Beyond Charity: How Micro-Financing is Fighting Extreme Poverty Around the World

by Quanda Zhang, RMIT University with a foreword by Nomad

One of the criticisms of international charity organizations is that, despite the best of intentions, the money doesn't always get to the people who need it the most. It is possible to ensure that your contributions do not end up being siphoned off by some corrupt government official or are simply lost in the paper-plagued bureaucracy.

"Rift" - A Look at Life for the "Have Nots"

by Nomad

This award-winning documentary was directed American writer-director, Travis Hanour. It reveals the struggles of an impoverished family at the edge of the Great Rift Valley. We meet a brave, 14-year-old boy named Henry as he goes about his daily routine.
Hanour explains:

We found a village in Kijabe with a wealth of compelling stories. The children and families here require superhuman bravery and perseverance in order to survive. But at the same time, they exude an infectious amount of joy. This is a truly humbling dynamic to witness.

Film Friday- Sarah’s Uncertain Path

by Nomad

Filmmakers Andrew Droz Palermo and his cousin Tracy Droz Tragos produced this 2014 vignette called Sarah’s Uncertain Path, documenting a low-income family in western Missouri.

We are introduced to Sarah, a pregnant Midwestern teen, who is struggling to beat the odds in a tragic family tradition.

Ditat Deus: How Red-State Arizona's Failed Policies on Poverty Just Got a little Worse

by Nomad

Arizona is a showcase of Republican policy when it comes to helping needy families. But that's not meant to be praise. Poverty has become an intractable problem and legislators seem to be intent on making life more difficult for the poor.

No Hope, No Change

Arizona's state motto is Ditat Deus which in Latin, translates as "God Enriches" and, for some Arizonans that might be true, but for many others, God seems to have all but forgotten them. Actually, it's not necessary to lay the blame on divinities but on the easily-distracted Republican legislators. 

When the US Census Bureau updated its poverty estimates last year, the bad news about Arizona should have been hard for state officals to ignore. The state ranked third in the nation when it came to the percentage who were at or below the federal poverty line. That's an estimated 21 percent of the state's population.

You'd think those numbers would set off alarm bells that past policies just weren't working. You'd think politicians would realize that changes had to be made as soon as possible. 

That's not what happened. 

Last summer, coincidentally, Arizona became the first state to cut poor families’ access to welfare assistance to a maximum of 12 months over a lifetime.  With the passage of the law, Arizona will have the harshest limit of all the states, most of which offer benefits for five years, the duration allowed under federal law. 

As a local source noted last month:

It means an estimated 2,500 people — including 1,500 kids — will no longer qualify for the modest stipends the program provides. The average payment is $278.

Democrats lawmakers and advocates for the poor struggled in vain to keep the program at its two-year limit went unheeded.

In the debate, Republican Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City. delivered the standard Republican approach to poverty: 

“I tell my kids all the time that the decisions we make have rewards or consequences, and if I don’t ever let them face those consequences, they can’t get back on the path to rewards. As a society, we are encouraging people at times to make poor decisions and then we reward them.”

It's a pretty pathetic excuse for parsimony. Reagan taught us that the poor don't need our pity or our assistance. And ever since then, the conservatives have been saying that poor have only themelves to blame. We must assume such a rationalization allows them to feel superior and look at themselves in the mirror.

Income Inequality and North Carolina Health Care: A Tale of Two Extremes

by Nomad

Without the Medicaid expansion, health care for the poor of North Carolina has become a real problem.  Of course, you'd never know it by the looks of salaries paid to CEOs of  non-profit healthcare organizations. 

To put it bluntly, If you are poor in North Carolina, don't even think about getting sick.

  

The Tarheel State is one of 20 states that rejected Obamacare's optional Medicaid expansion. Governor Patrick Lloyd "Pat" McCrory and a Republican-majority legislature left healthcare coverage as it stood, covering some 1.9 million residents, around only a fifth of the state's population. 

Surviving in the Gap
Not everybody was happy with the arrangement. Advocates of the expansion claimed that another 500,000 people might have been added to the rolls, including tens of thousands of childless nondisabled adults.  

USNews reported last October that there was a good reason for this dissatisfaction. The states' Medicaid program is broken.

Bureaucratically antiquated and growing faster than state revenues, it has gone over budget in three of the past four years, and its taxpayer cost and total enrollment have both doubled over the past decade. Last year, it cost North Carolina taxpayers $15 billion, nearly a third of the budget and more than twice what the state spent in 2003.

At the end of 2015, Gov. McCrory signed into law a bill to reform North Carolina's overgrown and out of control Medicaid program.

However, this reform will take, by the official estimate, around four years to become fully implemented. Supporters claim that it will reduce existing spending by 2%, saving hundreds of millions every year. 

How accurate that is is anybody's guess. But one thing is clear, until then, the uninsured poor in the state are going to have to live with things as they are. 

Overlooked Provision in Omnibus Spending Bill Throws Lifeline to Struggling Food Banks

by Nomad

If austerity-minded organizations, like the Heritage Foundation, or the Tea Party might have been roaring in anger about the omnibus spending package, some people thought certain provisions in the deal provided a much-needed ray of hope.

Republican members of Congress didn't really look forward to their constituents dwelling too much on the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill signed into law by President Barack Obama right before Christmas.

Better to think of happier things, seasonal joys and the promise of the new year. It's no wonder too. Far-Right Activists could understandably claim that once again they have been hoodwinked by politicians who promised a lot of things they had no intention of delivering upon.

The worst offender, according to their point of view, was Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. He was supposed to replace the cowardly crybaby John Boehner.  Fox News regaled Ryan back then. All of the cliches were present and accounted for: "a new day" and "turning a page."  

That was only in October. By Christmas, the honeymoon was definitely over. The annulment has already begun. It's really not his fault, though, that American government doesn't actually function the way some people think it does. 

Progress, Reality and Cynicism: Lessons We Learned From Millennium Development Goals

by Nomad

Back in 2000, the UN brought world leaders together to draw up a plan to make the world a better place. This year, fifteen years later, that effort was analyzed and the results might surprise you.

When the Paris Climate Change Summit came to its conclusion recently, it was easy to be a little skeptical about the level of commitment of the nations that pledged to address climate change. 

Preventing global destruction is not going to be a piece of cake.  

In fact, it will require nothing less than a re-tooling of the world's economy and the energy industry. 
Who knows if it is possible given the time constraints? It's easy to be cynical and defeatist when it comes to tackling such a huge problem. 

Critics claim this is all merely window-dressing. Just a bunch of timid self-serving bureaucrats making useless paperwork that's not even legally binding. There's no way, critics say, to confront and punish violators. 

Of course, this view automatically assumes that global progress can only be achieved by force, by a threat of punishment or by intimidation. 

But, to turn the tables on those critics, where is the evidence that that has ever worked? Simply because something is difficult shouldn't mean we ignore our responsibility. 

President John Kennedy, during one of the darkest periods of the Cold War, once warned about allowing hopelessness and defeatist to overwhelm us. (In this case, world peace.)

Thinking something is impossible makes it that much harder to address in a rational manner. In 1963, he told the graduating class at the American University that we must stop thinking war is inevitable. Mankind is not doomed, and we must not yield to the idea that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. 

"We need not accept that view. Our problems are man-made — therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.

No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable — and we believe they can do it again."

Even though the dream of world peace has not implemented universally even today, Kennedy's hard-nosed optimism is not wrong. Peace, he once said, is not a warm and fuzzy dream. It is a process. We make things harder by thinking that overnight we can solve all of the problems in the world, just by wishing and praying. 

While that may be a proper point to begin, just wishing for a better world isn't going to be enough.

It calls for a practical approach.

One of the problems is defining what it means when we say "a better world." What does that mean? Much better for a limited few, or slightly better for the majority?

In 2000, the UN General Assembly drafters of the Millennium Declaration had their specific notions and were determined to see progress in fifteen years. In that declaration, the representatives of all of the member nations recognized that:

"...in addition to our separate responsibilities to our individual societies, we have a collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human dignity, equality and equity at the global level. As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs."

The Surprising Connections You Might Not Know Between Religion and Income Inequality

by Nomad

Religion may be the "opiate of the masses" but there's another side to this story and it's not pretty. If religion is indeed a drug, then who are the drug dealers? This post looks at the interesting connections between the ruling class, religiosity, and inequality.

Rich People, Poor People, and Religion

A recent study in the Social Science Quarterly reaches some interesting and unexpected conclusions about the relationship between income inequality and the rise of religion.

The authors of  the article Economic Inequality, Relative Power, and Religiosity analyzed countries around the world the levels of income equality and the level of religiosity over a two-decade span. Their conclusions are worth a closer look. 

Let's start by defining the terms. What exactly is religiosity anyway? The sociological term "religiosity" can be considered the overall religiousness of a given culture or nation or group. In other words, the degree in which religion affects our day-to-day life. 

In the study, there were twelve benchmarks, from the percentage of people who felt that religion played an important factor in their lives to a percentage of people who took time to pray, those that believed in Hell and sin and the number of people that believed in a Divine power. This evidence was matched with the levels of income inequality in the same countries.

Some of the findings in the study were less than surprising. For example, the authors found that Muslim countries were considerably more religious than other religious societies, and Catholic and Orthodox societies were more religious than Protestant ones. The lowest religiosity was found among Communist or formerly Communist countries.
Nothing shocking there.

The Surprising Thing

Other things they found confirmed what many of us tend to believe anyway. The study determined, for instance, that there is a very strong relationship between how economically developed a country is and its religiosity: less developed countries are significantly more religious.

Criminalizing Charity: The Shame and Hypocrisy of a Christian Nation

by Nomad

Do city ordinances which forbid the feeding of the homeless violate the religious liberty of Christians? Why has there been so much more outcry about gay wedding cakes and yet barely a whisper when it comes to outlawing a core commandment of the Christian faith?

There's no denying that, from the time of the struggling Puritan settlers until this day, Judaic-Christian values have had a profound influence on American culture. Certainly more than any other religious teaching. This is true not merely in the so-called Bible Belt but in other regions and other aspects of American social life.

Of course, no fair minded person would say that America has no room for diversity of religious thought or that Christianity should be forced upon any citizen. Simply because a religion has an influence doesn't mean it has any more right to become the only faith or the national governmentally-endorsed religion. Yet, it is true that much of American morality has roots in this particular faith.

Despite what Justice Scalia has recently said, the government is constitutionally mandated to remain wholly neutral, neither supporting nor rejecting any religion. At the same time, according to past Supreme Court rulings, the government must also steer clear of interference with degrees of religious faith: from the devout to the unbeliever, all must be respected.

Even with the equally-strong belief in secularism (when it comes to religion and government), on a person level, the humanitarian principles found in Judaic-Christian teachings are generally considered the bedrock of American philosophy. 

Among those Christian unchallengables is the call to charity, a command to help those in need, to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked. This idea, of course, is not unique to Christianity but it is generally where Americans draw their inspiration for doing good works.  

After loving the Lord with the second uppermost command is that we "love our neighbors as we love ourselves." And the two points cannot be separate in the Christian theology as the Book of John observes:

If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion--how can God's love be in that person?

The Book of James one can find:

If one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?

In the Old Testament too one can find similar thoughts. Proverbs 14:31 for example:

Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God.

And in the same book:

Whoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor will also cry out and not be answered.

With regular outraged anguish about "religious liberty" the Far Right Christians seem strangely silence and disinterested when it comes to criminalizing one of Christianity's most noble articles of faith.

*   *   *

Only last month we featured a post about laws against feeding the homeless. Here's what it looked like in action when a 90-year-old man was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida last weekend. 

Shocking: Utah Republicans Discover the Existence of Poverty and Social Inequality

by Nomad

According to a Salt Lake City article, Utah Republicans have made an astounding discovery. The poor! Furthermore, the conservatives say, with a few relatively cheap government programs, the cycle of poverty could be stopped in its tracks.

Unfortunately this is the same message that liberal Democrats have been saying for more than 50 years.

An op-ed piece in the Salt Lake City Tribune entitled "Utah Republicans Starting to Take on Poverty" should have a lot of voters scratching their heads in disbelief.

A Conservative  Epiphany on Poverty?

The article regales Utah Republicans for suddenly discovering the poor. Those sharp eyed conservatives never miss a trick, do they? 

The Republican legislators are, according to the article, 

"starting to realize that the poor have always been with us. And that that’s not a good thing. And that the rich and powerful should be doing something about it."

No kidding? Well, I declare.

This remarkable discovery was announced by Republican state Sen. Stuart Reid, who has been representing District 18 since January 1, 2011 .Reid has also detected something called intergenerational poverty.
Poverty, the Republicans have learned, can be passed down like an unfortunate inheritance. Who could have imagined it?

The Starkville Enclave: How a Mississippi Town is Defying Failed GOP Policy

by Nomad

When it comes to searching for good news, Mississippi is probably the last place anybody would think to look. Mississippi has been called- for so many reasons- America's Third World.
However, even in failed state, there are pockets of positive news. You just have to know where to look.

The Showcase of Conservative Policy in Action

Nobody will argue with one thing about Mississippi. The Magnolia State is probably the most conservative state in the country. For decades now it is and has been almost totally under the near absolute control of Republican, from the governor to the chamber of the state legislatures. It is the closet thing America has to a one-party system.

And like a lot of one-party nations, the results are appalling. 

Mississippi should have been a conservative showcase.,, if Republican policy actually worked It should have been the one place where conservatives could have held as a model of success  in order to exalt their brand. 

Yet, of  all of the states, Mississippi is a testament to the failure of conservative policy. 

Need evidence?

In general, the South has long been crippled by the sort of poverty that is handed down from generation to generation. Nine of the top 10 poorest states are found in the South. Some have tried to make the case that the South has never recovered from the Civil War. 

That's possible, but then that was an awfully long ago. Europe was rebuilt in less than a generation, Japan and Russia were both devastated following a war but quickly managed to rise from the ashes. Besides, as every  narrow minded conservative would tell you, you shouldn't constantly blame the past for the present lack of initiative, right? Whose fault is it if you haven't become a success? Right? (Wasn't it conservative Michele Bachmann who said that all cultures were not equal? She wasn't talking about the Southern culture. of course.) 

But, even by the South's own low standards, the situation in Mississippi is a cryin' shame.

Economically of all states, Mississippi  comes in dead last in terms of per capita income. The primary reasons are pretty basic, a lack of  secure employment, decent wages, and healthcare.  

Poorest Area of the Poorest State

The Mississippi Delta region is the poorest area of the poorest state and it is the kind of poverty that should have compassionate legislators working overtime. Unfortunately not so in Mississippi.

Christopher Masingill, joint head of the Delta Regional Authority, a development agency. puts it this way: “You can’t out-poor the Delta." Masingill points out that the people of the Mississippi Delta have a lower life expectancy than in Tanzania; other areas do not yet have proper sanitation. 
And like a Third World, the people of the region have given up hope and many are concentrating their efforts not in building but leaving. 

Since 1940, the region’s population has fallen by almost half. Ask any Third Worlder why they risk (and often losing) their lives coming to Europe or America. It will be the same as answer from those leaving the Delta. It's hopeless to keep trying where there is no opportunity. The system has been built to keep people down.

The Key to Happiness and the Death of the American Dream

by Nomad

A recent study on happiness can tell us why Americans are so angry with Washington. It has, the study suggests, been a long time coming.

According to a study highlighted in Psychology Today, researchers from University College London have discovered, after studying more than 18,000 people from all over the world, what really makes people happy. One key factor, they concluded, comes down to what we expect and how strongly we expect it. They were even able to derive an equation to predict the factors that created happiness.

Dr. Robb Rutledge, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist and lead author of the study,

“Life is full of expectations — it would be difficult to make good decisions without knowing, for example, which restaurant you like better. It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower. We find that there is some truth to this: lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness

But, according to Rutlege, that's only half of the story. Sometimes happiness comes solely from the expectation itself. When some people play the lottery, the expectation of winning and the plans of what they would do with the winnings is more than enough to keep people playing week after week. This is true when those expectations are known to be false or based on fantasy.

Using MRI scans, the researchers were even able to track the place in the brain where our happiness originates. They found that setting expectations and receiving the pay off trigger a release of a the pleasure hormone, dopamine, which excited those areas of the brain.

So, the researchers seem to suggest that having high hopes is one way to achieve short term happiness but having realistic expectations is more important to long term happiness. 

The American Dream and the Happiness of Fantasy

The findings on the surface might seem a little obvious. At least the results of the study fits pretty squarely with conventional wisdom about keeping your expectations low.

However, on a social and political level, there are some interesting implications. 
There are things that Americans have tended to believe to the core. One of those articles of faith is the American Dream. Some have argued that that dream is dead. The expectation that life will forever improve, that social mobility is possible if only one works harder and that you too can rise out of poverty by virtue of your ambition and your intelligence, all that is now forever lost. 

If the American Dream is truly dead, then America is going to be a particularly unhappy place to live. Especially for the middle class. The poor have learned from grim experience to expect less and many have been forced to rely on social programs. The rich tend to have their expectations met and can use the system to guarantee it. However, it is the middle class that will not so easily adjust to the downgrading of our dreams.

A Snapshot from the Frontline: Where Boston's Homeless Find Health Care

by Nomad

Providing health care to homeless citizens is a job that gets far too little attention compared with, say, celebrity news. One film takes a closer look at the people who have dedicated themselves to that task.

Director  Jeff Schwartz hadn't anticipated that his short film would turn into a full-length documentary.. or a life-changing experience.

"With a small crew and unprecedented access to homeless men and women on the streets.. I was introduced to people I would have normally passed by. "

The result was a film that hat NPR has called "extremely powerful" and "fascinating."

"Give me a Shot of Anything: House Calls to the Homeless" deals with lives of homeless and the doctors and care-givers who provide them with health care. 

Schwartz gave his assessment:

"These are people that care. They see the humanity of the homeless and make sure they are granted basic rights like food, shelter and quality health care."

On a larger scale this film documents one city's response to America's health care needs, the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program. 

Progress and Poverty: The Life and Warning of Forgotten Crusader, Henry George

by Nomad

Outside of the academic world perhaps, few people have heard of the name of Henry George. That's a real pity since his observations about economic inequality are as timely as they are essential to our own day. 

A Pyramid On Its Apex 

So long as all the increased wealth, which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality, political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.

The life of Henry George reads like a novel from another age. George was born into a large, lower-middle class and devout Episcopalian family in Philadelphia in 1839 . His father was a publisher of religious texts and insisted on a religious education for his son.
By 14, George had left the religious academy and was seized with a wanderlust. In April 1855, young George at 15 went to sea as a foremast on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta. 

After 14 months at sea, he returned to Philadelphia and began working as a printer. Ever restless, George traveled to California where he married and started a family. Despite marital and familial happiness, times were not easy and according to his own admission, there were times his family was close to starvation. 

He tried unsuccessfully to become a gold miner in British Columbia before finding work as a newspaper printer, journalist and eventually editor and newspaper owner. 

Politically, George initially leaned toward the Republican party of Lincoln but later, after viewing how corporations and industrialists were corrupting the party, switched to the Democratic party. He was a staunch opponent of the railroads which as he saw it were benefited only those fortunate enough to have a financial interest. Everybody else, he said, was being thrown into poverty. Such a stand proved to be his undoing when he attempted to run for politics in the California State Assembly. Executives from the powerful Central Pacific Railroad apparently went to some lengths to ensure George's electoral defeat. 

Incidentally it was from a minor- seemingly unimportant railroad case in California from around that time - along with a few precedents built upon that original case- which provided the Supreme Court a basis for its outlandish Citizen United decision. The Court somehow decided that corporations possess rights equality to citizens, that is, as the Republican candidate in the last election famously said, corporations are people.

Paul Ryan, Bill Bennett and the Exclusive Country Club Mentality

by Nomad

This quote by Herman Melville was the impetus for this post about two well-known conservatives, Paul Ryan and Bill Bennett.   Whenever you hear two elitist white guys pontificating about what's wrong with the "inner-city" culture, it's hard not catch the faint scent of racism. 

Paul Ryan and the Dog-Whistle

On March 12 of this year, Republican Paul Ryan was on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show to share his brand of wisdom about poverty in the US. He was quoted as saying:

"We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with."

The whole conversation was absurd on so many levels even Melville could not have held back a chuckle. Of course, the thought that unemployment is a just moral/culture failure no doubt provides a welcome sense of superiority to some of the more privileged among us.

How Cleveland's Urban Farming Project is Helping Neighborhoods Find Homegrown Solutions

by Nomad

In many urban neighborhoods, a lack of access to affordable food, especially fresh produce, has reduced the inter-city to "food deserts." As many US cities are learning, urban farming can bring oases to such communities.

One doesn't normally associate hunger with urban life. Cities were supposed to be about shared resources and shared responsibilities. That's how they came into being in the first place.
Today, however, for the poor, the problem is trying to find nourishing food at affordable prices.

As UNICEF reported back in 2012,

Urban areas may appear to have great levels of food availability and security, however not every family is granted access to those resources. The urban poor experience high levels of food insecurity because of poverty and social exclusion. Urbanization ultimately leads to poverty because families incur high costs in paying for food, housing, health fees, transportation, school and other basic necessities.

The food, especially fresh produce, simply isn't available at an affordable price.

Class Mobility: Why Moving Up is Just a Dream for Many American Children

by Nomad

Recent studies about class mobility in America reveal some interesting findings on upward mobility- the core principle of the American Dream. 
They suggest that one key factor between making that dream a reality or not could just be where you happen to live.

A recent study, commissioned by  the Equality of Opportunity Project and funded by the National Science Foundation, made some interesting correlations. Researchers found that areas with greater mobility-where people can rise out of the class they were born into- tended to have five characteristics: 

• less segregation, 
• less income inequality, 
• better schools, 
• greater social capital,
• more stable families. 

Researchers are quick to point out that the study was more about finding patterns. The study was not an attempt to decide what is a cause and what is an effect.  In any event, the findings themselves provide valuable information about the state of cyclical poverty in the US.

Where You Call Home

One factor is simply where you live. For example, the cards are stacked against the poor in the Southeast and the industrial Midwest. Basically, if you are poor there, you're stuck. 

On the other hand, if you are born poor in in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota, you may be able to climb out of the inherited hole. At least, there's a chance.

Billionaire Tom Perkins' Kristallnacht Fears: Isn't There a More Accurate Historical Parallel?

by Nomad

Recent remarks from one member of the super-wealthy class comparing the treatment of Jews to how the 1% is being treated by progressive stirred a lot of controversy. That should have been expected.

The Nazi comparison was deeply flawed but another historical period- the time just before the French Revolution- might be a lot closer to the mark.

Recently venture capitalist Tom Perkins raised a bunch of eyebrows after comparing the so-called persecution of wealthy Americans to the Nazi campaigns against the Jews. As high level executive in many computer and technology related companies Perkins' net worth has been estimated at $8 billion. 
In an open letter to the (News Corporation-owned) Wall Street Journal, Perkins  said:

"Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.'

Progressive war? And he did not stop there.

"This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"

Progressive radicalism descended from Nazism? Really? What kind of education did this man get? Home-schooling?

Has Television Become the Propaganda Machine for Conservative Values?

by Nomad

Sometimes it's hard to realize how compliant commercial television is compliant when it comes to lowering our sense of compassion for the poor. I'm not talking about its overall narcotic effect. 

It's what TV shows don't reveal about reality that's important.

It wouldn't be the first time that critics have accused television of being a corporate propaganda machine, of course. But what seems to be happening today is a little more devious. 

Selling products is one thing but the problem goes way beyond using TV to sell detergent and watches. It has become a effective tool of selling a philosophy of greed and intolerance.

Failed GOP Solutions: Is Marriage Really the Answer to Poverty in Oklahoma? 2/2

by Nomad

In PART ONE of this two-part series, we investigated a bit of curious legislation in Oklahoma. The House Speaker there decided to that that federal funds which were supposed to be used to find employment for needy families, should instead be used for statewide public service announcements promoting marriage as a solution to poverty. The idea, highly supported by organizations like The Heritage Foundation and the Christian Right, has been used in many other Red States.

The Heritage Foundation promotes marriage
as a solution to poverty in ads like these. 

The Practicalities of Marriage

When it comes to the Marriage Initiative as a way of reducing poverty, what so wrong about it? 
First of all, it hasn’t worked.

Despite the more than a decade of the Marriage Initiative efforts in Oklahoma, the single-parent problem is not going away. 

According to the latest US Census Bureau, about 28 percent of Oklahoma's families are led by a single parent, with that figure increasing to more than 40 percent in some rural counties. In some counties, the number has climbed to around 45.5 percent of all  households. 

Unlike many states where poverty is a feature of urban life, in many states like Oklahoma, poverty is a way of life in the more rural zones. (That's just like any third world country, as a matter of fact.)

So what can account for the rise of single parent households in the state? 

For one thing, divorce is much more of a problem than unwed mothers. As NBCNews reported in 2011,

Oklahoma has extraordinarily high rates of divorce among both men and women compared to the rest of the country. According to the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, 32 percent of Oklahoma adults who have ever been married have been divorced. The association lists financial troubles as one of the leading causes of divorce in the state.

The sponsors of the Marriage Initiative don't like to talk about divorce. for very obvious reasons. The truth about divorce and its causes refuses to fit into framework of their marriage agenda.

In any case, let's ignore the divorce rate and just concentrate on marriage as a solution to poverty. Even then, their logic doesn't hold up against reality.