A Hidden Housing Crisis

"To a large extent, the fact that one-third of the nation still is ill-housed is a hidden problem. Lack of affordability - our number-one problem - and its broader implications on poor people's lives is not something the fortunate among us experience or even know about."
-Chester Hartman, housing advocate-

Read "The Real Housing Crisis", a call for a grassroots effort to solve a burgeoning housing crisis for the bottom third of society. Consider these statistics cited by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. As they report, "lack of affordable housing forces 74 percent of extremely low income renters to pay more than half of their incomes toward their homes, compared to 26 percent of renters in any income group."

What Would Guy Debord Say?

The first line of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle reads, "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." Debord's ideas were the first that came to mind this morning while I was reading through the Washington Post and happened upon an article entitled "FCC Seeks To Rein In Violent TV Shows," which details the renewed debate over what can only be labeled as television censorship. Using the public interest argument, the FCC has concluded that "based on hundreds of comments from parents, industry officials, academic experts and others...Congress has the authority to regulate 'excessive violence' and to extend its reach for the first time into basic-cable TV channels that consumers pay to receive." The report, commissioned by Congress in 2004, would demand that Congress develop a tenable definition for violence that could make its way through a court review.

Right after reading the Washington Post piece, I read "News Flash: Anything This Graphic Should Never Have a Logo" by Simon Dumenco (in this morning's AdAge), which made Debord's words only ring more true to me. Dumenco, writing about the Virginia Tech tragedy, observes that "every news outlet was doing exactly the same thing: marketing the massacre with graphics. We're all used to -- inured to -- the graphical dumbing down of major events by news outfits, but last week's insta-branding was out of control. Particularly at CNN." All of which has made me wonder that, in a world in which news outlets use the tools employed by the entertainment industry, doesn't everything merely become a "representation" rather than a "reality"? In other words, hasn't the blurring of entertainment and television journalism socialized a numbness to the effects of violence? I don't see how an act of Congress can fix that any time soon.

When Students Become "Leftovers"

"Fed up with low graduation rates and sometimes chaotic classrooms, schools chancellor Joel Klein has decided to kill off large neighborhood schools like Tilden and replace them with smaller, oftentimes more specialized ones. Klein is joined in this push by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and by a cadre of wealthy donors, notably Bill Gates. In recent years, the Microsoft multibillionaire has poured in $51.5 million to help the city open microschools, some of them occupying real estate recouped by closing places like Tilden."
-Jessica Siegel-

Siegel's Village Voice article, "Small Order," explores a new education initiative in New York City whereby larger schools will be closed to open smaller specialized schools, an effort to provide students with more choice. Siegel, who taught for twelve years in New York City public schools, profiles one such large school, Samuel J. Tilden High School. She finds that it's not so much the students who are getting a choice as it is the schools themselves. As Tilden student Carlos Richardson explains, "In a way, it's discrimination. They want to get us out of the school to get more high-quality students." This is in the face of a quality review of the high school not less than a few months ago. As activist and mother Ana Cartanega says, "Joel Klein, Mayor Bloomberg and their consultants came up with this scheme without ever asking parents or teachers what is working and what needs to change." After reading Siegel's article, check out the NYC Public School Parents blog.

Indisputable Poverty (in America)

"According to the Census Bureau, nearly 37 million Americans - 12.6 percent of the population - were living in poverty in 2005. That means that four years into an economic expansion, the percentage of Americans defined as poor was higher than at the bottom of the last recession in late 2001, when it was 11.7 percent. But that's not the worst of it. Recently, the bureau released 12 alternative measures of poverty, and all but one are higher than the official rate."
-The New York Times-

Read more of "Counting the Poor".

Genetic Justice

First introduced in 1995 by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar on March 29. With over 1200 genetic tests in existence today (growth from just 100 genetic tests 10 years ago), increased genetic information will become accessible through testing. It would follow that legal protection is necessary so Americans can be free to put their health concerns first without fear of discrimination, however, the bill has failed to make it through Congress since its introduction nearly 12 years ago.

Read more about why we need a bill to protect against genetic discrimination here. You can also read more about how genetic discrimination affects lives: check out the testimony of Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute before the House Subcommittee on Health, Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Shopping Mall Statistics

"Forget statistics on literacy, child mortality and access to clean piped water: here in Angola, the shopping-mall is the key indicator of social and economic development."
-Lara Pawson-

In her article "Angola: Worlds In Collision" Pawson explores socioeconomic stratification in Angola, where condos are on the market for as much as $2 million, a few minutes drive from the Belas Shopping center, while millions of other Angolans continue to live in substandard conditions.

Tehran Trap

"It is difficult not to feel a sense of deja vu. The entire history of the Islamic Republic of Iran since its foundation in 1979 has been characterised by the attempt of its rulers to stigmatise dissent and opposition with the taint of treasonable collusion with Iran's external adversaries...Throughout, the most enduring and dangerous of these oppositional forces - albeit very often the most ignored by those outside Iran ostensibly committed to the country's democratic advance - has been the organised working class of Iran."
-Shora Esmailian and Andreas Malm-

Interesting article on the working class movement in Iran from 1979 through the present day. Esmailian and Malm explore how Iran's leadership proclaims confidence and ambition but it draws power from a "western threat that enables it to target and crush grassroots protest." Read "Iran: The Hidden Power" here.

A Diseased Health Care System

"Five years ago last month, the Institute of Medicine released a congressionally-mandated report, Unequal Treatment, concluding that minority patients receive a lower quality of health care than whites - even after taking into account differences in health insurance and other economic and health factors. Authored by a blue-ribbon panel assembled by the nation's foremost health and science advisory body, the report went on to say that such inequalities in health care carry a significant human and economic toll and therefore are 'unacceptable.' Yet despite these urgent appeals, little has been done to address disparities - leaving too many Americans vulnerable to inequitable and inadequate health care."
-Brian D. Smedley and Alan Jenkins-

Smedley, Research Director of The Opportunity Agenda, and Jenkins, Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, make recommendations for ending inequality in health care in their article "Unhealthy Inequality".

Newsboys

"'While it might be tempting to say 'The Daily Show's' lack of diversity is a deliberate result of the white-male dominated media they parrot, the truth is the new guard looks a lot like the old boys' club,' said Matthew T. Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington organization that also studies diversity."
-Felicia R. Lee-

Felicia R. Lee profiles Larry Wilmore, the the resident "senior black correspondent" on The Daily Show. The joke, as Lee writes "is that Mr. Wilmore is the show's only black correspondent." Read her article "They Call Me Mister Correspondent" for more on how the new guard of news correspondents (real and fake) is just like the old boys' club of news correspondents.

Pay Day

"Some people say pay disparities between women and men are an illusion - women just like to choose jobs that pay less because they're not as risky or have shorter hours. But the data don't back up these claims. Even when researchers take into account such factors as part-time work or time out of the work force to care for kids, the numbers show that men make more. Another problem that just won't go away is that so-called "men's jobs" like plumbing, pay more than "women's jobs," like nursing. That tells us something about what we value as a society, and it's not women's work."
-Martha Burk-

Equal Pay Day again is coming up on April 24, the day when women's earnings catch up with what men made by December 31 of the previous year. Read Burk's article "Give Women a Fair Pay Day" for more on the continuing fight for pay equity.

Lost Girls

"If Lucilia were a 13-year-old Chinese girl smuggled to New York and made to work in a Queens brothel, she would not be seen, in the eyes of the authorities, as a prostitute at all. She would be a sex slave, a victim of human trafficking, and if she had the good fortune to be discovered by the police, she would be given federal protection and shielded by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. But she's not."
-Jessica Lustig-

Read Lustig's "The 13-Year-Old Prostitute," an excellent article, published by New York magazine, exploring child sex slaves within our own borders and our legal system's neglect of them. As she writes, "In this separate-but-unequal legal system, Lucilia's only real crime was being born an American citizen."

Race Still Matters...But How?

"If white-black conflicts are no longer the most salient, what are the main lines of enmity and alliance? Several social scientists are helping to make sense of the emerging landscape of race and politics in the contemporary American city, where the old social divisions have been reconfigured. Their work reveals that gentrification is still contested and economic development does not end up benefiting everyone, but predicting the winners and losers is getting harder. Minorities may be on the winning side more often than not."
-Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh-

Venkatesh, professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University and author of "Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor," examines the new politics of urban gentrification through work by William Julius Wilson, Lance Freeman and Mary Patillo. Read the article "Urban Puzzle" here.