poverty

When categorizing my class background I’ve invariably replied “working class” but in truth that was more aspirational than factual. My father was either unemployed or underemployed and died of a heart attack at age 46 while working as a night shift orderly at a veteran’s hospital in Fargo, ND. I was 12-years-old, with a 7-year-old brother, and thereafter our family income consisted of whatever my mother earned from doing infrequent odd jobs and the social security checks she received for her two boys. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we had a small house.

Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire, written and directed by Scott Noble, continues the run of quality documentaries by Metanoia Films. The film provides the historical context that allows the viewer to understand why inequality reigns while social justice and peace lag today.

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
— Borges, “The Immortal”, IV, in The Aleph (1949)
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
— Jorge Luis Borges

Most people in the West think of Denmark as a tolerant, peace-loving country, even—according to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—as a socialist country. Trump views this as a disease to be excised, and avoided in the US at all costs, while Sanders sees this as an ideal for America.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think there are 22 Democrat candidates for President. I admire some for their resistance to the Jewish Lobby. But not one of them is opposed to cutting our wages and pensions 50% or more.

India is swept up in a growing “maternalization” trend: the federal government is offering cash-transfer programs to pregnant women to improve maternal health, sidelining other safety-net programs for women. ADAM JONES/CREATIVE COMMONS
Social policy in developing countries provides crucial assistance to women, but evidence shows that it is increasingly being limited to women who are mothers. India is a vivid case in point.

Poverty causes far more death than weather. Free enterprise, technology, and opportunity will raise people who are poverty-stricken to a higher standard of living, but penalizing carbon emissions will produce just the opposie effect, which meas it will increase unnatural death rates.

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

In case you haven’t noticed, homelessness is on the rise in North America and Europe. With successive record-breaking years, it’s becoming clear that this is no mere socioeconomic anomaly – it’s a serious social epidemic. While glad-handing politicians and their corporate benefactors carry on in their state of denial, the painful truth continues to seep out from our streets.