poverty
lborkowski | September 11, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Dorry Samuels Levine at National COSH: On 12th anniversary of September 11 attacks, more than 1,100 reported cases of cancer among responders and survivors
Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities: How Poverty Taxes the Brain
Laura Helmuth at Slate: Fourteen Oddball Reasons You're Not Dead Yet
Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post's Wonkblog: How the cult of shareholder value wrecked American business
Lisa Schnirring at CIDRAP: CDC head: Global disease threats call for better tools
Steven Wilmsen at Reporting on Health: Immersive coverage of health issues…
lborkowski | July 31, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Two Nature news features on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by Maryn McKenna and Beth Mole, respectively: Antibiotic resistance: The last resort and MRSA: Farming up trouble
David Leonhardt in the New York Times: In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters
Jim Morris at the Center for Public Integrity: Industry muscle targets federal 'Report on Carcinogens'
Stephanie Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle/ Reporting on Health: Poverty, health struggles in scenic Mendocino
Charles Kenny & Justin Sandefur in Foreign Policy: Can Silicon Valley Save the World…
lborkowski | May 31, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
The Latest in the NPR-WAMU series Poisoned Places: Elizabeth Shogren and Robert Bennicasa on "Baton Rouge's Corroded, Overpolluting Neighbor: ExxonMobil"and Richard Harris on "Breathing Easier: How Houston is Working to Clean up its Air."
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: To Prevent MRSA In Hospitals, Don’t Prevent Only MRSA
Matthew Yglesias at Slate: The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty
Eric Jankiewicz and Sara Sugar of Brooklyn Bureau: Bushwick's Struggles With Asthma: What's Poverty's Role?
Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein, and Jennifer LaFleur of…
sastyk | February 24, 2013I get invited to speak to a lot of US Transition groups, and often I go. Often the leaders are blog readers, sometimes people I know through the internet, often future-friends. While every talk is different, they have some real similarities. Whether speaking in a suburb of Maryland, a large city in Ohio or to a coalition of rural towns in Virginia, I know that some things will probably happen.
I will meet wonderful, kind hosts who will put me up in their guest room and on their couch. I will most likely speak at a Unitarian Church (although I have spoken in many, many different kinds of…
sastyk | November 25, 2012A friend of mine who volunteered at a shelter in New York City told me this story over Thanksgiving. The shelter she worked in responded to the range of people affected by the crisis. Many of them, as always in a crisis, were those who were already struggling and marginalized - illegal immigrants afraid to go anywhere else, the already-homeless whose usual shelters and places of refuge were closed or underwater, the mentally and physically ill who had to be evacuated from hospitals in the flood zone. Many of the rest were storm evacuees from some of the city's most expensive neighborhoods…
sastyk | October 21, 2012A week ago, one of our former foster sons celebrated his ninth birthday. He's now living with family in another state, and we have kept in regular touch. We sent a gift, a card with some pictures we thought he'd enjoy, and on the afternoon of his birthday, we tried to call and wish him happy, but the phone had been disconnected.
This was not a total shock. It had happened once before, during the process of getting him ready to move. His family loves him and he's very happy there - but they live very, very close to the economic margin. Both of the adults in his family have serious health…
sastyk | September 6, 2012Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn't have enough food at least some of the time. In addition, the number of households with "very low food security" - meaning people regularly go hungry rose by almost half a million households - as high as at the height of the economic crisis. Notably, this is data that covers…
sastyk | July 3, 2012A little while back we took our current foster sons to visit the university where Eric teaches physics. The boys had never visited a university before, and were curious about who goes there and what they do when they are there. This led to a discussion of the value of a college education, what kinds of jobs require college, and what kind don't.
From here, we segued to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and it was here that the enormous gap between my biological children, trained from birth to see an adult profession/vocation, mixed perhaps with informal economic activities, as…
sastyk | May 23, 2012So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.
One of the things I don't approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the "1% vs. 99%" rhetoric. The reason I don't is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities - by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it…
sastyk | May 9, 2012Isn't it obvious? We gave women the right to vote. As Raw Story reports:
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist that's appeared several times on Fox News, and founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America's greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in "the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them."
I'm completely on Patterson's side, in fact, I'm sure he agrees with me that the real problems began when we extended the…
sastyk | April 20, 2012Note, no matter what I do it won't embed properly - sorry about that. Here's the link and thanks to Kerri for finding it: http://tinyurl.com/3sxfdjf
Friend Jerah sent this to me, pointing out that since I don't use a refrigerator, my family is among the .04% of the US population that constitutes the "deserving' poor. I'm so proud!
I thought it had to do with income, in which case I'm not, in fact, poor, but no, it is all about the appliance ownership! We're really getting somewhere now - who knew picking up a microwave at a yard sale or living in a subsidized apartment with an actual fridge…
sastyk | February 29, 2012For the last several years I've been working on the invention of "Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws" and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important - zoning presumptions simply can't be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.
Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas. Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we've instituted…
sastyk | February 23, 2012Note: I wrote a slightly different piece under this title on ye olde blogge back in August, but given the emphasis on discussion of contraception going on, I thought it was worth reiterating and mulling over further.
When your specialty as a foster family is taking large sibling groups, you hear a lot of stuff you'd rather not. The typical comment involves forced sterilization, and it is hard sometimes not to have a little sympathy. Of the kids we've taken or been called about, we've had three groups of five and three of four, and almost all have involved very young mothers, sometimes with…
sastyk | February 2, 2012Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.
GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very…
sastyk | January 23, 2012This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money:
1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on…
sastyk | January 19, 2012Well, as the republican donnybrooks narrow down, the enemy becomes evident - the American poor. Newt Gingrich particularly dislikes poor folk, especially poor children, because after all, if they were good people they wouldn't be poor, they'd be working 50 hours a week in some nice sweatshop!
Celeste Monforton at The Pump Handle has a nice post on the realities of the food stamp recipients Newt claims are lazy buggers.
"And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country."
It is absolutely…
sastyk | December 1, 2011I'm going to be buried under my book for the next few days as the Adapting-In-Place book finally goes to my editor, but I did want to respond to this email, or rather, get my readers to respond. Gwen writes:
"I just lost my job, and after a lot of late nights and panicked budget making, we think we can get along on just my husband's income, but it will be very tough and there will be no money at all for extras of any kind. We've always used our discretionary income to support things we care about - in the last few years this was local farmers and craftspeople, and making ethical choices…
sastyk | November 8, 2011A superb article by Benjamin Dueholm in Washington Monthly about Foster Parenting and its connection to politics and a whole host of other things. Well worth a read:
In a way that we never really anticipated, welcoming Sophia into our home led us into the wilderness of red tape and frustration navigated every day by low-income parents who struggle to raise children with the critical help of government programs. That same week, the office of the bone specialist who had treated Sophia's broken leg at the hospital tried to get out of scheduling her for an urgent follow-up appointment. Like many…
gregladen | October 3, 2011Remember last summer's tornado in North Minneapolis? North is one of the more challenged neighborhoods in the region, with a high poverty rate and where the schools are struggling against all odds. One of the schools in North Minneapolis that needs your help is one of the schools damaged by that tornado. So they got a double hit. I've hand selected all of the schools based on my interaction with local and regional schools, with a focus on supporting doable project related mainly to science or math. In addition, DonorsChoose carefully inspects budgets and proposals to make sure they are…
sastyk | September 26, 2011Dr. Wangari Maathai died on Sunday at 71, of ovarian cancer. It is interesting to me that so many of the obituaries get her work wrong - consider what the New York Times says:
Dr. Maathai, one of the most widely respected women on the continent, wore many hats -- environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, rabble-rouser, human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977. Its mission was to plant trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.
It is a small error, but an important one. Maathai did not wear many…