Poverty

‘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.

Class And Racial Inequalities In Police Killings

June 24, 2020 By Justin Feldman, People's Policy Project. Educate! Class war, Police Killings, Poverty, Racism

“Police Killings in the US: Inequalities by Race/Ethnicity and Socioeconomic Position" examines the databases of police killings contain important demographic information like race, gender, and age. But they do not contain socioeconomic information like education and income. This analysis shows that socioeconomic position plays a big role in police killings. The highest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 6.4 per million while the lowest-poverty areas have a police killing rate of 1.8 per million, a 3.5-fold difference. A similar class skew exists within each racial group as well. Whites in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 7.9 per million, compared to 2 per million for whites in the least-poor areas. Blacks in the poorest areas have a police killing rate of 12.3 per million, compared to 6.7 per million for blacks in the least-poor areas.

Over One Million People View Poor People’s Assembly And Moral March On Washington

June 23, 2020 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Resist! Inequality, Poor People's Campaign, Poverty, Racism

President Trump drew a smaller crowd than he expected for his rally this past Saturday, but that wasn’t the case for the Poor People’s Campaign. Well more than a million people viewed the campaign’s Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington via Facebook that same day. Many more viewed MSNBC and C-SPAN simulcasts and two repeat broadcasts over the weekend. According to organizers, the three and a half hour event was “the largest digital and social media gathering of poor and low-wealth people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, and people of conscience in this nation’s history.” The virtual rally lifted up people who are living the interconnected injustices that have been the campaign’s focus for the past two years: systemic racism, poverty and inequality, ecological devastation, and militarism and the war economy. Many spoke of how the Covid-19 pandemic has only deepened existing inequalities.

The Police May Pull The Trigger, But It’s The System That Kills

June 16, 2020 Richard E. Rubenstein, Transcend. Strategize! Police violence, Poverty, Rebellion2020, Systemic Racism

Fifty years ago this year, I published my first book, entitled Rebels in Eden – an exploration of mass political violence in America focusing on the uprisings that had by then incinerated substantial portions of the inner city communities of Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, as well as scores of smaller towns and cities.[i] Those riots were far more destructive than anything experienced in the protests following the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery by police and ex-police officers. The sixties uprisings killed several hundred people (almost all Black civilians), injured more than 12,000, and caused billions of dollars in property damage.

‘This Is Not What A Food Bank Was Designed To Do’

June 15, 2020 By Maya L. Kapoor, High Country News. Create! Food Banks, Food Insecurity, Hunger, Poverty

“You have so many people that have been displaced from work, you have so many single moms with children at home, and you have so many isolated seniors, that the demand for services has just gone through the roof,” Blake Young, the organization’s president and CEO for 15 years, said. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the organization served approximately 150,000 people each month. In April and May, that number went up to more than 300,000 people. But the worst may be yet to come, thanks to the ongoing recession. Regional food banks, which are designed to be safety nets, not main sources of food, fear that they won’t be able to meet the swelling need.

Poor Neighborhoods Are Only Getting Poorer

June 2, 2020 Marie Patino, CityLab. Educate! Cities, COVID-19, Poverty, wealth inequality

The latest maps of coronavirus cases in the U.S. confirm much of what we already know about the economics of location: People in poor neighborhoods have it worse. Health care isn’t as accessible, the ability to socially distance is less, and many residents fall into the role of essential workers, unable to work from home. What new research shows is that number of poor neighborhoods in metropolitan areas has actually doubled from 1980 — and most existing low-income areas only fell deeper into poverty. In two reports released by the Economic Innovation Group this month, researchers Kenan Fikri and August Benzow analyze poverty data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau between 1980 and 2018.

Chris Hedges: The Treason Of The Ruling Class

June 1, 2020 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. Educate! Democracy, oligarchy, Poverty, Ruling Class

The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft. The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence.

Mutual Aid In Public Housing Continues After Housing Authority Pushback

May 23, 2020 By Sarafina Harper, The Real News. Create! COVID-19, Food and Agriculture, Mutual Aid, Poverty, Recession

In early April, Baltimore City’s Housing Authority threatened Reverend Annie Chambers with arrest and eviction for distributing food to her neighbors at Douglass Homes, citing a policy barring non-government organizations from giving food donations to public housing residents. Rather than stopping Chambers’ mutual aid initiative, the incident led to widespread support for her work. Chambers says that the Housing Authority has not interfered with a giveaway since and that the public attention has resulted in an increase in donations. ”We have not had any trouble from them since. People called The Housing Authority from Washington, New York, Philadelphia and Virginia,” Chambers told The Real News Network. “Senator [Mary] Washington and the Teachers Union called the Housing Authority. Many single individuals have called the mayor and The Housing Authority on our behalf.”

As The World Battles COVID-19, Greece’s War On Migrants Rages On

May 22, 2020 By Spyros Galinos, ROAR Magazine. Educate! COVID-19, Greece, Immigrants, Poverty

For many years, a silent war has been waged along Europe’s borders, but this war has left the majority of the continent’s population seemingly untouched. This contrast has become even starker in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which it has become clear that the sensibility to life that is being so widely touted does not extend to everyone; the thousands of migrants amassed on both sides of the European border are, apparently, exempt from it. Those who manage to cross into Europe end up confined in modern-day concentration camps. Subjected to appalling living conditions, they face complete uncertainty about the future and are, moreover, stripped of their most fundamental rights. At the same time, their presence is used by governments to push through policies that galvanize national(ist) unity and broader interstate competition. Policies that are currently implemented as part of the global campaign against COVID-19 treat migrants as collateral damage.

Racial Health And Economic Disparities Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin

May 17, 2020 By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Sally Sim, Inequality. Create! Poverty, Recession, Systemic Racism, wealth inequality

In Baltimore, like in the rest of the United States, Covid-19 exacerbates racial inequality and economic marginalization. The legacy of discrimination and the continued corruption and disenfranchisement take shape in the city’s biggest issues – homelessness, food insecurity, crime, poverty, and lack of access to resources. Covid-19 magnifies these issues and shows that they cannot be fixed without systemic change. The Baltimore Brothers, a nonprofit organization serving the city’s most vulnerable people, have been providing food and necessary resources to the communities who aren’t reached by local agencies or state government. After a devastating shooting on March 17, the Brothers fed the community for 3 days straight after watching the city fail to provide any kind of social aid.

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