Newswires: Poverty

Credit Crisis | Casualisation / Workplace

Updated daily: Articles from external newswires filtered for the keywords: poverty, poor, unemployed, workfare...

WaPo: Unemployment rate for young veterans hits 21.1 percent

The unemployment rate last year for young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hit 21.1 percent, the Labor Department said Friday, reflecting a tough obstacle that combat veterans face as they make the transition home from war. more >>

Baltimore Worker Center Says Tourist District Shouldn't Grow on Poverty Jobs

Source: Infoshop News

Baltimore needs a jolt. Poverty conditions for workers in the city’s Inner Harbor, a premier tourist and entertainment district, are threa... more >>

Southern Poverty Law Center Takes Aim at Camp FEMA & Others

Source: Indymedia UK Newswire

In its Spring 2010 Newsletter and a recent article about Colorado Public Television, SPLC appears to be becoming a mouth piece for an out-of-control government. more >>

April 15th: Raise The Rates - Rally and March on the McGuinty Government

Source: Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

Thursday, April 15th 12Noon Allan Gardens Park (Sherbourne and Gerrard) free meal -Raise Welfare and Disability rates by 40% -Stop the attacks on the Special Diet -Defend Public Services In 2003, the Liberals were elected on the promise of change'. Those empty promises have done nothing to end poverty. The reality is that poor people in Ontario are worse off than we were 15 years ago. And now, things are about to get even worse. read more more >>

Solidarity with the PCS strike

Source: London Coalition Against Poverty

LCAP members visited the picket lines of workers from the Public and Commercial Services Union outside Hackney Jobcentres. We support the strike and stand with them against the government’s attacks on staff compensation. We know that the attacks on workers compensation are part of the same attack on the welfare system that threatens unemployed workers’ [...] more >>

The South Africa World Cup: Invictus in Reverse

Source: Mostly Water

By Dave Zirin - March 10, 2010 There are the dispossessions as thousands have been forced from their homes into makeshift shantytowns, to both make way for stadiums and make sure that tourists don't have to see any depressing scenes of poverty. The United Nations even issued a complaint on behalf of the 20,000 people removed from the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town, called an "eyesore" by World Cup organizers. read more more >>

Violence against women persists in Herat

Source: Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

PAN: Despite efforts at improving their overall situation, women continue to be the target of violence in western Herat province, officials said on the International Women's Day. The Women Affairs Directorate said on Monday 633 cases of violence against females were reported in the province during the last solar year. Human rights officer at the directorate, Soraya Baleegh, told Pajhwok Afghan News the cases were linked to an increase in the number of drug addicts and growing poverty. more >>

Notes On March Fourth And The Invisible College

Source: Anarchist News Dot Org

ARRIVAL: I traveled to Berkeley, California from a strange, anonymous land. I mingled with the desperate and the insane on my journey. People broken by the economy, the police, and society. Strangers amidst strangers, sharing what little they had with me and with each other. I traveled alone, just like all of the others, heading to our various failures, disasters, and dreams. When I arrived at UC Berkeley, I knew very little about the planning of the events of March 4th. I knew nothing about how the unions, workers, students, and unemployed came together. I knew nothing of the divisions, the drama, or the infighting which had taken place before, nor did I know the context for the infighting which was to happen later. read more more >>

Forced labour for Jobseekers

Source: Indymedia UK Newswire

Despite high levels of unemployment due to the recession jobseekers in Greater Manchester will be forced to work up to 40 hours a week as part of the Work for Your Benefits (WfYB) pilot scheme. The region is set to be the trialling ground for a government initiative that will see unemployed people put into mandatory work placements for up to six months just to hold on to their Jobseeker’s Allowance. more >>

Will Sanity Prevail?

Source: Infoshop News

Barack Obama must choose between high unemployment or large fiscal deficits. It's one or the other. If he chooses to increase government spendi... more >>

Poor People Crash Lavish Liberal Dinner Party

Source: Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

Video: Watch OCAP crashing Liberal heritage dinner OCAP Organizes to Raise Welfare/Disability Rates. On Thursday, February 25th, 2010, diners at a lavish Ontario Party Liberal fundraising event, which cost attendees $950 per plate and $9,500 a table, did not finish their meals in comfort. Members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) organized to crash the fundraiser, at which Premier Dalton McGuinty was scheduled to speak, in an act of outrage at the fact that rich Liberal Party supporters could spend more on a meal than people on welfare and disability have to live on for a month. While the Liberals feast, literally thousands of people in this city go without food or shelter. At about 7:00 p.m. at the Metro Convention Centre, 50 low income people and OCAP supporters managed to disrupt the fine dining and cocktails, walking past police and security and proceeding right to the front of the banquet hall. Just as hundreds of dinner attendees gathered in the reception area sipping on champagne, OCAP occupied the centre area chanting Raise the Rates and We are hungry, we’re angry, we won’t go away!. The group was loud, energetic and determined despite physical attacks by Toronto Police and Liberal Party members. read more more >>

Antiracist-Antifascist rally in Amerikis Square (Athens): February 24 at 6 pm

Source: Edelweiss Pirates News

Antiracist-Antifascist rally in Amerikis Square (Athens): February 24 at 6 pm SOLIDARITY TO THE IMMIGRANTS! There has been an effort by a fascist “citizens group” formed by extreme right wing racists and nazis, with the police in the leading role, to establish a type of Apartheid in the square of Agios Panteleimonas. Now, a new racist experiment is attempted in Plateia Amerikis (Amerikis Square). In this neighbourhood, where locals and immigrants have been living together for years, coexisting in their daily life, in the streets, in schools, in squares and public spaces, racists and the state are trying to artificially create a field of racist brutality and police occupation. In the reality of the financial, social and political crisis, the state and the bosses are launching and attack against the whole of society, intensifying exploitation and oppression. Immigrants and refugees, as the poorest and most excluded part of society, are the ones on whom this attack is focused in the most cruel way: Many are murdered in the borders, imprisoned in concentration camps, tortured in police stations. Living in the country, they are facing the most savage exploitation by the bosses. And they are hostages of the anti-immigration policies of the greek state which divides them into "legal" and "illegal". A perfect example is the new bill on citizenship that is defining which children have rights and which don’t! This way it is justifying the repression and manhunt of refugees and immigrants without papers while it promotes the incorporation of a small number of immigrants under the condition that they submit. In this context, the state has every interest in spreading racism within the society. Through a racist campaign by the media, the state is trying to force “national unity to save the greek economy” and it is targeting immigrants as a “threat to security and stability” in order to cultivate fear, class divisions and social cannibalism, so that in conditions of poverty the oppressed will be turned against each other, against the most oppressed among us, and not against the real enemy: the state and the bosses who are looting our lives. This way the state intensifies police repression to force its anti-social policies, especially after the social revolt of December ’08 where locals, refugees and immigrants met in the barricades, giving only an image of the future the bosses will have to face. The state itself is breeding racist groups through its policies and it is supporting them through its official repression forces. This is what happened in Agios Panteleimonas neighbourhood, where the police covered the locking of the playground, arsons against places of prayer for Muslim immigrants, attacks in which immigrants were beaten and stabbed by racists. These racist groups are presented as “local citizens committees” in order for the state to give the image that police brutality against immigrants is supposedly a “popular demand of society”. And it is also using these groups to attack against people and spaces of social struggle that fight in solidarity and against fascism. In mid December ’09, a fringe of “citizens”, mainly members of LAOS ultra-right party, showed up in Plateia Amerikis asking that the place will be “cleansed and evacuated”. Their gathering ended ingloriously, and Th. Plevris, a fascist member of LAOS in the parliament, left immediately, when dozens of people went to the square and declared that racists and misanthropists are not welcome in the neighbourhood. This effort of a hate committed to be established was also presented in “Eleftherotypia” newspaper, supposedly progressive. In an article published on 31 December ’09, under a heading saying that Plateia Amerikis is “a bomb about to explode”, a fake image of the neighbourhood is presented and the real motives of the racists are obscured by a discourse about cleanness and degradation problems of the area. Ultra-right conservatives and neo-nazis, with the blessings of the police, think that they can turn this multicultural neighbourhood of Athens, where locals and immigrants have a tradition of living together, into a field of intolerance and racist hatred. They think that they will be allowed to assault refugees and spaces of self- organization and social struggle (social centres, housing squats, parks). Never! Like in every neighbourhood, locals and immigrants, we are people who live together everyday, in our workplaces, in schools, in the squares. We share common problems (unemployment, work exploitation, devastating way of life in an urban jail, without sufficient green and free spaces, control and repression). And we will fight together for a world of equality, having solidarity as our weapon and having as only enemy the enemies of freedom for all people. - No racist and no fascist will define which people are allowed to live together in the neighbourhoods, to hang out in the squares and to walk in the streets of the city. - No consent to the racist policies of the state against immigrants. - No tolerance to the fascist – racist gangs. EVERYONE TO THE RALLY IN AMERIKIS SQUARE Wednesday, 24 February at 6 pm Anarchists, Anti-authoritarians, Antiracists, Antifascists from Athens neighborhoods more >>