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While newspapers and magazines write stories about the top ten schools in India – the schools where Microsoft and Oracle do their "body-shopping" – there is no mention of the 30 out of 100 children that never receive any schooling at all. Out of the 70 who enter first grade, another 35 drop out by the fifth because of economic pressures. Of the remaining 35, only 10 make it through junior high, and a mere five actually graduate from high school. The system manages to get rid of all the undesirables before they come to college and lead demonstrations.
Even more haunting are the hundreds of worldwide acclaims to fame of organizations, and famous people donating money- putting band-aids on open wounds that need surgery to heal. Yet this is what makes it into the international press. The preponderance of evidence showing media ignorance, covering, disinformation and exploitation has been brought forth. Yet we must ask the overall question of: what impact does this have on poverty and those suffering from it?
The answer to the question can easily be surmised. All you would have had to do is ask Salt Lake City and Atlanta’s homeless right before and after the Olympic games were held there. But wait- unfortunately, your patrons were not there. It is not because they did not exist before, or do not exist now- but because of legislation that allowed the two cities to ‘clean-up’ and extradite, force or erase the ones there. Homeless rights groups [in Atlanta] documented 9000 [homeless] arrests between May 1995 and May 1996, four times greater than earlier years (Dixon, WWW).Furthermore, policies in Atlanta were passed such as anti-loitering and anti-begging by-laws- an ordinance that allows police to arrest people in car parks who are "acting in a manner not usual for law-abiding individuals". Similar laws were created in Salt-Lake City prior to the Olympic Games (Dixon, WWW). None of these policies were in the news under their true intent- to wipe out the ‘bane’ of middle-class suburbia: the idea that inequity still exists around them. The impact of this media ignorance further allows other legislators to use the poor for their own gain. For example, President Bush. “His view, [is that] the poor are poor because of bad choices. Many Americans agree with him, and supported wholeheartedly tough welfare reform measures in 1996 that restricted their family size, locked them up for fraud and minor drug infractions, and punished children for their parents’ mistakes. The sentiment of such programs is if we can just make the poor "more like us," they will be much better off. Welfare has ceased being an anti-poverty tool and became instead an array of behavior modifiers (Pieper). These insinuations that President Bush are completely sound- as he was reciprocated his policies towards the poor from his Texas reign, nationally. Just recently in fact, Bush cut all funding to the PERKINS loan, which subsidizes education costs for poor students. Moreover, over the past two years, health and drug funding has decreased 20% that would otherwise go to needy families and homeless patients.
Our foreign policies on poverty mire our domestic ones. An example cited by Oxfam International: the African country of Mali received $37 million in U.S. aid last year, but lost $43 million to falling export prices for cotton, which is heavily subsidized in the United States (Sac Bee Oct 10 2002). Our loans and subsidies to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund make thousands rich, and keep almost seven hundred million poor. Yet the media do not report these things, and thus, the impoverished and poor continue to suffer. They do not account for the different perspectives on poverty nor do they relate back to the causes of poverty- never quite making that leap, or mentioning such politically unsavory words as ‘exploitation’ in their reports and articles. As a result, citizens of all different regions of the world are not only misinformed, but rubber stamp legislation that does not help the homeless.Out of fourteen hundred homeless shelters in America, all of them have different bureaucratic rules that limit the type of help they can give, that often ostracize the people they are trying to help. In fact, most women who need medical need will not get it, for fear of being reported to local authorities- since in California the homeless are required to have pre-natal care, by law. Women, men, children- all are affected. Yet President Bush calls for a policy of assimilation (Pieper). Certainly the Dawes Act more than a century ago and the attempted assimilation of the Native Americans still have no bearing on people’s decisions. The fear instilled in the homeless and impoverished keep them from getting the aid that is out there, and yet they know better than all of us that shelters and food drives are a temporary fix- so many avoid it and the people who think they’re helping the poor. The media has undermined the processes of reform and restructure and therefore their actions are not only exploitative to the poor, but to the very people they claim to serve: the people.
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Michael Newton-McLaughlin
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Perceptions of waste Scott Zoltok | Jul 31st, 2013
Here's an interesting story on changing perceptions of waste in society:
http://tigurl.org/jfbnn7-of-sustainability-sweden-runs-out-of-garbage
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