Poverty

Poverty Is Growing In Puerto Rico Under US Colonialism

September 27, 2023 Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy. Educate! Capitalism, Colonialism, Poverty, Puerto Rico

Poverty in Puerto Rico, under US colonialism, is getting worse over time, not better. More than two-fifths of Puerto Ricans suffer from poverty, and nearly three-fifths of Puerto Rican children live in poor households. In 2022, the poverty rate in the colonized US “territory” grew from 40.5% to 41.7%, according to US Census Bureau data. A staggering 57.6% of Puerto Rican children live in poverty. And 38.8% of families are below the poverty line. Poverty has been growing in Puerto Rico even at a time when more people are working. The unemployment rate fell from 13.1% to 9.9% in 2022, while poverty got worse.

Poverty Rose In 2022 As Inflation Surged, Pandemic Aid Terminated

September 13, 2023 Max Jones, Scheer Post. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Inflation, Pandemic, Poverty

In the aftermath of pandemic relief programs such as increased unemployment and nutrition benefits, greater rental assistance and the child tax credit — policies which the Biden administration allowed to expire in 2021 — Americans faced the largest one-year increase of poverty on record. According to a report from the Census Bureau published on Sept. 12, the sharpest increase in poverty affected children, as child poverty more than doubled from a record low of 5.2 percent to now 12.4 percent. This was indicated by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which “factors in the impact of government assistance and geographical differences in the cost of living.”

Many Senior Citizens Expect To Die With College Loan Debts

September 12, 2023 Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report. Educate! Joe Biden, Poverty, Retirement, Seniors, Social Security, Student Debt

Marjorie Sener was still in her 20s when she took out a loan for about $5,000 to get some college credits she hoped would eventually add up to a bachelor’s degree. That goal was thwarted when her partner became ill. “The burden of our living expenses fell on me,” said Sener, who lives in the Dallas suburbs. “I devoted all of my resources to keeping our heads above water.” But while Sener never got her degree, that student loan kept growing, fattened by compounding interest. Now, at 74, she owes more than $55,000, or 10 times what she originally borrowed, and has put off any hope of retiring. Sener still works, as a legal secretary, juggling her student loan debt with other expenses, including medical costs from recent cancer treatments.

Lula Launches New Plan To Lift Country Out Of Food Insecurity

September 5, 2023 Resumen English. Create! Brazil, Food and Agriculture, Food Insecurity, Hunger, Lula da Silva, Poverty

On Thursday Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva presented an ambitious plan to take the South American country off of the world hunger map. “The problem is not a lack of food, it is not a lack of crops, the problem is that the people do not have enough to buy food,” Lula said in a public event in the city of Teresina. In his speech he reminded that his program to fight poverty has as a connecting axis to address the structural causes of hunger that it is not limited to just economic aid but also must have an articulated policy. For this reason, he stressed that the Bolsa Familia program is not enough and does not represent a definitive solution, but a necessary step to ensure that the wealth produced in the country is distributed more equitably.

Homelessness Crisis Exacerbates As Leaders Look The Other Way

August 31, 2023 Shabbir Rizvi, Orinoco Tribune. Educate! California, Chicago, Homelessness, Housing, Poverty

A quick trip through any major American city and you can see it for yourself – “tent cities” underneath highways or alongside parks, people sleeping on the sidewalk, overcrowded and resource-stripped shelters. It is estimated that there are nearly 600,000 homeless people across the US, marking the highest yearly surge since the government began tracking the data in 2007, according to the Wall Street Journal. Major cities like Los Angeles are seeing homeless populations spike almost 10 percent from last year. This problem has been deeply exacerbated in the post-pandemic era. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, rent was already skyrocketing due to inflation levels as well as “development projects”, forcing long-time residents, mainly minorities, out of their own neighborhoods.

‘Progress Undone’: New Report Examines Ecuador’s Economy Since 2017

August 16, 2023 Center for Economic and Policy Research. Educate! Ecuador, International Monetary Fund, Neoliberalism, Poverty

Washington, DC — A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines key indicators for Ecuador’s economy and finds that significant gains of the 2007–2017 period have been erased by subsequent governments that returned to the International Monetary Fund and slashed spending. As a result, poverty and economic inequality have increased, as have crime, insecurity, and worsened health outcomes. “The data make it clear: things have gotten much worse in Ecuador since 2017, with the return to the IMF and to destructive austerity,” CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said.

AMLO’s Pro-Working Class Policies Are Why Poverty Decreased In Mexico

August 15, 2023 People's Dispatch. Create! Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Media, Mexico, Poverty

On August 10, the Mexican National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) released a report revealing that from 2018 to 2022, the poverty rate declined from 49.9% of the population below the poverty line to 43.5%. In Mexico, the income poverty line is measured as those earning below the monetary value of what is required to afford food and non-food necessities each month. In these same four years, the “multidimensional poverty” level decreased from 41.9% to 36.3% of the total population. Multidimensional poverty is a unique metric used in Mexico to measure poverty not only in terms of income levels, but also in terms of the deprivation of social rights.

Poorer Nations Break The Cycle Of Dependency That Has Inflicted Grief

August 11, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Brazil, Food Security, Global South, Landless Workers, Latin America, Neocolonialism, Poverty

In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of São Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco – who was assassinated in 2018 – and Irmã Alberta – an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irmã Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the MST mobilised landless workers to occupy these areas, build their own homes, schoolhouses and community kitchens, and grow organic food.

When The Welfare Rights Movement Was A Force For Uplifting The Poor

July 20, 2023 Eleanor J. Bader, The Indypendent. Organize! Class Struggle, History, Las Vegas, Poverty, Welfare Rights Union

When Dartmouth history professor Annelise Orleck was still working on her first book, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, she learned about the work of an intrepid group of low-income, southern-born women in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thirteen years of research and interviews followed. The result, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, tells the amazing story of fed-up and reviled welfare recipients who organized on their own behalf, winning a raft of financial, medical and educational improvements for themselves, their children and their westside community.

Chris Hedges: American Poverty Is A Calamity By Design

July 15, 2023 Chris Hedges, The Real News Network. Resistance Report Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, oligarchy, Poverty

Some 50 million people in the United States live in poverty today—and over 108 million people survive on less than $55,000 a year. Despite having the largest economy on earth, poverty in the US is often grinding and brutal. From millions who live without running water or reliable power, to countless children who experience food insecurity and homelessness. The data on poverty only becomes exacerbated when race is taken into account. In 2019, the median White household had a net worth of $188,200, compared with $24,100 for the median Black household. Matthew Desmond joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his new book, Poverty, by America

World Needs A New Development Theory That Does Not Trap The Poor In Poverty

July 14, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Development, Poverty, Sustainability, Transformation, United Nations

In June, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network published its Sustainable Development Report 2023, which tracks the progress of the 193 member states towards attaining the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘From 2015 to 2019’, the network wrote, ‘the world made some progress on the SDGs, although this was already vastly insufficient to achieve the goals. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and other simultaneous crises, SDG progress has stalled globally’. This development agenda was adopted in 2015, with targets intended to be met by 2030.

Why Are There No Slums In China?

July 14, 2023 Dongsheng News, Orinoco Tribune. Create! China, History, Homelessness, Housing, Poverty, Socialism

With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York [1]. Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common to most of the rest of the world. Slums were not uncommon in Chinese cities a few decades ago, from the precarious working class districts of 1930s Shanghai to the shanty towns of British-occupied Hong Kong in the 1950s onwards.

Rice Bowl Of The Chinese People Is Held Firmly In Their Hands

July 7, 2023 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! China, Poverty, Socialism, Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations

At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), member states decided to replace the Millennium Development Goals (established in 2000) with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first SDG was to ‘end poverty in all its forms everywhere’. Despite the enthusiastic verbiage, it was clear that poverty was simply not going to be ended across the world. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the data showed that poverty had become intractable. In October 2022, the UN Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative released its 2022 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index report, which showed that at least 1.2 billion people in 111 developing countries live in acute multidimensional poverty.

Tens Of Thousands Gather To Celebrate Fifth Anniversary Of AMLO’s Presidency

July 3, 2023 People's Dispatch. Resist! AMLO, Mexico, Poverty, US Hegemony

On Saturday, July 1, around 250,000 people gathered at Zócalo square in Mexico City to celebrate five years since the presidential victory of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The citizens called AMLO’s victory as “the triumph of the people,” hailed the good work done by the AMLO government, and expressed their support for the Fourth Transformation of the country, led by AMLO’s ruling Morena party. This rally comes as the Morena Party is picking a new candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Since assuming office, AMLO has taken significant steps in strengthening Mexico’s sovereignty and challenging the hegemony of the United States.

Five Facts About Producer Organizations And Rural Development

June 18, 2023 Jorge Sellare, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Educate! Food and Agriculture, Markets, Poverty, rural communities

Producer organizations (POs) receive substantial attention and policy support, given their potential to contribute to pro-poor rural development. Here, we first synthesize decades of empirical research in the form of five stylized facts—common and largely unchallenged conclusions—about POs. Then, we explore these stylized facts using several secondary and primary data sets. We confirm some stylized facts, challenge others, and highlight which ones lack empirical evidence to derive policy implications and directions for future research. We highlight largely overlooked low and regionally biased participation rates and suggest that future research should pay more attention to the diverse forms and characteristics of POs.

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