Poverty

A Seed To Save The World

Kansas City, MO - In the shadows of Kansas City, shop carts rattle past an urban farm as ragged figures scurry away from the burnt shell of an apartment building. “You get a strut on this block,” said Jake, an intern on the farm who spent almost a year living homeless under a bridge. We watched the motley crowd with their carts full of metal. “You see? Head down and shoulders up.” The farm sprouted in a neighborhood forgotten by the twinkling skyline to the west, where old buildings are often burnt to expose the copper wiring within the walls. The wiring is then stripped by “scrappers” and sold to the local scrapyard for five cents per pound. With all of the nearby high schools discredited as educational institutions, scrapping metal is often the most viable means of income.

Urban Farmers Want To Feed Whole Neighborhood For Free

March 20, 2015 Sam Bliss, www.grist.org Create! Food and Agriculture, health, Poverty, Urban Agriculture

Seattle, WA - The Beacon Food Forest is giving away dozens of strawberry plants. For free. It’s a drizzly, chilly, gray Saturday, typical of January in Seattle. In just a few hours, the Seahawks will host the Packers for the NFC Championship. While the rest of the city slugs its first tailgate beer of what will become an epic afternoon of football, 60 or so unpaid farmhands are hard at work. They wheelbarrow wood chips, prune pear trees, and remove invasive species from the hillside urban garden, preparing it for spring. Some are uprooting the profusion of propagating strawberry plants that are taking over pathways and smothering other ground-cover herbage (hence the gratis strawberry plants).

World Opposes World Bank Global Land Grabs

March 17, 2015 Our Land Our Business, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Food and Agriculture, Poverty, World Bank

Hundreds of civil society organizations are denouncing the World Bank’s role in global land grabs and its deceitful leadership on land issues. “The big question is whose interests the World Bank really serves. While they spend considerable time and money painting themselves as champions of the poor, the Bank has a battery of practices and policies that suggest a very different truth,” said Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute. Mittal points to the hypocrisy of the Bank’s claims to be interested in “securing farmers’ access to land” by highlighting that around the world, local communities face forced evictions and human rights abuses linked to Bank-financed projects as documented in recent years in Uganda, Honduras, and Cambodia. Just last year, the Bank created a $350 million facility to cover the risks of investments made by the Silverlands Fund, a private equity fund that has been accused of financing land grabs.

Sao Paulo: A Sea Of People Fighting For Water

March 8, 2015 Midia Ninja and Marianna Olinger, www.ninja.oximity.com Resist! Brazil, Commodification, Homeless, Poverty, Water

These sacred luxury consumer temples (where the water tanks are always full), lowered their doors before the the march that brought together 15 thousand men, women and children - a significant part dressing in MTST (Workers Homeless Movement)’s t-shirts - in addition to other left wing organizations protesting on Thursday (26/02) against the water crisis in São Paulo. It was the first major public protest on the issue and involved people like the seamstress Maria Francisca da Conceição, 69, who walked, wearing her flip-flops, the 6300 meters that separate Largo da Batata, in Pinheiros neighborhood, and the Bandeirantes Palace in Morumbi, where is the official residence of the governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) is located.Maria Francisca has been a resident of an MTST occupation in Numa Pompilius, in the extreme east of the city of São Paulo, since early 2014, when she joined the homeless movement.

World Bank’s Sham Conference On Land And Poverty

February 11, 2015 The Oakland Institute, www.popularresistance.org Organize! Land grabs, Neoliberalism, Poverty, World Bank

Every year for the last fifteen years, the World Bank has organized “The Conference on Land and Poverty,” ostensibly to discuss how to “improve land governance.” And every year, the World Bank Group has been accused of financing projects that support often brutal grabbing of land and other resources from local communities. This year, the 16th such gathering will take place in Washington DC, March 23 to 27. And yet again, the hypocrisy of their claims to be leaders of just and fair land reform will be called out, with opponents pointing to the impact of some of their recent investments in places like Uganda (2011), Honduras (2012), and Cambodia (2014). The big question is whose interests the World Bank really serves. While they spend considerable time and money painting themselves as champions of the poor, the Bank has a battery of practices and policies that suggest a very different truth.

Anti-Austerity Protesters Occupy Liverpool Cathedral

February 9, 2015 Olivia Rudgard, www.liverpoolecho.co.uk Resist! Austerity, England, Faith, Poverty, United Kingdom (UK)

A group of “concerned citizens” occupied Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral to protest about wealth inequality and benefit cuts. The group of around 20, including some children, protested near the altar at the front of the church. They came with a banner which read “We Need Sanctuary”, which they hung from a balcony high up in the cathedral. The group protested about benefit sanctions, wealth inequality, and new legislation regulating protests which was introduced last year. They want the church to speak out against austerity, and a repeat of 1985’s “Faith in the City” report into urban poverty. Organiser Ruby Sands said: “It’s really important because there’s people dying right now in this city. “There’s massive wealth division, it’s not being touched upon. People are killing themselves, and we need sanctuary.”

Over 2,500 Landless Families Occupy 6 Properties In Brazil

February 9, 2015 EFE, www.latino.foxnews.com Resist! Brazil, Housing, Land Rights, Poverty

More than 2,500 families are occupying six properties in Brazil's Federal District as part of a protest organized by the MTST Homeless Workers Movement, the organization said Sunday. The coordinated occupation was carried out peacefully in Brazlandia, Ceilandia, Planaltina, Recanto das Emas, Samambaia and Taguatinga, all of them cities in the Brasilia metropolitan area. The protesters plan to occupy the properties until an agreement is reached with the regional government, the MTST said. "We are going to stay here until there is an agreement with the government (of the Federal District). We spoke with them on Saturday and we set a new meeting for Tuesday," the MTST coordinator in Brasilia, Edson Silva, told Efe.

Protest Blocks Suburban St. Louis Court

February 7, 2015 Mariah Stewart, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Law, Politics, Poverty

Dozens of demonstrators briefly blocked access to a municipal court in this tiny, troubled St. Louis suburb on Thursday night, protesting a local government that relies heavily on revenue from traffic tickets and municipal code violations to survive. The city of Pine Lawn, which sits on just over half a square mile of land about 10 minutes from Ferguson, has around 3,000 mostly black residents, nearly a third of whom live below the poverty line. Pine Lawn does not have enough of a tax base to survive without extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from residents and drivers passing through the city. The number of warrants generated in 2013 alone surpasses the entire population of the city, and police that year issued seven tickets for every resident, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

80 People Control Half Of World’s Wealth & All Elected Officials

January 26, 2015 Crystal Shepeard, www.care2.com Educate! Economics, Poverty, wealth inequality

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting began this week in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting convenes “global leaders from across business, government, international organizations, academia and civil society for strategic dialogues which map the key transformations reshaping the world.” The hope is that the dialogue will lead to action on the part of the participating nations to improve conditions in their own communities, with an understanding that we are all globally connected. The idea is that the actions in one community can affect another anywhere in the world. The current state of global economic inequality shows just how tenuous that connection is. In what has now become tradition, Oxfam International, a confederation of organizations dedicated to fighting poverty, issued a report on the current state of economic inequality.

Senator Tells Hospitals To Stop Suing Poor Patients

January 24, 2015 ProPublica, www.rawstory.com Educate! Health Care, Poverty, Senate

Sen. Charles Grassley said nonprofit hospitals could be breaking the law when they sue poor patients over unpaid bills and issued a stern warning to one Missouri hospital that he hopes reverberates nationwide. Citing a ProPublica and NPR report, Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter Friday to Heartland Regional Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital in St. Joseph, Missouri, that has seized the wages of thousands of lower income workers who were unable to pay their medical bills. Under federal law, tax-exempt hospitals are supposed to provide care to those who can’t afford it, but the requirements are fairly vague.

People’s State Of The Union Injects Reality Into Debate

January 22, 2015 Margaret Flowers, www.popularresistance.org Educate! Health Care, Inequality, Poverty, TPP

Following the President's State of the Union on January 20, the Green Party US invited several speakers to present a People's State of the Union. Rather than the charade, manipulative stories and lies told in the President's SOTU, these speakers hosted by Green Party Presidential Candidate in 2012 Dr. Jill Stein spoke of the realities that people in the US face with falling wages, rising poverty, environmental and racial injustice and more. The people spoke about real solutions to the crises we are facing - solutions that will not be embraced by our corrupt and plutocratic government but that must be demanded and created by an organized and mobilized populace. The theme of the President's SOTU was inequality. And while some of the solutions he presented sound great, Dr. Stein noted that he waited six years, until he had a Republican Congress that would block them before he proposed them. She urged people not to succumb to his rhetoric.

One Million Losing Food Stamps As Poverty Increases

January 3, 2015 Greg Kaufmann, www.billmoyers.com Educate! Food and Agriculture, Food stamps, Poverty

Currently, 46 million people are living in poverty in the United States, 16.4 million children (23% of children) and 20 million are in deep poverty. 100% of Republican senators have agreed to vote to eliminate the food stamp program. Senator David Perdue (R-GA) makes the sadly ironic claim on his campaign website that he was one of the millions of Americans who would support free market solutions to feeding the nation. Doesn't he realize that so-called free market capitalism is actually the cause of the poverty problem? The wealth and income divides are part and parcel of the big finance capitalist economy that sends money from the middle class and poor to the already extreme wealthy. Can anyone really imagine those who seek profit from everything being a solution to poverty? Last January 89 Democrats voted to cut food stamps by $8.7 billion as part of the farm bill which President Obama signed. This was just one of a series of bills cutting the essential poverty program for which Democrats joined with Republicans, in a bi-partisan attack on people in poverty.

How One Of The Wealthiest Cities Treats Its Homeless

December 27, 2014 Evelyn Nieves, www.rawstory.com Educate! California, Poverty, wealth inequality

When San Jose dismantled the “Jungle,” the nation’s largest homeless encampment, many of its residents with nowhere to go scattered. They found hiding places in the scores of small, less visible encampments within the city, where more than 5,000 people sleep unsheltered on a given night. But one group of about three dozen evictees gathered what they could salvage in backpacks and trash bags, and crossed a bridge to a spot about a mile away. They found a clean patch of grass near Coyote Creek, the same creek that the Jungle abutted. There, they pitched tents donated by some concerned citizens, assigned themselves chores and hoped for the best.

This Holiday Season Say NO To GMO Chestnuts

December 27, 2014 Anne Petermann, www.climate-connections.org Educate! Food and Agriculture, GMOs, Poverty

ArborGen’s GE Eucalyptus trees will be an ecological disaster. They are non-native, invasive, water-greedy, suppress the growth of other vegetation, provide no habitat for wildlife, and are explosively flammable. And ArborGen wants to see them in huge plantations along the US Gulf Coast. So if the GE chestnut tree is truly “intended solely for the public good,” why is ArborGen involved? Why are they promoting them? For one reason. The GE American chestnut tree is being used to try to convince the public that GE trees can be beneficial. The hope is that they will help change the extremely powerful public opposition to GE trees and open up markets for new GE tree “products” that could mean big big profits for timber and biomass companies.

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