Poverty

I really liked this interview with Jon Jeter, author of "Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People."

He doesn't mince words and his analysis is right on target:

"Q. But isn't globalization a natural development of capitalism?
A. That's a contrived argument for a rigged system. Consider what's happened globally in the last 30 years. Low inflation, high profits, unemployment, falling wages. It is clearly a system designed to benefit bondholders and bankers. The idea that globalization is inevitable recalls the idea of Manifest Destiny, of American imperialism as God's will. What's more, we have the perverse spectacle of America's first black president speaking during the campaign about his reluctance to extend relief to defaulting homeowners because that would incur moral hazard. Yet he never speaks about moral hazard when it comes to bankers and those who are chiefly responsible for what's happened."

Globalism, the answer key that isn't

This interview is with a researcher, Daryl Collins, who investigated the ways in which families living in poverty in South Africa, India, and Bangladesh managed their finances.  This is such a common sense and yet novel approach to addressing the problem of poverty.  Instead of coming in with a kind of colonialist expertise, let's assume the people dealing with this problem day to day already have expertise and then think about how those strategies can be best utilized.

Here's the interview with Collins.

And the book she co-authored: Portfolios of the Poor.

This article suggests that we need to move beyond the perspective of dealing with racial inequities as problems of discrimination that can best be addressed through civil rights measures.  Instead we need to consider the problem of economic inequality--a problem that cannot be solved through the legal system.

What is at the heart of this distinction to me is that while the civil rights movement made dramatic changes in our society, it also allowed for a kind of psychic quick fix in which racism or racists become the central cause of problems of inequality and many people can then imagine that the problem is dealt with by condemning openly racist groups or practices, and often imagining that this makes them innocent of any complicity.  The same thing has happened with sexism I would argue.  Another way of saying this--it allows us to simplify problems such that scapegoats or bad guys are easily identified and condemned instead of dealing with the messiness of multiple causes and our own roles in a system.

The End of Civil Rights