Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
You Can Spare a Dime to Save a Kid
My rage regarding the enormous taxpayer-subsidized bonuses at AIG and Merrill Lynch had just about abated. I had read that Merrill Lynch paid $3.6 billion to its employees just before it went bust and got bought out by Bank of America, and that Peter Kraus, the CEO who left after three months on the job with a $25 million bonus, turned around and spent $37 million on a Park Avenue apartment. I knew that AIG handed out $165 million in bonuses; 73 employees got more than $1 million apiece, and the largest bonus was $6.4 million.
But then I read that one of the last decisions of Bear Stearns' former CEO James Cayne, who resigned in January, was to authorize payment of about $2 million to a young woman who was about to file a sexual harassment suit against former Bear Stearns chieftain Alan "Ace" Greenberg. Seriously, let Greenberg pay for his own sins.
But then I put that in context, too. While we were all freaking out about the excesses of the bankers and traders, and awed by their absolute obliviousness about getting and spending our money as most Americans watched our pension funds lose half their value, 1.4 billion people around the globe struggled to live on $1.25 a day. It's hard not to stay mad at John Thain and his $1,405 trash can when I think about that $1.25, but I also had to stop and think about my own relative wealth and that $1.25. It's about what I spend for a bottle of water. Imagine trying to get through a day on that amount of money.
Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher with a penchant for annoying people - he has, in the past, asserted that animals have rights and that euthanasia should be an option for severely disabled newborns -- has just published a most timely new book. "The Life You Can Save" asks those of us with more than enough how we can justify not giving away the excess to save the lives of desperately poor people. This is not a newly humanitarian Singer suddenly eschewing rationality. All Singer's work has at heart the same concern - the alleviation of suffering. His relentless rationality just happens to lead him to philosophical near absolutes about what it means to live an ethical life. He can't help himself.
Singer started asking what we needed to do about global poverty 1o years ago in a Times Sunday Magazine piece. The answer was unpalatable. To live a pretty good life, we needed about $30,000 -- and we could and should give the rest away. Singer scared a lot of folks with disposable income. Who did this atheist think he was -- Jesus Christ? He was derided for not taking his own medicine, since it was revealed that he spent a lot of money taking care of his mother, who had Alzheimer's.
Singer's current request is far more modest. He still suggests a specific percentage of giving based on income, but his major plea echoes that of Oliver Twist. Bowl extended, he simply asks that we do more to eradicate poverty and more to save children's lives. More than we are doing, more than we think we can do. More, please, is all he asks.
I hate poverty. When I was a kid we were mostly working-class OK, but we lived paycheck to paycheck. There were times when seconds at dinner did not exist and when we put paper in our shoes to keep out the rain. It kills me now when I traipse through Safeway with fresh O.J. and Häagen-Dazs and behind me or in front of me there's a father in his work clothes trailed by very quiet kids. Dad is counting his change to be sure he can pay for milk and bread. It reminds me of the pain of where I'd been and how getting out of the paycheck-to-paycheck life turned me into a big-time consumer. Security meant having more than enough. I had only my salary, but it was a lot more than enough. I hate poverty; I also love excess.
When I read Singer's Times piece 10 years ago, I knew I couldn't meet his high standard, but I also knew he was right. I decided that I'd give 5 percent of my income to charities related to poverty alleviation and top it off by contributing an amount equal to every major luxury I indulged as well. It cut down my consumption, but it also increased my giving. And I'm weak. I fudge on what is a luxury.
I know a lot of really rich people are charitable. The same Cayne who shelled out $2 million to avoid a lawsuit established a mandatory contribution policy for senior managing directors at Bear Stearns; they had to give 4 percent of their salary and bonus to nonprofits. But have the traders and bankers and the celebrity enviros and poverty mavens and the rest of us linked our charitable giving to our consumption and excess? Do we take seriously the fact that poverty really does kill? Ten million children under 5 years of age die unnecessarily every year. Can you know that and not give up those luxuries that probably don't make much real difference in your satisfaction?
Singer says you can't. He insists that "the truly ethical life is really a demanding one." Can you be an environmentalist and buy a 414-foot yacht for $200 million like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen? How many lives could $200 million save? One of the charities Singer talks about is the DC-based Population Services International, which has a program that saves lives by treating oral rehydration. For every $250 they spend, a life is saved. That's 800,000 lives. And since Allen owns two other yachts, he might have been able to manage without this one. John Thain's wastebasket alone could have prevented two children from getting malaria and dying. Another group, Partners in Health, provides basic health services in Haiti, Peru, Rwanda, Lesotho and Russia. Providing basic health service in very poor countries is relatively expensive. It cost $3,500 to save a child's life. Paul Kraus could have saved 10,571 kids lives if he had just stayed wherever he was living and not bought that Park Avenue pad. These charities and Oxfam, which is Singer's personal charity of choice, all have top-notch cost-effectiveness ratings.
So Singer says a very polite no to the Thains of the world. Even if you are giving away a good bit of money, if you are living an excessive lifestyle while children are dying for no good reason, you need to give more. For those of us with modest means, 95 percent of Americans, Singer says giving away 5 percent is a good starting point. He himself has gotten up to only 25 percent. He lives modestly. I watched him on YouTube demonstrating how one could eat simply. He was preparing a gloppy mess -- a red lentil dal -- in a very modest kitchen. There was nary a granite countertop in sight. I was reading Gael Greene's "Insatiable" at the time, with chapter after chapter devoted to foie gras and Chateau Margaux.
Singer makes a compelling case that we have an unprecedented opportunity to use our personal resources to complement those of government and actually end world poverty. Yes, we can, he says. The ethical life is demanding -- but is there any other choice?
- Posted in
7 Comments so far
Show AllYes, we all must do more to save the lives of the children already born. We also need to help their mothers and fathers understand the need for birth control and then provide those parents with various forms of contraceptives. I adore children, don't get me wrong here, but our planet cannot support the people who are being born in ever growing numbers. Let us all begin to think more globally, please.
"I hate poverty; I also love excess."...Certainly an honest statement. Do yourself a simple favor. Show some discipline and stop consuming in excess.
Greed is killing us all.
This is a good opportunity to promote a change in the tax code. My mother wanted to be a CPA but got married and had me at a young age. She used her math skills to run the family budget and taught me how to do my first tax return when I was about 16. Forty-four years later I still do my own taxes, although they are now so complicated I do them on a computer with a software program. For all those years I had always given a lot of time, goods, and money to charities. And for the vast majority of those years it never meant anything to my taxes regardless of the obligatory "fully tax deductible" shown on every ad or piece of paper involved with a charity. This last tax filing was no different. Even though I had over $5000 in charitable giving and thousands more in medical expenses, it still wasn't more than the standard deductions granted by the tax code. Only for those years when I had a mortgage with deductible interest did my charitable giving ever count in lower my tax. It has always been know that the more modest the income, the higher percentage that is given to charity yet that individual will still get the same standard deduction as his neighbor who gave nothing, kept it all for himself.
When I finally paid off my mortgage I no longer had the interest to write-off and once again got no credit for my donations. Don't get me wrong, I don't give for the write-offs, it's just that I would have more to give if I could actually benefit from the write-off.... see?
Now compare this to the uber-wealthy. All they have to do is donate some old inherited painting and they get the dual benefit of a tax write-off easily worth more than my yearly salary and the kudos and publicity for such a charitable giving from the organization which benefits. I donated an old electric car to one of the few high schools in San Francisco that still has a class in auto tech. You didn't read about in a local newspaper even though, as a percentage of my personal wealth it was ten times the millions that Bill Gates gave to an Oakland high school.
It would be nice if the tax code could be changed so that all our charitable giving could be counted. And that should include our time. As it is now you can only deduct your miles traveled for volunteer work but not the time you do the work. How about a $1 for each hour of volunteer work?
After reading this, I will commit. Thank you...
Charity < Solidarity.
Save your dollars and cents, and instead get educated about how the first world men-in-suits deliberately hinder development in the third world. Then get political.
Singer's idea of a crude wealth redistribution from the first world working and middle classes to the third world is a joke. Sorry, but an ethics doctorate does not enable you to speak intelligently on global political economy (apparently!), and anyone who acts as though all Americans (whether working class or billionaire foreign investor) are equal beneficiaries of third world exploitation is asserting something not just wrong, but pretty repugnant, really. Should Katrina victims send their dollars to Guatemala too?
Charity is less than a band-aid on a gaping wound. And it's an insult to those who receive it.
Some of you will scoff at this, but please realize that your indignation is *not* that I don't want to help the third world, but that you don't want to do the intellectual work to find out what actually would help them in any significant way. You're indignant that anyone would not be eternally grateful for the $1.50 you send them, and would dare to ask for something more of you, like a bit of learning and action.
If you think that working class people can mail off their spare change in amounts that will give to the third world faster than "our" politicians and CEOs are stealing from them, you need to wake up.
And if bailouts make you angry, as they rightly should, consider this fact: working and middle class Westerners currently must send a portion of their hard earned dollars overseas, either as individual charity or as foreign aid, to save the lives of a billion people who Western CEOs and the global capitalist economy keep perpetually on the brink of starvation (remember the food crisis/riots of 2007-8?). It's a bailout all over again, by the same people (working and middle class Westerners), for the same people (Western fat cats), but this time with the global poor as the unfortunate (that's an understatement) intermediaries.
Joseph Stiglitz is not a bad starting point.
Less Than Two Dollars a Day: A Christian View of World Poverty and the Free Market, by Kent A. Van Til, is even better (regardless of your religious affiliation, or lack thereof, it is good).
Some useful websites:
http://www.globalissues.org/
http://www.globalpolicy.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Books-about-economic-development/lm/R2GKKRO89XV6J6
http://www.amazon.com/Criticizing-Capitalism/lm/RQMOI2ITZ079A/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_title_full
In all honesty, I think that charityism by well-meaning, generally egalitarian people is a much bigger threat than open selfishness, and needs to be chopped off every time it rears its ugly head. Or rather, that people who are egalitarian by disposition need to be shown the way forward, and that it does not consist in sending a dollar here and a dollar there (or a dime, as the article title suggests). They need to be shown how charity is not just desperately insufficient to solve the world's problems, but insufficient even to stop them from getting rapidly worse.
Sorry if I am abrasive, but I am not wrong. :) Read up.
jimmyjazz;
Thank you for this very informative post.
I too was raised catholic and believed that I must sacrifice for the poor, while the clergy lived high off the hog. I remember giving every extra dime I had because children were living on garbage heaps in South America.I sent through the propagation of the faith. But when it came time for our four children to go to college I had no money to help them. I also realized that if the church allowed birth control the people might be able to work their way out of poverty and the corporations would not have overpopulated populations to exploit by paying slave wages. Besides who do we trust to get the money to the poor? Recently I was sending to a charity that collected money for children in the U.S.. They even helped families of the troops in Iraq. I went directly to Hillery Clinton's office to complain that U.S. children needed charity like the children in Poor nations. Then found out that the charity took way too much off the top.What ever happened to food stamps? If the charity was directed by a Muslim he would be in prison for taking money for his own friends and family.