A great Malaysian tragedy

 

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THIS is one article that I didn’t want to write. I put off writing it for two years. Writing 900 words about this subject was more painful than taking three years to write a 100,000-word thesis. I would do three more theses if I could avoid writing these next 900 words.

This article is about a tragedy that concerns us as a people and a nation. The tragedy should have sparked a national debate, but it was ignored despite being repeated four times.

What is this great tragedy, you might ask? Is it the May 13 race riots in 1969? Is it the Bukit Kepong incident in 1950? Is it the first riot in 1964 in Singapore before it left the federation? Is it the fall of a government? Or is it the dismal state of our institutions of education, justice and administration?

To me, all of these things combined fail to measure up to the tragedy I am about to describe.

Two years ago I happened to read a news article about an Indian-Malaysian family whose father killed all of his children. The report related how the mother died of cancer a few days before and the father, who was jobless and also in poor health, had become distraught. He ended up killing his 15-year-old son and three other children by strangling them all. After that horrifying deed, he hanged himself.

I could not sleep well for several days after reading about that, wondering why a father would kill his children. What drove him to do that? The police and other authorities dismissed it as the act of a crazy man. I did not think so.

Two weeks later, there was a report of another destitute Indian-Malaysian family whose parent, also suffering from an illness, killed the children. Again, the authorities dismissed it as “orang gila punya kerja” (a mad person’s act).

Several months later, I read of Chinese-Malaysian parents who poisoned their four little children and then themselves. At the last minute, an ambulance was called, but all the children died; the parents survived.

And just last week, a penniless father, whose race was not stated, smothered his three children after his wife died.

After each of these cases, our nation went on with business as usual. No professors from our 200 universities raised the issue. No religious clerics from any religion made it into a social and political issue. No NGO stood up and demonstrated or wrote press statements about the tragedies.

Was I the only one who cringed at the news of parents killing their children? Was I the only one to ask questions?

Firstly, why did these parents not seek help from other family members? All of us have wider family circles and if we begged several of them to care for one child each, surely they would respond? I have no issue whatsoever if adults decide to take their own lives, but I am aghast and crushed when children are killed just because one cannot figure out how to feed and care for them.

All children in this country – and the world – should be cared for and given a minimum chance to survive until they can make their own way. Is that not a social, political and spiritual right? What happened to the larger family system if parents think that it would burden other family members?

Then I asked the question: why did the parents not seek help from the leaders of their own race or religion? We have political leaders of all races and houses of worship worth millions. What is the purpose of religion and these splendid displays of architectural feats if parents had no faith that they could get help from going to a church, a mosque, a temple or a gurdwara to ask congregants to help their children?

If I were the parent, I would have taken them to the mosque and begged for help and asked to stay at the mosque. I would help sweep the floor of the mosque or scrub its toilets and then ask restaurants for leftovers so I could feed my children and myself. There is no shame in that. But, of course, I would ask for help from my own family and wife’s family first before going that far.

Finally, I asked: what should our government do for such families? Why did the four families not go to a zakat office or the Welfare Department for help? Why did they have no confidence in our institutions, orphanages and other forms of welfare? What are these zakat or welfare officers doing? Why are they not proactively walking the streets and looking under bridges for the homeless or talking to people in low-cost flats to see if there are families facing destitution?

I wish the four families had reached out to the media or someone for help instead of killing their children. What does it say about our nation when parents kill their children instead of trusting our institutions of race, institutions of religion and institutions of governance?

When I was in the United Kingdom, I was given a financial allowance for my four children. When I was in the United States, I was given food stamps when my daughter was born. I also remember watching a report on YouTube about 400,000 unemployed British youngsters given £250 (about RM1,400 at current rates) a month as a benefit back then.

I spent nine years overseas and I never read about parents killing their children because of poverty. What does it say about our country, our people and our faiths when four tragedies like these can happen – and that they raised not one iota of concern? We are, truly and sadly, a nation that is failing its most vulnerable people.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is Professor of Architecture at UCSI University. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.

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China has lifted 700 million out of poverty over 70 years, set to eliminate its last poor very soon

 

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Helping hand: President Xi Jinping (second from left) has a complete portfolio of poverty relief plans, despite the sudden onslaught of Covid-19. — Xinhua

 

BEIJING: China is making a final sprint to eliminate absolute poverty as it marches towards a moderately prosperous society.

Leading this anti-poverty effort is President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The Chinese leadership has set 2020 as the deadline to eradicate poverty. Every CPC leader in the past had worked towards this target, but the work by Xi has impressed many people.

Last March, Xi convened a televised symposium on poverty alleviation. He reiterated the deadline and vowed to lift the remaining five million-plus people out of poverty by the end of the year, despite the sudden onslaught of Covid-19. In September, Xi said China has “every confidence” of achieving the goal.

The nation will meet the poverty eradication target (set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) 10 years ahead of schedule, Xi told the 75th session of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly then.

In his latest instruction made public in mid-october, Xi said there should be no letting up until a complete victory has been secured.  

 Millions climb out of poverty trap

Poverty has plagued China for thousands of years. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the anti-poverty war has lifted over 700 million rural people out of poverty.

Great strides had been made under the reform programmes and opening up of China in 1978, started by Deng Xiaping.

Xi assumed the historic responsibility of leading this anti-poverty fight, after he was elected general secretary of the CPC in November 2012. At that time, About 99 million Chinese lived under the poverty line, earning a per capita income of less than 2,300 yuan (about US$1 dollar) a day.

To meet the 2020 anti-poverty deadline, over 10 million people have to be lifted out of poverty every year. This equates to about one million people every month, or 20 people every minute.

President Xi goes to the ground

About one month after taking over the helm of the CPC, Xi braved winter cold to visit poor villagers in Hebei Province. Sitting down with them, Xi asked about their income, if they had sufficient food and enough quilts and coal to stay warm.

In November 2013, Xi went to Shibadong, a Miao ethnic minority village nestled in the mountains of central China’s Hunan Province. There, he put forward the concept of targeted poverty alleviation.

Across the country, all impoverished people and the factors that have led to their poverty are identified. Each household or individual is given a customised poverty relief plan.

They might get help to start a small business, be relocated out of mountains or receive training to find jobs in cities.

Their children will be given education. And there is a system to keep track of progress to ensure the measures are having their desired effect.

Xi has put poverty relief work under the leadership of the CPC of 90 million members. Party chiefs at all levels are required to take up a role.

Over 2.9 million public sector officials are sent to villages to fight poverty “at the front line.”

The leader has convened a series of meetings on poverty alleviation. Before every meeting, he would visit impoverished regions to learn about local situations and listen to suggestions of grassroots officials and members of the public.

Xi has a complete portfolio of poverty relief plans. He sets basic targets at meetings: rural poor people must not worry about food and clothing, and have access to compulsory education, basic medical services and safe housing.

A lot of emphasis is given to the role of education to stop repeat of poverty from one generation to the next.

He has advocated relocation as an effective anti-poverty solution, and repeatedly warned against needless formalities, red tape.

Yuri Tavrovsky, a sinologist and professor at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, noted China’s anti-poverty fight has obviously gathered pace under Xi’s leadership.

No single poor to be left behind

Xi is no stranger to poverty. As a teenager and young adult, he spent seven years with peasants on the Loess Plateau where he lived in cave-like adobe houses and slept on a flea-infested bed on clay stove.

He joined the CPC in the village of Liangjiahe, and had his first experience as a grassroots-level CPC secretary there.

Xi once said his biggest dream back then was to make it possible for the villagers to have meat on their plates, which was a luxury during those days before the rise of China.

In his 80 domestic inspection tours over the past eight years, he has seen some of the most remote and impoverished areas in the country.

Xi has stressed that “no one should be left behind”. In the first four years as CPC chief, he had visited China’s 14 “contiguous impoverished areas.” At times he had to travel by plane first, and transfer to train and car before reaching the remote villages.

“What impresses me most is that Xi always puts people’s well-being first,” said Zhao Ruqi, an official who worked with Xi in Fujian.

In 2016, when visiting a village in Ningxia, Xi was seen checking the shower facilities in a villager’s home, and was happy to learn that the family had a solar water heater.

Recalling his early trips to some poor areas, Xi once said his heart sank when he saw the bumpy and rugged roads, harsh living conditions of the locals and heard stories of children dropping out of school, and patients not getting timely medical treatment and attention.

“But when I went to poor villages in recent few years, I saw substantial changes,” Xi said at the March symposium. “Seeing the smiles of the people, I feel delighted.”

The number of Chinese living in poverty has dropped from 98.99 million to 5.51 million in the seven years since 2013.

UN Secretary-general Antonio Guterres has remarked that China made the greatest contributions to world poverty alleviation in the past decade.

In China, the per capita net income of the poor has more than doubled – rising from 4,124 yuan in 2016 to 9,057 yuan in 2019, registering an average annual growth of 30%.

Rural people are seeing a significant improvement in their lives and standard of living. The development of rural industries has changed lives, as has relocation of villages. In the past five years, more than nine million rural poor in China have been moved out of inhospitable areas.

Yang Qingzhong recalled that his family of six had to cram themselves into a tiny mudbrick house in mountainous Guizhou Province.

In 2018, the family moved into a spacious modern apartment in town, allocated by the government. And he found a job in a workshop near his new home, making rattan chairs.

All over the country, rural infrastructure, education and health-care have improved. Some rural hospitals partner with their metropolitan counterparts to offer high-quality medical services to rural residents.

“Illness-induced poverty is one of the toughest problems in rural areas,” said Hu Yi, head of the public hospital in the county of Zhenxiong in Yunnan Province. “Now they don’t have to travel far to get treated, not even for serious illness.”

Benefiting from the poverty eradication programmes, some ethnic minorities – residing in the country’s remote areas in southwestern corners – have also experienced positive changes in their life.

But China under Xi’s leadership is not going to stop at poverty eradication. “Poverty eradication is only the first step; better days are still ahead,” Xi said in a letter to the Dulong ethnic minority group, congratulating the Dulong people for collectively shaking off poverty.

Xi has reminded his people that shaking off poverty is not the finishing line, but the starting line of a new life and new endeavour.

Revisiting Hunan in September, Xi said China must establish a long-term strategy to prevent any relapse into poverty. Among the plans being implemented in China are rural revitalisation programmes and economic development to build a moderately prosperous society. — Xinhua (Compiled by HO WAH FOON

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Behind crazy rich Singapore’s mask, a growing class divide

Inequality bites: In Singapore, households with accumulated wealth and connections over past generations, like the hit movie’s protagonist Nick Young’s family and friends, can pass on advantages to their offspring. —AP

Two Singapores: Poverty has always existed in the cosmopolitan city state, but the setting of the hit movie ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ has seen a widening income gap in the past few years. — Reuters

 There is another side to the Lion City's fabled wealth: a widening gap between rich and poor that is forcing its citizens to question whether their home is really the land of opportunity they once thought.

IN the background, a luxury goods shop, a stooped elderly cleaner sweeping its storefront; on one side of the bridge sits expensive condominiums, bars and restaurants, on the other, rental flats housing Singapore’s poorest.

These scenes unfolded in a documentary titled Regardless of Class by Channel News Asia released on Oct 1, with a security guard revealing he felt as though he was not treated like a person. A cleaner said: “I know I’m invisible. I have to get used to this, and learn to stop caring.”

Poverty and inequality in the city state – the setting of the hit movie Crazy Rich Asians and where the per capita income is among the highest in the world, hitting US$55,000 (RM228,494) last year – has always existed.

But in the last year, Singaporeans have been confronted with discomfiting evidence of growing social stratification, shaking to the core a belief that meritocracy can smooth out unequal beginnings and lead to more equal outcomes.

Sociologist Tan Ern Ser from the National University of Singapore said class origin or background now had a greater influence on opportunity and social mobility, as the country faced slowing growth, job losses and obsolescence and an ageing population.

Singapore’s Gini coefficient, a measurement of income inequality from zero to one – with zero being most equal – has fluctuated above 0.40 since 1980 before adjusting for taxes and transfers. It was 0.417 last year. In the United Kingdom, it was 0.52 in 2015, the United States was at 0.506, and Hong Kong reached a record high of 0.539 in 2016.

Experts say inequality in itself is not worrying – sociologist Tan said it could even “be good for motivating people to want to do better”.

But in Singapore’s case, it has allowed households with accumulated wealth and connections over past generations to pass on advantages to their offspring, helping them to shine, while those without the same social capital and safety nets are forced to toil harder to do the same.

As Singapore University of Social Sciences economist and nominated Member of Parliament Walter Theseira put it: “If you can buy advantages for your child, such as tuition and enrichment, they are going to end up doing better in terms of meritocratic assessments.”

Donald Low, associate partner at Centennial Asia Advisors and the former associate dean at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said Singapore’s meritocratic and universal education system for the past 50 years led to a great deal of social mobility initially, but society would “settle” after a few decades.

“This is amplified by marriage sorting. That is the well-educated marrying one another and passing on their advantages to their children,” Low said.

A paper published last December by local think-tank Institute of Policy Studies, which demonstrated the sharpest social divisions were based on class, not race or religion, started the latest debate on the impact of inequality.

The report, co-authored by sociologist Tan, showed low interaction between students who attended elite and regular schools, and between Singaporeans living in private and public housing.

This was followed by a bestselling book by Nanyang Technological University sociologist Teo You Yenn titled This is What Inequality Looks Like, which told of the experiences of the low income group, and the systemic issues keeping them poor.

In early October, a six-minute clip on Facebook of the Regardless of Class documentary sparked feelings of discomfort, guilt and self-reflection among Singaporeans – possibly from realising “there may well be two Singapores in our midst”, said former nominated Member of Parliament Eugene Tan, a law don at Singapore Management University.

In it, six students from different education streams talked about their dreams and school experiences.

Some were aiming for an overseas degree and a minimum of A’s; others just wanted to pass their examinations.

When presenter Janil Puthucheary, a Cabinet member, mooted putting students of mixed abilities together in one classroom, a girl from the higher education stream said it was not viable, as “it might even increase the gap if these students feel like they can’t cope so they just give up completely”.

Puthucheary asked if the conversation was awkward.

One boy from the lower education stream said: “The way they speak and the way I speak (are) different, I feel like.

” Another student completed the sentence: “Like they are high class and we are not.”

Seetoh Huixia, a social worker for 13 years who is assistant director of AWWA Family Services, said she had seen this sort of low self esteem in the people she works with. “The sense of us versus them, the inferiority complex, that they’re not good enough,” she said.

The Straits Times opinion editor Chua Mui Hoong wrote: “It got me thinking; how did we become a society that looks down on people for the work they do or the grades they get? Are we all complicit in this? Can anything be done to turn our society inside out so that we are all less disdainful, more respectful, of one other?”

Academics felt the documentary was a good conversation starter, but urged Singaporeans to look at the underlying causes of this class divide.

Low said the documentary was problematic because “the root causes of economic inequality, an elitist education system and the government’s anti-welfarism are not interrogated, and that a complex issue (of structural inequality) is reduced to people not having enough empathy or being snobbish”.

“All this class consciousness and implicit bias is a function of our systems and policies,” he added.

Teo urged Singaporeans to look beyond attitudes and focus on the inequality that had led to the divide.

“We must not focus on perceptions – whether of ourselves or others – at the expense of real differences in daily struggles and well-being. The perceptions exist in response to those differences. Just as thinking about gravity differently would not stop a ball rolling downhill, pretending differences don’t exist isn’t going to magically make the differences disappear,” she said.

Sociologist Tan said structural changes through policies would be critical. “It can’t be just about telling people to be nice and respectful toward one another.”

Experts have in the last decade proposed ways in which Singapore can mitigate gnawing income inequality, ranging from policy changes in the areas of wages, taxes on wealth, social spending, housing and education.

The government has responded by increasing its social spending — supplementing the income of low-wage workers, introducing a universal health insurance scheme, increased personal income tax rates for high earners. It has also expanded its network of social service touchpoints and just in September tweaked the education system to reduce the emphasis on examinations.

But its social spending is still lower than Nordic countries and personal income taxes remain competitive to attract talent, leading developmental charity Oxfam and non-profit research group Development Finance International to this month call out the government for “harmful tax practices”, low public social spending, no equal pay or non-discrimination laws for women and lack of a minimum wage.

They ranked Singapore in the bottom 10 of 157 governments (at 149th place), ranked on how they were tackling the growing gap between rich and poor.

The government staunchly disagreed with the report, with Minister for Social and Family Development Desmond Lee saying Singapore’s outcomes in health care, education and housing were better than most countries despite spending less. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index, leaders noted, placed Singapore top for helping people realise their full potential.

One area experts agree on is that more tweaks are needed to the education system.

Singapore Management University’s Tan said apart from higher wealth taxes, “the education system needs to ensure not just equal opportunities but endeavour to provide for equal access to opportunities. There is a world of difference between the two. We may have focused on the former but not enough on the latter”.

Low said the education system needed to be “truly egalitarian”.

He suggested the state funds a national early childhood education system for children aged four onwards to remove segmentation from the get-go, to remove the national exam sat by 12-year-olds in Singapore and have schools run for the entire day so parents do not fill their children’s afternoons with tuition.

Theseira had a more novel solution: affirmative action that accords favours to the disadvantaged.

“It basically says that somebody from a disadvantaged background who achieves the same thing as somebody from a privileged background should be given much more credit because that is actually a much bigger achievement given the starting point,” he said.

“Are we willing to contemplate that? I don’t think we are at the moment but it’s a very obvious policy that addresses this problem with the definition of meritocracy.”

There must be a sense that a class divide is harmful for everyone, especially among those who have thrived under the current system, Eugene Tan said.

“A class divide could threaten Singapore’s existence because it would pit Singaporeans against Singaporeans. The divide would render Singapore to be rife with populism and to be consumed by sub-national identities. The class divide is also likely to reinforce existing cleavages based on race, religion and language.” — South China Morning Post by kok xing hui

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A homeless man sleeps under an American flag blanket on a park bench in New York City in this file picture. As of June 2013, there was an all-time record of 50,900 homeless people, including 12,100 homeless families with 21,300 homeless children in New York - Photos AFP

A young homeless woman panhandles on the streets of Manhattan in New York City. According to a new report released by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development New York City’s homeless population expanded by about 4% in 2017.

American culture and a new tax Bill are exacerbating chronic poverty by helping to widen the wealth gap.

SITTING among a jumble of his few possessions on a San Francisco sidewalk, 41-year-old “Kaels” Raybon has begun to accept the bad choices he made.

He was a drug user, and did jail time. By the time he was let out, his wife and four children – two boys and two girls – had left him. Other family members had died and he had nowhere to live. He has now spent over 15 years on the street.

America may be the land of equal opportunity – but like many other countries, there is a thin line between a life on the street and a roof over one’s head. Poverty creates its own loop; a prison record, for instance, makes it difficult to find employment.

Raybon’s voice trembles as he speaks of his children.

“Emotionally, I’m a wreck most of the time,” he admits. “I see kids and dads, and I want that too. But it’s just not in my cards.”

The children came to visit him one day, he says. He was torn. “I wanted them to stay, but at the same time I didn’t, because I have nothing to offer them.”

Raybon is among those who make up the most visible indicator of America’s worsening poverty and inequality – over half a million urban homeless. They are a stark contrast in arguably the world’s richest, most powerful and most technologically innovative country.

But homelessness is only the visible tip of the poverty iceberg. Large areas outside big cities are mired in chronic poverty. The definition of poverty varies, but a commonly used measure from 2015 is an annual income of US$12,000 (RM47,500) or less.

Forty-one million Americans live in poverty – 12.7% of the country’s population. Some 46% of those live in “deep poverty” – on an annual income below US$6,000 (RM23,700).

Among them are 1.5 million households, including 2.8 million children, who live in extreme poverty or on less than US$2 (RM8) per person per day.

“These are people who cannot find work ... who do not qualify for any other (welfare) programmes or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market,” Dr Premilla Nadasen, author and professor at Barnard College in New York City, wrote in the Washington Post newspaper on Dec 21.

Poverty is in the news again on the heels of a scathing 15-page statement released late last year by Dr Philip Alston, a tall, lean, 67-year-old New York University law professor from Melbourne, Australia, who is the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. A special rapporteur functions like an investigator and reports back to the UN.

Dr Alston is not known for beating about the bush. After a 15-day swing across six American states and cities, he is warning that worse is in store for America’s poor, at the wrong end of an increasingly widening wealth gap, and in an environment and official culture in which if you are down and out, it is probably your own fault.

The recent passage of the Republican Party’s tax Bill will make their lives worse, says Dr Alston. The Treasury Department has explicitly listed welfare reform as an important source of revenue in part to make up for the deficit that the tax cut is likely to trigger.

More important, however, is the culture.

“In a poor country, there are two starting points – that there are social rights, and citizens have a right to healthcare, a right to education, a right to food,” Dr Alston says at an interview in his booklined office at New York University.

“Second, the only thing standing in our way is resources; we just don’t have the money.”

“In the US, it’s the exact opposite,” he says. “There’s no such thing as social rights. If people are living in abysmal conditions, it’s their fault because we have equality of opportunity.

“Secondly, it’s not a resource problem. We just found US$1.5trillion (RM6trillion) to give to the super rich. The money would have been there to eliminate poverty if there had been any political will. But there isn’t.”

The US$1.5trillion refers to the Republicans’ tax Bill, passed just before Christmas that will bring the middle class some relief but inevitably, analysts say, end up benefiting the wealthy disproportionately.

America’s wealth gap has been steadily widening. On average in 1981, the top 1% of adult Americans earned 27 times more than the bottom 50%. Today, they earn 81 times more.

Meanwhile, since the 1970s, the safety net has been considerably diminished, Dr Nadasen wrote in the Post recently. “Labour regulations protecting workers have been rolled back, and funding for education and public programmes has declined. The poor have been the hardest hit.”

She added: “The shredding of the safety net led to a rise in poverty. The United States has the highest child poverty rates – 25% in the world.

In the course of his tour, Dr Alston saw houses in rural areas of Alabama surrounded by pools of sewage. “The state health department had no idea how many households exist in these conditions, nor did they have any plan to find out, or devise a plan to do something about it,” he says in his statement.

He could not help noticing that most of the area’s residents were black. But while racial divisions are not far below the surface, it would be misleading to assume that poverty is generally worse in the Native American and African American minorities. It cuts across all ethnicities. There are eight million more poor white people than black people.

Like Rudy Damian, 53, who as a teenager ended up homeless in San Francisco after taking drugs and alcohol and being involved in crime – a common pattern contributing to broken families and financial ruin.

He has several missing teeth – dental care is not covered by most health insurance and the poor, at best, can go only to hospital emergency rooms where invariably a tooth is simply extracted.

Damian says he is sober now, and even works part-time as a security guard, but still can’t afford to rent a home. He calls his sister and his 94-year-old mother sometimes, but they avoid talking about his life. “They are disappointed by my lifestyle,” he says. “I was just a loner. I was the youngest when my father died, I decided to leave (home), and that isolation has lasted throughout my life.”

Fragmentation of families and the weakening of community support contribute to the isolation of homeless people in particular. But there is more.

“Caricatured narratives” drive the debate on poverty and homelessness in America, according to Dr Alston. The rich are seen as “industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic, and the drivers of economic success”. The poor are “wasters, losers and scammers”.

“As long as you have the mindset that we’re all on our own, it becomes possible that when my own brother falls off the cliff, I’m able to say, ‘Well, he had the same opportunities as me. He’s failed, he has to cope with it,’ instead of saying, ‘I can’t let that happen. I’ve got to do something.’”

In Los Angeles, he found that the objective for the local authorities was to raise the standard of Skid Row, an area less than a square kilometre but containing many hundred homeless, to that of a Syrian refugee camp.

“One of the richest countries in the world, and we’re aiming to meet the standards of a Syrian refugee camp for a large population in one of our richest cities,” he says. “It is sort of stunning.”

Sources: The Straits Times/Asia News Network, by Nirmal Ghosh who is The Straits Times ’US Bureau Chief.

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We don't need billionaire philanthropists, we need change !

An elderly woman sitting inside a store at a border village near the demilitarized zone in Yeoncheon, South Korea, Jan on 8, 2016. PHOTO: REUTERS 

Society needs people who adopt business models that can enrich ordinary people's lives and free them from a life bound by servitude and dependency.

These days we praise charitable donations and philanthropy; however, we must understand that they are the symptoms of a dysfunctional society, not the remedy.

It’s similar to the Red Cross during wartime; they can’t stop the war. In many ways, they propagate the dysfunctions because the biggest funders of these temporary resolutions are also the greatest oppressors of our society, from whom these dysfunctions stem.

There are, for example, many people suffering around the world from curable diseases simply because they don’t have access to proper medical assistance. Why do they have no access? Because they are too poor.

That is to say, this problem is derived from the massive income inequality around the world. If they could earn a sufficient living on their own, they wouldn’t need any charitable aid from developed nations. They don’t need rich philanthropists giving them millions of dollars. What they need is rich philanthropists to stop hoarding money and allow them to make a sustainable living.

Let’s look at Bill Gates, who was simply driven to make as much money as possible at any cost. Along the way, he has smothered many smaller companies, copied others’ ideas, and snuffed out many innovative competing products. Yet, all is forgiven and forgotten because now he donates a lot of money.

It is exactly this type of thinking that breeds income inequality around the world, which leads to people dying from poverty, and thus preserves the need for these billionaire philanthropists to remedy the situation.

Another exemplary indication of this problem is Lance Armstrong. He cheated to further his career and eventually got caught. Yet, today he is still a millionaire and is respected by millions of people: 3.8 million followers on Twitter to be exact. Why? Because he is a philanthropist who donated lots of money to cancer charities. None of this would have happened had he not cheated, but people forgive and forget. In our society, winners prosper no matter the means, as long as they become philanthropists in the end.

Take a moment to think of the other cyclists who didn’t allow themselves to cheat. Where are they now? Can you name them? Are they rich and famous?

To address the real origin of the problem, we need to change the way we go about earning and spending money at the very basic level. Instead of being driven to become philanthropists, treat people around you without greed and with consideration. Make your living and enable others around you to do so as well. If you aim to save money in order to be a philanthropist, you provoke everyone to be protective and hoard money also in order to control how the money gets spent. The more everyone does it, the more we are compelled and even forced to do it. We need to stop this vicious circle.

The resolution I’m putting forward is not a utopian concept. We simply need more people investigating and adopting business models that can enrich ordinary people’s lives, which can free us from a life bound by servitude and dependency.

In turn, this would empower us to solve our societal problems without asking such billionaires to solve them for us with their accumulated wealth. Nowadays I’m starting to see more and more entrepreneurs and business owners trying to figure this out, and it is quite inspiring. I think the real change derives from the ordinary things we do.

If this type of mission is to succeed and be sustained, the principal function of business must be ordinary. It is impossible for a sustainable economy to remain healthy and upright if it is only supported by the crutch of charitable donations and philanthropy.

The principal drive to better our society must come from ordinary businesses.

Hero-worshipping rich benefactors and philanthropists encourages everyone to accumulate more wealth than they need. We do not need billionaire philanthropists; we need ordinary business owners who treat other humans with respect and encouragement.

They are not rare or even uncommon; they exist all around us if we look carefully enough. It’s just that we are so busy looking up to iconic figures like the Bill Gateses of the world that we can’t see them.

By Justin Hiraga
  / 
Asia News Network

Justin Hiraga is an assistant professor at the Department of International Business Languages of Seokyeong University in Seoul. He can be contacted at jthiraga@gmail.com. –Ed.

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US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s

This photo shows new parents Garrett Goudeseune, 25, Laura Fritz, 27, left, with their daughter Adalade Goudeseune, as they pose for a photo at the Jefferson Action Center, an assistance center in the Denver suburb of Lakewood. Both Fritz and Goudeseune grew up in the Denver suburbs in families that were solidly middle class. But the couple has struggled to find work and are now relying on government assistance to cover food and $650 rent for their family. The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net. Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections. (AP Photo/Kristen Wyatt)

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 per cent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 per cent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county centre. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Centre on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalisation, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionisation that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 per cent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.

"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.

Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.

The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.

The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 per cent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 per cent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.

Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 per cent in 2010 to 8.9 per cent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.

Demographers also say:

—Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 per cent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels — 15 per cent to 16 per cent — will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 per cent and weak wage growth.

—Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 per cent, will increase again in 2011.

—Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 per cent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.

—Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.

—Child poverty will increase from its 22 per cent level in 2010.

Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 per cent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 per cent.

"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 per cent in 2007 to 14.7 per cent.

Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.

"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.

The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as non-cash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.

An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.

A new census measure accounts for non-cash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.

Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 per cent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 per cent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.

Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 per cent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 per cent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.

The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.

His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.

Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."

By Hope Yen Associated Press