TENS of thousands of protesters gathered in central London on Saturday to demand action to combat the cost-of-living crisis.
Trade unionists and campaigners from across the country marched from Portland Place to Parliament Square for a TUC-organised rally.
Banners such as “Cut war not welfare,” “End fuel poverty” and “Insulate homes now” highlighted widespread concern over soaring bills and spiralling inflation.
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Recently on December 15 Eli Saslow wrote a very important feature in The Washington Post on the daily routine life of an elderly police constable Lennie who has been charged with the responsibility of evicting those families or persons from their homes who have not been able to pay their rent.
Essentially his daily duty during the last two decades has been to go from house to house, based on a list of those households who have lagged behind in rent payment, carrying a gun as well as handcuffs, and evict them. Astonishingly, this single police constable has evicted 20,000 Arizonans from their homes over a period of 2 decades, or 1000 per year, or about 3 per day.
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The world’s richest people got a whole lot richer during the COVID-19 crisis.
In 2021, billionaires saw the steepest increase in their share of wealth on record, according to The World Inequality Lab’s annual World Inequality Report.
The top 0.01% richest individuals — the 520,000 people who have at least $19 million — now hold 11% of the world’s wealth, up a full percentage point from 2020, the report found. Meanwhile, the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has grown from 1% in 1995 to 3% in 2021.
Read More »The world has become more unequal in income and wealth in the last 40 years. That’s according to the World Inequality Report 2022, available here. Produced by the World Inequality Lab, run by Thomas Piketty and a group of over 100 analysts from around the world, the report has the most up-to-date and complete data on the various facets of inequality worldwide: global wealth, income, gender and ecological inequality.
The report shows how in 2021, “after three decades of trade and financial globalisation, global inequalities remain extremely pronounced … about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” Although the World Inequality report found inequalities between nations had declined since the end of the cold war (mainly due to the rise in living standards in China), it said inequality had increased within most countries and had become more pronounced as a result of the global pandemic over the past two years.
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The number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014, says the Food and Agriculture Organization and other United Nations organizations. The UN organizations warn: If recent trends continue, the number of people affected by hunger will surpass 840 million by 2030, or 9.8 percent of the population. This is an alarming scenario, even without taking into account the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 (SOF) report by the UN organizations said:
➔ Current estimates are that nearly 690 million people are hungry, or 8.9 percent of the world population – up by 10 million people in one year and by nearly 60 million in five years.Read More »
On March 16, 2021, Everett City Council, Washington, a city 30 miles north of Seattle, passed a local ordinance, which will bar people from sitting or lying down in a ten-block belt of the city. The controversial ordinance passed in 5-1 vote.
The ordinance covers a section of the city’s industrial area. Violators will face either a $500 fine or 90 days imprisonment.
The majority of city council members, Everett’s mayor, and the business community in the 10-block area supported the ordinance.
The ordinance, detractors say, criminalizes and discriminates against homeless individuals.Read More »
On Thursday, February 25, President Xi Jinping in Beijing declared China’s “complete victory” against absolute poverty in the country claiming that all remaining regions afflicted with it have successfully defeated it. He hailed the achievement as a miracle of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) government’s in the last 40 years since the beginning of the reforms. He also called it the achievement of the goal of building a “moderately prosperous society” in China before the first centenary of its foundation in 1921, with the ultimate objective to build a “modern socialist society” by 2049.
This announcement also marks China achieving the UN target of eradicating world’s absolute poverty by the year 2030 a decade ahead of the schedule and before any other country.Read More »
Photo: Vikas Choudhary/CSEThis includes the 31 million people who would have moved out of poverty (measured at the international poverty line of $1.90, or Rs 139.3 per day) in 2020 in the absence of the pandemic.
The estimates are based on the forecasts from the Global Economic Prospects (GEP) made by the international financial institution in January 2021.Read More »
A British family from the film Smashing Kids, 1975. Photograph: John Garrett
John Pilger interviewed Irene Brunsden in Hackney, east London about only being able to feed her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes in 1975. Now he sees nervous women queueing at foodbanks with their children as it’s revealed 600,000 more kids are in poverty now than in 2012.
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When I first reported on child poverty in Britain, I was struck by the faces of children I spoke to, especially the eyes. They were different: watchful, fearful.
In Hackney, in 1975, I filmed Irene Brunsden’s family. Irene told me she gave her two-year-old a plate of cornflakes. “She doesn’t tell me she’s hungry, she just moans. When she moans, I know something is wrong.”Read More »
Journal of People 