Galerie Polka presents American Realities by Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen (born in 1971 in Copenhagen).
“One in every six Americans lived below the official U.S. poverty line when Kira Pollack, Director of Photography at TIME Magazine, commissioned me to capture the growing crisis. During thirty-six days spread over seven months in 2011, and mostly accompanied by reporter Natasha del Toro, I traveled through New York, California, Louisiana, South Dakota and Georgia, visiting places that according to census data have the highest poverty rate.
The approximately 50 million poor Americans are a heterogeneous population from very varying backgrounds. Some are newly poor, some are immigrants who have come from humble conditions, dreaming of the American possibilities. Of course, U.S. poverty differs from poverty in developing countries. People living below the poverty line can have physical goods, even work but they are mired in debt, many homes are in foreclosure, and most often, being poor also implies having to resort to the cheapest, most unhealthy and risky lifestyle. Any unexpected occurrence may jeopardize the fragile system and find people living on the streets.
(…) The myth of the American Dream is very strong in the U.S., and it seems people are disillusioned with the fact that it is so difficult to get by today. They said there is no American Dream anymore. This, they said, was the American Reality.”
See, if the War On Drugs was actually about reducing drug crime, the capitalist state could win it in a matter of months. Decriminalise most drugs, legalise and tax the least dangerous drugs, plough the massive policing budgetary savings and tax revenues into treating drug addiction as a disease, and you’d completely undercut the demand which fuels black-market capitalist drug enterprises virtually overnight - and you’d still have a huge slice left over for all the fancy medals to award to ‘reforming’ police chiefs you could wish for.
The capitalist establishment know this; it’s bleedingly obvious. The War On Drugs is not even remotely about drugs - it’s about the social control necessary to enforce the managed decline of working-class communities via institutionally racist harassment.
When Police Budgets depend on confiscating cash from innocent people, in the name “Might be Drug Profits”, you know it has nothing to do with controlling drugs.
Opioids have become a deadly epidemic in the U.S. — and a new study begins to show just how dire the situation has become. According to a new paper by FAIR Health, there’s been an over 3,000% increase in opioid dependency between 2007 and 2014 among the privately insured. Even more troubling,it’s highest among one generation in particular.
President Barack Obama signed a bill Friday requiring labeling of genetically modified organism foods. The bill requires companies to be transparent about GMOs through one of two ways. They can present the information on the product label, or share GMO disclosures behind QR codes — but this is not quite what Americans want.
