Alabama Has The Worst Poverty In The Developed World, U.N. Official Reports
A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States was shocked at the level of environmental degradation in some areas of rural Alabama, saying he had never seen anything like it in the developed world.
"I think it's very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I'd have to say that I haven't seen this," Philip Alston, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.com earlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.
The tour through Alabama's rural communities is part of a two-week investigation by the U.N. on poverty and human rights abuses in the United States. So far, U.N. investigators have visited cities and towns in California and Alabama, and will soon travel to Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia.
Despite these concerns, the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the federal government, is on course to pass a tax bill before the end of the year that will increase the federal deficit by $1 trillion in 10 years--costs that the GOP says will be offset by reducing an already-weakened social safety net.
For Alston, these political decisions are at the root of systemic poverty in the U.S.
“The idea of human rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of the government — yes, the government! — to ensure that no one falls below the decent level,” he said. “Civilized society doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you can’t, bad luck.”
“Politicians who say, ‘there’s nothing I can do about that’ are simply wrong,” Alston told WKMS 91.3.
