Poverty

Ending Poverty In Yuangudui, China

October 5, 2020 Qin Ling, Qiao Collective. Create! China, Cooperatives, Poverty, Socialism

“Another year passes, but an unprecedented change begins.” Yuangudui’s stunning metamorphosis began on the 23rd of the 12th lunar month in 2013, the traditional Chinese holiday of New Year’s eve. On that day, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping, arrived at Yuangudui. There, General Secretary Xi, concerned as he is with the elimination of poverty, personally interviewed the villagers about their livelihoods, and earnestly enjoined the party cadres and villagers alike: “Let us all work harder together, and make the days to come even brighter than before.”

A New Nonviolent Medicaid Army Is On The March

October 4, 2020 Dr. Liz Theoharis and Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko, Inequality.org. Organize! Health Care, Medicaid, Poor People's Campaign, Poverty

Across the United States, poor and dispossessed people cannot wait for our politicians to act. This week, in states including Kansas, Maine, Alabama, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, people are coming together in “Medicaid Marches” to demand their right to health and healthcare. They know that Black people are dying at twice the rate of white people and that poverty is the highest risk factor for people of all races. They know that the United States now accounts for over 20 percent of worldwide deaths, despite having only 5 percent of the world’s population and that this was entirely preventable.

US Poverty Measure Fails To Meet Government Standards

September 22, 2020 Shawn Fremstad, Center for Economic and Policy Research. Educate! 2016 Elections, Census, Poverty, United States

The Census Bureau’s statement that only 10.5 percent of Americans were poor in 2020 is an utterly unreliable and inaccurate claim that does not provide a sound efficient basis for decisions and actions by governments, businesses, households, and other organizations. Federal statistical policy requires: “[s]tatistics produced by the Federal Government …. [to] meet high standards of reliability, accuracy, timeliness, and objectivity in order to provide a sound efficient basis for decisions and actions by governments, businesses, households, and other organizations.”

Poll: Financial Pain From Coronavirus Pandemic ‘Much, Much Worse’ Than Expected

September 11, 2020 Joe Neel, NPR. Educate! COVID-19, Poverty, Recession, Systemic Racism

In America's four largest cities, at least half of people say they have experienced the loss of a job or a reduction in wages or work hours in their household since the start of the coronavirus outbreak. That's the finding of a new poll published Wednesday by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Many of these problems are concentrated among Black and Latino households in the four cities, according to the poll, which gathered responses from July 1 through Aug 3.

This Public US University Has Seen Grades Soar Despite COVID-19

September 3, 2020 Andrew Gumbel, The Guardian. Create! COVID-19, Georgia, Higher Education, Poverty

If anywhere was going to take a pummeling from the coronavirus, you’d think it would be a place like Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta. Georgia State is not a glamorous flagship university – that would be the University of Georgia in Athens, the spiritual home of the Bulldogs, REM and the B-52s. It’s more of a workhorse public institution, with a large population of students who come from low-income households and have to work at least one paying job outside their studies to make ends meet.

Biden’s Headquarters Rents A Fence To Stop The Poor People’s Army

August 20, 2020 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Resist! Joe Biden, Philadelphia, Poor People's Army, Poverty

Cheri Honkala is a founder and coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) . We spoke after she was arrested outside Biden campaign headquarters on the opening day of the virtual Democratic National Convention. Ann Garrison: I see you marched from Philadelphia's Liberty Bell to Biden's Philly headquarters and got arrested yesterday. What did you do to once again menace the foundation of our American institutions? Cheri Honkala: We challenged American institutions by saying they shouldn't be run by corporations.

Poor People’s Army To Protest At Biden’s Headquarters During DNC

August 14, 2020 The Poor People's Economic and Human Rights Campaign. Resist! DNC, Joe Biden, Philadelphia, Poverty

Protestors have declared that irrespective of permits, they plan to march on Presidential Candidate Biden’s national headquarters on August 17th at 4pm from the Liberty Bell. Upon arrival demonstrators will present the DNC and Biden offices with a list of demands. They include: ● Unite immigrant families and children ● Transfer the war budget to provide healthcare, housing, and food for people ● Meet with PPEHRC homeless families that are forced to live in abandoned houses

Haiti: Tremors Herald The Collapse Of The Moïse Regime

August 13, 2020 ELAPRE (Struggle and Action for the Revolution), Marxist.com. Resist! Haiti, Poverty, Revolution, Socialism

Haiti’s economic and social situation has been steadily worsening since Jovenel Moïse came to power. It is a real descent into hell, planned by the tiny minority of bourgeois families as the holders of the majority of the country’s wealth. These include the Apaid, Boulos, Bigio, Mevs, Abdallah, Deep, Brandt, Braun, and Accra families. To generate large amounts of money, these bourgeois families occasionally employ the mafioso and abominable machine of exploitation, theft and corruption. These bosses were the main backers of Jovenel Moïse during his 2016 election campaign to become the holder of the executive power in the country.

‘Radical Real Estate Law School’ Is In Session

August 6, 2020 Natalie Orenstein, The Oaklandside. Create! Education, Law School, Legal System, Poverty

When Christine Hernandez saw an ad for something called the “Radical Real Estate Law School” in Oakland, she was intrigued. “I thought, radical? That’s me,” she said. “Real estate? I’m interested. Law school? Never thought of it.” The program is offered through the Sustainable Economies Law Center in downtown Oakland, one of the handful of organizations taking advantage of a little-known rule in California and a few other states allowing people to take the bar exam without first obtaining a traditional law school degree.

The Consequences Of Inequality Can Be Fatal

August 3, 2020 By Richard D. Wolff, Economy for All. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Inequality, Poverty

The COVID-19 pandemic, inadequately contained by the U.S. system, savages Americans of middle and lower incomes and wealth markedly more than the rich. The rich buy better health care and diets, second homes away from crowded cities, better connections to get government bailouts, and so on. Many of the poor are homeless. Tasteless advice to “shelter at home” is, for them, absurd. Low-income people are often crowded into the kinds of dense housing and dense working conditions that facilitate infection. Poor residents of low-cost nursing homes die disproportionally, as do prison inmates (mostly poor). Pandemic capitalism distributes death in inverse proportion to wealth and income. Social distancing has destroyed especially low-wage service sector jobs. Rarely did top executives lose their positions, and when they did, they found others. The result is a widened gap between high salaries for some and low or no wages for many. Unemployment invites employers to lower wages for the still employed because they can. Pandemic capitalism has provoked a massive increase in money-creation by central banks. That money fuels rising stock markets and thereby enriches the rich who own most shares. The coincidence of rising stock markets and mass unemployment plus falling wages only adds momentum to worsening inequality.

Yemen: A Torrent Of Suffering In A Time of Siege

August 1, 2020 Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Educate! COVID-19, Poverty, Wars and Militarism, Yemen

In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death. Cataclysmic conditions afflict Yemen as people try to cope with rampant diseases, the spread of COVID-19, flooding, literal swarms of locusts, rising displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed economy.

Hiding In Plain Sight: The Poor People’s Justice Movement

July 30, 2020 By Belinda Davis, BlackAgenda Report. Strategize! Housing, Human Rights, Poverty, Squatting

PPEHRC, constituted by poor people organizing themselves, has been once again highly visible, in rising up against the radically increased precarity that COVID has visited on vast populations. This crisis is all the more visible in Philadelphia, which already held the dubious honor of being the poorest big city in America, in real terms nearly half the population. How should oppressed peoples respond to a crisis that devastates their communities more than any other? With so many newly impoverished people—and as those who were already poor suffer far more still—PPEHRC has expanded its broad networks of mutual aid: distributing food to the homebound, sharing supplies with thousands of others, and fighting evictions; sharing knowledge with the newly poor (overwhelming people of color) and bringing new populations into the fight against the structures that perpetuate and exacerbate the country’s vast inequalities. PPEHRC members argue that capitalism and a government and electoral system controlled by the rich is the larger illness.

Chile: Night Of Fury To Demand The Withdrawal Of Pension Funds

July 17, 2020 Telesur English. Resist! Chile, Pensions, Police violence, Poverty

From Tuesday night until early Wednesday morning, Chilean citizens took to the streets to support a pension-related bill and protest against President Sebastian Piñera. Today the Lower House is expected to vote on a bill that will allow Chileans to withdraw the 10 percent of their savings that remain controlled by the repudiated Pension Fund Insurers (AFP), which are private companies that control pensions in this South American country since that time of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). "This initiative is supported by a large majority of the people, which claims to have the freedom to dispose of the money. The government, however, has done everything in its power to prevent the bill from going ahead," Prensa Latina explained.

United States: Record 47.2% Of Working-Age Without Jobs

July 7, 2020 Shannon Jones, WSWS. Educate! Poverty, Recession, Unemployment, United States

According to newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures, 47.2 percent of working-age Americans were without work in May, the highest level recorded since the end of World War II. The numbers are based on the BLS employment-population ratio, which states the proportion of the total labor force who are actually working. It is a more accurate measure of joblessness than the monthly unemployment report, which counts only those actively seeking work. At the end of May the employment-population ratio stood at 52.8 percent; it stood at 61.2 percent at the start of the year. The employment-population ratio reached a postwar high of nearly 65 percent in 2000.

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