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I had to show this video to all of my friends, and now I am sharing it with you. I can't remember the last time I have seen a politician addressing not only poverty with such absolute understanding of the issue, but also the interconnectedness of people and all of the issues we face as a nation and a world.

This quote made me cry:

"One of the greatest responsibilities of the next president is to convince americans that we are completely linked to one another, both as americans, AND we're completely linked to the people in the rest of the world. In fact, we are all ENTIRELY connected." -John Edwards

Here's the link. Watch it all. It's amazing.

Brancaccio: What is it about now...that gives you any hope?
Edwards: That we're faced with great challenges that can not be dealt with, except together.

"Why We Banned Legos" is an article in a magazine I subscribe to called Rethinking Schools. I wish the article was accessible online without fee, but unfortunately it is not, so I will attempt to summarize it here.

Basically, a group of teachers in an after school program at a school in Washington State were struck by the social dynamics surrounding the construction of a Lego town. They found that kids were excluding other kids and hording "cool pieces" in an insidious way that wasn't always vocally objected to (in fact, many of the excluded kids seemed resigned to exclusion, in spite of the fact that they later proved that they wished to participate and did not know how to break through the invisible wall). So, the teachers banned the Legos and created a unit study to examine the issues of wealth, power, privilege, and inclusion with their students (ages 5-9).

The original article goes on to describe a fascinating and well-organized exploration of this concept designed by the teachers. Students were asked to voice their opinions about property rights, ownership, and power...and they examined those opinions by taking field trips and playing games that were geared towards helping the children question the notion that power can somehow be benign and that really brought the idea of meritocracy into sharp focus for these children.

However, the reinterpretation of this article is somewhat staggering and reveals much about how strongly we want to protect the idea that the capitalist system of meritocracy. An article was sent to a homeschooling list I subscribe to that basically completely misinterprets the lesson in such a way that it could only have been intentional. I responded to the article thusly:

I suggest you read the actual article on which this editorial is based before leaping to the conclusion that the crafters of this lesson were in any way advocating that landowners be stripped of their property rights so big businesses can have them. I have this issue, and I have only skimmed the article, but I find the article below to be grossly slanted and inaccurate.

[...]

In fact, now that I think about it...it would be a really good homeschooling lesson on media to read this editorial and then go back and read the actual article about the lesson to note the evident slant of the editorialist.

Of course, the response to this was to skip right to communism. One of my fellow listmates said, basically, that while he believed the article wasn't supporting the usurpation of property by big business, he did feel that the lesson was promoting communism, to which I replied:

I imagine the responses on this list will also be useful in a study of media, as well as individual responses to the media. It is interesting to me that Brad has immediately decided that the only possible system of shared wealth is communism, and therefore declared any questioning of how property rights are handled in our society to be answered before they are even asked.

I think critical thinking would encouage children to experiment with several alternative methods of creating equity, and from what I have read in the original article, it looks like that is exactly what the children were encouraged to do.

Of course, all of that was before I actually read the article. hahaha. I had skimmed it, but had not had time to sit down and read it. Later that night, I did so, and found the lesson to be quite well-planned and executed, and nothing at all like it had been described by the author of the editorial linked above. So, this morning when I found another response that insisted the lesson was an insidious method of brainwashing our children to accept the tenets of communism (evil, evil communism!) I responded:

If you read the article, you would find that property rights were a very minute portion of the lesson. The main objective of the lesson was to encourage egalitarian and inclusive behavior among the children, while at the same time exploring the larger issues of power and privilege. Also, there was a lot of discussion and insight in the article about how we tend to assume that power is benign if it is not misused in such a way that would spark verbal protest. There was a really interesting portion of the lesson where arbitrary point values were applied to legos (to mirror how privilege based on skin color, family of origin, and other factors give some of us an unearned advantage over others), and those who "won" were allowed to make rules for the next round of the game.

Additionally, there is a huge leap from discussing equitable sharing of resources by a community and stripping individuals of rights to give them to corporations. The point of the experiment, and I think the objective of a communal social order (of which communisim is ONE example), is to distribute wealth and power in such a way that all members of society have an opportunity to participate. Perhaps we haven't seen such a social order yet in our lifetimes, but I am not sure why anyone would object to exploring how power and privilege operate in our society to give unearned advantage to some and undeserved disadvantage to others.

Later, someone equated the lesson with that urban legend that has a child skipping to school with all of her wonderful school supplies, only to get there and find that she is FORCED to dump her supplies in a communal bucket and comes away with *gasp* INFERIOR CRAYONS! Evidently, those individuals who send their children to public school to mix with the masses are very indignant about this concept of forced sharing. I gotta say, if you hate it so much, keep yr kids home. You won't hear me complaining about the taxes I am forced to share with the school district in spite of the fact that I have chosen to not participate. We LIVE in a society. We all benefit from its resources, and those resources include the other people in our communities. If you can't bear the thought of your child going to school and sharing his or her crayons, honey, I dunno what to tell you! At any rate, my response to the idea that "social engineering" was overtaking our schools was this:

That would be an interesting thing to discuss, but it does not have anything to do with the redistribution of legos that were already assumed to be a shared resource. I am curious how you think this experiment, and the exploration into how power and resources are shared, is equivalent to social engineering, and yet the very world we live in and are shaped by is not.

In fact, I think that's an interesting thing to think about. Do we all just assume that the way we live and the society we are shaped by is natural? And therefore any attempt to question and/or reorganize the order of things is somehow unnatural, or "engineered?"

And then I decided to explore further, and read a discussion about a reaction to the article (there is very little actual reading of the article in any of this. Mostly, people were just responding to the slanted reactions to the article, which led many to believe that the teachers noted that students were not behaving appropriately and therefore they simply yanked the legos away in a reactive manner, rather than the actual reality that the teachers got together and planned a very sophisticated lesson surrounding the removal and subsequent reestablishment of lego privileges, which encouraged the children to examine the issues of ownership, power, inclusion, and equity.

Boy, do I ever NOT have my finger on the pulse of America. What I read on this board shocked me. People are actually decrying the lesson these teachers were attempting to teach, and basically saying "children will be children" and therefore should not be encouraged to examine the power dynamics that come into play when groups of children exclude other children. In fact, I imagine that many of the people on that board believe that it's probably preferable that children learn to grab what is theres without considering how their unearned privilege influences their "rights" of ownership.

While I realize there are many within the public school system who are trying desperately to counteract this idea that the distribution of wealth and resources in this country is somehow equitable and meritocratic, I am frankly somewhat appalled by the response to this article by people who are allegedly parents of children. Are there really that many people who are so opposed to their children learning that perhaps our system is less equitable than those in positions of privilege would lead you to believe that they need to demonize an earnest attempt to point out the inherent inequities of our system and work with children to combat those inequities in the classroom?

Obviously I am in total support of any curriculum which moves our children towards examining "rights" that are essentially extensions of unearned privilege. I am concerned, however, that this is such a controversial thing to stand for. If we can't even address these issues with something so benign as Legos without a firestorm of opposition, how on earth do we address global poverty, hunger, and health care crises?

Another thought-provoking post by Richard:

It was very impressive that James Brown ascended so far from being in such a low place economically and socially (he came from some very real poverty) to become so wealthy and famous and, most importantly, such a major influence on so much good stuff – that is, so much good music and good culture. As I said before, if anyone had a moral right to talk about how people could come up from nothing to achieve the “American Dream,” James Brown did, because he'd made that kind of progress himself, unlike so many politicians who might promote the same idea but who actually started with lots of wealth and privilege right from birth. But I can’t help wondering whether a big part of James Brown’s success was due to the pure aggression and the unstoppable egotism that also influenced some of his worst behaviors. Of course he worked very hard and he had a lot of this quality that we call “talent” (whether that sort of thing is inborn or whether it is more a product of social influences , etc.), and he was also very socially concerned in some ways and generous, but maybe he had to have a lot of negative crap in his personality too in order to succeed in capitalism the way that he did.

Right on, mama:

We act as if people who are rich have somehow earned their money, and that is a lie from beginning to end. The riches come from not only valuing some work more than others, it goes back all the way to stealing land, enslaving people, and exploiting and murdering people. So today if you can 'get over' from legally exploiting people, it's all good; it's the American way. That is what this country was founded on, and this has somehow gotten laundered over the centuries into some perverted 'work ethic' belief that if you just work hard enough, YOU TOO can become rich, if you just apply yourself and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

me: oh fucking god.
There is a commercial
shit!
what the fuck is wrong with this country?
There is a commercial for a fucking cash america store
with a little girl who needs to go to the hospital
so her mom has to go to cash america to get a cash advance.
I want to gouge my eyes out.
I can't handle television, man.
Chris: hehe
yeah we should have at least universal free health care for kids
I mean
who's against that idea
me: well
cash america
for one.

***
That about sums it up, doesn't it?

The Black Commentator - Issue 182 - May 4, 2006

On closer examination, the campaign against “concentrated poverty” is a scheme for making poverty invisible. The policy is based on an anti-urban bias that is as frivolous as it is deep-seated, as though the romanticized small towns across the nation are not plagued with the litany of “urban” problems. Wherever there is chronic joblessness and poverty, and no matter its color, there are high rates of crime, alcoholism, drugs, school dropouts, domestic violence, and mental health issues, especially among the poor youth who pass up the option to rescue themselves by joining the army and fighting America’s imperial wars. To echo C. Wright Mills, when poverty is spread thin, then these behaviors can be dismissed as individual aberrations stemming from moral blemishes, rather than a problem of society demanding political action.

Besides, what kind of policy simply moves the poor into somebody else’s back yard, without addressing the root causes of poverty itself, and in the process disrupts the personal networks and community bonds of these indigent people? Contrary to the claim of the petition, the “careful studies” that have evaluated the “moving to opportunity” programs report very mixed results, and why should one think otherwise? Unless the uprooted families are provided with jobs and opportunities that are the sine qua non of stable families and communities, “move to opportunity” is only a spurious theory and an empty slogan.

[...]

This brings attention to two other fatal flaws in the logic of “moving to opportunity” policy. It is based on a demonized image of the reprobate poor, who make trouble for themselves and others. Yes, the drug dealers are swept out of the 9th ward, but so are countless others, often single mothers with children, with an extended kin network of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and that heroic grandmother, who indeed have deep roots in the communities from which they are being evicted. How is it that this Gang of 200, from their ivory towers and gilded offices, presume to speak for the poor? Tossing in a caveat to the effect that “we do not seek to depopulate the city or its historically black communities” must be read literally. They want only to depopulate the city of concentrated poverty, and they will leave intact middle-class black communities that will insulate them from charges of racism.

The great fallacy of the “moving to opportunity” programs is that, by definition, they reach only a small percentage of the poverty population (and typically those who are both motivated and qualified to participate in the program). Left behind are masses to fend for themselves, particularly since the “moving to opportunity” programs are themselves used as an excuse to disinvest in these poor black communities that are written off as beyond redemption. Moving to opportunity becomes a perverse euphemism for policy abdication of the poor people left behind who are in desperate need of programs, services, and jobs.

It strikes me that this is what gentrification is all about - thinning out people who live in poverty to make poverty invisible, an aberration, and someone else's problem. If you keep shifting the problem, you never have to solve it, and it always looks like you are acting on it.

This is all a result of viewing poverty as a concept, rather than a reality for people. If our nation's leaders and decision-makers really believed they were talking about people, rather than the concept of "poverty" - I would think (I would HOPE) they would not be so glib.

3 College Students Arrested in Alabama Church Fires - New York Times

The identities of the accused came as a surprise to investigators, who had speculated that the arsons were the work of people intimately familiar with the remote rural roads where the fires were set, not products of Birmingham's upper-middle class, one the son of a doctor and another of a county constable.

"This is just so hard to believe," said Alabama Fire Marshal Richard Montgomery. "My profile on these suspects is shot all to heck and back."

Gov. Bob Riley said he was happy to learn that the fires were "an isolated incident" and not an organized attack on religious beliefs or Baptists. Speaking at a news conference announcing the arrests, he said the last five weeks had been "a pretty tough time" for church-goers.

You know, the FIRES might not have been racially motivated...but this crap that they are spewing about the perps is nothing short of total racism/classism.

Can you IMAGINE what they would be saying if the arsonists were black and/or low-income? Certainly they wouldn't be playing up that "aww, it was all fun and games." Aspect.

I'll be sure to pass that bit of wisdom on to my children whenever I catch them playing with matches. "You know" I will tell them "It's always fun until somebody BURNS DOWN A MOTHERFUCKING CHURCH."

[link via The Dees Diversion]

Richard summarizes a number of Paul Craig Roberts' Counterpunch articles here, and discusses the shortcomings of an article about Economic Civil Disobedience here.

Another interesting article about global economics and poverty:

Friday morning in New Orleans a truck pulls up and is immediately surrounded by a group of Hispanic men. The driver shouts out his needs; the men shout back their price. Across the street a banner reads: "Remember those suffering from Katrina and Rita." But why remember something you can still see? The confederate general, high on his column in the middle of the roundabout, looks on at the haggling. Some go back to the curb; others jump in the back of the van. These scenes are replayed throughout the US every day. Scattered vignettes of supply and demand woven together with intense vulnerability that illustrate the human imperfections in a so-called perfect market.

A recent report from the University of California suggests that every morning 117,600 day labourers are hired this way. Half are employed by homeowners looking for gardening and domestic work. Slightly more than 40% are employed by contractors in construction and landscaping. Nationwide almost two-thirds are Hispanic and just over a quarter are from central America.

I guess I'm starting my semester early!

I'm going to be spending the spring focusing economics, both personal and global. This post by Egalia helps to clarify one of the reasons why I feel like personal and global economics need to be studied together. While it's important for me to get my finances in order, it's also important for me to understand the context of my struggle.

The comments to that post are as informative as the post itself, and are really illustrative of how we distance ourselves from reality using the metaphorical tools (such as this ambiguous concept of GDP as an indicator of wealth) of our masters to define our realities.