Thread: Trump policies 'punishing and imprisoning the poor' while rewarding the rich

Trump policies 'punishing and imprisoning the poor' while rewarding the rich, says UN expert

Human rights investigator ​urges US authorities to provide healthcare and social protection to the poor

• Stephanie Nebehay
• 5 hours ago

The Independent US

At least 550,000 people are homeless in America ( FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images )


Poverty in the US is extensive and is deepening under the Trump administration whose policies seem aimed at removing the safety net from millions of poor, while rewarding the rich, a United Nations human rights investigator has found.

Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, called on US authorities to provide solid social protection and address underlying problems, rather than “punishing and imprisoning the poor”.

While welfare benefits and access to health insurance are being slashed, Donald Trump’s tax reform has awarded “financial windfalls” to the mega-rich and large companies, further increasing inequality, he said in a report.

The truth about Donald Trump’s tax cuts
US policies since president Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s have been “neglectful at best”, he said.

“But the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship,” Mr Alston said.
Almost 41 million people live in poverty, 18.5 million of them in extreme poverty, and children account for one in three poor, he said. The US has the highest youth poverty rate among industrialised countries, he added.

“Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate... and the highest obesity levels in the developed world,” Mr Alston said.

However, the data from the US Census Bureau he cited covers only the period through 2016, and he gave no comparative figures on the extent of poverty before and after Mr Trump came into office in January 2017.

Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far...


The Australian, a veteran UN rights expert and New York University law professor, will present his report to the UN Human Rights Council later this month.

It is based on his mission in December to several US states, including rural Alabama, a slum in downtown Los Angeles, California, and the US territory of Puerto Rico.

US officials in Geneva were not immediately available for comment.

Citing “shameful statistics” linked to entrenched racial discrimination, Mr Alston said African-Americans are 2.5 times more likely than whites to live in poverty and their unemployment rate is more than double. Women, Hispanics, immigrants, and indigenous people also suffer high rates.

At least 550,000 people are homeless in America, he said.

“The tax reform will worsen this situation and ensure that the United States remains the most unequal society in the developed world,” Mr Alston said. “The planned dramatic cuts in welfare will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”

The tax overhaul, which sailed through the Republican-controlled US Congress in December, permanently cut the top corporate rate to 21 per cent from 35 per cent. Tax cuts for individuals, however, are temporary and expire after 2025.

Mr Trump has said they will lead to more take-home pay for workers and have touted bonuses some workers received from their employers as evidence the law is working.

Mr Alston dismissed allegations of widespread fraud in the welfare system and criticised the US criminal justice system. It sets large bail bonds for a defendant seeking to go free pending trial, meaning wealthy suspects can afford bail while the poor remain in custody, often losing their jobs, he said.

“There is no magic recipe for eliminating extreme poverty and each level of government must make its own good-faith decisions. At the end of the day, however, particularly in a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power,” he said.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8380471.html

LOL!! The socialist bastards can't stand our tax cuts which make America competitive. Can't wait until Congress cuts the business and corporate rates to Trump's 15% or better yet, passes the FairTax. You want to watch these globalists squeal like pigs in the slaughter? You pass the FairTax. With the FairTax, we can end all tariffs and still balance our trade deficits, without paperwork, negotiation, trade wars .... so beautiful. Wake Up Mr. President!! Wake Up Congresscritters!! Wake Up America!!!

FairTax Act of 2017, HR 25 in the US House of Representatives.

How about a POLICY of cutting off ALL foreign aid, no money to the UN either!

A POLICY of a 10 year moratorium on ALL immigration!!!

And a POLICY of NO taxpayer funded benefits to illegal aliens including school and healthcare!


EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATLELY!

THIS WILL SOLVE A LOT OF OUR DEBT AND PROBLEMS IN THIS COUNTRY!

GET OUR HOMELESS OFF THE STREETS INTO AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND INTO A JOB!

NO MORE BREED AND FEED PROGRAMS!

Oh yeah, cut all that shit, 6 million jobs available in US. Go find one!! Hire American Workers, Buy American Products. No American products on the floor or on the shelves? Tell management you'll come back when they have something American to buy. (Of course buy your necessities, but no extra stuff, until it says MADE IN THE USA).

These people really don't know who they're messing with!!

Yeah, unemployment is at an all-time low. A worker can find a job if they look. John points to the fact that trucking companies are offering bribes to get drivers, states are offering bribes to get teachers. But he focuses on some left-winger's cry that "the sky is falling".

I don't write the news articles.
I don't censor the news articles.
I just post the news articles.
So everyone can do whatever you want with them.

No one has to read any of them.

Analysis: Hiring is up. The economy is good. Why is everyone so grumpy?



America should be more at ease than this

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
Updated 9:53 AM ET, Sat June 2, 2018

(CNN)It should be morning again, in America.

The unemployment rate matched its lowest level in half a century.North Korea is talking peace. The fear of imminent terrorist attacks that haunted the 2000s has ebbed. While many troops are still in harm's way, the US no longer has tens of thousands of soldiers waging vast land wars in the Middle East.

"We have such a great country right now," President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

"We have some of the best economic numbers we've ever had as a nation and that goes a long way and we're building something very special."

Yet the United States is a long way from the fabled sense of security encapsulated by Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" re-election ad.

America is not at ease with itself. And it's putting the rest of the world on edge.

There have been more dangerous and polarized moments in American history -- but it's tough to recall a time when political discourse was so mean, and so dispiriting.

This week, the White House could not bring itself to condemn a racist attack by Roseanne Barr, one of Trump's most vocal supporters. Comedienne Samantha Bee did say sorry -- but only after calling the President's daughter Ivanka a "feckless c***" -- in what was just the latest explosion of angry and divisive rhetoric that punctuates most days in the Trump era.

With the economy roaring, things ought to feel more comfortable.

But in a turbulent time, kids now talk openly about the possibility of being shot at school. A new study in the journal Science suggests deepening polarization made Thanksgiving dinners up to 50 minutes shorter in politically divided families last year.

A special counsel is burrowing deep into a young presidency. Trump's own revolt against the boundaries of his power has the country perpetually on the cusp of a constitutional crisis.

"We are seeing a culture begin to seriously erode for our children and our grandchildren. It is happening," Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN this week.

Who is to blame?

The biggest question in politics is how much is Trump responsible for the distemper?

Well, he didn't invent political divisions and bare-knuckle politics.

Presidents -- with the possible exception of George Washington -- have cursed for eons, and politics has never been for the easily offended. After all, an opponent once called former Vice President John Nance Garner a "labor baiting, poker playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man."

But the vitriol is constant these days. Insults and controversies erupt every hour.

And there's no question that Trump, who called Mexican immigrants rapists, mocked a reporter with disabilities and branded protesting NFL players sons of bitches, has coarsened political discourse.

Many critics believe he's abandoned the notion that presidents should offer a moral lead. And Trump's winner/loser life calculus explains why he's ignored Americans who didn't vote for him.

His presidency functions in a riptide of chaos and acrimony -- in fact, its bewildering pace and emotive whirl may be what it needs to survive.

Its existential purpose is tearing at societal, racial and cultural fault lines to ensure its foundation is replenished by outrage and anger from Trump's ever loyal base.

His relentless churn leaves no time for reflection, or connecting the dots of a noxious political environment.

And anger begets anger. Trump's opponents start to adopt his own unchained rhetoric -- often on Twitter -- and barriers of decorum and decency are overwhelmed.

Yet for Trump's supporters, the disruption and shattered norms and outrage among establishment power centers in politics and the media in Washington is proof that he is doing exactly what they hoped he would do. For them, the old system and ways of behavior were so corrupt, dysfunctional and distant, that just tearing them down is enough.
In many ways, Trump inherited a political environment ripe for exploitation after two decades of turmoil.

Social media, the balkanization of the news industry into ideological fragments and gerrymandered congressional districts are often blamed for the bitter political tone.

A financial crisis a decade ago left deep economic dislocation and though jobless numbers and housing markets have recovered, many Americans are still worse off and hurting.

Mechanization is ravaging traditional industry. And an opioid crisis is scarring the heartland.

Twice in the last 20 years, on Sept. 11, 2001, and with Russia's meddling in the last presidential election, America's enemies have exploited its freedoms to attack it, igniting furious debates about US institutions and values that scorched national unity.

All of this is the backdrop to Trump's surge to power in 2016, when he turned bitterness at a political system that had no answers for many Americans into a populist crusade.

At the time, many Trump supporters saw his vulgarity as proof he was an authentic scourge of the establishment.

But in office, he's worsened national dislocation by making lying and the peddling of conspiracy theories a central political strategy. His presidency is rooted in an assault on the institutions -- like the Justice Department and the FBI -- that underpin American public life. And he's turned on America's friends abroad, launching trade wars with Europe and Canada.

'Bad for the country'

This week, Trump -- in his escalating effort to discredit the special counsel probe -- accused Robert Mueller of plotting to meddle in the midterm elections. It was a move that threatened to cast doubt on the integrity of the polls, and for his supporters, the result, should Democrats win.

A source familiar with discussions inside Trump's legal team told CNN's Jim Acosta this week that the President would sharpen the attacks heading into the fall elections.

"That's bad for the country," the source said, adding that "it's likely to get worse."

Trump's constant barrages may actually also be depriving him of some of the credit he is entitled to claim for the healthy economy.

At the end of 1988, when the unemployment rate hit the lowest point of his presidency, at 5.3%, Reagan's Gallup approval rating stood at 63%. Bill Clinton hit 66% at the end of 2000, when unemployment was at 3.9%.

In the latest CNN/SSRS poll, Trump was at 41%, and it stands to reason that his disruptive, norm-busting behavior is largely to blame.

Still, Gallup's famous poll of national mood has 37% of Americans satisfied with the direction of the country, the highest level since early August 2005. However, 62% are dissatisfied.

Given the depth of current political divides, and the hankering of Democrats who want revenge for 2016, as well as Trump's determination to ignite the anger of his base, it seems unlikely the political fury will end soon.

At the end of another tumultuous political year, 1968, which was characterized by assassinations and social unrest that makes 2018 look tame, the nation united in awe as the astronauts of Apollo 8 beamed back stunning photos of Earth,
humanity's common home, after beating the Soviets to become the first men to orbit the Moon.

With the space program in hiatus, it's tough to imagine another event that could ease today's political tempest and unite Americans in the same way.

The moment when then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois vowed there "is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America" seems far more than 14 years ago.

In his new book "The World as It Is," Obama confidant and speechwriter Ben Rhodes says his boss wondered after Trump's victory whether his vision of a politics freed of its tribal divides had been wrong -- or premature.

"Sometimes, I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early," Rhodes quotes Obama as saying. Many conservatives differ with the idea that the 44th president was a conciliator or a unifying force. But someday, probably decades hence, perhaps some other politician of either party might risk a campaign based on the idea that Americans are more united than divided.

Another leader soon to exit the stage, John McCain, is also pining for a time when political acrimony was less intense.

"Before I leave, I'd like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations," the ailing senator from Arizona writes in his new book, "The Restless Wave."

"We are citizens of a republic made of shared ideals forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/02/polit...ony/index.html

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

I don't write the news articles.
I don't censor the news articles.
I just post the news articles.
So you can do whatever you want with them.

It's the articles you choose to post, They are usually negative. You focus on the articles that claim failure, even when there is success. Like CNN, or MSNBC on President Trump. If he sets up talks with NK, they claim it will get us into war. When President Trump cancels the talks with NK, they say this will get us into war. If someone posts an article showing unemployment at an historic low, you will post a left-wing rag claiming that some aren't benefiting from the economy.

You can slant the news by just being selective as to which stories to run. And I perceive a bias in the collection of stories you post. That's what the major media does.

Just like your next post:
"(CNN)It should be morning again, in America.

The unemployment rate matched its lowest level in half a century.North Korea is talking peace. The fear of imminent terrorist attacks that haunted the 2000s has ebbed." The headline doesn't fit the facts. Get ready for more negativism!

No one is required to read them.

But, if they don't get posted no one gets a chance to disagree with them.

Articles that people disagree with get more comments posted than articles that people agree with, and more views.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Analysis: Hiring is up. The economy is good. Why is everyone so grumpy?

What evidence is there that everybody is more grumpy?

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Yet the United States is a long way from the fabled sense of security encapsulated by Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" re-election ad.

After 8 years of President Reagan and even four years of President Bush, that kind of came true, But then President Clinton took the reigns and immediately tried to raise taxes. At the end of his 8 years the economy was starting to weaken. So after 8 years of Clinton, 8 years of Bush, and 8 years of Obama, you blame President Trump for the condition of the United States, and the world.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

This week, the White House could not bring itself to condemn a racist attack by Roseanne Barr, one of Trump's most vocal supporters. Comedienne Samantha Bee did say sorry -- but only after calling the President's daughter Ivanka a "feckless c***" -- in what was just the latest explosion of angry and divisive rhetoric that punctuates most days in the Trump era.

THE WHITE HOUSE DID CONDEMN THE VITRIOLIC RANTS ALLOWED ON TOO MUCH OF OUR AIRWAVES.

Did President Trump write the words for Roseanne to post on Twitter? NO! And when Vallerie Jarrett responded to the attack, by Roseanne, she instead lashed out at President Trump, as if he could control what Roseanne writes. I'm sure, if he could, he would surely control what Samantha Bee writes. But the left is obsessed with blaming President Trump for anything they think can portray him negatively.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

With the economy roaring, things ought to feel more comfortable.

It took a couple of years for President Reagan to turn the economy around after only 4 years of Jimmy Carter. We have been turned into a society that expects instant reaction.

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

"We are seeing a culture begin to seriously erode for our children and our grandchildren. It is happening," Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN this week.

"Beginning"? No, it's been eroding for many years!

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Well, he didn't invent political divisions and bare-knuckle politics.

Wow! What an admission!

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Many critics believe he's abandoned the notion that presidents should offer a moral lead.

Imagine that? Critics being "critical"!

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

And Trump's winner/loser life calculus explains why he's ignored Americans who didn't vote for him.

Wrong again! he doesn't discriminate which people win and which lose. He tries to give everybody an opportunity to succeed!

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Its existential purpose is tearing at societal, racial and cultural fault lines to ensure its foundation is replenished by outrage and anger from Trump's ever loyal base.

Enough! The writer shows no balance at all. Pure bias. And this is what John seems to push!