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E.J. Dionne
$28.50
By Shlomo Sand
$23.07
$22
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ElvertBarnes (CC-BY-SA)
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By Eugene Robinson — King was a passionate advocate for economic justice, speaking not just for African-Americans but for all Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. On this score, we haven’t just failed to make sufficient progress. We’ve stopped trying.
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Wikimedia Commons via Miller-McCune
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Although the recession has increased demand for social programs such as food stamps, welfare rolls have not kept pace with the drastic increase in human misery. Long story short: Welfare reform, launched 15 years ago in a booming economy, broke the system … (more)
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Flickr / kallao
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With Hurricane Irene fixing to beat up much of the American Mid-Atlantic, now may be a good time to examine the legacy of Hurricane Katrina and U.S. “government bungling” for many of the still-stunned inhabitants of New Orleans. (more)
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Flickr / Ryan Vaarsi
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Gus Speth, environmental lawyer, former Clinton adviser and founder of the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute, who was arrested Sunday at the White House while protesting a proposed oil pipeline, has some bad news for American optimists. (more)
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AP / Elizabeth Dalziel
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The Guardian put together a database of court cases of those detained during and after the unrest that swept London in early August after Metropolitan Police shot 29-year-old Mark Duggan in the city’s Tottenham neighborhood. (more)
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how will i ever (CC-BY-SA)
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Britain’s riots were not political, we are assured, and looting is simply un-British, but “Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein takes a different view: From Iraq to Argentina, when corrupt elites pass the bill to the struggling masses, civil unrest is to be expected.
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Macmillan Publishers Ltd
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Ten years ago, writer Barbara Ehrenreich published “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” a blockbuster book on the state of the working poor in America. (more)
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
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AP / Nick Ut
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By Bill Boyarsky — The unrest tearing apart Britain greatly resembles that of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and conditions across the U.S. could set off a new explosion of violence.
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Al-Jazeera’s slick video news magazine “Fault Lines” investigates the incredible income disparity in the United States that now sees 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent. Spoiler alert: The rich get richer, and it’s not very pleasant.
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The EU decides to address far-right extremism; education fails to solve poverty and inequality, while Netflix may destroy TV networks. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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Ikayama (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — In the past few weeks, no fewer than 21 people have been arrested in Orlando, Fla., the home of Disney World, for handing out free food in a park.
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Flickr / slynkycat
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Research conducted over the last two decades lends powerful credence to the claim that chronic poverty cripples an individual’s ability to make sound financial choices, with each decision exacting a “psychic cost” that diminishes the mental fortitude needed to make subsequent tough choices. (more)
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AP / Jeff Chiu
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By James Harris — In a recent interview, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Tony Smith shared with me one of the most mind-numbing statistics I have ever heard.
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Wikimedia / Brave New Films
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After it destroyed neighborhood retailers, forced manufacturing overseas and helped bankrupt the middle class, Wal-Mart is suddenly surprised to learn that its customers are too poor to shop ... (more)
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Flickr / jankie
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Due to rising food prices, the Asian Development Bank is forecasting a surge in the number of people counted within the region’s severely impoverished class.
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Jorge Andrés Paparoni Bruzual (CC-BY-SA)
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Food prices shot up 36 percent in the last year, according to the World Bank, adding 44 million people to the ranks of the impoverished. For people who spend most of their money on food, it’s devastating when the price of maize, to take one example, goes up 74 percent as it did this year. (more)
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With the number of kids living below the poverty line closing in on 25 percent, homelessness and hunger are becoming normal for American children, as illustrated by this “60 Minutes” report.
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Patrick Chappatte, Cagle Cartoons, The International Herald Tribune —
Posted on Sep 27, 2010
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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AP / Oded Balilty
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By Steven Hill — How is a country with a lower per capita income than Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation and a dictatorship, besides, hailed by so many as the next global superpower?
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Why you should always do a test run before a presentation, what America’s war dead say about the class divide, and how air travel in coach could get a whole lot worse.
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U.S. Agency for International Development
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Anyone remember the Millennium Development Goals that nations made at the beginning of this millennium? Well, it turns out some people do, and they are meeting Monday to evaluate the efficacy of efforts to reduce poverty, disease, intolerance and inequality.
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Flickr / Misserion (CC-BY)
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One out of every seven Americans lived through 2009 in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. Working Americans haven’t been this poor in 50 years. The poverty line—$21,954 or less annual income for a family of four—is quite low and the number of Americans struggling to get by is much higher still.
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Flickr / seastoxfam
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A leaked IMF report shows that there is growing international backing for a tax on bank profits, part of what has been dubbed a “Robin Hood tax” that, if ultimately agreed upon, would raise money to help those pushed deeper into poverty by the global financial crisis and to restore public services.
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youtube.com
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New flooding in Pakistan continues to take a devastating toll on the country, as floodwaters sweep southward and have led to the displacement of an estimated 1 million people in Sindh province in just two days.
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Flickr / Troy Holden
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James Harris and Harry Edwards discuss President Obama and the myth of post-racial society, James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and why now is the time to repair the black community in urban cities such as Oakland.
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AP / Mohammad Sajjad
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The worst flooding in Pakistan in 80 years has killed more than 1,600 people and affected an unbelievable 12 million people. But there may be more misery to come as the country braces for yet more monsoon rains.
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By Amy Goodman — July 12 marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people and left much of the country in ruins.
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AP / Saul Loeb
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With the scent of the global financial crisis swimming in their nostrils, G-8 leaders pledged a mere $5 billion in aid to reduce deaths among African mothers and infants, a decrease of 90 percent in the funding promised five years ago at the group’s meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland.
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By Amy Goodman — “I have a dream.” Ask anyone where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. first proclaimed those words, and the response will most likely be at the March on Washington in August 1963. In fact, he delivered them two months earlier, on June 23, in Detroit.
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Flickr / thaths
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With malnutrition already well past dangerous levels, some 10 million Africans will face extreme hunger over the next few months as the threat of famine floats across West Africa amid a drought that killed off last year’s crops and has left the region’s agricultural economy in ruins.
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By Stuart Whatley — Perhaps the most troubling reality in the 21st century is that our economics now dictates our cultural values, rather than the reverse, where we the people would decide how resources, production and mutual prosperity should be systematized to achieve the best society for all.
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In an April 10 speech for the Poverty Initiative, at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Chris Hedges cuts right to the chase: “I think we have to face the fact that the Poverty Initiative and the civil rights movement failed,” he says.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Entrenched black poverty, with all its causes and implications, barely makes a ripple in the public debate these days.
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Wikimedia Commons / Whitedeer
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The highest-ranking Catholic clergyman in England and Wales, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, has made the slightest of admissions that he understands why contraception use may seem, well, useful under certain conditions—such as poverty, for example.
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AP / Charles Rex Arbogast
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By Bill Boyarsky — People are just barely hanging on at employment offices, homeless shelters, food banks and community centers around the country. Help is needed right away and Barack Obama is struggling to give it.
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Flickr / mckaysavage
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To mark International Women’s Day, Ms. magazine has helpfully broken down some femme-focused reports from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, detailing how the global group’s Platform for Action empowerment program is faring after 15 years and describing the challenges and gains that women around the world are facing in 2010.
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Flickr / Luis Iturra
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Chile may be way better off economically than Haiti, but many survivors of the Feb. 27 earthquake in the South American country are still awaiting government help a full week after the fifth-strongest temblor ever recorded.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The United Nations has offered a sobering estimate of how long it will take to rebuild Haiti: With the country starting “below zero” and relief and redevelopment logistics still a “nightmare,” efforts to bring Haiti to its pre-earthquake days will take generations.
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AP / Ryan Remiorz, The Canadian Press
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It’s been nearly two weeks since the cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti, and the life-or-death issue of food distribution looms larger than ever, despite the concerted efforts of various aid organizations—and the efforts of Haitians themselves—to combat starvation.
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Flickr / Mat Packer
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South Carolina’s Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has apologized for comparing poor people to “stray animals” that are encouraged by gifts of food to breed uncontrollably. Bauer, who is running in the state’s gubernatorial election, told CNN while apologizing that he is “not against animals.”
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AP / Henry Griffin
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By Chris Hedges — Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King.
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Flickr / Mills Baker
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About half of all American children will receive food stamps by the age of 20. Among black children, the figure is a stunning 90 percent. A new study drew those conclusions from data spanning 1968 to 1997. (Continued)
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wfp.org
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Global hunger is a “world emergency” now, if it wasn’t before, with the number of hungry people rising to a record 1 billion, according to the United Nations. Given this scary statistic, it’s not looking good for a goal, set in 2000, to reduce the number of people going hungry worldwide by half by 2015.
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EPA / Stephen Morrison
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Poverty has apparently become a kind of spectacle: Places such as Brazil’s favela slums and India’s shantytowns have become part of a “poverty tour” industry. Now Kenya has jumped on the bandwagon, with several organizations selling guided trips through the wretched Kibera slum in Nairobi.
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EPA / Win McNamee
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It looks like the G-20 is set to permanently replace the G-7 as the world’s dominant economic forum, an indirect admission that there was something unfair about the world’s seven wealthiest countries deciding economic policy for the entire globe.
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AP Photo / Toby Talbot
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By Marie Cocco — Overlooked in the health care debate is the recently reconfirmed fact that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are working better than ever.
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wordpress.com
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It’s a vicious circle: Millions of job cuts and shrinking household incomes combined to push more Americans below the poverty line last year. Nearly 40 million Americans now officially live in poverty.
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The Lotto Symbolizes the False Promises of Barracuda Capitalism
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