Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights*
Washington, December 15, 2017
I. Introduction
1. I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the enjoyment of human rights by its citizens. In my travels through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington DC I have spoken with dozens of experts and civil society groups, met with senior state and federal government officials and talked with many people who are homeless or living in deep poverty. I am grateful to the Trump Administration for facilitating my visit and for its continuing cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council’s accountability mechanisms that apply to all states.
2. My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by the President and Speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes. It is against this background that my report is presented.
3. The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.
4. I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks. I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death.
5. Of course, that is not the whole story. I also saw much that is positive. I met with State and especially municipal officials who are determined to improve social protection for the poorest 20% of their communities, I saw an energized civil society in many places, I visited a Catholic Church in San Francisco (St Boniface – the Gubbio Project) that opens its pews to the homeless every day between services, I saw extraordinary resilience and community solidarity in Puerto Rico, I toured an amazing community health initiative in Charleston (West Virginia) that serves 21,000 patients with free medical, dental, pharmaceutical and other services, overseen by local volunteer physicians, dentists and others (WV Health Right), and indigenous communities presenting at a US-Human Rights Network conference in Atlanta lauded Alaska’s advanced health care system for indigenous peoples, designed with direct participation of the target group.
6. American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.
7. In talking with people in the different states and territories I was frequently asked how the US compares with other states. While such comparisons are not always perfect, a cross-section of statistical comparisons provides a relatively clear picture of the contrast between the wealth, innovative capacity, and work ethic of the US, and the social and other outcomes that have been attained.
By most indicators, the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined.
US health care expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.
US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.
Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the U.S. and its peer countries continues to grow.
U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries
Neglected tropical diseases, including Zika, are increasingly common in the USA. It has been estimated that 12 million Americans live with a neglected parasitic infection. A 2017 report documents the prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama.
The US has the highest prevalence of obesity in the developed world.
In terms of access to water and sanitation the US ranks 36th in the world.
America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, ahead of Turkmenistan, El Salvador, Cuba, Thailand and the Russian Federation. Its rate is nearly 5 times the OECD average.
The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.
The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labor markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries, and 18th amongst the top 21.
In the OECD the US ranks 35th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.
According to the World Income Inequality Database, the US has the highest Gini rate (measuring inequality) of all Western Countries
The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality characterizes the US as “a clear and constant outlier in the child poverty league.” US child poverty rates are the highest amongst the six richest countries – Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Norway.
About 55.7% of the U.S. voting-age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. In the OECD, the U.S. placed 28th in voter turnout, compared with an OECD average of 75%. Registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was registered in 2016, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in Japan (2014).
II. The human rights dimension
8. Successive administrations, including the present one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights, despite their clear recognition not only in key treaties that the US has ratified (such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination), and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the US has long insisted other countries must respect. But denial does not eliminate responsibility, nor does it negate obligations. International human rights law recognizes a right to education, a right to healthcare, a right to social protection for those in need, and a right to an adequate standard of living. In practice, the United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance, they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable healthcare, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.
9. Since the US has refused to recognize economic and social rights agreed by most other states (except for the right to education in state constitutions), the primary focus of the present report is on those civil and political rights reflected in the US Bill of Rights and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which the US has ratified.
III. Who are ‘the poor’?
10. I have been struck by the extent to which caricatured narratives about the purported innate differences between rich and poor have been sold to the electorate by some politicians and media, and have been allowed to define the debate. The rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic, and the drivers of economic success. The poor are wasters, losers, and scammers. As a result, money spent on welfare is money down the drain. To complete the picture we are also told that the poor who want to make it in America can easily do so: they really can achieve the American dream if only they work hard enough.
11. The reality that I have seen, however, is very different. It is a fact that many of the wealthiest citizens do not pay taxes at the rates that others do, hoard much of their wealth off-shore, and often make their profits purely from speculation rather than contributing to the overall wealth of the American community. Who then are the poor? Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface. The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’. The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks. Similarly, large numbers of welfare recipients are assumed to be living high on the hog. Some politicians and political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smart phones, all paid for by welfare. I wonder how many of these politicians have ever visited poor areas, let alone spoken to those who dwell there. There are anecdotes aplenty, but evidence is nowhere to be seen. In every society, there are those who abuse the system, as much in the upper income levels, as in the lower. But the poor people I met from among the 40 million living in poverty were overwhelmingly either persons who had been born into poverty, or those who had been thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages, or discrimination in the job market.
12. The face of poverty in America is not only Black, or Hispanic, but also White, Asian, and many other colors. Nor is it confined to a particular age group. Automation and robotization are already throwing many middle-aged workers out of jobs in which they once believed themselves to be secure. In the economy of the twenty-first century, only a tiny percentage of the population is immune from the possibility that they could fall into poverty as a result of bad breaks beyond their own control. The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion as the US since the US now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.
IV. The current extent of poverty in the US
13. There is considerable debate over the extent of poverty in the US, but for the purposes of this report principal reliance is placed upon the official government statistics, drawn up primarily by the US Census Bureau.
14. In order to define and quantify poverty in America, the Census Bureau uses ‘poverty thresholds’ or Official Poverty Measures (OPM), updated each year. In September 2017, more than one in every eight Americans were living in poverty (40 million, equal to 12.7% of the population). And almost half of those (18.5 million) were living in deep poverty, with reported family income below one-half of the poverty threshold.
V. Problems with existing policies
15. There is no magic recipe for eliminating extreme poverty, and each level of government must make its own good faith decisions. But at the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated.
16. What is known, from long experience and in light of the government’s human rights obligations, is that there are indispensable ingredients for a set of policies designed to eliminate poverty. They include: democratic decision-making, full employment policies, social protection for the vulnerable, a fair and effective justice system, gender and racial equality and respect for human dignity, responsible fiscal policies, and environmental justice.
17. Currently, the United States falls far short on each of these issues.
1. The undermining of democracy
18. The foundation stone of American society is democracy, but it is being steadily undermined. The principle of one person one vote applies in theory, but it is far from the reality. In a democracy, the task of government should be to facilitate political participation by ensuring that all citizens can vote and that their votes will count equally. In the US there is overt disenfranchisement of vast numbers of felons, a rule which predominantly affects Black citizens since they are the ones whose conduct is often specifically targeted for criminalization. In addition, there are often requirement that persons who have paid their debt to society still cannot regain their right to vote until they paid off all outstanding fines and fees. Then there is covert disenfranchisement, which includes the dramatic gerrymandering of electoral districts to privilege particular groups of voters, the imposition of artificial and unnecessary voter ID requirements, the blatant manipulation of polling station locations, the relocating of DMVs to make it more difficult for certain groups to obtain IDs, and the general ramping up of obstacles to voting especially by those without resources. The net result is that people living in poverty, minorities, and other disfavored groups are being systematically deprived of their voting rights.
19. A common explanation is that people see no improvement in their well-being regardless of who they elect, so that voting is pointless. But the most compelling and dispiriting explanation I received came in answer to my question as to why voting rates are so extraordinarily low in West Virginia. A state official pointed to apathy, which he explained by saying that “when people are poor they just give up on the electoral system.” If this is the case, as seems likely, some political elites have a strong self-interest in keeping people in poverty. As one politician remarked to me, it would be instructive to undertake a survey of the campaign appearances of politicians in overwhelmingly poor districts.
2. An illusory emphasis on employment
20. Proposals to slash the meager welfare arrangements that currently exist are now sold primarily on the basis that the poor need to get off welfare and back to work. The assumption is that there are a great many jobs out there waiting to be filled by individuals with low educational standards, often suffering disabilities of one kind or another, sometimes burdened with a criminal record (perhaps for the crime of homelessness or not being able to pay a traffic ticket), and with no training or meaningful assistance to obtain employment. It also assumes that the jobs they could get will make them independent of state assistance. Yet I spoke to workers from Walmart and other large stores who could not survive on a full-time wage without also relying on food stamps. It has been estimated that as much as $6 billion dollars go from the SNAP program to support such workers, thus providing a huge virtual subsidy to the relevant corporations.
21. In terms of the employment market, the reality is very different from that portrayed by the welfare to work proponents. There has been a long-term decline in employment rates. For example, by 2017, only 89% of males from 25 to 54 years were employed. While ‘supply’ factors such as growing rates of disability, increasing geographic immobility, and higher incarceration rates are relevant, a 2016 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisors concluded that reductions in labor supply are far less important than reductions in labor demand in accounting for the long-run trend1. Factors such as automation and new technologies such as self-driving cars, 3D printers, and robot-staffed factories and warehouses will see a continuing decline in demand for low-skilled labor.
22. Reflecting on these developments, leading poverty experts have concluded that:
Because of this rising joblessness, the U.S. poverty population is becoming a more deprived and destitute class, one that’s disconnected from the economy and unable to meet basic needs. … 40 percent of the 1999 poverty population was in deep poverty … [compared to 46 percent of the 2015 poverty population … . Likewise, rates of extreme poverty (i.e., living on less than $2 per day per person) are also increasing, again because of declining employment as well as growing “disconnection” from the safety net2.
3. Shortcomings in basic social protection
23. There are a great many issues that could be covered under this heading. In view of space limitations I will focus on three major concerns.
(i) Indigenous peoples
24. Chiefs and representatives from both recognized and non-recognized tribes presented me with evidence of widespread extreme poverty in indigenous communities in the USA. They called for federal recognition as an essential first step to address poverty, indicating that without it their way of life is criminalised, they are disempowered, and their culture is destroyed – all of which perpetuate poverty, poor health, and shockingly high suicide rates. Living conditions in Pine Ridge, Lakota, were described as comparable to Haiti, with annual incomes of less than $12 000 and infant mortality rates three times higher than the national rate. Nine lives have been lost there to suicide in the last three months, including one six year old. Nevertheless, federally funded programmes aimed at suicide prevention have been de-funded.
25. Testimony also revealed an urgent need for data collection on poverty in all indigenous communities, greater access to healthcare, and stronger protection from private and corporate abuse. The Red Water Pond Navajo tribe spoke about predatory loans involving 400% interest rates, and a high incidence of kidney, liver and pancreatic cancers.
(ii) Children in poverty
25. A shockingly high number of children in the US live in poverty. In 2016, 18% of children – some 13.3 million – were living in poverty, with children comprising 32.6% of all people in poverty. Child poverty rates are highest in the southern states, with Mississippi, New Mexico at 30% and Louisiana at 29%.
26. Contrary to the stereotypical assumptions, 31% of poor children are White, 24% are Black, 36% are Hispanic, and 1% are indigenous. When looking at toddlers and infants, 42% of all Black children are poor, 32% of Hispanics, and 37% of Native American infants and toddlers are poor. The figure for Whites is 14%.
27. Poor children are also significantly affected by America’s affordable and adequate housing crisis. Around 21% of persons experiencing homelessness are children. While most are reportedly experiencing sheltered homelessness, the lack of financial stability, high eviction rates, and high mobility rates negatively impact education, and physical and mental health.
28. On a positive note, most children living in poverty do have medical insurance. Due to the expansion of Medicaid and the creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in 1997, as of 2016, some 95% of all children had health insurance. Medicaid and CHIP have lowered the rate of children without health coverage from 14% in 1997 to 5.3% in 2015.
29. Other support programs are also important, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is estimated to lift some five million children out of poverty annually, while in 2015 the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) lifted a further five million children out of poverty. By contrast, TANF is not getting to enough children, with less than 25% of all poor families that are eligible for cash assistance under TANF actually receiving it. Proposed cutbacks to most of these programs would have dramatic consequences.
(iii) Adult dental care
30. The Affordable Care Act greatly expanded the availability of dental care to children, but the situations of adults living in poverty remains lamentable. Their only access to dental care is through the emergency room, which usually means that when the pain becomes excruciating or disabling, they are eligible to have the tooth extracted. Poor oral hygiene and disfiguring dental profiles lead to unemployability in many jobs, being shunned in the community, and being unable to function effectively. Yet there is no national program, and very few state programs, to address these issues which fundamentally affect the human dignity and ultimately the civil rights of the persons concerned.
4. Reliance on criminalization to conceal the problem
31. Homeless estimates published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in December 2017 show a nationwide figure of 553,742, which includes 76,500 in New York, 55,200 in Los Angeles, and 6,900 in San Francisco3. These figures are widely considered to be an undercount, as illustrated by estimates of 21,000 in San Francisco provided by various experts with whom I met.
32. In many cities, homeless persons are effectively criminalized for the situation in which they find themselves. Sleeping rough, sitting in public places, panhandling, public urination (in cities that provide almost zero public toilets) and myriad other offences have been devised to attack the ‘blight’ of homelessness. Ever more demanding and intrusive regulations lead to infraction notices, which rapidly turn into misdemeanors, leading to the issuance of warrants, incarceration, the incurring of unpayable fines, and the stigma of a criminal conviction that in turn virtually prevents subsequent employment and access to most housing. Yet the authorities in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco often encourage this vicious circle. In Skid Row, LA., 6,696 arrests of homeless persons were reported to have been made between 2011 and 2016. Rather than responding to homeless persons as affronts to the senses and to their neighborhoods, citizens and local authorities should see in their presence a tragic indictment of community and government policies. Homelessness on this scale is far from inevitable and again reflects political choices to see law enforcement rather than low cost housing, medical treatment, psychological counselling, and job training as the solutions. But the futility of many existing approaches was all too evident as I walked around some of the worst affected areas.
33. In many cities and counties the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but diverse other programs. The use of the legal system, not to promote justice, but to raise revenue, as documented so powerfully in the Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson, is pervasive around the country. So-called ‘fines and fees’ are piled up so that low level infractions become immensely burdensome, a process that affects only the poorest members of society who pay the vast majority of such penalties. State, county and municipal police and law enforcement agencies are not always forces for change in such settings. While they play an indispensable role in keeping the citizenry secure, they sometimes also pressure legislatures to maintain high staffing and overtime levels, at the expense of less expensive approaches which would address the social challenges constructively and effectively and eliminate the need for a law enforcement response.
34. Another practice which affects the poor almost exclusively is that of setting large bail bonds for a defendant who seeks to go free pending trial. Some 11 million people are admitted to local jails annually, and on any given day there are more than 730,000 people are being held, of whom almost two-thirds are awaiting trial, and thus presumed to be innocent. Yet judges have increasingly set large amounts of bail, which mean that wealthy defendants can secure their freedom, whole poor defendants are likely to stay in jail, with all of the consequences in terms of loss of their jobs, disruption of their childcare, inability to pay rent, and a dive into deeper destitution. A major movement to eliminate bail bonds is gathering steam, and needs to be embraced by anyone concerned about the utterly disproportionate impact of the justice system upon the poor.
35. Finally, mention must be made of the widespread practice of suspending drivers’ licenses for a wide range of non-driving related offences, such as a failure to pay fines. This is a perfect way to ensure that the poor, living in communities which have steadfastly refused to invest in serious public transport systems, are unable to earn a living which might have helped to pay the outstanding debt. Two paths are open: penury, or driving illegally, thus risking even more serious and counter-productive criminalization.
5. The gendered nature of poverty
36. Many statistics could be cited to demonstrate the extent to which women shoulder a particularly high burden as a result of living in poverty. They are, for example, more exposed to violence, more vulnerable to sexual harassment, discriminated against in the labor market. Luke Shafer and Kathryn Edin conclude that the number of children in single-mother households living in extreme poverty for an entire year has ballooned from fewer than 100,000 in 1995 to 895,000 in 2011 and 704,000 in 2012. But perhaps the least recognized harm is that austerity policies that shrink the services provided by the state inevitably mean that the resulting burden is imposed instead upon the primary caregivers within families, who are overwhelmingly women. Male-dominated legislatures rarely pay any heed to this consequence of the welfare cutbacks they impose.
6. Racism, disability, and demonization of the poor
37. Demonization of the poor can take many forms. It has been internalized by many poor people who proudly resist applying for benefits to which they are entitled and struggle valiantly to survive against the odds. Racism is a constant dimension and I regret that in a report that seeks to cover so much ground there is not room to delve much more deeply into the phenomenon. Racial disparities, already great, are being entrenched and exacerbated in many contexts. In Alabama, I saw various houses in rural areas that were surrounded by cesspools of sewage that flowed out of broken or non-existent septic systems. The State Health Department had no idea of how many households exist in these conditions, despite the grave health consequences. Nor did they have any plan to find out, or devise a plan to do something about it. But since the great majority of White folks live in the cities, which are well served by government built and maintained sewerage systems, and most of the rural folks in areas like Lowndes County, are Black, the problem doesn’t appear on the political or governmental radar screen.
38. The same applies to persons with disabilities. In the rush to claim that many beneficiaries are scamming the system, it is often asserted, albeit with little evidence, that large numbers of those receiving disability allowances are undeserving. When I probed the very high rates of persons with disabilities in West Virginia, government officials explained that most recipients had attained low levels of education, worked in demanding manual labor jobs, and were often exposed to risks that employers were not required to guard against.
7. Confused and counter-productive drug policies
39. The opioid crisis has drawn extensive attention, as it should. It has devastated many communities and the addiction often leads to heroin, methamphetamine, and other substance abuse. Many states have introduced highly punitive regimes directed against pregnant women, rather than trying to provide sympathetic treatment and to maximize the well-being of the fetus. As one submission put it:
Mothers in Alabama face criminal prosecutions which can result in years of incarceration, as well as civil child welfare proceedings that have the power to separate families and sever a person’s parental rights. Families living in poverty are already disproportionately the subject of child welfare investigations in the United States. Experts have found that poor children disproportionately suffer impositions of the child welfare system, and families who receive public assistance are four times more likely than others to be investigated and have their children removed from the family home on the basis of alleged child maltreatment4.
40. Similarly, states are increasingly seeking to impose drug tests on recipients of welfare benefits, with programs that lead to expulsion from the program for repeat offenders. Such policies are entirely counter-productive, highly intrusive, and punitive where care is required instead. The justification offered to me in West Virginia was that the state should not be supporting someone who is addicted to drugs. It would be interesting to see if the same rationale were accepted if it was proposed that legislators and senior officials, who must keep the public trust, should also be regularly drug-tested, and punished for failure to go clean in a short time.
41. Similarly, the contrast between the huge sentences handed down to those using drugs such as crack cocaine, contrasts dramatically and incomprehensibly with the approach applied in most cases of opioid addiction. The key variable seems to be race. The lesson to be learned is that the generally humane and caring response to opioid users should be applied to most cases of substance addiction.
8. The use of fraud as a smokescreen
42. Calls for welfare reform take place against a constant drumbeat of allegations of widespread fraud in the system. The contrast with tax reform is instructive. In that context immense faith is placed in the goodwill and altruism of the corporate beneficiaries, while with welfare reform the opposite assumptions apply. The poor are inherently lazy, dishonest, and care only about their own interests. And government officials with whom I met insisted that the states are gaming the system to defraud the federal government, individuals are constantly coming up with new lurks to live high on the welfare hog, and community groups are exaggerating the numbers. The reality, of course, is that there are good and bad corporate actors and there are good and bad welfare claimants. But while funding for the IRS to audit wealthy taxpayers has been reduced, efforts to identify welfare fraud are being greatly intensified. The answer is nuanced governmental regulation, rather than an abdication in respect to the wealthy, and a doubling down on intrusive and punitive policies towards the poor. Revelations of widespread tax avoidance by companies and high-wealth individuals draw no rebuke, only acquiescence and the maintenance of the loopholes and other arrangements designed to facilitate such arrangements. Revelation of food stamps being used for purposes other than staying alive draw howls of outrage from government officials and their media supporters.
9. Privatization
43. Solutions to major social challenges in the US are increasingly seen to lie with privatization. While the firms concerned have profited handsomely, it is far from clear that optimum outcomes have been achieved for the relevant client populations. In particular, greater consideration needs to be given to the role of corporations in preventing rational policy-making and advocating against reforms in order to maintain their profits at the expense of the poorest members of society. During my visit I was told of many examples. For example, bail bond corporations which exist in only one other country in the world, precisely because they distort justice, encourage excessive and often unnecessary levels of bail, and fuel and lobby for a system that by definition penalizes the poor. The rich can always pay, and can avoid the 10% or even more that bail bond companies demand as a non-refundable down-payment. I heard cases of individuals who paid thousands of dollars to post bail, and lost it all when charges were dropped a day later. If they were subsequently charged with a different offence, the whole process begins again and all previous payments are lost. Other examples include the corporations running private for-profit prisons, as well as bounty-hunters.
10. Environmental sustainability
44. In Alabama and West Virginia I was informed of the high proportion of the population that was not being served by public sewerage and water supply services. Contrary to the assumption in most countries that such services should be extended systematically and eventually comprehensively to all areas by the government, in neither state was I able to obtain figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any government plans to address the issues in the future.
VI. Principal current governmental responses
45. The analysis that follows is primarily focused on the Federal level. Federalism complicates questions of responsibility but one irony that emerged clearly from my visit is that those who fight hardest to uphold State rights, also fight hard to deny city and county rights. If the rhetoric about encouraging laboratories of innovation is to be meaningful, the freedom to innovate cannot be restricted to state politicians alone.
1. Tax reform
46. Deep and dramatic changes look likely to be adopted in the space of the next few days as Congress considers a final unified version of the Tax Bill. From a human rights perspective, the lack of public debate, the closed nature of the negotiation, the exclusion of the representatives of almost half of the American people from the process, and the inability of elected representatives to know in any detail what they are being asked to vote for, all raise major concerns. Similarly, the proposed immediate upending of many longstanding arrangements on the basis of which citizens have planned their futures, raises important issues relating to the need for a degree of predictability and respect for reasonable expectations in adopting tax reform.
47. One of the overriding concerns however is the enormous impetus given to income and wealth inequality by the proposed reforms. While most other nations, and all of the major international institutions such as the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF have acknowledged that extreme inequalities in wealth and income are economically inefficient and socially damaging, the tax reform package is essentially a bid to make the US the world champion of extreme inequality. As noted in the World Inequality Report 2018, in both Europe and the US the top 1% of adults earned around 10% of national income in 1980. In Europe that has risen today to 12%, but in the US it has reached 20%. In the same time period in the US annual income earnings for the top 1% have risen by 205%, while for the top 0.001% the figure is 636%. By comparison, the average annual wage of the bottom 50% has stagnated since 1980.
48. At the state level, the demonizing of taxation, as though it is inherently evil, means that legislature effectively refuse to levy taxes even when there is a desperate need. Instead they impose fees and fines through the back door, some of which fund the justice system and others of which go to fund the pet projects of legislators. This sleight of hand technique is a winner, in the sense that the politically powerful rich do not have to pay any more taxes, while the politically marginalized poor bear the burden but can do nothing about it.
2. Welfare reform
49. In calculating how the proposed tax cuts can be paid for, the Treasury has explicitly listed welfare reform as an important source of revenue5. Indeed, various key officials have made the same point that major cuts will need to be made in welfare provision. Given the extensive, and in some cases unremitting, cuts that have been made in recent years, the consequences for an already overstretched and inadequate system of social protection are likely to be fatal for many programs, and possibly also for those who rely upon them.
3. Healthcare reform
50. The Senate majority leader recently wrote that “the Senate also voted to deliver relief to low- and middle-income Americans by repealing Obamacare's individual mandate tax. For too long, families have suffered under this unpopular and unfair tax imposed under an unworkable law.” Many observers with whom I spoke consider that this move will, over time, make the rest of the ACA unviable, thus removing many millions of persons from the ranks of the insured.
51. There have also been many references in statements by senior officials to the desirability of reducing Medicare and Medicaid expenditures. When I asked state officials what they thought the consequences would be of repealing the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, the unanimous response was that it would be disastrous, not just for the individuals concerned but also for state health care systems.
52. In addition, there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the funding of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), on which almost 9 million low-income children depend for their primary health and dental care6. If long-term funding is not secured, those children could be left unprotected. If funding is secured, but threats to gradually decrease funding for the program over the short-term eventuate, this would also have devastating on the health of millions of poor children in America.
Similarly, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQCHs) are federally-funded, “safety-net” providers of comprehensive primary and preventive health care, regardless of the insurance status or ability to pay7. The health center program has been able to grow due to expanded Medicaid eligibility and increases in federal grant funding, including under the Affordable Care Act8. The future of these centers is, however, uncertain, with a re-funding bill having passed the House but Senate consideration being delayed. If the funding is lost, some 2,800 health centers across the country could close9, 9 million patients could lose access to primary and preventive care, more than 51,000 providers and staff could lose their jobs, and $7.5 billion revenue will be foregone in economically distressed communities10. If the funding is decreased, one can only presume the effects will be commensurately devastating.
4. New information technologies
53. The term ‘new information technology’ or ‘new technology’ is not well-defined, despite its frequent use. It is commonly used for such widely different but interrelated phenomena as the spectacular increase in computing power, ‘Big Data’, machine learning, algorithms, artificial intelligence and robotization, among other things. These separate terms often also lack a clear definition11. There are clear benefits to the rapid development of new information technology. A 2016 White House Report, for example, highlights the major benefits of new artificial intelligence technology “to the public in fields as diverse as health care, transportation, the environment, criminal justice, and economic inclusion” in artificial intelligence12. But the risks are also increasingly clear. Much more attention needs to be given to the ways in which new technology impacts the human rights of the poorest Americans13. This inquiry is of relevance to a much wider group since experience shows that the poor are often a testing ground for practices and policies that may then be applied to others. These are some relevant concerns.
(i) Coordinated entry systems
54. A coordinated entry system (CES) is, in essence, a system set up to match the homeless population with available homeless services. Such systems are gaining in popularity and their human rights impact has not yet been studied extensively14. I spoke to a range of civil society organizations and government officials in Los Angeles and San Francisco about CES.
55. In Los Angeles, CES is one of the pillars of mayor Garcetti’s strategy15 to tackle the homelessness crisis in the city. The system is administered by the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority (LAHSA). Tens of thousands of Los Angeles’ homeless population have been included in the system since it was first set up in 2013. It works as follows. A homeless service caseworker or volunteer interviews a homeless individual using a survey called the Vulnerability Index-Service Priority Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT). This data is stored in a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) that stores the data. A ranking algorithm gives the homeless respondent a vulnerability score between 1 and 17 and a second, matching, algorithm, matches the most vulnerable homeless to appropriate housing opportunities.
56. The CES replaces a previous system of matching the homeless to housing that was described to me by various interlocutors as dysfunctional. It is based on the principle of ‘Housing First’, which focuses on providing housing before anything else. But despite the good intentions of officials in Los Angeles, there is an Orwellian side to CES. Similar concerns were expressed to me about the San Francisco CES.
57. A first, and major, concern is that the VI-SPDAT survey asks homeless individuals to give up the most intimate details of their lives. Among many other questions, the VI-SPDAT survey requires homeless individuals to answer whether they engage in sex work, whether they have ever stolen medications, how often they have been in touch with the police and whether they have “planned activities each day other than just surviving that bring [them] happiness and fulfillment”. One researcher I met with who has interviewed homeless individuals that took the VI-SPDAT survey explained that many feel they are giving up their human right to privacy in return for their human right to housing.
58. A civil society organization in San Francisco explained that many homeless individuals feel deeply ambivalent about the millions of dollars that are being spent on new technology to funnel them to housing that does not exist. According to some of my interlocutors, only a minority of those homeless individuals being interviewed actually acquire permanent housing, because of the chronic shortage of affordable housing and Section 8 housing vouchers in California. As one participant in a civil society town hall in San Francisco put it: “Computers and technology cannot solve homelessness”.
59. A third concern related to access to and sharing of the wealth of data collected via coordinated entry systems and stored in HMIS. According to 2004 data standards by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homeless organizations that record, use or process Protected Personal Information on homeless clients for a HMIS may share that information with law enforcement in a number of circumstances, including in response to “an oral request for the purpose of identifying or locating a suspect, fugitive, material witness or missing person” without the need for a warrant or any other form of judicial oversight16.
60. I understood from civil society organizations that homeless individuals who have been interviewed for VI-SPDAT have expressed a fear, a fear that does not seem unjustified in light of the current legal regime, that the police would access the very sensitive personal data stored in HMIS. When I met with the Executive Director of LAHSA, he assured me that LAHSA is working on a policy decision to deny the LAPD access to HMIS, which would be an important step in safeguarding the human right to privacy and other civil rights of the homeless. Other local and county officials have also assured me that the LAPD is currently not allowed access to HMIS.
61. However, since federal standards allow such access and given the fact that the LAPD informed me that it is “unfortunate” that they currently have no access to CES data, it is likely there will be continued pressure on LAHSA and similar agencies in other municipalities to give access to the police to this ‘gold mine’ of information. Access by the police to HMIS is only one policy decision away.
(ii) Risk assessment tools in the pre-trial phase
62. Across the United States, a movement is underway to reform the pretrial system. At the heart of the reform is an effort to disconnect pretrial detention from wealth and to tie it to risk instead. And to accomplish that goal, a growing number of jurisdictions are adopting risk assessment tools (also called actuarial tools, or Actuarial Pretrial Risk Assessment Instruments -APRAIs17) to assist in pretrial release and custody decisions18. This move from pretrial detention and money bail to risk assessment is widely supported, but new risks to the human rights of the poor in the United States arise with the use of risk assessment tools.
63. Automated risk assessment tools, take “data about the accused, feed it into a computerized algorithm, and generate a prediction of the statistical probability the person will commit some future misconduct, particularly a new crime or missed court appearance.”19 The system will generally indicate whether the risk for the particular defendant, compared to observed outcomes among a population of individuals who share certain characteristics, is ‘high’, ‘moderate’, or ‘low’. Judges maintain discretion, in theory, to ignore the risk score.
64. One fundamental critique is that risk assessments are based on turning individual circumstances into risk categories. The overwhelmingly poor defendants who are confronted with these new practices are turned into ‘high’, ‘medium’ or ‘low’ risk classes, a demeaning process for those involved which goes directly against the principle of an individualized criminal justice system.
65. Several interlocutors warned that these tools may seem to produce objective scores, but that the decision what risk level to qualify as ‘high’ or ‘low’ is not an objective, but a political choice, that should ultimately be decided by voters, not the, often private, developers of these tools.
66. Risk assessment tools pose the same risks associated with privatizing public functions that currently plague the money bail system. I met with a Division Chief in the Public Defender’s Office of Los Angeles County who explained the pressure court systems are under to buy risk assessment tools ‘off the shelf’ from private vendors. As in other contexts, the inner workings of such tools as proprietary to the company that sells it, which leads to serious due process concerns that affect the civil rights of the poor in the criminal justice system20.
(iii) Access to high-speed broadband access in West Virginia
67. Civil society organizations have urged me to focus on obstacles to internet connectivity in impoverished communities in West Virginia21. This is a persistent problem in the state, where an estimated 30% of West Virginians lack access to high speed broadband (compared to 10% nationally) and 48% of rural West Virginians lack access (compared to 39% of the rural population nationally)22. But when I asked the Governor’s office in West Virginia about efforts to expand broadband access in poor, rural communities, it could only point to a 2010 broadband expansion effort. It downplayed the extent of the problem by claiming that there were “some issues” with access to Internet in West Virginia’s valleys.
5. Puerto Rico
68. I spent two days of the nine days I traveled outside of Washington, DC, in Puerto Rico. I witnessed the devastation of hurricane Irma and Maria in Salinas and Guayama in the south of the island, as well as in the poor Caño Martin Peña neighborhood in San Juan. Both in the south and in San Juan I listened to individuals in poverty and civil society organizations on how these natural disasters are just the latest in a series of bad news for Puerto Ricans, which include an economic crisis, a debt crisis, an austerity crisis and, arguably, a structural political crisis.
69. Political rights and poverty are inextricably linked in Puerto Rico. If it were a state, Puerto Rico would be the poorest state in the Union. But Puerto Rico is not a state, it is a mere ‘territory.’ Puerto Ricans have no representative with full voting rights in Congress and, unless living stateside, cannot vote for the President of the United States. In a country that likes to see itself as the oldest democracy in the world and a staunch defender of political rights on the international stage, more than 3 million people who live on the island have no power in their own capital.
70. Puerto Rico not only has a fiscal deficit, it also has a political rights deficit, and the two are not easily disentangled. I met with the Executive Director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board that was imposed by Congress on Puerto Rico as part of PROMESA. This statement is not the place to challenge the economics of the Board’s proposed polices, but there is little indication that social protection concerns feature in any significant way in the Board’s analyses. At a time when even the IMF is insisting that social protection should be explicitly factored into prescriptions for adjustment (i.e. austerity) it would seem essential that the Board take account of human rights and social protection concerns as it contemplates far-reaching decision on welfare reform, minimum wage and labor market regulation.
71. It is not for me to suggest any resolution to the hotly contested issue of Puerto Rico’s constitutional status. But what is clear is that many, probably most, Puerto Ricans believe deeply that they are presently colonized and that the US Congress is happy to leave them in the no-man’s land of no meaningful Congressional representation and no ability to really move to govern themselves. In light of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence and Congress’s adoption of PROMESA there would seem to be good reason for the UN Decolonization Committee to conclude that the island is no longer a self-governing territory.
* I am grateful for the superb research and analysis undertaken by Christiaan van Veen, Anna Bulman, Ria Singh Sawhney, and staff of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as the many inputs made by civil society groups, including those organized by the US Human Rights Network, and by leading scholars in the field.
Notes
1. Council of Economic Advisers, The Long-Term Decline in Prime-Age Male Labor Force Participation (2016).
2. Charles Varner, Marybeth Mattingly, & David Grusky, ‘The Facts Behind the Visions,’ Pathways, Spring 2017, p. 2.
3. https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/ ... Part-1.pdf
4. Poverty and Human Rights in Alabama.
5. https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/p ... -11-17.pdf
6. https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2017/08/03/w ... refresher/ ; https://www.medicaid.gov/chip/downloads ... report.pdf;
7. National Association of Community Health Centers, http://www.nachc.org/about-our-health-c ... th-center/
8. Julia Paradise et al, Community Health Centers: Recent Growth and the Role of the ACA (18 January 2017),
9. National Association of Community Health Centers, http://www.nachc.org/wp-content/uploads ... unding.pdf.
10. National Association of Community Health Centers, The Health Center Funding Cliff and its Impact, September 2017; Peter Shin et al, What are the Possible Effects of Failing to Extend the Community Health Center Fund?, RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative
Policy Research Brief # 49 (21 September 2017), https://publichealth.gwu.edu/sites/defa ... _Final.pdf
11. In a written submission received by the Special Rapporteur from researchers at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, they write: “The concept of AI has been proven to be notoriously difficult to define. A basic though popular definition of AI refers to “intelligence exhibited by machines” or “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” These definitions assume that ‘intelligence’ is clearly defined itself, though it, too, is ambiguous. No commonly agreed upon definition of artificial intelligence currently exists.” Available here: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/ ... input.aspx
12. Executive Office of the President National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology’, ‘Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence’, October 2016, p.1.
13. Cathy O’Neil, ‘The Ivory Tower Can’t Keep Ignoring Tech’, 14 November 2017, available from: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/opin ... ithms.html
14. One important exception is an excellent book that will be published in January: Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: Automating Inequality How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (Forthcoming, 2018)
15. https://www.lamayor.org/comprehensive-h ... s-strategy
16. https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/ ... ndards.pdf
17. The Criminal Justice Policy Program (CJPP) at Harvard Law School, ‘Moving Beyond Money: A Primer on Bail Reform’, October 2016, p. 18.
18. Sandra G. Mayson, ‘Bail Reform and Restraint for Dangerousness: Are Defendants a Special Case?’ Public Law Research Paper No. 16-30 Yale Law Journal (Forthcoming DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION), p.1, available from: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=2826600; Human Rights Watch, ‘Not in it for Justice: How California’s Pretrial Detention and Bail System Unfairly Punishes Poor People’, April 2017, p. 87-88.
19. Human Rights Watch, ‘Not in it for Justice: How California’s Pretrial Detention and Bail System Unfairly Punishes Poor People’, April 2017, p. 88.
20. Written submission from the AI Now Institute: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/ ... input.aspx
21. Written submission from Access Now: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/ ... input.aspx
22. West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy & American Friends Service Committee, ‘2016 State of Working West Virginia: Why is West Virginia so Poor?’, p. 55.
http://ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Di ... 3&LangID=E
Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur
Re: Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur
UN rapporteur “shocked” by deep poverty in US
By Eric London
18 December 2017
On Friday, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston published a report on poverty and democratic rights in the United States titled “Statement on Visit to the USA.”
In 1831, the French intellectual and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States and compiled notes on what he saw, publishing an optimistic report titled Democracy in America. One hundred and eighty six years later, Alston, an Australian academic and New York University professor, traveled through a country in the throes of a social catastrophe. His report might well be titled Destitution in America .
Alston recently concluded his trip through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington DC, visiting working-class neighborhoods and talking with experts and local officials.
“I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks,” he writes. “I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.”
His concludes that the government does not recognize “rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”
Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, with 18.5 million living in deep poverty. The US infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world. Obesity is rampant. The US is 36th in the world in access to water and sanitation. Its incarceration rate is the highest in the world. Youth poverty is nearly double the rest of the industrialized world. “Neglected tropical diseases” are “increasingly common.”
Hookworm is spreading in poor areas of Alabama as sewage flows openly through homes and streets. The US is 35th out of 37 among all industrialized countries in terms of inequality and poverty.
The UN report suggests that poverty and inequality are the product of the domination of the political system by a corporate oligarchy. “Successive administrations, including the present one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights,” Alston notes.
His statement begins:
“My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by the president and Speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”
The report notes that at the federal level, proposals to cut Medicare will be “disastrous.” Underfunding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will “have devastating [effects] on the health of millions of poor children.” If funding for the Federal Qualified Health Centers (FQCHs) is eliminated, “9 million patients could lose access to primary and preventative care.”
Alston describes a situation where the police, courts and public agencies treat impoverished workers like criminals. “In many cities and counties the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but diverse other programs,” he writes.
Over 730,000 people are in jail, “of whom almost two-thirds are awaiting trial, and thus presumed to be innocent.” The government sets bail at extremely high levels, “which means that wealthy defendants can secure their freedom, while poor defendants are likely to stay in jail.”
Intrusive policing policies for welfare, food stamps and other public benefits include forcing workers to undergo drug tests, in-home inspections and other humiliating procedures.
“Calls for welfare reform take place against a constant drumbeat of allegations of widespread fraud in the system,” Alston writes. “The contrast with tax reform is instructive. In that context, immense faith is placed in the good will and altruism of the corporate beneficiaries, while with welfare reform the opposite assumptions apply.”
Alston rejects the notion that poverty is primarily a racial issue. “The poor,” he says, “are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants.’ The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks… The face of poverty in America is not only Black or Hispanic, but also White, Asian and many other colors.”
Child poverty is widespread across races: “Contrary to the stereotypical assumptions, 31 percent of poor children are White, 24 percent are Black, 36 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are indigenous.”
Conditions for Native Americans, ignored by Black Lives Matter and other identity politics groups, are particularly deplorable. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, conditions are “comparable to Haiti... Nine lives have been lost there to suicide in the last three months, including one six-year-old. Nevertheless, federally funded programs aimed at suicide prevention have been de-funded.”
The growth of inequality has “steadily undermined” democratic forms of rule, Alston writes. In fact, democracy is incompatible with the ruling class’s efforts to expand and protect its wealth at the expense of the working class. This process is not accidental, but the product of the policies implemented by both major capitalist parties, whose aim over recent decades has been to eviscerate all benefits and protections won by the working class through more than a century of social struggle.
The corporate-controlled media is complicit in the growth of inequality and poverty. This shocking and disturbing UN report, which speaks frankly of the immense levels of economic inequality and destitution in America, reflecting the stark class divide that dominates US social and political life, has barely been reported by the establishment broadcast and print media. Meanwhile, the same media outlets are devoting endless coverage to allegations of sexual harassment made for the most part by wealthy and privileged women against prominent figures in the worlds of entertainment, the arts and politics.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... e-d18.html
UN rapporteur reports extreme poverty “unseen in the first world” in Alabama
By Shelley Connor
13 December 2017
A United Nation team’s tour of Alabama last week exposed what many Alabama residents have known for decades: residents of the state’s Black Belt region are suffering in social conditions most frequently encountered in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Notably, Lowndes County, the home of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suffers from poor sewage disposal and resultant hookworm infection otherwise unknown in the United States.
Phillip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, witnessed communities where raw sewage flows into open pits or into surrounding creeks and streams.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World,” Alston said to reporters as he toured Butler County in South Alabama. “This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”
Alston visited communities in Lowndes and Butler Counties last Thursday, accompanied by local activists. These counties are located in the so-called Black Belt, named for the rich loam that stretches throughout the Deep South States.
The region’s fertile soil, along with its steamy, subtropical climate, made it the epicenter of the Antebellum South’s cotton-growing industry. Today, it is known for its entrenched poverty and appalling social conditions. The lack of sewage disposal and the related occurrence of gastrointestinal pathogens in the Black Belt are but two startling indicators of those conditions.
In Lowndes and Butler Counties, residents frequently struggle with gastrointestinal diseases such as E. coli. Many of those who are not diagnosed have reported in the past to health officials that they suffer from frequent or protracted bouts of vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea.
Lowndes County activist Aaron Thigpen took Alston and his team to a property inhabited by members of Thigpen’s extended family. The house had no functioning septic system; the family, which includes two minor children, relies upon PVC pipes to direct the household sewage into an open-air, aboveground pool.
As Thigpen pointed out, the main water line lies in close proximity to the improvised sewage system. Should the water main become open, everyone in the house “gets sick all at once,” as Thigpen told Alston.
He also took Alston to a community in Butler County, where he showed the UN team an entire community where man-made ditches carry effluent into a nearby creek.
“It’s really bad when you’ve got a lot of kids around like there are here,” Thigpen told AL.com. “They’re playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don’t know the importance of not handling sewage.”
Another Butler County resident showed Alston where his outdated septic system leaches raw sewage into the soil and bubbles up into his yard. A significant flood would send this raw sewage into the house, exposing all residents therein to coliform bacteria and parasites.
In September, the National School of Tropical Medicine (NSTM) at Baylor University published a study that revealed serious sanitation deficits in Lowndes County. Three-quarters of study participants reported that raw sewage had managed to reenter their houses, either because of heavy rainfall or clogs in improvised sewage disposal systems.
The problem is not entirely unknown: in 2011, the Alabama Department of Public Health reported that the number of households with no sewage disposal or inadequate sewage disposal ranged from 40 to 90 percent. The ADPH further reported that 50 percent of homes with on-site sewage containment systems had systems that were failing or expected to fail within the near future.
The loamy soil and hot, humid weather that made cotton farming such a profitable endeavor in the Deep South provides a perfect breeding environment for Necator americanus, a species of hookworm that lays its eggs in the intestines of those it infects. In a place like Lowndes or Butler County, where raw sewage seeps into poorly draining soil, the eggs deposited through sewage have a warm and hospitable locale to incubate, hatch and reproduce. A person unwittingly walking through a soil where hookworms have incubated can become infected when one or more worm enters their body, usually through bare feet and exposed ankles.
According to the NSTM study, 19 of 55 participants tested positive for the parasite, which causes stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea. As infection progresses, severe anemia frequently leads to fatigue and cognitive disabilities; in some cases, particularly among the very young, the very old, and the immune-compromised, it leads to death.
Hookworm infections were largely eradicated from the United States between the 1950s and the 1980s due to social programs that addressed both sanitation infrastructure and community health. The parasite is mainly associated with extreme poverty in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, and many infectious disease researchers had assumed that it no longer existed in the US at all.
The Baylor study would not have occurred had Catherine Flowers, the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise in Montgomery, Alabama, not prevailed upon the NSTM to investigate the situation in Lowndes County.
“Hookworm is a 19th-century disease that should have by now been addressed,” Flowers told the Guardian in September, “yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in the 21st Century.” As NSTM researchers pointed out to the Guardian, the discovery of hookworms in Lowndes County highlights the need for further research throughout the United States.
The incidence of hookworm is clearly tied both to poverty and to blatant malfeasance on the part of local, state and federal governments. In Lowndes County, the annual median household makes a mere $30,225 yearly. According to the 2010 US Census, over 25 percent of county residents live below the poverty line. For a family that earns less than $2000 a month, the cost of a new septic system—which can cost up to $15,000 to install—is prohibitively high.
Speaking to the Guardian in September, Aaron Thigpen pointed out that, while people are “disgusted” by having to live near raw sewage, “there’s no public help for them and if you’re earning $700 a month there’s no way you can afford your own private sanitation.”
Thigpen also pointed out that between 2002 and 2008, the State of Alabama prosecuted many residents who could not afford to install septic systems. Thigpen recounted the case of an elderly woman who was jailed for a weekend after she was unable to install a new septic tank; the installation would have cost more than her annual income.
“People...don’t like to speak out as they’re worried the Health Department will come round [sic] and cause trouble,” Thigpen stated.
Flowers reported that 80 percent of Lowndes County is without municipal sewer systems. In the absence of such systems, people are required to install and maintain their own septic tanks. In a location such as Lowndes County, however, very few people can afford to install any septic system—much less one sophisticated enough to deal with the water retention of the area soil.
The poverty and lack of infrastructure in Lowndes County is neither incidental nor accidental, and the urgent state of its sewage disposal issue is not the only evidence for that.
Lowndes County was known as “Bloody Lowndes” during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, home to a large proportion of disenfranchised African Americans whose demand for voting rights was met with police violence and the state’s intentional destruction of roads, ferries, and public transit that might allow poor residents to make it to the voting polls. Older residents recount how the homes of black residents were shot up or set on fire to dissuade them from voting; law enforcement either turned a blind eye or actively encouraged such acts.
Voting rights remain an issue in Lowndes County. Philip Alston and his team made their final stop in Alabama at the home of Pattie Mae Ansley in Fort Deposit. The 96-year-old Ansley told Alston how her house was “shot up” in 1965, after the Voting Rights Act was ratified. Her children spoke to Alston privately about their experiences with obtaining a voter ID card and the difficulty of getting to the polls.
Flowers pointed out that access to the polls is not the only issue. “People are frustrated because people are getting into office who aren’t doing what the people elected them to do,” she told AL.com.
Alston rightly points out that access to decent sanitation, like voting rights, is a human rights issue. However, the Republican Party stands poised to pass a tax bill that will overwhelmingly place the country’s tax burden onto the backs of the poor while subsidizing the wealthiest, exacerbating the social problems seen in Alabama.
Moreover, the budget proposed by President Donald Trump drastically cuts spending for creating new infrastructure or for upgrading outdated infrastructure; to the contrary, it places social infrastructure at the mercy of private entrepreneurs. Lowndes County and its abominable lack of sewage disposal stands as an example of how such a system, which Alabama’s government has faithfully embraced since the 1960s, utterly fails to addresses even dire social issues.
As this article was being written, Alabamians were waiting for the results of a special election to determine whether Republican Roy Moore or Democrat Doug Jones would take the hotly contested US Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Sessions. Moore is an openly fascistic, antidemocratic candidate, well-known as a highly partial judge who supports restricting voting rights.
Nevertheless, the Jones campaign refused to mount an attack upon either Moore’s viciously antidemocratic positions or the failure of the Republican Party’s history within the State of Alabama, which has orchestrated massive cuts to public programs.
The NSTM released its study in September. Jones’ campaign has had ample time to answer to the damning report on social conditions in Lowndes and Butler Counties. Nevertheless, the Democrats persisted in running a right-wing pro-business campaign against Moore focused solely on allegations of sexual misconduct, ignoring the poverty that will only continue to fester in the Black Belt along with hookworm and E. c oli infections.
The reason for such an abject lack of concern for the conditions of workers in the Democrats’ campaign in Alabama is clear; it does not concern them, and they cannot offer an answer to it. Neither party represents the interest of Alabama’s working-class residents. To resolve the social problems they confront, workers in Alabama and throughout the US must reject both parties of big business just as surely as those parties have rejected them, and stand united with their counterparts worldwide in fighting for a socialist program.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... a-d13.html
By Eric London
18 December 2017
On Friday, United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston published a report on poverty and democratic rights in the United States titled “Statement on Visit to the USA.”
In 1831, the French intellectual and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States and compiled notes on what he saw, publishing an optimistic report titled Democracy in America. One hundred and eighty six years later, Alston, an Australian academic and New York University professor, traveled through a country in the throes of a social catastrophe. His report might well be titled Destitution in America .
Alston recently concluded his trip through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington DC, visiting working-class neighborhoods and talking with experts and local officials.
“I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks,” he writes. “I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.”
His concludes that the government does not recognize “rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”
Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, with 18.5 million living in deep poverty. The US infant mortality rate is the highest in the developed world. Obesity is rampant. The US is 36th in the world in access to water and sanitation. Its incarceration rate is the highest in the world. Youth poverty is nearly double the rest of the industrialized world. “Neglected tropical diseases” are “increasingly common.”
Hookworm is spreading in poor areas of Alabama as sewage flows openly through homes and streets. The US is 35th out of 37 among all industrialized countries in terms of inequality and poverty.
The UN report suggests that poverty and inequality are the product of the domination of the political system by a corporate oligarchy. “Successive administrations, including the present one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights,” Alston notes.
His statement begins:
“My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by the president and Speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”
The report notes that at the federal level, proposals to cut Medicare will be “disastrous.” Underfunding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will “have devastating [effects] on the health of millions of poor children.” If funding for the Federal Qualified Health Centers (FQCHs) is eliminated, “9 million patients could lose access to primary and preventative care.”
Alston describes a situation where the police, courts and public agencies treat impoverished workers like criminals. “In many cities and counties the criminal justice system is effectively a system for keeping the poor in poverty while generating revenue to fund not only the justice system but diverse other programs,” he writes.
Over 730,000 people are in jail, “of whom almost two-thirds are awaiting trial, and thus presumed to be innocent.” The government sets bail at extremely high levels, “which means that wealthy defendants can secure their freedom, while poor defendants are likely to stay in jail.”
Intrusive policing policies for welfare, food stamps and other public benefits include forcing workers to undergo drug tests, in-home inspections and other humiliating procedures.
“Calls for welfare reform take place against a constant drumbeat of allegations of widespread fraud in the system,” Alston writes. “The contrast with tax reform is instructive. In that context, immense faith is placed in the good will and altruism of the corporate beneficiaries, while with welfare reform the opposite assumptions apply.”
Alston rejects the notion that poverty is primarily a racial issue. “The poor,” he says, “are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants.’ The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks… The face of poverty in America is not only Black or Hispanic, but also White, Asian and many other colors.”
Child poverty is widespread across races: “Contrary to the stereotypical assumptions, 31 percent of poor children are White, 24 percent are Black, 36 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are indigenous.”
Conditions for Native Americans, ignored by Black Lives Matter and other identity politics groups, are particularly deplorable. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, conditions are “comparable to Haiti... Nine lives have been lost there to suicide in the last three months, including one six-year-old. Nevertheless, federally funded programs aimed at suicide prevention have been de-funded.”
The growth of inequality has “steadily undermined” democratic forms of rule, Alston writes. In fact, democracy is incompatible with the ruling class’s efforts to expand and protect its wealth at the expense of the working class. This process is not accidental, but the product of the policies implemented by both major capitalist parties, whose aim over recent decades has been to eviscerate all benefits and protections won by the working class through more than a century of social struggle.
The corporate-controlled media is complicit in the growth of inequality and poverty. This shocking and disturbing UN report, which speaks frankly of the immense levels of economic inequality and destitution in America, reflecting the stark class divide that dominates US social and political life, has barely been reported by the establishment broadcast and print media. Meanwhile, the same media outlets are devoting endless coverage to allegations of sexual harassment made for the most part by wealthy and privileged women against prominent figures in the worlds of entertainment, the arts and politics.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... e-d18.html
UN rapporteur reports extreme poverty “unseen in the first world” in Alabama
By Shelley Connor
13 December 2017
A United Nation team’s tour of Alabama last week exposed what many Alabama residents have known for decades: residents of the state’s Black Belt region are suffering in social conditions most frequently encountered in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Notably, Lowndes County, the home of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, suffers from poor sewage disposal and resultant hookworm infection otherwise unknown in the United States.
Phillip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, witnessed communities where raw sewage flows into open pits or into surrounding creeks and streams.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World,” Alston said to reporters as he toured Butler County in South Alabama. “This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.”
Alston visited communities in Lowndes and Butler Counties last Thursday, accompanied by local activists. These counties are located in the so-called Black Belt, named for the rich loam that stretches throughout the Deep South States.
The region’s fertile soil, along with its steamy, subtropical climate, made it the epicenter of the Antebellum South’s cotton-growing industry. Today, it is known for its entrenched poverty and appalling social conditions. The lack of sewage disposal and the related occurrence of gastrointestinal pathogens in the Black Belt are but two startling indicators of those conditions.
In Lowndes and Butler Counties, residents frequently struggle with gastrointestinal diseases such as E. coli. Many of those who are not diagnosed have reported in the past to health officials that they suffer from frequent or protracted bouts of vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea.
Lowndes County activist Aaron Thigpen took Alston and his team to a property inhabited by members of Thigpen’s extended family. The house had no functioning septic system; the family, which includes two minor children, relies upon PVC pipes to direct the household sewage into an open-air, aboveground pool.
As Thigpen pointed out, the main water line lies in close proximity to the improvised sewage system. Should the water main become open, everyone in the house “gets sick all at once,” as Thigpen told Alston.
He also took Alston to a community in Butler County, where he showed the UN team an entire community where man-made ditches carry effluent into a nearby creek.
“It’s really bad when you’ve got a lot of kids around like there are here,” Thigpen told AL.com. “They’re playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don’t know the importance of not handling sewage.”
Another Butler County resident showed Alston where his outdated septic system leaches raw sewage into the soil and bubbles up into his yard. A significant flood would send this raw sewage into the house, exposing all residents therein to coliform bacteria and parasites.
In September, the National School of Tropical Medicine (NSTM) at Baylor University published a study that revealed serious sanitation deficits in Lowndes County. Three-quarters of study participants reported that raw sewage had managed to reenter their houses, either because of heavy rainfall or clogs in improvised sewage disposal systems.
The problem is not entirely unknown: in 2011, the Alabama Department of Public Health reported that the number of households with no sewage disposal or inadequate sewage disposal ranged from 40 to 90 percent. The ADPH further reported that 50 percent of homes with on-site sewage containment systems had systems that were failing or expected to fail within the near future.
The loamy soil and hot, humid weather that made cotton farming such a profitable endeavor in the Deep South provides a perfect breeding environment for Necator americanus, a species of hookworm that lays its eggs in the intestines of those it infects. In a place like Lowndes or Butler County, where raw sewage seeps into poorly draining soil, the eggs deposited through sewage have a warm and hospitable locale to incubate, hatch and reproduce. A person unwittingly walking through a soil where hookworms have incubated can become infected when one or more worm enters their body, usually through bare feet and exposed ankles.
According to the NSTM study, 19 of 55 participants tested positive for the parasite, which causes stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea. As infection progresses, severe anemia frequently leads to fatigue and cognitive disabilities; in some cases, particularly among the very young, the very old, and the immune-compromised, it leads to death.
Hookworm infections were largely eradicated from the United States between the 1950s and the 1980s due to social programs that addressed both sanitation infrastructure and community health. The parasite is mainly associated with extreme poverty in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, and many infectious disease researchers had assumed that it no longer existed in the US at all.
The Baylor study would not have occurred had Catherine Flowers, the founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise in Montgomery, Alabama, not prevailed upon the NSTM to investigate the situation in Lowndes County.
“Hookworm is a 19th-century disease that should have by now been addressed,” Flowers told the Guardian in September, “yet we are still struggling with it in the United States in the 21st Century.” As NSTM researchers pointed out to the Guardian, the discovery of hookworms in Lowndes County highlights the need for further research throughout the United States.
The incidence of hookworm is clearly tied both to poverty and to blatant malfeasance on the part of local, state and federal governments. In Lowndes County, the annual median household makes a mere $30,225 yearly. According to the 2010 US Census, over 25 percent of county residents live below the poverty line. For a family that earns less than $2000 a month, the cost of a new septic system—which can cost up to $15,000 to install—is prohibitively high.
Speaking to the Guardian in September, Aaron Thigpen pointed out that, while people are “disgusted” by having to live near raw sewage, “there’s no public help for them and if you’re earning $700 a month there’s no way you can afford your own private sanitation.”
Thigpen also pointed out that between 2002 and 2008, the State of Alabama prosecuted many residents who could not afford to install septic systems. Thigpen recounted the case of an elderly woman who was jailed for a weekend after she was unable to install a new septic tank; the installation would have cost more than her annual income.
“People...don’t like to speak out as they’re worried the Health Department will come round [sic] and cause trouble,” Thigpen stated.
Flowers reported that 80 percent of Lowndes County is without municipal sewer systems. In the absence of such systems, people are required to install and maintain their own septic tanks. In a location such as Lowndes County, however, very few people can afford to install any septic system—much less one sophisticated enough to deal with the water retention of the area soil.
The poverty and lack of infrastructure in Lowndes County is neither incidental nor accidental, and the urgent state of its sewage disposal issue is not the only evidence for that.
Lowndes County was known as “Bloody Lowndes” during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, home to a large proportion of disenfranchised African Americans whose demand for voting rights was met with police violence and the state’s intentional destruction of roads, ferries, and public transit that might allow poor residents to make it to the voting polls. Older residents recount how the homes of black residents were shot up or set on fire to dissuade them from voting; law enforcement either turned a blind eye or actively encouraged such acts.
Voting rights remain an issue in Lowndes County. Philip Alston and his team made their final stop in Alabama at the home of Pattie Mae Ansley in Fort Deposit. The 96-year-old Ansley told Alston how her house was “shot up” in 1965, after the Voting Rights Act was ratified. Her children spoke to Alston privately about their experiences with obtaining a voter ID card and the difficulty of getting to the polls.
Flowers pointed out that access to the polls is not the only issue. “People are frustrated because people are getting into office who aren’t doing what the people elected them to do,” she told AL.com.
Alston rightly points out that access to decent sanitation, like voting rights, is a human rights issue. However, the Republican Party stands poised to pass a tax bill that will overwhelmingly place the country’s tax burden onto the backs of the poor while subsidizing the wealthiest, exacerbating the social problems seen in Alabama.
Moreover, the budget proposed by President Donald Trump drastically cuts spending for creating new infrastructure or for upgrading outdated infrastructure; to the contrary, it places social infrastructure at the mercy of private entrepreneurs. Lowndes County and its abominable lack of sewage disposal stands as an example of how such a system, which Alabama’s government has faithfully embraced since the 1960s, utterly fails to addresses even dire social issues.
As this article was being written, Alabamians were waiting for the results of a special election to determine whether Republican Roy Moore or Democrat Doug Jones would take the hotly contested US Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Sessions. Moore is an openly fascistic, antidemocratic candidate, well-known as a highly partial judge who supports restricting voting rights.
Nevertheless, the Jones campaign refused to mount an attack upon either Moore’s viciously antidemocratic positions or the failure of the Republican Party’s history within the State of Alabama, which has orchestrated massive cuts to public programs.
The NSTM released its study in September. Jones’ campaign has had ample time to answer to the damning report on social conditions in Lowndes and Butler Counties. Nevertheless, the Democrats persisted in running a right-wing pro-business campaign against Moore focused solely on allegations of sexual misconduct, ignoring the poverty that will only continue to fester in the Black Belt along with hookworm and E. c oli infections.
The reason for such an abject lack of concern for the conditions of workers in the Democrats’ campaign in Alabama is clear; it does not concern them, and they cannot offer an answer to it. Neither party represents the interest of Alabama’s working-class residents. To resolve the social problems they confront, workers in Alabama and throughout the US must reject both parties of big business just as surely as those parties have rejected them, and stand united with their counterparts worldwide in fighting for a socialist program.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... a-d13.html
Re: Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur
Sunday, December 17, 2017
United States of America: The World Champion of Extreme Inequality (UN Special Report)
"Today's United States has proved itself exceptional in ways shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights," the United Nations reports.
The United States – one of the world's richest and most powerful countries – is being transformed by President Donald Trump and his Republican Congress into the "world champion of inequality," according to a scathing new report by the United Nations' monitor on extreme poverty and human rights.
Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, an Australian academic and law professor at New York University, completed a 15-day fact-finding mission spanning California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico and West Virginia before making his findings public late last week.
He concluded that "instead of realizing its founders' admirable commitments, today's United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound."
Alston, who spent time with both public officials and people living in extreme poverty, also dispelled the popular myth that the poor are derived exclusively from ethnic minority groups.
There are, according to his report, eight million more white people than African-Americans living below the poverty threshhold. "The face of poverty in America is not only black or Hispanic, but also white, Asian and many other colors," Alston writes.
He also noted common misconceptions among elected officials about the difference between rich and poor, including the notion that "the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success [while] the poor are wasters, losers and scammers.
"Despite the fact that this is contradicted by the facts, some of the politicians and political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smartphones, all paid for by welfare."
Among the most alarming findings in Alston's report is his conclusion regarding Trump's proposed tax reforms, of which he writes: "The proposed tax-reform package stakes out America's bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans.
"The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes."
Other key indicators in the report include the fact that Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the "health gap" between the United States and its peer countries continues to grow.
The report also notes that inequality levels in the United States are far higher than those in most European countries; that 25% of young people live in poverty compared to less than 14% across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
As Alston observes: "The United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and technologically innovative countries, but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty."
U.N. Official Shocked by Toxic Conditions in US Black Belt: "Worst Poverty" in First World.
Extreme poverty, environmental degradation and toxic hazards in poor communities in the United States are facing increased international scrutiny following an inspection of rural Alabama communities by a United Nations official. The conditions struck the official as shocking and completely out of step with prevailing conditions in the wealthy, developed world.
The tour by Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has cast a light on an issue known well to poverty-blighted communities and oppressed nationalities in the U.S.: inequitable local policies that safeguard environmental racism by literally concentrating toxic hazards in the backyards of the poor.
“Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States. But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality,” Alston said.
The U.N. official's tour aims to provide transparency to the human rights violations, destitution, and lack of access to crucial basic services that have blighted oppressed communities throughout the United States. U.N. investigators have also toured cities and towns in California and Alabama, as well as Washington, D.C., West Virginia and the colonial territory of Puerto Rico.
According to Alston, the level of degradation he found can only be compared to the disparities that exist in the poor peripheries of the global economy – where the vast majority of people have known little besides maldevelopment, impoverishment and the institutional violence of inequality.
During a tour of a rural Butler County community, Alston witnessed "raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits," with one home's water line running straight through the fetid outdoor pool.
"I think it's very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I'd have to say that I haven't seen this," Alston commented.
Prior to the Civil War, the southern Alabama region was a cotton-farming area where antebellum plantation owners exploited the labor of thousands of Black slaves on vast estates.
In a fitting and sadly typical sign of the long history of racist terror and institutionalized discrimination in Butler County, the county seat lies a mere two-minute drive from Confederate Park, where a 16-foot marble Confederate soldier has overseen local affairs since 1903.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that nearly 41 million people in the U.S. live in poverty, ranking the country as the second-highest in terms of poverty rates among wealthy countries.
The income disparities and general dispossession of oppressed nationalities such as Black, Native American and Latino communities are reflected by a denial of civil rights, disproportionate levels of exposure to hazardous industrial waste and effluvia, as well as displacement and subjugation at the hands of local authorities who often shoot first and ask questions later.
The violence of grinding poverty in the United States has spawned disease outbreaks in the United States that are more typical of nations with substandard sanitary conditions. In recent weeks, Hepatitis A outbreaks have been reported in San Diego, Maine and Southeast Michigan.
In Butler County and Lowndes County, Alston also investigated a recent outbreak of E. Coli and Hookworm – the latter of which is a “19th-century disease” commonly found in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to The Guardian.
While health experts assumed that basic advances in sanitation caused hookworm to disappear in the 1980s, recent studies reveal that the parasitic disease continues to thrive on a breathtaking scale – especially in areas like Lowndes County, an impoverished region lacking waste disposal infrastructure where 73 percent of the majority-Black population have reported raw sewage inundating their homes due to faulty septic tanks.
The prevalence of such diseases is also rooted in a lack of consistent access to clean drinking water, which is often contaminated by the raw sewage effluence from homes that is spread across forests and grassy fields whenever it rains, “spreading the waste and the pathogens it contains, generating toxic conditions, repulsive visuals and an overwhelming stench,” according to Al.com.
"These two pipes are the raw sewage pipes coming from the house. And you've got your main water line here, and it may have a hole in it, so everyone gets sick all at once," local resident and activist Aaron Thigpen said.
"It's really bad when you've got a lot of kids around like there are here. They're playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don't know the importance of not handling sewage," he added.
Alston was blistering in his assessment of state and local authorities' brazen negligence of residents' needs for basic human services and their disinterest in minimizing environmental harm to poor communities.
“There is a human right for people to live decently, and that means the government has an obligation to provide people with the essentials of life, which include power, water and sewage service. But if the government says, ‘oh no, we’re not going to do it,’ and leaves you to install very expensive septic tanks, that’s not how it should work,” Alston said.
Alston stressed that governments play an instrumental role in addressing the environmental inequalities, illnesses arising from exposure to hazardous waste, and other toxic byproducts of systemic racism.
In spite of such clear threats to public safety and social rights, however, the Republican Party is set to pass a tax bill that will shred what remains of U.S. residents' nearly-nonexistent social safety net, while the Democratic Party has offered little more than lip service in its lackadaisical “resistance” to the offensive being waged by the ultra-rich in the era of Trump.
“The idea of human rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of the government — yes, the government! — to ensure that no one falls below the decent level,” he said.
“Civilized society doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you can’t, bad luck.”
https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/1 ... on_17.html
United States of America: The World Champion of Extreme Inequality (UN Special Report)
"Today's United States has proved itself exceptional in ways shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights," the United Nations reports.
The United States – one of the world's richest and most powerful countries – is being transformed by President Donald Trump and his Republican Congress into the "world champion of inequality," according to a scathing new report by the United Nations' monitor on extreme poverty and human rights.
Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, an Australian academic and law professor at New York University, completed a 15-day fact-finding mission spanning California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico and West Virginia before making his findings public late last week.
He concluded that "instead of realizing its founders' admirable commitments, today's United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound."
Alston, who spent time with both public officials and people living in extreme poverty, also dispelled the popular myth that the poor are derived exclusively from ethnic minority groups.
There are, according to his report, eight million more white people than African-Americans living below the poverty threshhold. "The face of poverty in America is not only black or Hispanic, but also white, Asian and many other colors," Alston writes.
He also noted common misconceptions among elected officials about the difference between rich and poor, including the notion that "the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success [while] the poor are wasters, losers and scammers.
"Despite the fact that this is contradicted by the facts, some of the politicians and political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smartphones, all paid for by welfare."
Among the most alarming findings in Alston's report is his conclusion regarding Trump's proposed tax reforms, of which he writes: "The proposed tax-reform package stakes out America's bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans.
"The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes."
Other key indicators in the report include the fact that Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the "health gap" between the United States and its peer countries continues to grow.
The report also notes that inequality levels in the United States are far higher than those in most European countries; that 25% of young people live in poverty compared to less than 14% across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
As Alston observes: "The United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and technologically innovative countries, but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty."
U.N. Official Shocked by Toxic Conditions in US Black Belt: "Worst Poverty" in First World.
Extreme poverty, environmental degradation and toxic hazards in poor communities in the United States are facing increased international scrutiny following an inspection of rural Alabama communities by a United Nations official. The conditions struck the official as shocking and completely out of step with prevailing conditions in the wealthy, developed world.
The tour by Philip Alston, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has cast a light on an issue known well to poverty-blighted communities and oppressed nationalities in the U.S.: inequitable local policies that safeguard environmental racism by literally concentrating toxic hazards in the backyards of the poor.
“Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States. But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality,” Alston said.
The U.N. official's tour aims to provide transparency to the human rights violations, destitution, and lack of access to crucial basic services that have blighted oppressed communities throughout the United States. U.N. investigators have also toured cities and towns in California and Alabama, as well as Washington, D.C., West Virginia and the colonial territory of Puerto Rico.
According to Alston, the level of degradation he found can only be compared to the disparities that exist in the poor peripheries of the global economy – where the vast majority of people have known little besides maldevelopment, impoverishment and the institutional violence of inequality.
During a tour of a rural Butler County community, Alston witnessed "raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits," with one home's water line running straight through the fetid outdoor pool.
"I think it's very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I'd have to say that I haven't seen this," Alston commented.
Prior to the Civil War, the southern Alabama region was a cotton-farming area where antebellum plantation owners exploited the labor of thousands of Black slaves on vast estates.
In a fitting and sadly typical sign of the long history of racist terror and institutionalized discrimination in Butler County, the county seat lies a mere two-minute drive from Confederate Park, where a 16-foot marble Confederate soldier has overseen local affairs since 1903.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that nearly 41 million people in the U.S. live in poverty, ranking the country as the second-highest in terms of poverty rates among wealthy countries.
The income disparities and general dispossession of oppressed nationalities such as Black, Native American and Latino communities are reflected by a denial of civil rights, disproportionate levels of exposure to hazardous industrial waste and effluvia, as well as displacement and subjugation at the hands of local authorities who often shoot first and ask questions later.
The violence of grinding poverty in the United States has spawned disease outbreaks in the United States that are more typical of nations with substandard sanitary conditions. In recent weeks, Hepatitis A outbreaks have been reported in San Diego, Maine and Southeast Michigan.
In Butler County and Lowndes County, Alston also investigated a recent outbreak of E. Coli and Hookworm – the latter of which is a “19th-century disease” commonly found in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, according to The Guardian.
While health experts assumed that basic advances in sanitation caused hookworm to disappear in the 1980s, recent studies reveal that the parasitic disease continues to thrive on a breathtaking scale – especially in areas like Lowndes County, an impoverished region lacking waste disposal infrastructure where 73 percent of the majority-Black population have reported raw sewage inundating their homes due to faulty septic tanks.
The prevalence of such diseases is also rooted in a lack of consistent access to clean drinking water, which is often contaminated by the raw sewage effluence from homes that is spread across forests and grassy fields whenever it rains, “spreading the waste and the pathogens it contains, generating toxic conditions, repulsive visuals and an overwhelming stench,” according to Al.com.
"These two pipes are the raw sewage pipes coming from the house. And you've got your main water line here, and it may have a hole in it, so everyone gets sick all at once," local resident and activist Aaron Thigpen said.
"It's really bad when you've got a lot of kids around like there are here. They're playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don't know the importance of not handling sewage," he added.
Alston was blistering in his assessment of state and local authorities' brazen negligence of residents' needs for basic human services and their disinterest in minimizing environmental harm to poor communities.
“There is a human right for people to live decently, and that means the government has an obligation to provide people with the essentials of life, which include power, water and sewage service. But if the government says, ‘oh no, we’re not going to do it,’ and leaves you to install very expensive septic tanks, that’s not how it should work,” Alston said.
Alston stressed that governments play an instrumental role in addressing the environmental inequalities, illnesses arising from exposure to hazardous waste, and other toxic byproducts of systemic racism.
In spite of such clear threats to public safety and social rights, however, the Republican Party is set to pass a tax bill that will shred what remains of U.S. residents' nearly-nonexistent social safety net, while the Democratic Party has offered little more than lip service in its lackadaisical “resistance” to the offensive being waged by the ultra-rich in the era of Trump.
“The idea of human rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of the government — yes, the government! — to ensure that no one falls below the decent level,” he said.
“Civilized society doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you can’t, bad luck.”
https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/1 ... on_17.html