India, Katrina, and the Bailout: How Poor People Everywhere Are Being Neglected

Written beside the American creed of hating terrorists and loving the Irish and Italians should be the footnote and we ignore poor people. Poor people always get the shit end of every deal usually because they can't get the attention of politicians or pundits, and because of this the poor people in New Orleans and India have a lot in common.

India has more than 100,000 millionaires, and is creating new ones at a rate rivaled only be Russia. Meanwhile, nearly half of Mumbai's 14-18 million residents live in slums. In the United States, poor people suffer under a specialized caste system that masquerades as a functioning democracy. In the good ole' US of A, the top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

Yet, in the 2008 election, neither major candidate uttered the word "poor" in the thousands of hours clocked speaking into cameras. But the sickness of ignoring the poor goes beyond John McCain and Barack Obama. The United States government and the corporate media systematically ignore the suffering of the poor, too.

Whether observing FEMA's shameful handling of post-Katrina New Orleans or the situation in India, it's pretty clear that governments and corporate media only care about disasters if they involve rich, affluent people. If poor people are drowning, the government takes weeks to throw them rafts. If their slums wallow in poverty and violence for years, the cameras only arrive when terrorists bomb a luxury hotel in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, the United States Treasury department takes poor people's tax dollars and funnels them into Wall Street corporations that are tanking because of their own failed policies. Nevermind that millions of poor people may now lose their homes. Nevermind that America's infrastructure is crumbling and its schools continue to deteriorate, including the schools in Olmsted Falls, which facetiously asked for $100 billion in bailout money. The superintendent, Todd Hoadley, said the bailout would "repay the district's cost of meeting federal mandates under the federal No Child Left Behind law, such as testing, tutoring and remediation."

That sounds pretty reasonable, but unfortunately Hoadley isn't a billionaire CEO so he's out of luck. Most of the world shares this crappy deal. Almost half the world (around three billion people) live on less than $2.50 a day. Eighty percent lives on less than $10 a day. Worse, another eighty percent live in countries where the wealth disparity is widening, and that includes America.

We all know that poverty is a really big issue, but what people don't always understand is that being poor makes individuals invisible. Money buys access to more than shelter and food. Money buys media attention.

The recent attack in Mumbai is a good example of this. India has been attacked many times over the past decade, but the media blitz only arrived when rich people became the victims of terrorists. Vijay Prashad, Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, commented on Democracy Now:

The media had not really called any of the other attacks in Mumbai, and there have been many since 1992, 9/11, precisely because most of those attacks the have taken place in areas which afflicted the working poor, working-class, and middle-class people. This attack, for the first time, targeted places of the top elite. Very expensive hotels, leading restaurants, and this therefore, brought this kind of assault into the bedrooms, into the restaurant of the elite.

In 2001, 700 people died in the Gujarat riots. Though it has adopted a market economy, Gujarat is still home to many poor people, which may explain why this riot received considerably less attention than the Mumbai attack. In 2007, riots exploded in India's Rajasthan state. Poor people demanded that they be included in an affirmative action quota which would give them access to government jobs and other benefits. Fourteen people died. This past summer, 250 people were arrested in India when thousands of people flooded the streets to protest the power outages that left residents sweltering in the summer heat.

Yet the media's attention has been almost entirely focused on the attack of a fancy hotel. Calling the attack Mumbai's 9/11 seems to be an excuse to push through some very Draconian laws that do little to stem actual terrorist violence. Americans experienced the same thing post-9/11 with the Patriot Act, which resulted in no arrests of domestic terrorists, but successfully violated the rights of many poor Americans. Once again, the powers that be will use a disaster to further repress poor people.

And this is all about repression. Before, during, and after a serious terrorist attack, poor people endure retched conditions. US prisoners and Indian slum residents both share 59 square feet of living space.

Harsh Mander, a former civil servant who runs the Centre for Equity Studies, describes the situation as dire for poor India citizens. "There is a deep prejudice about the poor. Their slums are demolished. They have no access to water or health facilities. They are denied access to public amenities and facilities. The state feels it has no duty to them."

Just as the India government feels no obligation to their poor, so the American government ignores its domestic destitute. While many Americans witnessed Katrina's destruction on television and read about it on the internet, post-Katrina coverage declined rapidly once the storm passed. Many poor people still do not have permanent housing in the areas where Katrina hit the hardest. Yet, the treasury received over $700 billion in bailout money to save rich people from themselves.

The government has attached no strings to this bailout like promises to keep jobs inside the United States - jobs that will help poor people save money for buying food and a home for their families. Overseas, poor people in India are still invisible even as they toil in cramped, sweltering, filthy conditions.

Only when the rich are in peril does the media take notice. This is really unfortunate because the media are the eyes and ears of the disenfranchised, and no other group is further marginalized than the poor.

If only poor people would organize into some kind of party, say the Poor People's Party (PPP). Their numbers here and abroad would be daunting, considering they far outnumber their government overlords. Other severities of sects (race, sexuality, gender, religion) all pale in comparison to the exploitation of the poor by the rich and powerful. It's just a matter of time before the poor realize that.

Follow Allison Kilkenny on Twitter: www.twitter.com/allisonkilkenny

Comments

[Luigi19]

It’s safe to say that America is giving less and less attention to the poor. The lack of media coverage in New Orleans concerning those who still don’t have housing after Hurricane Katrina is ridiculous. Katrina received a lot of media attention immediately after the storm hit but most Americans just assume that because it now receives no media attention that the city has fully recovered. It was very disturbing to watch all the recent political debates and see little to no discussion of poverty. How can our country just choose to ignore all the injustice and suffering that occurs in America and around the world? The situation with the homeless in Atlanta is also very disturbing. The city became very anti-poor when the Olympics were held in Atlanta and the government has been trying to kick people out of their houses if they live in the ghetto so that the government can make more money off of the land. To make matters worse, the city does not appreciate non-profit organizations helping the poor get back on their feet again and many organizations are facing pressure from the government that may cause them to close down. Events such as these need more media attention so that Americans can put pressure on the government to make the necessary changes.

[zjr909]

And, of course, the greatest irony of all: societies could exist quite well without the rich, but would perish overnight without the poor. Or to put it another way: the exploited do not need their exploiters, but the exploiters absolutely need those they exploit. Which is, no doubt, why untold billions are spent to obscure that simple and otherwise obvious fact of human existence.

[tiffj01]

This op-ed hits the nail on the head. We constantly heard about the middle class during the campaign, but poor people were rarely mentioned. If you're poor, you probably can't event imagine having a decent paying job or a home. The middle class may be worrying about losing these two necessities in their lives, but poor people don't even have access to these two things. When are we as a people going to start caring about the poor and quit blaming them for their situation?

[Stephanie71]

A large part of this is likely because many of those who would statistically be considered poor, don't self-identify as such (and would probably be insulted if they were to be referred to as poor). I beleive the term that was most used by the Obama campaign rather than "middle-class" was "working-class" which I beleive to include a large part of America's poor. And if I do recall the word poor did actually get used a time or two.

Sometimes its just a matter of preserving people's pride.

Not only that but many of the policies that were part of the Obama platform we most definitely designed with the poor in mind.

[davism97]

Outsourcing and paying less than the national minimum wage is a form of slavery. Why doesn't our government recognize this?

[Jsens3]

Regardless of governing political philosophy, socialist, democratic, communist, monarchy, etc. the rich have always had it better economically than the poor. If I am wrong about this, I am sure someone will straighten me out. The blogger is correct, but the blog is an exercise in frustration.

[mmaza]

The needy always have to wait for the greedy.

[11907281]

I think the rich have used the media to create the illusion that we all can be rich, live the American dream.
To quote St. Carlin "They call it the American dream because you have to be a sleep to believe it"