Thank-you, Mr. Holland. I have been very aware of how different our lives are when compared to the lives of those in other, less fortunate countries after travelling in Kenya and Egypt. Perspective is something that needs to be developed by travel and reading. Watching reality shows on T.V. just won't do it! Peace!

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

You do bring some perspective to this problem. I find myself this morning wondering though whether perspective is the right word, or if prophetic is more accurate.

I was discussing this week's financial meltdown with my 82 year old right-wing Republican mother this week, and she noted that she had heard about the rise of tent cities in several areas around the country. Apparently it started as people who had lost their homes to foreclosure had gone out to the outskirts of towns and cities and set up tents to live in. The towns began to realize that this was a cheap form of housing for the poor, so they are expanding these tent cities, including proper sanitation facilities, as a way of handling the increasing numbers of homeless as the result of job losses and foreclosures. She said it made her think of the Depression and the migrant camps that occurred then.

Unfortunately, perhaps what you have reported here is not so far from home?

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Inequality is arguably one of the primary roots of poverty, as well as breakdown of community (as globalization shatters local involvement in the political system) and the destruction of the planet's ecosystems.

Poverty is difficult to measure, because it includes quality-of-life issues in addition to issues of physical survival such as access to food, water, shelter, and medicine. Even with these measures, though, there are a vast number of people throughout the world who live in poverty or dire poverty.

However, income is more a measure of integration with the world's monetary economic system than it is a measure of privation. There are economic and social systems "under the radar", not yet usurped or controlled by capitalist globalization, that support many people throughout the world whose culture has not yet been forced into the global monetary economy - or those who have wrested control back and whose livelihoods are no longer completely tied to the monetary economy. Examples are common, from squatters in the land reclamation movement in Brazil to peasant movements in Columbia.

It is misleading and oversimplifying, though common on the Left, to overlook this urgent economic struggle and assume that monetary income equates directly to poverty and a low quality of life. Taking this mistaken approach interferes with our ability to tackle the global economic system and implies an underlying agreement with the global economic capitalist monetary system. There are some people who live on $4 a day in China who are healthier and have a better quality of life than some people in the slums of Baltimore who live on $40 a day.

The fundamental issue is about inequality, distribution of wealth, social control over capital, and the strength of alternative economic systems - not monetary income.

I think that is a more useful way to put things into perspective than the approach Joshua Holland has suggested.

Dan Nissenbaum

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

for the rich. Re the current wall street bailouts, but socialism or social programs for the poor or the middle class would be sinful. When do we stand up on our hind legs and demand our rights. Eric Hoffer was amazed that the middle class was so passive.

How is it that we as a people allow social morals that are so nasty and perverted? Yet on the subject of private morals, often kept hidden, selfrighteousness has reached a level of obnoxiousness that is unbearable.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]