Who is somebody like Bill Gates to be saying "you're too poor...but the next guy is just poor enough"?

because i some many struggling people who attack those who are more poor than them as being the cause of their problems.

as close to three meals a day as possible, adequate shelter, education, and access to medical care as needed.

I'm guessing the Gates types would settle for a lot less than that. Which would be obscene, because less than that is less than a life with dignity.

those with even less than them as the enemy .

they view them as lazy , and blame them for that person not doing well financially.

But leaving people with a very little out in the cold(as the emphasis on "extreme poverty", again a distinction made mainly by bazillionaires)does nothing to ameliorate that.

The real need is to work for a world WITHOUT poverty(and maybe that wouldn't be by white Western standards, which are distorted)but universalism is a crucial part of the approach, because without that you just keep the poor fighting the even-more-poor.

If nothing else, the standards should not be set by the wealthy in the non-impoverished zones. There's no way they can be entitled to judge who has it bad enough to help and who doesn't(which is what the "extreme poverty" paradigm...sorry for the big freakin' word...does. It creates a means test among those with no means at all).

and provide enough spending money for essentials like soap, I know living high off the hog right. I also think we have enough to provide everyone with a job with something like the WPA so that people wouldn't have to live in gov housing, and get the "free stuff".

Yes, I'm being sarcastic, I just don't know how to do the sarcasm tag.

Have a nice weekend.

You too.

Last column on the right at the very bottom you will see a box with 3 dots. (...)

Click on the 3 dots.

Hope that helps.

Have a great weekend.

since large-scale co-op alliances are about the only hope people in the global poverty zone have of standing up to multinational corporate extortion(extortion that is used to force people in those countries to accept the lowest possible prices for their export goods and crops, and the lowest wages, and the fewest number of people being employed to earn those low wages).

We also need to work for a democratic takeover of decisions involving global finance...because as long as the international credit agencies are controlled by forces demanding short-term massive rate of return on credit and investment, no form of humane economics or socially responsible corporate culture will have any chance of prevailing on any level but that of the cosmetic and the advertised.

I'm very anti-corporation (to the point of banning them if I could) and one way of shrinking the power of teh corporates would be large co-op (or variations on the theme of co-op) systems. We need to nurture a form of capitalism that puts down roots in it's community, that considers jobs as a plus, not just profits. We also need to bring back the concept of for-life employment and decouple employment from healthcare.

A) Capitalism requires some poverty, requires some unemployment, to keep wages low.
B) Much of the country believes that, if you provide funds for people at the bottom, they'll get to like it there. They genuinely believe that making poverty "too comfortable" will stop people trying to do better.
C) Much of the country has been trained to resent anyone getting anything at all in welfare, has been trained to view a penny spent in welfare as a dollar stolen from them personally.
D) Much of the country still thinks in Dickensian terms, that the poor are poor because of some fault of their own, because they drink or take drugs or "don't have the habit of work" (our demonically evil DWP Sec).
E) The PtB is talking about alleviating "extreme" poverty on the fairly safe bet that, if you handle teh people actually starving in the streets, everyone will assume the problem has been dealt with. Anyone in poverty after that obviously doesn't work hard enough. The plebs, in both our countries, have been trained to only ever kick downward, to never question the oft-told myth that it's possible to make more from benefits than working and never consider that doesn't mean benefits are too high, it means wages are too low.

I grew up poor. Being disabled (I'm severely mentally ill and physically crippled), I'm still poor. And I have heard all the excuses, all the moralising, all the resentment. I';m for a national minimum guaranteed income but it'll take a real, blood-in-the-streets revolution before the PtB let that happen.

It's made you a fighter, and I admire your spirit.

Still, you deserved better. Everyone does.

Thanks for your post and your experience.

My SO has had to cut me off from domestic news (I'm British) because, with my mental issues, the constant demonising of the poor and sick triggers a self-harm spiral fairly often.

of his presidential campaign and, IIRC, Tricky Dick himself embraced some form of a GAI.

The Reagan counterrevolution ended all talk of a GAI. Among its many sins, electing and re-electing Reagan has to rank right beneath slavery, Manzanar and what was done to indigenous peoples in America's sullied past.

Your post is great, btw. Serious salute!

I'm 38 and British so I had no idea that it had ever been a part of the dialogue (and, if it had happened in your country, it would eventually have happened in ours). Your country is still suffering the hangover from Reagan, mine is under the reign of the cartoonishly evil Tories.

Thank you

Sometimes, the meds let me think clearly.

It does no one any good to try and hide that.

Does this have to do with West Africa? Because I am trying to figure out what you are saying.

It's about the whole concept of "extreme poverty" as opposed to...I dunno...regular, run of the mill poverty?

Of course there are different levels. But the point is, it's wrong for anyone to be kept at any level of poverty.

(I'm not talking about religious orders in which vows of poverty are part of the deal...or about people once in privilege who have chosen to "live simply". Those are entirely different things).

The effort should be to lift all out of poverty...to, at least, get everyone to where they have three meals a day, shelter, access to medical care, education, and the means to express themselves and preserve their culture(at least to the degree that that culture doesn't harm anyone).

Not that everybody would have a Mercedes(I'm not sure most of the people who have high-priced "things" like that should have them, but it's not likely that you'll get people's hands off of their toys).

The "extreme poverty" meme is about wealthy people picking and choosing among the world's poor(many of whom are poor because of the actions of said wealthy people)as to which are worthy of some pathetically tiny measure of relief and which are miserable but not miserable ENOUGH to be given even some extra crumbs.

There's a level of moral insult in that concept that is unforgiveable, in my view. And I'm hopefully not alone in that.

We are propagandized to accept poverty as acceptable and inevitable. That, when the entire global system around us has been and is being further rigged to suck obscene percentages of the world's wealth to a very few pigs at the top.

It is the messaging of a corporate world we marinate in, and it is vile. I agree with every single word in your OP.

Also linking to your other excellent OP from tonight, which I think should be on the Greatest Page for the reasons I explained in my response: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5682851

with doubling the minimum wage.

People who have the skills and ability to work will work at that wage as the economy expands to hire them.

The rest will need to be looked at for mental retardation, chronic depression, substance abuse issues, and just having young children in the home as deterrents to working.

I was on welfare the first time my kidneys conked out. I couldn't wait to get back to working because life on welfare was horrible. I went back to work as soon as I could stand up for more than an hour and against doctor's advice. Most people who have the ability to get off public assistance will do so, it's a rotten way to live. Wages they can pay rent on will help that process. The rest are likely to have problems that can be treated unless they are disabled.

Where our Mayor, who has been not-so-secretive about his efforts to block the development of low-incoming housing in Berkeley (for obviously crypto-racist reasons) has spent a good portion of a low income housing grant on Big Consultants to tell us we need to separate out the "chronically homeless" from the "not really" homeless who have managed to find friends to couch surf with. These "not really homeless" people should be encouraged to continue to impose on these friends for as long as possible (while the friends are probably desperate to get them off of their couches) since that is somehow seen as a regular housing situation.

http://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2014-09-30-WS-Item-01-Homeless-Data.pdf

You better believe this is exactly what you're talking about: making it seem like there are fewer truly desperate people than there actually are. And by continuing to withhold help from these masses of desperate people, who have been holding on by their fingernails for months, if not years, already - our esteemed Mayor Bates hopes to persuade the people who just happened to fall into poverty "move on". And once he gets their displaced asses out of here, he can encourage more tech millionaires to move in and rent the new Luxury Shoebox Apartments built by his cronies - if not his very own relatives!

I've sat beside the coordinators at local nonprofits while they've taken call after call from people seeking housing, and there is nowhere to refer them to. The current political situation is the equivalent of a "lie of omission". We as a society didn't *actively* takeaway you're housing, so we are weaseling out of all blame and we feel no guilt as we look away as you become homeless. Of course we didn't do anything to address the housing crisis either. Is it our fault we left more potholes than road, and you fell in a pothole? Nawwwwwwwwww....

Millions were no longer in poverty. Problem solved.

And to reward their progress, we'll send another million jobs there.

and I thought I would be able return to work I did not apply for SSDI (yeah young and stupid) and my credits ran out.
Tried to get retrained but after weeks of testing which I scored above average on every test they said my back problems were too great and once again I fell through another crack.
My girlfriend now wife stuck by side and now since I'm married I can not collect any benefits because of household income which is incredibly low. Just my story, thought I would just throw this out there.

Dealing with extreme wealth is the best way to deal with all poverty - extreme or otherwise. And any programs which have the effect of redistributing wealth more fairly will probably help the extremely poor the most but they will help all poor which is the goal. It does not matter where the poor are located - north, south, east or west, domestically or globally.