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Are you proud that this is what the Philippines looks like to the rest of the World? If you are one of those Filipinos who thinks that the “Filipino First Policy” of actively discouraging Foreign Direct Investors and multinational companies from coming into the Philippines by requiring them to partner with local Filipino investors who will own at least 60% of the company set up in the Philippines is a step in the right direction, think again. Local Filipino investors are not numerous enough to create as many businesses that would create the huge number of jobs necessary to absorb...

Hopes that the pope’s encyclical will narrow the climate-change divide are likely to be dashed. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” Pope Francis tells us in his encyclical Laudato si’. The encyclical had climate alarmists in a swoon for the pope’s deep dive into climate policy and taking a swing at skeptics for denial and obstructionism. But the encyclical has the merit of honesty in not maintaining any pretense of objectivity and balance. “Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity” — the pope writes in...

Big first-year anniversary for anticapitalist, anticonservative, socialist Pope Francis. Fortune magazine ranks him first among the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.” Tenure unlimited. Now he’s in an ideological war with U.S. Senate Majority boss Mitch McConnell’s Big Oil backed GOP as well as conservative ideologues. At war in America’s unstable, endlessly fickle, myopic, rigged political arena. [...] [...] Yes, Pope Francis is celebrating his one-year anniversary since laying down his anticapitalism manifesto for his army of 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. He’s also been removing conservative cardinals and bishops from leadership roles. He’s hell-bent on changing the world fast. And his mandate...

The poorest Americans, who can’t afford to buy property, are increasingly priced out of rentals. There were only 28 adequate and available to rent homes for every 100 extremely low-income renters in 2013, down from 37 in 2000, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that focuses on social and economic policy. “This gap between supply and demand leaves 72% of the country’s poorest families burdened by the high cost of housing,” it found. Extremely low-income renters are households with incomes at or below 30% of the median income in that region. Not one county in the...

Pope Francis says that global warming is a fact and that a new global political authority is necessary in order to save humanity from utter disaster. The new encyclical that was scheduled to be released on Thursday has been leaked, and it is being reported that this new global political authority that Pope Francis envisions would be in charge of “the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions”. The funny thing is that this sounds very much in line with the new sustainable development agenda that is going to be launched at the United Nations in...

BALTIMORE A few Notes on Riots April 29, 2015 Rea L. Ginsberg, LCSW-C, ACSW, BCD **** The moment we cease to hold each other, The moment we break faith with one another, The sea engulfs us and the light goes out. – James Baldwin My town is on fire. Spreading now to Washington D.C., New York City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia. No wonder. This is not just a Baltimore problem. This is a USA problem. This is a worldwide problem. Long ago, I worked in those inflamed communities. I worked there for a year, 1966-67. When Dr. King was murdered in 1968...

I’ve been trying to think through a way of really getting across the point that a $15 an hour minimum wage for the US is really just too high. And I may have found it: a $15 per hour minimum wage would put all workers in the US into the global 1% by income. Well, all those workers in the US who managed to keep their jobs when there’s a $15 an hour minimum wage at least. Given that the US labour force is rather larger than merely 1% of the global labour force this isn’t really going to work,...

In the 1970s, crime was soaring, and American policymakers had all sorts of ideas for how to reduce it: longer sentences, more police, prison reform and more. But one of the most potent remedies was not conceived as a way to combat crime. To clean up the environment and improve public health, the federal government banned lead in paint and gasoline. By diminishing lead, though, it reduced the harm it was doing to young brains -- harm that could push kids into delinquency. Curbing lead exposure was a big reason for the decline in violent crime that began in the...

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.” A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The U.S. and other wealthy nations have spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century trying to lift the world’s poorest people out of penury, with largely disappointing results. In 1966, shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty, 14.7% of Americans were poor, under the official definition of the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2013, 14.5% of Americans were poor. Finally, after decades of failure there is a movement afoot to launch “a new generation of experimental programs focusing not on large-scale social support and development but on helping the poor and indebted to save more, live better...

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND— Sirens wail frequently outside Bronwyn Mayden’s office, with ambulances and squad cars rushing to the University of Maryland Medical Center half a block away. It’s a trauma hospital, the one where 25-year-old Freddie Gray wound up dying in April from a neck injury sustained in police custody. Mayden deals with trauma, too, but of a different kind. Assistant dean at the university’s School of Social Work, she’s also executive director of Promise Heights, an academic-community partnership that assists one of West Baltimore’s neediest neighborhoods just over a mile from her office. Upton-Druid Heights – like the adjacent Sandtown...

our average left-winger agrees with this stuff and thinks Sanders is a genius Just as an exercise in curiosity, I’m going to try to think like a socialist. And since I really have no earthly idea how socialists come up with the ideas they embrace, I’m going to let Bernie Sanders get me rolling. Tell me, Bernie, your thoughts on economic growth: The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake...

La Voz del Pueblo: What are the worst evils that beset the world today? Pope Francis: Poverty, corruption and human trafficking. I can be wrong with the statistics, but what will you tell me if I ask you: When it comes to spending, what thing in the world comes after food, clothing and medicine? The fourth is cosmetics and the fifth are pets. That is serious. Pet care is like love that is somewhat programmed; that is, I can program the loving response of a dog or a little cat, and I do not need to have the experience of...

Last week, President Obama held a summit on poverty at Georgetown University. There, he explained that unrest in major American cities could be traced not to lack of values, but to simple lack of cash -- and that lack of cash, he suggested, could be attributed to simple lack of luck. "The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all of the kindergarten teachers in the country," Obama stated. "You pretty much have more than you'll ever be able to use or anyone in your family will ever be able to use. There's a fairness issue involved here." He...

Dear President Obama, I write this letter in response to your May 12 visit to Georgetown University where, in a so-called religious setting, you urged conservatives and liberals to unify to fight poverty. Helping those in need is a cause that touches the heart of God, so I was a little encouraged until you took a potshot at Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, insinuating they could care less about the plight of the poor. Your insinuation was offensive, revealing that even in helping others you cannot help insulting your political opponents. And obviously,...

Will someone please inform our so-called President it's not 1860 and that neither him or Michelle Obama have ever been slaves. Even at the height of slavery during the Antebellum period, less than 2% of the population were slave owners; which by the way, included black Americans amongst their infamous ranks. This of course is omitting the trivial facts African tribes sold their brethren into bondage for everyday trinkets and that nearly 400,000 white men died to procure their freedom. I'm also guessing our myopic pastor of prejudice forgot that the KKK was specifically forged as the terrorist arm of...

Inequality in Baltimore has been thrust into the national spotlight this week, with riots and civil unrest in that city following the funeral of Freddie Gray. This inequality has roots that stretch deep into the past. It's been exasperated by bad policy decisions in the present-day. And it makes itself felt in every aspect of life in the city, from the racial composition of neighborhoods to the number of empty houses standing in them. For another illustration, let's look at a hypothetical case of two babies born on the same day this year in Baltimore. One is born in Roland...

These days, it wouldn’t be a presidential appearance without some gratuitous Christian-bashing. And at yesterday’s roundtable on poverty, President Obama didn’t disappoint. During the panel discussion at Georgetown University, President Obama took the common goal of helping the poor and used it to drive an even deeper wedge between his administration and people of faith. In between swipes at Fox News, the President scolded the church for being too preoccupied with the culture war to help the needy. “I think it would be powerful for our faith-based organizations to speak out on this in a more forceful fashion. This may...

http://media.salon.com/2015/05/hillary_warren_de_blasio.jpgEarlier this week, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with a gaggle of bored reporters and some boldfaced names in the progressive movement, unveiled a “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality.” Much like the media event that accompanied its unveiling, the agenda is supposed to be understood as a kind of 21st-century, liberal version of the storied “Contract with America,” the PR stunt that, as legend (erroneously) has it, rocketed Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to power after the 1994 midterm elections. As my colleague Joan Walsh reported on Thursday, this backward-looking attempt to lay out a...

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama participated in a panel discussion this week about poverty in America, but failed to acknowledge the central reason why it has remained so high under his presidency. And that reason has to do with anti-growth policies that have held back tens of millions of low income Americans, and destroyed entry level jobs that would help the poor get on the first rung of the economic ladder. The Census Bureau, which gathers the nation's poverty data, said that more than 45 million Americans were stuck below the poverty line, according to figures released late last year. This...