News About Inequality - January 2009

'A Sad Slide Backwards'

• The Economist, January 29, 2009
  Located in a poor neighbourhood, Thailand is cautious about giving refugees a generous welcome. Doing so, it worries, might draw millions more across its borders, especially from Myanmar, a populous, wretched country with a ghastly regime. But there is no excuse for the astoundingly callous way Thailand has treated around 1,000 refugees from the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority group from Myanmar...

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'A Great Migration into the Unknown'

• The Economist, January 29, 2009
  Global recession is hitting China's workers hard.

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'Fixing a Broken World'

• The Economist, January 29, 2009
  The planet's most wretched places are not always the most dangerous...

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'A City Made of Waste'

• The Nation, January 29, 2009
  The international border between the United States and Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana checkpoint is the most trafficked in the world. Approximately 60 million people cross annually, moving untold amounts of goods and services back and forth. Zooming into the particularities of this volatile territory, traveling back and forth between these two border cities, we can expose landscapes of contradiction where conditions of differences and sameness collide and overlap.

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'Doing the Recovery Right'

• The Nation, January 28, 2009
  For most of the past generation, the aims of environmental sustainability and social justice were seen as equally worthy, yet painfully and unavoidably in conflict. Over the years, there has been a dramatic reversal of thinking...

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'Rags in the Shadows of Riches'

• The Washington Post, January 23, 2009
  Inside Spanish ramparts built to repel pirate attacks lies a colonial gem-the historic heart of Cartagena, a city on Columbia's northwestern coast, complete with $500-a night hotel rooms, stylish restaurants and newly-renovated apartments at Manhattan-like prices. To the government of President Alvaro Uribe, Cartagena symbolizes a new Columbia, vibrant and prosperous.

  But outside the 400-year-old walls, away from the cobblestones and charm of the old city, is a swath of slums so miserable that public health officials compare conditions there to life in sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike those who live in and visit Cartagena's affluent heart, most of the residents of the ramshackle barrios are black. Drug trafficking is rife, children are malnourished and preventable diseases are common.

  United Nations data show that Columbia remains one of the world's most unequal societies - a root cause of the country's 45-year-old conflict.

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'The White Working Class: Britain's Forgotten Race Victims?'

• Runnymede Trust, January 22, 2009
  Anti-racists urgently need to get involved in the current discussion on whiteness. It is important to take the grievances of white members of the working class seriously, but surely this does not mean disregarding the views of ethnic minority members of the working class. The problem is the deeply ingrained hierarchical class structure which remains one of the hallmarks of British social life, not ethnic diversity. This is why Runnymede asked eight prominent thinkers on race, class, and inequality to reflect on the state of class in 21st century Britain, and its relationship with race inequality.

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'Hope for the Homeless?'

• The Nation, January 22, 2009
  Throughout the country, homelessness is rising. By most accounts, there's little mystery to this rise in the ranks of shelter seekers. It's the economy and, more specifically, the recession and the foreclosure crisis. But there's another essential point, one that bears fundamentally on how we understand, and tackle, this crisis. While the recession has swollen the ranks of the homeless population, modern homelessness has been with us for more than a quarter century.

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'Access to Healthy Foods Worse in Poor Areas'

• Reuters, January 21, 2009
  People who live in poorer neighborhoods in the U.S. are less likely to have easy access to supermarkets carrying a wide variety of fresh produce and other healthy food, an analysis of 54 studies confirms.

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'Japan's Outcasts Still Wait for Acceptance'

• The New York Times, January 16, 2009
  For Japan, the crowning of Hiromu Nonaka as its top leader would have been as significant as America's election of its first black president.

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'In Recession, Poverty Strikes Middle Class'

• Reuters, January 16, 2009
  The collapse of the U.S. housing market means many middle class people are either living in poverty or are one pay check away from hard times.

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'Global Migration and the Downturn: the People Crunch'

• The Economist, January 15, 2009
  The economic slump is battering migrants. For tens of millions of people working outside their homelands, life is becoming much more precarious.

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'The Price of Prejudice'

• The Economist, January 15, 2009
  It's what you do that counts, not what you say you'd do.

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'U.S. School Segregation on the Rise'

• Reuters, January 14, 2009
  Black and Latino students are educated in U.S. schools that are increasingly segregated, said a report on Wednesday that undercuts optimism about race in America surrounding the presidency of Barack Obama.

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'Internally Displaced Persons: A Neglected Issue on the International Agenda'

• New Routes (Brookings Institution's website), January, 2009
  While the concept of refugees was defined in a UN convention in 1951, it took another 30 years until internally displaced persons were recognized as a group with special needs and rights. Their double position as both displaced and citizens in their own country sometimes blurs the roles of actors in charge of their protection and assistance. The last decade has seen the elaboration of a much-needed set of Guiding Principles for this group.

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'Case Study of Aid Effectiveness in Kenya: Volatility and Fragmentation of Foreign Aid, with a Focus on Health'

• The Brookings Institution, January, 2009
  In September 2000, 149 heads of state and government endorsed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With this endorsement they set themselves eight goals to be reached by 2015 (from the 1990 base), foremost of which is to halve the proportion of the world's people who were absolutely poor. The MDGs provide a departure from past approaches in addressing poverty. By focusing attention on a core set of interrelated goals and measurable targets, it is now easier to track progress and measure the impact of development interventions.