11-10-2022, 03:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-10-2022, 04:17 PM by Eric the Green.)
Southern poverty gets the United Nations' attention
By Junior Walters, July 11, 2018
https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/07/sout...-attention
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, recently toured parts of the U.S., including impoverished communities in Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia. Released last month, his report holds the U.S. government responsible for creating so much poverty — and for fixing the problem.
In a report presented to the United Nations' Human Rights Council last month, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty called attention to the tremendous scale and consequences of poverty in the United States — and particularly in the U.S. South.
Philip Alston, who is also a law professor at New York University, pointed to a combination of political, social, and economic discrimination that keeps 40 million Americans below the official poverty threshold, with 5.3 million living in conditions of absolute poverty that resemble those of undeveloped countries.
"My report demonstrates that growing inequality, and widespread poverty which afflicts almost one child out of every five, has deeply negative implications for the enjoyment of civil and political rights by many millions of Americans," he told the council during a June 22 presentation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Alston toured the U.S. for 10 days in December 2017, and much of the report is based on his findings in the South. He visited Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia, where he witnessed the consequences of poverty in both urban and rural contexts. He also visited California, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
He was particularly struck by the rural poverty he witnessed in Alabama. In his presentation to the Human Rights Council, Alston called for swift government action in the state as he referred to the sewage that "poured into the gardens of people who could never afford to pay $30,000 for their own septic systems in an area remarkably close to the State capital."
Everywhere he went, Alston was greeted by community leaders, activists and organizers. They included Catherine Coleman-Flowers, rural development manager at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise. Coleman-Flowers invited Alston to Lowndes County, Alabama, to see rural poverty in the Southern Black Belt region.
"I wanted him to meet and talk to families that are living in what has been described as Third World conditions in America," Coleman-Flowers told Facing South in an e-mail. She said she showed Alston "raw sewage and the conditions that have yielded evidence of tropical parasites."
Lowndes County ranks among the poorest in the U.S., with a median household income under $30,000 and poverty rate of over 30 percent — double the national average. Its most impoverished communities have become notorious for their poor environmental conditions and lack of adequate sanitation. Raw sewage often pools outside of homes, dramatically increasing the risk of parasitic infections such as hookworm, which was once thought to have been eradicated from the U.S.
African Americans account for 70 percent of the population in the 18 counties that are part of Alabama's Black Belt, and about a third of them live in poverty. The region includes Dallas County, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, partly as a protest against the economic challenges facing African-American sharecroppers.
Indeed, the UN report did not shy away from drawing a connection between racial discrimination and poverty. It noted that African Americans are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be unemployed, and, when employed, are likely to make less than white Americans.
"These shameful statistics can only be explained by long-standing structural discrimination on the basis of race, reflecting the enduring legacy of slavery," the report said.
The report also addressed the stigmatization of the poor in U.S. culture, expressed in both the welfare and the criminal justice systems. It pointed to government officials' allegations that people seek to "live high on the welfare hog" and accusations of welfare fraud often made against people with disabilities, a phenomenon Alston particularly noticed in West Virginia.
The report also accuses the U.S. of using criminalization to conceal the underlying poverty problem.
"In many cities and counties, the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but many other programmes," the report said.
Alston placed the responsibility for poverty on the U.S. government — both as the cause and the solution. "The persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power," he said in the report....
My Note: And who puts who in power in the USA? The voters. Who keeps the system of elections and their financing the way it is? The voters. Or those who don't vote.
I live in San Jose California, and we just elected a new business/real-estate oriented former tech entrepreneur as mayor (but who says he's a Democrat), who used the homelessness and other similar issues and people's fears to get elected by a 52-48 margin. I am ashamed of my city's voters, and not for the first time. I ride my bike around town and I see some homeless camps along river trails, and some homeless people hang out in downtown parks. But this is a tiny fraction of the people who live here, and a tiny fraction of the city's area. Santa Clara County CA is probably the world's most expensive place to live, and you have to be rich or double up on space a great deal to live here. It is expensive because of the high paying jobs here in "Silicon Valley", of which San Jose is the "capitol". The universities in northern CA, many of them state supported and even free back before Reagan, one of which I attended, are one reason for the high tech culture that dominates the economy here. But it's too expensive for many who may be stuck here for one reason or another.
Another aspect of San Jose is the high degree of ethnic diversity, and the different ethnic groups are somewhat spread out across the city. But of course people jealous of our free lifestyle, our near-perfect weather and our cultural richness here in NorCal knock Democratic-voting California, but they should look at their own places instead. How people vote, and for which Party, has a large influence on the quality of life and opportunity in each state, although it's not the only factor. Among those states who vote for the wrong Party, the Republicans, those in the south and border regions rank lowest on all measures among "red" states, while some in the mountain and plains west are less awful by comparison. There are good people in all regions, and the margins between states are not huge among these measures of quality of life, health and so forth. But the USA as a whole has the worst record of any developed country, and the South is one reason because it drags the rest of the country down-- not the least because of how it votes. Besides a small minority of Democratic House seats in the big 2 states of FL and TX, it's hard to find any Democrats in congress representing these states these days. And back to the thread topic, the South is probably the most vulnerable region in the USA to the disasters of global warming, but is by far the region most culpable for it in the world; again, because of how they vote. Check that scorecard again if you doubt this fact. https://scorecard.lcv.org/members-of-congress
By Junior Walters, July 11, 2018
https://www.facingsouth.org/2018/07/sout...-attention
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, recently toured parts of the U.S., including impoverished communities in Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia. Released last month, his report holds the U.S. government responsible for creating so much poverty — and for fixing the problem.
In a report presented to the United Nations' Human Rights Council last month, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty called attention to the tremendous scale and consequences of poverty in the United States — and particularly in the U.S. South.
Philip Alston, who is also a law professor at New York University, pointed to a combination of political, social, and economic discrimination that keeps 40 million Americans below the official poverty threshold, with 5.3 million living in conditions of absolute poverty that resemble those of undeveloped countries.
"My report demonstrates that growing inequality, and widespread poverty which afflicts almost one child out of every five, has deeply negative implications for the enjoyment of civil and political rights by many millions of Americans," he told the council during a June 22 presentation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Alston toured the U.S. for 10 days in December 2017, and much of the report is based on his findings in the South. He visited Alabama, Georgia and West Virginia, where he witnessed the consequences of poverty in both urban and rural contexts. He also visited California, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
He was particularly struck by the rural poverty he witnessed in Alabama. In his presentation to the Human Rights Council, Alston called for swift government action in the state as he referred to the sewage that "poured into the gardens of people who could never afford to pay $30,000 for their own septic systems in an area remarkably close to the State capital."
Everywhere he went, Alston was greeted by community leaders, activists and organizers. They included Catherine Coleman-Flowers, rural development manager at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise. Coleman-Flowers invited Alston to Lowndes County, Alabama, to see rural poverty in the Southern Black Belt region.
"I wanted him to meet and talk to families that are living in what has been described as Third World conditions in America," Coleman-Flowers told Facing South in an e-mail. She said she showed Alston "raw sewage and the conditions that have yielded evidence of tropical parasites."
Lowndes County ranks among the poorest in the U.S., with a median household income under $30,000 and poverty rate of over 30 percent — double the national average. Its most impoverished communities have become notorious for their poor environmental conditions and lack of adequate sanitation. Raw sewage often pools outside of homes, dramatically increasing the risk of parasitic infections such as hookworm, which was once thought to have been eradicated from the U.S.
African Americans account for 70 percent of the population in the 18 counties that are part of Alabama's Black Belt, and about a third of them live in poverty. The region includes Dallas County, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, partly as a protest against the economic challenges facing African-American sharecroppers.
Indeed, the UN report did not shy away from drawing a connection between racial discrimination and poverty. It noted that African Americans are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to be unemployed, and, when employed, are likely to make less than white Americans.
"These shameful statistics can only be explained by long-standing structural discrimination on the basis of race, reflecting the enduring legacy of slavery," the report said.
The report also addressed the stigmatization of the poor in U.S. culture, expressed in both the welfare and the criminal justice systems. It pointed to government officials' allegations that people seek to "live high on the welfare hog" and accusations of welfare fraud often made against people with disabilities, a phenomenon Alston particularly noticed in West Virginia.
The report also accuses the U.S. of using criminalization to conceal the underlying poverty problem.
"In many cities and counties, the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but many other programmes," the report said.
Alston placed the responsibility for poverty on the U.S. government — both as the cause and the solution. "The persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power," he said in the report....
My Note: And who puts who in power in the USA? The voters. Who keeps the system of elections and their financing the way it is? The voters. Or those who don't vote.
I live in San Jose California, and we just elected a new business/real-estate oriented former tech entrepreneur as mayor (but who says he's a Democrat), who used the homelessness and other similar issues and people's fears to get elected by a 52-48 margin. I am ashamed of my city's voters, and not for the first time. I ride my bike around town and I see some homeless camps along river trails, and some homeless people hang out in downtown parks. But this is a tiny fraction of the people who live here, and a tiny fraction of the city's area. Santa Clara County CA is probably the world's most expensive place to live, and you have to be rich or double up on space a great deal to live here. It is expensive because of the high paying jobs here in "Silicon Valley", of which San Jose is the "capitol". The universities in northern CA, many of them state supported and even free back before Reagan, one of which I attended, are one reason for the high tech culture that dominates the economy here. But it's too expensive for many who may be stuck here for one reason or another.
Another aspect of San Jose is the high degree of ethnic diversity, and the different ethnic groups are somewhat spread out across the city. But of course people jealous of our free lifestyle, our near-perfect weather and our cultural richness here in NorCal knock Democratic-voting California, but they should look at their own places instead. How people vote, and for which Party, has a large influence on the quality of life and opportunity in each state, although it's not the only factor. Among those states who vote for the wrong Party, the Republicans, those in the south and border regions rank lowest on all measures among "red" states, while some in the mountain and plains west are less awful by comparison. There are good people in all regions, and the margins between states are not huge among these measures of quality of life, health and so forth. But the USA as a whole has the worst record of any developed country, and the South is one reason because it drags the rest of the country down-- not the least because of how it votes. Besides a small minority of Democratic House seats in the big 2 states of FL and TX, it's hard to find any Democrats in congress representing these states these days. And back to the thread topic, the South is probably the most vulnerable region in the USA to the disasters of global warming, but is by far the region most culpable for it in the world; again, because of how they vote. Check that scorecard again if you doubt this fact. https://scorecard.lcv.org/members-of-congress