These folks have a YouTube channel and are launched a Twitter and even a PodCamp. How’s that for groundbreaking? Chris Brogan has great coverage. Mahalo has a pretty decent rundown of some sweet poverty resources.
This is a problem internationally and domestically. More locally, Richard Florida in his book the Creative Class warns:
“The top 1 percent of households earned 20 percent of all income and held 33 percent of all net worth. The US hasn’t witnessed an income gap like this since the Gilded Age.”
Dave Richards thinks the answer is micro-finance. What do you think? Is microfinance a viable solution domestically and internationally? What model is best?
A few thoughts on how neglectful policies fuel the erosion of family from the pages of Jim Wallis’ book God’s Politics…“Indeed, what can destroy family life and values is losing a job that provides the capacity to support your family or being unable to find affordable housing, quality health care, or educational opportunity for your children. Conversely, steady employment at a livable family income, access to health care, a path to homeownership, and the chance to send your kids to good schools can lay the best foundation for solid and successful family values.”“Today it is large corporations that push down wages, cut health benefits, lay off workers, and export good jobs overseas; they are the biggest violators of ‘family values’ and the principal force destabilizing family life in America”“We must have a clear moral message. Budgets with billions of dollars of increases for the military and massive tax cuts for the wealthiest—while cutting funding for overcoming poverty—should be named as morally unacceptable. Rather, funding for real solutions to poverty needs to be increased. Let’s reward people’s efforts to improve their lives.”“More and more we see how our anxious striving after affluence has also created spiritual poverty. It is the great myth of modern advertising that mere prosperity can give us happy, fulfilled, and purposeful lives. Nobody wants to say out loud that shopping doesn’t satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.”What do you think? Is the Christian response to turn away from these atrocities? Should Christians be taking a stand on these issue? How can the situation be changed? How can political and economic power be checked sufficiently and kept accountable? Any authors or verses or examples you like on the issue of poverty?
