Poverty 2

On Poverty 6 David Santin Kilday DSK Copyright 2026 My total net worth presently is ~$345. This is all the money I have in the world. I pay my debts early so I have earned a credit rating of 805. I have never lived on more than $15,000 per year in my entire lifetime. I am 58 years old. In a world where nearly half of the world lives on less than $7 per day who am I to complain about my ~$40 per day. I am an American man of the people. My luxuries are cigarettes and coffee. At the end of the month, when money gets thin, I roll my own cigarettes with fine, pipe tobacco from the bulk, tobacco blending corporation America’s Lane Limited. For smokers, it is hard to top fine, pipe tobacco rolled in bleach-free paper (or bleached paper for the traditional and for the hardcore). Hand rolled cigarettes should be a home option for all of us who enjoy smoking. I was disbursed ~$13,500 from Social Security Disability and received a gift of $1,500 from my father to take a vacation in 2025. I paid into the Social Security Administration when I worked as a young man, and before I was diagnosed with a difficult illness for which I was declared permanently, partially, and legally Disabled in 2001 after one year of medical treatment (as is required for a Disability medical judgement). All of us pay into the Social Security Administration when we work. The taxes that support the Social Security Disability trust fund and the Social Security Retirement trust fund are withheld from all working American’s paychecks when they are paid in the form of what is called a withholding tax, as it was from my paychecks before I became medically Disabled. A benefit of American citizenship is that we are supported by our government taxes when we get ill and/or elderly. Sadly, the Social Security Retirement trust fund will run out of money in the 2030s; the Social Security Disability trust fund is funded until the 2090s because preventative medicine and cogent medical treatment is so cost effective. I most sympathize with the poor who live on less than $6.85/day; this is 44% to 47% of the world according to my research with Gemini's free smartphone app artificial intelligence (AI). Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It seems that the Haitian people are forever punished for the Haitian revolution of the slaves, the only successful slave revolt in modern history (Gemini, AI). One of the leading industries in Haiti today–I learned from a film on the Duvalier administration: Arnold Antonin’s Haiti: The Way to Freedom (1975)--is the extraction of blood from the poor. Poor Haitians sell their blood for $3/liter; the liters of blood are then sold in the global North for $27/liter. In poor Haiti, vampirism is a leading industry. Haiti is a country in which, on average, the people are malnourished and consume less than 35g of protein/day, I learned from Antonin’s documentary (featured on CriterionChannel.com). Imagine being malnourished and emptying your life force by the liter. A liter is a lot of blood: approximately a quart. What if this was your only option short of starvation. That is real poverty. In America, we work our way up and everyone wants to be self-made and independent. I started my writing career (after some juvenalia) in 1995 (or was it 1994) when I began Konflagrations (a work I would not publish until 2023 in the form of my novella Konflagrations Revised in my collection of writings Lemonade). My desire to write fell into tension with my duties as a graduate student and Teaching Fellow. I wanted to be an author, an English professor of literature, and a professor of film history. All of these goals pulled in different directions. My primary attraction to writing, as a bookworm and scholar, was to make the contribution to world literature, an art form I so enjoy, my own carefully written and rewritten words. My desire to be an author was always associated for me with breaking through to financial independence and so real freedom. I know there are book thieves in this world. Who steals books today? These proud Frauds, as we say in Ohio, are unworthy of either hand. They celebrate their lazy, oafish deceit. The act of creation and the toil of writing is exhausting. The theft of writing is lazy, malicious, and shows no respect for the two primary values all honest writers share: the integrity of authorship and the inviolability of intelligence property. Who are the bloodsuckers today?