Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and
human rights on his mission to the United States of America

Report:

http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

2-min must-watch video:

Staggering Poverty and Inequality in America
How are 40 million people in one of the world's richest countries living in poverty? Extreme inequality, according to a UN report.
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/1232683533539818

[That cesspool comeback was a TOTAL KO... GG Special Rapporteur]

Last section of the report:

Quote :

"VII. Conclusions and recommendations 70. The following analysis focuses primarily on the federal level. It is nonetheless ironic that those who fight hardest to uphold state rights also fight hard to deny city and county rights. If the rhetoric about encouraging laboratories of innovation is to be meaningful, the freedom to innovate cannot be restricted to state politicians alone. 1. Decriminalize being poor 71. Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done. 72. It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating strategy. Federal, state, county and city governments incur vast costs in running jails and prisons. Sometimes these costs are “recovered” from the prisoners, thus fuelling the latter’s cycle of poverty and desperation. The criminal records attached to the poor through imprisonment make it even harder for them to find jobs, housing, stability and self-sufficiency. Families are destroyed, children are left parentless and the burden on governments mounts. But because little is done to address the underlying causes of the original problem, it continues to fester. Even when imprisonment is not the preferred option, the standard response to those facing economic hardship is to adopt policies explicitly designed to make access to health care, sick leave and welfare and child benefits more difficult to access and the receipt of benefits more stigmatizing. 73. A cheaper and more humane option is to provide proper social protection and facilitate the return to the workforce of those who are able. In the United States, it is poverty that needs to be arrested, not the poor simply for being poor. 2. Acknowledge the plight of the middle class 74. Only 36 per cent of Republican voters consider that the federal Government should do more to help poor people, and 33 per cent believe that it already does too much.112 The paradox is that the proposed slashing of social protection benefits will affect the middle classes every bit as much as the poor. Almost a quarter of full-time workers, and three quarters of part-time workers, receive no paid sick leave. Absence from work due to illness thus poses a risk of economic disaster. About 44 per cent of adults either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400 or would need to sell something or borrow money to do it. Over a quarter of all adults are classified as having no access or inadequate access to banking facilities. 113 The impacts of automation, artificial intelligence and the increasing fluidity of work arrangements mean that employer-provided social protection will likely disappear for the middle classes in the years ahead. If this coincides with dramatic cutbacks in government benefits, the middle classes will suffer an ever more precarious economic existence, with major negative implications for the economy as a whole, for levels of popular discontent and for political stability. 3. Acknowledge the damaging consequences of extreme inequality 75. The United States already leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality, and it is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal. But this is a race that no one else would want to win, since almost all other nations, and all the major international institutions, such as OECD, the World Bank and IMF, have recognized that extreme inequalities are economically inefficient and socially damaging. The trajectory of the United States since 1980 is shocking. In both Europe and the United States, the richest 1 per cent earned around 10 per cent of national income in 1980. By 2017 that had risen slightly in Europe to 12 per cent, but massively in the United States, to 20 per cent. Since 1980 annual income earnings for the top 1 per cent in the United States have risen 205 per cent, while for the top 0.001 per cent the figure is 636 per cent. By comparison, the average annual wage of the bottom 50 per cent has stagnated since 1980.114 76. The problem is that “inequality” lacks salience with the general public, who have long been encouraged to admire the conspicuous, and often obscene, consumption of billionaires and celebrities. What extreme inequality actually signifies is the transfer of economic and political power to a handful of elites who inevitably use it to further their own self-interest, as demonstrated by the situation in various countries around the world. While the poor suffer, so too do the middle class, and so does the economy as a whole. High inequality undermines sustained economic growth. It manifests itself in poor education levels, inadequate health care and the absence of social protection for the middle class and the poor, which in turn limits their economic opportunities and inhibits overall growth. 77. Extreme inequality often leads to the capture of the powers of the State by a small group of economic elites. The combined wealth of the United States Cabinet is around $4.3 billion. As noted by Forbes: “America’s first billionaire president has remained devoted to the goal of placing his wealthy friends in his Cabinet, a top campaign promise.”115 And many regulatory agencies are now staffed by “political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts”.116 Extreme inequality thus poses a threat not just to economic efficiency but to the well-being of American democracy. 4. Recognize a right to health care 78. Health care is, in fact, a human right. The civil and political rights of the middle class and the poor are fundamentally undermined if they are unable to function effectively, which includes working, because of a lack of the access to health care that every human being needs. The Affordable Care Act was a good start, although it was limited and flawed from the outset. Undermining it by stealth is not just inhumane and a violation of human rights, but an economically and socially destructive policy aimed at the poor and the middle class. 5. Get real about taxes 79. At the state level, the demonizing of taxation means that legislatures effectively refuse to levy taxes even when there is a desperate need. Instead they impose fees and fines through the back door, some of which fund the justice system and others of which go to fund the pet projects of legislators. This sleight-of-hand technique is a winner, in the sense that the politically powerful rich get to pay low taxes, while the politically marginalized poor bear the burden but can do nothing about it. There is a real need for the realization to sink in among the majority of the American population that taxes are not only in their interest, but also perfectly reconcilable with a growth agenda. A much-cited IMF paper concluded that redistribution could be good for growth, stating: “The combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution — including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality — are on average progrowth.”117"

This is a complex issue, but unchecked and extreme capitalism (profits and growth at all costs), coupled with an extreme form of individualism is one of the main causes, adultswim proclaims.

6/27/2018 11:47:37 AM

well god damn an OEP post not from the daily star or similar


... and nevermind this is from a facebook video

6/27/2018 12:01:09 PM

tldr;

people is po'. the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

6/27/2018 1:44:16 PM

https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/united-nations/

Quote :

"We, the leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, request to convene a hearing before the U.N. Human Rights Council on the state of poverty in our nation. After more than three years of traveling across the U.S., meeting with poor communities from El Paso to Aberdeen to Detroit to Selma, Harlan County, Marks and Memphis, we have just completed 40 days of nonviolent moral fusion direct action with more than 3,000 poor people, clergy and other activists presenting themselves for nonviolent civil disobedience and a call to action rally and march of tens of thousands of people putting a face on the facts, demanding an end to abandonment in the midst of abundance. We write with a sense of urgency. Just last week, the U.S. doubled down on its commitment to inflicting policy violence against children and families by pulling out of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. Days later, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley responded to a report from the U.N.’s special rapporteur on poverty by saying, “It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America.” Here is what is patently ridiculous: Today, despite substantial economic growth, a full 60 percent more Americans live below the poverty line than in 1968, and 43 percent of all U.S. children live below the minimum income level considered necessary to meet basic family needs. Fifty-three cents of every federal discretionary dollar goes to military spending, while only 15 cents is spent on anti-poverty programs. An alarming 13.8 million U.S. households cannot afford water, and a quarter million people die in the U.S. each year from poverty and related issues. And 23 states have enacted voter suppression laws since 2010, leaving the US with fewer voting rights than we had 50 years. For a nation that declared it was founded upon principles of equality, systemic inequality has never been starker. In the richest nation in the world, 140 million people live in poverty. The richest 1 percent in our country hold more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. And our leaders continue to feed us the same moral narrative: We blame poor people for their poverty, when in fact the government has gutted social programs. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 has not been raised since 2009, and on average, wages for all workers in the U.S. have raised $0.04 a year since 1979. In recent weeks it has been brought to the public’s attention that Brown children have been systematically separated from their families at the border. Inside our borders, families of all races are separated from health care, food stamps and a living wage, and with widespread voter suppression and racist gerrymandering, millions of people have been separated from the ballot box. Hundreds of thousands of children are taken away from their parents because of their poverty; we hear the cries of the people “take away our poverty, not our children; take away unjust policies, not our children.” Our democracy is impoverished. Policies serve the few at the expense of the many, while leaders spread lies to divide people against each other. To be clear: Poverty is a moral and political crisis, one that this administration and Congress are inflaming instead of solving. Every policy decision is a moral one, but choices being made by our leaders have been overwhelmingly immoral. We need to reshape the heart and conscience of this nation, starting from the ground up. We need immediate and major changes to address systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative. Seventy-one years ago, W.E.B. DuBois submitted a petition to the United Nations about the unequal treatment of Black Americans. More than 50 years ago, Malcolm X approached the U.N. with a similar message, charging the United States with being “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African American brothers and sisters.” Both human rights leaders and countless others including welfare rights activists, indigenous leaders, women and other marginalized groups addressed the U.N. at times when the U.S. government failed to bring forth solutions to moral and political crises. Since our government is committing policy violence against its citizens and exacerbating poverty instead of alleviating it, we urge the U.N. Human Rights Council to hear directly from the poor and dispossessed of the United States. We call on you to listen to the Alabama woman whose daughter died in her arms because the state refused to expand Medicaid; to the undocumented California woman struggling to raise a family; to the Kansas City McDonald’s worker battling to raise three young girls on $9/hour; and to the Flint woman who is fighting for clean water in her community still four years after it became public that public officials had knowingly poisoned the whole city. We know you’ve heard from the special rapporteur on the conditions; now we ask you hear directly from those impacted by America’s policy violence. As W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X and other human rights activists requested decades ago, we request an audience with you because our government seems unwilling or incapable of doing the right thing."

6/27/2018 1:59:20 PM

Freedom inherently produces inequality. But to produce this level of inequality requires government run schools and government imposed barriers to entry. Subsidies for the rich, taxes and regulations for the poor.

7/1/2018 12:21:10 PM