Exploitation Goes By Many Names

One of the consequences of the social devaluation of disability is the devaluation of care providers, at the same time they are lauded as brave and heroic for taking on the ‘burden’ of disability; this is seen especially starkly with parents of disabled children, who often encounter the attitude that they are superhuman for not throwing their broken family members on the curb. Disability is not a burden. Needing personal assistants and aides does not make you a burden.

But, caring for disabled people is work. And it is often devalued as work, just as caring for nondisabled children and aging parents is not considered ‘real work.’ It does not escape my notice that the people tasked with this work are most commonly women, and that they are often expected to perform it for free, and to perform it endlessly, with no break. They may not be provided with any alternatives; the choice may literally come down to quitting your job to provide around the clock care without a rest, unless you can get friends and family to pitch in periodically, or institutionalising your family member, often in a facility treated as a warehouse for human beings, rather than a place where people receive care.

Caregiver exploitation is a serious problem with a myriad of presentations, perhaps starting with the exploitation of family members. People who provide assistance to disabled family members are expected to do so for free. Even if they have to quit their jobs, stop pursuing careers, and only leave the house under very controlled circumstances. They are not provided with respite care. This problem is often framed in terms of ‘disability is such a burden,’ when in fact it’s more that social attitudes about caregiving are a burden; people are expected to provide care, will be shamed if they cannot provide it, and are told to ‘just try harder.’ Assistance from the government and community organisations is often limited, especially now, in a time of substantial cuts to disability services.

This is dangerous. It’s dangerous for caregivers, who can experience burnout. Working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without a break, without pay, without benefits, is very, very draining. Caregivers often operate under tremendous stress and this has deleterious health effects. It’s also dangerous for their disabled family members. Burnout can contribute to the development of abuse, whether deliberate or negligent. It can create a sense of desperation and the belief that there is no escape, which, of course, contributes to depression and distress on the part of the disabled person, who starts to feel like a burden. When you feel like a burden, your thoughts tend to drift to ways you could be less of a burden.

Ways like disappearing. You’re not a burden if you’re dead. You’re not a burden if you ask your family to place you in an institution, even if you want to be in your home, if you ask to die so that people don’t have to care for you anymore. These stories are framed as personal tragedies, how unfortunate it is to be disabled, how miserable it makes you. They are social problems. They are the result of living in a culture where caregiving is uncompensated work thrust on the backs of whoever is most convenient. They are a result of living in a culture where you can ask for assistance and respite care, a night nurse, adult day care, anything, and you are told you do not need it, because there’s already a family member at home providing care, so what’s the problem?

Professional caregivers face a different kind set of circumstances. Many are underpaid, whether they are providing home health services to disabled people who can afford them1 or working in facilities that provide care to institutionalised people. Many are also exploited; large numbers of undocumented immigrants with limited training work in long term care facilities. In some cases, human trafficking is involved; every now and then a report about a facility using trafficked workers2 crosses my eyeballs and it makes me wonder how many more of those reports I just didn’t see.

When you are underpaid, when you are working in an exploitative labour situation, that, too, contributes to burnout and stress. Which also creates circumstances ripe for abuse. Whether people in long term care facilities are leaving patients to lie in their own urine out of negligence, or beating them for amusement, it has real consequences for residents.

People approaching the problem of caregiver exploitation from the perspective of caregivers often frame it as an individual problem. They tell us this is not representative of all caregivers, that it’s not fair to tar them all with the same brush. They miss the larger picture, which is the combined devaluation of disabled people and caregivers that contributes to the tolerance of unacceptably exploitative employment situations. Anyone in a position of high stress with no break from work is in danger of becoming a bad caregiver. It’s not a personal problem or failing, it’s a social one. Society in general is failing disabled people and caregivers.

Slashes to budget cuts in places like the US and the UK are leading to a complete dissolution of respite and support services for people with disabilities and caregivers. This means that exploitative employment, abuse, and death are going to go up. This isn’t because disability is a burden and a problem. It’s not because caregivers are inherently evil, awful people who are eager to find ways to torment their subjects. It’s because society in general thinks that people who care for people with disabilities are performing a very special charitable service, instead of engaging in work and doing their jobs.

  1. Which is very few of us, because most of us are poor. ↩
  2. ‘We had no idea!’ ↩
31 May, 2011 – 10:48 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

To Remember the Dead

The origins of Memorial Day lie in Decoration Day, a Civil War-era tradition that began in the South around 1865. The practice of visiting cemeteries in an organised way on specific dates is common to many cultures; in some, you date your cemetery visits on a calendar based on the death of the loved one, while in others, they are organised around a date, like Day of the Dead in Mexico. It is perhaps not unusual that residents of the South, reeling from the catastrophe of the Civil War, chose to take to their cemeteries to mourn, and visit, their dead, to decide to schedule that event for a day that wouldn’t commemorate a battle, lost or won. The holiday caught on, and in the wake of the First World War, rather than being specific to the Civil War, it was adopted to commemorate all war dead from the United States, no matter which conflicts they served in.

Few people visit cemeteries on Memorial Day anymore, other than service organizations who make a point of putting flags on graves. I usually spend time in cemetery service throughout the year, weeding, cleaning and straightening headstones, dealing with flowers, and so forth, and sometimes I schedule a visit for Memorial Day, while in other years, I do not. Cemetery service for me is a complicated thing that I have a lot of thoughts about which I don’t really have room for here; suffice it to say that it is a way of honouring the dead and the sense of community around them, and a way of letting the world know that we do not forget our dead. The regimented rows of military headstones are a silent reminder of a cost of war.

And sometimes it seems to me like people would rather that war remain silent, that we not discuss the costs of war. War is a very abstract thing for many civilians in the United States right now. Many people don’t know servicemembers, let alone servicemembers who have been killed in action. Many people seem to prefer to keep it that way; the war is routinely pushed to the back pages, these days, the casualty counts sink to the lesser-seen portions of the newspaper. We do not even acknowledge our war dead when we talk about things like the tremendous advances in traumatic brain injury treatment, some of which were won at the cost of soldiers’ lives (members of the military in general, throughout history, have made immense contributions to trauma medicine and medical developments that save the lives of civilians every day).

I think of my war dead every day, but they seem especially loud on Memorial Day, clamouring for attention. I see the blatant displays of nationalism in the windows of certain businesses that crop up on Memorial Day, the ‘support our troops’ banners, and I wonder, always, what they are doing to support the troops beyond flying a banner, what it is they do the rest of the year, after they fold their flags up and wash the tempura paint off the windows. Do they think of their war dead? Have they any war dead? Do they contribute to charitable organizations? Do they send things to active duty servicemembers? It is impossible to judge, of course, from a mere flag painted on a window, but my mind creeps around it, some days.

My mind creeps a lot these days, it seems like, sometimes. There are a lot of reasons why war feels less immediate to many civilians now; the lack of a draft is certainly responsible. One of the consequences of an all-volunteer military is that many civilians think they can make assessments about the approximately 1.5 million people serving worldwide right now. There are stereotypes about what leads people to military service, why people pursue military careers, and these play out in the conscious decision to spend a lot of time ignoring the military.

The distance of wars taking place in countries far away plays a role as well, as does the government’s lack of discussion about the war. I very much get the sense that at least part of the government feels like we are fighting dirty wars right now, which means that we are not deluged in signaling and messages about them. We must actively seek these things out. We are not being asked to buy war bonds, to save scrap metal, to be conscious about our use of energy to conserve it for military purposes. We are not being asked, on a personal level, to make sacrifices, and the news doesn’t thrust the war in our face every day because it is too busy, apparently, covering celebrities and royal weddings. CNN certainly doesn’t start coverage at an absurd hour of the morning to cover the wars, that’s for sure.

There’s an attitude that people in the military themselves are isolated from the war, again, a consequence of the belief that it is possible to use your own attitudes about military service to make inferences about members of the military. Being ‘distant’ would most certainly be a surprise to servicemembers on the ground, but also to the people on carriers and destroyers responding to chemical weapons warnings and running boarding operations on ship traffic. This is not ‘distant’ and it comes with real costs. And when you return to the States, you are reminded that most people don’t know what you do or why you do it, let alone care.

And if you return in a coffin, people will say things about ‘wasted lives’ and turn away. Because apparently it is easier to betray our war dead, to throw them away, than it is to face them.

30 May, 2011 – 10:31 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reflections | Tagged , , |

Is Hulu Too Successful for Its Own Good?

Fact: I have never owned a television. When the second Iraq war broke out, I had to borrow one so we could watch. Until a few years ago, the television I watched was limited to what I happened to catch while out and about, and to what I felt like buying on DVD. I tended to wait for shows to end so I could buy the boxed sets, and lagged far, far behind everyone else and their television viewing, which I didn’t really mind. I appreciated and loved the medium as a method of expression, but didn’t really follow it in real time. I suspect sometimes my delayed perspective was at least interesting.

And then various networks started putting their shows online on their websites, and I delved into the wide world of actually watching shows vaguely around the time they aired, right as everyone else was going to DVR and saving shows for days or weeks later. And I sort of dug it, following shows at a more leisurely pace than watching a set of DVDs. It definitely changes the nature of the show in a way you might not be aware of unless your experience of television was like mine, of swallowing great clots of episodes all at once instead of having to wait every week. I got cliffhanger endings more, and also saw where slow pacing could be a serious problem, how you could quickly tired of a show after one or two sluggish episodes that wouldn’t be a problem sandwiched between more active ones if you saw them back to back, instead of a week (or more) apart.

Along came Hulu, running not just current shows but backlogs, and I was in hog heaven. So much television to watch, so little time. Hulu grew pretty rapidly and it’s easy to see why. Right as it started to get big, the economy started tanking. A lot of households were faced with the ‘television or Internet?’ decision and Hulu made it for them. Why pay for television services when you can get most shows for free? And, of course, where’s the tipping point where you decide you don’t need to see a show as it airs for $50 a month and you’d rather buy the DVDs than the expensive cable package?

As recent rumblings suggest, Hulu may actually be too successful for its own good. Television and cable providers are starting to grumble about the loss of revenues from households canceling their subscriptions. I don’t know how much of that can fairly be attributed to Hulu specifically and how much of it is about budgeting and economies in a time when a lot of people start to view television as a luxury they really don’t want to pay for. But Hulu certainly plays a role, and the television industry is clearly starting to have second thoughts about it.

Writing at the LA Times, Dawn C. Chmielewski and Meg James highlight the key issue here:

The crux of the problem is that Hulu’s ad sales are still dwarfed by some $30 billion annually in programming fees that pours into the media giants from cable, satellite and telecom providers. Those fees support the cost of producing content, and undercutting them by steering viewers away from TV and to the Internet would jeopardize the sturdiest financial leg of the TV industry.

It’s not unusual for a content distribution model to move ahead at a faster pace than people are ready for, but the problem Hulu is facing is the need to try to cram itself back into the box, to howls of outrage from the public. Setting up fee-based models for accessing some content (and sweeteners, like allowing people to see shows earlier on Hulu Plus than they can on the free service) is the first step, but I suspect it’s not going to end there. I note, for example, that the service has stopped offering the option of watching a single long ad at the start of a show in lieu of the ad breaks.

Hulu’s struggle is taking place within a larger shift in media. Consumers don’t want to pay for content anymore, and they’re not afraid to complain vociferously and go elsewhere when content providers charge or try to shift their models; look at the brouhaha over the New York Times and its decision to go back to offering a limited number of free articles for those who don’t want to pay for a subscription. What Hulu, the Times, and other publications are learning is that ad-supported media is not necessarily self-sustaining, and that the alternative is charging media consumers for it.

If those consumers aren’t willing to pay, that definitely leaves the content creator in an awkward position. Viewers and readers are still expecting the quality of paid media, but aren’t willing to participate in that process, which leads to situations like news publications soliciting free work, making it harder for journalists to make a living. Hulu’s promotion of a number of web-only shows and events definitely paves the way to soliciting work for free from filmmakers and other video content creators, who then have to finance their sometimes very expensive projects on their own, making some significant cuts to quality so they can deliver for free.

The media has been struggling with this issue for several years and it seems that we have finally reached the tipping point, where unsustainable models are breaking down to the surprise of consumers who have never been in the role of content creators. Content creation, despite being work, often arduous and costly work (have you ever tried conducting investigative journalism without the backing of a major media company?), is treated as a service people should be giving up for free. Hulu’s lessons are about a lot more than whether you should be able to watch House for free online.

29 May, 2011 – 10:01 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged , , |

Save the Environment: Use Environmentally Friendly Bullets

One of Gerald Durrell’s books about the Jersey Zoological Park covers a frustrating medical mystery that occurred at the zoo one year. Abruptly, for no reason they could identify, the waterfowl started dying. They would be healthy, and then they would not be, and then they died. With some necropsies, Durrell and the zoo’s vet determined the cause: lead shot. The birds were somehow finding lead and consuming it, probably thinking it was the ideal size for their crops. With some hunting, they discovered a pile of decaying parcels of lead shot on the bottom of a lake, possibility abandoned during the Second World War. They cleaned up, the birds got healthy, and the crisis was averted.

The story stuck with me, because lead continues to be a significant environmental pollutant. Covering this issue at Grist, Bruce Dorminey notes how quickly lead can kill waterfowl:

The first indication of lead poisoning in birds is lethargy. But by the time the swans start showing lead’s effects, it’s too late to save them, said University of Washington wildlife biologist Mike Smith. Their life span after ingestion is only about three weeks.

Historical sources of lead included a wide variety of products because people were fans of using it in just about everything until they understood how toxic it is. Today, lead use is more limited; you cannot, for example, slap some lead-based paint onto your walls, and people generally seem to agree that lead does not belong in children’s toys, although some manufacturers have apparently not gotten the memo on this particular topic. One continuing source of lead in the environment is the same one Durrell struggled with: ammunition. Dorminey notes that despite some restrictions on the use of lead in the manufacture of bullets, it has not been banned entirely.

While the Environmental Protection Agency has been petitioned to ban all lead in ammunition, it is still legal to use lead shot to hunt pheasants and shoot doves, and for skeet and trap target ranges. So lead shot is still being deposited in various habitats (as are lead sinkers from fishing gear).

It’s not just birds who suffer from lead in the environment; people get sick as well, and so do other animals, who may take weeks or months to die from lead poisoning. Eliminating the use of lead in ammunition would be a significant environmental victory. It’s not the only current source of lead in the environment, but it is a source, and it is one that seems like it should be easy to address. However, the matter has been complicated by the involvement of groups like the National Rifle Association, which sternly resist any activity they see as limiting gun rights. Last year, the EPA caved on the issue under pressure, backing off from regulations on the grounds that they didn’t have the jurisdiction. Let me repeat that: The EPA decided it did not have the jurisdiction to pass regulations to improve environmental health and safety. If the Environmental Protection Agency can’t protect the environment, who can?

Hunters are among the people behind the initiative to switch to lead-free ammunition. They see the impacts of lead poisoning on the natural environment first hand, and are well aware that alternatives are available. Green ammunition is available not just for hunting, but law enforcement and other activities; even the military uses green ammo1. This is a situation where many people who own and fire guns are ready to switch, the ammunition industry is set up to switch, and advocacy groups for gun owners are resisting a lead ban.

People may argue that a lead ban should not be necessary, that people will switch over on their own once they understand the issues and environmentally friendly ammunition is readily available. Banning lead in ammunition is not just about trying to protect the environment, though, it also sends a clear message. Lead is dangerous, it should not be freely floating in the environment, and any regulatory steps we can take to reduce the presence of lead are good ones. These regulations also reinforce each other, because people may reasonably ask why lead should be banned in other things if people can continue to fire lead bullets.

Switching to more environmentally friendly components in the production of a wide variety of goods is a step in a positive direction. This isn’t a situation where a ban would make it functionally impossible to access something. Lead-free ammunition is available, people are producing it, and people are asking for it. There are some concerns about affordability that need to be addressed, and some critics believe lead-free ammunition may not be as effective, which clearly demonstrates the need for a campaign to promote not just the environmentally-friendly nature, but also its functionality. Banning the use of lead in bullets would not infringe on the ability to own, use, and fire guns. The NRA seems convinced that this is some kind of slippery slope, a back door to anti-gun people succeeding in limiting gun ownership. In no small part this is probably because the environmental movement tends to include a lot of prominent liberals, and prominent liberals often support limitations on gun ownership, so it’s a logical connection to be make.

This despite the fact that the people supporting switching to green ammunition, and supporting lead bans, are gun owners. Hunters, one of the NRA’s core constituencies, the people even many anti-gun people seem to agree should be allowed to own guns, are asking for a more environmentally responsible era of gun use. The military is down with green ammunition. It is definitely high time to get the lead out, especially since, much though the NRA seems loath to admit it, the interests of many of its members dovetail nicely with the environmental movement. Hunters want the environment to be healthy, because otherwise they have nothing to hunt!

  1. For our current purposes, we won’t get into the hazardous substances the military also uses in munitions production, including depleted uranium for armour-penetrating rounds. ↩
28 May, 2011 – 10:22 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , , , , |

There’s An App For That: Castle and Teen Privacy

One of my favourite television relationships right now is that of Richard Castle and his daughter Alexis. First of all, I like seeing single dads on television. I also like that his mother lives with them and they have three generations under one roof. Castle and Alexis have an interesting, dynamic, and complicated relationship and I feel like the show explored that much more this season. I hope that’s something they continue to do, because Alexis is an awesome character.

Alexis benefits from her father’s privileges; she goes to private school, and she doesn’t appear to want for financial support, although we also see Castle laying down the line in terms of not endlessly forking out money. She’s sassy and smart and it’s easy to read her as another adult on the show, and to play her that way, except that sometimes her vulnerabilities break through and we are reminded that she’s a teen girl, going through the things that people go through at that age. We see her struggling with shoplifting friends and boyfriend stuff and backstabbing drama.

An interesting storyline came up in March where Castle realises that she’s sneaking around, and uses an app to track her cellphone. He proudly talks about this to other characters on the show and they seem kind of dubious and horrified about the idea, reminding him that it’s a pretty gross violation of privacy. When Alexis finds out, she’s understandably enraged, and the show brought up some interesting issues around teen privacy; Alexis talks about the sense of feeling violated, telling her father that he doesn’t own her, even as Castle talks to other characters about wanting to do anything to protect her. In the end, he deletes the app, saying that he realises what he did was wrong.

I liked this storyline because those apps creep me out, big time. I think they’re incredibly violating, and the ease with which parents can overstep the boundaries of autonomy really appalls me, from monitors to tell whether kids are speeding to geotracking your children. Locking phones and computers to prevent teens from utilizing them to their full extent. And doing all of these things in sneaky, hidden ways so people don’t even realise they are happening until after the fact. Who wouldn’t feel violated by that? Indeed, I feel like this is a topic that comes up a lot with privacy breaches in the news and legal adults howling about how upsetting it is, but some of those same people would turn around and do the same thing to the teens in their lives.

I haven’t raised a teenager, so I can’t speak to the experience from that end, but I have been a teenager, and I feel like the experience of rebelling against restrictions is pretty universal (though not entirely, of course). My father trusted me to make reasonably responsible decisions and he didn’t violate my privacy (that I know of), and it meant that, for the most part, I didn’t do anything particularly dangerous as a teenager. I’m sure he wouldn’t have been exactly stoked about some of the things I did, but, you know, he probably did them himself and he turned out ok, so glass houses, stones, etc.

Whereas the friends I had who were oppressively tracked and monitored by their parents tended to blow up explosively, and sometimes very dangerously, because they had no real outlet. Living in a state of constant distrust from their parents, a state where they weren’t allowed to do anything, there was the obvious allure of the forbidden and it sometimes ended very badly. Things like drinking never appealed to me because I’d been having wine with dinner from a very young age; it didn’t occur to me to sneak out because I could just shout upstairs that I was going out for a few hours, I didn’t hide relationships from my father just as he didn’t hide his from me. We were really more like roommates by the time I got to high school.

Sure, we hid things from each other, but that’s the way with almost all the human relationships I know. Some things you just don’t talk about with certain people. I’m sure he sometimes wondered where I was and what I was up to, but he wouldn’t have used an app to track me even if such a thing had existed, just as I didn’t snoop around in his personal life. He respected me as a person with autonomy who would come to him if I needed help. And he also made no bones of the fact that he was legally responsible for my actions, that wrongdoing I committed would come back on him as much as me, and that was the deciding factor in a lot of my behavioural decisions as a teen. I understood the consequences because they’d been explained. He didn’t sugarcoat things and he pointed out that, for example, being caught doing certain things might result in him being called a neglectful parent, could result in being taken from him and placed in foster care. So I have a real incentive to, you know, not do those things.

Or, at least, to be sneaky about how I did them. And I felt like many of my peers weren’t aware of the consequences of some of their actions not because they were inherently reckless or silly, but because no one had bothered to tell them. With Castle and Alexis, I feel like I get some notes of my relationship with my father, at the same time that the relationship feels kind of alien in other ways. One thing I particularly like about it is that Alexis is a sharp cookie who defies authority and isn’t afraid to tell her father when he’s being a bit of a prat; that, to me, rings particularly true.

27 May, 2011 – 10:48 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender, television | Tagged , , |

Sozzled Sunhats

A programming note: Starting today, I’m retiring the weekday link roundups, for a variety of reasons I don’t really want to get into right now that boil down to ‘it’s a lot of work and I have very limited time right now.’ I may pick them up again in the future and I will definitely have periodic special edition roundups; generally, my Twitter account is a good place to look for links to whatever I’m reading at any given time, including links to my work when I write in other places, which is often. I’d also note that a lot of my link material comes from members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, which is a great site to subscribe to if you don’t already.

Dylan Watson at Jackson Free Press: Freedom Rides Again

As he calmly surveyed its drab, blue-gray interior, the lanky 19-year-old black student from Howard University had no idea that in about two weeks he would come dangerously close to meeting his maker on its floor.

Anthony Pignataro at Sacramento News and Review: Wine & power

Wine is so interwoven with social functions and fine dining that it’s hard to think of it as something political.

Josh Rosenblatt at Austin Chronicle: The Color of Fire

Or more simply: When will the Austin Fire Department finally begin to resemble the city it serves?

John Lasker at Cleveland Scene: The Job Machine

The group hopes to stem the tide of Cleveland’s outward migration, while courting newcomers who can fill vacant jobs — or create new ones for thousands of unemployed locals.

Hannah Sayle at Memphis Flyer: Road to Recovery

Memphians displaced by the historic flooding of the Mississippi River are beginning the long path to recovery, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) moves in to dispense disaster relief funding.

27 May, 2011 – 9:08 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , |

In Shocking News, Not All Ingredients Are Available To Everyone!

We were making dinner, a Thai curry. We’d gone to Harvest to pick up an assortment of vegetables and we were peacefully chopping things in the kitchen and making sure the rice was under control and listening to music and generally having a good time, until I opened the door of the fridge and pulled out a jar, and she tensed. I actually saw her freeze at the cutting board for a moment.

‘What’s what,’ she says, lightly.

‘Curry paste,’ I say.

‘From a jar? I never use curry paste from a jar, I always make it fresh.’

I blinked, for a moment, took a deep breath, and tried to think of the best way to approach this. She is not From Here, you know, and thus she doesn’t understand the layers of problems with the statement she has just made. I could talk about the fact that making curry paste is a pain in the ass, and not even an option for all people because of disability issues or lack of supplies. I could point out that, as a single person, I really dislike making things that don’t keep well for extended periods of time and require a lot of work to make, because I can’t just make a big batch and call it good. That, as a single person, I must make my meal planning practical for my needs and interests.

Or I could talk about the fact that the raw ingredients for curry paste are not available here. That I must drive to San Francisco for a lot of spices, or order them online, where I have limited control over freshness and quality unless I am willing to order and return repeatedly. Sure, I could cobble something together, but it wouldn’t taste right. So, I make curries with curry paste out of a jar. Yes. I do. I have no shame about it.

There’s a lot of snobbery about ingredient availability that always puzzles me on a lot of levels. I want to say that food snobs are just not aware of how they sound, and maybe don’t know about the issues that they are breezily ignoring with snide statements about how other people cook. But a lot of them clearly are aware of these issues, and think that shaming people will somehow address them, like, oh, I will suddenly run out and start making fresh curry paste for all my curries now that I have been sneered at for daring to use a jar. For being ‘inauthentic.’ For failing to toe the foodie line.

In fact, there are significant obstacles to ingredient availability that do not simply go away, no matter how hard people wish they would. Food deserts being perhaps the most obvious; some people cannot even access the raw ingredients they need to satisfy the specific demands of foodies. They do not have stores in their area that will meet their needs. Not even if they make ‘a little trip’ 15 minutes out of the way. No, they have to go hours out of their way, round trip, and that is a bit ridiculous, even setting aside issues like the need to work or care for children or manage disabilities or any number of other things. Some people cannot physically access the ingredients they might need, even if they very much want them.

Affordability, of course, is another significant barrier to access. It is often cheaper to buy packaged foods than the raw ingredients to make similar foods; it is cheaper for me to pick up a box of Kraft than it is to buy macaroni, milk, and cheese. Fresh vegetables and fruits, in particular, are extremely expensive, and yet foodies sneer at poor folks who eat packaged foods and fast food, as though they are just lazy and useless. Not trying to make ends meet and eating what they can afford, even if they are not thrilled to be eating it. Shaming people makes it a personal problem; ‘you don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables,’ instead of a social problem, ‘we need to make fruits and vegetables more affordable.’

Time, too. Time can be a factor when it comes to ingredient availability. Let’s say ingredients are located in reasonably nearby locations that you could easily visit. You may not have the time to work with them, to prepare them, to handle them correctly. You may not have the time to learn how to work with them. Again, even if you want to. We cannot overcome immovable obstacles; the earth will keep turning, it will keep orbiting the sun, the hours will keep progressing, and some of us have less time than others, for a variety of reasons. Especially for single cooks like myself, spending an hour or more on meal prep alone, before we’ve even turned the stove on, is just not an option most of the time. We don’t have the benefit of kitchen helpers, who not only cut down on time but also help us justify the significant time investment for a major meal. Would I like to spend two hours making dinner every night? Honestly, not really, although sometimes I do make a complex meal for the fun of it.

I see people who sneer at me for using tinned curry paste, and I know that they are ignorant, whether deliberately or not. I could take the time to patiently explain why they are full of crap and how they could try dedicating energies to making ingredients more accessible, instead of lecturing people for not meeting their standards, but, really, why bother? For every minute I’m spending trying to educate people, I should be out churning butter, right?

26 May, 2011 – 10:32 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in Food | Tagged , , , , |

Delicious Dragons

Denis C. Theriault at Portland Mercury: The Naughty List for Landlords

The release is Fish’s most forceful action yet after findings released on FHCO’s website on April 20 showed Latinos seeking rental housing reported facing discrimination in 17 of 25 tests compared to prospective white tenants, while blacks said they were treated differently in 15 of 25 tests.

Justin Kendall at The Pitch: At Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Drain found religion but lost a daughter

A decade ago, Drain was a 35-year-old aspiring filmmaker from Florida who wanted to shoot a documentary showing that Fred Phelps and his church were, he says, “full of crap.” He became a believer.

Forrest Wilder at Texas Observer: He Who Casts The First Stone

So imagine the swingers’ surprise when they arrived at their New Year’s Eve bash to find two dozen protesters, local media in tow, holding signs and singing songs. This was a most unwelcome coming-out party.

Camilla Mortensen at Eugene Weekly: Drone on the range

Unmanned aerial vehicles can be as small and virtually undetectable as an insect or a hummingbird (and look disturbingly like one) while the Predator drones being used by the Pentagon in Afghanistan and Pakistan are full-size airplanes armed with deadly missiles.

Mike Smith at NOW Toronto: Layton lament

But despite a few exceptional members who prove the rule, the Liberals – their uncompromisingly tepid platform, their irrepressibly somnambulant leader, their hodge-podge right-wing-but-with-taxes ideology – weren’t much of an option.

26 May, 2011 – 9:37 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

Poor Little Rich People

For those not flying in high tax brackets, rumours are in the air that, to make up for serious budget shortfalls, the government wants to limit eligible charitable deduction contributions for people in the top tax bracket. Museums and other charitable organizations have expressed concerns about this policy change because they think it may create a disincentive for giving, or will make people reluctant to give more than whatever the maximum deduction will be.

Let’s be clear about something. This is not a low cap:

Obama’s proposal would put a cap on the tax rate for itemized deductions at 28 percent for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples earning more than $250,000.

People throw around a lot of reasons for the popularity of philanthropy. Among very rich people, one of the reasons people like to give amply and often is because they can use it to reduce tax liability. That’s not the only reason, but it’s obviously a big temptation. This, like many other tax tricks, primarily benefits wealthy people. Those of us slogging down here in the low brackets usually can’t afford to donate 28% of our income to charity because we need it to, you know, live.

The concerns on the part of organizations benefiting from substantial donations are not without merit. I’d say they are pretty sound, and expose the naked greed behind wealthy contributions to charity. People donating to charity often want to know what’s in it for them, because charity is more about them and their actions than actually making a difference in the world. Will organizations face a disappearance of big donors as rich people look to other methods to hide their income so they can avoid paying taxes?

Because they definitely will. Close one loophole, people will find another one, because that’s how they operate. It’s not that I think this idea, of limiting deductions for wealthy people, is totally pointless or a bad thing. It will definitely create more tax revenue, even as wealthy people continue to pay much less in taxes than the rest of us. And not just in percentages, either; I’m willing to bet that I paid more, in dollars, than many people in higher tax brackets last year. Because, unlike them, I don’t have access to methods to hide my income in order to reduce my tax liability.

What the reactions to this proposal illustrate is that the state of charitable giving is pretty sorry at the moment. Charity is often a performance for wealthy people; people must give publicly, they must be seen giving, they must receive recognition, for them to want to continue giving. And charity must have benefits for the giver, beyond the pleasure of knowing that their monies are funding important and useful things. Givers want their tax candy, and if someone takes the jar away, how many people will continue to donate at the levels that they are currently? What’s in it for them?

Another notable thing about NPR’s coverage of this topic is the stress on where people are most likely to feel the penny pinching: The arts. As the article points out, organizations like environmental charities are not likely to suffer, and likewise with a lot of other social justice organizations. People are not donating millions at one fell swoop to the ACLU to fund the construction of a new wing they can have named after them. The megabucks come out for museums and the like. Museums can certainly use the money and I don’t begrudge it.

I think it’s telling, though, to look at breakdowns of who contributes to what. Wealthy people give to the arts to feel better about themselves, to become patrons, to get their names in bronze over the door. The middle and working class give to organizations working to actively make the world a better place, organizations defending the rights of the environment, people living in poverty, prisoners, and other people not in a position to protect and defend themselves. We have little to give and many of us stretch to the limit to do so, not because we want some juicy deductions on our taxes, but because we think it matters and we believe it is important.

It’s also notable that many middle and lower class donors are reluctant to identify themselves and do not want attention. This is not the case with everyone, of course, but it does seem to be a trend. The focus is not on the benefits to ourselves, on becoming known as charitable people, but on getting funds to where they are needed. Getting money to an organization that can stretch that money and make it go as far as possible. Taking our dollars and using them to fight for a better world. Hell, some middle and lower class people I know don’t even claim deductions for their charitable contributions.

The structure of the tax system in the United States favors wealthy people. This is a pretty established fact. The question here is when poor and middle class people will finally reach the tipping point where they start to push for actual tax reform and a shift in the system. Just for example, the standard deduction is clearly too low, and exposes low income people to unreasonable tax liability. Many people are paying taxes when they shouldn’t be, because they are barely scraping by. Spotting headlines about galleries being sad about not getting more charitable donations is pretty galling in that situation, when you think about the fact that the tax liability those wealthy people avoid through their ‘selfless’ charitable contributions is equal to the wages of a minimum wage worker many times over.

25 May, 2011 – 10:32 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |

Callous Xeroxes

Leilani Clark at North Bay Bohemian: On the Outside

As Jeri Becker’s prison sentence stretched from two years to 24, her life constrained to a cell and a prison yard, she made a vow that when she got out, if she got out, she would live in a cabin by the water.

John Katsilometes at Las Vegas Weekly: Saying goodbye to the once-great Sahara

What I remember most about the night the Sands was imploded was the pause. It was brief, just a couple of seconds.

Linda Xin at New York Press: 8 Million Stories: A Night At Ikea

As the voice over the intercom at the Ikea in Red Hook announced the 10-minute countdown toward closing, I grabbed my soon-to-be roommate and told her to hide under the bed with me. “Quick! Before anyone sees!” I hissed.

Isaiah Thompson at Philadelphia City Paper: Righting the Blight?

And so the banks have simply sat on the properties, in essence turning into slumlords themselves — except for a single batch of properties, including 3310 Argyle which, Moffett learned not long ago, had been sold, along with about 50 other properties, to a company called GCG Investments, LLC, owned by one Manilal Mathai.

Jason Whited at Las Vegas City Life: Two hundred thousand dollars for 33 feet

By the time the Nevada Supreme Court rules on whether the city can seize this private property to finish a neighborhood road, officials could have spent more than $200,000 in tax dollars on the legal fight.

25 May, 2011 – 9:06 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , |