poverty

During the 2014 holiday season, Margaret Cho was in San Francisco helping raise funds for youth services. (Photos by Gerard Livernois)"It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends $500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only $53 annually on the victims of poverty." -- Dr.

It was 30th May, deep autumn in Argentina. The streetlights had been turned on an hour earlier, just as I was entering the house/museum. Now inside, it was dark, silent, warm and cozy.
Magda Konopacka de Bruzzone brought two cups of tea upstairs, after locking the gate. For a while, we sat in silence.
“Now tell me about the world outside,” she whispered, after I took my first sip.
“People are freezing to death,” I said. “Argentinean people are dying.”
She looked at me and then her eyes moved somewhere behind, way beyond me.
*****

P. Sainath started building the People’s Archive of Rural India only a couple of years ago. But the passion behind the innovative online project that mixes journalism and oral history, which was launched last month to overwhelming acclaim, goes back more than two decades.

Question One. In 1990, twenty percent of all children in the US lived in poverty. What percent of the children in the US live in poverty today?
A: Ten percent
B: Fifteen percent
C: Twenty percent
Question Two. The median wealth of black households in the US is $11,000. What is the median wealth of white households?
A: $22,000
B: $62,000
C: $141,000

Some time ago, Al Jazeera America carried an item by David Cay Johnston with the jaw-dropping revelation that “Americans fared better after the Great Depression than today.” I should mention that Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize winning former investigative reporter for the New York Times who now teaches business, tax and property law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s Law School, so that’s all you need to know right there.

For many years and decades and in the most vulgar manner, plane crashes have been exploited by mass media. As if lives lost at 30.000 feet above the ground or the surface of oceans were more valuable than those that were interrupted ‘on the surface’ by calamities, misery, hunger or preventable diseases, especially in the poor neighborhoods and in the slums.
Air Asia flight QZ-8501, lost en route from Indonesia’s second largest city, Surabaya, to Singapore, brought unprecedented outpouring of sorrow in all corners of this sprawling and socially collapsed archipelago.

Producing Criminals

You and I constitute the very system that we blame for the world’s problems, which is starkly illustrated at Christmas when we rob our fragile earth on the high streets in the name of Jesus. What better way to celebrate the birth of Christ this year than to unite under the banner of freedom and justice, and peacefully demonstrate for an end to hunger and poverty across the world, writes Mohammed Mesbahi.
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Workfare in Theory

In March 1982, conservative theoreticians James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published a brief article in The Atlantic entitled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” that was to drastically alter the scope of policing. As opposed to previous ‘community policing’ stratagems in which police officers were encouraged to play an active if not collaborative role in building relationships with the community in their designated location, Wilson and Kelling advocated for the deployment of heightened police aggression—‘zero tolerance’—towards small-time offenders.