domestic violence situation a couple years ago. Adding to the problems, she has a severe knee injury from the show that makes it difficult for her to find work. Also, the knee troubles make it hard to deal with homeless shelter programs which generally make participants leave early in the morning but be back before 5–a difficulty depicted well in my opinion in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness.

Although Clark received $1,500 a day for her famous job as Storm in the early 90s, she receives no royalties now from her time on American Gladiator. Of course, homelessness is more complicated than income or lack of income, and has a lot more to do with access to people who can help; in that department both of Clark’s parents died within a month of each other with little money due to two states both taxing them when they moved.

Hopefully, thanks to the publicity of the situation, maybe Clark will now get some help from fans, her former coworkers or anyone who hears about the story. Unfortunately, Clark is only one of millions of homeless people in the USA. And despite common misconceptions, most homeless people in the USA are not men, are not bums and unfortunately are not seen as much as the homeless people we do see. To that end, Clark says that when she gets back on her feet she wants to find ways to help other homeless people.