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July 28, 2013, WASHINGTON - Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused - on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press....(Click title for more)

August 1, 2013 - NBC's recent story on how 80 percent of Americans will be living at or near the poverty level [3] in their lifetimes was accompanied by the above photo of a "poor white family".

The heart of the the AP's report on the (further) economic imperilment of the American people is focused on the rise in "white poverty", and the struggles faced by the "white working class" in the time of the Great Recession.

Images that feature human beings "work" in communicating political and social meaning because of how the viewer "reads" them. As such, there are stated and unstated assumptions which the person who is "seeing" applies to the "object" of their gaze.

For example, the White Gaze views a photo of a young black man wearing a hoodie and whose pants are sagging and sees a person who exists in a state of criminality, and is a social predator.

A photo of a white man wearing a suit and walking down Wall Street in New York will be seen by the White Gaze as representing a "respectable" person and a "hard worker" living the "American Dream."

In reality, the former may be on the way to his 3rd job, has never been in prison or arrested, and takes care of his aged parents and siblings. The latter could be a child-molesting murderer and rapist, who is also embezzling millions of dollars from his clients.

White and male--and Whiteness more generally--views itself as benign and harmless. Black and male--and Blackness more generally--is viewed by White American society as dangerous and pathological. The power of images is how they harness and channel assumptions about how various types of personhood find representation in, and are configured by, a broader system of dominance, subordination, privilege, inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy.

NBC.com's photo is an example of those processes at work. There we "see" two overweight white women with a young child, and thus make social and political assumptions about gender and class. We see a small home and generalize from that visual about how "poor people" live, and more importantly, "what type of people" they are.

Images also give the viewer permission to empathize or to condemn the subject. Are these "good" people or "bad people?" What is my sense of obligation to them? Does my sense of community extend to people like them?...(Click title for more)

Miami Herald via McClatchy

July 23, 2013 - In many ways, Nguyen Thi Ly is just like any other 12-year-old girl. She has a lovely smile and is quick to laugh. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up. She enjoys skipping rope when she plays.

But Ly is also very different from other children. Her head is severely misshapen. Her eyes are unnaturally far apart and permanently askew. She's been hospitalized with numerous ailments since her birth.

Her mother, 43-year-old Le Thi Thu, has similar deformities and health disorders. Neither of them has ever set foot on a battlefield, but they're both casualties of war.

Le and her daughter are second- and third-generation victims of dioxin exposure, the result of the U.S. military's use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, when the U.S. Air Force sprayed more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides over parts of southern Vietnam and along the borders of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The herbicides were contaminated with dioxin, a deadly compound that remains toxic for decades and causes birth defects, cancer and other illnesses.

To this day, dioxin continues to poison the land and the people. The United States has never accepted responsibility for these victims - it denies that Agent Orange is responsible for diseases among Vietnamese that are accepted as Agent Orange-caused among American veterans - and it's unclear when this chain of misery will end.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama will meet with Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang at the White House, only the third meeting between chief executives of the two countries since Vietnam and the United States established diplomatic relations in 1995.

The two countries share many contemporary concerns. The White House says Obama plans to discuss cooperation on regional issues and trade, plus other U.S. priorities such as climate change and human rights. The two countries share a strong common interest in countering China, which has become increasingly assertive over potentially oil-rich areas of the South China Sea.

Many Vietnamese say it's time for the United States to do more to address the issue of Agent Orange and its victims, so that the last tragic chapter of the Vietnam War finally can be closed.

Le Thi Thu's father served in the North Vietnamese army and was wounded in Quang Tri province, one of the most heavily sprayed areas of the country.

"Before he went to war, my father had two children: my older brother and sister," said Le, who was born in 1970. "They were normal. But after he came back, he had me."

"I could see the differences in myself and others right away," she recalled. "When I was a small child, I felt pain inside my body all the time. My parents took me to the hospital, and the doctors determined that I had been affected by Agent Orange."...(Click title for more)

Debating Energy and Growth:
The Great Progressive Reversal

April 29, 2013 - Over the last few decades, humans achieved one of the most remarkable victories for social justice in the history of the species. The percentage of people who live in extreme poverty - under $1.25 per day - was halved between 1990 and 2010. Average life expectancy globally rose from 56 to 68 years since 1970. And hundreds of millions of desperately poor people went from burning dung and wood for fuel (whose smoke takes two million souls a year) to using electricity, allowing them to enjoy refrigerators, washing machines, and smoke-free stoves.

Of course, all of this new development puts big pressures on the environment. While the transition from wood to coal is overwhelmingly positive for forests, coal-burning is now a major contributor to global warming. The challenge for the twenty-first century is thus to triple global energy demand, so that the world's poorest can enjoy modern living standards, while reducing our carbon emissions from energy production to zero.

For the last 20 years, most everyone who cared about global warming hoped for a binding international treaty abroad, and some combination of carbon pricing, pollution regulations, and renewable energy mandates at home. That approach is now in ruins. In 2010, UN negotiations failed to create a successor to the failed Kyoto treaty. A few months later cap and trade died in the Senate. And two weeks ago, the slow motion collapse of the European Emissions Trading Scheme reached its nadir, with carbon prices, already at historic lows, collapsing after EU leaders refused to tighten the cap on emissions.

What rushed into the vacuum was "climate justice," a movement headed by left-leaning groups like 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace. These groups invoke the vulnerability of the poor to climate change, but elide the reality that more energy makes them more resilient. "Huge swaths of the world have been developing over the last three decades at an unprecedented pace and scale," writes political scientist Christopher Foreman in "On Justice Movements," a new article for Breakthrough Journal. "Contemporary demands for climate justice have been, at best, indifferent to these rather remarkable developments and, at worst, openly hostile."

For the climate justice movement, global warming is not to be dealt with by switching to cleaner forms of energy, but rather by returning to a pastoral, renewable-powered, and low-energy society. "Real climate solutions," writes Klein, "are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users..."

Climate change can only be solved by "fixing everything," says McKibben, from how we eat, travel, produce, reproduce, consume, and live. "It's not an engineering problem," McKibben argued recently in Rolling Stone. "It's a greed problem." Fixing it will require a "new civilizational paradigm," says Klein, "grounded not in dominance over nature, but in respect for natural cycles of renewal."

Climate skeptics are right, Klein cheerily concludes: the Left is using climate change to advance policies they have long wanted. "In short," says Klein, "climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative." ...(Click title for more)

Is America anti-intellectual? The jury is still out.

One could make equally plausible cases for our country as a hotbed of hostility to organized intelligence and as a sort of paradise for the cleverest, a place that elevates intellectual sophistication (especially when it has economic or technological applications) above basic moral decency.

We oscillate wildly between demonizing our intellectuals and deifying them; they appear to us, in turn, as nuisances, threats, and saviors. We cut their funding and then study how their brains function. We trust them with our economy, our climate, our media and our institutions, then rage against them for their failures-and then trust them all over again.

Of course, much depends on what is meant by "intellectual." The term, which originated in France and entered the English language around the time of the Dreyfus Affair, is notoriously vague and unstable. Though in its most neutral sense it describes only a tendency toward speculative thought, it is very quickly made into a social category with determinate characteristics.

Put a novelist, a philosopher, a physicist, a political analyst and a computer programmer in a room together and they're likely to discover as many differences as similarities-provided they can understand each other at all-but all can be identified (for ease of condemnation, if nothing else) under this single heading. The very notion of "the intellectual" depends on the idea that, over and above what particular people happen to know or do, there is a social category that we can enshrine, or hold culpable. Like the notion of "the aristocrat" that it has in some ways replaced, the intellectual provides a screen on which to project aspiration and hatred, idealism and cynicism.

In Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, the cultural historian Aaron Lecklider explores how "Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture." Here he follows the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci, who theorized a distinction between "traditional" (bourgeois) and "organic" (working-class) intellectuals, as well as in the vein of British cultural historians Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy) and Raymond Williams (The Long Revolution). Against the received idea, which he associates with historians like Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Lasch, that "the masses" have always been reflexively anti-intellectual, Lecklider argues that, throughout the twentieth century, intelligence-or "brainpower," as he prefers to say-was in fact highly valued by working-class people in a variety of contexts.

Lecklider's agenda is a broadly populist one: he wants to defend the American working class from allegations of anti-intellectualism, and to redescribe what might look like hostility or resentment as a form of fascinated engagement. His story begins around the turn of the century, with what he calls a "mainstreaming of intelligence": a mass movement, mediated by popular culture, to devalue traditional intellectuals and promote organic ones. "Cultural texts consumed by millions of ordinary men and women between 1900 and 1960 suggested all Americans were intellectually gifted," Lecklider writes, "while deflating the presumptuous grandstanding of the traditional intellectual elite." (In this, organic intellectuals have not operated so differently from traditional intellectuals, who have never been above undermining the stature of others in order to build up their own.)

In the book's compelling first chapter, Lecklider discusses the attempts of Coney Island theme parks like Dreamland and Luna Park to bolster their educational aspects. (Dreamland, for instance, hosted the experimental baby incubators of Dr. Martin A. Couney in 1903, and in 1909 Luna Park was "disrobed of its sugar coating" and became the Luna Park Institute of Science.) At around the same time, the Chautaqua circuit, a 1904 extension of the popular adult-education gatherings held as far back as 1874 in upstate New York, provided a sort of fin-de-siècle equivalent to today's TED Talks. Chautaqua lectures, described by Theodore Roosevelt as "the most American thing in America," were held on topics of political and scientific interest, with speakers ranging from William Jennings Bryan to Mascot the educated horse. "Audiences for the Chautauquas were comprised of women and men without any particular standing as intellectuals or claims to expertise," Lecklider writes, "and though they were occasionally glossed with the narrative sheen of social uplift, the assembly programs were designed to offer education to undistinguished audiences and to imbue mass culture with a gleam of shimmering smartness." At the same time, brainpower was being valorized and mobilized by working-class labor organizers, and by African-American leaders involved in the 1920s "New Negro" movement....(Click title for more)

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Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS