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^^^ February 24, 2004         Substandard Housing

[asfo_del]
Having recently moved to a house that is palatial by any standards to which I am accustomed, I’ve been giving some thought to the issue of housing. Unlike the place we lived in before, with a serious roof leak, no bathroom sink, and a number of other weirdnesses, this is a standard house that a middle class person might live in, except that it’s a two-family. And what I’m struck by is how excessive it is for me. While I’m sitting in a little room by myself watching TV, I’m paying [actually, my parents are] to heat every room in the house, about ten in all [the other apartment is not rented out yet]. Yet central heat, which seems to me to be terribly wasteful, is the norm. It is so much the norm that only the weirdest hovels [no offense to weird hovels, which I very much admire and respect] don’t have it.

I’m not sure if the building code actually requires central heat, but I know it does require hot and cold running water, a certain number of electrical outlets, stairs that are not too steep, and a minimum square footage for every room. And while all of this may seem reasonable enough, and is in fact intended to make sure that everyone has housing that meets minimal standards of usability, what this type of regulation does, in effect, like so many other laws, is to make being poor illegal. So that if you’re poor, you have to live below the legal radar, or you’ll be priced out of any life at all. Yes, the roof leak at our old place pretty much sucked, but if there had been no roof leak the rent would have been one and a half times higher. How else, besides putting up with some substandard feature, can you get a two-bedroom house, albeit tiny, in a borough of New York City for $475 a month? There were trees outside every window, on all four sides of the house, including a cherry tree right beside the porch, which bloomed beautifully in the spring and was laden with cherries in the summer, and countless birds of many different varieties.

When I lived in Providence in the 1980s, in a pretty large apartment on the first floor of a 200 year old house, our rent was $250 a month. We had no central heat. There were two space heaters, one of which was usually broken, and they had to be turned off at night since they didn’t run without constant attention. One day some workers came to redo the bathroom. They tore out everything in the existing bathroom, leaving a bare dirt floor, and didn’t come back for six months. Okay, so that was considerably less than ideal, but we paid no rent for six months. We had a patio that was overrun by waist-high purple wildflowers in the spring, and above the stone steps leading up to the yard was a rose bush that produced lavish blooms of blood-red roses. In the fall, the large side yard was carpeted with brilliant yellow maple leaves.

I know it’s not an easy argument to make, in favor of substandard housing. But that is my argument. Whose standards are they anyway? I’d much rather live in a place that I can afford than a place that is excessive for my needs, and whose excesses I have to pay for, especially if that excess is mandated by the government, which presumes to know what is best for me but is not willing to help me pay for it.

On our former street here on Staten Island, there were at least two trailers, permanently parked, with people living in them. One was tiny, tucked away at the very end of a dead end, almost in the woods. The other one was bigger, within a fenced-in area that was used for car repairs. I thought it was a commercial office at first, but then I realized there were cereal boxes in the window. I’m sure these living arrangements were not legal, just like it isn’t legal to squat abandoned buildings, live in your car, or camp in a vacant lot. And I have little doubt that those living under these conditions would prefer better housing, but it is not available at an affordable price and not provided by the same government that says the solutions people have come to on their own are not allowed. The greatest risk in coming up with an unconventional solution to meet one’s housing needs is probably the law itself, which will protect [some] of your rights as a tenant if you can afford to live by the rules, but will throw you out into the street without warning if you figured out a way to survive on your own that is not officially sanctioned.

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^^^ February 22, 2004         A Decent, Middle Class Life

[asfo_del]
According to Elizabeth Warren, whose book, The Two Income Trap, I mentioned in a recent entry, she had set out to write a book about overspending, but found instead that spending was not the problem that was squeezing the middle class, but the lack of affordable services in the wake of increasing privatization. I agree with her on the evils of privatization, of course, but I also think that spending is a problem. In spite of the high price of real estate, for instance, she says the average living space per person is actually slightly larger now than it was thirty years ago.

There are two separate issues here: the failures of public policy to address basic human needs like health, education, housing, and social services are grave and have forced people of average means to dig deeper into their own pockets. That’s one issue. The other issue is that people of average means have been sold an ideal of wealth and prosperity that requires them to spend beyond their means on items that are not necessities in order to fulfill that ideal. According to standards applied in divorce cases, $6000 a month is considered a normal budget for a household comprised of one parent and one child. This budget, on one income, is affordable for less than one tenth of American adults. Yet it’s considered normal, because you pay for all of the accoutrements that have become the norm for an average family – items like cable TV, video game systems, cell phones, vacations, entertainment, and trendy clothes – that is how much you actually have to spend.

The people who merely accept the conventional norm, and live and spend accordingly, eventually find themselves in deep financial trouble, and they feel cheated. We have been taught to believe that if you have a decent job and make decent money you should be able to afford a decent life. I agree with that. I think everybody should have a decent life, as a matter of fact, even if they don’t have a good job, or any job at all. The reality is, sadly, far different from that. There are over one billion people who don’t even have adequate food or clean water. The great majority of the world’s people cannot afford any kind of housing, let alone health care, transportation, or entertainment.

Bell Hooks is one of the few writers I’ve seen ever discuss this issue. She argues, in Where We Stand: Class Matters, that fantasies of wealth help keep poor people poor. Any one of us can emulate the visible, flashy aspects of wealth by acquiring some of the same possessions of the rich, on credit. But spending money does not make us wealthy, of course. It does just the opposite. Living a decent life, for the one percent of the world’s people who make over $25,000 a year, requires only rejecting the fantasy and reassessing our view of what is decent.

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^^^ February 15, 2004    Busy Writing Elsewhere, and Dwelling Obsessively on Fundamental Attribution Errors

[Richard]
Apologies for being so neglectful of the journal, especially while my main collaborator remains modemless. (And, incidentally, I might have made a minor attribution error in my comments to her last message. The truth is, it was not actually my modem that I had brought to her temporarily; it was a modem that I had borrowed from Mike years ago. So, the modem problem really should be solved by me. But we're working on it...)

Anyway, I have been busy writing -- and reading -- elsewhere on the Internet. My mind has been spinning as a result of some excellent articles posted on some ChuckO-connected sites. Over on Infoshop.org, there has been some very good discussion around an article from Green Anarchy, Issue #15 (Winter 2004) called "The Left Handed Path of Repression." It makes some excellent points about repressive and controlling group behaviors, especially in relation to overly moralistic political correctness, as practiced by groups that are supposedly working toward liberation...but maybe really aren't (which, by the way, is a favorite topic of mine, in case you people didn't know yet). Also, from the same issue, there is another interesting (though not quite as interesting) article, "Liberation, Not Organization," which dwells on the old "formal/informal" or "organizationalist/anti-organizationalist" debate. Actually, with regard to this debate, I don't really agree with Green Anarchy (i.e., that smaller, informal groups are always freer) or the other side, either. I think that in many ways the "organizationalist" versus "anti-organizationalist" debate may be tangential to the main issue that it dwells on, namely, how/whether people organizing in groups really can take greater steps toward the spirit of liberation, collectively guaranteeing maximum freedom and the elimination of hierarchies, at least within their own circles. My own opinion -- or, rather, our opinion, expressed in the Collective Book and the article in Social Anarchism -- is that often groups should adopt formal internal procedures to safeguard against manipulative power struggles, the unfair accusations and incidents of character assassination that often spring from such struggles, and the establishment of hierarchies (whether those hierarchies would be officially acknowledged or not).

Unfortunately, when the "organizationalist" anarchists tout the value of organization, they are more often referring to grand schemes of external organization, such as building regional or continental federations of revolutionary collectives whose total membership combined might fill a large classroom or small auditorium. They usually obsess over that kind of stuff before, if ever, getting to the details of how to set up internal processes that would, to quote myself (from Social Anarchism), help to guarantee internal group integrity and the commitment of their own small memberships.

As I mentioned, I've been writing as well as reading. I've been contributing to the Infoshop dialogues under various pseudonyms, as most people do (although this is the only forum I can think of where I do that sort of thing), and people can find my most recent contributions under the pseudonym "N. Stadt Nyland."

ChuckO makes a very interesting contribution to these discussions in a current post to his blog, Monumental Mistake. Here he focuses on a psychological problem known as the fundamental attribution error, which is "the tendency for humans to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior." This summary, as Chuck points out, accurately describes a very common attitude in the activist "community." As the text states, "In other words, people tend to have a default assumption that what a person does is based more on what 'kind' of person she is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person." Yet, to this concept I would add that within activist circles, many people make a clumsy and superficial attempt at addressing social and environmental forces rather than doing any serious analysis or examining the actual power dynamics within their own groups. So, for example, activists at a meeting might make very obvious assumptions about people's "social privilege" through a quick look around the room (who's white, who's male, etc.)

The worst campaigns of political correctness probably occur when people are superficially judged by some simplistic behavioral checklist related to those assumptions. Often when this is done, the dispositional labeling evetually takes over as the group indulges in the same old blame game. (That man interrupted a woman at the meeting; he must be a sexist!... This plan is being drawn up to help the plight of people of color, and we even have people of color supporting it. But this white male opposes the plan.... He must be a racist!)

I guess I better point out that I, too, support struggles against racism and sexism and also take these problems very seriously; I am also fairly partial to certain feminist critiques and feel that they are important in the overall assessment of the problems within our society (although I have become more skeptical of some critiques as I've gotten older, more experienced, and jaded (thanks especially to my experiences within the activist "community") and, so, I no longer as easily accept so many of them). At the same time, I do think more people need to speak up when political correctness is applied too excessively and simplistically and when any faux pas or transgression of the PC code of conduct is reacted to in unnecessarily punitive, blaming and/or unfair, undemocratic ways.

I've got to admit, though, that personally, I've become increasingly weary from contending with so much crap in activist groups. I think this is why many people quit hard-core activism after a few years and older people often burn out (although some of that trend might be connected to all-too-prevalent youth-centered ageism, one oppressive tendency that these groups just about never address) .

I often feel like an activist burnout these days, as I am so much happier just avoiding direct interaction with activists. People talk about how activism supposedly makes us happier -- in fact, there was some dumb psychological research report to that effect that came out a few months ago which was being electronically circulated by a number of activists under the heading "Activism Makes People Happier" -- but I think it generally just makes me more miserable these days. When I do get actively involved, it's because I think the cause is important enough for me to make the sacrifices necessary to participate. I certainly don't participate to get the glowing feeling of solidarity that the above-mentioned report was talking about. Frankly, I can get much more of that feeling just sitting at home with my cat.

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^^^ February 10, 2004    "Cultivating Profit, Harvesting Poverty"

[Richard]
I strongly recommend that people look at the February, 2004 issue of Monthly Review, entitled, "Cultivating Profit, Harvesting Poverty." If you can afford to shell out $5.00 for this journal, you can find copies at most bookstores or newsstands that carry independent political journals and literary magazines (or at least this is the case in New York City). If you can't pay the $5.00 for this issue, you can actually find it on their Web page, as they faithfully adhere to their commitment to "place these articles at no charge on our Web site to serve all the people who cannot afford Monthly Review, or who cannot get access to it where they live."

The February issue, as you might guess, contains many of the grim statistics about both U.S. and global poverty that you'll find here at Living on Less, though some figures may be more recent than some of the ones that we've obtained. Throughout the issue, you'll also find many statistics and other concrete examples showing how inequality has been rapidly growing in the U.S. and in the world.

The best source of this information is probably Michael D. Yates' article, "Poverty and Inequality in the Global Economy". For example, Yates informs us that:

In the United States in 2000, income inequality was greater than at any time since the 1920s, with the richest 5 percent of all households receiving six times more income than the poorest 20 percent of households, up from about four times in 1970.

In other parts of the world, the increase in inequality is even worse. Referring back to information originally mentioned in an earlier (November 2002) issue, Yates tells us:

In China and India, the world’s most populous nations and two of its fastest growing economies, inequality is growing rapidly. In China, once an extremely egalitarian country, income inequality is now barely distinguishable from that in the United States. China has witnessed perhaps the greatest income redistribution in history. In India, "Most of the benefits of...rapid economic growth are going to the wealthiest 20% of society." There, "350 million [persons] -- more than a third of the population -- live in dire poverty... In Calcutta alone, an estimated 250,000 children sleep on the sidewalks each night."

Yates also points out something you rarely hear economists and pundits discuss, the fact that "equally poor people will be worse off in terms of many social indicators if they live in the state or country with the greater income inequality." And, citing Paul Krugman, Yates points out something we've repeatedly pointed out, that:

It now appears clear that in the United States -- whose politicians and pundits are always touting the myth that “you can be anything you want to be” --it is “increasingly apparent that the secret to success is to have a successful parent.”

But maybe I shouldn't focus exclusively on the Yates article, as the other two anti-poverty features in this issue contain important information, too. "A Precarious Existence: The Fate of Billions?" by Fred Magdoff discusses local and global hunger and "food insecurity" in a world in which there actually is enough food to go around, while "Rice Imperialism: The Agribusiness Threat to Third World Rice Production" by Matthew Clement discusses the "potentially disastrous" implications of certain corporate manipulations within the global food market.

All of these articles make a point we'd expect to be made by a Marxist journal, that capitalism stinks. They also consistently drive home the point that capitalism with corporate globalization and "free trade" agreements stinks even more. It is important to focus on and emphasize this latter point in the coming months, considering that we're unlikely to see it made much during a presidential election between two rich men who've consistently supported corporate globalization and "free trade" agreements. (And by the way, for some good info on Kerry's record, check out the February 8 post by The Autonomist.)

Among the radical publications that I see regularly, Monthly Review is definitely one of the best-researched and most accurately critical journals around. And this issue, in particular, might repeatedly serve as a reference for installments in our blog.

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^^^ February 10, 2004         No Internet Connection

[asfo_del]
I moved recently. For a few days, I had no phone, because it hadn't been turned on yet at the new place. Then for a couple days, the phone was not in our apartment, because Verizon mistakenly connected our phone line to the downstairs apartment (then tried to say we would have to pay them to fix their obvious mistake!). Now the phone is okey dokey, but I can't go online. Don't know why. The connection lasts for about four or five seconds, then drops. By the way, yes, I do have a dial-up connection, which costs me $10 a month, an amount I already find somewhat exorbitant. So until this one is puzzled out, I will not be making many entries. The last two were saved to a disk and delivered manually to Richard when he came over.

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^^^ February 9, 2004         Middle Class Poverty

[asfo_del]
I recently saw the author, on TV [on both NOW with Bill Moyers and on Dr. Phil (yep...)] , of a book about the current reality that two-income, middle class families in the United States are finding themselves so squeezed for cash that they are having trouble surviving. The Two-Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren. I have not read the book, and this entry is not about the book, nor is it even about the remarks I heard on the author's television appearances. It's about a nagging, troubling idea that seems to die hard: if you're middle class, if you have a middle income, then you're somehow entitled to a life of comfort that is unavailable to the poor - and if it turns out that you have to live like others whom you consider poor, well, that's terribly unfair! The corollary: poverty is fine for the poor, but it's unsuitable for the middle class.

Societally, that is actually correct, in a dry, mathematical sort of way: if the very wealthy are taking such a disproportionate share of the available resources that everyone is feeling the pinch, not just the poorest but even the relatively well off U.S. middle class, that is shameful. If there were such a thing as a living wage, if needed social services, particularly health care, were provided by the state, and if there were less privatization of the resources necessary for survival, then middle income people in rich countries like the U.S. would be able to live reasonably comfortably. And that would be a good thing. If the very wealthy shared just a little more of what they have, the situation would be slightly less shameful.

On the other hand, we're talking about people who, with two combined incomes, are making something like $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The majority of the people on earth make less than $1000 a year. 1.3 billion survive on under $370 a year. The "middle class" as it is conventionally understood makes up less than one percent of the world's people. Ninety nine percent of the world's population has an annual income that is below $25,000. Sure, it sucks that the middle class are being robbed by the wealthy, but the very poor, who are the vast, overwhelming majority, are being robbed to an astronomically greater degree.

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^^^ February 5, 2004    Maybe, Finally, Something Creative is Coming out of the Democratic Primaries

[Richard]
Thank you to Magpie for letting me know about the first potentially creative movement to be influenced by the Democratic primaries. If only I had one of those newfangled computers with sound cards, I would take advantage of it. But I think the people out there with all the right computer equipment might find something interesting here. Apparently, there are some sites where you can get dozens of techno remixes of the Howard Dean scream (which hip Dean supporters are actually treating as a good thing rather than a bad thing). And more people are submitting remixes every day.

Unfortunately, I never saw or heard the infamous Howard Dean scream, because I haven't seen any primary coverage on TV. I've gotten most of my coverage from the Internet (in text and silent photos), and a little from the newspapers now and then. Whenever I'm home, I just never get the urge to turn on the TV. I sometimes watch TV at friends' houses, but then I only watch Jeopardy or episodes of some of the current dramas and comedies. So, I'm afraid I probably missed the most memorable moment in the primaries on TV.

Nonetheless, I'm hoping that maybe someone will make a compilation CD out of all this. In fact, some record company out there will probably do exactly that, because they know that screaming politicians sell records.

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P.S. My linking to the above-mentioned site should in no way be interpreted as an endorsement of Howard Dean. If I had to endorse somebody for the primaries, I guess it would be Kucinich or Sharpton, but that's not where I'm putting my energies. I'm more interested in trying to get across some real aternative visions during the protests around the RNC. As to whether that will actually happen, well, we'll see...

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^^^ February 1, 2004    Nice to be In Print

I am delighted to report that the Common Wheel Collective has a feature article out now in Social Anarchism #35 (2003-2004). (The issue is $6.00, available from Social Anarchism, 2743 Maryland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA; it's also at various bookstores and newsstands. For info on Social Anarchism and back issues, go to http://www.socialanarchism.org.)

The article is entitled, "The Machiavellian Circus: How Well-Meaning Collectives Degenerate Into Power Struggles & Purges." There's probably no need to explain it much further, as the title sums it up pretty well.

I actually didn't know that people were receiving the new issue until I saw a message last week at this very interesting blog called Thanksgiving Is Ruined. I was then able to find a copy (among several) at the Universal News across from the subway on 72nd Street in Manhattan's Yupper West Side. (Incidentally, it's too bad that they closed their branch at the bottom of Manhattan -- the branch that they boasted about being right near the NY Stock Exchange and the best place for selling "business/finance" publications -- because this was the place I always used to go to on my way to the ferry to pick up copies of Earth First and Green Anarchy.)

I'm kind of hoping that we receive our contributor's copies sometime soon, but at least I have one copy to show people right now, and the people at Social Anarchism do put out a really nice honest-to-goodness print journal.

In a short time, we will also have articles ("reprints" from the Collective Book) out in Practical Anarchy. This publication actually was planned first and it's too bad that circumstances prevented it from appearing first, but I'm happy that we've got stuff in both publications regardless of the order.

There's something very nice about being in print and there's something really cool (I think) about getting a collaborative or collective article out in print. I like the Net just fine (especially the blog world), but the old writer me sometimes gets a special thrill from contributing to a publication (especially a good journal or magazine) that you can actually pick up at a bookstore, library, or newsstand. With any luck, maybe we'll be able to continue producing articles in both formats for a while.

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