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I’ve taken way too long to post something here. I have, however, been working my way through several books recently and I hope to review all of them at once soon.
Grace and peace,
Jared
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Please support the changes that Senator Akaka has put forth. This country needs its veterans to receive quality educations and job training to make this country greater than it is now by contributing to our corporate civic life as well as our economic well-being. Please do everything you can to see that this bill becomes law.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
My last post reminded me of another episode of The Journal. The idea that we benefit from free trade principles because it lowers prices is a tactic that a rich man uses to mollify the working class into believing that right-wing economic policies will benefit them.
In August of 2008 the Journal ran excerpts from a documentary by Exposé titled The Business of Poverty. I’m going to post a little bit of the transcript here then a few of my thoughts. You can follow the link above to watch the full episode, or follow this link to the transcript. So here goes:
SILVIA CHASE:Brian Grow is a reporter in Atlanta for BUSINESSWEEK magazine. It was late 2006 when that advertisement with a slew of asterisks caught his attention. Soon after, a think tank report arrived on his desk. As he read it, Brian grow began to connect some dots.
BRIAN GROW:Matt Fellowes, at Brookings Institution, published a report called “From Poverty, Opportunity” how more companies were looking at low-income Americans as a very attractive business opportunity.
Sort of defies conventional wisdom that the low-income consumer is a segment of the market, where most companies wouldn’t want to play. And it was pretty powerful and fascinating.
MATT FELLOWES:I’ve estimated in my research that among the bottom 25 percent of households, they’re collectively bringing in about 650 billion dollars every year.
So you can imagine why an amount of money that large is attractive to a great variety of businesses, from large financial services companies to new, uh, to entrepreneurs looking for innovations to serve this market.
SILVIA CHASE:That the poor can be lucrative to big business was intriguing enough to the reporter. But Matt Fellowes’ evidence for that case was even more so. The Fellowes report noted that wages have been stagnant for years; to compensate the working poor are buying items small and large by taking out loans from companies all too happy to lend them the money at a very high rate.
MATT FELLOWES:Lower income families tend to pay higher prices for nearly every basic necessity from groceries to the price of a car to the price of a mortgage.
MATT FELLOWES:Between 1989 and 2004, they borrowed about 240 percent more debt than they did in 1989. So there is this enormous increase in the amount of debt held by low and moderate level income houses.
SILVIA CHASE:BUSINESSWEEK may be considered an unlikely publication to take on a poverty investigation — based in New York City, it is a magazine that, like the corporations it covers, has traditionally viewed the world from the top down. But the think tank report hinted at a story a business magazine could embrace: an industry based on poverty, serving 25 percent of the American population.
PAUL BARRETT:The aha moment was that we could show a marketplace could be exploited, both in the neutral sense of exploited, just profits could be found; and exploited with the connotation of people being taken advantage of.
SILVIA CHASE:One player which for BUSINESSWEEKepitomizes what the magazine calls ‘the poverty business’ is the company that sold Roxanne Tsotsie her car: the company with the bright orange and blue signs. It’s called J.D. Byrider.
BRIAN GROW:When you go to a J.D. Byrider lot, if you’re paying attention then what will strike you as different, is that there are no prices on the cars. Which for most people would be what, how, why?
PAUL BARRETT:Their method is quite creative. The interest rate depends on what they think they can get out of you. So they basically debrief their customers to a much great degree than you could imagine.
SILVIA CHASE:The company uses sales techniques that brought lawsuits from Attorneys General in Kentucky and Ohio alleging that customers were being misled. The Kentucky case created a public docket that included J.D. Byrider corporate papers.
This is sick. Taking advantage of the poor is, and always has been, incredibly easy. There’s a reason there are so many passage in scripture intended to protect the poor. The poor are not typically the parasites in a community, it’s the rich that take advantage of the poor and the working and then tell them that they aren’t working hard enough when they aren’t rich. I have a serious problem with this kind of thing. What to do?
Life is not getting better for the poor anywhere in the world. Could it be that the ideology that tells us that wealth is a morally good thing, in and of itself, is corrosive to families, communities, economies and people’s lives? Are we freer when markets, rather than people, control things? Can democracy bring about the necessary conditions to rein wealth in to the benefit of the public? I hope it can.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
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I’ve been in San Angelo for something like twenty days now. I miss my wife, I miss my son. Right now I just get to talk to them on the phone and I watch a slide show of pictures that serves as my screen saver. It’s a barrage of pictures that remind me of the last three years.
When Euan was first born I didn’t feel anything. I was scared that it wouldn’t ever click, that he would just be some kid I did things for. For the first couple of months most of what I felt was fear. I was petrified that this would make me a bad father. But that was nothing new. This was just the newest iteration of a fear that I’d had my whole life. But eventually, it happened. It was new and heavy and exciting and stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. I had known people I loved, people I would do anything for. But this was a tangible feeling. It didn’t make sense to me, because feelings are only loosely attached to physicality. You get a hot feeling because of stress, but it’s not stress.
This deluge of emotion made me need more. There was so much going out to this little boy that I had to pull something from outside of myself. My wife doesn’t know it but I pulled from her. Well, she knows, but not in the, “I’m wearing a blue shirt right now,” kind of way. She knew vocational, like how a table knows there’s a lot of weight on it. But love is a good thing right? I relied on a woman who wasn’t always up to being relied upon.
Through that time, I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t realize that I was being compelled to come closer to this person. It’s hard to see through late-night fights, but I tried. I just didn’t have the best perspective. I had no focal point, I just want to get to the other side. It’s kind of how I live my life in general. I want to lose weight right now, so I run. But when I run I just want to finish. I don’t connect the one with the other in my mind.
That’s kind of how I approach my marriage. I want to be a good husband, and I understand that’s requires me to do the things that a good husband does; changing diapers, washing dishes, cleaning litter boxes folding laundry, etc. But when I do those things it’s not in my mind to be something, I’m just trying to get something done. And I can be a dick when I want to get something done and other people are around. Two weeks ago I was driving along and I saw a river. I thought to myself, “Laura would probably want to go there, if she were here.” It made me really miss her. I think that that feeling made me realize that I had finally had a moment very similar to what happened when Euan was an infant. I wasn’t just dong the things that a good husband does, I was very clearly feeling the things that a good husband feels.
It may sound like I’m saying that this was new. It’s not new, it’s just never been so clear before. But then again, most things don’t make sense for me until the end. I’ve read whole books and not known what the hell I’m reading until I get to the end. It’s probably better that it happened now, ,while Winston is in love with Julia and Boxer is still safe, rather than later in room 101 or the glue factory.
I miss my wife…
Grace and Peace,
Jared
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The following is a message that Sojourners asks its readers to send to their district representative in the U.S. House. The last paragraph is my personal contribution, the rest is the text that Sojourners generated. I’d like to add that if at some point in the future it becomes feasible (i.e. I have the money and it becomes remotely possible for someone who is not a Republican to win in this district) I will try to take this seat from Michael McCaul. He is the spoiled, thoughtless kind of Republican elitist that is doing damage to this country in a number of ways. I know it may not mean much, but I’d like to go on record as saying that, even if I have to run as a Democrat, I’d like to see this man lose his seat. Maybe someday.
Representative Michael McCaul
U.S. House of Representatives
131 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-0001
Dear Member of Congress,
Please vote YES on health-care reform.
Despite the long months, heated debates, and tough negotiations,
millions of Americans are still uninsured, insurance companies
continue to deny coverage, and health-care costs are bankrupting
families.
As one of God’s children, I believe that protecting the health
of each human being is a profoundly important personal and
communal responsibility for people of faith.
Thank you for all of your hard work over the past months on this
legislation. I understand the bill might not be perfect, but
extending coverage to millions of Americans and passing crucial
insurance regulations is the right thing to do.
I think that it is time to put parochial concerns aside, leave
personal wealth on the periphery and consider the needs of our
neighbors. Pleas support the reforms this legislation contains.
I’m sure you’ve held your nose on votes before.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
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First, I think that rights are granted to individuals by their creator. Second, states have responsibilities to their citizens and inhabitants. And third, if they are unable or unwilling, which mot of our states have proven themselves to be, then we need to take another course of action. The same thing happened when we let wealthy powerful interests run our economy into the ground in the twenties. We’re almost back where we started.
I remember hearing a lot of this nonsense when Clinton was President, but not so much when Bush 43 was. I wonder why…
Grace and Peace,
Jared
This is a fantastic book that I’m reading for the second time right now. Noll does a fantastic job bringing some major events in the history of Christianity into this condensed volume for Christians who have never had formal exposure to Christian history.
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1. I yell at old people on the street while driving my car.
2. I committed my first federal offense at the age of five.
3. I started the largest forrest fire in US history.
4. I pooped a squirrel.
5. I still wear Member’s Only jackets.
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I never thought the day would come when a The Daily Show with Jon Stewart elicits the same response that a show like Moyer’s Journal. But it did.
I think that maybe CNN, Fox and MSNBC need to pack it in. Those guys suck. I’ll take Stewart and Colbert over those jackasses any day.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Anglopressy 