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The Walls of Conscience

Imagine a world where the richest 10 percent of the population controls more than 50 percent of the wealth. The wealthy cannot fully enjoy themselves, however, because they live in fear of kidnappings, extortion and premeditated acts of violence. They must live in walled-in compounds away from the teeming masses and commute via helicopter or bulletproof car to work, shop and worship. Thousands of private soldiers patrol the perimeters of their compounds, and electrified barbed wire keeps the “lower” classes from getting too close.

Unfortunately, this scenario is not the plot of some grim futuristic film. It already exists in São Paulo, the largest city in South America and the financial and commercial capital of Brazil. According to The Washington Post, the homicide rate in São Paulo tripled in the 1990s. Sixty people out of every 100,000 each year are murdered, as opposed to 7.4 out of 100,000 in Washington, D.C., and 7.8 in New York City.

Police reported 63 kidnappings in the first five months of this year, up from 15 during the same period a year ago. So many wealthy victims have been abducted that plastic surgeons have become expert at treating elite clients who return from hostage situations with ears missing, fingers severed and other body parts removed (so that they can be sent to family members along with ransom notes).

Rather than address the growing inequality in Brazil, over 1 million of its wealthiest citizens have retreated behind walled community gates, according to a recent study. This is a doubling of the gated population in the last five years. São Paulo alone has over 300 such communities.

“The elite have made a decision. Instead of looking to better Brazilian society in general, they are abandoning it and finding their own personal protection behind guarded walls,” said Brazilian author Teresa Caldeira. “The rich are retrenching, restricting their lives in incredible ways and living their lives in an increasingly paranoid fashion.”

While the United States does not yet have this level of walled segregation and regular violent confrontations between the rich and the poor, several recent trends are troubling to an impartial observer. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (www.povertyusa.org) launched a multimedia campaign recently to raise awareness of what it calls the 51st state: “Poverty USA.” With 34 million residents, it is the second largest state of the union, and nearly 12 million children — 1 in 6 — live in this state. Despite these facts, a March 2000 Gallup Poll found that only 5 percent of Americans believe poverty and homelessness are important problems for the country.

Part of the reason for the lack of concern is the think tanks funded by the rich that act as apologists for the concerns of the rich. These think tanks flood our newspapers, television shows and radio stations with seemingly “objective” commentaries. According to Michael Dolny of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (www.FAIR.org), the problem is not that these think tanks should not have a place in the spectrum of voices in the media. The problem is that pundits funded by right-wing think tanks are often quoted with the same deference as independent academicians, but are rarely labeled as being funded by special interests.

For example, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 24, 1998, entitled, “America Has the World’s Richest Poor People.” Essentially telling the poor to stop belly-aching because they were better off than the poor overseas and better off than our American ancestors, columnists such as Mr. Hector shut off questions such as “Why does the richest country in the world still have so much poverty?” They assume a world of inequality as inevitable, and adopt a moralistic view of the poor as lazy and ineffectual. Following this logic, should we view America’s poor as the modern equivalent of the house slaves in the old divide-and-conquer Southern plantation economy? Are we really telling them that they had better shut up and accept their color TVs and air conditioning, or else they may be forced to live like the really poor overseas?

The tragedy of Sept. 11 and the recent economic downturn have exacerbated the problems of the poor in this society, and has sent many from the “middle class” into the ranks of the unemployed and homeless. New personal bankruptcies filed during the second quarter of 2002 and for the past 12 months set all-time records, and they continue to go up (www.abiworld.org). Some of these newly-poor and bankrupt are Asian Pacific American waiters, garment workers and baggage screeners.

Experts assert that less than 3 percent of individual bankruptcy filings are done by those trying to cheat creditors. Many bankruptcies result when a catastrophic illness wipes out the savings of a family with no health insurance. Nevertheless, “the big guys can file multi-billion dollar bankruptcies, but the rest of us can’t get protection when we face difficult financial times,” said consumer advocate Doug Heller.

“Homeland security” is a growing concern for many of us in the wake of the terrorist attacks last year. However, in our zeal to build fences and walls to protect ourselves, we must be careful not to create barriers between the rich and poor of our own society, and between the United States and the rest of the world.