HodgBlog

I recently read a book called The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher. In it, Ms. Pipher shares stories of refugees who were settled in Lincoln, Nebraska over the past 10-20 years.

On February 11th, 2008, over 1000 people from over 70 countries, all of whom now live in the state of Washington, visited Olympia (our state capitol) for the second annual Refugee and Immigrant Legislative Day. I decided to take a day off work and attend. Here are some observations from the day:

The city that I live in (Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle) closed two elementary schools this year, and the city of Seattle has also been talking about closing schools, in both cases because the number of children enrolled in school has declined. Yet the population of both Seattle and Shoreline must be increasing, as houses are replaced by condo buildings and apartments, so I had been somewhat confused about this...

I finally saw Michael Moore's film Sicko. It's very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have "good" health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you.

In my volunteer work (teaching English to adult immigrants and Spanish-English interpreting), I come in contact with a lot of immigrants -- some are here legally, and some are not. Illegal immigration has also been in the news a lot lately, so I find myself thinking about the subject frequently. When I hear what our so-called leaders are saying about illegal immigration, I get frustrated, because I don't think they're thinking constructively. So, I decided I'd better get my own thoughts together.

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts:

In my last article, I wrote about poverty, especially among people who have jobs. Many of the workers living in poverty around the world are working in the clothing industry; most of the clothing available for sale in the US is produced in sweatshops (which we can define as places where basic worker rights are lacking or where the workers do not earn a wage that allows them to support themselves and their families). But there are alternatives.

I have some more thoughts as a follow-up to my previous post about poverty and the economy -- about solutions to the problem of poverty. First, the basics. Since poverty occurs when there is an imbalance between earnings and the cost of living, to move an individual out of poverty, either the person's earnings must be increased, or his/her cost of living reduced. There are several ways we could consider doing that for the working poor segment of the population (whether here or overseas).

I have been thinking lately about the U.S. economy, and how it is related to poverty. Here are some thoughts:

I finally finished reading Chalmers Johnson's book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which prompted me to think about the differences between the United States that our founding fathers envisioned, and wrote into the Constitution, and the United States we are living in today. Here are some thoughts.