World Hunger and Poverty

In a recent article from Watching The Watchers, Lee Russ concludes the following:

Poverty and violence are not, it seems, merely some abstract philosophical states that matter only in the context of some partisan discussion of economic and social policy (nor are poverty and violence unrelated to each other). There is considerable evidence indicating that both poverty and violence affect the physical and mental health of those who experience them. And if they do, is there any doubt that the rest of society is affected in various adverse ways by this impact on the poor and violence-exposed?

Read entire article by Lee Russ.

That conclusion interests me. He also gave some interesting evidence and cited some sources to reach it. Nonetheless, I think common-sense tells us that poverty correlates with violence. In other words, we know that poor people more often experience violence, which in turn leads to more violence and poverty.

For example, a child who leaves his poor home to try and walk to school hungry everyday only to get interrupted by gangbangers, well, that child has more of a chance of learning violence than math. He has more of a chance of turning into a drug-dealer than a college-student.

This shows not only that the prevalence of poverty causes a poverty cycle, but also that those effect even the so-called non-poor. Allowing innocent children to grow up in poverty and failing to give them adequate education leads to more violence in our society among other problems.

A recent editorial on jconline.com describes how some schools have overcome the achievement gap. I include an excerpt:

Chenoweth cites schools from coast to coast that have extricated themselves from what she calls the demography myth — the one that implies low-income means low-achieving.

High schools in Worcester, Mass., Elmont, N.Y., and elsewhere where poverty is an issue and most students are minorities are posting consistently high achievement scores, at times outscoring wealthier, less ethnically diverse counterparts across their states.

These students are graduating from high school at higher rates as well.

What is happening in these schools in which children are succeeding, regardless of their cultural background or income levels?

According to Chenoweth, teachers and administrators have placed high expectations on them, have worked hard to bring the kinds of learning experiences that will help them excel and created an environment where learning for learning’s sake is valued.

Teachers and administrators have examined students’ needs, adjusting teaching methods in a way that best fits them.

Read entire editorial on jconline.com.

Finally, some good news! I often refer to education as the most important tool in the fight against hunger. Luckily, the schools above actually use it to give poor kids a quality education, thus stoping the poverty cycle. Unfortunately, those schools only represent a tiny minority of schools. Most schools still have a huge achievement gap, and as a result the economic gap between rich and poor also increases because poor kids never get a fair shot. With the same potential and motivation, a poor kid will live a life of under-education and poverty, whereas a wealthy kid would live a life of success.

In a recent commentary, Christine Jeske explains how she and her husband learned from poor villagers Nicaragua. I include an excerpt:

One special influence to us was a man who quit grad school to move to El Salvador, where he lived through a civil war. He challenged us, “Don’t go somewhere thinking you have the answers. Go somewhere to learn from the poor.”

So we lived for a year in a Nicaraguan village, with no running water or electricity. Many nights I would sit on a rock at Carla’s house. She would rest her large frame on a bucket, her only furniture, and rock her little boy on her lap while she told stories of poverty. Always she was thankful—that her husband narrowly escaped death in a hurricane, that her daughter could go to high school, and that we had come.

Also there was Rodolfo, father of 10, who spent a year learning to write his name, and Naya, the anemic mother who begged me to teach her to crochet, and Neno the village president struggling to make ends meet.

We returned to America with a hunger to connect the world of these poor to that of North America. We studied economic development in grad school and worked in China, but many of our influences continued to be ordinary people with questioning and generous hearts, among them friends in Oshkosh.

Even now I feel my work is as much for America as it is for Africa. I want my children to know they are akin to every nation we might set foot in, and for the people there to know the same.

Read entire commentary by Christine Jeske.

That line by the unnamed man moved me. “Don’t go somewhere thinking you have the answers. Go somewhere to learn from the poor.” How wise!

Christine Jeske connects the situation in the United States to that in the so-called third-world. We have both similarities and differences. For example, the U.S. has shockingly high poverty rates, as one in 8 U.S. citizens lives below the poverty line, but U.S. poverty has a different nature. Nonetheless, as a global community we can best eliminate poverty by seeing the world as a single intricate community rather than a bunch of unconnectedly individual nations – whether we divide those nations by race, region, or religion. We cannot afford separatism. None of us can.

Lethia Swett Mann recently wrote an article describing her hope that one day we will fulfill King’s dream:

Four days before his death, on March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Dr. Martin Luther King said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

Sadly to say, as of today it seems we do not have the will.

[...]

The article based on 2005 census data goes on to state that nationwide, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership persist decades after the civil rights movement, and by some measurements, are growing.

Throughout the U.S. white households had incomes that were two-thirds higher than blacks and 40 percent higher than Hispanics.

Read entire article by Lethia Swett Mann.

I see it as a terrible disgrace that we still have poverty in this day and age. Even worse, racism still plagues our society.

We cannot ignore this problem. The poverty trap keeps racist poverty alive, generation after generation. Our society neglects children born into poverty. At best, poor children receive second-rate education and healthcare, and inadequate food, clothes, and shelter. As a result, they neither gain the skills nor the opportunity to succeed by growing into self-sufficient adults. Thus, most children born into poverty remain in poverty their entire lives. And racism plays its part in two major ways. First, more blacks get born into poverty. Then, poor black children face yet even more obstacles, such as racist police and Eurocentric education curricula.

Why did we let Martin Luther King’s plan die with him?

A recent report on israelinsider.com says that a third of Holocaust survivors in Israel live in poverty:

Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, Ynetnews reported. That is almost a third of all Holocaust survivors in Israel.

Many of them suffer from severe mental and medical problems due to the hardships and torture many of them experienced during World War II. Dental, hearing and visual problems are common among Holocaust survivors.

Almost three-quarters of the survivors (73 percent) are over the age of 76, and about a fifth are older than 86. 50,000 to 60,000 survivors are in need of nursing care.

The Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund assists only about 30,000 survivors due to budgetary restraints, although twice that number need care.

The Fund is hoping to boost government support and secure a $100 million budget, which would ensure that all survivors’ basic needs are provided for.

This poverty in Israel saddens me, but I don’t recommend wasting efforts trying to boost government support. Instead, we as a global community need to work together in non-governmental organizations. We need to base this voluntarily cooperative organizations not on nationalism, but rather on a human unity that overcomes race, religion and nationality. Corrupt negligent governments, greedy international mega corporations, and non-meritocratic social inequality cause undeserved poverty not only in Israel, but also in all regions that affects all people, including native Palestinians. Unfortunately, nationalism causes these peoples to fight each other, their peers. As a result, both Palestinian and Israeli innocent civilians and children die from wars between the two camps as well as poverty.

Karen Nakamura explains in a recent article how poverty and starvation cause the so-called immigration crisis the United States:

CNN’s Larry King interviewed James Edward Olmos during last summer’s Latino workers’ demonstrations. King was discussing illegal immigration when Olmos suggested that maybe people were flooding across the border because there were few jobs at home, small farms were going under and people were starving.

Besides Mexico’s financial dependence on the United States, economists are concerned about low wages, underemployment for a large segment of the population and inequitable income distribution. Again, according to Wikipedia, few opportunities exist for the largely impoverished “Amerindian” population. In 2005, unemployment stood at 9.6% and worker’s rights were basically non-existent.

Ralph Nader said when CAFTA was debated: “…the corporate globalization model has caused the ‘race to the bottom’ in labor and environmental standards and promotes privatization and deregulation of key public services.” His group, Public Citizen, claimed “independent farmers in the US, Canada and Mexico have been hit particularly hard by NAFTA, with thousands wiped out and farmland shifting into the hands of huge agribusiness concerns such as Tyson Foods and Cargill.”

Those rural sectors already riddled by poverty have been the most adversely affected by CAFTA. There are 224 million people living in poverty in Central America and 96 million in extreme poverty. Mexican wages have fallen in real terms by 36% since 1994, although workers have increased their productivity by 53%.

Read entire article by Karen Nakamura.

So, it seems in the name of bloody profits the powerful corporations of the United States contribute to the Mexican poverty which causes the so-called immigration crisis. Mexico also has the same disturbing socioeconomic inequality in their own country.

In fact, I see it as a global problem. International megacorporations swindle the wealth out of working-class both in America and abroad, using their dirty money to manipulate governments.

Additionally, corporate interests explain why the immigration problem in the United States continues. Corporations and businesses, such as Walmart, like the cheap labor of illegal immigrants. If the legal authorities targeted these businesses that employ illegal immigrants, rather than the immigrants, than that would eliminate the illegal immigration problem by eliminating the job opportunities.

The allowance of illegal immigration undermines national security. Terrorists and criminals can sneak into the unchecked flow of illegal working immigrants.

The government could also significantly reduce the problem by increasing legal immigration. Given the choice, most immigrants would prefer to work legally. Unfortunately, corporate interests won’t allow this to happen, because illegal immigrants work cheaper. I’ve never heard of an illegal workers union.

Alas, it appears poverty and the illegal immigration problem will continue until the international working-class stands up to these selfishly greedy international corporate interests who have no qualms about using the violent and coercive powers of government to make their bloody profits and rob the working-class.

(Granted, in theory I disagree with the whole concept of illegal immigration. I support freedom, including the freedom of innocent people to move and live in whatever general area they want. I don’t think people can own an entire country the size of the United States.)

The city’s food bank has created a program that will try to help alleviate hunger by bringing healthy habits back to the classroom and hopefully, back home with students as well. NY1′s Roger Clark filed the following report.

It’s a twist on the Food Bank for New York’s BackPack Program, which provides kids at this after school program with fresh produce and healthy foods for the weekend and holidays, when reduced price school lunches and breakfasts are not available. Here the children get to pick their own groceries, learning how to shop for food that’s good for them.

“Provide children with choices, and do it in a way that’s constructive, in a way that also emphasizes nutrition education, fitness, and ties it all together as part of what we need to really combat childhood hunger,” says Carlos Rodriguez of Food Bank for NYC.

Which remains a big problem in the five boroughs. The Food Bank says almost one third of the children in the city live below the federal poverty level – about one in five rely on emergency food programs.

Read entire report by Roger Clark.

The above story makes me very happy. I like the way they mix nutrition education with food assistance at the schools.

The poverty trap creates a devastating cycle in which children born into poverty never receive the necessities to develop into self-sufficient adults, leaving them destined for a life of poverty. The following statistic demonstrates it: 50% of United States children born into poverty remain in poverty for their entire lives.

On the upside, programs and initiatives such as the one mentioned in the story above help break the poverty cycle. I hope to see many more of them.

Ron Harris reports that veterans who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are increasingly showing up homeless at shelters and agencies across the nation. I include an excerpt:

As the nearly 1.5 million military personnel who have been deployed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to return home, more are expected to join the ranks of the estimated 195,000 homeless veterans, Veterans Affairs officials said.

In addition to mental health issues and addiction, the homelessness stems from several other factors, say federal officials and veterans advocates. Long and repeated deployments strain the bonds of relationships back home, they said.

“Guys, when they get back, their girlfriends put them out,” said Steve Baker, executive director of Grace Resource Center, which serves homeless veterans in Lancaster, Calif. “Some of them, their wives get divorces while they’re overseas. So, they have nothing to come back to.”

Others never had a home to return to, said Peter Dougherty, director of the VA’s Homeless Services Division. Many former foster children join the military once they are too old for foster care so they can have a place to live and an income, he said.

Others are unemployed or underemployed. Some severely disabled veterans unable to work end up homeless because of long delays in receiving disability pay — sometimes up to two years.

But homelessness among today’s returning service members mainly can be traced to the nation’s inability to meet veterans’ mental health needs, federal officials, service providers and veterans advocates said.

Read entire article by Ron Harris.

Needless wars such as that in Iraq cause many devastations, but some of the worst happen to the troops – the young men and women who give up their freedom to protect the citizens of their country, only to have the pledge misused by corrupt politicians and war profiteers. First these brave troops get killed and injured in these needless wars. Then, out of the ones that get to come home from these wars, they get ignored and neglected.

How come the politicians who claim to “support the troops” the most send them to needless wars to get traumatized, injured, or killed? Why do these some politicians enact policy that leaves veterans hungry, poor, and/or homeless?

Take for example draft-dodger George Bush, the leading warmonger. Bush cut $600 million from the Veterans’ Administration budget, although the VA is already under-funded by around $2 billion a year and now has over 200,000 new veterans to service.

Let’s support the troops by ending these needless wars. Let’s support the troops by bringing them home from Iraq.