“Poverty is the denial of human rights.”

-Irene Khan, Former Head of Amnesty International, Author: The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights

OR

Update: Ushahidi does Haiti.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. “Some people don’t come forward even though they know the people are here,” said the former Detroit cop. “They don’t have the money.”

Lifelong Detroit residents Darrell and Cheryl Vickers understand this firsthand. On a chilly September morning they had to visit the freezer to identify the body of Darrell’s aunt, Nancy Graham — and say their goodbyes.

The couple, already financially strained, don’t have the $695 needed to cremate her. Other family members, mostly in Florida, don’t have the means to contribute, either. In fact, when Darrell’s grandmother passed recently, his father paid for the cremation on a credit card — at 21% interest.

So the Vickers had to leave their aunt behind. Body number 67.
[...]

“One way we look back at a culture is how they dispose of their dead,” said the county’s chief medical examiner, Carl Schmidt, who has been in his position for 15 years. “We see people here that society was not taking care of before they died — and society is having difficulty taking care of them after they are dead.”
via Bodies pile up in Detroit morgue; poor can’t afford burial – Oct. 1, 2009 .

What is this a f*cking Dickens’ novel? Damn.

Mr Aso was asked whether poverty was making people marry later, contributing to Japan’s low birth rate.

His response was: ”Young people had better not get married with little money.”

He added it was difficult for him to see how someone without pay could be seen as an object of respect.

via BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Japan PM in gaffe on poor couples.

A home in a canyon shantytown on the edge of Mexico City. c/o UMD Merrill School Of Journalism

Mike Davis posits that slums are ground zero for pandemics. Mega-slums are where pandemics gain new life.

Mike Davis, a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, is author of The Planet of Slums. The following is adapted from an interview with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels.

The global pandemics we see today tend to originate and spread from impoverished slums that push humans into close proximity with animals and food sources, thus providing an incubator for viruses that would otherwise die out or go dormant. Pandemics are thus closely linked to the emergence of “hot zones” in what I call “the planet of slums.”

Using conservative definitions by the United Nations Habitat office, there are today 1 billion people living in slums globally. A slum is defined by substandard housing with insecurity of tenure and the absence of one or more urban services and infrastructure—sewage treatment, plumbing, clean water, electricity, paved roads and so on.

via NPQ.

Many of the largest slums? Latin America. The biggest such slum in the world? Just south of Mexico City. As H1N1 has to be dealt with, we must begin to realize that it keeps popping up in North America for a reason. Other people’s poverty matters.

NPR.org, July 15, 2009 · To some people, the Land of the Free doesn’t always seem so free. And America the Beautiful doesn’t look so pretty.

That’s the viewpoint of two Washington-based groups — the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, and the National Coalition for the Homeless — that have targeted the country’s mingiest municipalities.

1. Los Angeles
2. St. Petersburg, Fla.
3. Orlando, Fla.
4. Atlanta
5. Gainesville, Fla.
6. Kalamazoo, Mich.
7. San Francisco
8. Honolulu
9. Bradenton, Fla.
10. Berkeley, Calif.

They built this index by how people treated the poorest folks. Its funny this list is Cali and Florida heavy. I am probably just throwing out a nutty a hypothesis, but I wonder if this list speaks somewhat to the reasons Florida and California are sub-prime/alt-a mortgage ground zeros. Brokers peddling that garbage to consumers was pretty mean as well.

Maybe if they averaged their data with indexes for sub-prime/alt-a mortgages, pay day loans and other predatory lending, this list would change significantly.