The U.N. finds growing numbers of Americans are living in the most impoverished circumstances.
How did we get here?
Premilla Nadasen teaches at Barnard College and is the author of "Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement" and "Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement."
'Finish all your food, my mother used to tell me. Theres a child in Africa who would love to have that food on your plate. It was an effective disciplinary approach, especially because my family is from Africa. But my experience is not unique. Images of poverty in the Third World then and now permeate American society, reassuring us about our countrys ostensible democratic promise and potential for upward mobility. What economists call extreme poverty, most Americans think, is a distant problem, a hallmark of the less developed world.
But could extreme poverty also be a feature of what is (although perhaps not for long) one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world? Quite possibly. To answer the question, the United Nations launched an investigation of extreme poverty in the United States.
Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States. His team visited Alabama, California, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The findings, released last Friday, documented homelessness, unsafe sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor. The rise in poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and women, but also large swaths of white Americans. The report concluded that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality are shockingly at odds with [the United States] immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.'>>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/12/21/extreme-poverty-returns-to-america/?