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Category: poverty

  • ‘What could we have done?’ – Pacific community grief for shooter victims

    RNZ Pacific

    The Pacific Island community in Aotearoa New Zealand is grieving for the deaths of two men killed at an Auckland downtown construction site last week.

    Solomona To’oto’o, 45, of Manurewa and Tupuga Sipiliano, 44, of Wattle Downs have been named as the victims of 24-year-old gunman Matu Reid, who also died.

    Several others were wounded, including a police officer.

    The Samoa Observer reports friends and relatives of the two victims took to social media to express their condolences, and relatives of Sipiliago sent messages to the victim’s wife and children as they mourned.

    The Samoa Police, Prison and Correction Services have extended their sympathies to the New Zealand Police, saying their thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected, along with their solidarity with the NZ Police.

    Former Auckland city councillor and Pacific islands advocate Fa’anānā Efeso Collins told RNZ’s Morning Report the community was rallying around the families.

    Fa’anānā said people he goes to church with were social workers and youth workers and are questioning what could have been done.

    ‘Some questioning’
    “Some questioning became what else could we have done?” he said.

    “How can we continue to support these communities and even the young man who undertook the shootings as well . . . I guess the holes in the community or in the system that we need to assist and fix and help to facilitate.”

    He said some people were “really angry” while some were questioning how else to support young people going through these issues.

    Fa’anānā said people were asking how to address issues like poverty, isolation and young people who had fallen out of the school system.

    He said he had talked to social and youth workers in churches.

    “Because even as young dads we are wondering what it is to get people to talk, to invite people to feel like they re connected to a community, because it is that connection that really is going to offer people support,” Fa’anānā said.

    “We experience tragedy and triumphs as a village and the village wants to work out what else can be done to support.”He said it was also going to mean a conversation with public agencies like Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Education.

    Fa'anānā Efeso Collins
    Former Auckland city councillor Fa’anānā Efeso Collins . . . “How can we continue to support these communities.” mage: RNZ

    Tongans ‘thankful’ to police
    A Tongan construction worker, Uate Vea, was one of those in the building at the time of the tragic deaths.

    RNZ Pacific correspondent Kalafi Moala said Vea said they were at level 21 of the building where the shooting was taking place, about six levels away from the gunman, when they were instructed to leave.

    “We ran down to level 15 before we were told to return to level 16 because the shooter was heading our way,” he said.

    And while they moved to level 16, he heard more gunshots.

    Vea said he was thankful that the NZ police were quick to send the helicopter which helped save them, Moala said.

    He said there were eight Tongans altogether in his team and he understood there were more Tongans working at the site.

    ‘MATES help mates’
    MATES in Construction has also extended its sympathies to the workers that were affected by the shooting.

    In a statement last week it said it “is actively engaged to support impacted people throughout the industry.”

    The suicide prevention group said it was “developing a plan to ensure there is a comprehensive process in place for the weeks ahead and intends to maintain a strong supportive presence on site” when workers returned to the site this week.

    “It is important that workers know there is someone to turn to if they need help and know how to look after their mates on site who may be experiencing difficulties.

    “MATES help mates and that is a priority for us during this sad time.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • 60 Years After the March on Washington, 1 in 3 Black Children Live in Poverty

    Conservatives today would have you believe the civil rights movement of the 1960s was so successful that systemic racism is a problem of the past. Every February, white Republicans observe Black History Month by twisting famous lines from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech to serve their own agendas. The Constitution is “colorblind,” they claim, and if this flies in the face…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Guaranteed Income Programs Are Uplifting Oppressed Communities Across the US

    The expanded child tax credit, signed into law by President Joe Biden more than two years ago, provided families with children with monthly installments of $250 or $300, reduced rates of child poverty, and served as a lifeline for low-income families. The tax credit expired after the 2022 tax year, and efforts to revive it were unsuccessful. In its absence, local and state organizers and advocates…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With Sir Kid Starver keeping the two-child limit, Labour is supporting Eugenics

    Social media has been in uproar over now-renamed Keir Starmer’s announcement that the Labour Party will keep the two-child limit on benefits like Universal Credit. So-called “Sir Kid Starver” has briefed his front bench to hold the line over the controversial plan. However, the fuss over the policy fails to put it into context: that the Tory-created cap on benefits is little more than Eugenics, to stop poor people having kids.

    Two-child limit: a devastating policy

    Sir Kid Starver told BBC hack Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday 16 July that Labour would not scrap the two-child limit policy if it won the next election:

    As the Canary previously wrote, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) brought in the Tory policy:

    on 6 April 2017. It meant the DWP would only pay Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit for two children in a family; any more than this the DWP would not count in benefits calculations.

    The policy has been controversial. A court ruled in June 2017 that the policy was “discriminatory” against single mothers with children under two. Then, in April 2018, another court said the cap was unlawful. This was in relation to young carers. The so-called ‘rape clause‘, where women have to prove they’ve been raped to get an exception to the two-child limit, also sparked outrage.

    The policy has been devastating. The two-child limit affects one in 10 children. The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) says the policy is “one of the biggest drivers” of child poverty  – and figures show this. By 2020, there was a near-10% increase in poverty among families with three or more kids. The policy has cut over £5bn from people’s benefits. Plus, the CPAG recently found that over 110,000 kids were hit by both the two-child limit and the equally obscene benefit cap.

    Labour: doubling down

    With this in mind, you’d think Sir Kid Starver would consider it wise to scrap the policy, especially given the £1.3bn cost of doing this is less than half a percent of total DWP budget. But no – once a Red Tory, always a Red Tory. Moreover, shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell doubled down on Sir Kid Starver’s pledge while doing the breakfast media rounds on Tuesday 18 July:

    People are rightly furious:

    A lot of people are also pointing out the cruelty of the two-child limit:

    Note as well that Sir Kid Starver is supporting a policy that’s just a little bit systemically racist (no surprise there, given his own racism):

    However, what most people failed to mention was that when you actually break the two-child limit down, it is dripping in Eugenics.

    Sir Kid Starver: supporting Eugenics

    As the Canary previously reported, after the Tories brought in the two-child limit, abortion rates among women who already had two or more kids increased rapidly. However:

    The Canary analysed the birth rates for women by socioeconomic status; that is for the richest and poorest women.

    Our research found that birth rates fell generally between 2017 and 2019. But we found the biggest falls were among the poorest households. For example, between 2013 and 2016, birth rates in four bottom deciles (10%’s of population) fell overall by 0.9%. Then suddenly, between 2017 and 2019, this accelerated to a 12.4% fall in birth rates. This fall also correlated with an 11.74% increase in abortions – and the poorest women were having abortions at over twice the rate of the richest.

    What does this mean?

    Well, it’s hard not to look at the figures and think that the Tories intentionally designed the two-child policy to stop poor people having children. As the CPAG noted:

    If these findings are related to the two-child policy, it is horrifying. China’s one-child policy was driven by burgeoning birth rates. We have sub-replacement fertility. There is no other country in history that has adapted social security policy to increase child poverty to reduce fertility or encourage abortion. It is a completely outrageous assault on liberty.

    That is – the Tories introduced a policy to socially engineer certain groups of people to stop them having kids. This is Eugenics in all but name – and the evidence backs up that assertion. Now, with Sir Kid Starver and Labour supporting it, they’ve shown their true colours – and there’s no red anywhere to be found.

    Featured image via Channel 4 News – YouTube, and Political TV – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • People’s Assembly blames ‘profiteering’ supermarkets for worsening child poverty crisis

    With the school holidays set to begin in the UK, the issue of child poverty has once again come to the forefront. Children who receive free school meals during term time may go without over the holidays. This leaves parents “faced with the grim choice of going hungry, getting behind on essential bill payments or taking on debt to cover” the cost. So, the People’s Assembly has announced a national day of action to take place on 22 July 2023. In the runup, it’s targeting supermarkets and the government over “gross profiteering”.

    A growing problem

    At the beginning of the 2022 summer holidays, Katie Schmuecker of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said:

    In the midst of a year of financial fear for families on low incomes, parents of school-age children are now facing the summer holidays and all the extra meals and childcare that comes with them. Too many families lack the income to cover the essentials and are already regularly going without them, including food.

    She added:

    Now, more than ever, they [families] will be faced with the grim choice of going hungry, getting behind on essential bill payments or taking on debt to cover it.

    The People’s Assembly suggests little has changed since then, with the reality being that the situation may actually have worsened.

    Child poverty: taking action

    According to government figures, 23.8% of pupils received free school meals – a figure which “represents over 2 million pupils”. The figure is also up from 22.5% in 2022. And according to the Big Issue, the problem of child poverty likely runs deeper than those figures suggest:

    Around 14.4 million people are living in poverty in the UK in 2021/2022, according to the government’s official statistics. That is around one in five people. Around 4.2 million children are affected.

    These harrowing figures were captured before the cost of living crisis took its toll on the country, driving hundreds of thousands more people into poverty.

    So the People’s Assembly has spoken out against what it calls “obscene profiteering” from supermarkets. It says they “are shamelessly cashing in on the cost of living crisis”. The group’s day of action over child poverty will take place on the first day of the school holidays. It corresponds with a list of demands, including:

    • Immediate supermarket price reduction – profits must be used for lower food prices and higher wages for supermarket workers.
    • Government price controls on food to make it affordable for everyone.
    • A raise in wages, benefits and pensions to create hunger free communities!
    • Free school meals for all children.

    According to the group itself, People’s Assembly “formed a decade ago to campaign against the Conservative Government’s austerity program”. It recently “put on waves of demonstrations around the UK in response to energy price hikes back in February 2022″.

    ‘Devastating’ effects

    Economist and long-standing supporter of the People’s Assembly Michael Burke said:

    These demonstrations are vital and we hope that thousands will turn out across the country. Everyone should have a basic right to food & no child should be left hungry this summer. As millions of us struggle to pay our basic food bills, the government and their profiteering backers blame inflation on wage growth. However, the real crisis is food price inflation as wage growth is just a third of the 19% inflation rate of food this year.

    The effects are devastating – in 2010 there were 50 Trussell Trust foodbanks. Now the number of foodbanks has reached 2600. NHS England reports a quadrupling of poverty diseases such as scurvy and rickets over the last 15 years as well as malnutrition. All this while in recent weeks Tesco’s, Iceland and Sainsbury’s have all reported surging underlying profits.

    The People’s Assembly said it “has local groups across the UK” and “they expect thousands to turn out at the protests which will target supermarket profiteering and what the groups describe as ‘deliberate inaction’ from the Tory government”. Organisers added:

    We’ve already been faced with 13 years of Tory austerity, services have been cut to the bone and families are struggling to survive, The Cost of Living Crisis could be brought under control by the Government, yet they are allowing gross profiteering from Supermarkets and energy companies. At the end of the day this is just the latest form of austerity as it serves exactly the same purpose – the transference of wealth from ordinary working class families to the super rich.

    People’s Assembly National Secretary and former Labour MP Laura Pidcock said:

    With 4.2 million children in poverty, the situation families are facing is grim. Summer holidays are always a particularly difficult financial time for parents and carers. Extreme wealth inequality and grotesque levels of poverty are becoming endemic in the UK and people are absolutely sick of platitudes about “hard decisions” from both sides of the Westminster political establishment.

    The People’s Assembly website includes more details about the day of action as well as local actions around the UK.

    Featured image via Francisco Osorio (Flickr) – image cropped to 770 x 403

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Why Are There No Slums in China?

    With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York.1 Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common to most of the rest of the world.

    Slums were not uncommon in Chinese cities a few decades ago, from the precarious working class districts of 1930s Shanghai to the shanty towns of British-occupied Hong Kong in the 1950s onwards. How did China manage to develop in a way that decreased mass housing precarity?  What are the structural reasons behind it?

    This issue of Dongsheng Explains looks into how the Chinese government deals with homelessness, how this issue relates to socialist construction, and how China confronts the challenges posed by rapid economic development, urbanization, and the migration of recent decades.

    Why did mass urbanization not create large slums in China?

    When reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, 83 percent of China’s population lived in the countryside. By 2021, the proportion of the rural population had fallen to 36 percent. During this period of mass urbanization, over 600 million people migrated from rural areas to cities.

    Today, there are 296 million internal “migrant workers” (农民工, nóngmín gōng), comprising over 70 percent of the country’s total workforce.2 Migrant workers became the economic engine of China’s rapid growth, which created the world’s largest middle class of 400 million people.

    This historic migration came with many challenges, including the emergence of “urban villages” that had poor living conditions and inadequate infrastructure. Although basic amenities – such as running water, electricity, gas, and communications – were provided, sanitation, public services, fire safety, and other such amenities resembled that of rural villages. Due to lower rents and the lack of other affordable housing, urban villages are largely inhabited by migrant workers.

    With the acceleration of urbanization in the 2000s, the Chinese government began to promote large-scale transformation of the old areas of the cities, focusing on renovation of historically deteriorated neighborhoods and the removal of dangerous housing. Between 2008 and 2012, 12.6 million households in urban villages were rebuilt nationwide.Migrant workers are workers whose household registration is still in rural areas and who are engaged in non-agricultural industries or leave their hometowns for work in another part of the country for at least six months of the year.3 At the same time, efforts were made to construct public rental or low-rent housing. For instance, in Shanghai today, families of three or more people with a monthly income of less than 4,200 yuan per person can apply for low-rent housing, with the monthly rent being just a few hundred yuan (or five percent of monthly household income). In 2022, the central government announced the construction of 6.5 million units of low-cost rental housing in 40 cities, representing 26 percent of the total new housing supply in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025).4

    Indeed the explosion of rural-to-urban migration in recent decades is not a phenomenon unique to China. While understanding that there are different definitions of “slums” used by countries and international organizations, they all point to the same tendency:  since the 1970s, slum growth outpaced urbanization rates across the Global South. China’s efforts to upgrade existing precarious housing or build new affordable housing does not, however, explain why China did not develop slums like in so many other countries. Urbanization in China, therefore, must be understood within the context of socialist construction.

    What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?

    One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.

    Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.

    Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension,  and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.

    How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness?

    In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas.”5 The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns.

    Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases.6

    Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.

    Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc.

    This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems.

    What are the current challenges of urbanization, migration, and inequality?

    While creating relief centers is an important advancement, it is clear that shelters are not a structural solution and they alone cannot meet the needs of a metropolis like Shanghai of 25 million people, let alone the country’s 921 million urban residents. The government has been implementing many structural reforms to address inequality, and to make the cities and the countryside more liveable.

    In his report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC, President Xi Jinping said: “We have identified the principal contradiction facing Chinese society as that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life, and we have made it clear that closing this gap should be the focus of all our initiatives.”7 The unbalanced and inadequate development points to the gap between the countryside and cities, between underdeveloped and industrialized regions, and between the rich and poor.

    On a broader scale, the anti-poverty campaigns – highlighted by the eradication of extreme poverty in 2020 – and the rural revitalization strategy have helped alleviate the pressure of migrant workers moving to the cities. The government has invested substantial funds and resources, using diversified ways to alleviate poverty beyond income-transfer schemes, including developing rural industry, education, health care, and infrastructure.8 These measures fundamentally improved the living and employment environment in rural areas and created more opportunities so that people have the option to stay and work in the countryside. For example, every year, more migrants are returning from cities back to their hometowns, which increased from 2.4 million (2015) to 8.5 million people (2019).

    Over the last decade, China has implemented reforms to balance the easing of hukou residency requirements and to improve the social welfare of migrant workers, while ensuring that urbanization and population distribution responds to the country’s needs. Since 2010, major cities have gradually relaxed the household registration restrictions for school admission, allowing children of migrant workers to attend public schools like children with local hukou. Furthermore, according to the 2019 Urbanization Plan, cities with populations below three million people are required to remove all hukou restrictions, while bigger cities (under five million) can begin to relax restrictions. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and the country’s economic strategy until 2035 focus on redistributing income through tax reform, reducing the gap between the rich and poor, and removing the barriers that prevent millions of migrant workers from enjoying the full benefits of urban life. In 2021, the government invested US$5.3 billion to relax the hukou residency rules, and to also boost urban migrants’ spending power as part of the country’s “dual circulation” policy.9

    These efforts to tackle the “three mountains” of the high cost of housing, education, and health care faced by all Chinese people, including migrants, is at the center of the government’s vision and policy reforms towards “common prosperity” for all its citizens and the building of a modern socialist society.

    ENDNOTES


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The World Needs a New Development Theory That Does Not Trap the Poor in Poverty

    La presa de Akosombo en el río Volta, inaugurada en 1965 durante la presidencia de Kwame Nkrumah, fue en su momento la mayor inversión en desarrollo de la historia de Ghana. La planificación del proyecto implicó una amplia consulta pública, incluso con diferentes representantes de los Consejos Tradicionales.

    The Akosombo Dam in the Volta River, inaugurated in 1965 during Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency.

    In June, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network published its Sustainable Development Report 2023, which tracks the progress of the 193 member states towards attaining the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘From 2015 to 2019’, the network wrote, ‘the world made some progress on the SDGs, although this was already vastly insufficient to achieve the goals. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and other simultaneous crises, SDG progress has stalled globally’. This development agenda was adopted in 2015, with targets intended to be met by 2030. However, halfway to this deadline, the report noted that ‘all of the SDGs are seriously off track’. Why are the UN member states unable to meet their SDG commitments? ‘At their core’, the network said, ‘the SDGs are an investment agenda: it is critical that UN member states adopt and implement the SDG stimulus and support a comprehensive reform of the global financial architecture’. However, few states have met their financial obligations. Indeed, to realise the SDG agenda, the poorer nations would require at least an additional $4 trillion in investment per year.

    No development is possible these days, as most of the poorer nations are in the grip of a permanent debt crisis. That is why the Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for a revision of the credit rating system, which paralyses the ability of countries to borrow money (and when they are able to borrow, it is at rates significantly higher than those given to richer countries). Furthermore, the report calls on the banking system to revise liquidity structures for poorer countries, ‘especially regarding sovereign debt, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises’.

    It is essential to place the sovereign debt crisis at the top of discussions on development. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that ‘the public debt of developing countries, excluding China, reached $11.5 trillion in 2021’. That same year, developing countries paid $400 billion to service their debt – more than twice the amount of official development aid they received. Most countries are not borrowing money to invest in their populations, but to pay off the bondholders, which is why we consider this not financing for development but financing for debt-servicing.

    The TAZARA Railway (or Uhuru Railway), connecting the East African countries of Tanzania and Zambia, was funded by China and constructed by Chinese and African workers. The railway was completed in 1975 under the presidencies of Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), and Mao Zedong (China) and has become an important lifeline for landlocked Zambia to bypass white-led colonial governments and access trading ports via Tanzania.

    The TAZARA Railway (or Uhuru Railway), connecting the East African countries of Tanzania and Zambia, was funded by China, constructed by Chinese and African workers, and completed in 1975.

    Reading the UN and academic literature on development is depressing. The conversation is trapped by the strictures of the intractable and permanent debt crisis. Whether the issue of debt is highlighted or ignored, its existence forecloses the possibility of any genuine advance for the world’s peoples. Conclusions of reports often end with a moral call – this is what should happen – rather than an assessment of the situation based on the facts of the neocolonial structure of the world economy: developing countries, with rich holdings of resources, are unable to earn just prices for their exports, which means that they do not accumulate sufficient wealth to industrialise with their own population’s well-being in mind, nor can they finance the social goods required for their population. Due to this suffocation from debt, and due to the impoverishment of academic development theory, no effective general theoretical orientation has been provided to guide realistic and holistic development agendas, and no outlines seem readily available for an exit from the permanent debt-austerity cycle.

    Entre los proyectos mencionados figuran: La presa elevada de Asuán en el río Nilo construida en los años 60 y 70 en Egipto durante la presidencia de Gamal Abdel Nasser, la planta siderúrgica de Bhilai en Chhattisgarh, India, terminada bajo la presidencia de Jawaharlal Nehru con la ayuda de la Unión Soviética en 1959, y el proyecto de viviendas en altura de Eisenhüttenstadt en la República Democrática Alemana, terminado en 1959.

    Collage of the Aswan High Dam (Egypt), Bhilai Steel Plant (India), and the Eisenhüttenstadt high-rise housing project (German Democratic Republic).

    At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we are eager to open a discussion about the need for a new socialist development theory – one that is built from the projects being pursued by peoples’ movements and progressive governments. As part of that discussion, we offer our latest dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, which surveys the terrain of development theory from 1945 to the present and offers a few gestures towards a new paradigm. As we note in the dossier:

    Starting with the facts would require an acknowledgement of the problems of debt and deindustrialisation, the reliance upon primary product exports, the reality of transfer pricing and other instruments employed by multinational corporations to squeeze the royalties from the exporting states, the difficulties of implementing new and comprehensive industrial strategies, and the need to build the technological, scientific, and bureaucratic capacities of populations in most of the world. These facts have been hard to overcome by governments in the Global South, although now – with the emergence of the new South-South institutions and China’s global initiatives – these governments have more choices than in decades past and are no longer as dependent on the Western-controlled financial and trade institutions. These new realities demand the formulation of new development theories, new assessments of the possibilities of and pathways to transcending the obstinate facts of social despair. In other words, what has been put back on the table is the necessity for national planning and regional cooperation as well as the fight to produce a better external environment for finance and trade.

    Anshan Iron and Steel Company, one of China’s largest state enterprises, was renovated and expanded as one of the 156 construction projects in the country that received significant aid and expertise from the Soviet Union. It was also part of China’s first Five-Year Plan (1953–1957).

    Anshan Iron and Steel Company was renovated and expanded as one of the 156 construction projects in China that was supported by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

    A recent conversation in Berlin with our partners at International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) led to the realisation that this dossier failed to engage with the debates and discussions around the development that took place in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Yugoslavia, and the broader international communist movement. As early as the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920, communists began to formulate a theory of ‘non-capitalist development’ (NCD) for societies that had been colonised and integrated into the capitalist world economy while still retaining pre-capitalist forms of production and social hierarchy. The general understanding of NCD was that post-colonial societies could circumvent capitalism and advance through a national-democratic process to socialism. NCD theory, which was developed at international conferences of communist and workers’ parties and elaborated upon by Soviet scholars such as Rostislav A. Ulyanovsky and Sergei Tiulpanov in journals like the World Marxist Review, was centred on three transformations:

    • Agrarian reform, to lift the peasantry out of its condition of destitution and to break the power of landlords.
    • The nationalisation of key economic sectors, such as industry and trade, to restrict the power of foreign monopolies.
    • The democratisation of political structures, education, and healthcare to lay the socio-political foundations for socialism.

    Unlike the import-substitution industrialisation policy advanced by institutions such as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, NCD theory had a much firmer understanding of the need to democratise society rather than to merely turn around the terms of trade. IF DDR’s ‘Friendship’ series features a powerful recounting of the practical application of NCD theory in Mali during the 1960s in an article written by Matthew Read. IF DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be working on a comprehensive study of NCD theory.

    Page from Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’), c. late 1700s.

    Page from Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’), c. late 1700s.

    Prior to colonialism, African and Arab scholars in West Africa had already begun to work out the elements of a development theory. For example, ʿUthman ibn Muhammad ibn ʿUthman ibn Fodyo (1754–1817), the Fulani sheikh who founded the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), wrote Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’) to guide himself and his followers on a path to lift up his people. The text is interesting for the principles it outlines, but – given the level of social production at the time – the caliphate relied on a system of low technical productivity and enslaved labour. Before the people of West Africa could wrest power from the caliphate and drive their own society forward, the last caliph was killed by the British, who – along with the Germans and French – seized the land and subordinated its history to that of Europe. Five decades later, Modibo Keïta, a communist militant, led Mali’s independence movement, seeking to reverse the subordination of African lands through the NCD project. Keïta did not explicitly draw a direct line back to ibn Fodyo – whose influence could be seen across West Africa – but we might imagine the hidden itineraries, the remarkable continuities between those old ideas (despite their saturation in the wretched social hierarchies of their time) and the new ideas that were put forward by Third World intellectuals.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Poverty in America is by design w/Matthew Desmond | The Chris Hedges Report

    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

  • In 31 States, Utilities Can Shut Off Electricity for Nonpayment Amid Heat Waves

    Millions of Americans have already been sweltering through heat waves this summer, and forecasters warn of hot months ahead. July 3 and 4, 2023, were two of the hottest days, and possibly the hottest, on satellite record globally. For people who struggle to afford air conditioning, the rising need for cooling is a growing crisis. An alarming number of Americans risk losing access to utility…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Guaranteed basic income program aims to support unhoused people

    By Megan Rose Dickey

    See original post here.

    Guaranteed basic income could make a dent in the ongoing homelessness crisis in San Francisco, advocates say, and an ongoing program seeks to measure the impact of monthly payments to people who are currently unhoused.

    Driving the news: Miracle Messages, a nonprofit that aims to help unhoused people rebuild social support networks, is conducting a yearlong basic income program, Miracle Money, in which participants in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles get $750 a month for a year.

    • The roughly $2 million program is funded through donations and grants from local philanthropists, as well as Google’s philanthropic arm.

    Why it matters: Like many large cities on the West Coast, San Francisco has a homelessness crisis, and guaranteed basic income programs could be “a core strategy in addressing homelessness,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told Axios.

    “Many unhoused families in the city are able to self-resolve their challenges if they can just get some basic financial stability,”

    Jim Pugh, co-director of the Universal Income Project, told Axios via email.

    What’s happening: The program, which started dispersing money to people last June, has so far onboarded 70 people on a rolling basis and expects to reach 100 participants in total throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Kevin F. Adler, founder and CEO of Miracle Messages, told Axios.

    • At least a dozen people have already secured housing thanks to their monthly stipends, he said.
    • By the end of the current program, Adler said, Miracle Money will have given out more than $1 million directly to unhoused individuals.

    Flashback: Miracle Money’s first pilot launched in December 2020 in the Bay Area. Of the nine unhoused people in the program, six were able to secure stable housing thanks to the $500 monthly stipend they received for six months, Adler said.

    • “They used the money better than I could have used it for them,” he said. “We saw most of the money going to rent, housing, food security, paying down debts, storage, family emergencies and health.”

    The big picture: Cities throughout the country, including Denver and Des Moines, have begun experimenting with basic income programs as a way to better support those experiencing poverty.

    • Advocates cite studies that show the cash guarantees are more efficient than programs that greatly dictate the terms of assistance.
    • Yes, but: A two-year program in Finland that gave monthly payments to 2,000 unemployed people was viewed as a failure since so many remained unemployed at its conclusion, Axios’ Jennifer Kingson reported.

    Between the lines: San Francisco, in March, announced a $2 million investment in the Trust Youth Initiative, a program that involves giving 45 people aged 18 to 24 who are experiencing homelessness monthly payments of $1,500 for two years, Emily Cohen, a spokesperson with the city’s department of homelessness, told Axios via email.

    What to watch: As part of Miracle Money, Adler and his team are working with researchers from the University of Southern California to evaluate the impact of social support both with and without basic income.

    • Some of the pushback around basic income programs is the idea that recipients will spend the money on drugs or alcohol, and will end up doing more harm than good, he said.
    • Yes, but: “Our theory,” Adler said, “is that by not only investing in individuals but coupling it with relationships and social supports, people will see really good outcomes that probably are going to be more cost-effective than a lot of other programs that are out there.”

    The post Guaranteed basic income program aims to support unhoused people appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food

     

    WSJ: The GOP’s Progress on Work and Welfare

    The Wall Street Journal (5/30/23) calls it a “mistake” that “veterans and the homeless” are exempted from work requirement for food vouchers: “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.”

    After holding the economy hostage for months, some Republicans are going through a bit of a depressive slump. “We got rolled,” is how one Republican congressmember (Roll Call, 6/6/23) described the outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations. “It was a bad deal.”

    But don’t cry too much, guys! The Wall Street Journal is here to cheer you up, and remind you that, though you didn’t get all the austerity you wanted, you did get to hurt the poor a bit. Maybe not as much as you wanted, but life’s not always fair, is it?

    As the Journal’s editorial board (5/30/23) recently wrote: “One reason the deal is worth passing: The provisions on work and welfare are incremental progress the GOP can build on.”

    Most centrally, the bill included an expansion of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”) for adults without a disability or children, raising the maximum age for those subject to work requirements from 49 to 54.

    The editorial’s takeaway:

    A major difference between the two political parties these days is that most Democrats favor a culture of dependency. The GOP’s task, which is popular with voters, is to rebuild a culture of work. The debt-ceiling bill starts to do that, which is one reason to support it.

    Vulnerable people

    CBO: Work Requirements andWork Supports for Recipients of Means-Tested Benefits

    CBO (6/22): “Work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid have reduced benefits more than they have increased people’s earnings.”

    It’s an odd statement to make when employment for prime-age workers (those between 25 and 54) is at its highest level in more than two decades, thanks in large part to the Democrats’ decision to go big in their Covid relief package in the spring of 2021. And it’s particularly odd when you consider the utter lack of evidence for the idea that expanding work requirements for food vouchers will increase employment in any significant way.

    As Shawn Fremstad has summarized for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the available evidence on the specific work requirement that is being expanded under the debt ceiling legislation

    tells a relatively consistent story about its impacts. There is no question that the work test reduces access to SNAP food vouchers among vulnerable people with few resources. On employment, the best read of the evidence is that it has no impact on employment, or only a very small one.

    In its 2022 analysis of the existing literature, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office similarly reported:

    SNAP’s work requirement has probably boosted employment for some adult recipients without dependents but has reduced income, on average, across all recipients. Earnings increased among recipients who worked more, but far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits because of the work requirement.

    So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

    Twisted logic

    The Journal apparently greets these outcomes with a grin, as the kind of “incremental progress the GOP can build on.” And it salivates for more. Reaching peak evil, the editorial board bemoans:

    One mistake in the debt deal is that the food-stamp work requirement exempts veterans and the homeless. These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.

    Notice the twisted logic here: Allowing people minimal access to food resources (SNAP benefits for a single person max out at $281 a month) is an indulgence that harms them. On the other hand, imposing punitive measures on people, forcing them to prove that they’re working a certain amount each month, that’s actually helping them. It’s teaching them the value of hard work, giving them dignity. Because the real problem is that these people just haven’t had enough of a fire lit under their ass. How do you address homelessness? Just threaten the unhoused with starvation, and I guess everyone left after that just deserves to be homeless.

    The unspoken premise is that people need to prove their worth to have access to food. Rather than having food guaranteed as a basic human right, people should be threatened with starvation. That way they’re insecure, and willing to accept the first job that comes around, no matter how bad the conditions and pay. That a major newspaper takes this editorial line is horrifying—though, given that the Journal is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, unfortunately not surprising.

    ‘Unemployment too attractive’

    WSJ: Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal

    In the United States, which has more than 200,000 people living on the street, “public policy has made unemployment too attractive,” according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley (5/23/23). 

    And the Journal isn’t just showing up for the celebration, either; it’s been hard at work pushing to cut people off from government benefits for a while. In one earlier piece (5/24/23), the editorial board lashed out at states for exempting too many people from already-existing SNAP work requirements. In another (5/17/23), it invoked the old lazy welfare recipient trope, whining that government assistance through programs like SNAP shouldn’t be “a permanent sinecure in return for doing nothing.”

    As the debt ceiling drama unfolded, the paper published a slew of anti-poor essays arguing for increased hurdles to accessing government assistance:

    • “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23)
    • “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23)
    • “Work Requirements Still Work” (5/29/23)
    • “Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996” (6/2/23)

    By far the most absurd was “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23), by columnist Jason L. Riley, which included some incredible lines, like:

    Asking something of people on the dole is perfectly rational, but liberals in Washington have long prioritized making the poor comfortable over helping them out of poverty.

    And:

    Too many healthy adults are opting out of work because public policy has made unemployment too attractive.

    And, for the ending:

    Mr. McCarthy is right to assume that most people don’t want their tax dollars being used by the government to subsidize laziness. I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Work harder: Millions of welfare recipients are depending on you.” So are a lot of liberals in Washington.

    It would be hard for the Onion to come up with a more perfect caricature of conservative mean-spiritedness. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that sticker is still proudly plastered on Riley’s bumper.

    Remarkably misleading numbers

    WSJ: Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/23) declared Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirements a success because people on Medicaid in the state got jobs—at a time of rapid economic growth. A more serious look at the impact of the requirements “found no evidence that low-income adults had increased their employment” (Health Affairs, 9/20).

    Meanwhile, another op-ed points to where the Journal believes the debt ceiling deal fell short. In “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23), Nick Stehle of the Foundation for Government Accountability holds up Arkansas’s experience with Medicaid work requirements to argue for a federal expansion of such work requirements. Stehle throws out some remarkably misleading numbers to suggest that Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas reduced dependence by boosting employment and incomes: “Tens of thousands went back to work, and more than 14,000 boosted their incomes enough to leave Medicaid entirely.”

    But people move on and off Medicaid each year because of changes in job status and earnings. What matters is whether the work requirements led to any increase in employment that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the requirements. A thorough 2020 analysis (Health Affairs, 9/20) found that they did not: “Work requirements did not increase employment over 18 months of follow-up.” The added hurdles were incredibly effective at reducing enrollment, though—18,000 people lost coverage while they were in effect. And they were great at aggravating all sorts of hardship, with disenrolled individuals struggling much more with medical bills and delays in care than people who were able to stay enrolled.

    The Journal was totally fine with printing Stehle’s shoddy, propagandistic analysis, handing the microphone to the vice president of communications of a group known for peddling junk science. But the paper seemed to realize that the likelihood of getting its way on Medicaid work requirements was slim, and it didn’t push the policy much in editorials. In one piece (5/17/23), the editorial board advised, “Now Republicans can hold firm, and even if Mr. Biden won’t agree on Medicaid, they can bank the incremental wins and build on the progress later.” In another (5/24/23), it wrote, “If Democrats can’t abide work in return for free healthcare, they should at least be willing to fix the work loopholes in food stamps.”

    The obvious question, though, is: Why should there be any condition for “free” healthcare (i.e. healthcare paid for through progressive taxes)? Why shouldn’t it be a basic right guaranteed to all? It’s not like we can’t afford it.

    The same goes for food. Why shouldn’t we guarantee decent nutrition to everyone by ensuring that the worst off have enough money to pay for food? Again, it’s not like we can’t afford it. The progressive economist Dean Baker has estimated that reducing the pay of the five highest-paid CEOs by half would generate savings equal to the entire SNAP budget, and that waste in the financial sector eats up at least six times as much money as the SNAP budget each year.

    Rigged: Gains from restructuring markets, in units of SNAP spending

    A host of progressive reforms to markets, outlined by the economist Dean Baker in his 2016 book Rigged, would generate savings that would dwarf the SNAP budget.

    For a reader of the Journal, this thinking must appear outlandish. Because what’s common sense in the pages of the paper is not basic decency, but general disdain for poor people, and extreme skepticism of their worthiness of any sort of governmental contribution to their well-being. By teaching people to celebrate the imposition of work requirements on a new cohort of SNAP-eligible adults, rather than being outraged by a blatant attempt to increase hunger and insecurity, the Wall Street Journal is doing little more than feeding hatred of the poor.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food

     

    WSJ: The GOP’s Progress on Work and Welfare

    The Wall Street Journal (5/30/23) calls it a “mistake” that “veterans and the homeless” are exempted from work requirement for food vouchers: “These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.”

    After holding the economy hostage for months, some Republicans are going through a bit of a depressive slump. “We got rolled,” is how one Republican congressmember (Roll Call, 6/6/23) described the outcome of the debt ceiling negotiations. “It was a bad deal.”

    But don’t cry too much, guys! The Wall Street Journal is here to cheer you up, and remind you that, though you didn’t get all the austerity you wanted, you did get to hurt the poor a bit. Maybe not as much as you wanted, but life’s not always fair, is it?

    As the Journal’s editorial board (5/30/23) recently wrote: “One reason the deal is worth passing: The provisions on work and welfare are incremental progress the GOP can build on.”

    Most centrally, the bill included an expansion of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “food stamps”) for adults without a disability or children, raising the maximum age for those subject to work requirements from 49 to 54.

    The editorial’s takeaway:

    A major difference between the two political parties these days is that most Democrats favor a culture of dependency. The GOP’s task, which is popular with voters, is to rebuild a culture of work. The debt-ceiling bill starts to do that, which is one reason to support it.

    Vulnerable people

    CBO: Work Requirements andWork Supports for Recipients of Means-Tested Benefits

    CBO (6/22): “Work requirements in SNAP and Medicaid have reduced benefits more than they have increased people’s earnings.”

    It’s an odd statement to make when employment for prime-age workers (those between 25 and 54) is at its highest level in more than two decades, thanks in large part to the Democrats’ decision to go big in their Covid relief package in the spring of 2021. And it’s particularly odd when you consider the utter lack of evidence for the idea that expanding work requirements for food vouchers will increase employment in any significant way.

    As Shawn Fremstad has summarized for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the available evidence on the specific work requirement that is being expanded under the debt ceiling legislation

    tells a relatively consistent story about its impacts. There is no question that the work test reduces access to SNAP food vouchers among vulnerable people with few resources. On employment, the best read of the evidence is that it has no impact on employment, or only a very small one.

    In its 2022 analysis of the existing literature, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office similarly reported:

    SNAP’s work requirement has probably boosted employment for some adult recipients without dependents but has reduced income, on average, across all recipients. Earnings increased among recipients who worked more, but far more adults stopped receiving SNAP benefits because of the work requirement.

    So basically we can expect the new work requirements to definitely take food vouchers (in other words, food) away from a bunch of people—perhaps 225,000—and maybe slightly increase employment. Oh, yeah, they could also worsen physical and mental health, and increase reliance on food banks. Is that what rebuilding a culture of work looks like?

    Twisted logic

    The Journal apparently greets these outcomes with a grin, as the kind of “incremental progress the GOP can build on.” And it salivates for more. Reaching peak evil, the editorial board bemoans:

    One mistake in the debt deal is that the food-stamp work requirement exempts veterans and the homeless. These Americans could perhaps most benefit from the dignity and stability of work.

    Notice the twisted logic here: Allowing people minimal access to food resources (SNAP benefits for a single person max out at $281 a month) is an indulgence that harms them. On the other hand, imposing punitive measures on people, forcing them to prove that they’re working a certain amount each month, that’s actually helping them. It’s teaching them the value of hard work, giving them dignity. Because the real problem is that these people just haven’t had enough of a fire lit under their ass. How do you address homelessness? Just threaten the unhoused with starvation, and I guess everyone left after that just deserves to be homeless.

    The unspoken premise is that people need to prove their worth to have access to food. Rather than having food guaranteed as a basic human right, people should be threatened with starvation. That way they’re insecure, and willing to accept the first job that comes around, no matter how bad the conditions and pay. That a major newspaper takes this editorial line is horrifying—though, given that the Journal is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch, unfortunately not surprising.

    ‘Unemployment too attractive’

    WSJ: Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal

    In the United States, which has more than 200,000 people living on the street, “public policy has made unemployment too attractive,” according to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley (5/23/23). 

    And the Journal isn’t just showing up for the celebration, either; it’s been hard at work pushing to cut people off from government benefits for a while. In one earlier piece (5/24/23), the editorial board lashed out at states for exempting too many people from already-existing SNAP work requirements. In another (5/17/23), it invoked the old lazy welfare recipient trope, whining that government assistance through programs like SNAP shouldn’t be “a permanent sinecure in return for doing nothing.”

    As the debt ceiling drama unfolded, the paper published a slew of anti-poor essays arguing for increased hurdles to accessing government assistance:

    • “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23)
    • “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23)
    • “Work Requirements Still Work” (5/29/23)
    • “Work Requirements and the Lost Lessons of 1996” (6/2/23)

    By far the most absurd was “Make Welfare Reform Part of the Debt-Ceiling Deal” (5/23/23), by columnist Jason L. Riley, which included some incredible lines, like:

    Asking something of people on the dole is perfectly rational, but liberals in Washington have long prioritized making the poor comfortable over helping them out of poverty.

    And:

    Too many healthy adults are opting out of work because public policy has made unemployment too attractive.

    And, for the ending:

    Mr. McCarthy is right to assume that most people don’t want their tax dollars being used by the government to subsidize laziness. I once saw a bumper sticker that read “Work harder: Millions of welfare recipients are depending on you.” So are a lot of liberals in Washington.

    It would be hard for the Onion to come up with a more perfect caricature of conservative mean-spiritedness. And it’s hard not to wonder whether that sticker is still proudly plastered on Riley’s bumper.

    Remarkably misleading numbers

    WSJ: Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/23) declared Arkansas’ Medicaid work requirements a success because people on Medicaid in the state got jobs—at a time of rapid economic growth. A more serious look at the impact of the requirements “found no evidence that low-income adults had increased their employment” (Health Affairs, 9/20).

    Meanwhile, another op-ed points to where the Journal believes the debt ceiling deal fell short. In “Work Requirements for Welfare Aren’t ‘Wacko’” (5/12/23), Nick Stehle of the Foundation for Government Accountability holds up Arkansas’s experience with Medicaid work requirements to argue for a federal expansion of such work requirements. Stehle throws out some remarkably misleading numbers to suggest that Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas reduced dependence by boosting employment and incomes: “Tens of thousands went back to work, and more than 14,000 boosted their incomes enough to leave Medicaid entirely.”

    But people move on and off Medicaid each year because of changes in job status and earnings. What matters is whether the work requirements led to any increase in employment that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the requirements. A thorough 2020 analysis (Health Affairs, 9/20) found that they did not: “Work requirements did not increase employment over 18 months of follow-up.” The added hurdles were incredibly effective at reducing enrollment, though—18,000 people lost coverage while they were in effect. And they were great at aggravating all sorts of hardship, with disenrolled individuals struggling much more with medical bills and delays in care than people who were able to stay enrolled.

    The Journal was totally fine with printing Stehle’s shoddy, propagandistic analysis, handing the microphone to the vice president of communications of a group known for peddling junk science. But the paper seemed to realize that the likelihood of getting its way on Medicaid work requirements was slim, and it didn’t push the policy much in editorials. In one piece (5/17/23), the editorial board advised, “Now Republicans can hold firm, and even if Mr. Biden won’t agree on Medicaid, they can bank the incremental wins and build on the progress later.” In another (5/24/23), it wrote, “If Democrats can’t abide work in return for free healthcare, they should at least be willing to fix the work loopholes in food stamps.”

    The obvious question, though, is: Why should there be any condition for “free” healthcare (i.e. healthcare paid for through progressive taxes)? Why shouldn’t it be a basic right guaranteed to all? It’s not like we can’t afford it.

    The same goes for food. Why shouldn’t we guarantee decent nutrition to everyone by ensuring that the worst off have enough money to pay for food? Again, it’s not like we can’t afford it. The progressive economist Dean Baker has estimated that reducing the pay of the five highest-paid CEOs by half would generate savings equal to the entire SNAP budget, and that waste in the financial sector eats up at least six times as much money as the SNAP budget each year.

    Rigged: Gains from restructuring markets, in units of SNAP spending

    A host of progressive reforms to markets, outlined by the economist Dean Baker in his 2016 book Rigged, would generate savings that would dwarf the SNAP budget.

    For a reader of the Journal, this thinking must appear outlandish. Because what’s common sense in the pages of the paper is not basic decency, but general disdain for poor people, and extreme skepticism of their worthiness of any sort of governmental contribution to their well-being. By teaching people to celebrate the imposition of work requirements on a new cohort of SNAP-eligible adults, rather than being outraged by a blatant attempt to increase hunger and insecurity, the Wall Street Journal is doing little more than feeding hatred of the poor.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Prayer Helped Me Survive Poverty, But I Needed Government Support, Too

    You could say the blues have followed me wherever I’ve gone. My mom came from a family of 18, picking cotton and peanuts in Georgia. My dad, who played the blues, couldn’t read. He learned numbers selling produce. I was born in Massachusetts, where my mom worked in the factories and raised me alone after More

    The post Prayer Helped Me Survive Poverty, But I Needed Government Support, Too appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Trish Brown.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Prayer Helped Me Survive Poverty, But I Needed Government Support, Too

    You could say the blues have followed me wherever I’ve gone. My mom came from a family of 18, picking cotton and peanuts in Georgia. My dad, who played the blues, couldn’t read. He learned numbers selling produce. I was born in Massachusetts, where my mom worked in the factories and raised me alone after More

    The post Prayer Helped Me Survive Poverty, But I Needed Government Support, Too appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Trish Brown.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New Work Requirements for Food Aid Would Deepen Hunger and Poverty, Critics Warn

    Hundreds of thousands of older Americans could soon be at risk of losing federal food aid and falling deeper into poverty due to a provision of the new debt ceiling agreement that expands work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a change that comes as food banks across the United States are seeing demand surge. The deal that the Biden White House reached with House…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The SNAP Expansion Helped Me Lead a Dignified Life on Disability — Now It’s Gone

    One thing I was grateful for during the pandemic was masks — and not just for safety reasons. I’m on Medicare for disability, which unfortunately doesn’t cover dental care. At 60 years old, I’ve lost many of my teeth. It was nice hiding behind a mask for a while. But I was grateful for another reason, too: for once, Congress actually expanded the social safety net. With stimulus payments and extra…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Happy Mother’s Day! A women-friendly budget

    I never intended to be a single mum. Indeed, when I turned 38 and had notched up 10 years without a partner, I investigated having a baby by myself and very quickly decided not to. It wasn’t the medical intervention or cost that put me off, it was the knowledge that trying to raise a child alone would be horrendously difficult and expensive and would almost certainly mean giving up my career for less demanding work that I could fit around being a full time, solo mum. I also wasn’t at all sure I was up to meeting the emotional needs of a child on my own. So no: not for me, I reluctantly decided.

    As it turned out I met a wonderful man just after my 39th birthday and, a couple of years later, we were married with a beautiful baby girl. My late life miracle was just that for six years or so – a miracle of unexpected joy and family life. And then my husband began to get very sick.

    He’d warned me when we met. He was a “bad bet”, he said, having barely survived childhood cancer and the treatment that, back in the 1980s, was almost as brutal as the disease. Massive doses of radiation had left him with significant damage to his heart valves, vascular system and other key organs. He survived on a cocktail of medication. His health was never good in all the time we were together, but secondary cancer was defeated while I was pregnant, and a quadruple bypass and heart valve replacement were successful when our daughter was just six months old. We had a good half decade after that.

    But in early 2020, during Melbourne’s first pandemic lock down, my beloved entered a spiral of ill health that saw him spend at least 70 % of his time in hospital over the next three years – a hospital we were unable to visit due to the necessary protocols around Covid-19. His multiple, complex health problems began to cascade, and he lost a foot, then a lower leg, to amputation, and then the use of his other leg due to a blood clot which caused massive nerve damage.

    He fought on, in a cycle of months spent in hospital and a couple of weeks at home before every next challenge. In the middle of a once in a century pandemic, his immune system struggled with the slightest infection. Last July his heart began to fail again and only experimental surgery pulled him through.

    Finally, after five unexpected months at home with us over summer, he developed sepsis from a relatively innocuous skin infection and, despite fighting valiantly again to stay with us, he died of a massive brain haemorrhage in early February this year.

    It was four days before his 51st birthday.

    Our daughter is nine years old.

    Being a single mother to a young child is, as I had suspected all those years ago, incredibly challenging. It crept up on me over the years my husband was ill and absent for weeks and months at a time, so it’s not a sudden shock to not have him here to help. Nor is it “hard” because I have so much love and gratitude for our daughter. But it’s very, very difficult.

    A nine year old child can’t be left alone for a moment, obviously. I can’t pop out to the shops if I’m out of milk. I can’t make casual plans outside school hours. I can’t stay back at work unexpectedly if needed. Interstate, overnight work travel has become virtually impossible.

    There’s no-one else to read stories at bedtime or help with homework or take her to swimming lessons or weekend activities.

    Our income has been cut in half but the mortgage has not, so there’s no money for cleaners or regular babysitters. I have no time for anything other than work, parenting and domestic labour. I am constantly exhausted and emotionally drained. I’m worried about money and every interest rate rise requires a new calculation of what needs to be cut from our already much changed lives. And there’s no-one to share the emotional load – no-one who loves her as I do, who shoulders half the worries or shares the many joys and milestones.

    And, of course, we are grieving. We will always be grieving.

    Yet I’m lucky. I have a well paid job, with heaps of flexibility. I work long hours but I can do a lot of them after my daughter goes to bed or while she’s at weekend or after school activities (I’m pretending to watch every basketball shot while secretly writing this essay in the notes function on my phone). I can work from home a couple of days so she’s not in before- and after-school care for up to 20 hours a week. I can do all this because I established a career before I became a mum.

    Believe me, I count my blessings.

    Because most single mums aren’t so lucky. A few become sole parents by choice, but more often it’s through abandonment or bereavement. Most have their kids at a much younger age than I did, so they haven’t established a career they have some control over, with an above-average salary: they’re juggling casual shifts at minimum wage jobs that they must fit around their kids’ needs. Most are living in private rental accommodation with ever-escalating costs and no security. It’s hard enough to be a sole parent without struggling in grinding poverty.

    So the Albanese Government’s decision this week to restore Parenting Payment Single to sole parents until their youngest child turns 14 was the element of this budget that made me weep with relief.

    I’m not on the payment myself – I wouldn’t still have a mortgaged home if I were – but for around 57,000 sole parents, 52,000 of whom are women, and 110,000 kids whose households will be moved off JobSeeker, the increase of over $175 a fortnight is life-changing and long overdue.

    It largely reverses a policy enacted by John Howard in 2006 as part of his disastrous Welfare to Work programme. As part of this punitive approach to social security, and at the same time as increasing family tax benefit for households with a stay-at-home-mum, Howard decreed that single parents would be “incentivised” to look for paid work when their youngest child turned 6, and pushed onto the much lower unemployment benefit and when that child turned 8. In typical Howard style, he masked the impact of this cruel and ideological policy by “grandfathering” the payment for anyone already in receipt of the PPS. It was nakedly ideological: if you “choose” to have a baby without a man, from now on you’ll be punished.

    It was perhaps the greatest mistake and betrayal of women by the Gillard Government when, in pursuit of a fabled budget surplus, it ended the grandfathering of the PPS changes and pushed tens of thousands of single parent families into abject poverty overnight – infamously, on the same day she gave her lauded misogyny speech to the Parliament.

    Then-cabinet minister Anthony Albanese was rumoured to be so incensed by this decision that he considered quitting the front bench. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that now-Prime Minister Albanese, famously raised by a single mother on sickness benefits, has moved in his first full budget to fix that mistake.

    Credit must go here to the remarkable Terese Edwards who, as the head of the National Council of Single Mothers and their Children, has fought for this change for well over a decade. Thanks also to Anne Summers, who used her considerable influence with the government to push this through, and to Sam Mostyn and other members of the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, which made it a core recommendation of its advice to the government this year. (Read Terese’s recent article for BroadAgenda here.)

    It’s undoubtedly the centrepiece of what is arguably the most women- friendly budget in Australian history.

    Tired mother with baby

    Single parenting just got a little bit easier for those on income support payments. Picture: By Jelena Stanojkovic

    As well as an increase in their fortnightly income support payments, single parents moving off JobSeeker and onto the PPS will be able to earn an extra $569.10 per fortnight, plus an extra $24.60 per additional child, before their payment stops.

    Alongside this decision is the move to scrap the punitive ParentsNext program that forced the mothers of pre-school­ children to engage in meaningless activities to demonstrate that they “deserved” income support. Good riddance to such a nasty, ineffective program.

    There is also additional money to support the National Pan to End Violence against Women and Children, bringing the total committed to women’s safety since October last year to $2.29 billion.

    And there’s an historic commitment of $11.3 billion to give a 15% pay rise to aged care workers – almost 90% of whom are women, and who receive among the lowest wages for some of the most important work in our society. Let’s not forget that the vast majority of residential aged care residents are women, too.

    This is all underpinned by a huge investment in early childhood education and care – lifting the rebate to 90% for low and middle income households and investing another $72.4 million in skills development for early childhood education and care workers – again, more than 90% of whom are women.

    All these measures will make a material difference to the lives of Australian women – especially single mums. That’s not to say that life as a sole parent on income support will become easy: the PPS itself is still a payment below any measure of the poverty line. But combined with increased rent assistance, cheaper childcare, the removal of some punitive welfare measures and a significant lift in the amount they can earn before losing benefits – coupled with better paid job prospects in the care economy – this is a budget that has deliberately stopped punishing single mothers and their kids, and restored meaningful support to help them build better futures.

    All in all, the outcome of the 2023 budget means it’s just possible than even single mums without the great privileges I have will also, finally, be able to start to count their blessings.

    • Emma with her late husband, David. Picture: Supplied 

    The post Happy Mother’s Day! A women-friendly budget appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • FATHER BOB

    I shed a tear this week when I learned of the death of Father Bob Maguire, then I revived my soul to give thanks for the inspiration he has given me. Father Bob was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church who lived in Melbourne and believed that his prime task was, not to give …

    Continue reading FATHER BOB

    The post FATHER BOB appeared first on Everald Compton.

    This post was originally published on My Articles – Everald Compton.

  • Luke Brooks died after the council failed to order his landlord to remove mould from his home

    A Manchester coroner has ordered an inquest into the death of Luke Brooks. Luke died after developing breathing difficulties linked to his “heavily mould-infested” rented accommodation.

    Luke lived in Oldham, not so far away from the Rochdale social housing flat where two-year-old Awaab Ishak died after prolonged exposure to black mould, as a coroner’s court recently ruled.

    London Renters’ Union tweeted a stark message:

    Coroner Joanne Kearsley – who recently presided over Awaab Ishak’s inquest – ruled that there should be an investigation into Luke Brooks’ death.

    Complaints ignored

    27-year-old year old Luke lived with his parents in their rented accommodation. They told the Manchester Evening News that he was a “fit lad” and a talented artist.

    Luke developed a rash before his death, and complained of difficulty breathing. He developed fatal pneumonia, which caused acute respiratory distress syndrome. The coroner’s court found provisionally that this was due to mould at his home.

    Luke’s family have lived at the property for eight years. They complained to the council about the state of the accommodation. Environmental health officers visited last November.

    The landlord was instructed to make some improvements, but crucially they were not told to address the mould issue. This is despite the inspectors finding mould in Luke’s room.

    ‘Corporate manslaughter’

    Luke died just weeks before the inquest into Awaab’s death. Steve Topple previously wrote for the Canary:

    The coroner ruled that Awaab died due to mould exposure that RBH failed to deal with. The housing association repeatedly ignored Awaab’s family’s desperate pleas for help. Since the coroner’s verdict, RBH has sacked its boss after he refused to resign.

    The bottom line is this housing association committed what some people are saying is corporate manslaughter against him.

    Topple described how RBH initially blamed the mould in Awaab’s house on his family. Their response was clearly racist. The barrister for the Ishak family said that:

    At first, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing said that [the cause of the mould] was due to the ritual bathing practices of the family, or the cooking practices that are common among some cultures, all with no evidence.

    Blatant classism

    In Luke’s case, the environmental health officers found mould in his room, when they visited in November. However, they chose not to order the landlord to deal with it. They clearly felt it was ok for Luke to live in mouldy accommodation. This is a classist attitude that devalues the lives of renters. It’s an attitude that places more importance on the rights of landlords to make a profit, than on the health of their tenants.

    One of the police officers who accompanied the environmental health officer said – in evidence at the Coroner’s Court – that Luke’s room was “untidy” and there were “animals present”. These remarks reek of classism: the implication being that we shouldn’t be blaming the landlord for the mould, but blaming Luke for how he kept his room.

    The inquest into Luke’s death will examine whether his landlord bears criminal responsibility and whether the council should have intervened.

    The housing crisis is forcing us to live in dangerous squalor

    Luke’s family are private renters, while Awaab lived in social housing. But the underlying reasons for both their deaths stem from the state. Luke and Awaab – like many of us – were forced to live in unsafe conditions by the classist, racist society that we live in. Authorities allowed Luke to die because of classism, while RBH is responsible for Awaab’s death due to its institutional racism, and its classism, too.

    If you want to fight back against your housing conditions, then you might want to join a renters’ union. Check out the Acorn, Living Rent, and London Renters’ Union websites, and get organised.

    The featured image is of mould in a rented flat, via screenshot/ITV News

    By Tom Anderson

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • ‘It’s About Hurting the Poor’: GOP Ramps Up Cruel Push for Work Requirements



    Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz and other far-right members of the House GOP, Republican lawmakers are intensifying their push to establish new work requirements for millions of people who receive Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, an effort that progressives slammed as a cruel attack on the poor.

    The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), have rallied around work requirements as a key demand as they use the ongoing debt ceiling standoff as leverage to pursue steep spending cuts and other policy changes.

    “The debate in some ways resembles the Republican-led campaign against so-called welfare queens in the 1990s, when a politically resurgent GOP—then under the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich—secured a dramatic restructuring of the government’s social safety net,” the Post noted. “The resulting overhaul, enacted by President Bill Clinton, slashed cash benefits for millions of Americans in ways that GOP leaders now cite as a model.”

    In a February letter to President Joe Biden, Gaetz (R-Fla.) and four other House Republicans favorably cited the 1996 welfare reform law—which doubled extreme poverty—as an example of bipartisan cooperation that should be replicated to avert a catastrophic debt default.

    During a press conference last month, Gaetz cast his call for tougher work requirements as an attempt to extract a “broader contribution” from “couch potatoes,” which is often how Republicans demean people who receive federal food aid and other benefits—even though most who get such assistance work.

    “The legislators that want new work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid are the same ones working to eliminate the estate tax so that billionaire heirs never have to work a day in their lives,” the Patriotic Millionaires, a group that supports tax hikes on the rich, tweeted Tuesday. “It’s not about work, it’s about hurting the poor.”

    A recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that legislation introduced by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) would strip Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from more than 10 million people, including 4 million children.

    Research has repeatedly shown that SNAP work requirements, which add significant complexity and administrative burdens to the process of obtaining benefits, aren’t effective at boosting employment.

    “SNAP recipients who can work, do work,” Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) said Tuesday. “Yet they do not earn enough to escape poverty. Taking away SNAP doesn’t help anyone find work, it just makes them hungry and ensures the cycle of poverty continues.”

    Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) echoed his colleague, writing on Twitter that “adding draconian hurdles to receive food assistance and benefits makes it harder for people to get back on their feet, not easier.”

    “The GOP should call it what it is—a cut to benefits,” he added.

    “Republicans still haven’t released a budget, but they’re continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families.”

    As for Medicaid, state experiments with work requirements have proven disastrous. In Arkansas, a state that briefly imposed work requirements on Medicaid recipients during the Trump era before a judge intervened, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage due to the rules.

    Some Republicans, including Gaetz and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), want to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients nationwide, a move that would compound massive coverage losses stemming from the recent end of pandemic protections.

    In February, Gaetz unveiled the Medicaid Work Requirements Act, which would mandate that adults deemed “able-bodied” work at least 120 hours a month, volunteer for at least 80 hours a month, or take part in a work training program for at least 80 hours a month to remain eligible for Medicaid benefits.

    “Republicans still haven’t released a budget, but they’re continuing to make their priorities clear: They want to protect wealthy donors while cutting food assistance and healthcare from families,” tweeted the Senate Budget Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

    In a statement to the Post on Tuesday, White House spokesman Michael Kikukawa indicated that Biden will oppose adding new work requirements to SNAP and Medicaid as part of any deal to raise the debt ceiling.

    “The president has been clear that he will oppose policies that push Americans into poverty or cause them to lose healthcare,” said Kikukawa. “That’s why he opposes Republican proposals that would take food assistance and Medicaid away from millions of people by adding burdensome, bureaucratic requirements.”

    As the GOP ramps up its assault on SNAP and other critical programs, members of the Senate Democratic caucus are urging the Biden administration to do everything in its power to bolster and expand federal food aid, which was slashed for many families earlier this year when pandemic-related enhancements lapsed.

    In a letter to the heads of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Social Security Administration (SSA) earlier this week, a dozen Senate lawmakers called for action to remove “administrative burdens that create barriers to food security” for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients.

    “SSI recipients are low-income people at least 65 years old, or blind or disabled adults or children,” the lawmakers wrote. “To help alleviate food insecurity, SSA and USDA must create a seamless path to ensuring that SSI recipients and applicants can obtain SNAP benefits, one with minimal administrative burden. SNAP is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and SNAP benefits translate to fewer people in poverty and a healthier population.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Oxfam Slams Rich Nations for Using ‘Financial Wizardry’ to Skimp on Global Climate Funding



    With global finance leaders set to gather in Washington, D.C. this week for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Oxfam is warning rich countries against using accounting gimmicks to artificially inflate their global climate funding commitments.

    The international humanitarian group estimated in an analysis released Monday that low- and middle-income nations will need an additional $27.4 trillion at minimum by 2030 to “fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change”—as well as addressing the damage already inflicted by intensifying extreme weather and other consequences of fossil fuel use.

    Interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other powerful central banks have compounded the financial struggles of poor nations as debt servicing costs rise, putting critical public investments at risk.

    “But despite the dire economic situation facing the poorest countries today, and much political discussion of the trillions needed to tackle poverty, inequality, and climate change, there is no indication that rich countries are willing to pay the true price of a fair and sustainable future,” Oxfam said Monday. “In fact, there is a risk that rich-country finance ministers meeting in Washington this week will celebrate progress on reforms that deliver just 0.1% of the climate and social spending gap in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs) between now and 2030. And that they will do so through financial wizardry that doesn’t cost them a cent.”

    The group pointed specifically to the recent replenishment process for the International Development Association, a member of the World Bank Group ostensibly dedicated to aiding poor nations with grants and loans.

    “Although IDA20 saw a record replenishment in 2021, this was not a result of increased donor contributions. In fact, donor contributions declined and the increased allocation was only achieved through the financial wizardry of ‘balance sheet optimization,’” Oxfam noted. “Now, with IDA20 commitments again being frontloaded due to mounting crises, there are fears that IDA is facing a ‘financial cliff’ in the near future.”

    Oxfam also criticized “green bonds” and other such “financial innovations” that—while positive-sounding and potentially beneficial on the margins—ultimately provide minimal benefit relative to what’s necessary to help avert climate catastrophe in nations that did the least to cause the crisis.

    “If rich countries were serious about investing in people and planet, they would go beyond financial wizardry,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International’s incoming interim executive director. “It’s time for governments to find their moral fiber and tax the richest, so we can stave off climate catastrophe and lift everyone out of poverty.”

    Oxfam’s analysis suggests several policy steps for wealthy countries, including actually meeting their existing aid commitments to poor nations and ending “the accounting trickery of siphoning off large amounts of aid to spend in donor countries on things like in-country refugee costs and vaccine donations”; committing to a “debt swap” whereby rich nations would borrow $11.5 trillion to help fund climate costs in low- and middle-income countries; and pledging new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

    The group also called on rich nations to pursue “steep and progressive tax increases on the incomes of the super-rich, on property, land, and inheritance, and on the profits of the wealthiest companies, especially windfall profits, as well as on fossil fuels and on financial transactions.”

    “If rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms there would be more than enough money to go round,” Oxfam said. “We cannot allow the richest countries to argue they ‘cannot afford’ to raise the trillions needed for social and climate spending in the poorest countries. It is clear that mobilizing this money would simply take political will.”

    The new analysis comes as the World Bank is preparing to confirm Ajay Banga, a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO chosen by the U.S., as its new president, replacing an outgoing leader who has come under fire for climate denial.

    In recent weeks, as E&E News reported Monday, the World Bank has outlined changes that would “free up roughly $5 billion annually over the next 10 years, mainly through a slight relaxation of the bank’s rules for how much risk it can assume.”

    “Specifically, it would lower the bank’s so-called equity-to-loan ratio from 20% to 19%, which would allow it to increase its lending with the same amount of shareholder money,” the outlet noted. “Critics have called the plan underwhelming, saying it’s still too vague and risk-averse. Some argue that the equity-to-loan ratio could be lowered further without jeopardizing confidence in the bank’s lending ability, making additional lending capacity available.”

    Oxfam said Monday that it is “essential that the World Bank and IMF also step up their ambition” during this week’s talks.

    “The World Bank’s own analysis shows that extreme economic inequality is a barrier to poverty reduction—yet the current goal on ‘shared prosperity’ is weak and ineffective,” said Behar. “We need to see far more ambition from a global body tasked with fighting poverty.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Majority of LGBTQ+ People in the US Struggle to Afford Basic Necessities

    A new study paints a bleak financial picture for LGBTQ+ adults in the United States: Many respondents don’t have a checking or savings account, are unable to pay their bills in full, and are worried about affording basic necessities and health care. The research, organized by the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research (CLEAR) and the Movement Advancement Project, found that many of the…

    Source

  • North Dakota Republicans Vote to Boost Own Meals After Nixing Free School Meals

    Last week, Republicans in the North Dakota Senate killed a bill that would have expanded a program to provide children living close to the federal poverty line access to meals at school for free. The vote was met with outcry over its cruelty, as one Senate Republican asked, “Is [children going hungry] the problem of the state of North Dakota?” This week, 13 of the Republicans who voted to kill the…

    Source

  • Almost half of children of colour in England and Wales live in poverty

    Content Warning: This article contains reference to suicide.

    Almost half of all children of colour in Wales and England are living in poverty right now, according to research from campaigning organisation the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). On top of that, new figures show the extent of the over-policing of kids of colour.

    CPAG has recently released statistics saying that:

    48% of children from black and minority ethnic groups live in poverty

    In total, 4.2 million children in England and Wales are currently living in poverty. That’s 29% of young people. This is an increase of 350,000 since last year.

    The highest possible price for poverty

    CPAG also calculated that 450,000 fewer kids would be in poverty if child benefit was increased by just £10 a week. The group argued that the government should extend the provision of free school meals, and scrap the two-child cap. The cap means that families don’t receive any extra Child Tax Credit or Universal Credit if they have more than two children.

    CPAG Chief executive Alison Garnham said in a statement:

    Children pay the highest possible price for poverty – they pay with their health, their well-being and their life chances. Our research shows the country also pays a heavy financial price.

    Black children are 11 times more likely to be strip-searched by police

    On top of this, the UK’s systematic racism discriminates against children of colour in a whole multitude of additional ways. The same weekend as CPAG released its figures on child poverty, news broke of fresh findings that Black children are 11 times more likely to experience being strip-searched by police than their white peers. This reflects the massive over-policing that Black people have to endure in the UK.

    The Children’s Commissioner found that police had strip-searched at least 2,847 children between 2018 and 2022. 38% of these children were Black, despite them making up less than 6% of the population.

    The Canary previously reported how police strip-searched a Black schoolgirl, known as Child Q, while she was on her period. Cops and teachers carried out the search on the child because they were looking for cannabis. The Children’s Commissioner’s statistics show that Child Q was far from alone.

    ‘Withdrawing consent from policing’

    The Canary‘s Sophie Purdy-Moore suggested some ways that we could protect children from degrading, unnecessary strip-searches. She wrote :

    Teachers – don’t invite police onto school grounds. Police are not equipped to prevent harm or to deal with the complex social issues that impact children’s lives. Their job is to criminalise.

    For the rest of us, this means resisting the presence of police in schools and intervening in every police stop we witness on the streets. It means withdrawing consent from all forms of policing. And it means demanding funding for specialist services that support vulnerable children and young people.

    It’s not just in schools that Black kids have to endure degrading searches. Met police officers strip-searched Olivia, a 15-year-old dual-heritage autistic child at a London police station. Olivia was also on her period at the time of the strip-search. Four Met police officers are currently under investigation for the incident.

    Both Olivia and Child Q experienced significant psychological harm as a result of these intrusive searches. Olivia made an attempt to take her own life following the incident.

    These two sets of figures expose the racism at the heart of our society, and illustrate two of the ways it affects the lives of people of colour. Kids of colour are much more likely to face economic disadvantages. On top of that, they are forced to deal with the actions of a police force that is institutionally racist, too.

    You can learn more about the grassroots campaign to end strip searches here, and also find out about CPAG’s campaign for teachers about ‘the cost of a school day’ here.

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Katie Crampton (WMUK), cropped to 770x403px, CC BY-SA 4.0

    By Tom Anderson

  • Tackling our deep discomfort with miscarriage

    Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. So why are we so damned bad at dealing with it? Journalist Isabelle Oderberg has written a groundbreaking book called Hard to Bear. The work investigates the science and silence of miscarriage. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with Isy about the book’s themes.

    Tell us about your own personal backstory that led you to write “Hard to Bear”.

    During our journey to complete our family, I experienced seven pregnancy losses. Obviously during that time I did a lot of reading in my quest to figure out why my body couldn’t do what I needed it to do. Being open about it publicly meant a lot of other people made disclosures to me about their own experiences. But I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it until our family was complete.

    Once we decided that it was, I started reading again. And I realised that while I had some answers, I also had a lot of questions. And there was a huge amount of work and unpacking to be done in this space. And I thought there was no one better than me to do it, with the lived experience but also the ability to put that aside where necessary and wear my journalism hat to approach the issue with a forensic eye, while never losing sight of the human element.

    There were so many OMG moments that just stopped me in my tracks. Like the moment I realised we had no idea how many people are actually having miscarriages in this country. Absolutely no idea.

    You’ve long been vocal about the silence around miscarriage. Unpick this for us. Why the societal shame and silence? How does your book try to change this? 

    One thing that drives me crazy in this space is acknowledgement of the silence without understanding of why it exists and where it comes from. So that’s a  big part of the book; unpacking it so we can move forward. We have a multitude of issues that feed this silence.

    Miscarriage exists at the intersection of two things we find incredibly uncomfortable in Western society: grief and menstruation. Also it’s wrapped up in Judeo-Christian tradition, abortion and misogyny.

    It certainly wasn’t always this way. I also do a lot of digging around other cultures that treat and talk about it completely differently. I really do find it fascinating.

    Your book is also funny. Why does humour play a role here? 

    I’m Jewish and I draw on a long cultural tradition of irony, satire, self-deprecation and Black humour. There absolutely is a lot of humour in this book, where appropriate. I want people to enjoy reading it to whatever degree that’s possible, without struggling under the weight of a heavy topic. We can acknowledge the sadness of something while still finding ways to smile along the way.

    Your book delves into the science (in addition to telling personal stories). Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. What do we know about why it happens and how it can be prevented? 

    I guess that’s a core part of the book: there is far too much we don’t know. And the things we do know aren’t properly explained to the people birthing the babies or their partners or families. For instance, environmental factors are a huge risk factor. But we don’t talk about it. Also, poverty. Nutrition.

    And as in medicine so often, there are often factors overlaying each other that increase your risk profile. I do examine some of the factors that can contribute, both the commonly known ones and the ones we’re not talking about. But if there was more extensive testing and funding for research, we’d know far more.

    Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)

    Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)

    How does “medical misogyny” play into this? 

    We know through the work of journalists and authors like Gabrielle Jackson (Pride and Prejudice) and Kylie Maslen (Show Me Where It Hurts) that medical misogyny affects almost all aspects of medical care for women or people with uteruses.

    This was acknowledged by the medical journal The Lancet when it wrote that the era of just telling women to try again after miscarriage is over. This issue affects up to 150,000 Australian families each year (and could be higher, we don’t know). We are decades past the time when we should have started talking about it openly.

    Conversely, what do you have to say about the need medical kindness around instances of miscarriage?

    The Australian medical system is not fit for purpose. It is stretched far too thin. And consecutive governments want to fix it with band-aids, if at all, rather than giving it an overhaul and structuring it from the presence.

    Where there are medical and allied health practitioners who do want to do better (and there are many of them), often they are restricted by structural barriers. And the other thing I would say is that where medical practitioners do express kindness and compassion – I can tell you from the hundreds of patients I’ve spoken to – it is remembered and valued for the rest of our lives.

    What role does hope have in this discourse? 

    This book is aimed at being fully accessible and fully inclusive. We are a village. We have to lift up parents whose journey to children isn’t easy and give them hope. Through sharing my story and doing this research, that’s what I want to do. Otherwise, I’m sharing for the sake of sharing and that’s just not my jam.

    Equally, hope must be felt in our fight to change the system. Because otherwise what’s the point? This book is absolutely a book of hope that aims to improve the experiences of my children and theirs. We can do it. We absolutely can.

     

    The post Tackling our deep discomfort with miscarriage appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • The Deadly Results of Economic Inequality



    If you grew up in America, then you almost definitely have heard some variation of the refrain: “America is the greatest country in the world.”

    It’s an idea that’s so commonplace that it’s more or less taken for granted. We boast of inventions like the airplane, the light bulb, the internet, and even the humble chocolate chip cookie. We are home to some of the best universities in the world and most of the largest corporations.

    But when we look more closely at other metrics, America’s position as the top country in the world is called into question. There are many such metrics, but perhaps none more important than life expectancy.

    According to a report released last year by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can now expect to live 76.4 years. Life expectancy in the US has dropped off in recent years; as life expectancy in other wealthy countries rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued to decline in the US. All in all, the US now ranks 53rd among 200 countries in life expectancy. Citizens of all developed countries suffer from things like heart disease, cancer, and liver disease, but Americans suffer more and, as a result, live shorter lives.

    Countries where life expectancy is the highest ( > 82 years) include places like Japan, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. What are these countries doing differently than the US, you may ask? Why are their citizens living longer?

    It all comes down to one word: inequality. The US is not poorer than any of these countries – year after year, we have the highest GDP in the world. And on a per-capita basis, we’re consistently in the top 10, far from 53rd in the world. But the difference between the US and other developed countries is that we do a much poorer job sharing wealth (and all the benefits that come with it) among our citizens. Among developed countries, the US has one of the highest rates of inequality, both in terms of wealth and income – and we can, unfortunately, see that disparity in health and life expectancy as well.

    Just because the average American life expectancy is 76.4 years doesn’t mean that all Americans can expect to live that long. It’s sad, but in America how long you live has a lot to do with how much money you have. People with high incomes can live 10 to 20 years longer than people with low incomes, even if they live just miles apart in the same metro area. For example, rich residents in Columbus, Ohio can expect to live close to 85 years while poor residents in the very same city typically live just 60 years.

    This trend applies to a host of other social outcomes besides life expectancy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson made this case in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They found that countries with low inequality consistently outperformed those with high inequality not only in life expectancy but in literacy rates, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness, and social mobility. (With high inequality, the US was among the lowest performers in all of these metrics.) It was not GDP or overall levels of wealth that mattered for these social outcomes; it was instead how wealth was distributed that made the difference.

    Inequality is not just an abstract concept or a set of numbers – it’s a real-world phenomenon that has tangible effects on the way that ordinary people live (or don’t live) their lives. And we are clearly not doing very well in the US on this front compared to the rest of the world. Americans shouldn’t go around boasting about living in the greatest country on Earth when our citizens are quite literally not living as long as their neighbors.

    But all hope is not lost. Our situation in the US is not in any way an inevitability. Inequality is a choice. We certainly can’t bring about change overnight, but, if we keep at it, we can bring about change.

    What can be done to turn the tide? It’s simple: follow the example of our neighbors with less inequality and orient our economic policy around reducing the gap between those at the top and everyone else. We can do that by raising taxes on rich people like us, just as President Biden proposed in his latest budget, to limit extreme wealth. We can also lift up the bottom by raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and investing in a strong social safety net that keeps all Americans afloat.

    The policy possibilities are limitless. Our only limit is a lack of political will. We truly believe that the United States can and should be the greatest country in the world – after all, we’re not called “Patriotic” Millionaires for nothing. But the American Dream that was once a shining light for all is fading. If we want to revive it, we need to start fighting against the inequality that is holding us back.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Female Urinals, Extra-woke Hollywood, Privacy Violations, Mouse Brain Cells, Pizza & Disneyland

    This criminal gaslighting ends when enough of us say NO.

    Starting with next year’s Oscars, the Academy will require that a film meet two of the four inclusion standards above to be eligible for a best picture nomination.

    Read the full Hollywood Reporter article here.

    Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) has been caught selling drivers’ personal information without their consent and without the option for them to opt-out. Last year alone, the BMV made around $25 million from selling personal information.

    Read the full article here.

    The disappearance of the $1 slice in NYC is an unwelcome development for many reasons. (details) For example, so many of the homeless women I’ve helped over the years have relied on 2 Bros. Pizza for quick, affordable meals.

    “The schemes of the devil…” (Ephesians 6:11)

    (watch a short video here)

    Click here for a one-minute video that will end this post with a smile!

    The post Female Urinals, Extra-woke Hollywood, Privacy Violations, Mouse Brain Cells, Pizza & Disneyland first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Female Urinals, Extra-woke Hollywood, Privacy Violations, Mouse Brain Cells, Pizza & Disneyland

    This criminal gaslighting ends when enough of us say NO.

    Starting with next year’s Oscars, the Academy will require that a film meet two of the four inclusion standards above to be eligible for a best picture nomination.

    Read the full Hollywood Reporter article here.

    Indiana’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) has been caught selling drivers’ personal information without their consent and without the option for them to opt-out. Last year alone, the BMV made around $25 million from selling personal information.

    Read the full article here.

    The disappearance of the $1 slice in NYC is an unwelcome development for many reasons. (details) For example, so many of the homeless women I’ve helped over the years have relied on 2 Bros. Pizza for quick, affordable meals.

    “The schemes of the devil…” (Ephesians 6:11)

    (watch a short video here)

    Click here for a one-minute video that will end this post with a smile!

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘They’re Such Cowards’: GOP Pushes Bill Targeting Food Aid for the Poor



    More than a dozen House Republicans are expected to release legislation Tuesday that would impose more harsh work requirements on certain recipients of federal food aid, a clear signal that the GOP intends to target nutrition assistance in critical debt ceiling, budget, and farm bill talks.

    Led by Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), the measure would “expand the age bracket for able-bodied [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients without dependents, who have to meet complicated work requirements,” according to Politico, which obtained a copy of the bill ahead of its official introduction.

    Johnson’s legislation, which currently has 14 Republican co-sponsors, would broaden the SNAP work requirement age bracket for able-bodied adults without dependents to 18 to 65, adding 16 years to the current age ceiling of 49, Politico reported. Former President Donald Trump previously proposed raising the age ceiling to 62.

    Under SNAP rules, people categorized as able-bodied adults without dependents are only allowed to receive federal food benefits for three months during any three-year period when they aren’t employed or taking part in work training, a restriction that experts and advocates have long decried as cruel and punitive.

    “Essentially, this is a time limit—which disproportionately affects people of color—that takes SNAP away when people aren’t working, withholding food as a punishment for not having a stable job,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes.

    Most adult SNAP recipients already work, though they are often precarious, low-wage jobs with poor benefits.

    While Johnson and other Republicans claim their support for more stringent SNAP work requirements stems from a desire to boost employment, research has repeatedly shown that they are ineffective at doing so. Work requirements do, however, succeed at booting many people off the program.

    States are currently allowed to request waivers for the SNAP benefit time limits, but Johnson’s bill would constrain the federal government’s ability to grant such requests, Politico reported.

    “These guys talk about states’ rights all the time, except when it comes to poor people,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said in response to the GOP bill.

    Johnson’s legislation comes as food insecurity is mounting across the U.S. after emergency SNAP benefit expansions lapsed earlier this month, slashing benefits for tens of millions of people amid high food prices. The cuts—the result of an end-of-year deal in Congress—have been dramatic for many, costing families hundreds of dollars per month in food aid.

    “These enhanced benefits were a lifeline for millions—many of whom will now go hungry,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “And Republicans want to cut these programs even further.”

    Politico reported that while Democratic lawmakers are publicly voicing opposition to the Republican Party’s latest attack on food benefits, “some House Democrats are quietly raising alarms about their lack of plans to push back on the GOP proposals.”

    “We need to be prepared for a showdown on food security—and right now, we’re not ready,” one unnamed House Democrat told the outlet.

    Anti-hunger campaigners are pushing Democrats to protect food benefits and fight for a permanent SNAP expansion during upcoming farm bill negotiations.

    But as Slate’s Alexander Sammon wrote last week, “the lack of willingness to fight for SNAP when it was already expanded is not a heartening sign.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • UK aid to India does little for human rights and democracy, watchdog finds

    Programme spent £2.7bn between 2016 and 2021 but is fragmented and lacks a clear rationale, report says

    Britain’s aid programme to India is fragmented, lacks a clear rationale and does little to counter the negative trends in human rights and democracy in the country, the government’s aid watchdog has found.

    The findings are likely to be used by those who claim the UK government risks using its aid programme to deepen its relationship with India, including seeking free trade deals, rather than attempting to reduce poverty, which is the statutory purpose of UK aid.

    Continue reading…