. . . Can't get level

. . . the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil

I’ve been reading The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett lately. Recommended to me by a reader (Thanks Dave S), the title caught my attention immediately. I’ll review the book at http://readwit.blogspot.ca/ in a few days.
    At the centre of Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s thesis is that it’s not poverty that breeds crime and addictions and school-dropoutism and all the other illnesses we’ve come to associate with slums, reserves and other places where incomes are low, but that the real culprit is inequality. I can hear you jumping to the question: “But inequality in what? Wealth? Education? Gender?” Wait for the review, but for now, let’s say it boils down to money. Let’s say the primary method by which our North American society is herded into strata is the possession of means, and that from that stratification all kinds of ills arise.
    This would, after all, be Biblical:   For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (I Timothy 6: 10). (An aside: from the King James Version to the New English Version “the root of all evil,” turned into “a root of all kinds of evil.” I leave this significant difference to text scholars to elucidate.
    Think about the income inequality question at a more local level for a minute, let’s say the town of Glad in rural Maniskatchewan. The town has an upper-middle class group of astute business and respectable professional families who have done very well, earned a living over the years with enough surplus to build large houses, own several vehicles, spend winters in warmer climates, and in general, live securely and comfortably . . . plus. 
   But it’s also a place which some sociologists call “a Canora situation:” the modest housing abandoned by the wealthier citizens has been bought up by real estate entrepreneurs who rent them, primarily to social services who place their charges in them because they are all that’s available. Many of them happen to be young, unwed mothers, indigent families and individuals from nearby First Nations, seniors and poorly-educated younger persons from marginal farming areas north of town, etc.
    Glad has become a test case for the effects of income inequality, with a huge gap between the woman in the fur coat who doesn’t even check prices in the grocery store and the unwed mother who is down to Kraft Dinners for her children this week. They may well be courteous to each other as they pass in the grocery store, and the unwed mother may have benefitted on occasion from the can of soup the lady in the fur coat drops routinely into the food bank basket at the front door of the Groceteria.
    But it’s not these two women I’m concerned about. It’s their children and their grandchildren. What happens in school for instance, when children in cheap and worn clothing, poorly fed, unable to afford sports equipment, are placed adjacent to those with IPhones, mountain bikes, designer jeans, etc.? Well, we know what happens. Stratification. A caste system. The children of the parents that run the town, run the playground. Status is conferred. Status is denied.
   And with it, dignity is conferred and denied. And those who are denied dignity and status drop out; the system, after all, clearly doesn’t belong to them. They will find their status in another “playground” and the children of the elites in Glad will cross this other “playground” at their peril.
   The USA and Singapore are by far the most “income-unequal” countries in the world according to the sociological markers Pickett and Wilkinson are using. Japan comes close to being the most egalitarian in this regard. The homicide rate in the USA is 62 per million population annually; in Japan, the corresponding number is 3. Canada rests at 17. Now there’s obviously more than inequality involved here, but there’s no disputing that inequality contributes mightily to social illness when looked at statistically.
   What’s most alarming is that the gaps are growing. No, actually, that comes second. The most alarming is that we don’t have politicians smart enough to understand which is cause here and which is effect. How thick do you have to be to meet the problem of social illness by building more jails!
   There is no substitute for the fair distribution of resources that the earth provides for its citizens. There are groups and individuals, of course, who work at plucking individuals from the morass of illness that predominates in the underprivileged classes and settling them on a higher, safer plane. Applaud them for attempting to help in the only way they know how, but urge them to know that their efforts don’t deal with the cause of the illness itself, and may in fact be perpetuating it.
   I finish with a gem from Fay Wattleton quoted in The Spirit Level: “Just saying ‘No’ prevents teenage pregnancy [in the same way] as ‘Have a nice day’ cures chronic depression.” (p.119)

Look out! Here comes money!

Oh! Hard times, come again no more^©

By George Epp

Yesterday’s Saskatoon StarPhoenix carried a bold, front-page article with the headline: Making money hand over fist. Record oil and potash prices mean that royalties paid to the provincial government will bring in some 265 - 475 million in unexpected revenues. That’s roughly 250-450 dollars for every man, woman and child in the Saskatchewan. That’s additional; not total.

In the words of song writer Ian Tyson, it looks like we may be “Alberta Bound.”

But looking at these indicators means different things to different people. The “additional” hundreds of dollars obviously won’t be handed back to the citizens in greeting cards that say, “We didn’t plan on this money in the budget; we don’t need it; it’s rightfully yours so we have enclosed a cheque. Be happy!” (Ralph Klein’s Alberta Conservatives actually did this at least once; the Bush administration is planning something similar to kick-start the economy in the USA.)

And it might not be a bad idea. We are certainly paying-in the additional amount: not in taxes, but in gasoline, diesel and food price increases. What to our finance minister looks like a lottery-winnings windfall, looks like trouble to all but the few for whom an increase of, say, 20% in the cost of living isn’t threatening.

The other, sad part of the news involves the crush on urban housing. Landlords eager to cash in on the record-breaking real estate prices in Saskatoon are evicting tenants, slapping a coat of paint on the apartments and selling them as condominium units at horribly inflated prices. People on social assistance, small fixed incomes of other kinds and the working poor and the labourer/waitress/McJob class in our culture can no longer find accommodation they can afford.

A story on page 3 of the same paper is headlined, Priced out of the market. It’s about a grandmother raising three grandchildren on social assistance cheques and child tax credits. The rent on the house they live in is going from $550 to $900. If the provincial government were to share their windfall with the grandmother, she could actually afford to stay in her home for at least another month.

She claims she’s cut her personal meal portions in half to trim what she can from her escalating grocery bills. The article goes on to tell us that food bank use has jumped by nearly 10% . . . in the last month!

Around the world, the rising cost of grains, fuel and fertilizer is creating a crisis: poorer countries can no longer afford our food commodities, period.

How can it be that prosperity can cause such hardship? Why are we so elated to see the housing boom, the rising population in the province, the overflowing government coffers?

Maybe we’ve been conditioned over time to measure our security by the pronouncements of those to whom prosperity does mean a great deal, i.e. the investors in the stock market, the holders of commodity shares, the political culture, etc. For the working stiffs, the seniors on fixed incomes and the poor, good times can be hard times.

Prepare yourselves; you’re going to be fleeced again of the little you may have, while the shearers who don’t need it will be laughing all the way to their brokers’ offices!

It's OUR story!

November 11, 2007

It’s not just coffee!

It’s ­our story; not my story.

What’s on your plate?

We all have AIDS.

I decided to begin today with a series of maxims that recent events have conspired to plant firmly in my brain. The first two are from a sermon delivered this morning by Nadine Ens on the occasion of Remembrance Day. The third is from Duane Guina of earth care, an agricultural conservancy here in Saskatchewan and the last from Race Against Time, the CBC Massey Lectures of 2005 by Stephen Lewis.

Nadine talked about a recent trip to Guatemala with Rosthern Junior College students and some of the things she learned from that trip regarding coffee growing, land clearing, mudslides and poverty. Her central point arose from the idea that we wealthy North Americans love and demand lots of good coffee, that this demand drives the clearing of more and more land for coffee growing, that the clearing of land often results in mudslides that destroy villages and kill people. Hence our coffee habit ends up killing people. Or does it?

She suggested that the stories we hear on the radio and television about the tragedies suffered by the most vulnerable people on earth are our stories, not their stories as opposed to my stories. She was saying the same thing that the final quote is saying: the whole world has AIDS. We are all interconnected in too many ways to be able to say that we don’t share the responsibility for tragedy, or for that matter, that we don’t share the credit for the relief of people’s agony when it comes.

“What’s on your plate?” could also read, “What’s on your back, on your feet, in your home, in your garage or in your backyard?” As consumers, we decide on the parameters that will circumscribe the economic lives of the producers. It makes a difference if our cars are manufactured in the USA, Canada, Japan or Korea. Do we know what the difference is? It makes a difference if we choose to get our Vitamin C from imported grapefruit or from domestically-grown blueberries. Do we know what the difference is? Many corporations have been challenged on the use of cheap labour in order to produce everything from toys to gadgets to clothes. Do we know what effect our demand for NIKE running shoes is doing at the production end? Current estimates are that the average distance our food travels is something like 1500 Km. Transportation consumes non-renewable energy. So it matters “what’s on my plate.” We need to begin schooling ourselves in the intricacies of consumer wisdom. Do we know how to do that, where to go? Send me titles or links that you are aware of and I’ll publish them here.

Race Against Time is subtitled, “Searching for hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa.” I personally am HIV negative, so how is this “our story?” For most of you, the answer will be obvious, as it was to Nadine as she told us to remember that it’s all “our story” because we are all so inextricably linked that the echoes of each event reach all of us in one way or another.

Since hearing Stephen Lewis a week ago, I’m contemplating a poor-person’s dinner at $30.00 a plate to raise some money for “Generations at Risk”, an MCC program to alleviate the suffering caused by AIDS in Africa. I might serve lentil and chickpea soup and South African bread and pass the proceeds on to MCC.

Who wants to join my project?

I’m easily reached at g.epp@sasktel.net.

It’s not just coffee!

It’s ­our story; not my story (or their story).

What’s on your plate?

We all have AIDS.

Winning a war may get all the celebratory attention, but foreseeing and preventing war is a far greater challenge and a far nobler undertaking than the commanding of a victorious army.