Not so: Missisippi is one of the poorest US states-however, it is one of the richest farming areas in the world, and has a large number of millionaires-it is just that the wealth is not evenly distributed. Same for the hills of Appalachia-billions of dollars extracted from the coal mines, which leaves the area, while the locals are impoverished. Poverty results from the uneven distribution of wealth, and the New York bankers who benefit from the coal mines, never send a cent back to West Virginia.
Louisiana is the same way. It has a huge amount of natural resources including natural gas, oil, and good farmland not to mention the tourism aspect. Louisiana has large number of very rich people but also a disproportionate number of people living at or below the poverty line.
If you’re really interested in this subject there is a great book by Catherine Reef, called Poverty In America.
It’s a history of poverty in America from the time of the first European settlements.
In it Reef points out by 1960 poverty in America had been transformed. It no longer was transparent and group oriented, but rather it fell on indivduals who for one reason or other fell through the cracks.
Kids pose a special problem but slowly are getting better and better, for instance, in Illinois kids get a great deal of benefits, free medical care, free food, housing vouchers, priority for programs.
So why does Illinois have kids that suffer? In a nutshell it boils down to drugs. Many parents who are crackheads and such simply don’t know how to apply, are too stoned to apply or fear the authorities will find out about their drug useage and arrest them or have the kids taken away.
But Reef’s book is really interesting. For instance, she points out that while the Great Depression was bad, it actually effected farmers minimally, as they had been going through a depression for years and had adjusted. She also points out people in two states, West Virginia and Mississippi actually saw their standard of living go UP, by 1933 because FDR’s programs aided them. In otherwords people in those two states were already in a state MUCH WORSE than the Great Depression before it hit the nation. So by installing aid programs, FDR raised the standard of living in those two states.
Povert is also a complex issue 'cause it’s full of political correctness. You simply aren’t allowed to ask questions that fall back on why such things occur. For instance in Chicago, packets of poverty revolve around black areas, yet we never see blighted white areas of Chicago. So why? Well no one will ever study that? It’s too politically hot, but it’s an area that needs to be studied.
The typical answer falls back on ghettoization yet it fails to explain the ghettoization of Jews, Latinos, Asians and others who went through exact same conditions. Yes EXACTLY when measured. Yet Reef points out and gives evidence where no one will touch this.
Getting back to the OP question there are living conditons that are definately third world in America, but since 1950 poverty has been transparent. In otherwords, people can get basic clothes, and food and a roof over their head, (granted it may be a roach infested roof). Thus you can’t see the other struggles of poverty that go with it.
The problematic thing about the OP question is that, as other posters have noted, you can leave, even if temporarily. For instance, if my city block is third world like, I can hop on a bus and in 15 minutes be in a nice area. In a third world country there is hopping a bus and leaving, even for temporary stays.
That’s common to the entire Southwest, there was a lot of that in New Mexico also.
I dont understand…isnt that the whole point of living on an indian reservation?
Why shouldnt it have low employment.
The indians do not allow whites to move onto their land and build malls and factories and office buildings and such, so what else would you expect?
Of course there will be lower “unemployment” on an indian reservation-----------that is the whole point of it!!!
As far as electricity, telephone, running water, sewer, wood stoves, isnt that what you choose when you choose NOT to be a part of the American mainstream culture? Isnt a more primitive life the kind of life that you would choose if you choose to live on an Indian reservation?
Besides, arent all the people on an Indian reservation there, by choice? Indians can live out in the wilds away from white civilized society, or they can choose to move to Denver and live in the city with electric, water, gas furnaces, etc if they want to.
At least the indians have a choice.
On the other hand, “I” can not choose to move to an indian reservation if I want to abandon the crowded polluted noisey white cities.
Indian reservations are not unlike parts of Detroit, where the people who live there have “chosen” to be a third world area with businesses and offices and stores moving out.
Have you ever actually been on a reservation? Depending on the reservation, “out in the wilds” seems an odd way to describe them. You do know that Native Americans are allowed to build stuff on their reservations, right?
30 years ago I saw some areas in the hills of SW Virginia that really shocked me, the people were living in shacks that seemed to be made of cardboard. But just a few miles away there was a normal small town with mostly middle class people. I think that area was worse than any inner city area I have been to.
Yes… I have been on lots of Indian reservations
Yes… I know that indians can build on indian reservations.
Did you know that a NON-indian cannot move there, live there, hunt there, fish there, build there (without permission which is almost never granted)
There is NO WAY!!! you are going to see Boeing, Microsoft, Oracle, JDSUniphase, or General MOtors building plants on indian lands.
There is no way that Pulte, or Levin, or I myself can go there tonight and buy up some land parcels on indian reservations and build massive subdivisions and shopping malls in their reservation.
There is NO WAY the indians are going to allow NON-indians to move there, to bring jobs with them, and to change and deface and overpopulate their lands with white people.
The indians CHOOSE to keep their reservation lands primitive, and unlike non-indian lands. It is THEIR choice!!! It is what they want.
Indian reservations are “like” third world nations, because they ARE!!! third world nations.
You’re wrong.
I agree.
Cherokees in NC let an outside company build and run their casino. The tribe keeps the profits. After a while the Cherokees will run it but they don’t now.
Not sure how other Indian casinos were built and run.
I think the original point made upthread about the Indian reservations is that the whole purpose of them, at least nowadays, is to permit the residents to live in their ancient ways. Ancient being equivalent to pre-technological and partly nomadic. In other words, like the poor parts of the Third World, but ideally with fewer marauding bandits with AK-47s or machetes.
So it is not surprising that a place designed to have no technology or business or what we moderns call employment lacks those things.
So outrage over high unemployment, low education, low income, and low assets on reservations is misplaced. Thise things are exactly the point of chosing to live primitively.
Certainly any given tribe can choose to take a more modern path, including letting Harrah’s build and run a casino on their land and taking a percentage.
http://www.ramusa.org/learn/media.html There is Remote America Medical that was formed to help third world countries get medical help. They now do half their work in rural USA.
Please elaborate.
Fast Facts on Adult Literacy in the US.
From the link:
"One measure of literacy is the percentage of adults who perform at four achievement levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient. In each type of literacy, 13 percent of adults were at or above Proficient (indicating they possess the skills necessary to perform complex and challenging literacy activities) in 2003. Twenty-two percent of adults were Below Basic (indicating they possess no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills) in quantitative literacy, compared with 14 percent in prose literacy and 12 percent in document literacy. "
Almost everybody is signature-literate, but a LOT of people can’t read, say, USA Today, which is written for intelligent gibbons. Many of my homeless library patrons spend all day with the paper in front of them but not reading it - I’m sure many of them can’t read it.
When I was a kid I’d go to my dad’s company to sell Girl Scout cookies. The cleaning lady would always buy some, but she’d have me write down her order. It was years before my mom gently explained to me that she probably couldn’t read well.
Nope. The purpose of the reservation system was a place to put the people who were on the land that we thought was valuable somewhere out of the way. If we put a bunch of native Americans on a piece of land and discovered something valuable on it, we’d toss them off onto the next piece of land.
In fact, we’d prefer it if they didn’t practice their old ways and became dependent upon government handouts. People who need government handouts to survive were more docile and less likely to take up arms if they got upset with you. Thus, we liked putting them on land where they couldn’t live their old life.
Many of the Indian tribes were not nomadic when we first started kicking them off. In fact, the Cherokee actually adopted much of the ways of Western civilization including Christianity, but that didn’t prevent Andrew Jackson kicking them off their land and over to what later became Oklahoma.
The casino business only came about recently when the Indians decided to use the legal “reservation” system we created against us. The original idea of the reservation system was to say that the Indian tribes were sovereign governments, so 1). We could sign a treaty with them to take their land, and 2). So, we didn’t actually have to give them specific rights like the right to actually own the land they occupied or the right to elect Congressional representation or the right to due process. Remember that the Indian Citizenship Act didn’t pass until 1924. Before that, Indians didn’t have an absolute right to American citizenship even though they were born in this country. That part of the 14th amendment didn’t apply to them.
Well, the Indians decided if they were truly sovereign nations, could they do such things as run casinos since they weren’t directly under state law. (A little more complex than that. Reservations in a state follow the state law, but if the state permits a particular practice like gambling, they cannot prohibit or regulate that practice on a reservation. State has a lottery, the reservation can run a casino.)
I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. Being poor in Somalia is a lot different than being poor in New York. In New York, you can go somewhere for help: the welfare office, a church, a hospital, etc. In Africa, there’s nowhere to go. It’s possible that the only way to starve to death in the US is by choice, the same goes for medical help, psychiatric help, or even clothes.
In my city, the poorest people live in housing projects, getting government aid in the form of free housing, food stamps, and social services. Homeless people are abundant, but there’s no reason they can’t live in the projects as well.
There’s a big difference between not having help vs refusing help.
The NC Cherokees had a casino well before NC had a lottery. For some reason the state of NC somehow regulates what games the casino can offer. For example right now they only have video poker but if they add live dealer poker they need NC to approve that. I thought they could do whatever they want but that’s not true here in NC.
According to an Elder of the Seminole Nation I met in Miami (I worked with his son), Uncle Sam was trying this as recently as the 80s. The main reason my coworker didn’t want to take jobs outside Florida was so he’d be able to become an Elder someday and work to further his people’s educational level and economic independence. Not very “third world,” but then, the guy had a PhD in Chemistry.