When I first moved here, the Colombian concept of Strata was one of the most difficult things for me to get my head around. Colombia defines economic difference within a unique legal framework, called “strata.”

The house or apartment building that you live in is designated by a government body as being in a zone or stratum, 1 through 6; those in Estrato 1 supposedly are those in the poorest urban areas and those in 6 in the richest. Accordingly and depending on where you live, you have a different tax rate and you pay very different rates for your public utilities. Public utilities include gas, electricity, water, and telephone. More or less, in terms of taxes and monthly bills, the government has outlined how the rich living in Estrato 5 and 6 need to pitch in to help the poor, those who live in Estrato 1 and 2. This exchange is often referred to as cross-class subsidy. Bottom line, the rich pay more, the poor pay less.

This has been going on for more than 30 years, made possible by a series of laws that began to come into effect in the 1980’s. A 1994 law specifically outlines how municipalities should classify their populations based on the characteristics of their housing, taking into account criteria such as garage, front yard, facade, construction materials, access roads and neighborhood. Basically, the distribution of social subsidy is based on a subjective visual perception of your place of residence. Income is not one of the criteria used.

To confound matters, landmark buildings and neighborhoods, including Bogotá’s central colonial La Candelaria, are given protection and classified as Stratum 1. Even though a historic home purchased today in La Candelaria might run you well above a $1 million, your monthly bills will be subsidized by those living in Stratum 5 and 6 buildings, many of whom most likely are living in housing that cost well below a million dollars. Owners of a designated patrimonio, or landmark building, on a street in a Stratum 4 neighborhood, will have benefits not available to their neighbors.

Further anomalies abound. I live in a building whose utilities are billed as Stratum 4, except for water. Water in my building is billed as Stratum 1. Go figure!

Colombians, who in general are surprised to learn that the idea of Strata is pretty much unique in the world, are deeply conflicted on the societal imposition of the concept.

You may live in a Stratum 5 building, have lost your job, be behind on your car payments, and yet be expected to pay more for your monthly electricity and other utilities than those living in a Stratum 3 building just a block away. You may end up living in a Stratum 6 apartment, paying the highest rates for water bills, and feeling disturbed at seeing those in front of a Stratum 1 building washing their motorcycles with a liberal use of water on a Sunday morning. This gets complicated.

The strata in Colombia have become culturally ingrained, straying far from the original intent of equalization. Personal classified ads, for example, now often state that the person placing the ad is professional, economically stable, good-looking, and looking for similar in Estrato 3. Both the terms Estrato Uno (1) and Estrato Seis (6) are now at times used derogatorily. And I have heard people say, I am not Estrato 10 or 11, to signify that their aspirations and goals are down-to-earth.

Needless to say, when looking to rent or buy an apartment or house, one of the first questions you ask is the Estrato of the building. Builders often advertise apartments still being built as Stratum 3, or 4 or 5 or whatever, even though the final governmental classification is not made until after the building is finished.

Trying to get the Stratum designation of your building changed is an ordeal. Thousands of petitions are submitted monthly. I would hazard a guess that not one of these petitions is seeking to have their Stratum upgraded so that residents of the building in question might be able to pay more in taxes and monthly outlay. Getting a response to your petition can take up to two years, and more often than not, the final decision leaves the original Strata designation in place.

Now jumping into the fray is UN-Habitat, a United Nations group dedicated to a better urban future worldwide. UN-Habitat believes that the Colombian system of Strata has created stereotypes, division, distrust and even fear among citizens. There is a sense that over time the Strata system has grown into a mechanism for segregation.

Believing that governmental subsidies should be focused on individuals and families in need and not on housing, UN-Habitat has been working with the city of Bogotá to refocus priorities. In July, the Mayor’s Office proposed congressional hearings on the elimination of Strata, or at the very least, the exclusion of Bogotá and other major cities from the constraints of the Estratos. In an editorial, the daily newspaper El Tiempo called the proposal both timely and necessary.

The Strata system has become so embedded in Colombia, that any change will necessitate a major realignment of thinking. Colombians will need to be convinced about an alternative system of subsidy. The discussion has just begun.

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With soccer’s World Cup just a few months away—this time in Brazil—the story behind the story is beginning to emerge. The sports story will, of course, be followed by billions of fans rooting for their country’s all-star teams. But for non-sports fans, there’s a back story that’s worth noting, too. It’s the economic story—the one about the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on soon-to-be-white-elephant stadiums, the displacement of slum dwellers who inconveniently occupy suddenly-valuable real estate near the venues, and the pacification of Brazil’s traditionally hyper-exuberant, singing-and-dancing fans.

“…there are two Brazils,” says soccer writer Greg Wahl in an article in the March 4, 2014 issue of Sports Illustrated. “As the freighted month of June approaches again, how those two interact will be as compelling as anything that takes place on a soccer field.”

The article examines the economic excesses and inequalities, and the political and cultural impacts that underlie that country’s preparations for the June 2014 World Cup. Read the full article here: “Like a lingering cloud of tear gas: how do you reconcile the two Brazils?

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Many of my friends have been incredibly generous with donations of food, money, toiletries and blankets to the St. Louis Homeless Winter Outreach volunteers.  These volunteers go out on really cold nights to find people without a place to sleep indoors.  Can you imagine sleeping outside with temperatures near zero?  I can’t imagine how painful it must be to be that cold.  I complain when I’m outside just for a short time without gloves on.  My hands actually hurt.

How much more must it hurt to be out in the cold wind day and night all winter.  My friend Tina told me today that there seems to be “an explosion” of people trying to survive outdoors.  She doesn’t know where they are all coming from.  Some may have been trying to get through the worst of the winter inside abandoned buildings, but temperatures even inside can be life threatening.  On Tuesday night, the Winter Outreach volunteers were out until 11:30 p.m. taking people to shelters.  They found men huddled on the grates near the Savvis Center with no blankets.  The one shelter in a city-owned building took in over 100 people that night.  That’s not even counting the other temporary shelters in churches and the New Life Evangelistic Center.

There was a letter in the Post Dispatch on Monday by someone very concerned about the damage being done to low income people by our state legislature and the U.S. Congress.  The Republicans in the state legislature refuse to expand Medicaid, while the Congress is cutting food stamps and unemployment compensation.  Every time I open the paper or watch the news there is a story about income inequality.  The facts are clear.  The richest people in the U.S. have done phenomenally well while  working and middle class families have had to learn to make do with less and less.  Many of the homeless are actually working full time but don’t make enough money to pay rent, utilities, etc.  If they have family or friends with a couch or extra bed, that’s like heaven next to living under a bridge.

This is outrageously inhumane in the richest country the world has ever known.  There have to be better ways to protect our fellow citizens than relying on a handful of volunteers to search for people freezing outdoors and taking them to temporary shelters where they have to leave again in the morning.  The City of St. Louis relies on volunteer organizations to staff their emergency shelter and provide food.  I’m really not in a position to know why the City can’t budget for emergencies like this, but it seems like it should be a top priority.  I know they get millions of dollars from HUD to provide services for the homeless.

The TV weather forecasters tell us to “bundle up” when we “head out the door in the morning.”  I wonder if they ever think about people who don’t have the means to “bundle up” and don’t even have a door.  If there were more attention by the media to the plight of the homeless, we would surely see more effort by the decision makers to find solutions to this problem.

The bottom line for the Winter Outreach volunteers is to keep people from freezing to death.  That’s a pretty grim mission statement.  Tina said they work so hard to get people into shelters because they don’t want to pull back a pile of blankets and find a frozen corpse.

Is this what has become of us?  We mark our progress as a society when no one freezes to death?  What happens when the volunteers find their first body?  Will the goal then be to avoid letting five people freeze to death?  Or ten?  This is what happens when we allow our elected leaders to serve and protect the robber barons and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

Every cut in programs that serve the poor “trickles down” and causes terrible pain.  You might say it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Let’s stop rationalizing and blaming the victim.  That’s what the Republicans want us to do.  If a child starves or has to huddle under blankets all night in an abandoned building, the hard-hearted politicians say it’s the parents’ fault for not making better choices.  That’s a cop out and a lie.  We’ve also been fed the story that homelessness is such a complex problem that no one can solve it.  Well, we can start by making sure everyone has the minimum of a warm place to sleep and a hot meal.

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I’ve just spent two hours I’ll never get back watching “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.” We had intended to go to a showing of another movie set in the 1980s—“American Hustle”—but I misread the schedule—a dimwitted move worthy of the Ron Burgundy character– and settled for something we had no intention of ever paying for. Overall, it’s a wreck of a movie, overloaded with pointless, slapstick comedy, Steve Carrell’s dreadful scenes as an idiotic dolt, a pasted-in sendup of syrupy animal-rescue movies, jokes about being blind, and a bizarre and unfunny blow-‘em-up battle royale that serves as a cameo showcase for all the Hollywood and Saturday Night Live stars that producer Judd Apatow is able–because of his connections and reputation– to round up.

Every once in a while, though, a bit of social satire manages to wangle its way in. So it shouldn’t be a total loss, and to atone for my misspent time, I’m going to try to wrestle a socio-political lesson or four from this silly movie of meager merit.

Socio-political lesson #1: Plus ca change…

“Anchorman 2,” set in 1980, offers a sendup of the fashions, social mores and sexual politics of the day. Yup, the huge shoulder pads, plaid trousers and big-ass hair are amusing period touches. The sad thing is, though, that while external fashions have changed, the ostensibly dated bad behavior of the principal characters isn’t really all that antiquated. Intentionally or not, the writers use the sexism, racism and homophobia of the 1980s as a way of showing us that things haven’t changed much.

I’m not sure that Will Ferrell, his writing partner Adam McKay, and Apatow [the current king of bad-boy comedy] had a plan that sophisticated. Basically, I think they just wrote what they thought was funny—and a lot of what they think gets laughs in 2014 are penis and vagina jokes. That’s an indication that things are the same as they always have been: Adolescent humor remains adolescent humor. The sad reality is that a lot of chronologically grownup boys [Apatow is 46] appear never to get past that phase, and that our popular culture rewards them for their developmentally arrested sense of humor.

Socio-political lesson #2: Post-racial America? Nope.

Apatow and the [white] guys who wrote this movie use racial issues as an opportunity for satire and a few uneasy laughs. This is the part of this very uneven movie that manages to achieve some effective social commentary. And, right here, I’m going to have to admit that I did, indeed, laugh along with the movie in some of the scenes spoofing racist behavior.

One thing they got right was white people’s continuing discomfort in the presence of African-Americans. Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy, upon meeting his female, African-American boss, is totally flummoxed and can only uncontrollably and repeatedly blurt out what he’s really thinking—“Black.” Sad to say, that state of the white mind did not disappear with the end of the 1980s, and white people like me can all see a bit of ourselves in Burgundy’s behavior in that scene.

Later, Burgundy has dinner with his boss’s family. Burgundy’s exaggerated and clueless attempt to talk “black” at the table is absolutely cringe inducing. For anyone who has ever—consciously or unconsciously—tried to fit into a social situation by affecting what he or she thinks are “black” speech patterns, this scene is going to make you squirm. By the way, the scene got belly laughs from some African-American members of the audience, who have probably been on the receiving end of some pretty lame attempts at sounding cool, and who recognized the truth behind the joke.

Socio-political lesson #3: Homophobia [still] sells

One of Burgundy’s sidekicks is portrayed as a guy who craves—to excess—hugging other men, especially Burgundy. Naturally, in the homophobic atmosphere of the 1980s, that need is repulsive to Burgundy, and supposedly funny to today’s audience. This over-hugging shtick occurs, if I remember correctly, only twice in the movie, but unfortunately, because it’s supposed to make us laugh, its effect is to make fun of homosexuality, not of homophobia. I doubt that’s what the writers had in mind—well, I hope not, anyway—but that’s what we get.

Socio-political lesson #4: Crap sells

Anchorman 2’s essential plot point is the dumbing down of the news media. When Burgundy stumbles upon a live feed of a high-speed car chase and hypes it as breaking news, his ratings soar, outdrawing a serious interview with Yasser Arafat on a rival network. One of the jokes in this segment is that even Arafat wants to watch the car chase. It’s the beginning of the end of serious news coverage. Ironically, at the same time that the filmmakers are spoofing the silliness that passes for news, they’re presenting us with a movie that is silly itself– all the way to the bank.  Yes, crap sells. Get used to it.

Socio-political lesson #5: In Hollywood, as elsewhere, money and connections talk

How do you get a slapped-together movie like this made in Hollywood? Money and connections. Judd Apatow is a brand name. Will Ferrell—a comedy guy with very limited acting skills—is, nevertheless, a proven, ticket-selling, DVD–rental commodity. As exhibited by the fact of this movie’s existence, who you know—not how good you might be—continues to be the byword of opportunity in Hollywood and, by extension, in the wider world.

The power to say yes or no in Hollywood has been consolidated in recent years, rendering independent movies harder than ever to get off the ground. Similarly, American economic power also is being aggregated in smaller and smaller circles—and not just in finance, but also in the general corporate world. If you don’t start near the top of the ladder—if you’re a worker bee, or an immigrant, or if you don’t come from a wealthy family,  or if you don’t attend an elite school where you can make connections—you are playing on an economically unequal field, and your chances of moving up are constricted from the get-go.

In Hollywood, it’s getting harder and harder to successfully pitch a movie if you’re an unknown—even an extremely talented unknown with a unique idea and great skills. The franchise movies—the sequels, the prequels—the movies with the bankable stars and big opening weekends–get the green light, because the risk is lower and the product is predictable.  The parallels with politics are striking: Want to run for office? Better get some serious financing early on, because you’ll be judged by how much money you can raise in your opening fiscal quarter. Better yet, be an incumbent, because you’re a sequel, you’ve got connections and a track record of pleasing powerful political donors. And don’t present any unique “plot lines,” such as innovative policies that go beyond the comfort zone of the donor class.

I know, I know. It’s a movie, for gawd’s sake. Drawing big-ticket lessons from a movie as small-bore as this one is stretching things. Guilty as charged. I just can’t help myself.

The post Socio-political messages from an unlikely place: “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The White Tiger, the novel by Aravind Adiga which won the Man Booker Prize in 2008, has been described as black comedy and a hilarious look at the insanities of life in modern India, but to this reviewer it is chilling as well, because it reveals a society in which the poorest classes have little hope of ever improving their lives. This is not a society that any of us would choose to live in, but sometimes we appear to be headed in that direction. If I had read The White Tiger when it came out in 2008, I might not have thought it had any parallels to our country or any political significance to us.  But now, unfortunately, I do.

The narrator and hero, Balram Halwai, begins the novel with a letter to the Premier of China, a man Balram expects to visit Bangalore within the week.  He has heard that the Premier wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their successes, so Balram writes:

Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs.  And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.  Thousands and thousand of them.  Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs – we entrepreneurs – have set up all of these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.

Balram identifies himself as “half-baked” which means that he was never allowed to complete his schooling.  But he considers himself advantaged in the sense that while very well-educated people tend to take orders from others for the rest of their lives, “Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay.”

He loses his mother to sickness and death before he is eight years old, but is raised by a grasping grandmother and by a father whom he reveres as a man of honor and courage, in spite of his humble occupation as rickshaw-puller. Although his father chooses not to fight the system himself, he determines that his son will have an education.  Balram remembers his father’s words all of his life, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey.  All I want is that one son of mine – at least one – should live like a man.”  Although he does not understand exactly what his father means, Balram decides to be a white tiger – the creature who comes along only once in a generation, a person who takes advantage of every opportunity without exception. Sadly, within a few months Balram’s father succumbs to tuberculosis in a hospital in which there is no doctor to attend him.  The doctors are all attending wealthy patients.

Balram keeps his eyes open and learns the bitter truths about his society.  He misses no chance to move ahead in a very unfair world by watching everyone and seeing what they do, not what they say. He astutely observes the way the wealth in his district has been divided between four men, and he manages to be employed by one of them.  In moving ahead as quickly as possible, he has to leave behind his own beloved older brother.  After a visit home, he agonizes, “They were eating him (the brother who cares for the family) alive in there!  They would do the same thing to him that they did to Father – scoop him out from the inside and leave him weak and helpless, until he got tuberculosis and died on the floor of a government hospital, waiting for some doctor to see him, spitting blood on this wall and that!”  Sadly, Balram knows he must move on and not go back home.  Meanwhile he grows more cynical and ruthless, although the reader cannot help admiring him for his savvy humor and determination.  And he does have his standards, although he is willing to betray others in the servant class in order to get a better job, that of driving his boss in Delhi, a city where he has even more opportunities to learn hard lessons.  The book entertains the reader beautifully, in spite of its harshness, because Balram essentially sees truth is a totally unsentimental way and amusing way.  The reader slowly succumbs to the seduction of a lovable and funny fictional character, one capable of both empathy and murder.  At the end of the novel, Balram owns his own company with a fleet of cars and driver/employees whom he claims to treat with respect. True, he has made some ruthless decisions to get there.

So . . . Balram maneuvers in a class system that has a wealthy, powerful group of people and an underclass who sees little hope of bettering themselves; at least he is surviving and enjoying his success at the end of the novel.  However, none of us Americans envy the two tiered society in which he lives.  In fact, we fear such a way of life.  As the author Aravinda Adiga himself says in a Q and A at the end of the novel:

India is being flooded with “how to be an Internet businessman” kind of books, and they’re all dreadfully earnest and promise to turn you into Iacocca in a week.  This is the kind of book that my narrator mentions, mockingly – he knows that life is a bit harder than these books promise.  There are lots of self-made millionaires in India now, certainly, and lots of successful entrepreneurs.  But remember that over a billion people live here, and for the majority of them, who are denied decent health care, education, or employment, getting to the top would take doing something like what Balram has done.”

The White Tiger entertains, absolutely, but it is also a cautionary tale.

The post The White Tiger: fiction from India, cautionary tale for US appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A recent article in the Washington Post pointed out a “myth” about the Civil War that relates to why middle and low income people in contemporary America have acquiesced to the continued tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

In an op-ed piece on January 9, 2011 entitled “Five myths about why the South Seceded,” James W. Loewen states that one of the five myths was the belief that, since most white Southerners didn’t own slaves, they wouldn’t secede for slavery.”  He states that there were:

“factors [that] caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy now.”

Without attribution to anyone, it has been said that if you tell a lie enough times people will  eventually believe it.  Similarly, when a myth based on falsehood is perpetuated, people can come to accept it as truth.

Perhaps there was a time when Americans correctly saw their society as upwardly mobile.  However, that is not true now.  We are falling back into an economic abyss similar to those of the gilded age and 1929.

Have you ever heard someone say, “If I can lose 75 pounds anyone can?”   The words are intended to be encouragement to someone else; in reality they are self-aggrandizement, because the speaker wants us to believe that no one else’s weight loss challenge could be greater than his or hers.

Funny how television is now rife with programs about “get rich quick” schemes and the glory of weight loss competition.   If these programs are of any interest, it is only because getting rich quickly or losing pounds by the dozen rarely happen, but we want to believe that it can happen for us.

In America’s 21^st century, the odds of a middle or lower income person becoming a millionaire are about as slim as they were for a slave to gain his or her freedom in the ante-bellum South.  But many Americans are not very wise at handicapping odds.  If they were, they wouldn’t go to the casinos, where the only guaranteed winner is the house.

It’s not that Americans are incapable of resenting wealthy people who want even more.  In 1994, when millionaire baseball players and billionaire owners could not reach a working agreement, fans sad a pox on both your houses.  The average salary of a player in 1994 was $1.2 million.  Fans justifiably asked how could anyone be unsatisfied with making over a million dollars to play a kids game; a game that I would play for free.  And sweet resentment was reserved for the owners who pleaded poor, when making more money than ever.  If you don’t remember the strike, just wait until a month after the Super Bowl when it is quite feasible that there will be a work stoppage in the NFL.  You’ll notice it when there’s no April draft of college players.

If there is a labor stoppage in March, today’s heroes, such as Payton Manning or Adrian Peterson, are likely to become the targets of our ire.  But the damage done to the average American by professional athletes or even their “owners” is miniscule compared to the Wall Street barons who have bought a few hundred politicians in order to keep their marginal tax rate at 36% rather than 39.6%.

Part of Republican framing involves displacement; convincing people to demonize the wrong party.  When insurance companies are making out like bandits, Republicans call it a government takeover, and many Americans believe it.

So if an NFL strike happens, let’s use it as an opportunity to try to educate the American people that however the labor dispute is resolved, it will have little or no impact on them. Conversely, rescinding the Bush tax giveaways to the wealthy would raise nearly a trillion dollars over a decade.  As former Republican Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois once said, “a billion here, a billion there; pretty soon we’re talking real money.”  Progressives need to convince more Americans that zeros do mean something, especially when they are strung at the end of an already large number.

Back to the Civil War.  Think of how many individuals in gray lost their lives to defend a system that was of no economic gain to them.  Similarly, how many of today’s middle and lower income individuals are undermining their real economic self-interests in order to satisfy their economic fantasies.

We need to try to teach Americans a little placement rather than displacement.  This will not be an easy task, but opportunities to come along when it’s easier to make the point.  If the NFL has a work stoppage, seize the moment!

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