MMFA: Conservatives Can’t Decide If Obama Was Too Busy Golfing Or Biking To Stop The Earthquake — Following the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook the D.C. region last afternoon, conservative media figures have responded the only way they know how: by twisting it into an attack on Obama’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. [ READ MORE ]
Fox Defaulted To Bad Economic Policy During Debt Ceiling Debate: During the debt ceiling debate, Fox relentlessly pushed economic policies and positions that experts have said would be harmful to the economy, including downplaying default concerns, openly advocating for default and a credit downgrade, and actively lobbying for a balanced budget amendment. [ READ MORE ]
Elsewhere at MSNBC, the resident bigot, white supremacist Patrick J. Buchanan — while on Al Sharpton’s 6 PM show discussing President Obama’s debt deal — referred to the president as “Your Boy:”
“And let me tell you, your boy, Barack Obama, caved in on it in 2010 and he’ll cave in on it again,” he said.
Sharpton pounced.
“My what? My president, Barack Obama? What did you say?” he asked. “He’s your boy in the ring, he’s your fighter,” Buchanan responded.
“He’s nobody’s boy,” Sharpton thundered back. “He’s your president and he’s our president. And that’s what y’all have got to get through your head.”
Sensing an opportunity to help her maintain relevance, the former ½ governor of Alaska, serial ding-bat Sarah ‘DEATH’ Palin — threw in her racist hat. Apparently, vice president Joe Biden or a staffer had referred to the tea-bagging debt-ceiling hostage takers as — terrorists, which indeed they are — home grown domestic terrorists. Bone-crushing hyenas, for good measure.
Dingbat Sarah pounced — and went straight to her favorite Fox anchor — the relentless, syphilitic liar Sean Hannitya.k.a Sean KLANnity, to unearth her despicable 2008 claim that “Obama is Paling Around With Terrorists”
½ Governor, DingBat Sarah Palin Plays The Terror Card on Obama, Invokes Bill Ayers!
On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity attacked President Obama for hosting a birthday fundraiser, claiming that Obama was “turning his back on the American people” at a time when the nation is struggling with debt and a slow economy.
During the segment, Hannity aired a graphic prepared by the “Fox News Brainroom” that claimed Obama had headlined 37 “re-election fundraisers” “to date,” while President George W. Bush had only headlined three fundraisers “as of June 2003.” [ READ MORE ]
Racist & Personal: GOP’s Contemptible Disrespect of Obama Goes Beyond The Debt Fight
Countdown with Keith Olbermann: Worst Persons: Martin, Buchanan, Lamborn
Limbaugh Criticizes Republicans For Accepting Default Deal: “We Could Have Hung All Of This On Obama“
Bolling Laments “Horrendous Economy” Inherited By Reagan, But Ignores Severity Of Recession Obama Inherited
Fox Ties Someone’s Interpretation Of The Three Little Pigs To Obama Trying To “Share The Sacrifice“
Gutfeld Compares Panel Created By Debt Deal To “Fatal Attraction When You Thought Glenn Close Was Dead”
Bolling Attacks Obama For Giving Bin Laden A “Muslim-Approved Burial“
By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez John McCain said there was ‘substantial evidence‘ linking wildfires in Arizona to illegal immigrants. The Arizona senator accuses Mexican immigrants of starting wildfires, but he is fanning the flames himself – of prejudice.
Does it surprise anyone that Arizona Senator John McCain has blamed undocumented immigrants for the wildfires in his state?
Hard economic times drives desperate people to do desperate things. Throw in the subject of immigration and a little bit of xenophobia … and shazzam! You have the recipe for a political ideology: blame the Mexicans! Send that recipe into Arizona and you have the perfect storm:
• Uneducated and unable to find a [high-paying] job? Blame the Mexicans.
• Social security and Medicare going broke? Yup, it’s the Mexicans.
• Terrorism in the Middle East has you up at night? Blame the Mexicans for your insomnia, send troops and wall the US-Mexico border.
• Crime, drug usage and communicable diseases on the rise? You know the answer.
Blaming Mexicans, or “illegal aliens”, is a tradition here; and in Georgia and Alabama, too … the whole country, really. Last year, McCain claimed that “illegal aliens” were intentionally causing accidents on freeways.
American XENOPHOBIA: Anti-Immigrant FEAR, HATE and LOATHING
[CLICK PLAYLIST FOR MENU]
McCain’s charges read like comedy but here in Arizona, immigration is serious business – and so is scapegoating. It is [Sheriff Joe] Arpaio country, where racial profiling is American as apple pie. It is this state that gave us SB 1070 – based in large part on the unproven allegation that Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was killed by “illegal aliens”. Amazingly, another whopper was conjured up one week after SB 1070 was signed – that a Pinal County sheriff’s deputy had been shot by Mexican drug smugglers (the incident was self-inflicted). And two weeks before SB 1070 was set to go into effect, Governor Jan Brewer began to warn people about finding headless bodies in the Arizona desert. But the fantastical tales don’t end there: in this state, it’s not even that Mexican migrants are falsely blamed for real problems; they are also blamed for invented problems. Dana Milbank from the Washington Post writes about this:
“Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world’s No 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.”
Per the FBI, we know that the border region is safer than it was a decade ago, and that many of the safest US cities are along the US-Mexico border. But when it comes to fueling xenophobia in this country, facts never get in the way.
For example, Tucson’s highly successful Mexican American Studies programme is on the verge of being eliminated because our current attorney general, Tom Horne, has long maintained that the classes foment revolution (“Viva Che!”). A recent independent audit found all the charges against the programme to be false.
“Illegal aliens” causing Arizona wildfires? While the US Forest Service has made no such claim, McCain and his ideological supporters would have us accept his speculation as fact. What’s next? Blaming Mexicans for increased sun spot activity?
Reckless ‘Psycho Talk‘: 2008 Loser John McCain Blames Immigrants For Arizona Wildfires
Playlist: ‘Apartheid’ States in The U.S.
Playlist: American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia
Playlist: American Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia — Immigrants For Sale
Aliens vs. Senator: Puppet John McCain blames illegal immigrants for starting the wildfires in Arizona, hiding his remote and taking his reading glasses.
“This draconian initiative signed into law this morning by Gov. Robert Bentley is so oppressive that even Bull Connor himself would be impressed,” said Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, referring to Birmingham’s notorious segregationist public safety commissioner from the civil rights era. “HB 56 is designed to do nothing more than terrorize the state’s Latino community.”
The Alabama immigration law, which is set to go into effect on Sept. 1, follows Arizona’s lead in requiring police to ask for legal documents if they reasonably suspect someone is in the country illegally.
But the Alabama law goes one step further than SB 1070, which was passed last year and then challenged by the federal government. The Alabama law requires schools to check the citizenship of their students — even though undocumented children are allowed, under law, to attend K-12 schools — and penalizes businesses if they do not check immigration status. It also forbids drivers from transporting undocumented immigrants, even though Alabama does not allow people without proper papers to get driver’s licenses and transport themselves. [ READ MORE ]
Analyses of global poverty often focus on a narrow concept of economic poverty, which is measured by income, consumption or wealth. Accordingly, an individual who does not have an access to food that provides a standard minimum daily energy requirement or lives on an income of less than US$ 1.25 per day, or does not own any significant asset of one or another sort is regarded as poor. Poverty is also measured by lack of access to basic social services such as basic education, health, water and sanitation. Gender inequality has also been adopted as an important indicator of poverty in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of several developing economies.
In line with the above view, the World Bank defines poverty as ‘pronounced deprivation in well-being, including low incomes and the inability to acquire the basic goods and services necessary for survival with dignity. It also encompasses low levels of health and education, poor access to clean water and sanitation, inadequate physical security, lack of voice, and insufficient capacity and opportunity to better one’s life.’
While economic poverty and lack of access to basic social services distinguish the haves from the have-nots and reflect the world’s primary concern about global poverty, there are other apparently more subtle forms of poverty that transcend all income levels, classes, and societies. These include, among others, lack of self control (poverty of will); racial, religious, and ethnic prejudices often leading to xenophobia and racism (which we shall call cognitive poverty); and often controversial spiritual poverty (lack of relationship with God). We term these types of poverty as “poverty of humanity” for analytical simplicity.
The two types of poverty are related in that the latter often reinforces the former by acting as stumbling block on efforts aimed at alleviating the former. A society where there are no democratic spaces for citizens to make independent choices that enable them to make optimal uses of their resources is bound to keep them under perpetual poverty. Likewise societies plagued by racial, religious and ethnic intolerance and perpetual hatred of any one they perceive as different from them are bound to be trapped in eternal competition, conflict and blame game that can seriously undermine efforts towards reconciliation and development.
This brief article attempts to provide an overview of the morphology of global poverty with the view of creating awareness on the critical linkages among it’s the most obvious and the hidden aspects.
Global Absolute Poverty: poverty of the poor
A decade after the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, the fight against global absolute poverty looks promising. Standard poverty is gradually falling across all regions of the world with the sharpest fall occurring in Asia. In 2010 the rate of global poverty was 15.8%, i.e. about 878.2 million people lived in poverty. Regionally, the poverty rate was the highest in sub Saharan Africa with 46.9% or 370 million people living in poverty. However, in absolute terms there are more poor people in Asia than in Africa, with poverty rate of 27.7% or 458.3 million people living in poverty. Absolute poverty has sustainably fallen in Latin America and the Caribbean with a total of 35 million people living in poverty. In Europe and central Asia about 8.4 million people lived in absolute poverty.
Poverty and power
In his book “Pedagogy of the OppressedSchool Management Books),” the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire reiterated that the contradictory coexistence of the oppressed and oppressors cannot be altered without full understanding of the dynamics that sustains this relationship and suggested that education was a key instrument to uplift the oppressed. The power of knowledge in transforming power relationships is enormous. The current revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are a testimony that higher economic growth and improved income levels do not necessarily uplift the poor. Autocracy, nepotism, corruption and a complete lack of power to voice concerns about how ones country is run seems to be at the core of the turmoil in the region. And this turmoil is fueled by an improved access to education, and particularly by the ability to make an effective us of the new advances in information and communication technology such as the social media.
Poverty and freedom
The seminal work “Development as Freedom” by Professor Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, critically exposed the severe limitations of economic policies that dwelt on growth to the neglect of social transformation. According to Professor Sen the wellbeing of humans should be placed at the center of economic development and that freedoms from poverty, hunger, malnutrition, tyranny, lack of economic opportunities, lack of access to basic social services, and oppressive political systems are both the means and the end of development.
Attempts to foster rapid rise in per capita income while consistently suppressing the voices of the citizenry will not only not ensure sustainable development but will cause serious backlash sooner or later. This mechanistic, anti- people centered development effort is often mired with corruption and misuse of nations’ limited resources due to complete lack of accountability and will ultimately fail to sustain the mechanical growth trajectories themselves and is there futile.
Poverty of Humanity
The world has made remarkable progress in addressing the poverty of the poor during the past three decades. China is a typical success story. Poverty in China fell from over 80% in 1980 to about 15% in 2005. Even sub Saharan Africa has seen progressive decline in poverty since the past decade with the number of poor far below those in fast growing Asia. However, the non obvious poverty that cuts across all income levels, classes and societies which we dubbed above as the “poverty of humanity” is unfortunately on the rise. The few types of poverty of humanity are presented below:
Poverty of the will
Today an increasing number of humans lack self control in their actions. Abuse of members of family and society is on the rise regardless of the income and social status of individuals involved. Black mailing lies and deceptions are becoming the order of the day globally. If it continues unabated, poverty of the will may cause more damage to societies than lack of basic economic and social services or absolute income poverty.
Xenophobia and racism: cognitive poverty
Xenophobia, racism, religious and ethnic prejudices are nurtured by erosion of critical social value — tolerance. As cognitively better developed animals, humans are expected to display more tolerance towards their species. While most humans still preserve this critical human value, the recent trend is worrying. Individuals and groups, who actively promote these tendencies across the globe, need to come to their senses and re-embrace tolerance for the good of humanity.
While the world has shown an increased concern about the poverty of the poor due primary to its scale and pervasiveness, cognitive poverty continues to attract little attention. This type of poverty is an antithesis to the current trend of globalization and has been exacerbated by the recent global economic downturn which deprived many of their livelihoods.
Concluding remarks
The world has made a remarkable progress in alleviating the poverty of the poor. The fastest gains in poverty reduction during the past three decades occurred in Asia with huge gains in countries like China and India. Progress in Africa has been slow but improvements have been observed since the beginning of the last decade when poverty fell below 50% for the first time.
Most of the MDG goals are expected to be achieved by 2015 in many developing countries. The world still has the capacity to eradicate poverty within the coming half decade if there is a political will. Alongside lack of political will, the most serious bottleneck remains to be the continued unfreedom faced by millions of the poor.
While eradication of the poverty of the poor remains promising, the poverty of humanity presents a lingering challenge. Governments, global and regional multilateral institutions and civil societies are encouraged to recognize the threat posed by this often hidden poverty of human society and act in unison to mitigate it.
,” the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire reiterated that the contradictory coexistence of the oppressed and oppressors cannot be altered without full understanding of the dynamics that sustains this relationship and suggested that education was a key instrument to uplift the oppressed. The power of knowledge in transforming power relationships is enormous. The current revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are a testimony that higher economic growth and improved income levels do not necessarily uplift the poor. Autocracy, nepotism, corruption and a complete lack of power to voice concerns about how ones country is run seems to be at the core of the turmoil in the region. And this turmoil is fueled by an improved access to education, and particularly by the ability to make an effective us of the new advances in information and communication technology such as the social media. 
