When I began this blog I knew very little about urban poverty. In fact that was the challenge. It was one thing to experience poverty growing up; quite another to treat it as an intellectual, academic problem. And I promised myself to learn the issue, study it, and keep a web log to chart my journey. The idea was that others could learn with me, perhaps teach me along the way.  

With that said I’ve tried to answer two questions. First, what are people currently saying about poverty in the news? Second, what have historians said about poverty throughout American history? In the blog I’ve mainly addressed the first question, because America needs change more than it needs a poverty historiography. Poverty is a problem for millions of Americans in the *present*. By reporting on current issues I feel we can transform our awareness into informed decisions about how we organize and mobilize, what solutions we propose, and who we entrust with our votes when poverty-related policies hang in the balance.

Browsing the net for English-language reporting on Italy under Berlusconi, I found this 8-minute piece by the New York Times. Italy's most effective opposition these days are a gaggle of independent journalists and some brilliant stand-up comedians. Controversial comedian-environmental activist-former accountant Beppe Grillo is a very good example of the latter, and his citizen journalism blog is the most read in Italy, and according to the NYT, the tenth most read in the world.

Do you remember your first credit card? I remember mine. It was a grey, black, and red MBNA Master Card with a $1,000 limit. It felt like gold in my wallet…

 I got it way back in ’97, when Guess jeans were in and every dude in the ‘hood had to have the beef’n’broccoli Timbs. I was sixteen with no job and no sense – so your boy put his Master Card to work. In no time I was in debt. Deep in debt. I bought whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. New discman. New beeper. New cds. A nice little necklace for my high school sweetheart. Dates at the movies, the ice skating rink, the steakhouse. Truth be told,  it was one of the best months of my life.

How do you see development?

I’ve just recently started taking a class at Boston University called Analysis of Educational Policies and Practices for Development. At the end of the first class everyone tried to come up with a metaphor for development. They included:

• Tree (where the roots represented the community)
•  Healthy Body Clean Water (don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone)
•  Winding River Space shuttle (learning from each mission)
•  Haircut (slash and burn, don’t just cover over with fancy conditioner)
•  Ecosystem Starvation (only when fed do you know healthy from unhealthy food)
• The evolution of a caterpillar to a butterfly
•  Forest
•  Rather than just throwing fire, lighting candle by candle

Last summer the world looked on as millions of people took to the streets of Tehran (and other cities) to protest against the blatant abuse of an election, a crucial democratic instrument. What grabbed the headlines was the scale of the protest, and the way in which the resistance forced the political leadership of the opposition to, well, oppose the result,and in particular the way people power could combine with new technologies. The media focused on the use of mobile phones, of Facebook and Twitter to organize‘from below’, hackers joining in with the US DoS' actions. The crucial element was the sheer size of protests, particularly early on: hundreds of thousands if not millions of people taking to the streets to protest all across the country. The regime attempted to counter as best it could: shutting down mobile phone networks, slowing down the internet as well as the ‘usual’ methods of bussing in supporters and using batons and even bullets against the massive outpouring of disgust with a regime left with no credibility in their eyes. The struggle was a momentous one, and the casual observer should not make the mistake it was fruitless simply because Ahmadinejad was eventually allowed to remain President. 

To my mind journalists too often eschew the past in their reports. In so doing the current issues and events that they write about enter the public domain as if they had no antecedents, no context within which they developed—no historical contingency. 

I feel the problem acutely when I write about urban poverty. I often try to raise awareness of the struggles of the poor in America’s cities. So I comment on food, clothing, and shelter, as well as employment and the cultural representations of the poor in the news. Rarely, however, do I bring up the history of poverty in America; not one of my posts has been about how the poor have gotten to where they are today. I’m not even sure that I’d even know where to begin…

In more than a few history seminars I’ve heard the claim that “Journalism is the first draft of history.” This is in fact a much distilled version of the idea from which it came. Speaking to Newsweek magazine’s overseas correspondents in 1963, Philip Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, delivered the now clichéd remark. His exact words were: “So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.”[1] 

What bedeviled journalists, Graham thought, were their attempts to explain a world in motion; that is, to write about present phenomena without the benefits of hindsight. In the race to publish a story journalists could *only* write a “first rough draft of history” and then move on. The rest was for the historian, for whom the journalist left traces of the past. Indeed newspaper and magazine accounts offer historians at least two insights, a view of the phenomenon under investigation, and the perspective of at least one witness.

After 10 years of symbolic resistance to the World Economic Forum and neo-liberal ideology, the World Social Forum is taking a year off from its centralized meeting . In lieu of their usual forum , there will be 27 WSF sanctioned events throughout the year including a Seminar to discuss the successes and failures of the last ten years. 

In their own words this seminar will bring together...

"70 intellectuals and social leaders around the world - many of whom have integrated the process of creation and construction of the World Social Forum (WSF) in the last ten years."

Here’s a sad indictment of what Italy has been reduced to after two decades of joint rule by the current majority and the equally parasitic current opposition. Two days ago a flurry of articles hit the Italian press about a forty-year-old teacher who gave up on her profession after two decades of short-term contracts, and what was her best employment option after teaching? Porn.  No word of a lie.

Michelle Liò, her stage name, comes from Venice’s Lido, and lives and worked with her family in the rich north-east of the country, in prosperous provincial towns like Treviso and Conegliano. And yet, even here the combination of nearly three decades of economic mis-management and the current recession has driven people to make drastic choices such as this.

One of my intellectual and spiritual inspirations has been, and will continue to be, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To my mind the best way to commemorate him is to revisit and reflect upon his words, some of which speak directly to issues this blog attempts to address. Below is an excerpt from Dr. King’s sermon, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,”[1] which he delivered before the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1968, less than a week before his life was taken:

".…I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.