"Taxation Without Representation," sounds familiar doesn't it? Is this not the slogan that members of the thirteen colonies used to illustrate the repressive acts of the tyrannical leadership and the unrepresentative nature of the taxes imposed upon them? Unfortunately, this phrase rings true again in the politics of the U.S. capitol.

Washington, D.C., a metropolitan conglomerate of almost 600,000 U.S. citizens, still emphasizes the slogan's historical parallel through the use of ostentatious license plate inscribing. The only American city without a voting member in the house or senate, this city finds itself in a unique political conundrum. City funds are appropriated by Congress, and the only native input is found by way of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting representative of our nation's capitol. Recently elected Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has promised to propel the district towards "world-class" prestige (of that other than political significance) and fulfill the district's motto, Justitia omnibus, "Justice for All." 

To this I attribute the rapidly gentrifying areas of Columbia Heights, Anacostia and parts of S.E., north of the Anacostia (for those of you familiar with the layout of D.C.). However, this is not only occurring in Washington, it has been or is currently problematic in Los Angeles, New York City boroughs and other predominantly minority-populated, urban neighborhoods. But more importantly, local policies are not protecting the low-income and section 8 housing neighborhoods in many of these metropolitan cities. The housing developments are being flattened to make way for condominiums and upper-class housing complexes by those attempting to capitalize on the breathtaking views of metropolitan society. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/forcedout/)

These residents are being marginalized into the suburbs, where they struggle to find jobs, and loose out on the readily accessible public transportation and public services offered within city limits. You can argue for the safety and charm these new urban middle-and-upper-class developments bring, but at what expense? Anacostia recently opened its second Supermarket, and for those of you that know Anacostia, it is far too expansive for only two Supermarkets. The problem is that it was strategically placed against the backdrop of newly-built, suburban-looking middle-class housing, attempting to push out the native residents of historic Anacostia. 

What gentrification is doing is pushing out the residents of urban cities, pushing out the residents who rely on public transit, who rely on the multiplicity of human services found within city limits. These newly gentrified areas simply allow the wealthy a new home, of which they most assuredly do not need. They move from areas of accessibility into areas of accessibility, forcing the poor and repressed further into the clogged gutters of urban society. We can be ashamed of the American poverty found constant across metropolitan society, it is our creation. But we cannot attempt to hide the downtrodden by subjugating them into the materialistic over-consumption of suburban society, of which they cannot, and will never survive. 

In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

First there was eco-tourism.  Now, there’s “slum tourism,” a growing industry where tourists are taken way off the beaten path, into some of the most impoverished neighborhoods and districts in the world.

A New York Times article today talks about the increasing number of tours to slums, and offers both the criticisms and defense of such excursions:  “Critics charge that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all. It’s voyeurism. The tours are exploitative, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical traveler’s itinerary…”  On the other hand, “[i]gnoring poverty won’t make it go away.”

I can understand the appeal of so-called slum tourism (I really don’t like this phrase, but I’m not sure what else to call it—any ideas?)  Tourism is often extremely exploitative, and dependent on an underclass native population to survive.  Jamaica Kincaid’s wonderful book, A Small Place, expounds on the actual feelings of resentment, even hatred, that locals often feel to tourists, who come to “get away from it all” while blinding themselves to the life that the local population leads.  Furthermore, I know I have often visited places and come away feeling like I didn’t get past a pretty basic, surface experience.  In short, is it even fair to visit, say, Mumbai or Rio de Janiero, and not be faced with the crushing poverty the overwhelming majority of the cities’ residents endure on a daily basis?

Over the weekend the Financial Times reported that poverty stunts neural development. 

Neuroscientists said many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development. That effect is on top of any damage caused by inadequate nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins.

Studies by several US universities have revealed the pervasive harm done to the brain, particularly between the ages of six months and three years, from low socio-economic status.

Add this to the growing list of reasons the U.S. should do more to fight poverty abroad and at home.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, he was in the midst of an anti-war, anti-poverty campaign that ostracized him from the mainstream. CNN.com features a pretty decent reminder about King's legacy, and how "I have a dream" has been manipulated to create an icon rather than a complex man.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/01/21/mlk.legacy.ap/index.html

This week, a bipartisan group of representatives introduced a bill to combat the rising costs of birth control on college campuses. When the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 was implemented this year, it removed university clinics from a list of groups eligible for discounted rates from pharmaceutical companies—monthly birth control costs spiked, going from $5 to $50 or more in many cases.

“A technical oversight prevented many lower-income women from safe and low-cost contraceptives,” noted co-sponsor Mark Kirk (R-IL). “This should not be a political debate – it should be a matter of restoring discounts to support women’s health.” It’s refreshing to see such a quick, pragmatic response to an innocuous omission.

And, even better, the bill’s sponsors are drawing a direct link between prohibitively expensive contraceptives and unintended pregnancy, getting at the meat of the issue. “Let’s be frank with the American people,” said Tim Ryan (D-OH). “If Congress does not fix this problem, the cost of contraceptives will continue to rise, unintended pregnancies – especially on college campuses – will continue to rise, and more abortions will be the result.” So not only are these representatives working to quickly fix its mistake, but they’re using it to make a larger point about the importance of access to birth control. Happy Friday!

via Inside Higher Ed. 

From NARAL Pro-Choice America:

"The global gag rule – reimposed on January 22, 2001 by President George W. Bush – prohibits the granting of U.S. funds to any overseas health clinic unless it agrees not to use its own, private, non-U.S. funds for: (1) abortion services, (2) abortion-related advocacy, or (3) abortion counseling or referrals."

The Global Gag rule is dangerous for women overseas because it limits the availability of family planning. And in countries with a high poverty rate and over population problems, women and their children die every year from the combination of pregnancy and poverty. Ethiopia is an unfortunate example of this. Without the resources for proper family planning, unsafe abortions and infant mortality rates increase.

The New York Times reports today that according to the Census Bureau, US income and poverty rates improved in 2006--though the only bits of good news I found in the piece were that poverty among the elderly is relatively low and that poverty rates for Hispanic Americans fell to 20.6 percent (which doesn't seem acceptable anyway). Poverty rates for white, black and Asian Americans were statistically unchanged.

Other highlights:

• median household income rose slightly, but only for white people. Rising incomes were a "reflection of more family members taking jobs to make ends meet," not of people getting paid better wages

• more adults lack health insurance than in 2005

• 700,000 more children lack health insurance than in 2005

Great. Really seems like an improvement. 

An unpleasant surprise awaited me on CNN.com today.

"at least 25 percent of doctors are women, up from only 8 percent in 1970. By 2010, women are expected to make-up one-third of the profession...What's more, the pay gap between men and women is decreasing -- women were earning 81 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2005 compared to when women earned about 63 percent as much as men did in 1979, according to a report conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the BLS."

Later in the article:

Although the pay gap is getting smaller, it definitely still exists. There is also a strong pattern of men more frequently doing the jobs that are higher paid, and women doing jobs that are lower paid.

The pay gap still exists -- and it's still huge. There's a tone of acceptance in this article, or its cousin complacency, that's grating.

A few more substantive complaints. You'd think that that point about the types of jobs -- that glancing reference to "lower paid" positions -- would merit further exploration. It didn't.

There's also no mention of the repercussions of the gap: disproportionate representation of female single-parent households below the poverty threshold.

This article also comes on the heels of recent studies that the number of women in elected office in the United States has leveled off -- and at a level significantly lower than in Europe and Latin America -- and along with reporting and polls indicating that several key state and federal female office-holders will be extremely vulnerable in the coming elections. 

Celebrate the small victories, but don't lose sight of the war. 

…a year is not nearly enough. Today’s Examiner newspaper totes a story about the increase in federal minimum wage to take effect tomorrow. It will rise from $5.15 to $5.85; an increase of a mere $0.70. Where do I begin to talk about the problem with this scenario?

            First, an increase that amounts to less than $1, while still an improvement for those making minimum wage, is not suffice. It’s not even close to suffice. Federal wages set the standard for states. With such a meager increase from the federal government, it is likely that state governments will feel they have been given permission to follow that same sorry example.

            Second, this is the first increase in a decade. That’s ten years for those who hike up their eyebrow when you see that word. Ten year wait should not equal seventy cents. Come on, that’s a mess. In the article, all the officials quoted said they knew the increase wasn’t enough. So, if everyone is aware that this “boost” a bit less than a lift, why can’t more be done about it?

            The federal poverty line is marked at approximately $10,000 for a single-person income. With the new wage increase, that would pull full-time workers making $5.85 out of the poverty basement with an annual income of about $12,000 a year before taxes.

            As a person who is a stones throw away above the poverty line, I know that more should be done in this area, and on the heels of  this “win” I hope that I can be apart of a downward snowball effect to continue the improvement of the situation. It also makes me really grateful that I work in a pretty progressive state on wages, which stays a couple of dollars ahead of the federal minimum (Calif.)

            One really important note to make is that the seventy cent increase is a rolling one, occurring every summer for the next two years ending in 2009. At the end of the rolling increase, the federal minimum will be a reasonable $7.25, getting closer to decent.

What is poverty? What does it mean to be poor? Certainly such questions provoke a string of images in the mind of the reader: urban slums, peasant farmers, etc. But for any hope at a solution to the problems of poverty, we must refine our image.

It’s well known that the United States has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world (about 6 per 1,000 births). Progressive health care wonks have long suspected that sub par Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and cuts to programs like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program are culprits. Last month, the counter-CW folks over at Slate announced that actually, babies die because wealthy American spend a lot of money on fertility drugs, prenatal care, and other newfangled treatments that save otherwise unviable pregnancies and lead to increased rates of prematurity and infant mortality.

Yesterday a must-read article on infant mortality in the South appeared in The New York Times. On this issue, at least, it seems counter-intuition will only take us so far: American infant mortality is very much a byproduct of poverty, with all the usual disturbing implications for race and gender. In Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, the infant mortality rate rose from 9.7 to 11.4 per 1,000 births in 2005. Nationwide, white Americans have an infant mortality rate of 5.7, while African Americans have a much higher rate of 14.0.

Poor black mothers are especially at risk for a variety of reasons, ranging from high rates of obesity (which can make ultrasound monitoring difficult and lead to diabetes, thus under-nourishing the fetus) to increased deaths from SIDS, accidents, and disease. Doctors are few and far between in rural counties, and local doctors report that many poor women have no prenatal care at all. In addition, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, has raised barriers for entrance into the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

All in all, not a rosy picture.

Cross-posted at TAPPED. 

For the first time in 23 years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development presented a report to Congress yesterday documenting the scope of the United States’ homelessness epidemic. The survey used a new approach, collecting data on the number of Americans sleeping on the street or seeking temporary shelter over a three-month period from January to April 2005, instead of just counting street-dwellers on one specific night, as past surveys have done. The results? 754,000 Americans were homeless for at least part of 2005, meaning they slept on the street or sought beds in shelters or transitional housing. One-third of the homeless were families with children. About half were black. (According to the Urban Institute, meanwhile, only 6 percent of the homeless population does not suffer from a mental illness or substance abuse problem.)

In urban America, affordable housing, job training, and public health are all solutions to homelessness. But politicians tend to focus on erasing the evidence of homelessness rather than addressing its causes. As New York mayor, of course, Rudy Giuliani epitomized this approach. Under his leadership, homelessness was seen mainly as a quality of life issue for the rest of us. I’m from New York and hey, I’ll be the first to admit that the sanitized, chain-ified Times Square has been good for the city’s public image. But when you hear talk of Giuliani being a social moderate, it’s worth remembering that this is the mayor who criminalized sleeping on the street and even laying down in public, suggested putting children into the foster care system if their parents lost their jobs and became temporarily homeless, and cut the city’s affordable housing budget in half, all while opposing a hike in the minimum wage that would have raised living standards for the working poor. After building his popularity on the backs of the city’s neediest, he of course claimed credit for “cleaning up the streets.” And sadly, many New Yorkers were just fine with that.

Cross-posted at TAPPED.