Blue Collar Adoption: January 2009

"Traveling through the world produces
a marvelous clarity in the judgment of
men. We are all of us confined and
enclosed within ourselves, and see no
farther than the end of our nose. This
great world is a mirror where we must
see ourselves in order to know
ourselves. There are so many different
tempers, so many different points of
view, judgments, opinions, laws and
customs to teach us to judge wisely
on our own, and to teach our judgment
to recognize its imperfection and natural
weakness."
-Michel de Montaigne

"How far you go in life depends on your
being tender with the young, compassionate
with the aged, sympathetic with the striving
and tolerant of the weak and strong.
Because someday in your life you will have
been all of these."
~George Washington Carver

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest may weaken and the wisest might err".
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

In a world where half the population – three billion people – lives on less than $2 a day, Ethiopia is home to many of the poorest of the poor. More than 250,000 children under the age of five die from diarrhea every year. Half the adult population can’t read and write. The average life expectancy is just 48 years of age.
Ethiopia is one of the five poorest countries in the world, with four out of every five people living on less than $2 a day.
Subsistence agriculture a way of life for 90 percent of its population and yet, despite the prominence of farming, agricultural production is low and extremely vulnerable with cyclical drought.
The country’s persistently low rainfall totals are a major factor in the extreme poverty that exists in rural areas as well as period famines that affect millions on people.
Ethiopia’s population has grown dramatically in the last several decades, from 33 million in 1983 to more than 75 million today. Many of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas of Ethiopia that face acute shortages of basic social and an almost nonexistent economic infrastructure.
For example, access to safe drinking water in Ethiopia is at critically low levels. Only 12 percent of the population has access to clean water while just seven percent has access to adequate sanitation services.
Waterborne diseases claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of people each year. One Ethiopian child in 10 dies before their fifth birthday; half of those die from diarrhea.

"The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself."--and that's according to Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan."The Fed chief than added that the 80 percent of the workforce represented by nonsupervisory workers has recently seen little, if any, income growth at all. The top 20 percent of supervisory, salaried, and other workers has." "As I've often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing," Greenspan told the congressional hearing.
The cause of this problem? Education, according to Greenspan.
The real problem, in my opinion, is the decline in 'real' wages. Wages have been nearly stagnant for 20 years when adjusted for inflation. "In 1979 the American worker's average hourly wage was equal to $15.91 (adjusted for inflation in 2001 dollars). By 1989 it had reached only $16.63/hour. That's a gain of only 7 cents a year for the entire Reagan decade."
TheStateOf...the "working poor." The American economy has changed from a manufacturing economy to a service and technical economy. As a result, unions have become less relevant, and management has gained an upper-hand in salary bargaining. America's poor, however, remain silent and unmoved, largely because they are satiated with lower prices, basic services and hours and hours of mind-numbing television.