dhampir72 reblogged
dhampir72 reblogged
Philip Alston wanted to know: Just how bad is poverty in the United States?
He’s an Australian law professor who in 2014 was appointed as a United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He contacted the Obama administration before the presidential election to get permission to undertake a fact-finding mission in the United States. The Trump administration honored the invitation.
Now, after two weeks of reporting, Alston has released his preliminary findings. And they present a bleak picture. The American dream, he says, is an “American illusion.“ But he did find a few glimmers of hope.
Alston undertook his expedition with a series of questions: “Are those in poverty able to live with dignity? What does a government do to protect those who are most vulnerable?“ To gather information, he traveled to Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Alabama; Puerto Rico; and West Virginia. He talked to poverty experts, civil society organizations, government officials and regular people born or thrust into poverty.
In a statement released last week and in an interview for All Things Considered, he shared some of his conclusions.
Just who are the poor? Alston says that many of them are children and women. And they are all races. “The face of poverty in America is not only black or Hispanic but also white, Asian and many other colors.”
He found that stereotypes serve to undermine the poor — and are used to justify not coming to their aid. “So the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success. The poor, on the other hand, are wasters, losers and scammers,” Alston told NPR. As a result, he says, many people believe that “money spent on welfare is money down the drain. Money devoted to the rich is a sound investment.”
He spoke to politicians and political appointees who were “completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smartphones, all paid for by welfare.”
But Alston says he met people working full time at chain stores who needed food stamps because they couldn’t survive on their wages.
And he was shocked by the type of poverty he witnessed: “I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility.“ And “people who had lost all of their teeth” because dental care wasn’t covered by their health insurance plans. And homeless people who were told to move by a police officer who had “no answer when asked where they could move to.”
“People in the U.S. seem particularly unable to stomach the sight of homeless,” he says, “yet are unwilling to enact policies to help them.”
Contrasts between the rich and poor abound. “While funding for the IRS to audit wealthy taxpayers has been reduced, efforts to identify welfare fraud are being greatly intensified,” he says. The wealthy also stand to benefit from advances in technology, while robots and automation threaten to take away jobs from people in low-skill labor positions, he says.
Meanwhile, the poor may not even be able to use the Internet. Alston states that nearly half of all people living in West Virginia lack access to high-speed Internet. “When I asked the governor’s office in West Virginia about efforts to expand broadband access in poor, rural communities, it could only point to a 2010 broadband expansion effort,” he says in the statement. It’s not that they don’t want it; half of the state’s counties have reportedly applied for broadband assistance. The U.N. considers the Internet to be a human right for its ability to support education, drive development and foster citizen engagement, among other things.
Not everything Alston found was grim.
“I was very impressed by a lot of the community organizing,” Alston told NPR. “I was very impressed by a voluntary health, dental, even psychological care clinic that I saw called West Virginia Health Right, which has no full-time doctors or dentists but relies on volunteer services from those communities and ends up seeing 21,000 patients a year.“ He visited St. Boniface, a Catholic church in San Francisco, where people without homes could rest in pews during the day.
Still, he concludes that American innovation, money and power aren’t being channeled to address poverty — and there is a lot of poverty to address. In 2016, 40 million people — more than 1 in 8 citizens — lived in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “The reality is that the United States now has probably the lowest degree of social mobility among all the rich countries,” Alston says. “And if you are born poor, guess where you’re going to end up — poor.”
Alston also criticized the Republican tax reform bill that just passed in Congress. He says it “stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world.”
Last Friday, Alston met with State Department representatives. He says he isn’t holding out hope that top-down reform will be implemented after his final report is released in the spring. But he hopes that his work will motivate lawmakers, media and ordinary Americans to address poverty in their areas. And maybe the United States will feel pressure from the international community after seeing the facts, he adds.
“There is no magic recipe for eliminating extreme poverty, and each level of government must make its own good faith decisions,” says Alston. “But at the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.”
Sasha Ingber is a multimedia journalist who has covered science, culture and foreign affairs for such publications as National Geographic, The Washington Post Magazine and Smithsonian. Contact her @SashaIngber
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kyhaven
“The persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.” Need to plaster this quote all over the place.
dhampir72 reblogged
Well, there’s one story I tell to help people understand intersectionality: There’s a picture I show of this young boy named Antoine, who lives in Indiantown, Florida, 3 miles from a coal-fired power plant. He has severe asthma. There’s a picture of his bag of medicines that show what he depends on to get by from day to day. And there’s a picture of him as a young boy watching other kids play in a fountain. Another one shows him looking out the window and watching kids go to school. Not him—there’s so many poor air quality days that would put his life at risk if he went.
I talk about the connection between the very facility that is driving climate change and the increased concentration of pollutants that come from climate change. And the kids who can’t go to school. Or have a hard time paying attention because the other things that come out of smokestacks [are] lead. Or they might be drinking it from their water supply. I want people to see all those levels of risk kids have from these impacts.
And then I overlay it with the maps that show these same communities are food insecure—more likely to get Doritos and Cheetos than kale or quinoa. And I overlay that with the fact that when you have this many problems, including living next to a toxic facility, on average your property values are 15 percent lower. So that affects the quality of their schooling because they’re less resourced—fewer tax dollars. And then I show an image of a child standing on a milk crate being fingerprinted.
If you’re not on grade level by grade 3, you’re much more likely to enter into the school-to-prison pipeline. And then the same entities that fight against the regulations to help the air are the same entities pushing forward punitive criminal justice measures, and privatizing our prisons, and so on. People see that through the lens of an actual child, how all those systems come into play. How they come into play against his chance to be a thriving adult.
Jacqueline Patterson, the director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, “Climate Justice Is Racial Justice Is Gender Justice” (August 2017) (via wocinsolidarity)
dhampir72 reblogged
lower-income people tend to be “hoarders” and richer people are able to do more “minimalist” living spaces. if u don’t have much, you will hold onto any little thing that comes across your way. you got a new tv, but you still keep the old tv because you know things can break. you keep extra boxes of macaroni and cheese lying around because there will be a week when you don’t have money for groceries. you hold onto your stacks of books and clothes for dear life. those are your assets. physical evidence of where your money’s gone. it’s hard to get rid of it. the bare wall is terrifying when you don’t have much.
herlobster
Fuck. This makes so much sense and explains so much about me. I must have inherited this from my mum.
so I’d normally put this in the tags but it’s kind of a lot so just reblog this from OP to skip my commentary. But I dogsit for a family who is clearly LOADED. Their house is immaculate. High, vaulted ceilings, wood flooring, two chandeliers in one room. These things are fancy, right ?? I really don’t know, anything that isn’t tile or 30 year old carpet seems fancy to me. It also so… bare. Everything is organized perfectly, they have no excess. Their decor is extravagant and yet minimal - it is carefully and precisely executed. Nothing that doesn’t match the aesthetic sits in their living room. I tried to replicate some of it, but it’s just not possible. I have every book I’ve ever owned, my mom keeps papers upon papers, VHSs in a dresser, how do you just get rid of these things when you know you may not have the opportunity to buy them again? How must it feel to live in such orderly quarters where everything is replaceable?
This really locked into my brain when I was reading one of the declutter your space things and it suggested getting rid of duplicate highlighters and pens. /Pens/. It suggested that you needed one or two working pens, so if you had extra you should get rid of them. That was when I realized minimalist living was /innately/ tied to having spare money, because the idea was, of course you just went out and bought the single replacement thing whenever the first thing broke. You obv. Had the time and money to only ever hold what you needed that moment, because you could always buy more later.
burrgeoisie
there’s a nice article titled “minimalism is just another boring product wealthy people can buy” by Chelsea Fagan which i feel addressed lots of my problems with minimalism, you can read it [here]
dhampir72 reblogged
So the USA is trying to starve its poor to death. Not even an exaggeration.
The SNAP program is getting some work requirements applied again which are expected to leave up to (or more than) a MILLION people without benefits. Of these people, 97% are at OR BELOW the poverty line.
And the only way to “earn” your benefits - the way to “prove” that you don’t “deserve” to starve to death - is to work 20 hours per week, or 80 per month.
Either pull a job out of your ass (earn your paycheck AND qualify for food assistance), OR participate in 80 hours of UNPAID labor (PLUS the expense and time of transportation to and from a set, unflexible location).
And after working 80 hours (plus paying money you don’t have for transportation to get to the designated “program” location/s) for the state to “prove” you don’t deserve to die, you get… are you ready?
I’m gonna use the Florida figures, because that’s what I was reading up on.
Less than $200 in food assistance. The average is actually less than 150.
Care to do the math?
$150 for 80 hours.
$1.88 per hour.
The USA is a fucking dystopia.
somethingsomethingbutterfly
What the ever living fuck.
selphinrose
@fullten @lady-feral I…what
Yeah, I was hit with this. We’re okay right now since we’re staying with family, though feeding us puts a strain on them as well.
I make some internet money that works out to about 125 a week so if I wanna keep getting my food assistance I have to itemize that so it qualifies as a 20 hour a week job, which it probably does, but it’s ridiculous that anyone has to do this and most people under the poverty line will not be able to.
I HAVE had real jobs. I’ve had enough real jobs that the taxes taken out of my own past paychecks already cover all the food assistance I’ve used and plenty to come. I have already paid for this food myself.
And every day a politician somewhere in this country wastes enough money to feed our entire fucking population.
I WANNA ADD SOMETHING IMPORTANT for anyone who thinks they might need to sign up for food assistance, cause a few people just asked me some stuff about it.
In your interviews and applications, they are going to ask “do you ever eat with other people.”
This is a trick question.
You’re gonna probably think “well, technically, yeah, I had lunch with my friend last week…my mom made me a dinner….”
STOP
Answer NO. Always always answer NO. This question is designed to weed people out. If you admit to literally ever sharing a meal with another human being, that actually allows them to deny or alter your benefit amount. Even though this is legally referred to as “supplemental” food assistance and it isn’t enough to live on by itself, Republicans already don’t want anyone to have even that, and they want to consider it “fraud” if you both receive food assistance and EVER share food with another person, whether you’ve used your benefits to buy ingredients for someone’s birthday dinner or your mom made you a casserole one visit.
The correct thing to say when asked these questions is “I purchase and prepare my own food” or “we eat separately.” Even if you’ve already told them you live with family or a roommate.
Remember: Republicans don’t even want assistance recipients to be able to buy “luxury” items like fucking pasta sauce. They would limit you to nothing but gruel if they could. They’ve fought and pushed to load the benefit process with “tricks” and catch-22′s like these to treat as wide a range of people they can as lazy fraudsters and moochers.
selphinrose
Hey @fullten , this is some super important information from bogleech here. Sorry to bother you to post it again but I think this might save some people some pain in the future to see this.
Famine was used as a means of population control throughout the age of empire. From Ireland to Bengal and even Ethiopia.