Alabama has the worst poverty in the developed world!

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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.

Of particular concern to Alston are specific poverty-related issues that have surfaced across the country in recent years, such as an outbreak of hookworm in Alabama in 2017—a disease typically found in nations with substandard sanitary conditions in South Asia and Subsaharan Africa.

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Roll Tide!

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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 FM, a public radio station in Ohio near one of the other sites under investigation by the U.N.

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LINK

I'm gonna have to disagree with Mr. Alston there. If he spent more than one afternoon touring rural Alabama or the rural parts of any Southern state, he would realize that main reason why poverty is so great there is an over reliance on government aid (aka welfare). He would also then realize that more government involvement doesn't improve the situation and usually makes it worse; because the corrupt and/or incompetent politicians, which I'm assuming are not republicans in Selam Al, either steal the $$$ outright or waste due to mismanagement.