The New York Times’ current series of articles on class and wealth in the United States highlights some thought-provoking new trends in wealth.  In particular, this Sunday’s “Richest are Leaving Even the Rich Behind” notes the following trends:

—The portion of the nation’s income earned by taxpayers in the top 0.1 percent has doubled since the 1970s, to a level not seen since the 1920s.

—Taxpayers within the $100,000 to $200,000 tax bracket lost a greater portion of their income to taxes than those making $10 million or more.

The rich are getting richer and leaving the rest of us far behind. Our parents grew up in a world where millionaires were a rarity and no one thought bringing a $700 piece of electronic equiptment to school was a good idea. (See May 29th’s “Where the Jones Wear Jeans”.)

We knew the gap between rich and poor in America was growing wider, but not the degree to which it had exploded. And, while the consumer market has expanded rapidly to accommodate the growing millionaire class’s whims and tastes, our society has not visibly benefited in other ways.  Charitable giving has increased the last 39 out of 40 years, and approximately 90 percent of Americans give money to charity. The examples of Bill Gates and George Soros may serve as inspiration to the men and women who can afford to buy $2.5 million homes in Nantucket, merely to preserve the view and their privacy. But ultimately, the hyper-rich’s charitable giving does not balance out the tax burden born by the rest of the American population. Their inflated income is shadowed by the memory of the 1920s crash and the subsequent Great Depression that equalized much of the nation in abject poverty.

llouison

The most recent installment of the humanitarian travesty and farce that is occurring in the western Sudanese region of Darfur happened on Monday when Paul Foreman, head of the Dutch branch of Medecins San Frontieres, which translates as “doctors without borders,” was arrested for perpetrating crimes against the state of Sudan with his report about the rapes that are occurring in the genocide-ridden region of Darfur. The pro-government Janjaweed militias in Darfur have been charged with genocide and systematic rapes, and the Sudanese government has been implicated as complicit in the acts; the Sudanese government denies such charges. And now the Sudanese government has jailed the head of a medical charity for compiling a report about the mass rapes.

The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur catalogues the sexual mistreatment of 500 women who received treatment from Medecins San Frontieres over four and a half months in Darfur. Medecins San Frontieres insists that its report is accurate; the Sudanese government is livid about the report that highlights the grotesque abuse occurring in the region, and when Foreman refused to present the government with the evidence which led to the report — Foreman states that to do so would violate the confidential nature of the doctor-patient relationship — the government promptly arrested him. He has since been released on bail.

The Darfur region is located in western Sudan, and the Sudanese government stands accused of providing support and arms to the Arab Janjaweed militias that are engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleaning against Sudan’s black African population. Since February of 2003, the conflict has resulted in over 70,000 deaths and two million refugees.  

The recent arrest of Paul Foreman is merely the most recent travesty related to Darfur.  Earlier this year a United Nations report claimed, in a preposterously worded report and against all evidence, that genocide was not occurring in Darfur. The United Nations report, begun in October of 2004 at the behest of the U.N. Security Council, on whether genocide is taking place in Sudan, stated that “the commission found that (Sudan’s) government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks,” including “killing of civilians, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.”  Although some individuals might have perpetrated “acts with genocidal intent,” the government of Sudan “has not pursued a policy of genocide.”

The U.N. report — which contradicts the American declaration that genocide is currently occurring in Darfur — recommends that the International Criminal Court (ICC) located in The Hague try any specific cases of genocide and war crimes that may have occurred in the Sudan. Had the U.N. report concluded that genocide is occurring in Darfur, the U.N. would have been legally obligated to intervene to help end the conflict.

Mimi Hanaoka

“I might phrase my views a little differently, but fundamentally there is no change.”

— Siegfried Kampl, a 69-year-old Austrian politician who has recently made explicit his sympathy for the Nazis, and who has condemned what he claims was the “brutal persecution” of Austrian Nazis following the Second World War. He has also denounced as “assassins of battle comrades” the Austrians who deserted their posts in Nazi Germany’s military units.

While Kampl’s pro-Nazi sympathies inspired horror among his colleges, he did, unfortunately, inspire one of his peers; several days after Kampl’s outburst, John Gudenus, a right-wing politician, asserted that the existence of gas chambers employed by the Nazis in their concentration camps “remains to be proven.”

Mimi Hanaoka

Last fall when I started graduate school my sense of proportion seemed healthy. I took the required number of courses and earned straight As. I completed two freelance jobs. And though I always seemed to be working on papers and reading, there was time to spend with the people I love. Maybe the seven years I spent in the “real world” free from school strengthened my immunity to the guilt I witnessed in other grad students, who seemed to take school much too seriously. But it had been a hard summer: too much death.

I won the fellowships I applied for in winter while I watched what I didn’t know about Italian and Russian literature eclipse what I knew exponentially. Questions multiplied like rabbits. Answers, on the other hand, bloomed like yuccas: beautifully, slowly.

It seemed logical to call upon my experience working on set and behind the scenes in the film industry, where no alternative to getting the shot exists: on set, “impossible” is not an option. I would tackle the challenge of learning an immense body of knowledge as anyone on set confronts a film production dilemma. As on most film sets, I threw personal safety and well-being to the wolves. It seemed to follow that I should be able to learn more if I could devote more of my time to my studies. I sacrificed my time away from my books. And the quality, and amount of work I accomplished, remained the same as it had the first quarter.

Now I face down the last two weeks of spring quarter with what seems to be an insane pile of work. The time stretching ahead of me appears inadequate, my brain too slow. Will I complete it? Will I decide to forfeit perfect grades and request an “incomplete” in order to spend the first weeks of summer finishing spring course work? I can sit for hours in front of my computer screen, trying to outline a paper that will write itself. The time left for writing the paper is slipping away.

On my birthday, death and seven years of life outside academia melt away. Guilt rises at the thought of abandoning my books to see my family. It’s absurd. Where did the perspective go? When did it vanish? My family planned an ambush for my birthday: I succumbed. I didn’t crack a book this afternoon, but I ate two kinds of cake.

Is it failure I’m facing, or courage? I persist, clueless as to whether I’ll get everything done this time or whether, for the first time, I’ll come up short. With twice the required courseload, I’ve raised the stakes. What do I call what I’ve been given today? Family? Love? Perspective? An immunization against guilt?

All I know for sure is that I wouldn’t trade it for a bigger, better brain.

“To our regret, during Vice-Premier Wu Yi’s stay in Japan, Japanese leaders repeatedly made remarks on visiting the Yasukuni shrine that go against the efforts to improve Sino-Japanese relations,” seethed Kong Quan, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, explaining Vice-Premier Wu Yi’s abrupt departure from Japan during her good will visit, which was intended to warm the frosty Sino-Japanese relationship.  

The shrine in question is Yasukuni Shrine, which is a perennial if symbolic thorn in Sino-Japanese relations. Founded in 1869, Yasukuni is dedicated to the souls of the approximately 2.5 million Japanese war dead, and the souls of innocent children and war criminals alike are venerated in the shrine. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Yasukuni every year, and the shrine functions as a symbol of both respectful patriotism and militaristic nationalism. Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is a frequent visitor, and he insists that he makes his visits in his capacity as a private citizen; his Chinese counterparts view his visits as persistent affronts to China and a tacit approval of Japan’s history of military aggression against its East Asian neighbors.  

Given the recent publication of a new Japanese history textbook that glosses over Japan’s wartime atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s — one of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history includes referring to the Nanjing Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident,” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre — and the ensuing violent protests that erupted in China, the nasty game of brinksmanship is consistently escalating.  

Mimi Hanaoka

After a 10-hour parliamentary session and 23 votes against the motion, the Kuwaiti parliament has finally voted to amend its electoral laws and grant women the right to vote and to run in local and parliamentary elections.

The motion had been previously opposed and successfully thwarted by tribal and Islamist members of the parliament when they formed a majority and insisted that, according to Islamic law, women were barred from such leadership positions.  The parliament was finally convinced otherwise, but female candidates and voters must, even with this amendment, abide by Islamic law.

Mimi Hanaoka

Travel writing and photography are meant to excite the reader and inspire wanderlust; inevitably, however, travelogues reveal far more about their writers than their subjects.  To reread 19th-century accounts of travel in Egypt and Africa is to be appalled at the explorers’ attitudes towards the “simple” people they encountered.  Unfortunately,  the New York Times special photography section, “The Face of Cairo” in last week’s Travel Magazine carries on proudly in the same dated vein.  The feature purports to show us the true people of Cairo’s many neighborhoods but instead presents a photogenic assemblage of wealthy and, well, simple people.

Of the subjects, only a handful of lower-income men and women are shown, and all are employed.  The majority are members of the middle or upper class. These are some of the faces of Cairo, but by no means representative of the majority. The article highlights a small section of the Cairo population and allows them to represent a country where, according to Unicef, there were three Internet users among every 100 citizens in 2002.  Given the Internet’s immense cultural infiltration, this number has no doubt since tripled, but nonetheless, the majority of Cairenes are not wealthy.  The UNDP estimates that a quarter of the country lives below the Egyptian poverty line – which means that by United States standards, a quarter of the country is living in abject and unthinkable poverty.  The Times isn’t representing the faces of Cairo. Instead, it’s representing the faces we want to see to make us feel safer.

In light of recent terrorist attacks in Cairo targeted at tourists, the message of the photos is clear — it’s safe to come visit because we want to be just like you.  And so, ultimately, these photographs reveal far more about what we are seeking when we look to the Middle East than what is truly there.  We seek similarity to assuage our fears  — we want to see that these people look like us, think like us and, most importantly, buy the same things as us.  Over and over again, the men and women featured tell us that their favorite labels are “Louis Vuitton, Dior and Gucci” and that they love Julia Roberts.  When the subjects state otherwise, they are portrayed as unusual and anomalies. Only the three conservatively dressed, veiled girls “have no interest in American culture,” and no Internet.  They also have “no boyfriends or fiancés,” a fact which is presented as a charming piece of piety, when in fact, most Egyptian women do not date and postpone marriage until they have finished university and are more financially stable.

No one benefits from simplifying and homogenizing groups of people; there is no greater impediment to understanding than relying on simplistic stereotypes or, even worse, imagining that everyone everywhere is a version of yourself.  The Times’ photos might ensure that Nile cruise cancellations will be assuaged, but in the long run, we gain nothing from imagining that Cairenes are American wannabees with uncomplicated dreams.  

llouison

In an article for the International Herald Tribune, Katrin Bennhold ties the development of a new European identity to the European university foreign exchange program, Erasmus, which has enabled 1.2 million university students to study abroad since 1987. Around one-third of Europeans between the ages of 21 and 35 claim they consider themselves “more European than German, French or Italian,” Bennhold writes, citing a Time magazine survey from 2001. Professor of Political Science Stefan Wolff, of the University of Bath, refers to them as the “Erasmus generation.”

With the birth of the European Union, many university students not only study outside their country of origin, but also elect to remain in their host country to work after graduation, according to Bennhold. Erasmus has grown from 3,000 grants in 1987 to a current 136,000 grants to study abroad per year. And as Bennhold points out, the impact subsidized exchange opportunities may have upon the newest members of the European Union is significant. Participation in Erasmus programs has increased by a third among the new Eastern European EU members since their admittance to the EU one year ago to a current 20,000 students. Wolff’s hopes for the future are high:

“For the first time in history, we’re seeing the seeds of a truly European identity … Give it 15, 20, or 25 years, and Europe will be run by leaders with a completely different socialization from those of today. I’m quite optimistic that in the future there will be less national wrangling, less Brussels-bashing, and more unity in EU policy making – even if that is hard to picture today.”

Profits, as recently reported by the BBC, that a forced prostitute will reap on behalf of his or her master:

$67,200 in industrialized nations
$45,000 in the Middle East
$23,500 in transitional countries
$18,200 in Latin America
$10,000 in Asia and Africa

By means of comparison, the average annual salary of a Bulgarian worker: $2,600.

Sex, and more broadly forced labor and exploitation, sells; the International Labour Organisation reports that forced labor is a $31 billion global industry.

Mimi Hanaoka