Human rights: Food for a perpetuating thought ‘More on HR and poverty’
HRR 769
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about what impoverishes people, perpetuates poverty and how we need to fight against it. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–There are two categories of the rich and powerful: The haves and the have yachts. (Evan Osnos)
1. Confession: I have become addicted to one-liners. But they are so telling!
- Rising national income is no guarantee of rising human well-being.
- Once a person is above the poverty level, there is little relationship between increased consumption and increased happiness.
- We forget that there are people above the poverty line, but are still poor… (Nancy Krieger)
- A situation in which everyone is just above the edge of poverty and hunger may be tolerable and sustainable; but it is not a condition worth striving to achieve.
- The key difference between the poor and the middle class is that those in the latter have choices.
- Poverty in the USA represents a moral failing, a dishonor that society cannot forgive; it is un-American. (Henry Miller, Crazy Cock)
- The absolute poor have been said to be members of the ‘5H club’: hungry, healthless, homeless, hugless and hopeless.
- “Dying is a relief”. (Karina García R., Bristol University).
- The media fail to report that poverty is the creation of the powers that be.
‘Leaving no one behind’ or pushing/keeping some people behind?
–Why are we not reaching those left behind first? (WEMOS)
2. Consider: What does it really mean to ‘leave no one behind’, as the SDGs famously proclaimed? Communities are not forgetfully left behind! It is the neoliberal policies that systematically exclude them. (Warda Rina)
Poverty is presented as a major problem in the South without acknowledging the North’s role in producing it.
3. Do not forget: Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial and post-colonial looting. The Global North believes it knows what is best and has created a world enforcing this. (Stephen Bezruchka)
4. Further consider: Someone who works every day and full time, cannot be poor; and if s/he is, it is not her/his fault or failure; it is the system’s! The system convinced us that it was our fault, but poverty is not a sin or an individual failure: it is a failure of the state. (Marco Enriquez-Ominami)
5. We, therefore, need to shatter the myth that poverty is self-inflicted or somehow an inevitable byproduct of a global economy.
6. The current economic system commodifies people and nature and often criminalizes those rendered poor. Labor, environmental and human rights regulations are treated as impediments to free markets and are thus progressively and consistently weakened (ignored?). In essence, as somebody said: “We are not poor; we are made poor; we cannot only concentrate on fighting poverty; we need to fight against that which impoverishes us.” (escr-net)
Non-poor people today have a ‘fitness coach’, poor people a social worker (Francine Mestrum)
–Great moral principles do not help addressing poverty if people are hungry and/or without a roof over their heads.
7. Anyone who wants to fight poverty must first of all ensure that poverty is no longer being generated. Because not only do we live in an inequality-perpetuating-machine, as some authors call our economic system; we also live in a poverty factory, and that is the main factory that urgently needs to be closed.
8. All austerity programs that want (and succeed) to avoid a wealth tax or a tax on assets, work in the poverty factory. Let us face it, most anti-poverty policies do not really want to eradicate poverty; on the contrary, they want to perpetuate it in order to conceal the real problems, the growing inequality and the immense wealth that is increasing while the bottom of society is impoverished. …And with some charity added, they pretend they are doing good. After all, poverty reduction is perfectly compatible with neoliberalism…
9. Hatred and intolerance find a breeding ground in the many incongruities and red tape of current policies and in the fog raised around simple problems. Time and again, it is ordinary people who have to foot the bill for a fundamentally unjust system that outrageously promotes, allows, and tolerates gross inequalities. The best policy has done is to go in search of the poorest of the poor and to look at child poverty while the dads and mums are denied benefits. That has to stop.
Call a spade a spade
10. The focus of the battle against poverty has been on poor people themselves; the only social responsibility states and governments accept comes from their neoliberal ideology, i.e., while helping poor people is obviously a moral and political duty, they never forget that the poverty agenda is perfectly compatible with neoliberalism. This is the major reason anti-poverty policies can never succeed. The system that perpetuates poverty remains in place. The idea behind this is that as soon as people are out of extreme poverty they should buy health insurance in the private market. This being so, serious arguments emerge to question the political will to eradicate poverty and to promote development. (Just think of one country, China, that really did develop and eradicate extreme poverty and how it is vilified today by several rich countries). (the above from F. Mestrum)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com