Bob Feldman : Texas Still Ranks High in Poverty and Segregation by Race and Income, 1964-2012

Poverty in Texas has continued to grow in recent years. Image from WebGovernments.

The hidden history of Texas

Conclusion: 1996-2012/Final Section -- Texas still ranks high in poverty and segregation by race and economic status and low in health care and education.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / June 19, 2013

[This is the final section of the conclusion to Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Despite the surplus wealth accumulated by some ultra-rich folks in Texas between 1996 and 2011, the number of people living in poverty also continued to increase during these same years. The University of Texas' Texas Politics website indicates the extent to which the economic, educational, and health care needs of large numbers of people in Texas are still not being met by Texas society in the 21st-century:

In 2007 Texas ranked second among all the states in the percent of its populace that was poor... The poverty rate for Texas in that year was 16.5 percent. The only other state that had higher poverty rates was Mississippi (20.1 percent)... Texas...clearly has the highest poverty rate of any large industrial state... Its poor population in absolute numbers: 3.934 million people... California...is the only state with a larger number of poor people...than Texas...

Texas therefore has both a large number of poor people and a high percentage of its population living in poverty. In 2007, Texas ranked 9th in the poverty rate for the elderly; it ranked 49th in the percentage of its adult population with a high school diploma; and it ranked first, at 24.4 percent, in the percent of the populace with no health insurance...

Of the Anglo population, 8.4 percent is poor, while 23.8 percent of the African-American and 24.8 percent of the Hispanic populations are poor. In other words, the rate of poverty among the two minority groups is three times greater than among the Anglo population… If we take the entire poor population of Texas (some 3.9 million people)…23.8 percent of all poor Texans are Anglo, and 15.8 percent are African-American, but well over half (53 percent) are Hispanic...

...in the entire United States, the two absolutely poorest [counties]... were both along the Texas-Mexico border -- Cameron County and Hidalgo County... Cameron and Hidalgo were the only two counties in the United States with median household incomes under $25,000... Cameron and Hidalgo counties also had the highest poverty rates of any counties in the United States; each had a rate of about 41 percent...

El Paso had a poverty rate of 29 percent... Of the 10 poorest counties in the United States, Texas had El Paso (sixth) and Lubbock (tenth) in addition to Cameron and Hidalgo. Texas was the only state to have more than one of the poorest ten counties nation-wide...

And according to a recently-released report of Austin’s Center for Public Policy Priorities, titled "The State of Texas Children 2011," 24 percent of all children in Texas and 22.2 percent of all children in Austin were now living in poverty in 2009, while the poverty level for the total population in Texas increased to 17.1 percent in 2009 (even before the state’s official jobless rate reached 8 percent in December 2010) and 16 percent of all people living in Austin were now economically impoverished.

A May 5, 2011, issue brief of the Economic Policy Institute, titled “Distressed Texas,” also noted that “the African-American unemployment rate in Texas rose from 8.1 percent at the beginning of the Great Recession to a high of 14.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010,” and “in 2010, 13.6 percent of African-Americans and 9.6 percent of Hispanics were unemployed, compared with 6.0 percent of white non-Hispanic Texans.”

And, according to "Ongoing Joblessness in Texas," a May 16, 2013, report from the Economic Policy Institute, "In Texas, where the overall unemployment rate was 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 (compared with a national average of 7.8 percent), African American and Hispanic families continue to bear the brunt of that economic pain."

In a February 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at Austin’s Southgate-Lewis House, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson made the following observation about the extent of perceived white racism in 21st-century Austin, a town otherwise known as a progressive enclave:

Austin, Texas has been and still it is, I think, a place that is hung up in the late '40s. I think Austin is a very racist city. Matter of fact, even though I have received a lot of the goodness that Austin offers, and I have been blessed, I find Austin to be a real racist place. And I was born in Hearne, Texas, and I know racism when I see it. And it is here [in Austin] greater than it exists anywhere else in this state.

And there’s just a different kind of a slave mentality here than just other places. There’s also more opportunity here than in most other places. But people here are so hell-bent on seeing themselves a little bit better than the people in Elgin and Giddings because that’s their yardstick. So you don’t have to be a lot better; all you have to be is just alive.

Though there are towns in Texas where racism is certainly more blatant, Austin is a very segregated city and is experiencing substantial displacement of blacks and Hispanics due to gentrification. More overt racism may be found elsewhere in the state, especially in towns like Vidor and Jasper in East Texas that have struggled to overcome histories of KKK-dominated racial violence.

An April 25, 2013, article in Business Insider on the 21 most segregated cities in the U.S. included only Houston (at 20th) among Texas cities. But an August 2, 2012, feature in the same publication, citing a study by the Pew Research Center, called Houston "America's most economically segregated city," citing that "Houston leads the way among the nation's 10 largest metropolitan areas when it comes to affluent folks living among others who are affluent, and poor living with poor."

In Houston, according to the article, "the percentage of upper-income households in census tracts with a majority of upper-income households increased from 7 in 1980 to 24 in 2010. Likewise, low-income households in majority low-income tracts jumped from 25 to 37." Of the nation's 30 top metropolitan areas, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas topped the Pew study's  "Residential Income Segregation Index."

According to the Sentencing Project website’s most recent figures, for every 100,000 African-Americans who live in Texas, 3,162 are now imprisoned, while the rate of incarceration for white people in Texas is currently 667 per 100,000. And since 1995 the total number of people of all races locked up inside state and federal prisons in Texas has increased from 127,766 to 162,186 (including 11,620 female prisoners).

There are some positive signs on the horizon, with major demographic changes likely to transform the state's political complexion. With rapid growth in youth, African-American, and Hispanic populations, and increased clout for the state's urban areas, Texas is projected to change political colors in the next decade or two. As the Center for American Progress Action Fund put it, "changing demographics will have significant impact on [Texas's] social, economic, and political landscape."

But for now, as we enter the post-2012 period of Texas history (and a possible post-2017 “Perry Era” of right-wing political resurgence in U.S. history), the anti-democratic direction of recent Texas history has not been reversed and the people of the state continue to be economically exploited and politically dominated by the white corporate power structure and political establishment of Texas -- which has been the story for the last 190 years of the hidden history of Texas.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : African-Americans and Institutional Racism in Texas, 1954-1973

Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas State Legislature in 1966.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/3 -- African-Americans elected to office but institutional racism continues

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the third section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

In 1966 an African-American, Barbara Jordan, was elected to the Texas State Legislature, and by 1971 African-American City Council members had been elected in Austin, Bryan, Fort Worth, Galveston, Hearne, Houston, Huntsville, Malakoff, Port Arthur, San Antonio, Waco, and Wichita Falls.

But institutional racism in Texas did not disappear during the last half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, despite the victories achieved by local civil rights movement activists in the early 1960s struggle to end legal forms of racial discrimination, white supremacy, and racial segregation in Texas.

In Austin , for example, local residents voted to repeal a Fair Housing Ordinance in a May 1968 referendum; and the U.S. Justice Department initiated a lawsuit against the Austin School District in August 1970 because of the failure of city officials to desegregate Austin’s public school system.

In addition, in the early 1970s the Austin Human Relations Commission reported that discrimination in employment in Austin was still “widespread and well-documented,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

In 1969, the University of Texas administration still only employed one African-American faculty member. And although the poll tax in Texas was finally declared unconstitutional in 1966, as late as 1966 the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency still included no African-Americans.

African-Americans in Texas were still also likely to live in poverty. Around 39 percent of all African-American residents of Texas still lived in poverty in 1970, for example, whereas 90 percent of all white Anglo residents of Texas did not live in poverty.

Dormitories at Texas Southern University that housed African-American students were shot up by Houston police in 1967; and in the late 1960s, “Lee Otis Johnson, who led anti-war protests at Texas Southern University and publicly criticized the mayor and police of Houston at a Martin Luther King memorial rally, received a 30-year sentence for giving a police undercover agent a marijuana cigarette,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

Peoples Party II leader
Carl Hampton.

After People’s Party II was formed in Houston in the summer of 1970, its African-American chairman, Carl Hampton, was killed by Houston police on July 26, 1970; and three African-American supporters and a white supporter of People’s Party II were wounded by the Houston police in the same incident.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, “Negroes in many Texas cities continued to complain that police stopped and searched them without reason, used dogs to move non-violent persons or groups, and still used... profane terms in addressing black people,” according to Black Texans. Not surprisingly, there was an African-American urban rebellion in Midland, Texas, in July 1968 and an African-American urban rebellion in Lubbock, Texas, in September 1971.

Affordable housing opportunities for African-Americans who lived in Texas cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio were also still limited in 1970 because residential segregation still existed in these three cities at that time -- although 26 percent of all Houston residents and 25 percent of all Dallas residents were now African-American in 1970.

And in Austin, “as a result of the Keating urban renewal project in Austin during the 1960s... one-third of the families in the `renewed’ area did not get decent homes, 70 percent paid more rent or higher house payments afterward, and 19 percent of the pre-project home owners had become renters;” and “highway construction in Austin went far toward eliminating the small black enclave called Clarksville on the overwhelmingly white west side of the city,” according to Black Texans.

The official unemployment rate for African-American workers in Texas also continued to be nearly double the official unemployment rate for white workers in the state during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1967 and 1970, the jobless rate for African-American workers in Texas was between 5.7 and 7.6 percent, while the jobless rate for white workers in Texas was between 2.7 and 4 percent.

And as late as 1970, African-American workers were still apparently being excluded from membership in the construction worker unions and skilled trades unions in Texas. And, although in the late 1960s “Negroes formed 20 to 25 percent of the population in Dallas and Houston, they owned only about 3 percent of the businesses in each city” and whites still “owned a majority of the businesses in the black community,” according to Black Texans.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Remembering the Great Society

President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Remembering the Great Society:
Addressing poverty and hunger in America

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

On Monday, September 26, the Reverend Jesse Jackson visited Ohio University, located at the northern edge of Appalachia. President Lyndon Johnson had introduced his vision of a “Great Society” in 1964 at this site and Jackson was returning 47 years later to call for the establishment of a White House commission to address poverty and hunger in America.

Jackson pointed out that Athens County, Ohio, where he spoke, represented “ground zero” as to poverty in America today. Thirty-two percent of county residents live in poverty.

The fact that increased poverty is a national problem was underscored in a September 13 press release from the United States Census Bureau. The Census Bureau reported that 46.2 million people lived below the poverty line in 2010, the highest number in 52 years. In 2010, 15.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty, the highest percent since 1993. The poverty line for a family of four was $22,314.

The New York Times (September 14, 2011) quoted Professor Lawrence Katz, economist, who said that “this is truly a lost decade. We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

In a press release, the Census Bureau identified some additional data which reflects the economic status of large numbers of Americans:

• The number of Americans below the poverty line in 2010 increased by 900,000 over 2009.
• Proportions of Black and Hispanic citizens living in poverty increased from 2009 to 2010. Black poverty rose to 27 percent from 25 percent; Hispanic poverty 26 percent from 25 percent.
• 48 million Americans, 18 to 64 years of age, did not work at all in 2010, up from 45 million in 2009.
• Median income declines were greatest among the young, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a 9 percent decline between 2009 and 2010.
• Childhood poverty rates rose from 20.7 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010.

Timothy Smeeding, Director, Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, was quoted in the New York Times article: “We’re risking a new underclass. Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless.”

Arloc Sherman, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reminded readers that the level of poverty was higher and median income was lower in 2007 than 2001.

In this economic context, it was surprising that the calls by Reverend Jackson for a new Great Society largely were ignored by the liberal blogosphere as well as most of the mainstream media.

One impressive exception was an interview on Up with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, on Sunday, September 25. On this program, Jackson pointed out that if it had not been for President Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam War policy he would have been recognized as one of the transformational presidents in American history.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has pointed out in an interesting essay entitled “Race, Class and Economic Justice” that the Johnson programs, the “Great Society,” and its “War on Poverty,” were grounded in the civil rights struggle for jobs and justice. When LBJ’s program got mired in the escalating war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King launched the “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Both the Great Society and the Poor People’s Campaign need to be revisited as young people, workers, men and women of all races and classes, mobilize along Wall Street and in virtually every city and town in America to demand economic and social justice. And as the Reverend Jackson reminded students and citizens of Athens County on September 13, LBJ’s program was a comprehensive one linking government and community groups. Among its major achievements the following need to be celebrated:

• The Food Stamp Act (1964) provided low income families with access to adequate food.
• The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) created the Job Corps, VISTA, and other community-based programs.
• The Tax Reduction Act (1964) cut income tax rates for low-income families.
• The Civil Rights Act (1964) outlawed discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
• The Wilderness Preservation Act (1964) protected over 9 million acres of national forests from developers.
• The Elementary and Secondary School Act (1965) provided federal aid to schools with low-income students, including the establishment of the Head Start program.
• Amendments to the Social Security Act (1965) established Medicare for retirees and Medicaid for low-income health care recipients.
• The Voting Rights Act (1965) ended racial discrimination in voting.
• The Water Quality Act (1965) required states to clean up polluted rivers and lakes.
• The Omnibus Housing Act (1965) provided for low income housing.
• The Higher Education Act (1965) created scholarships for college students.
• The School Lunch and Child Nutrition Act (1968) was expanded to provide food to low-income children in schools and day care facilities.

Between 1964 and 1968 the United States Congress passed 226 of 252 bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion in 1968. One million workers received job training from these programs and 2 million children experienced pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.

Progressives should revisit this history and tell the story of the successes and failures of the 1960s vision and programs and work for the fulfillment of the dream articulated by Dr. King and LBJ. Both visions presupposed the connection between government, communities, and activists.

And, it should be made clear that the Great Society floundered, not because of errors in the vision or programs, or because of “government bureaucrats,” or because the “free market” could serve human needs better, but because of a disastrous imperial war that sapped the support for vibrant and needed domestic programs.

Slogans about Money for Jobs and Justice, Not for War, constitute the lessons for today. The Reverend Jesse Jackson should be supported in his efforts to revive the vision of the Great Society.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Jim Rigby : Scriptures You Won't Hear at Perry's Prayer Event

The parable of the Good Samaritan was a lesson in humility. Image from Sarcastic Lutheran.
Five scriptures you won’t hear
at Rick Perry’s prayer event

If the governor wants to call us to repentance it should begin with our real sins against the poor...

By Jim Rigby / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2011

As a native Texan, I’m used to crazy religion and crazy politics. So, the announcement of Gov. Rick Perry’s plans for “The Response,” a prayer event scheduled for August 6 at Houston’s Reliant Stadium, was not a surprise.

But as a Presbyterian minister and community organizer, it’s part of my job to stand up for my neighbors. The use of the governor’s office to promote one religion in a country with such rich religious diversity is obviously unhealthy politics, but -- if one takes the Christian and Jewish scriptures seriously -- it is also unhealthy religion. Here are five rather important verses of scripture you aren’t likely to hear at “The Response”:


Don’t make a show of prayer

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray in public places to be seen by others... But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your heavenly parent, who is unseen.” (Matt. 6:5-6)

While Jesus never addressed the issues most important to some of this event’s co-sponsors, such as homosexuality and abortion, he did speak out against public displays of religion. Whatever Jesus meant by the word “prayer,” it seems to have been about the quiet and personal. The disciples had to ask Jesus how to pray, which is a pretty good indication that he wasn’t praying a lot publicly. What he did say about prayer carried a warning label: “Don’t rub it in other people’s faces.”


God doesn’t withhold rain because we’ve done something wrong

“God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matt. 5:45)

Perry recently called Texans to pray for rain, which implies that God steers clouds toward the worthy. According to Right Wing Watch, one of the events co-sponsors has said the earthquake in Japan happened because the emperor had sex with the Sun Goddess. It may be a part of our lower nature to blame disasters on people we don’t like or understand, but Jesus taught that God sends rain on the just and unjust. Furthermore, he said our love should be equally nonselective.

I have chosen Christianity as my life’s religion, but when nonjudgmental love is taken out of its center, it becomes poisonous and predatory. The word “God” can be a helpful symbol for all the transcendentals of life, but the symbol becomes instantly pathological when used as a scientific explanation or political justification.


God doesn’t have favorites

Then Peter began to speak:

“I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism.” (Acts 10:34)

When the Bible says that God is not a “respecter of persons” it means that God doesn’t have a favorite country or religion. The idea that God wants Christians to be in charge of other people violates Jesus’ teaching that we are to take the lowest place. We are to change the world by humble persuasion and good example, not by messianic coercion. The assumption that Christianity and America are God’s two favorite things will be particularly ironic, as the prayer event falls on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.


Worship by those who neglect the poor is offensive to God

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me... Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:21-24)

The prophet Amos chastised the religion of his day for praying to God while mistreating people. Texas leads the nation in citizens who are uninsured, who work for minimum wage, and who die from unsafe working conditions on construction sites. Our state has the widest gap between rich and poor of any in the union. If the governor wants to call us to repentance it should begin with our real sins against the poor, not the imaginary sins dreamed up by his friends.


The heart of Christian ethics is being a good neighbor

When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) it was to teach humility to a rich young zealot who thought he was approaching moral perfection. The Samaritans were the scapegoats of the day. The rich young ruler would consider Samaritans heretics and immoral people. Jesus used a merciful Samaritan as the example of ethical perfection. It is a lesson many Christians have yet to learn.

One sponsor of the event, the American Family Association, is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The group’s director of analysis for government and policy is quoted by the SPLC as saying that Hitler was “an active homosexual” who sought out gays “because he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough.” He also said Muslims should not be allowed in the military or be allowed to build mosques in the United States.

None of this analysis springs from malice. In fact, I must confess that I have a soft spot for Rick Perry. When the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in Texas was passed, I had the honor of pushing the wheelchair of Byrd’s mother into the governor’s office for the signing. I privately thanked Perry for his courage in standing up to all the groups who had fought against the bill; I knew he might pay a political price for signing the bill. Tears came to his eyes, and he said, “It’s the right thing to do.”

I can’t know what is in Perry’s heart, of course, but I do know the problem isn’t one politician but rather a nation that has embraced an unhealthy political arrogance undergirded by even unhealthier religious hubris. The “prayer” that is most needed at this time is for each of us, believer or not, to go into our own heart and find the humility and empathy that is at the core of righteousness, political and spiritual.

[Rev. Jim Rigby, a human rights activist, is pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. He can be reached at jrigby0000@aol.com., and videos of his sermons are available online here. Read more articles by Jim Rigby on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Poverty and Public Health in America

The picture of poverty in America. Image from Bay View.
Poverty and public health:
The social causes of death in America

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2011

"[The] incredible absolute size and commanding market positions [of a few immense corporations] make them the most exceptional manmade creatures of the twentieth century... In terms of the size of their constituency, volume of receipts and expenditures, effective power, and prestige, they are more akin to nation-states than business enterprises of the classic variety." -- Richard Barber, from the book Friendly Fascism by Bertrand Gross.

These days we are always on the lookout for a bit of encouraging news. But the final analysis of the Vermont health care plan comes as a bitter disappointment. The online organization Single Payer Action on June 21 provided us with the sad news: the much-touted Vermont plan is not single payer, not even close.

It seems that the phrase "single payer" was stripped out during the final negotiations, and the implementation of the legislation is dependent on federal approval. It also appears that agencies in Washington will not grant needed waivers. The bill permits the private insurers to operate in Vermont indefinitely.

ScienceDaily reports on a study done at the Columbia University School of Public Health that brings home once again the great failings of the healthcare system in the United States. The study “found that poverty, low levels of education, poor social support and other social factors contribute about as many deaths in the U.S. as such familiar causes as heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer.”

The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the year 2000 could be attributed to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty.

Overall, 4.5% of U.S. deaths were found to be attributable to poverty -- midway between previous estimates of 6% and 2.3%. However, the risks associated with both poverty and low education were higher for individuals ages 25-64 than for those of 65 or older. The authors’ findings for a broader public health conceptualization of the causes of mortality and an expansive policy approach that considers how social factors can be addressed to improve the health of populations.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives continue their budget negotiations in Washington with an eye on further cutting an already inadequate Medicaid program and "revising" Medicare benefits, continuing the downward spiral of health care for the poor, the disabled, our returning servicemen/women, and the emotionally ill.

Happily, there is some galvanizing opposition, as witnessed by a massive protest by National Nurses United in Lafayette Square demanding a tax revenue increase from corporations in order to prevent such cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.

I am encouraged by the rare occasions that a group of dedicated Americans will gather in public to speak up against injustice. But I also wonder about the lack of public militancy against injustice here that we see demonstrated by the citizens in our fellow democracies in Europe, especially in Greece, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom.

It would seem that there is an answer, a disturbing answer, contained in an article by Harriet Fraad, published in Tikkun and distributed by AlterNet. The title: "Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families, and the American Dream?" While Dr. Fraad offers some suggestions, one hopes that they do not come too late.

Noam Chomsky peripherally addressed this matter in a 1995 essay when he wrote:

A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers and in the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who... years ago would have been teaching in working-class schools, writing books like Mathematics for the Million, participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, they are not to be found, it seems, when there is an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country right now is in a very strange and ominous state.

People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer’s dream... It’s also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics who can (and, in fact, already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.

A few bright lights in the darkness: Senator Bernie Sanders is facing down the pharmaceutical industry. He has introduced a bill in the Senate authorizing government expenditures of some $80 billion per year to buy up the patents that were awarded to the drug companies for "carrying out research."

These patents, in essence, provide government-granted patent monopolies, thus providing the pharmaceutical companies the right to price drugs at hundreds of dollars per prescription and sometimes several thousand dollars per prescription in the United States.

The money would come from a tax on public and private insurers. The savings from lower-cost drugs would immediately repay more than 100 per cent of the tax.

The country is projected to spend almost $300 billion on prescription drugs this year. Prices would fall to roughly one-tenth the amount in the absence of patent monopolies, leading to a savings of more than $250,000 billion. The savings on lower drug prices should easily exceed the size of the tax, leaving a substantial net reduction in costs to the government and private insurers. For more details about the legislation, see "The Drug Market Scam" by Dean Baker on AlterNet.

The other side of the coin involves a decision by the Supreme Court on June 23, 2011, freeing the generic drug makers from providing consumers with the specific dangers of using a drug. The court, at the same time, gave the pharmaceutical industry access to prescriptions written by physicians for their patients. So much for “patient-physician confidentiality”!

The other bit of good news came in a June 16 New York Times op-ed by President Jimmy Carter, when he joined the chorus of those asking the government to call off the Global War on Drugs. Thus he added his voice to those of Richard Branson, George Shultz, and Paul Volker. President Carter pointed out that this legislation has increased our prison population from 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.3 million in 2009. The increase mostly is for crimes that are non-violent and related to drug possession. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher proportion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison, on probation, or on parole -- more than 3% of all American adults.

The cost? California in 1980 spent 10% of the state's budget on higher education and 3% on prisons. In 2010, almost 11% went to prisons and only 7.5% to higher education.

Of course, the fight for enlightened drug policy, as seen in most European nations, will be fought tooth and nail by those who are financially rewarded by the so-called war on drugs — the crime cartels and those receiving baksheesh from the criminal enterprises (corrupt law enforcement officers, politicians, judges, and the operators of our uniquely American private prisons).

One final personal thought: The Republicans keep repeating the mantra that if we increase the taxes on the wealthy, they will not have the funds to create jobs. Of course, this is pure and simple poppycock. Their wealth is not used to produce employment. In the autumn of 2008 at the time of the financial crash, I was talking to a Swiss banker who works for a typical big Swiss bank. In the autumn of 2008, he said, the bank’s below-street-level gold vault, encased in concrete, cracked open under the weight of the gold bullion being shipped in from the U.S.A.

Create jobs!?! Maybe for Swiss concrete workers...

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]

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Anne Lewis : Workers' Rights and the Fight Against Poverty

Labor leader John L. Lewis testifies before Congress in 1947. Still image from archival film footage.
Poverty in America and the
attack on public sector unions

I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor?

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2011

The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress in 1947 about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies.

The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.

We frequently marginalize each other -- social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.

I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.

That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.

Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level -- we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.


Then NPR asked folks to name the most important cause of poverty in the United States.


Number one is “the poor quality of public schools.”

At about the same time, the Heritage Foundation decided to prove poverty in the United States wasn’t a problem after all. The Heritage Foundation survey is titled, “Understanding Poverty in America.” Here’s the starting point.

The next bar graph compares the living space of poor people in the United States favorably to that of the average European.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.

Here are two more rational definitions of poverty:

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. -- United Nations

To meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated. -- Amartya Sen

Better, right? We’re at least getting to the idea of living well and a more humane definition. Notably lacking is the mention of labor unions and collective action, although you could make the argument that the United Nations definition pushes us in that direction with language about effective participation, dignity, and jobs. The lack of worker organization isn’t mentioned in the NPR study. Neither is discrimination, race, ethnicity, or gender or environment or workers’ rights.

Would you have named lack of unionization or lousy labor law or something like that as an important reason why poverty exists in this country?

In July 2002, union members overall had a 20% higher hourly wage ($20.65 vs. $16.42). In blue-collar industry it was $18.88 vs. $12.95; in service occupations, $16.22 vs. $8.98. That’s not counting benefits. Those ratios have remained constant.

Currently nearly one in three public workers are union members compared with 6.9 percent of the workers in private-sector industries. These organized workers are under siege in Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Indiana, Ohio, and here in Texas. Many work in public schools and universities. The occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with 2,000 graduate teaching assistants and union members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Feb. 14. The attack on these workers and on the work that they do is tightly connected -- and they are fighting back.

First, education is not, in and of itself, a cure for poverty. NPR poll aside, “Poor quality of public schools” is not the most important cause of poverty. We could go on and on about how good or bad our schools are, but lack of education is not the leading indicator of poverty.

As much as we’d like it to be so, there isn’t any substantial difference in the average wage of a high school graduate and a high school drop out. It’s considerably less than the boost from unionization. Remember unionization gave a worker at least a 20% boost in wages. A high school diploma gives a less than 15% boost.

The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency.

Unfortunately, the way we’ve been looking at education both at primary and secondary level is supply-side economics: improve the quality of workers through education and grow the quantity of quality workers-- all for the rich employers -- and they won’t be poor no more because the rich will take care of them. Well it doesn’t work that way any more than tax breaks for the rich have created an economy that benefits all of us.

All this talk about creating a competitive workforce for the global economy and endless debates about whether our public schools and universities do or don’t meet the demands of the marketplace is a bunch of hooey. But most folks believe this nonsense. Me too. When I think about our teen-age son’s future, I immediately think: will he finish high school; will his grades and SAT scores be high enough to get into a good college; what’s a high ranked college we can afford... and so on.

Even though I know darn well that there would be much better ways to go about making sure that our child has a good future -- make sure that his nutrition is good, introduce him to cultural expression, work to strengthen our community with public transportation, public space, libraries, and museums, fight for the rights of public school workers and quality public schools, and fight for the rights of all workers, especially their right to organize.

The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency. I also believe there are large elements of sexism involved here. 70% of public school teachers are women overall. In Texas about 82% of elementary and middle school teachers are female. At UT, about 80% of full professors are male and about 60% of lecturers are female.

Working conditions for teachers are really lousy. Think about being the only adult in front of a class of 20 eight-year-olds and having to pee. Forced overtime -- hours worked without pay are unbelievable -- and pay isn’t so great. Wisconsin teachers average about $40,000 a year. Lecturers in my department, which is unusually well paid, start at $6,500 a class and are only allowed two classes a semester and two semesters a year. That’s $26,000 a year for what works out to be full time work with an unpaid leave over the summer.

Still image from archival film of John Lewis testifying before Congress in 1947.
In 2002, No Child Left Behind began a new attack in the name of school reform by devaluing teachers in the name of accountability. It was really insidious. It told teachers what to say in their classrooms (teachers in low performance schools are scripted like actors these days); used corporate standardized tests to tell teachers what to teach; it bought curriculum prescribed by corporations (yes folks like Pearson Education, Houghlin Mifflin, and The Pet Goat publisher McGraw Hill use the language of illness as though kids are sick and they’re doctors); and emphasized charter schools and privatization as salvation. And it’s not just the Republicans. Think of Arne Duncan and the Race to the Top.

Now I would agree that our public schools have failed Latino and African American and working class children. That’s one of the reasons that so many parents fought for integration. We know that separate is not equal. Now we have further segregation of the schools in a system based on and currently exhibiting apartheid.

I don’t think the language is too extreme. A very interesting study explores the role of the Koch brothers of Wisconsin fame in defeating the Wake County, North Carolina, socio-economic integration plan. That plan was a model of quality education for all children for the country. The Kochs poured money into the school board race, cast the plan as communistic, and put in a new school board. They won and the children and teachers of Wake County lost big.

Then we have “Waiting for Superman,” which I watched at the Alamo Drafthouse South with a “progressive” Austin audience who giggled at those lazy teachers, cried and then rejoiced with the poor little black child who won a school lottery, and really dug the idea that the problem with the public school system was teacher tenure and their union. I resorted to drink.

Here’s a cartoon from Saving Our Schools from Superman that sums up the movie.



Saving our schools from Superman

At UT, our buildings are plastered with plaques that reveal the connections between the corporate world and higher education. We have the Accenture Endowed Excellence Fund; the Arthur Anderson and Co. Centennial Professorship; Austin Smiles Endowed Fellowship in Speech Pathology; Bank of America Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering; Enstar Chair for Free Enterprise; La Quinta Motor Inns, Inc. Centennial Professorship in Nursing; the BP Exploration Classroom Endowment; Conoco Phillips Faculty Fellowship in Law; and so on.

We have a University President whose three legislative priorities are:

• no disproportionate cuts (I guess it’s okay to cut education as long as we also let folks die on the streets);
• support for the Texas Competitive Knowledge Fund (dollar match for external research support);
• and a new engineering building.

We have a legislature and a state governor that doen't believe in public services at all -- not education, not health care -- not for children, not for the disabled, not for the elderly. They’re cutting off college scholarships and denying the rights of immigrants as well as working class students an education.

That’s the external world. The internal one at the University of Texas, Austin is that the budget crunch is used as an excuse to do what the higher-ups have wanted to do all along. Raise tuitions and cut programs that serve students and lay off lecturers, graduate students, and staff (we’re down to once a month office cleanings). Do away with the Identity Studies Centers that we fought to bring to the University -- African American, Asian, Mexican American, women, and gender. Forget undergraduate education and turn us into an elite research institution.

We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.

Before I summarize this rant, I wanted you to see a scene from an interview I did with the Director of Public Affairs, Martin Fox, at the National Right to Work Committee. That’s one of the main organizations that the Koch brothers fund and hang out with.

The clip is from a documentary I made in the context of the Pittston coal strike, which was about health care for retired and disabled miners and widows. “Justice in the Coalfields” is about the contradictions between individual and collective rights and what justice means.

The clip begins with a map of right to work states -- you’ll be hearing a lot about that in the next few months. It ends with Bradley McKenzie who led a student walkout in support of the miners. He became a non-union coal miner because there were no union jobs, but his ideas express solidarity at its core. In between is Martin Fox who handled press communications for the Committee at the time.

Martin Fox was a proud member of the National Rifle Association. I know this because I watched him get in his car, with a customized license plate that read “GETAGUN.” Martin Fox is now President of the National Pro Life Alliance and a priest. He holds forth on unions on his blog.

Who has the power to challenge these obscene thugs who have taken over our country? Who wants to challenge them?

Well we do. The “we” is organized labor -- public worker unions. Really, we’re not providing state “services.” We’re providing public necessities. We’re helping the social movement create a vision of a more decent world that includes the working class. And when we collectively fight for ourselves to have decent pay and decent working conditions and democratic control in the work place, we’re not in contradiction with the public good. We’re supporting it.

There are a lot of us. The Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA local 1686 has 12,000 members in Texas. We have large numbers of women and African Americans and Latinos. Discrimination has been slightly less in the public sector and these workers are more likely to join a union because of a history of struggle. AFT has 57,000 members in Texas and TSTA has 65,000 members. And there are state workers organized by AFSCME and other unions.

Those of us in the labor movement and those of us in the social movement have got to get to know each other. We need to practice democracy together and work together. We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.

There’s a great line at the end of a Committees of Correspondence statement on Wisconsin:

And to the workers of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio: our heartfelt thanks -- may your occupation of the statehouses foretell the day when you become the governors.

[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]

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Ansel Herz : Cholera Spreads in Haiti

Above, MINUSTAH soldier points his gun at former Austin activist/independent journalist Ansel Herz in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on October 15, 2010, at a demonstration against the renewal of MINUSTAH, the UN peackeeping mission. Photo from Gaentantguevara / Flickr.

For more about photo see sidebar story below.

Port-au-Prince fears the worst
as cholera spreads in Haiti

By Ansel Herz / The Rag Blog / October 24, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Days after an outbreak of cholera began in Haiti’s rural Artibonite region [see story below], killing at least 200 people, there are now five confirmed cases of cholera in the busy capital city.

The cases “do not represent spread of the epidemic” because they originated in central Haiti, according to a bulletin circulated by Haiti’s UN peacekeeping mission with the heading “Key Messaging,” obtained by IPS.

“The fact that these cases were picked up and responded to so fast demonstrates that the reporting systems for epidemic management we have put in place are functioning,” it concludes.

Residents of the capital city are not so confident. “It’s killing people -- of course, I’m scared. We’re in the mouth of death,” 25-year-old Boudou Lunis, one of 1.3 million made homeless by the quake living in temporary settlements, told the Miami Herald.

Radio Boukman lies at the heart of Cite Soleil, an impoverished slum crisscrossed by foul trash-filled canals where cholera could be devastating. The station has received no public health messages for broadcast from authorities, producer Edwine Adrien told IPS on Saturday, four days after reports of cholera-related deaths first emerged.

At a small, desolate camp of torn tents nearby, a gleaming water tank is propped up on bricks. Camp-dwellers said it was installed by the International Organization for Migration last week, more than nine months after the January earthquake damaged their homes.

But it’s empty because no organization has filled it with water. “We need treated water to drink,” a young man named Charlot told IPS matter-of-factly.

Cholera, transmissible by contaminated water and food, could be reaching far beyond the capital city. There are suspected cases of the disease in Haiti’s North and South departments, according to the Pan-American Health Organization, as well as confirmed cases in Gonaives, the country’s third largest city.

In Lafiteau, a 30-minute drive from Port-au-Prince, Dr. Pierre Duval said he had stabilized two cholera-infected men in the town’s single hospital, but could not handle more than six more patients. One died yesterday. All of them came from St. Marc, near the epicenter of the epidemic.

The main hospital in St. Marc is crowded with the infected. Supplies of oral rehydration salts were spotty when he arrived Friday after rushing from Port-au-Prince, American medic Riaan Roberts told IPS.

“We first talked to some lady from the UN who told us, ‘Oh I have to go to a meeting, I’ll mention your names, but just come back tomorrow,’” he said. “These microcosms of operational logistics are just beyond them.”

Roberts said a Doctors Without Borders team quickly put his skills to use, adding, “[The UN] is so top-heavy with bureaucracy that they can’t effectively react to these small outbreaks which quickly snowball and spread across an area.”

Buses and tap-taps filled with people speed in both directions on the dusty highway connecting the Haiti’s stricken central region to Port-au-Prince. There are no signs of travel restrictions or checkpoints near the city.

At a Friday meeting convened by the Haitian government’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation, “there were conversations around shutting down schools and transportation routes,” said Nick Preneta, Deputy Director of SOIL, a group that installs composting toilets in displacement camps.

“But if that’s the conversation now, however many hours after the first confirmed case, it’s already too late,” he continued. “One of the recommendations was to concentrate public health education at traffic centers... there were a lot of no-brainers at the meeting.”

Cholera bacteria can cause fatal diarrhea and vomiting after incubating for up to five days, allowing people who appear healthy to travel and infect others. The medical organization Partners In Health calls it “a disease of poverty” caused by lack of access to clean water.

The Artibonite river, running through an area of central Haiti known as “the breadbasket” for its rice farmers, is considered the likely source of the epidemic after recent heavy rains and flooding. Analysts say the regional agrarian economy has been devastated by years of cheap American imports of rice to Haiti.

Be sure to check the Haiti Documents Index for the latest internal reports, (mostly) free of spin, from officials.

[Ansel Herz, a former Austin activist, is a multimedia journalist and web designer based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. This article also appears on Ansel's blog, Mediahacker, and was distributed by IPS.]

Relatives of Haitians struck by cholera, outside a local hospital in Saint Marc, Haiti, October 22, 2010. St-Felix Evens / Reuters.

Health workers scramble to keep
cholera out of crowded camps

Some 1.3 million people have lived in makeshift camps throughout Port-au-Prince since the January earthquake devastated the city. Living conditions are "appalling," according a recent report by Refugees International.

But one bright spot of the multi-billion-dollar relief effort, touted by the United Nations and Haitian President Rene Preval, has been the prevention of the spread of a highly infectious, catastrophic disease.

Until now.

At least 160 people have died this week [the number has now passed 200] from an outbreak of cholera in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of renowned health organization Partners in Health.

The fear now is that the disease will reach Port-au-Prince [see story above] and wreak havoc in the crowded camps by contaminating the water.

There are already six suspected cases of the illness in the capital city, Monica Ferreira, a Portuguese medic, told IPS on Friday. Her team has operated a health clinic for quake victims since January.

"All defensive countermeasures should immediately focus on Cite Soleil and Lafiteau if they want to save Port-au- Prince," said Dr. James Wilson of the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System (HEAS).

A HEAS partner reported that a market woman and child died from cholera in the small town of Lafiteau, just 25 kilometres from the capital.

Melinda Miles, director of the Haitian organization KONPAY, told IPS she witnessed a man die of cholera Friday afternoon at the Hospital Centre of the Haitian Academy in Lafiteau. Doctors at the hospital could not be reached for comment before publication.

"We went into the room and he died right in front of us," she said. "He came from St. Marc. The doctor said there are a lot more patients on their way with cholera."

"If a case from St. Marc has had time to arrive in Lafiteau, then it's had time to arrive in Port-au-Prince. So I'm really scared," she added.

The Haitian government says the disease is cholera, a waterborne bacterium that can incubate in bodies for days and suddenly cause death by dehydration. Officials from the Pan American Health Organization, the regional arm of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Authorities have rushed medical resources to St. Marc, about 70 kilometers north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overcrowded with patients. Villagers who traveled from far away are lying on the floors, hooked up to IV drips, while lines amass outside the gate.

Attempting to cope with the overwhelming patient load, a Doctors Without Borders team has moved from the hospital to construct their own treatment center, spokesperson Petra Becker told IPS.

Other medical teams are gathering information from rural villages to isolate areas where the illness is concentrated and discourage people from moving, she said.

In a blog post on Partners in Health's website, Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera "a disease of poverty". She wrote that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the Artibonite region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"The international community's failure to assist the government of Haiti in developing a safe water supply has been violation of this basic right," Muhkerjee continued.

If the disease reaches Port-au-Prince, the number of victims is likely to skyrocket.

The New York Times reported Friday that cholera cases are surfacing on the island of La Gonave, as well as the areas of Arcahaie and Croix-des Bouquets closer to the capital.

The United Nations and Haitian government are holding emergency meetings in Port-au-Prince to counter the cholera outbreak. Daily truckloads of water delivered by relief group Pure Water for the World to the seaside slum of Cite Soleil have received double the usual chlorination, said Noelle Thabault, the group's deputy director.

Nesly Louissaint, who lives in Camp Carradeux, an officially recognized camp for thousands of quake victims, received a short text message on his cell phone alerting him to the outbreak of the disease. But no authorities have visited the camp with further information, he said.

It's not clear what prevention measures have been taken in the capital city. Traffic, schools, businesses and markets were open Friday and the streets appeared to be bustling as usual.

"I have not seen any general information distributed in the streets or camps at this time. I don't see relief groups out here," Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, told IPS.

"I do see U.N. peacekeeping trucks full of troops, but they are not being utilized to spread information," he continued. "They're doing security patrols, which seems like a waste of resources."

Earlier this week, at least 12 people died when heavy rains flooded some of Port-au-Prince’s displacement camps. Dr. Wilson warns that October is the peak of Haiti's rainy season, making any further outbreak of the disease more difficult to contain.

-- Ansel Herz / Oct. 22, 2010

MINUSTAH peacekeeper guards food in Haiti, January 17. Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images.

UN peacekeeper to photographer:
'Shoot me and I'll shoot you'

By Mac McClelland / October 21, 2010

SEE PHOTO AT TOP OF POST

When I showed this amazing picture [at top of post] to my friend, after she registered what she was looking at, her eyes went huge while she exclaimed, "Oh my god!" with her hand over her mouth.

The scene is a protest last week in Port-au-Prince. The guy on the left is a clearly unarmed and videotaping journalist from Texas named Ansel Herz, whom I happened to work with when I was in Haiti last month. The uniformed fellow pointing a gun directly at his face is a United Nations peacekeeper.

I didn't meet many (okay, any) Haitian fans of MINUSTAH, the UN stabilization force that's been in the country since 2004. I have, for the record, met some MINUSTAH who are definitely good guys and have, for example, helped a woman in labor get to the hospital, and helped stop a man who was trying to kill his wife for refusing to have sex with him.

But the force has also shot civilians. It's had to have meetings about how not to sexually abuse the Haitian population. In fact, last week's protest erupted after the UN officially renewed MINUSTAH's mandate.

Some of the protesters' complaints, which echo those I heard while in-country, are that MINUSTAH doesn't actually do anything to protect civilians living in filthy, violent, rape-infested displacement camps, and that the money could be better spent dealing with those issues.

I asked Ansel how he ended up on the business end of a UN gun, just in case there was any kind of conflict or missing context surrounding this photo. Not so much, he says: "Maybe they felt threatened by my camera."

--Mac McClelland / Mother Jones

Also see:

• Citizen Protests, Government Repression Mount in Haiti by Beverly Bell / Oct. 18, 2010 / CommonDreams.
• Previous posts from Haiti by Ansel Herz on The Rag Blog.

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Roger Baker : 'Peak Food' Next Global Crisis?

Image from Care2.
The next global crisis:
Will 'peak food' follow 'peak oil'?

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / September 23, 2010

Will we soon experience a global peak in food production, similar to peak oil?

It is too difficult and too soon to predict a global peak in world food production, but it is easy to see that some such event cannot be delayed much longer, and is quite likely to occur within the next five years. This despite the fact that global grain reserves seem to be adequate for now.

The World Bank writes that "it is too early to make conclusive statements on the impact of the very recent global wheat price spikes at the national and household level." The FAO has likewise stated that there does not currently appear to be a crisis, but that it is concerned about the amount of volatility in food markets. And that volatility might bode ill for progress toward overcoming challenges like those laid out in the Millennium Development Goals being discussed at the U.N. this week.

"These recent global staple price increases raise the risk of domestic food price spikes in low income countries and its consequent impacts on poverty, hunger and other human development goals," according to the Bank.

Peak food is pretty hard to determine compared to peak oil, partly since so much of its production is local. Global food demand can restructure in its demand over time to accommodate a reduction in food supply. Those who are hungry will tend to shift their consumption to cheaper calories, often at the expense of its nutritional content. Globally, the wealthier tend to favor animal protein produced from grain, foods imported from afar, and in general less energy efficient foods.

Grains are the most important global food commodities to focus on because they provide such a large percentage of the world's total food calories, and because they can be stored and traded to reduce local food shortages. Wheat and rice are the top human food grains by tonnage. Other commonly used animal feed grains like corn are termed coarse grains. Wheat tends to be more used globally to prevent regional hunger, whereas rice provides cheaper food calories but is more often produced and consumed locally.

Since food is so vital for survival, those who are hungry will try to shift their spending to food if they are able. Intensive urban or backyard agriculture can help some. The suburbs of today may be the produce gardens of tomorrow. If animals are fed less, then humans can eat considerably more. Biofuels like corn ethanol are mostly an energy waste, so that in response to high fuel prices, food can probably outbid biofuel production in competition for arable cropland.

The economics of the food marketplace is obviously a lot different for affluent countries when compared to poor countries struggling to feed themselves. If food prices rise, the world's affluent can eat less beef in exchange for eating more of the the corn previously fed to the cow. However, many of the world's poor may already spend a lot of their total income on grain, or they may suffer from local production crises complicated by poor transportation, as is the case with Pakistan. Localized food shortages are likely to increase.

The big picture in terms of global food production is that the healthy survival of adults requires about 2,500 food calories per day for each person, in order to feed roughly 6.8 billion people. Since global population is increasing at about 1.17% per year, this means food production needs to increase accordingly to hold food prices constant, assuming the same food production and consumption patterns.


The global food production trends
are moving in the wrong direction

Looking at this food price chart (below), over the span of about a decade we see a trend line increase of over 10 percent per year.

Food price chart from IndexMundi.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

If we ignore the late 2007 to early 2009 price spike and the brief below the trend line decline, we see a recent return to the long range upwards trend. We need to examine the various factors that affect the global food price index, and how they are likely to influence the total average cost of food.

If we extend the 10 percent yearly food price index increase trend line, we find that the previous price pain level is likely to be reached again by about 2014. We might anticipate about the same unhappy result if average food costs reach the 2008 peak while average earnings remain stagnant. This situation was painful enough to cause food riots in about 30 countries around the world, as well as encouraging speculation in food commodities.

The immediate causes of the protests in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, and Chimoio about 500 miles north, are a 30% price increase for bread, compounding a recent double-digit increase for water and energy. When nearly three-quarters of the household budget is spent on food, that's a hike few Mozambicans can afford.

Deeper reasons for Mozambique's price hike can be found a continent away. Wheat prices have soared on global markets over the summer in large part because Russia,the world's third largest exporter, has suffered catastrophic fires in its main production areas. These blazes, in turn, find their origin both in poor firefighting infrastructure and Russia's worst heatwave in over a century. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin extended an export ban in response to a new wave of wildfires in its grain belt, sending further signals to the markets that Russian wheat wouldn't be available outside the country. With Mozambique importing over 60% of the wheat its people needs, the country has been held hostage by international markets.

This may sound familiar. In 2008, the prices of oil, wheat, corn and rice peaked on international markets -- corn prices almost tripled between 2005-2008. In the process, dozens of food-importing countries experienced food riots...

Dr. Tad Patzek is Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Besides working on fossil fuels, Patzek is studying the thermodynamics and ecology of human survival, and the food and energy supply for humanity. He spoke at a September 14 meeting of the Austin Sierra Club and provided the following abstract of some of his studies on food crops, which indicate that per capita food production is likely already peaking:

The main staples I have looked at are wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, and rye. The world’s production of these staples is not keeping up with population growth. Their production is stagnant or declining, and crop areas are declining. Per capita production (kg per person) and per capita yield (kg per person per ha) are declining.

We are witnessing a global failure of modern food supply and inflation of food prices. This inflation became hyperinflation in 2007 and 2008, because of the massive, destructive speculation on wheat and other staple futures by Goldman Sachs and international investors.

The main energy crops I have looked at are maize, sugarcane, soybeans, and oil palms. The world’s production of these crops is rapidly expanding. Their crop areas are increasing (exponentially for soybeans and oil palms in the tropics). Per capita production is increasing, but per capita yields are declining. We are witnessing a global move away from food to energy crops. Diverting more land to pure energy crops, switchgrass, etc., will only deepen the food supply crisis, especially in the poorest countries.

Genetically modified plants, while easier to grow, and very profitable for the seed manufacturers, create problems with yields, water, and fertilizer requirements, and cause a fast-spreading resistance of weeds and pests. So, is there a solution? Perhaps, but it would require a change in the current paradigm of industrial agriculture.

Image from Green Assassin Brigade.
What causes food prices to rise?

How do we explain the steady upwards food price trend and then the sudden spike and decline in 2007-2009? I believe there are three basic and somewhat interacting factors at play.

The first factor is the declining per capita food production discussed above. It is primarily this factor that causes the steady upward trend line. If per capita food production is really decreasing, it could hardly be otherwise. The other two important factors are peak oil, and finally, food market speculation.

When we try to discount the early 2008 food price spike tied to oil oil costs, and to speculation, we see the longer term food price index rise of more than 10 percent a year. This trend line looks like it will intersect its previous price 2008 peak before 2014, if not before.

Since the last few years have been a period of global recession, we can probably assume that average global per capita purchasing power for food has been been almost flat during the last three years, as it has been in the USA. Furthermore, we can probably anticipate that given a globally depressed economy, there is scant prospect for a real earnings increase in the near future.

It makes sense to imagine that over a period on the order of a decade, and discounting speculation, the various roughly linear factors like population increase, global warming, water constraints, urbanization of arable land, and rising energy price increases will continue to work together to restrain an increase in the global food supply.

The rise in food prices has a natural component related to its steadily rising difficulty of production in the face of increasing demand. The steady component of the rise in the food index increase is due to the combined effects of these factors, well outlined here.

Nomura Group is confident that this is a long-term macro trend that will continue in the years ahead:

We expect another multi-year food price rise, partly because of burgeoning demand from the world's rapidly developing -- and most populated -- economies, where diets are changing towards a higher calorie intake. We believe that most models significantly underestimate future food demand as they fail to take into account the wide income inequality in developing economies.

The supply side of the food equation is being constrained by diminishing agricultural productivity gains and competing use of available land due to rising trends of urbanization and industrialization, while supply has also become more uncertain due to greater use of biofuels, global warming and increasing water scarcity.

Feedback loops also seem to have become more powerful: the increasing dual causation between energy prices and food prices, and at least some evidence that the 2007-08 food price boom was exacerbated by trade protectionism and market speculation...

Meanwhile, global warming is lowering food production and raising food prices in a way that can be roughly quantified on average, though it is seen locally as an unpredictable increase in weather volatility like droughts, floods, and heat waves:

The two scientists analyzed six of the most widely grown crops in the world -- wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, barley and sorghum. Production of these crops accounts for more than 40 per cent of the land in the world used for crops, 55 per cent of the non-meat calories in food and more than 70 per cent of animal feed.

They also analyzed rainfall and average temperatures for the major growing regions and compared them against the crop yield figures of the Food and Agriculture Organization for the period 1961 to 2002.

"To do this, we assumed that farmers have not yet adapted to climate change, for example by selecting new crop varieties to deal with climate change," Dr Lobell said.

"If they have been adapting, something that is very difficult to measure, then the effects of warming may have been lower," he said.

The study revealed a simple relationship between temperature and crop yields, with a fall of between 3 and 5 per cent for every 0.5C increase in average temperatures, the scientists said...

Image from treehugger.
The looming wild card:
How peak oil can spike food prices

Peak oil is already a serious problem that affects food prices in many ways. Parts of the slowly depleting Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. Midwest have been so heavily pumped so far below the ground level, that the rising cost of diesel fuel to pump aquifer water up to the surface has eliminated the profit to be made on the irrigated crops.

The food price index has a strong tendency to echo the price of petroleum, in common with many other traded commodities. Global oil prices are currently fluctuating within a band of about $70-$80 a barrel, held down for now largely by a depressed world economy.

A major oil price increase is also partly being restrained by the buffering effect of the untapped reserve capacity of OPEC, estimated at about 5 million barrels per day.This reserve capacity is mostly within Saudi Arabia, which is suspected of exaggerating this reserve capacity.

We are already well past a global peak in conventional oil production on dry land. Oil is getting harder and harder to produce. If we are not yet peaking in liquid fuel production, we are probably within five years of such a peak in all liquid fuels. These fuels are vital for portable power and transportation needed for food production and distribution. Robert Hirsch is a top oil analyst who argues that the politicians who understand the energy situation are mostly unwilling to discuss the true implications publicly.

Since food production and distribution are both energy intensive, any return of the 2008 oil price spike would necessarily be soon reflected in another spike in global food prices. With the end of an undulating global oil production plateau we have been experiencing since 2004, and facing a significant decline in liquid fuel production, we face a steep increase in the cost of fuel embedded in the price of food. Another oil price spike is nearly certain to bring in its wake another food price spike, and the return of widespread hunger and political unrest.

Food speculation: Another Bubble?
The threat of another food speculation bubble

Even if we could somehow assume perfectly ample supplies of liquid fuel, the trend line shows that various other factors inhibiting food production increases are probably enough to cause the return of a food price crisis widely felt by about 2014.

Such an increase is likely to encourage some nations to stockpile reserves of their national production. This may be quite rational given the key importance of food security to national economies, but it would also tend to encourage the return of global food speculation. We can see the speculative bubble in the sharp food price rise above and subsequent fall beneath the trend line, during the period from 2007-2009.

The exponential food price rise seen during 2007 seems to be a speculative bubble because it soars far above the decade long trend line before collapsing. Part of this sudden price increase was due to rising oil price, and some was due to food market speculation.

We now know that Goldman Sachs and others were strongly involved in food price speculation, anticipating profit from a sharp rise in food price:

In early 2008, everything boiled to the surface. The banks were fueling this artificial demand, and speculation drove wheat prices out of control. This spurred riots in more than thirty countries and drove the world’s food insecure to over one billion people. Somehow, this so-called fabulous investment was causing some serious trouble...

This far away world of high finance and commodities trading impacted the price of bread, cooking oil, butter, and other items all over the world. This is when the price of food gets scary -- it’s as if the masters of high finance have the ability to reach down and take the food right off of the tables of the poor. For most of the readers of this blog, you are maybe spending 15 or 20% of your income on food. But most people on this planet are spending upwards of 50% of their daily earnings on food. For many, the food bubble pushed that up to 80%, and right into the arms of food insecurity, malnutrition, and starvation...

Food reserves have always been by nature conducive to hedging, hoarding, and speculation. Countries that experience shortages tend to try to secure food reserves in advance. Russia is now embargoing its wheat, which is raising its price globally. A rise in price tends to encourage further speculation.

Food is naturally and historically conducive to stockpiling reserves in anticipation of possible crop failure. If the price of a basic food crop rises, there is a natural tendency to buy some in reserve, which then causes the price to rise further.

This may be rational behavior for individuals, who may decide to stockpile a few months supply of grain for their family. However if this difficult-to-control behavior becomes widely practiced, it can easily lead to serious food shortages becoming a lot worse, which in turn is likely to force food rationing, other than by price.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog.]

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