Writing Life

In today’s Baltimore Sun, Larry Carson writes that Ken Ulman’s Howard County administration is ending its program of providing low-cost diesel fuel and bus repairs to the county’s Head Start program. Given only one week’s written notice, County advocates are scrambling trying to find some way to restore the program or find alternative sources. Already, an additional bus that was to be added to the program will be skipped.

One rationale for cutting the program was offered by Lonnie Robbins, the chief administration officer for Howard County. He based his decision on a technicality that says the IRS ruled in 1998 that it was illegal for the County to resell gasoline without federal taxes being paid on it.

It’s sad that it took ten years, an entire decade, before the County found this clever little “get out of helping poor people” card. Community Action Council chairman Michael McPherson says that the “purchase of government gas is not illegal, but the subject of an IRS rule that could be changed”. He also said that Head Start has insurance to cover any potential lawsuits that would be brought against the County.

I understand that the County is facing budget pressures with a weak economy in Maryland and across the country. However, there’s funding for new police officers, a new environmental position, leasing an entire floor for county government business, refurbishing schools, traveling to India for exploring new business opportunities, funding the formerly private 4th of July events at the Lake, and providing high level staffers of the County government six figure salaries (usually around $150,000). The fact that one of the richest counties in the United States can’t provide even the most minimal of funding and support for its most needy citizens is outrageous.

One motto of the County and this administration that I hear is “Making Howard County Even Better.” The question I have today is “for whom?”

A friend forwarded me this article by Paul Krugman. It was published in Rolling Stone in December. Rolling Stone has some fabulous political articles that I’ve been looking at over the last year, including one on enforcer Rahm Emanuel and the absolutely good-for-nothing 109th Congress.

This piece has also been copied onto a great deal of websites, including the Welcome to Pottersville blog and the Information Clearing House.

The article discusses how far we’ve come in transfering wealth from the masses to an infinitesimally small number of people in America. Ridiculous pay-outs to CEOs and sports figures excite and titillate, but few ask (besides Krugman) what about the rest of us, those on the lower rungs of corporate life. Why do CEOs make 10, 20, 30 times what their lowest employees make? If the economy is growing, as most indicators used by the left and right have shown, where are the proceeds going? Who’s getting and who’s getting left behind? Take a gander at this article.

I read a fabulous article in today’s Washington Post on the Columbia Heights neighborhood and how some of its new, affluent residents are petitioning Whole Foods to open up a store there. The article provides most of its ink for those wanting a Whole Foods, and their online and offline efforts to garner attention, and a store, from Whole Foods. However, the article also touches upon the impact of gentrification in the neighborhood. Housing prices have soared as have property taxes. Long-time residents are being forced out since they can’t afford the new cityscape. The article also touches on the impact on local store and restaurant owners whose clientele have left and the new residents aren’t coming in. Of particular note to me was the fact that old-time residents are saying that instead of asking for a Whole Foods, with its grand and broad selection of produce, the new homeowners should be supporting the local community farmer’s market. The market has been closed down due to the incessant construction going on in the area. That’s something I hadn’t thought of. The whole article touches on my concerns regarding the entire healthy, organic food market. It seems that only the affluent have access to healthy foodstuffs.

You can read the full article from page D1, entitled “Hungry for Whole Foods,” at the Post’s website.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez provided steeply discounted heating oil to residents in the Bronx, in New York today. This follows on oil provided in Massachusetts. The oil was provided by Citgo, the U.S. arm of the Venezuelan state oil company. Some are spinning this as pure political theater, with Chavez taking yet another swipe at President Bush and his neoliberal cabal. But, Representative Jose Serrano (D-NY 16) said, “To those folks who say that this is a way for Hugo Chavez to score political points, I invite every American corporation that wants to score points with my community, to start scoring points this afternoon.”

A friend told me that Chavez is a thug and that this doesn’t do anything to make him less of a thug. I replied that Chavez certainly is playing to his base and making a political point with this move. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have noted human rights abuses and potential setbacks with respect to the rule of law. However, Chavez has been helping poor and indigenous people in his own country and throughout Latin America. Radical social and economic change, as advocated by Chavez, often will be perceived as thwarting the rule of law. One must note, though, that the rule of law is premised on perfecting, and perpetuating, the current state of affairs.

For more information, see Dan Wilchin’s Reuter’s article. Rep. Serrano also has a press release on his website.

My first session on the 2nd day was What’s the Matter with the United States? One of the early speakers was Jeff Maskovsky, whose work I find excellent. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it there early enough to see him speak, but I did see him make some responses during our short discussion period. Unlike many sessions at AAA, this one had a shortened discussion session since the hotel fire alarm went off during one of the presentations. We all had to hurry out a side exit and stand on an elevated concrete area waiting for the all clear.

During this session, Jane Schneider made a great connection between government morality policies and an actual upsurge in vice. One example she presented was the puritanical imposition of Prohibition in the early 20th Century. It was meant to cut down on vice but it ended up created an entire new market niche for liquor producers and runners. This illicit business actually caused more harm (bodily and mentally) than the supposed vice that Prohibition was attempting to proscribe.

Ida Susser described the impact of US neoconservatism on US AIDS policy (both domestic and international). She noted the current administration’s attempt to re-regulate the poor and ethnic minorities. She threw particular scorn (as do I) on the abstinence only requirements built into TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). In PEPFAR, it’s mandatory that 33% of the funding provided be spent solely on abstinence programs. Condoms, birth control, help for sex workers, and sex education are forbidden. This ideological policy is a death sentence for so many people in the US and throughout the world. The ideologues say that abstinence and “be faithful” are the best options. However, some married men stray and have multiple sex partners and the woman living in an assumed monogamous relationship suffer the consequences. The ideologues are creating repressive understandings of familial and women’s roles in society.

Dorothy Roberts, the discussant, summed it up well by noting the punitive aspect of American neoliberalism. The state is not simply withdrawing from its responsibilities but it is leaving in its wake a new, repressive social contract. Claims of multiculturalism and social harmony from the right simply mask strong racist policies.

My next session was Public Interest Ethnography: Theory, Practice, and Action. There were some interesting talks about Indy Media, and how it might help unite the cyber-left and provide an avenue for praxis-oriented ethnography. Amy Rosenberg Weinreb described an interesting concept of shadow publics. Chris Thornton and Peggy Sanday raised an interesting tidbit in their talk on male violence. The described a model of male-male social relationship that posited woman as the medium through which men define these relationships.

I attended the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group (AARG), which is a special interest group in the Society for Medical Anthropology section of the AAA. It was an interesting meeting and something I might get involved with in the future.

After that, I went to the Compliance, Resistance and Social Realities: How Does Medical Anthropology Inform Ethically Responsible Research. Chris Simon talked about the difficulties of funding social health research vs. what a community needs and desires. He and others on the panel discussed the 90/10 problem where 90% of the global research dollars for health are applied to 10% of the total global disease burden. In the developed world, anti-aging and sexual performance are the primary focus while health dollars rarely go towards developing world problems such as clean water, treatable infectious diseases, etc. In summing up this panel, Barbara Koenig noted, as I and many people have said before, that the root causes of today’s global health situation is rooted in poverty and wealth inequality. While biotechnology is a unique tool we can use to work on health issues, we must avoid a biomedical reductionist solution that renders invisible poverty as the core factor.

Prior to my trip to Santa Fe, I finished reading Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, by Paul Farmer. I wanted to finish it up before I moderated our HIV/AIDS panel at CGS’s second annual conference. I wanted to see if there was any great material I could draw on for my portion of the panel.

This is a great book, which really helped drill in his concept of “a preferential option for the poor”. It laid out a solid epidemiological case and backed it up with deep ethnography. It seems that Paul’s combination of anthropology and medicine are perfect for confronting the deeper structural issues of modern plagues. He argues effectively about the fallacy of cost effectiveness. We must treat people with infectious diseases. It’s not fair to offer one class of people one thing and another class a lesser option. He also argues that treatment vs. prevention is a false dichotomy. With millions already infected with HIV and millions with TB (both regular and multiple drug resistant strains), we don’t have the option to exclude those who are already sick. Their sickness is often a manifestation of structural violence. The situations they find themselves in contribute as much, and often times more, to their infections than do their individual agency (ability to affect their own lives).

Infectious disease in the modern world is as much about class and politics as it is about bacteria and viruses.

I found an earlier book of his, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, to be a better read. But this book is certainly one to have in your hand. I wanted to say have on your shelf, but these types of books need to be used, not just used to decorate your bookshelves.

In a BBC report today, new statistics show that poverty continues to increase in the US, even during a period of so-called strong economic growth. Poverty will not be wiped away by the invisible hand of the market. It won’t simply fade away. Sadly, it often seems to fade into obscurity. No one wants their economic recovery news to be tainted by those poor folks. If we make them invisible, we can all sleep better at night…

Here’s the report:

The number of people classed as poor in the US has increased – despite strong economic growth, say official figures.

An extra 1.1 million Americans dropped below the poverty line last year, according to the US Census Bureau.

There were 37 million people living in poverty in 2004, up 12.7% from the previous year.

The report said non-Hispanic whites were the only ethnic group to experience an increase in poverty as well as a drop in income.

Economic lag

Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty in 2004 compared with the previous year, while poverty among the elderly also fell.

It rose only for non-Hispanic whites, from 8.2 % in 2003 to 8.6 % over the same period. The poverty rate remained unchanged for black and Hispanics.

The last time poverty fell in the US was in 2000 when there were 31.1 million people officially classed as poor.

The rise in poverty comes despite solid economic growth in 2004, which helped to create 2.2 million jobs in the US.

“I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty,” said Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau.

Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said poverty rates were still much better than in the early nineties.

“The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom,” Mr Danziger said.

Poverty levels are based on the bureau’s population surveys, carried out over three months, beginning in February, with about 100,000 households nationally.


BBC MMV

I’ve moved from conservative capitalist when I was young, through liberal capitalist just after college, to liberal centralized socialist, and have now stopped at the libertarian socialist mile marker. I’m finding that anarchy is a pretty good philosophy, especially when it includes the social justice seeds that I bring with me from my socialist background. I was introduced to anarchist philosophy by my friends Devin and Val. I was intrigued but never ventured too far down that pathway of investigation.

However, I’m almost finished reading The Grape of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. It was only a book I’d always heard about (“hey, I saw the movie, it was good”) or referenced in the Rage Against the Machine cover song: The Ghost of Tom Joad. Having finally read it, I’ve moved it from unknown to one of the top three books I’ve read in my 37 years of life. I’m amazed at how something penned in the 1930s could still resonate so strongly in 2004. Change the names and places, or don’t, and it reads like contemporary America. It says in fiction what my anthropology course on Urban Poverty said through ethnographies and policy studies.

If you take every other chapter of this novel, it is a scathing inditement of big capitalism gone wrong. The story of the Joad family’s trek from Oklahoma to California adds the depth and human feeling that the other chapters talk about in a more generalized tone.

What has this got to do with my political transformation? Well, the government camps in the book appear to be a realization of a libertarian socialist point of view. Self-governed, self-policed, community-based living. Structures and organization pop up when needed and disappear when no longer of use. While this book certainly is fiction, the depth of community is drawn not from Steinbeck’s mind but from the American experience, especially during the Depression. For a well-written piece on poverty in America and the strength of these so-called homeless people, see the book by Kenneth L. Kusmer (2002) called Down & out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History.

While this is an unfinished entry, I wanted to get my thoughts down while they were fresh. More later!