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Republicans are racing to pass a tax cut scam that will place many more of the people who voted for them in poverty. America criticizes third world countries for their poverty and human rights violations yet for more than 41 million Americans and growing; there is no difference. This foreign reporter’s cataloging our poverty is astounding.
When one points fingers there are at least pointing back. American poverty is growing, and the disregard with which we treat it is a human rights violation.
The article in The Guardian titled “A Journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America” is jaw-dropping.
The UN’s Philip Alston is an expert on deprivation – and he wants to know why 41m Americans are living in poverty. The Guardian joined him on a special two-week mission into the dark heart of the world’s richest nation. …
So begins a two-week journey into the dark side of the American Dream. The spotlight of the UN monitor, an independent arbiter of human rights standards across the globe, has fallen on this occasion on the US, culminating on Friday with the release of his initial report in Washington. His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty. Of those, nine million have zero cash income – they do not receive a cent in sustenance.
Alston’s epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of America’s reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.
And Alston added a little justifiable dig to our country.
Think of it as payback time. As the UN special rapporteur himself put it: “Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time I’m in the US.”
Alston showed that the American poverty is ever present, whether rural, urban, or colonial. The heart touching stories he got as went through America’s poor areas leaves tears in one’s eyes. What is most disgusting is this is a poverty that does not hide from most of us. And yet, we continue to elect politicians that exacerbate the problem.
The Guardian did not miss that reality.
The tour comes at a critical moment for America and the world. It began on the day that Republicans in the US Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet – owning as much as half of the entire American people.
A few days into the UN visit, Republican leaders took a giant leap further. They announced plans to slash key social programs in what amounts to an assault on the already threadbare welfare state.
The Republican Congress is about to exacerbate the generational theft that has been occurring since the inception of trickle-down economics, voodoo economics. One can only hope that Millennials and Generation Xers would organically skip work, school, or anything else they have to do, and all carpool to Washington DC and stop politicians from executing this heist. Americans should be out in force the streets is force about this theft.
Read The Guardian article. At the rate the politicians are robbing Americans, it will be the future of many.
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