Siv O'Neall - Hunger Is A ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’

"Every five seconds, a child under 10 dies of hunger. – Thirty-five million people die each year from hunger or its immediate aftermath. – One billion people are permanently and severely malnourished and the situation is becoming increasingly catastrophic." (Jean Ziegler)

In his latest book “Mass Destruction – the Geopolitics of Hunger”, Jean Ziegler[1] talks about the current state of the world and the neoliberal politics of starvation of the poor, which has led to a crisis situation amounting to calculated murder. What we are witnessing today is the worst hunger crisis in human history is. And it is all because of human greed, colossal mismanagement for profit.

Professor Ziegler deals in detail with the various causes of the current worldwide hunger disaster, which could have been avoided. This crisis is not determined by fate – or, to use Ziegler’s own word – ‘La famine n’est pas une fatalité’. The world could perfectly well provide food for 12 million people, almost the double of the present population of 7 million.

Read More:

http://countercurrents.org/oneall200112.htm

Bill Quigley - Working and Poor in the USA

“Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/19-4

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo - Poverty in America: The Subject Presidential Candidates Would Prefer to Ignore

This week in Johannesburg, South Africa a mother was trampled to death as thousands of young people surged, desperate to register for university, because there are no jobs and studying seems a way of waiting out the recession.

No work makes people desperate. Just the week before a young friend in Boston who graduated last year with a management degree told me he was going back to college because he could not find work, so the hopes of young people there and here are similar. Indeed this recession is making young people poorer than older folk, and as we age and the burden on economies increases from so many gray hairs, they will never experience the prosperity we, their parents, did.

An hour before I read of the South African tragedy I listened to Tavis Smiley and Cornel West on NPR discussing poverty in America; one in two are now poor, 42 percent of American children don’t get adequate nutrition, 41 percent of African American youth can’t find work. Those figures now parallel poverty measures in South Africa.

Read More:

http://blackagendareport.com/content/poverty-america-subject-presidential-candidates-would-prefer-ignore