International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

The US media didn't mention it, but October 17 was the UN's International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. It was noticed by the rest of world:

School children in Gaza, cricket fans in India and African church-goers have helped set a Guinness world record for "the largest number of people to 'stand up against poverty,'" U.N. officials said on Tuesday. The record was set when 23,542,614 people stood up ....

The "stand up" campaign was organized to promote the achievement by 2015 of a series of anti-poverty goals set at the Millennium Summit in 2000. It was timed to coincide with Tuesday's U.N. International Day for Poverty Eradication. [Reuters]

Read more about the Millennium Development goals.

What did get some good coverage last week was the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and "Banker to the Poor". WELL DESERVED!

An idea can change the world...Mr. Yunus implemented his idea and his actions have changed lives.

What actions will you take today?

Paul Krugman: The War Against Wages

Check out Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times (October 6, “The War Against Wages”).

In the column, he explains why American wages have not gone up, even though worker productivity has increased. Krugman notes that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 provided protection for workers to organize, and that in 1970, the business community began "a successful campaign to roll back unions."

It should be noted, however, that the roll back began in 1947 with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.

Taft-Hartley dealt a crippling blow to labor unions, as it outlawed secondary boycotts, allowed management to work against union-organizing drives, and allowed the president to force strikers back to work for up to eighty days when the nation's "safety and health" were at stake, along with a series of other policies that fundamentally shifted the balance of power in favor of business.

In order to level the playing field, Taft-Hartley must be repealed.

How ‘Contact’ Shaped America: Columbus & The Roots of Equality

Americans from the United States are rightfully proud of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, which assert that all people are created equal. However, this American belief in equity, which would inspire social reformers and social justice advocates in the United States and around the world, is not grounded solely in European philosophy.

Rather, a strong argument can be made that the American notion of egalitarianism entered modern social thought as a result of European and Euro-American thinkers being challenged by the equality of Native American society, and as a result, a new way of thinking emerged.

The fact is that European cultures, in the time of Christopher Columbus up to the American Revolution, did not have a deep commitment to equality or freedom. Thomas Jefferson believed that Europe was divided into two classes, the rich and the poor, and that under the pretense of governing, the former took advantage of the latter, as wolves prey on sheep.

The European belief that the wealthy were superior to the poor is revealed when one examines who was allowed to participate in political affairs. In late eighteenth-century England, only 1 in 20 men could vote, and in Scotland, only 3,000 men could vote.

To appreciate the great intellectual debt owed to Native Americans, it is necessary to look at what European and Euro-American intellectuals were writing at that time. After examining the record, the consistent theme is that Native Americans lived with a level of equality and freedom greater than that in European society.

In one of the earliest descriptions to reach Europe, Michel de Montaigne, the French essayist, described what the first Europeans saw when they made contact with Brazilian indigenous society. Montaigne reported in 1575 that “Indian” society lacked poverty, riches, or inheritance, and that it was wrong to label this culture as savage or barbarian. Montaigne’s essay, as well as other initial postcontact commentaries that stressed egalitarianism, had a profound impact on European ideas about equity, emerging in the works of William Shakespeare in The Tempest and Thomas More in Utopia.

Over a century later, in 1703, Louis Lahontan reported details of a conversation he had with Adario, a Huron (Wyandot) male, where the latter described how American Indians lived in egalitarian relationships. According to Lahontan’s account, Adario was stunned by the high level of European poverty and repulsed by the inequality between rich and poor. Adario described Huron society as devoid of this type of inequality and argued that this would not be allowed among the Hurons. Once again, these egalitarian ideas had a strong effect on European society, as Lahontan became an international celebrity after his popular writings were adapted and made into plays, operas, farces, and burlesques throughout Europe.

In the period of the American Revolution, Europeans and Euro-Americans continued to be impressed with the level of equality in Native American society. St. John de Crèvecoeur described the American Indian way of life as superior to that of Europeans living in America, since indigenous people lived “with more ease, decency, and peace.” James Adair, who wrote The History of the American Indians in 1775, stated that in every Indian nation a person “breathes nothing but liberty” and lives with “an equality of condition, manners, and privilege.” Benjamin Franklin noted that this high degree of equity and freedom was the reason that many whites decided to go and live in Native American communities; at the same time, Franklin knew of no case where an Indian had chosen to live in white society.

The fact is that a new consciousness was gained from Native Americans about the possibility of living in a society that was both equal and free, and this served as a counterpoint to the “Old World.” Europeans and Euro-Americans had the opportunity to appraise theoretical ideas from the Enlightenment, like Locke’s notion of “liberty, equality, and property” and Rousseau’s “social contract,” in light of what they observed in Native American societies. What came out of this appraisal and reassessment led to the creation of a new philosophy of government based on equality and liberty, where society was not ruled by a monarch, but by the people.