Consequences of Crowding

The other day I read about a doctor in the small town of Camden Indiana. He began getting patients with a rash of small pimple like protrusions that quickly turned into saucer-sized wounds. He sent tissue samples to the state laboratory and was told it was methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA. Strains of these bacteria are often referred to as "flesh-eating." The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that by 2005, MRSA was killing more than 18,000 Americans a year, more than AIDS. The doctor in trying to account for the number of patients he was seeing began to wonder if the many hog farms in the vicinity might have something to do with it. Researchers in Holland had discovered that the bacteria could pass from pigs to humans. In short, the doctor determined that the highly crowded pig farms (think pork factories) might be involved. These farms are immense enclosures which look like factories from the outside with tall feed silos that have large food delivery systems emanating from them. He found that they were functioning as massive MRSA incubators.

This got me thinking about some of the consequences of crowding. If the intense crowding of pigs can create a bacterium factory, what about the intense crowding of human beings? Mike Davis, a history professor at U. C. Irvine, recently published a book Planet of the Slums. Mike, who has written a number of books on the world's social conditions, points out that as of last year more of the world's population is living in urban than in rural areas. This is a first for mankind. The large majority of this increased urbanization consists of vast slums. Other than the often-cited social antagonisms that result from animal, including human, crowding, are we creating human disease incubators in slums of a million or more people? Mike has also written a book (The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu) on the pandemic potential of avian flu, which is moving from Chinese small farms to the chicken factories of Hong Kong. Crowding, on the scale that human beings have done it, contains the seeds of our own destruction. Is it not possible to see that we have far more in common than we have in differences? If moral concern for the poor of this planet will not move mankind to adequately address the massive disparities in global resource allocation, will an imminent global Black Plague do it?

Finally, in this paean to population idiocy, I will mention another recently-read article on Quiverfull. Quiverfull is a movement among Christians, mostly Protestants, who use Psalm 127 "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." as an imperative to have as many children as God gives them, usually 8 to 12. They view this practice as the way to advance the kingdom of their god by having more children than their adversaries. This movement is thought to have tens of thousands of adherents and is growing exponentially. It is supported by the head of the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Of course, these people are not alone. The Roman Catholics and the Muslims have the same goal and are practicing the same means. These people say overpopulation be damned, we will breed more than our religious opponents. Thus in the throes of a present and increasing overpopulation and its attendant horrors, we have large religious groups waging a war for world domination using birth rate as the ammunition. Can we not call out and indict these enemies of humanity?
Bob Newhard

On Dealing Honestly With Poverty

The other day, in conversation with a relatively affluent professional, I remarked on the immense gap between the rich and the rest of us. He felt that the existing arrangement was acceptable. I noticed that I have been using "the rich and the rest of us" lately rather than the "rich and the poor." I think I have picked this up from the political literature I read and I believe it is used there to enlarge the population opposed to the very rich in this time of diminishing economic activity. In other words "the poor" would not be politically viable.

In any event, this change in locution got me asking why we have abandoned the long-established rich/poor dichotomy. I suspect that this change is ultimately due to the American cultural refusal to deal honestly with poverty as a human condition, not unlike some contagious diseases and that, as with disease, we need to find a remedy.

If we were concerned to deal candidly with poverty we would ask why do we have the cliché "the poor are always with us?" instead of "the rich are always with us." After all, it has been the rich who have dominated the mass of mankind. It is they who have started most of our wars. It is they who have oppressed the working class. It is they, in short, who have treated a class of human beings, the poor, as objects to be discarded when their serviceability has been used up. It is also the rich that create societies of the rich and the poor in which democracy cannot survive. Currently this attack by the wealthy is being carried out by the Republicans who, of all things, accuse Obama, by proposing increased taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, of conducting "class warfare."

Of course, when the Bush administration gave the wealthiest an enormous tax break, which the rest of us would have to subsidize, it was not class warfare, because the wealthy would reinvest those funds in enterprises. Nor, when Ronald Reagan created the "welfare queen", was it class warfare.

However this glaring duplicity is not my point. It is that this society will accept the mistreatment that the wealthy subject it to rather than seek a just economy in which the society as a whole benefits from its productivity. As a case in point the wealthy have created a national economy, and hence the welfare of us all, on the skittish response of wealthy investors to every shift in the financial wind. Is this any way to run a country's economy? Our economy is too important to be put in the hands of wealthy privateers seeking their own ends. The mere fact that Henry Paulson, one of the architects of the house of cards that collapsed in 2007 could be kept on as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush to throw hundreds of billions of dollars to Wall Street financiers with little accountability and that Obama has continued much of this practice, illustrates the utter self-absorption of the monetary elite. This shows how "regulation" can be and has been manipulated for the benefit of the few. It also shows the extent of the gullibility of the American citizenry who apparently believe such an approach is necessary to save capitalism and the freedom that is supposedly contingent upon it. It is doubtful that either Kafka or Becket could have dreamed up such an absurd misplacement of faith on such a large scale.

What can be done? I am not sure that we yet know how to organize a human economy so that the full human potential of its citizens can be optimized. However, given what our experience with capitalism has revealed, I believe a few precepts are indicated.

• All investment should be kept as close to production as possible. Money invested only to generate more money is counter-productive and should be carefully scrutinized if not banned. Using money to simply generate more money is a primary bane of capitalism.

• Human welfare, including care for the planet we inhabit and the other species with which we share some portion of our DNA, should be the focus of our economy. If an enterprise cannot be justified on this basis it should not be permitted.

• Society should be viewed as the fundamental requirement for civilization. Without it we are but beasts in the jungle.

• The objective of society should be the optimum realization of each citizen's potential.

Bob Newhard