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Archive for April, 2007

Complicity

Published by
Stacy Becker
at April 26, 2007 in Miscellaneous. Closed

I confess: I’m an American Idol fan. It’s not that I like the music or the celebrity hoo-ha. Rather, each week a group of young adults put their hearts and souls on the line. A waitress from a small town. A backup singer who never thought she had the talent to star. A farm girl who had never been on an airplane until she was flown to Los Angeles. They are inspirational.

Of course, Idol is a mega-mega-million dollar hit. So whoever has that knack of striking for gold came up with the idea of “Idol Gives Back.” Broadcast last night, it featured the starving and AIDs-stricken children of Africa. The all-star singing guests were background.

It may have turned me off of Idol forever.

Exactly what Fox and the Idol judges Cowles, Abdul and Jackson were giving back wasn’t clear. Coca-cola’s five million was amply rewarded in commercials. Con Agra’s donation? Hmmm… who profits from food aid to Africa? The rest of us saps were implored to donate any dollar we could. (Oh, did I mention that Idol got 70 million votes for that show, almost double the norm? Who’s giving and who’s receiving here?)

The scenes and stories from Africa were heart-wrenching. An orphaned 12-year old boy serving as surrogate father to his 7 year sister and living in an 8×10 “house” is a lesson to us all. Forget Idol Gives Back. Here’s the real lesson.

Dollars do matter. But let’s not use the occasional donation to blind us from what’s really going on. Bad stuff around the world doesn’t just happen. Everybody is complicit. Each of us is complicit. The truth is that American food policy serves American interests far more than the starving people in Africa, and we could demand that it be changed. The truth is that our over the top consumption of energy is contributing to global warming, which is having the most devastating effect on the poorest countries around the world. American farm subsidies combined with NAFTA have put Mexican corn farmers out of business, encouraging illegal immigration to the U.S.

Things happen for a reason.

The Bad, The Ugly, the Uglier…and the Good

Published by
Stacy Becker
at April 26, 2007 in Miscellaneous. Closed

So many of our public decision-making processes are broken. And the public knows it. Here’s a recent sampling.

The bad. People in Zambia are on the verge of starvation…in massive numbers. It’s not that there isn’t enough readily available food. There is. It was grown by local farmers and stockpiled. Some countries have sent money to purchase the food so it can avert a humanitarian crisis. Not the U.S. It insists that all food aid be American grown food shipped on American ships. If even a quarter of American dollars were used to buy local food, one million more people could be fed for six months and 50,000 lives could be saved.

According to the New York Times, over the past three years, four companies and their subsidiaries have made sales of more than half the $2.2. billion in food aid. Shipping companies were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food aid overseas.

What do America shippers, agricultural companies and elected officials have to say? Gloria Tosi, a lobbyist and immediate past president of the American Maritime Congress, an association of United States-flag ship owners, says ”There’s no constituency for cash.”
Not only is the self-interest sickening, this is a dreadful slap in the face to the American people. I do not believe for one second that they would insist that American food aid be home grown and shipped.

The Ugly. A person having a heart attack can avert muscle damage to the heart if he gets the proper care within about an hour or so. The problem is that many—most—hospitals cannot offer the appropriate emergency care such as angioplasty. However, they don’t want to divert their patients to other hospitals because Medicare reimbursement rates depend on the acuity of care a hospital offers. If the hospital stops serving patients with the more grave conditions, its reimbursements for other care will decrease.

The Uglier. A republican controlled committee doctored the report of an investigation into voter fraud, so that the report would suggest that fraud is far more prevalent than it is. This helped support crackdowns on voter registration in numerous states. Upshot? The ONE thing that probably unites us as American…the unimpeded right to vote, has been maliciously stripped away for some voters. And no surprise, it’s the poor and elderly paying the price.

The Good. I’m not going to comment on the Don Imus uproar. What is interesting though (and not at all surprising) is that MSNBC’s decision to pull Imus from their programming was due to NBC employees. NBC took the time to seek out the views of employees, especially women, who felt strongly that Imus is antithetical to their values.

Americans do care. Ask them. They’ll say buy grain from Zambia, redirect the ambulances and allow people to vote. I’m sure of it.