Twenty Questions: Social Justice Quiz 2008

Friday 12 September 2008

by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    We in the US who say we believe in social justice must challenge ourselves to look at the world through the eyes of those who have much less than us.

    Why? Social justice, as defined by John Rawls, respects basic individual liberty and economic improvement. But social justice also insists that liberty, opportunity, income, wealth and the other social bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to everyone's advantage and any inequalities are arranged so they are open to all.

    Therefore, we must educate ourselves and others about how liberty, opportunity, income and wealth are actually distributed in our country and in our world. Examining the following can help us realize how much we have to learn about social justice.

    1. How many deaths are there worldwide each year due to acts of terrorism?

    Answer: The US State Department reported there were more than 22,000 deaths from terrorism last year. Over half of those killed or injured were Muslims. Source: Voice of America, May 2, 2008. "Terrorism Deaths Rose in 2007."

    2. How many deaths are there worldwide each day due to poverty and malnutrition?

    A: About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. Poverty.com - Hunger and World Poverty. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes - one child every five seconds. Bread for the World. Hunger Facts: International.

    3. In 1965, CEOs in major companies made 24 times more than the average worker. In 1980, CEOs made 40 times more than the average worker. In 2007, CEOs earned how many times more than the average worker?

    A: Today's average CEO from a Fortune 500 company makes 364 times an average worker's pay and over 70 times the pay of a four-star Army general. Executive Excess 2007, page 7, jointly published by Institute for Policy Studies and United for Fair Economy, August 29, 2007. The 1965 numbers from State of Working America 2004-2005, Economic Policy Institute.

    4. In how many of the more than 3,000 cities and counties in the US can a full-time worker who earns the minimum wage afford to pay rent and utilities on a one-bedroom apartment?

    A: In no city or county in the entire USA can a full-time worker who earns minimum wage afford even a one-bedroom rental. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) urges renters not to pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent. HUD also reports the fair market rent for each of the counties and cities in the US. Nationally, in order to rent a two-bedroom apartment, one full-time worker in 2008 must earn $17.32 per hour. In fact, 81 percent of renters live in cities where the Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom rental is not even affordable with two minimum-wage jobs. Source: Out of Reach 2007-2008, April 7, 2008, National Low-Income Housing Coalition.

    5. In 1968, the minimum wage was $1.65 per hour. How much would the minimum wage be today if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968?

    A: Calculated in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the 1968 minimum wage would have been $9.83 in 2007 dollars. Andrew Tobias, January 16, 2008. The federal minimum wage is $6.55 per hour effective July 24, 2008, and will be $7.25 per hour effective July 24, 2009.

    6. True or false? People in the United States spend nearly twice as much on pet food as the US government spends on aid to help foreign countries.

    A: True. The USA spends $43.4 billion on pet food annually. Source: American Pet Products Manufacturers Association Inc. The USA spent $23.5 billion in official foreign aid in 2006. The US government gave the most of any country in the world in actual dollars. As a percentage of gross national income, the US came in second to last among OECD donor countries and ranked number 20 at 0.18 percent behind Sweden at 1.02 percent and other countries such as Norway, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Austria, France, Germany, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and others. This does not count private donations, which, if included, may move the US up as high as sixth. The Index of Global Philanthropy 2008, pages 15-19.

    7. How many people in the world live on $2 a day or less?

    A: The World Bank reported in August 2008 that 2.6 billion people consume less than $2 a day.

    8. How many people in the world do not have electricity?

    A: Worldwide, 1.6 billion people do not have electricity and 2.5 billion people use wood, charcoal or animal dung for cooking. United Nations Human Development Report 2007/2008, pages 44-45.

    9. People in the US consume 42 kilograms of meat per person per year. How much meat and grain do people in India and China eat?

    A: People in the US lead the world in meat consumption at 42 kg per person per year, compared to 1.6 kg in India and 5.9 kg in China. People in the US consume five times the grain (wheat, rice, rye, barley, etc.) as people in India, three times as much as people in China, and twice as much as people in Europe. "THE BLAME GAME: Who is behind the world food price crisis," Oakland Institute, July 2008.

    10. How many cars does China have for every 1,000 drivers? India? The US?

    A: China has nine cars for every 1,000 drivers. India has 11 cars for every 1,000 drivers. The US has 1,114 cars for every 1,000 drivers. Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, "Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future" (2007).

    11. How much grain is needed to fill an SUV tank with ethanol?

    A: The grain needed to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a hungry person for a year. Lester Brown, CNN.Money.com, August 16, 2006.

    12. According to The Wall Street Journal, the richest one percent of Americans earns what percent of the nation's adjusted gross income? Five percent? Ten percent? Fifteen percent? Twenty percent?

    A: "According to the figures, the richest one percent reported 22 percent of the nation's total adjusted gross income in 2006. That is up from 21.2 percent a year earlier, and it is the highest in the 19 years that the IRS has kept strictly comparable figures. The 1988 level was 15.2 percent. Earlier IRS data show the last year the share of income belonging to the top one percent was at such a high level as it was in 2006 was in 1929, but changes in measuring income make a precise comparison difficult." Jesse Drucker, "Richest Americans See Their Income Share Grow," Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2008, page A3.

    13. How many people does our government say are homeless in the US on any given day?

    A: A total of 754,000 are homeless. About 338,000 homeless people are not in shelters (live on the streets, in cars or in abandoned buildings) and 415,000 are in shelters on any given night. The 2007 US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Annual Homeless Report to Congress, page iii and 23. The population of San Francisco is about 739,000.

    14. What percentage of people in homeless shelters are children?

    A: HUD reports nearly one in four people in homeless shelters are children 17 or younger. Page iv, the 2007 HUD Annual Homeless Report to Congress.

    15. How many veterans are homeless on any given night?

    A: Over 100,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. About 18 percent of the adult homeless population are veterans. Page 32, the 2007 HUD Homeless Report. This is about the same population as Green Bay, Wisconsin.

    16. The military budget of the United States in 2008 is the largest in the world at $623 billion per year. How much larger is the US military budget than that of China, the second-largest in the world?

    A: Ten times. China's military budget is $65 billion. The US military budget is nearly 10 times larger than the second leading military spender. GlobalSecurity.org

    17. The US military budget is larger than how many of the countries of the rest of the world combined?

    A: The US military budget of $623 billion is larger than the budgets of all the countries in the rest of the world put together. The total global military budget of the rest of the world is $500 billion. Russia's military budget is $50 billion, South Koreas is $21 billion, and Irons is $4.3 billion. GlobalSecurity.org.

    18. Over the 28-year history of the Berlin Wall, 287 people perished trying to cross it. How many people have died in the last four years trying to cross the border between Arizona and Mexico?

    A: At least 1,268 people have died along the border of Arizona and Mexico since 2004. The Arizona Daily Star keeps track of the reported deaths along the state border, and it reports 214 died in 2004; 241 in 2005, 216 in 2006, 237 in 2007, and 116 as of July 31, 2008. These numbers do not include deaths along the California or Texas borders. The Border Patrol reported that 400 people died in fiscal 2206-2007, while 453 died in 2004-2005 and 494 died in 2004-2005. Source The Associated Press, November 8, 2007.

    19. India is ranked second in the world in gun ownership with four guns per 100 people. China is third with third firearms per 100 people. Which country is first and how widespread is gun ownership?

    A: The US is first in gun ownership worldwide with 90 guns for every 100 citizens. Laura MacInnis, "US most armed country with 90 guns per 100 people." Reuters, August 28, 2007.

    20. What country leads the world in the incarceration of its citizens?

    A: The US jails 751 inmates per 100,000 people, the highest rate in the world. Russia is second with 627 per 100,000. England's rate is 151, Germany's is 88 and Japan's is 63. The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any country in the world. Adam Liptak, "Inmate Count in US Dwarfs Other Nations'" New York Times, April 23, 2008.

BILL QUIGLEY IS A HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER AND LAW PROFESSOR AT LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS. HE CAN BE REACHED ATQUIGLEY77@GMAIL.COM.

A New Green Card Deal

by MAE M. NGAI

[from the July 9, 2007 issue of The Nation]
This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/ngai

The Senate immigration bill faces opposition from conservatives and liberals alike, but critics on both sides are missing a crucial problem with the legislation. The bill fails to address a fundamental flaw in our current immigration system: the arbitrary and unfair manner in which it restricts the number of green cards issued each year.

In addition to placing an annual limit on the number of green cards, the current system imposes a uniform per-country cap. Most countries never come close to reaching their limit, which is 25,620--or 7 percent of all family and employer-sponsored visas. But four countries persistently max out their caps: Mexico, India, the Philippines and China. For these countries the visa backlog for some family categories is twenty or more years--an impossible wait. For employer-sponsored visas the backlog for skilled workers is five or more years.

The cap on annual admissions from these countries is a major cause of illegal immigration and the deficit of skilled immigrant labor. The Senate proposal skirts the problem but cynically addresses its effects by increasing the number of green cards only for those with education and wealth while channeling lower-skilled immigrants into a guest-worker program.

Congress repealed the noxious national-origin quota system, in place since the 1920s, which blatantly discriminated against immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and Asia on grounds that they were racially undesirable. Individual attributes--family relations and job skills--were deemed more important in selecting immigrants than national origin or race. The per-country cap was established to keep the immigration stream diverse, to keep the system from being monopolized by a few countries. The logic appealed to Americans’ sense of fairness, that we should treat each country the same.

But this sense of formal equality obscures the fact that not all countries are the same: Some are larger and some smaller, some are more prosperous than others, some have special historical relationships with the United States that others do not. The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in the real world. Why should Belgium and New Zealand, say, have the same number of visas as Mexico and India, if the former are underused and the latter are oversubscribed?

In the early 1960s Michigan’s Democratic Senator Philip Hart proposed an innovative bill that did not treat immigration as a zero-sum game but took into account both America’s needs and the needs of sending countries. Hart’s initial vision allocated 20 percent of all visas to refugees; 32 percent to countries in proportion to their size of population; and 48 percent to countries in proportion to their immigration to the United States during the previous fifteen years. It set a minimum and maximum for all countries and called for an update every five years. It was a complicated formula that eschewed a unilateralist approach in favor of one that balanced human rights, the emigration needs of sending countries, and Americans’ historical and familial ties abroad. The bill had bipartisan support but was bypassed by another bill, supported by the Kennedy Administration. That bill was ultimately signed into law as the Hart-Celler Act by President Johnson in 1965.

Hart’s ideas could be updated to solve the problems caused by the per-country limits in ways that don’t denigrate family ties or create an underclass of temporary guest workers. Since 1980 we’ve had a separate law dealing with refugee admissions. But we could allocate green cards to countries based on the relative size of their population and emigration demand; their ties to American citizens and institutions; and their supply of low- and high-skilled labor that we need. In other words, if we acknowledge that migration is driven by supply and demand and take into account the needs of the United States and other countries, we might have a system that is more realistic and fair.

We might also return to a regionalist approach. Few people know that before 1965 there were no numerical restrictions on immigration from countries of the Western Hemisphere, in keeping with the tradition of Pan-Americanism. When we imposed quotas on Mexico and the rest of the Americas after 1965, we got illegal immigration. Today the free-trade agreements in the Americas (NAFTA and CAFTA) ease the movement of goods and investments--especially those of multinational corporations--but not people. The European Union, by contrast, allows citizens of member states free movement to other member states. If we combined measures to strengthen the economies of our hemispheric neighbors with a more sensible immigration policy, we would go a long way toward solving the illegal immigration problem.

Finally, rather than rehash the agonizing debate over a mass-legalization program every twenty years, we might consider restoring statutes of limitations on prosecuting unauthorized presence. We used to have such a policy (one to five years) before Congress eliminated it in the 1920s. The underlying logic was much the same as the arguments for legalization today: Immigrants who work hard and sink roots in their communities effectively become part of our society and should not have to remain in the shadows forever.

We would be wise to rethink the unilateralist premises of US immigration policy. It makes much more sense for our policies to reflect how migration is driven by supply and demand in a world in which population and wealth are distributed unevenly. History shows that policies designed to categorically exclude--from the Chinese exclusion acts of the nineteenth century to the imposition of unrealistically low quotas on Mexico in the twentieth--are doomed to failure.

Immigration Legislation -- comments by Lou Dobbs

Dobbs: Give it a rest, Mr. President
By Lou Dobbs • CNN
Editor’s note: Lou Dobbs’ commentary appears weekly on CNN.com.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush is building his legacy, adding another unfortunate line of hollow bravado to his rhetorical repertoire. To “Mission accomplished,” “Bring it on,” “Wanted: Dead or alive,” and of course, “I earned ... political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” he has added “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” referring to his own ill-considered push for so-called comprehensive immigration reform legislation.
Bush emerged from a midday meeting with Republican senators on Capitol Hill to declare, “We’ve got to convince the American people this bill is the best way to enforce our border.”
No, Mr. President, someone you trust and respect must convince you that kind of tortured reasoning should never be exposed before cameras and microphones. Isn’t there anyone in this administration with the guts to say, “Give it a rest, Mr. President”?
Sen. Jeff Sessions came close when he said, “He needs to back off.” This president desperately needs to be reminded that he is the president of all Americans and not just of corporate interests and socio-ethnocentric special interest groups.
In what other country would citizens be treated to the spectacle of the president and the Senate focusing on the desires of 12 million to 20 million people who had crossed the nation’s borders illegally, committed document fraud, and in many cases identity theft, overstayed their visas and demanded, not asked, full forgiveness for their trespasses?
Illegal aliens and their advocates, both liberal and conservative, possess such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they demand not only legal status, but also that the government leave the borders wide open so that other illegals could follow as well, while offering not so much as an “I’m sorry” or a “Thank you.”
This bill would be disastrous public policy and devastate millions of American workers and their families, taxpayers and any semblance of national security. Yet even in defeat, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, one of the reform bill’s chief architects, declared: “Doing nothing is totally unacceptable.” Like the senator, Bush says the status quo is unacceptable.
The president and the senator are wrong. It is the sham legislation they support that is totally unacceptable. But if Bush and Kennedy sincerely desire resolution to our illegal immigration and border security crises, I’d like to try to help. But a word of caution, if I may, to our elected officials: Resolution of these crises will require honesty, directness and an absolute commitment to the national interest and the common good of our citizens. Here are what I consider to be the essential guiding principles for any substantive reform:
First, fully secure our borders and ports. Without that security, there can be no control of immigration and, therefore, no meaningful reform of immigration law.
Second, enforce existing immigration laws, and that includes the prosecution of the employers of illegal aliens. As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, put it, illegal employers are the magnet that draws illegal aliens across our border. Enforcing the law against illegal employers and illegal aliens at large in the country will mean bolstering, in all respects, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Third, the government should fund, equip and hire the people necessary to man the Citizenship and Immigration Services. To do so will ensure that the agency is capable of fully executing and administering lawful immigration into the United States and eliminating the shameful backlog of millions of people who are seeking legal entry into this country.
Those three steps are necessary to the security of the nation and the effective administration and enforcement of existing immigration laws. Those steps should be considered non-negotiable conditions precedent to any change or reform of existing immigration law.
At the same time, the president and Congress should order exhaustive studies of the economic, social and fiscal effects of the leading proposals to change immigration law, and foremost in their consideration should be the well-being of American workers and their families.
The president and Congress should begin the process of thoughtful reform of our immigration laws. Public hearings should be held throughout the nation. The American people should be heard in every region of the country, and fact-finding should be rigorous and thorough. The process will be time-consuming and demand much of our congressmen and senators, their staffs and relevant executive agencies.
The importance of securing borders and ports and reforming our immigration laws is profound, and that security is fundamental to the future of our nation. That future can be realized only with a complete commitment to a comprehensive legislative process of absolute transparency and open public forums in which our elected officials hear the voices of the people they represent. American citizens deserve no less.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/12/Dobbs.June13/index.html?eref=rss_topstories