12 posts tagged “poverty”

Unlike George W. Bush's destructive, self-absorbed, bull-in-a-China-shop policies in the world, here is part of a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt about his vision for the world from The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, a great book by Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist and economic adviser to the UN.

(The book has a foreword by Bono and provides concrete and practical plans in how to tackle extreme poverty and diseases like AIDS and malaria. If there is someone to give us all hope that we can do something about extreme poverty and rampant diseases, it is Mr. Sachs, quite the visionary himself.)

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God is his own way - everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings, which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.

This is a very disturbing and sad article from AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/68713/, War on Iraq section, posted November 26, 2007, about the number of American veterans who have committed suicide. The woman who wrote the article, and who has also written a book about war, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, is also a widow of a Vietnam veteran who died by committing suicide.

120 WAR VETS COMMIT SUICIDE EACH WEEK ON AVERAGE

by Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2007.

The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to "personal problems," not experience in combat.

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

Today, the 17th of November, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the fourth and final report that makes up Climate Change 2007.

The draft report (without final copy editing) is found at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf. The IPCC site is http://www.ipcc.ch/.

Are the governments of the United States, Canada and Australia unaware of the human and environmental and financial consequences of dealing with increasing climate change losses? No.

Each country has scientists and researchers who have been involved for many years in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, which includes scientific research, and information on adapation and mitigation. The report is easily available online to anyone, even politicians, in full or in a shorter policy version, to anyone who can type IPCC in Google.

So why are the leaders allowing themselves to be led by the nose - by multinationals, their lawyers and lobbyists, trade agreements favouring corporations, corporate contributions to election campaigns, insteading of leading the campaign to slow global warming?

The U.S., Canada, and Australia are three of the largest historic polluters and have a moral obligation, being wealthy, developed nations, to clean up the mess they have caused in the past, without any strings being attached to poorer and less developed nations, who did not create the historic mess.

Forget the next election, gentlemen, your own self-interest or those of your political parties or corporate pals or their lobbyists, needless spending on needless wars instead of the environment, or whatever useless and lame excuse is stopping action. The costs of not doing anything will far outweigh the worth of anything we are spending money on now and they will continue to increase.

The writer of the Global Issues section of the Toronto Star, called the three heads of state the Three Climate Stooges.

Leaders, you have all the information you need to act now. Get out of Iraq (US) and Afghanistan (Canada), don't start a needless war on Iran (US), and the billions saved can be used to solve not only climate change issues, but poverty and other humanitarian issues at home and in the world.

Anything less is not a joke, but a crime against humanity.

The Toronto Star, in an editorial in the Comment section, Monday, September 17, 2007, page AA6, said that Canada was right to be cautious in not signing a UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights.

Cautious? After several centuries of misuse of aboriginal peoples and their lands in Canada? I would substitute the word spineless. Corporations get the nod from governments and the common good gets trampled. Is it corruption?  Powerful lobbyists? A view that only extends to the next election? Blinkers? Lack of ethics or morals, or shall I say ethics and morals sometimes but not if inconvenient, which is to say, no ethics or morals, just hypocrisy.

The editorial hypes up words such as "fuzzy" and "open to interpretation" and "unclear" to make the declaration seem unfathomable and scary. It makes horrific the concepts that aboriginal peoples should have self-government and rights to their own lands. That the human and moral rights of aboriginal peoples in this editorial should also be made to sound frightening is not just shameful, it is mean-spirited, ugly and racist.

CAUTION ON NATIVE RIGHTS

Canada is taking considerable heat for joining only three other countries in voting against a United Nations declaration on aboriginal rights that was more than 20 years in the making.

The UN General Assembly adopted the declaration Thursday by a vote of 14-4, with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States opposed, and 11 abstentions. Since then, aboriginal and human rights groups have denounced Canada's opposition to the document, with some calling it "a stain on Canada's international reputation."

Despite this criticism, it would have been difficult for Canada to support the declaration in its current form. Its fuzzy wording and overly broad guarantees threaten to undermine our legal framework for addressing aboriginal rights, which has been hammered out over decades of constitutional developments and court decisions.

As imperfect as our current system is, John McNee, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, was right to register Canada's "significant concerns" about this flawed declaration and vote against it.

Particularly troubling is the "right to self-determination" in article 3. Notwithstanding last-minute changes to the declaration that purposrt to protect the territorial integrity of existing states, could this phrase go beyond encouraging legitimate aspirations for native self-government and empower full-blown secessionist movements?

Based on the declaration, it's hard to tell. That's worrisome.

Also wide open to interpretation is article 26, which says aboriginal people "have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired." Canada already recognizes aboriginal land rights both in treaties and in a well-established, if cumbersome, land-claims process.

The effect of the declaration is unclear. It is anyone's guess whether natives could use it to reopen long-settled treaties, or claim large parts of urban Canada, with UN backing, because they once fished there.

Article 19, which says governments should consult aboriginals "in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent" before adopting laws that affect them, also leaves too much to the imagination. Of course, Canada's native people should have a say in such circumstances. But if the upshot is to oblige the government to sound out every native community in the country and give them a virtual veto over any measure that could possibly touch them, the potential for legislative paralysis across Canada would be profound.

True, the declaration is non-binding. But even without legal teeth, it still carries a moral weight that could seriously undermine the relationship between natives and non-natives in Canada.

Canada has little to be proud of in its dealings with native peoples. Too many live in dire poverty. Many still carry the emotional scars of forced assimilation in residential schools. And the government has only fuelled frustration by dragging its heels on land claims.

But by signing an international document that leaves many questions unanswered, Ottawa would have done this country a disservice.

From the Comment, Editorials, section of the Tuesday, September 25, 2007, Toronto Star, page AA6, is an article about parents whose first language is not English or whose level of literacy have a negative impact on their children's ability to get out of the cycle of poverty.

MISSING PIECE OF POVERTY PICTURE

Norm Beach

The provincial election has spawned a lot of talk about education. The Ontario Social Planning Network wants voters to make child poverty a ballot question too.

But almost nobody is talking about where those issues intersect in the lives of parents whose language or literacy barriers keep their children stuck in the poverty trap.

Adult education, the key to helping many parents improve their families' lives, hasn't even been near the radar screen in the public debate about schools and poverty.

Sept. 8 was International Literacy Day, causing barely a ripple in Canada, where the conventional wisdom holds that illiteracy is a problem only in faraway countries.

In fact, Statistics Canada estimates that almost half of adult Canadians don't have the minimum reading skills to cope with everyday life and work, a figure that has been stuck at virtually the same level for decades.

Studies show that poor literacy greatly increases a person's likelihood of suffering unemployment, poverty, and illness -- risks that apply to his or her children as well. You can multiply those risks by 12 million -- the estimated number of Canadians between 16 and 69 with inadequate literacy skills -- if you want to get an idea of the scope of this problem. Yet it rarely surfaces in political debate.

Another challenge, particularly in the GTA, is immigrant poverty. Although most newcomers are well-educated, Toronto has some ethnic neighbourhoods with twice as many university graduates as the national average yet double the poverty.

Accreditation issues and many employers' insistence on Canadian experience are the most publicized hurdles immigrants face when they look for work, but language barriers round out the dreary list. I've heard it all from the newcomers who attend my adult ESL class.

These students come from all over the world, but share a common conviction that lifelong learning is the key to their success.

And for many of them, succcess is all about their children.Parents want to understand what's going on at school, talk to their children's teachers, and make enough money so they can support their further education.

But my students can't do that unless they learn more English to get work, job training or further education themselves.

Four years ago one of them, Linda Shai, summed up the value of adult education in a deputation to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance:

"In China, I was a regional sales manager of an international pharmaceutical company. But I immigrated from Shanghai to Toronto with my husband and 9-month-old daughter, because we wanted a life of freedom in a multicultural, tolerant society.

"In Canada, we faced cultural and language barriers. We struggled to make a living. I became a cashier at Pizza Pizza. I worked there for two years until I had a chance to upgrade my English at an advanced ESL class funded by the Ontario government.

"I learned to communicate confidently with my daughter's daycare teachers. The ESL class helped me pass an examination and interview to enter a post-graduate program in marketing. I graduated, and have begun work in my field."

"I so often think, oh, Canada, I have got so much from you. In return, I will contribute as much as I can. From the bottom of my heart, I say thank you ESL, thank you teacher, and thank you, Canada."

The war against poverty can't be won without using all the tools at our disposal. Adult education is one of them.

Norm Beach has taught adult ESL with the Toronto District School Board for 20 years.

A editorial on public housing in the Monday, September 17, 2007, Comment section, page AA6, talks about the problems with respect to getting the provincial and federal governments to provide the funding they promise to assist Toronto in maintaining the public housing in the city. (It is no wonder that the UN special envoy who came to Canada the next month after this editorial was published was unhappy with the housing in cities in Canada.)

PUBLIC HOUSING TURF WAR MUST END

For years, a veritable city within a city, with a population as large as Prince Edward Island, has been left to fester in Toronto, the result of persistent neglect by the provincial and federal governments.

More than 164,000 people live in 58,500 public housing units run by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation around the city. And, as the Star revealed in major feature on Saturday, far too many of these apartments are plagued with leaking roofs, and mould, cockroaches, crumbling balconies, broken heating and air circulation systems, rusted plumbing and fraying electrical wiring.

Unfortunately, such deplorable conditions have existed for years. But governments at Queen's Park and in Ottawa, despite promises to help, have done little to ease either the crushing problem of quality and supply of affordable housing in Toronto.

Now, several tenants are trying to urge their neighbours to speak up in order to get the problem of dilapidated public housing on the political agenda in time for the Oct. 10 provincial election.

The problem of aging public housing has existed for decades. But it became worse after the provincial government under Mike Harris downloaded the cost of maintaining public housing stock to the city in 2001. At that time, the buildings already needed $230 million in repairs. But the province refused to transfer any money tocover those costs. Since then, the bill has grown to $300 million.

These public housing units have an average age of 35 years and need major structural repairs. The housing corporation has launched a 10-year $1.1 billion repair plan. It says it can fund $800 million of that through rents and loans. But without the $300 million from the province, the plan cannot be completed, leaving the corporation constantly playing catch-up with emergency repairs and temporary patch jobs, instead of needed major renovations.

The city spends more than $90 million a year on public housing and argues the province has a moral responsibility to pay for needed repairs. But when Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty announced last month that the province would take back the cost of some social services, public housing was not on the list.

All three parties at Queen's Park acknowledge it is unfair to dump this public housing problem on cities. New Democratic Leader Howard Hampton has pledged that by 2015, his party would assume the full cost of public housing as well as other social programs. Conservative Leader John Tory is awaiting a high-level review of provincial downloading due next spring before committing to any program, although he would continue to revitalize aging public housing projects.

Queen's Park is not alone in terms of being responsible for the failure to properly fund public housing. Ottawa must accept part of the blame, since it completley abandoned responsibility for housing in the 1990s. By doing so, it effectively shifted the problem on to the province, which in turn tossed it off to cash-strapped municipalities.

Since then, there has not been a federal long-term affordable housing policy. And with 67,000 families on a waiting list for affordable housing, the need for more housing in this city is greater than ever.

It is time all political parties, at Queen's Park and in Ottawa, stopped their bickering over who is responsible for public housing and worked together to pay for much-needed repairs and for new construciton.

Our poorest residents have been forced to live in deplorable and unhealthy conditions in public housing buildings for too long.

The homeless are always with us in many big cities in the United States and Canada.  Despite homeless shelters, Out of the Cold programs, and even draconian anti-panhandling laws, that has not changed.

This article from The Economist suggests more understanding approaches to aid the homeless may also be slower costs of helping.  It is reprinted in the Ideas section of the Sunday, October 21, 2007, Toronto Star, page ID12:

A NEW APPROACH TO HOMELESSNESS

The queue, which began forming hours before the doors opened, stretched across the lobby and onto the pavement in front of the downtown Minneapolis convention centre. More than 1,800 people -- bantering groups of friends, loners, shell-shocked veterans, and weary single mothers -- turned up recently for an event dubbed Project Homeless Connect.

It offered everything from job applications and educational assistance to haircuts and a hot lunch. In return, attendees were asked to provide data on themselves and their living circumstances, all of which were fed into a local database.

Homelessness is not an issue normally associated with places like Minneapolis. This city is relatively prosperous, has cold winters, and is in an overwhelmingly white, northern state. But homelessness has moved up the agenda for many American mayors lately.

Driving the movement is a better understanding of the homeless population. Despite the perception that it consists mostly of single men with drug, alcohol or mental-health problems, the majority are families, singles or young people who simply cannot afford housing, says Nan Roman at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The better understanding of the group's diversity has led to new approaches being used. Much current thinking about homelessness is based on the work of Dennis Culhane, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, who several years ago followed thousands of homeless people in New York.

Each of them used up an average of $40,000 a year in public services, such as hospital care and jail time. When half of the group was offered public housing (coupled with services such as counselling), that group's time in hospital and prison fell dramatically. The net result was a big improvement in the problem at little net cost.

About 40 communities around the United States have since attempted to emulate the scheme. The approach is also backed by Philip Mangano, who heads the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness.

All this is a departure from traditional means of dealing with the homeless, which Mangano says are either too soft or too tough. Some communities, he admits, are still using heavy-handed police tactics.

"The punitive approach," he says, "has never worked anywhere."

The Economist

From the Comment section of the September 16 (?, numbers in day obscured), 2007, Toronto Star, here is an article about governmental obligations to address issues regarding poverty, welfare and the working poor:

ALL GOVERNMENTS HAVE A DUTY TO TEAR DOWN WALLS OF POVERTY

With politicans in election mode, now is the time to secure a decent living for all

John Stapleton

Earlier this year, an impressive list of community leaders -- including three former premiers from all parties -- united with other leaders in an open letter called on Premier  Dalton McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper to follow the "fair deal" road map laid out by the Task Force on Modernizing Income Security for Working-Age Adults. In a full-page newspaper plea, they urged senior levels of government to ensure "a decent living for all Ontarians."

Announcements on new income security measures surfaced soon after. But with a provincial election and a new federal session on the horizon, now is the time to review expectations for the fall and to encourage governments to achieve the goal of ensuring a decent living for all.

It will be all the more important is the woes that have recently beset world markets result in tougher economic times for Canada. Our social safety net has been fair game for cuts following recessions, as we saw in the 1990s. If times get tough again, the affordability of our safety net programs may become a topic of debate. We must ensure that we stay the course and continue with the promising start we see today.

In Ontario, the most important safety net budget announcement concerned the implementation of an Ontario Child Benefit. Starting with a modest down payment in July, the program is set for full implementation in 2011. Activists have called for the program to be fully implemented faster and they remain watchful to ensure that no children will be left out in the longer term.

They are also calling on all parties to use the momentum of the Ontario Child Benefit as a springboard for a full-fledged poverty reduction strategy. A dental program for the working poor is an important beginning and it now looks like the province will act on repeated requests to inject funding to set up badly needed clinics to help low-wage earners get the dental care they need.

Yet several important questions remain.

For the Ontario government:

• Outdated employment standards regulations require sprucing up to reflect the realities of today's labour market. Will the government respond and will it hire the necessary enforcement staff and prosecute repeat offenders?
• People who find themselves on social assistance should not be forced to give up their life's savings because they have hit a rough patch. A single person cannot now save more than $560 without becoming ineligible for benefits. Will recipients be allowed to retain a modest amount of assets so that they have a cushion to ease their transition back into the labour market?
• The move to raise the minimum wage to $10 has been heralded as recognition that a hard day's work deserves a fair day's pay. But will the province speed up its schedule of minimum wage increases to allow low-income wage earners to gross at least $350 a week for a 35-hour week by 2008?
• Children in care of a Children's Aid Society who leave care at 18 need help with their transition into adulthood. Will the province standardize the rates of subsidy across the province for 18- to 20-year-olds who can no longer access the services provided for children whose parents no longer take care of them? Will they extend these subsidies to age 24?
• Quality early learning and childcare alongside access to affordable housing are essential components of Ontario's social architecture. Will action be taken?
• And lastly, Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America that requires municipalities to fund an open-ended set of programs with finite revenues. Will the province finally find a way to relieve cash-strapped municipalities from paying for Ontario Works (welfare) especially now that it has announced that disability payments will be uploaded?

For the federal government:

• The original five-year plan for the national child benefit -- heralded as one of Canada's most effective anti-poverty tool -- ran out in July without mention or fanfare. Will the federal government put a new plan in place and revitalize its child benefit policy?
• Wage earners continue to pay into Employment Insurance but most Ontarios have less than a one in four chance of ever collecting a cent if they become unemployed. Will the federal government introduce fairness to the EI system?
• The Canada Social Transfer has still not been resolved 11 years after the demise of the Canada Assistance Plan, which it was designed to replace. Will the federal government look into implementing a properly funded Canada Social Transfer or consider a shared-cost program with provinces once again?

As we await more details on these programs in the next round of federal budget legislation in the fall, we look forward to answers to these fundamental questions.

The federal government's response to the task force's recommendations was modest. The 2007 budget included a narrow Working Income Tax Benefit to help social assistance recipients attain work, and a new registered savings program (Registered Disability Savings Plan) to allow family members to save for a nest egg for their loved ones with disabilities.

The Working Income Tax Benefit has been already scaled down from the original plan to help the working poor make ends meet so that it now only helps people leaving welfare. It leaves out the poor who are working now.

The benefit has been designated as a potential recipient of future federal budgetary surplus dollars through a program called "Advantage Canada." Will new federal funds from budgetary surpluses be used to boost the Working Income Tax Benefit and to help more of the working poor achieve a decent standard of living?

As the weather turns cool and harvest colours make their appearance, let's hope that governments sign on to an agenda to assure "a decent living for all."

John Stapleton was research director for the Modernizing Income Security for Working-Age Adults Task Force.

This article is about a travelling program developed to talk about the importance of voting to Mauritanians, to decrease the number of spoiled votes, and encourage Mauritanians to learn about the platforms of their candidates. It is from World Vision Canada's Child View, The Magazine for Child Sponsors, Fall 2007, pages 13-15:

A VOTE FOR HOPE

A travelling road show traverses the Sahara in the Mauritania to make everyone's vote count

By Karen Homer

Khadijetou Mint Zeine arrives at the polling station at 7 a.m. to beat the scorching 45-degree heat in Nouakchott, the desert capital of Mauritania. She is among several hundred people crowded into a walled schoolyard patiently waiting to cast their ballots at makeshift voting booths set up inside.

Like many of the people at the polling station, Khadijetou, 20, has never voted. But this illiterate young woman is anxious to make her mark in the country's first-ever free and open elections.

Despite her electoral inexperience, Khadijetou knows just what to expect when she finally enters the polling station. Behind a curtain tacked to the school's crumbling concrete wall, she stamps the box beside the photo of her candidate from among 19 choices. She slips her paper into the ballot box -- a giant, sandproof plastic container. Finally, she dips her finger into a bottle of indelible ink and marks her voter card.

"I made my vote count," says Khadijetou, proudly pointing her purple-stained index finger skyward. "I'm happy I learned about how to vote from the Caravane de l'Espoir, or I might have stayed home today.

A few weeks before the election was held in the West African country this past March, Khadijetou and some friends joined 5,000 youth gathered eagerly in a local soccer field on a Saturday night to see the "theatre on wheels" that everyone has been talking about. They had come to see World Vision's Caravane de l'Espoir (Caravan of Hope) -- a 12-tonne truck with a flip-down side panel that converts the vehicle into a mobile stage. The Caravan's team of young actors and musicians used skits, songs and film to inform Mauritanians about the nation's electoral process.

When Commission Electorale Nationale Independante (CENI), Mauritania's elections commission, was charged with the daunting task of preparing Mauritanians to vote for the first time, it turned first to the Caravan team. For years the troupe has been raising awareness about HIV and AIDS through evenings of entertainment attracting thousands. CENI was confident the troupe could repeat the success of their HIV and AIDS tour by creating a completely new show that would bring home the message that everyone's vote counts.

Mauritania, a country of three million, presented some challenges. Many of the rural people had never even heard of democracy or what it means to vote. Since winning independence from France in 1960, all presidents in this former colony had come to power solely through military coups. With 48 per cent of Mauritanian adults unable to read or write, how would they learn to properly mark a ballot?

An analysis of the municipal elections held in 2006 revealed that many people had blindly voted along ethnic or religious lines without being aware of the issues. More resources would have to be directed into enhancing voter education if the national elections were to be truly fair and open.

CENI gave the World Vision Caravan team a three-point mandate for the election tour: reduce the incidence of spoiled ballots from 18 per cent to four per cent; inform Mauritanians about the importance of voting; and encourage them to learn about the candidates' platforms.

In January, the 27-member Caravan rolled out across the Sahara. Most of the audience heard the public dialogue about democracy for the first time. "They weren't sure how to respond," says Jon Shadid, a former World Vision employee who envisioned and designed the Caravan. "In Mauritania, as in many cultures, individualism is not valued. We talked about making your own decision about how to vote, and we openly told people not to sell their votes."

Selling one's vote to a candidate is tempting in a country where most people earn less than a dollar a day and parents routinely put their children to bed hungry, explains Shadid.

The Caravan team collaborated with other education groups working with CENI. Together they covered 80 villages and the capital, perofrming more than 200 shows. After a gruelling six-week tour covering 31,000 kilometres, the team trucked back to Nouakchott to await election day on March 11.

The result: more than 70 per cent of the electorate participated in the first round, and women and youth were well represented.Spoiled ballots were reduced to less than four per cent -- the acid test for the Caravan team. Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, 68, a minister under the former autocratic president, won the presidential race with 52.8 per cent of the vote.

Esther Lehmann, director of World Vision in Mauritania, is confident that this historic step towards democracy will eventually mean a better future for children in Mauritania. UNICEF reports that 16,000 children in this country die each year before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable diseases linked to poverty.

Lehmann says children who have been marginalized by poverty and injustice in Mauritania will have more access to power and decision-making -- something their parents never had. "In a few years, today's children will not only have questions, they'll bring solutions to the poverty facing this country."

This is an article by Ed Hamer, in the July/August 2007 issue of  the British environmental magazine Ecologist:

TAKING THE DIRECT APPROACH

Non-violent direct action can be an effective and sometimes necessary, part of a campaign.  Go on, says Ed Hamer, dare to throw a spanner in the works.

It is nearly 2000 years since the working-class hero Ned Ludd inspired a campaign of social discontent from the heart of the Black Country. The Luddites saw the dismantling of the newly mechanised cotton mills as their only defence against the job losses and poverty that accompanied the advancing industrial revolution.

Today, the kind of inequalities that first inspired Ludd are growing daily, and on a global scale. Fortunately, so too are the numbers of individuals willing to throw a spanner in the works. From the high-profile road protest movement of the 1990s to recent climate change demonstrations at Britain's airports, direct action is alive and very much kicking.

The object of direct action is immediate and effective change; in some cases this involves civil disobedience which may be illegal. Says John Sauven, Executive Director of Greenpeace, 'Non-violent direct action enables the stopping of wrongs and the highlighting of solutions. Concerned people taking non-violent direction action is exactly how Greenpeace was founded.'

Renowned environmentalist Jonathon Porritt is also a believer in direction action: applied intelligently and effecively, it can strengthen conventional campaigns. 'Historically, non-violent direct action has always played an important part in the UK environment movement, and, in my opinion, always will,' he says, 'Those who claim this undermines the credibility of mainstream environmental organisations are plain wrong.'