IT (2017)

Extreme poverty in America: read the UN special monitor's report

Philp Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has spent 10 days touring America. This is the introduction to his report

I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the enjoyment of human rights by its citizens. In my travels through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington DC I have spoken with dozens of experts and civil society groups, met with senior state and federal government officials and talked with many people who are homeless or living in deep poverty. I am grateful to the Trump administration for facilitating my visit and for its continuing cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council’s accountability mechanisms that apply to all states.

My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes. It is against this background that my report is presented.

The United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks. I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by opioids, and I met with people in Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.

Of course, that is not the whole story. I also saw much that is positive. I met with state and especially municipal officials who are determined to improve social protection for the poorest 20% of their communities, I saw an energized civil society in many places, I visited a Catholic Church in San Francisco (St Boniface – the Gubbio Project) that opens its pews to the homeless every day between services, I saw extraordinary resilience and community solidarity in Puerto Rico, I toured an amazing community health initiative in Charleston, West Virginia that serves 21,000 patients with free medical, dental, pharmaceutical and other services, overseen by local volunteer physicians, dentists and others (Health Right), and indigenous communities presenting at a US-Human Rights Network conference in Atlanta lauded Alaska’s advanced health care system for indigenous peoples, designed with direct participation of the target group.

American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.

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SEVENTEEN 2ND ALBUM ‘TEEN, AGE’ CONCEPT PHOTO 01 2017.11.06 Release #SEVENTEEN #세븐틴 #TEEN_AGE #20171106_6PM

[TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT, SEXUAL HARASSMENT] Over the weekend, post started popping up on Facebook either simply saying “me too” or saying that and explaining that it’s meant to show how many women have experienced sexual assault and/or harassment. It’s heartbreaking to see all my female friends post it, but at the same time I can’t imagine that any woman out there hasn’t experienced some form of sexual harassment, so I’m not surprised. I was sexually harassed by boys in school starting at age 13. I was sexually harassed at my first job right out of college. I never spoke up because I felt that nobody would do anything about it, that my concerns would be dismissed and that there was a chance I would be blamed for it, get in trouble, lose my job. I’m hoping that this will get some men to realize how pervasive the problem is. But I feel like many will dismiss the movement because they don’t understand how awful sexual harassment is. Imagine being 13 and already uncomfortable in your own skin, and then all these people are going out of their way to make you feel deeply uncomfortable about something that you don’t really understand and that you’ve gotten intense mixed messaged about since you were old enough to watch TV or go outside. Imagine gross men way too old for you are invading your personal space on a daily and you're so afraid to rock the boat because you need your job to survive. Imagine feeling utterly trapped in an impossible situation because you know in your heart that the people in charge will not help you and nothing you do will make the harassers stop. And it’s not just feeling uncomfortable. It’s feeling unsafe. Feeling dehumanized. Objectified, like you’re worthless except your ability to sexually satisfy someone else. For many of us, it’s terrifying and triggering. Sexual harassment was responsible for many, many miserable days and nights in my youth. It disrupted my education. It likely worsened my anxiety disorder that interferes with my career and personal growth on a daily basis. Another thing I want to say, because I’ve already seen some controversy over it. I don’t mind men joining in on the Me Too thing. I hate when men jump into something to try and make it all about men as much as anybody, but in this case, I don’t feel like any man or masculine-aligned person  saying “me too” is making it all about them. For me, a man saying “me too” here is both telling me that he understands what I’ve been through and is therefore more trustworthy in that respect and reminding others that yes, men can be sexually harassed. And I hate that it takes this sometimes, but men being reminded that it can happen to them might help them want to correct the problem. But also, there is a special problem in this society with men’s experiences with sexual harassment and assault being outright dismissed. And I’ll be the first to point out that men created that problem, but also I can tell the difference between someone trying to shut down a discussion about violence against women by going “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEN” and an actual survivor being like “hey that happened to me too, solidarity sister.” If you’re a man or masculine-aligned person, and of course if you’re non-binary, and you’ve been sexually assaulted and/or harassed, I’m here for you and I love you. Let’s make sure everyone who thinks this shit is not a problem has their faces rubbed into the massiveness of it until they admit  something needs to be done.

Um, so why *are* American police allowed to turn off their body cameras, anyway?

“Well, you know, I was, um, going to the toilet.”

*pause*

“Then SOMEHOW the dead unarmed black guy, the conveniently-placed drugs and my inconsistent, plot-hole filled story happened in the middle of all this.”

Saw this little figurine and it immediately reminded me of our one and only 10:10.

The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too

“It has shown up on Irish trivia Facebook pages, in Scientific American magazine, and on white nationalist message boards: the little-known story of the Irish slaves who built America, who are sometimes said to have outnumbered and been treated worse than slaves from Africa.

But it’s not true.

Historians say the idea of Irish slaves is based on a misreading of history and that the distortion is often politically motivated. Far-right memes have taken off online and are used as racist barbs against African-Americans. “The Irish were slaves, too,” the memes often say. “We got over it, so why can’t you?”

A small group of Irish and American scholars has spent years pushing back on the false history. Last year, 82 Irish scholars and writers signed an open letter denouncing the Irish slave myth and asking publications to stop mentioning it. Some complied, removing or revising articles that referenced the false claims, but the letter’s impact was limited.

A meme made from the 1908 Barbados photograph uses several false claims about Irish-American history to criticize African-Americans.

The Irish slave narrative is based on the misinterpretation of the history of indentured servitude, which is how many poor Europeans migrated to North America and the Caribbean in the early colonial period, historians said.

Without a doubt, life was bad for indentured servants. They were often treated brutally. Not all of them entered servitude willingly. Some were political prisoners. Some were children.

“I’m not saying it was pleasant or anything — it was the opposite — but it was a completely different category from slavery,” said Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Ireland who has spearheaded the debunking effort. “It was a transitory state.”

The legal differences between indentured servitude and chattel slavery were profound, according to Matthew Reilly, an archaeologist who studies Barbados. Unlike slaves, servants were considered legally human. Their servitude was based on a contract that limited their service to a finite period of time, usually about seven years, in exchange for passage to the colonies. They did not pass their unfree status on to descendants.

Contemporary accounts in Ireland sometimes referred to these people as slaves, Mr. Hogan said. That was true in the sense that any form of coerced labor can be described as slavery, from Ancient Rome to modern-day human trafficking. But in colonial America and the Caribbean, the word “slavery” had a specific legal meaning. Europeans, by definition, were not included in it.

“An indenture implies two people have entered into a contract with each other but slavery is not a contract,” said Leslie Harris, a professor of African-American history at Northwestern University. “It is often about being a prisoner of war or being bought or sold bodily as part of a trade. That is a critical distinction.”

This image, cropped from an 1884 painting of a Roman slave market by Jean-Léon Gérôme, is used to illustrate memes and articles that falsely claim Irish people were slaves in colonial America.

The memes sometimes pop up in apolitical settings, like history trivia websites, but their recent spread has mirrored escalating racial and political tension in the United States, Mr. Hogan said. Central to the memes is the notion that historians and the media are covering up the truth. He said he has received death threats from Americans for his work.

“These memes are the No. 1 derailment people use when they talk about the slave trade,” he said. “Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”

The memes often have common elements: the false claim that Irish people were enslaved in America or the Caribbean after the 1649 British invasion of Ireland led by Oliver Cromwell; the false claim that Irish slaves were cheaper and treated worse than African slaves; the false claim that Irish women were forcibly “bred” with black men.

This version of the meme uses a 1911 photograph of child laborers in a Pennsylvania mine to illustrate its false claims about Irish slavery.

Some of them are easy to disprove. Many of the memes use photographs, including of Jewish Holocaust victims or 20th century child laborers, to illustrate events they claim happened in the 17th century, long before the invention of photography. Many reference a nonexistent 1625 proclamation by King James II, who was not born until 1633.

They often hijack specific atrocities committed against black slaves and substitute Irish people for the actual victims. A favorite event to use is the 1781 Zong massacre, in which over 130 African slaves were thrown to their deaths off a slave ship.

InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy site favored by President Trump, is one site that has falsely claimed Irish people were the victims of the Zong massacre, whose death toll it inflated by adding a zero to the end.

“It almost becomes a race to the bottom of who suffered more,” Mr. Reilly said, adding that the memes are “an effort to claim a certain ancestry of suffering in order to claim a certain political position.”

The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right, but it became specifically Irish after the 2000 publication of “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland,” a book by the late journalist Sean O’Callaghan, which Mr. Hogan and others have said was shoddily researched. It received positive reviews in Ireland, however, and was widely read there.

In America, the book connected the white slave narrative to an influential ethnic group of over 34 million people, many of whom had been raised on stories of Irish rebellion against Britain and tales of anti-Irish bias in America at the turn of the 20th century. From there, it took off.

Mr. O’Callaghan’s work was repeated or repackaged on Irish genealogy websites, in a popular online essay, and in articles in publications like Scientific Americanand The Daily Kos. The claims also appeared on IrishCentral, a leading Irish-American news website, where many of the Facebook comments were critical of African-Americans.

The memes became popular on white nationalist message boards, neo-Nazi websites and far-right sites like InfoWars. On social media, they are primarily a creature of Facebook, where they have been shared millions of times.

This article on a possible movie about Irish slaves was illustrated with a 1913 photograph of child laborers on a farm in Texas.

Ireland has a long history of verifiable tragedies: centuries of British occupation, famine, emigration and sectarian violence. Three decades of armed conflict in Northern Ireland ended only in 1998, and paramilitary violence has intermittently flared ever since.

Mr. Hogan said it was upsetting for many Irish people to see that history “used as a weapon” by Americans who claim a connection to the country. He said that for some people, it seemed like the meme was “replacing the actual history of their Irish heritage.”

It is true that anti-Irish sentiment was present in the United States until well into the 20th century, but that is a separate issue from 17th century indentured servitude, Ms. Harris said. The descendants of indentured servants, Irish or otherwise, did not face a legacy of racism similar to the one faced by people of African descent, she said.

Nevertheless, she called the meme’s existence unsurprising. “There has been a huge backlash against talking about slavery that continues to this day,” she said, not to mention Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination against blacks that “grew out of enslavement.”

“This continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history,” Mr. Hogan said. “There are libraries filled with all the bad things that actually did happen. We don’t need memes and these dodgy articles full of lies.”

—from the article Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too by Liam Stack

a little man without a worry

if ur sad do not fear friend i am sending puppies to help u