UN Poverty Official tours Alabama's Black Belt: 'I haven't seen this' in the First World

[DEAD7]

We already did this thread jackass

Damn, you alright breh?



@FAH1223 merge threads please

 

[Pressure]

We already did this thread jackass

Is he trying to shame black voters?

 

[Jimi Swagger]

Not happy that the article is lumping Black Americans with other minorities, who do not have the same historical legacies of racism that required laws written into the Constitution and 1866 Indian Treaties from property to citizens. If only multigenerational Black Americans, descendants of slaves would mobilize to make claims for reparations based on Jim Crow segregation and current Indian Treaties which have yet to be honored. It muddies the underlying issue of the foundation of the country, sanctioned in the first 12 Amendments of the Constitution, of a White overclass and a planned Black underclass based on the social construct of race where Blacks are always at the bottom. This allowed elites to amass unearned wealth(capital gains) off free labor. This was solidified with national immigration act in 1790 which brought in more Whites as a management class to receive unearned benefits off the labor of Blacks while economically crippling them.

Think there is a previous thread about the UN report published in 2016 which states:

Despite the positive measures, the Working Group remains extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans. In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
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Just wait until they survey rural Mississippi

 

[Broke Wave]

All these places have nothing on some native reserves

 

[acri1]

@DEAD7 I thought right-wing/libertarian economic policies are supposed to lead to economic prosperity like you alway say?

Alabama (last night notwithstanding) is about as right wing as you get.

 

[FAH1223]

You can see poverty like that everywhere in America.

The media never covers it so people are unaware

 

[Idaeo]

A ghostly chant of “Bill of Rights, Bill of Rights” drifted out of a sidewalk tent as the United Nations monitor on extreme poverty walked the streets of skid row as part of a national tour investigating human rights conditions for the poorest U.S. citizens.

Philip Alston, an Australian and a New York University law professor, got a full taste of the epicenter of L.A. homelessness last week, passing by a shelter courtyard with dozens of people bedding down on the concrete because there was no room inside.

He and his entourage veered into the street to avoid a shirtless man who lay groaning across a wheelchair, a colostomy bag showing below his shorts hem.

“I think it’s on a scale I hadn’t anticipated, block after block of people,” Alston said at the tour’s end. “When you see how concentrated it is, it’s more shocking.”

U.N. monitor on extreme poverty tours skid row in L.A.

 

[Dig]

The media never covers it so people are unaware

Sex and violence sells

 

[Robbie3000]

oh please...you nikkas are making excuses.

My parents came here from a third world Caribbean country without a pot to piss in. If they can migrate to a totally different country with no money and no English, then black Americans can do it to. Too much "woe is me" in the black American community.

Why is your country of origin such a shyt hole that you were forced to move here? Better question, why didn't you and your parents stay there and fix your country? Better yet, why did you immigrate to a country that was built by Black Americans?

 

[DEAD7]

@DEAD7 I thought right-wing/libertarian economic policies are supposed to lead to economic prosperity like you alway say?

Alabama (last night notwithstanding) is about as right wing as you get.

Big difference between these two...
Republicans figured out its easier to oppress with a big government then with a small one... now right wing policies are almost as "big government" as liberal policies.



Alabama though, suffers from a bunch of problems from top to bottom... a lot of work needs to be done there.

 

[Robbie3000]

Big difference between these two...
Republicans figured out its easier to oppress with a big government then with a small one... now right wing policies are almost as "big government" as liberal policies.



Alabama though, suffers from a bunch of problems from top to bottom... a lot of work needs to be done there.

The reason for these poverty stricken areas in the south is due to underdevelopment of these states. Using States' rights argument, the former confederacy was able to effectively marginalize up to 35% in some states of it's population via explicit racist policies from reconstruction times to the Civil Rights era and in some cases, even today.

What these nasty cac didn't realize or more likely they realized but didn't care, is that you can't effectively hold down huge portions of your population without negatively effecting the rest of the state. Blind racial hatred is a huge reason why the former confederate states are not as economically prosperous as the rest of the country.

This was all done under State governments so miss me with that big bad federal government shyt. And clueless Negroes like you still advocate for states' rights.

 

[Jimi Swagger]

We already did this thread jackass

Why the vitriol? I started the hookworm issue in Alabama topic in a previous thread, including keyword tags, and didn't insult the OP or other posters. Just glad to bring awareness to people to hopefully create effective change.

Aside: I hope that Terri Sewell representative for AL-7 use the recent Jones victory as leverage to help constituents secure septic infrastructure and access to affordable, if not free, hookworm medication. People with social media should put pressure on her in addition to residents writing letters and requesting meetings. Black Americans lost the art of quid pro quo after 1965.

 

[ZoeGod]

“Finish all your food,” my mother used to tell me. “There’s a child in Africa who would love to have that food on your plate.” It was an effective disciplinary approach, especially because my family is from Africa. But my experience is not unique. Images of poverty in the “Third World” — then and now — permeate American society, reassuring us about our country’s ostensible democratic promise and potential for upward mobility. What economists call “extreme poverty,” most Americans think, is a distant problem, a hallmark of the less developed world.

But could extreme poverty also be a feature of what is (although perhaps not for long) one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world? Quite possibly. To answer the question, the United Nations launched an investigation of extreme poverty in the United States.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States. His team visited Alabama, California, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The findings, released last Friday, documented homelessness, unsafe sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor. The rise in poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and women, but also large swaths of white Americans. The report concluded that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality “are shockingly at odds with [the United States’] immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.”

To be sure, poverty in the United States is not equivalent to poverty in less developed countries. This has never been a country free of inequality and poverty, but their rapid growth over the past two decades has undermined any professed commitment to equal opportunity or the belief that the nation’s prosperity rests on the well-being of ordinary Americans.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, unfettered capitalism in the United States led to rapid economic expansion. This was characterized by widening class disparities and profound economic insecurity among the poor, a recipe that contributed to the crisis of the Great Depression.

Amid this crisis, our modern welfare state was born. Because of massive grass-roots protest, politicians and business leaders came to believe that capitalism would function better — in fact, flourish — if Americans could be assured a basic standard of living. While the welfare state primarily benefited and bolstered the white middle class with housing and education assistance, it also uplifted many of the poor (both white and nonwhite) through Social Security for the elderly, monthly stipends for single mothers and the disabled, and a minimum wage for workers. The safety net was later expanded to include food stamps, public housing and health care.

Although unequal and stigmatizing, public assistance successfully kept most people out of extreme poverty. The welfare state fueled post-World War II economic growth, strengthened consumer capitalism by putting money in the hands of the middle and working classes, and upheld the promise (if not always the reality) of upward mobility through access to education and a modicum of economic security.

But since the 1970s, the safety net has been diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have been rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined. The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor single parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of assistance and mandatory work requirements. Some states require fingerprinting or drug testing of applicants, which effectively criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles to getting on welfare are formidable, the benefits meager. The number of families on welfare declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year. The decline of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.

Instead, the shredding of the safety net led to a rise in poverty. Forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States has the highest child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world. Then there are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market.

In addition to the reduction of public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S. … now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.” In 1981, the top 1 percent of adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50 percent.

Declining wages at the lower end of the economic ladder make it harder for people to save for times of crisis or to get back on their feet. A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker, often employed in a dead-end job, falls below the poverty threshold for a family of three and often has to rely on food stamps.

The current tax bill promises to further exacerbate the problem by providing generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, modest tax cuts for many middle-class families and decreased spending on programs that help the poor, which currently constitute only 1.5 percent of federal outlays.

The growth of extreme poverty in the land of plenty is an indicator that we shouldn’t be talking about how to slash spending on social programs, but how to expand services and better meet the needs of the vulnerable among us. One and a half million American households live in extreme poverty today, nearly twice as many as 20 years ago. If this trend continues, we will undoubtedly see the number of extremely poor Americans rise dramatically, imperiling the values of democracy and human rights.

Getting children to eat their food is a peculiar problem of those who have enough to eat. With my own children, it seems that a more appropriate way to encourage them to clean their plates is to tell them: “Finish all your food. There’s a child down the block who would be thrilled to have that food on your plate.

"May you live in interesting times" is a blessing and a curse. . And when the next economic crisis comes 5-10 years it will be a disaster. America is truly in decline. And this tax bill will make things worse. Malthus once said when the top 1% controls 70% of the wealth a society is set to be overthrown. We are at 80% and the tax bill will make it worse. Do the wealthy care about social cohesion? I doubt it.

 

[Take It In Blood]

be pro capitalist brehs

 

[DEAD7]

Do the wealthy care about social cohesion?

Does anyone, is the real question...