poverty

China aims to significantly reduce poverty by 2020 [Xinhua]
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday called the campaign against poverty the “toughest of all battles” and that the country should exert all efforts to eradicate it.
His statement comes ahead of the UN earmarked International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17.
Two weeks ago, Beijing upgraded a new mechanism to help local governments and municipalities target poverty reduction through a 100-point assessment system that measures the efficacy of funds allocated to this pursuit.

Forty-three U.S. states can suspend people’s driver’s licenses for failure to pay fines, regardless of their ability to pay, a policy that selectively punishes the poor, the Legal Aid Justice Center said in a report today.

The New York Times Business Page recently featured a front page article about the annual conference In Jackson Hole, Wyoming hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It contained this interesting opening:

In the decade since the financial crisis economic policymakers, professors and protestors have gathered here every August to argue about the best ways to return to faster economic growth. This year, they gave up…instead focused mostly on making sure things don’t get any worse.

Bearing quilted bedcovers Afghans walk through the cemetery to their mountainside homes

Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a lot of serious problems. Neoliberal reforms have been imposed against the will of the people here and it is only our pride and our racially informed sense of kinship with imperial power that keeps us from recognising that we are a neocolony – a privileged neocolony perhaps, but a neocolony nonetheless.

They – those Clintonistas-Kissingeristas-Friedmanistas-Obamaistas-Romneyistas-Adelsonistas-Sorosistas-Trumpistas-Zbigniew Brzezinskistas — are the deplorables. Really, for 60 years on this planet, in this precarious walkabout, I have trudged through the sooty rain of capitalism plaguing the land, as the rich and the generals call to duty the soldiers of pain, yearning to be enforcers, witnesses to the dystopia of their dreams. Money changers, bureaucrats, oh they are Eichmann’s. Israeli Jews, many Little Eichmann’s all encapsulated in post-pre-future chrysalis of genocide.

“At bedtime, I am afraid to turn the lights off. I am not a coward, it is just that I worry that this bulb hanging from the ceiling is the last light that remains (shining) in my life.”

Days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, the national news media expressed collective alarm at the discovery that in modern America, many people shelter in place during storms for the simple reason that they can’t afford to get out (Extra!, 7–8/06).

As a tender of youth – 16 to 21 year olds, as my clients are in foster care, held by the state or some other guardian, or on their own, but still labeled as foster youth – I find the topics of our time more magnified by the presence of the ever-vaunting capitalist mindset about time, work, energy, technology, digital supremacy, patriotism, consumerism, punishment, surveillance, worthiness.

Chinese news outlet Xinhua has released the full remarks of President Xi Jinping from a 23 June symposium on the eradication of poverty which took place in Shanxi Province.
During his speech President Xi stated that he seeks to embark on a three year plan to fully eradicate rural poverty in the county.