Charles Bukowski on human experimentation…
Tag: poverty
Cash-Strapped Consumers Resort To “Dumpster Dining” To Save On Grocery Bill
Despite the Biden administration’s cheerleading that “Bidenomics” is the economic savior of the middle class — most Americans will disagree there has been an economic revival amid the worst inflation storm in a generation that has sent negative real-wage growth negative for more than two years, forcing consumers to deplete personal savings and rack up record amounts of credit-card debt in a high-interest rate environment.
We have shown many households are in rough financial shape. Dollar Tree executives confirmed weeks ago that mid/low-tier consumers are trading down from other more expensive retailers to their stores for groceries. This means Walmart has become too expensive for some consumers.
Even before we noted “Consumers Trade Down From Walmart, Dollar Tree Becomes Supermarket For The Working Poor,” we found a trend on TikTok that showed an increasing number of Americans in March were resorting to dollar stores for groceries to save money. We tilted that note “Dollar Tree Dinners”: TikToker Goes Viral After Showing People How To Cook For $35 A Week.
Last week, we were the first to point out that Google searches for “pawn shop near me” just erupted to record highs, indicating that consumers are in rough shape.
Building the Global Police State
During our investigation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the disingenuous use of language to sell SDGs to an unsuspecting public has emerged as a common theme.
The United Nations (UN) claims the purpose of SDG16 is to:
Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
If we accept the supposition that “sustainable development” is global development that meets the needs of the world’s poor, then a reasonable person is unlikely to disagree with this stated objective.
But helping the poor is not the purpose of SDG16.
The real purpose of SDG16 is threefold: (1) empower a global governance regime, (2) exploit threats, both real and imagined, to advance regime objectives; and (3) force an unwarranted, unwelcome, centrally controlled global system of digital identity (digital ID) upon humanity.
We find the UN’s digital ID objective tucked away in its SDG Target 16.9:
By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.
While SDG16 doesn’t allude specifically to “digital” ID, that is what it means.
As we shall see, the SDG16 target indicators don’t reveal the truth, either. For example, the only “indicator” to measure SDG16.9 progress (16.9.1) is:
[The] proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age.
You might therefore think the task of “providing legal identity” would primarily fall to said “civil authorities.” That is not the case.
Within the UN system, all governments (whether local, county, provincial, state, federal) are “stakeholder partners” in a global network comprised of a wide-ranging gamut of public and private organisations. Many of these are explicitly backed by or housed at the UN, and all of them are pushing digital ID as the key mechanism to achieve SDG16.
This aspect of SDG16 will be more fully explored in Part 2.
There is a term that this worldwide amalgam of organisations often uses to describe itself: it is a global public-private partnership—G3P, for short.
The G3P is toiling tirelessly to create the conditions necessary to justify the imposition of both global governance “with teeth” and its prerequisite digital ID system. In doing so, the G3P is inverting the nature of our rights. It manufactures and exploits crises in order to claim legitimacy for its offered “solutions.”
The G3P comprises virtually all of the world’s intergovernmental organisations, governments, global corporations, major philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups. Collectively, these form the “stakeholders” implementing sustainable development, including SDG16.
Don’t Bring Back Public Housing
One of the biggest frustrations about getting old is hearing younger people propose ideas that were debunked decades ago—and then getting “eyes glazed over” looks from them after explaining that we’ve already been there and done that. Proposers of such ideas rarely change their minds after I say, “Dude, I was there and remember—and it was a disaster.”
The latest “old is new again” proposal is for the government to just build housing—as in public officials buying the land, choosing the design, finding a developer, and then serving as landlord. The impetus is the nation’s affordable-housing crisis. Advocates have changed the terminology. They are proposing that “we” build “social housing” rather than “public housing projects,” but it’s the same blighted idea.
“Public housing is ready to make a comeback,” wrote Daniel Denvir and Yonah Freemark in left-leaning Slate. They say current efforts to up-zone property (allowing developers to build higher-density projects with fewer regulations) yield only modest results. They rehash the debate on the Left—between YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yarders) and those who claim that new building promotes gentrification.
“But this debate is often impoverished,” they add. “As policymakers continue to confront this crisis, it is time for them to reconsider an obvious but long-taboo solution: building new public housing.” Of course, this time the government will do it better than the last time by—get this—avoiding income restrictions and opening the units to all comers.
Plutocracy Uses Technology to Clobber the Poor
Technology wielded by oligarchic government is a nightmare. From killer police dog robots to facial recognition in public housing, it’s not just the poor who are targets, it’s everybody. But the poor and the left get smacked with it the worst. It’s open season on antifa, a season inaugurated by killer Kyle Rittenhouse shooting two Black Lives Matter protestors to death, getting off scott free and becoming the darling of far-right celebrities. As for how technology crushes the poor, just take the case of 33-year-old Tania Acabou, who found herself a victim of constant surveillance in her public housing project.
Cameras bought through the department of Housing and Urban Development have been installed in public housing, supposedly to fight crime. Instead, the poor domiciled there find themselves under continuous watch. “It got to the point where it was like harassment,” Acabou told the Washington Post after being evicted from her New Bedford, Massachusetts project due to this surveillance. The Post reported May 16 that Acabou received “an eviction notice in 2021 after the housing authority…used cameras to investigate her over several months…The housing authority believed her ex was living at the house without contributing rent [he was babysitting their kids]…violating a policy that restricts overnight visitors to 21 nights per year.”
In a Steubenville, Ohio project, the Post added, “One man was filmed spitting in a hallway. A woman was recorded removing a cart from a communal laundry room. Footage in both cases was presented to a judge to help evict the residents in court.” So if you’re poor, you live under a security microscope with the excuse that it fights crime, when really it just fights you. One woman, threatened with eviction “for lending her key fob to an unauthorized guest,” explained that her declining vision necessitated a friend bringing her groceries. She was allowed to stay.
HUD used federal crime fighting grants to buy the cameras. But as anyone with a brain can deduce, this surveillance is aimed at public housing residents, not criminals. Or maybe, as far as HUD’s concerned, the residents are the criminals…While several states have limited police use of facial recognition, as the Post notes, because it produces false matches, HUD does not appear to have caught on. “In rural Scott County, Va., cameras equipped with facial recognition scan everyone who walks past them, looking for people barred from public housing,” according to the Post. “In New Bedford, Mass., software is used to search hours of recordings to find any movement near the doorways of residents suspected of violating overnight guest rules.” So if you reside in public housing or visit someone there, you are treated as a potential lawbreaker.
Facial Recognition Shows Up in Public Housing, Small Cities
The race to make biometric surveillance commonplace is only getting faster, with systems going up in public housing and municipalities far from city crime.
With the growth comes a mission that residents worldwide have often been told is off the table, that of the all-seeing, always analyzing sentinel that never stops recording what happens in the community.
The issue is again in the news, this time following a lengthy article in The Washington Post reporting on facial recognition systems being used in United States public housing.
Also, Context, a Thomson Reuters Foundation analytical publication, has shown how surveillance vendors are selling smaller cities on big-city facial recognition systems – and how residents are being cajoled into linking their own cameras to police networks.
Post reporters said they found six public housing centers whose boards have purchased surveillance cameras and computer servers. Some of those on the list also use biometric surveillance algorithms.
They were the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing, Omaha Housing, Scott County (Virginia) Redevelopment & Housing, Jefferson County (Ohio) Housing and Grand Rapids (Michigan) Housing agencies.
Canada is euthanizing its poor but these “bioethicists” think that’s the right thing to do. Come read their reasoning.
Remember Amir Farsoud? The man that nearly chose Canadian euthanasia over homelessness but was saved from being suicided by an outpouring of generosity from concerned citizens.
That was a feel-good story, but it is unfortunately the exception to the rule in Canada these days, as more and more examples of Canada euthanizing the poor pop up.
For every Amir Farsoud, there’s a Sophia who doesn’t get saved. Sophia couldn’t afford better housing to help with her condition, and rather than pay for the housing, the state paid for euthanasia.
She left a video to be shared with the media after she was dead.
“The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a**,” she says on the video.
Another woman opted for MAID because her medical debt was too high, which is a crazy thought in a country with socialized medicine.
Isn’t healthcare free there?
Roger Foley, another man who said his hospital wanted to off him, testified before the Canadian Parliament. During that testimony, he said it doesn’t seem like medical care is free is if MAID is a cheaper option for the government. He claims the doctors said they would charge him $1,800 per day if he didn’t agree to MAID.
But if MAID for the poor makes you mad, you are on the wrong side of the ethical equation, at least according to two bioethicists at the University of Toronto.
Trump Advocates Mass Incarceration, ‘Tent Cities’ To Address Homelessness
On April 18, former President Donald Trump posted a video on his Truth Social account titled “Homelessness Plan.” In it, Trump alleged that “the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged” had ruined America’s cities, “turn[ing] every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs.” He promised, “When I’m back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority” to “end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean and safe and beautiful once again.”
How would he accomplish this? “Working with states, we will ban urban camping wherever possible…. We will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land; bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists; and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.”
Treatment would be catered to individual need: “For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”
Trump’s plan may sound magnanimous, but it’s anything but. First off, there’s no telling what such a plan, or for that matter any plan, would cost. Advocates often say that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates $20 billion as the cost of ending homelessness in America. But that number was an informal, unverified estimate of the annual cost in 2012. And as Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told VERIFY in 2021, “It’s not so difficult to figure out what it would cost to end homelessness for everyone who is homeless tonight…. The problem is that more people BECOME homeless every day because they don’t earn enough to pay for housing – we’re 7 million housing units short to meet the needs of low-income people.”
Poverty Kills More Americans Than Obesity, Diabetes, and Drug Overdoses, Study Reveals
Poverty kills more Americans than obesity, diabetes, and murders, making it the nation’s fourth leading cause of death, according to a new analysis. A researcher from the University of California-Riverside reports that the only things that kill more people are heart disease, cancer, and smoking.
According to the findings, not earning enough money to meet basic needs contributed to around 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 alone. An international team working on this project are now dubbing poverty the “silent killer.”
This is a conservative estimate, scientists note, since the data focused on those over 15 years of age and was collected just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic — which caused spikes in deaths as well as an economic upheaval worldwide.
The researchers defined poverty as earning less than 50 percent of the median U.S. income. Suicides, firearms, homicides, and obesity, diabetes, and drug overdoses, were all less lethal than poverty, according to the study. Impoverished people have roughly the same survival rate until they reach their 40s. After this, they die at significantly high rates than those with more adequate incomes and resources.
Scientists believe their research has major policy implications and urge those in power to pay more attention to the issue. They add that beyond the emotional suffering of bereaved loved ones, death is expensive for a family, community, and government.
Colorado school district to introduce biometric scans of kids for free school meal access
The Poudre School District, in Colorado, will be piloting a controversial biometrics program to make the distribution of free lunches more “efficient.”
The pilot program will launch by May 25, 2023 in elementary, middle, and high schools, if it doesn’t go contested.
According to the school district, the biometric scans would take around two seconds. The program will use identiMetrics scanners, which will replace the current system where students have to enter their ID number on a keyboard to access their free school meal.
The fingerprints will be stored locally by the school district.
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