Sunday, January 20, 2013

UN War on Poverty Fails To Help Poor, While Charities Are Told To Stop Feeding the Homeless

By Douglas V. Gibbs

The bleeding hearts of liberals try to use government to stamp out poverty, but instead, they create dependents upon the government, in a sense paying the poor to remain poor, and ultimately exacerbating the problem.  Governmental intervention causes more damage than help.  The way for the poor to no longer be poor is to give them a reason not to be poor. In other words, incentive.  The free market is the best tool for fighting poverty.

This is not to say that capitalism will ever eliminate poverty.  The folks that reside in the lower economic class, or at least some of them, will always be with us.  Matthew 26:11 says the "poor will always be with us."

Government seems to want to force their benevolence upon everyone.  Freedom is a funny thing.  Liberty cannot force people to pursue a better life. Helping is important, but it needs to be a voluntary decision.  Escaping poverty is the same.  Those who live in poverty need to want to get out of it, and must take actions to make that possibility real.  In the end, if they remain poor it is nobody's fault but their own.

Scripture advises us as individuals to help the poor if we can.  Charity is a good thing, and if members of the less fortunate segment of our population desires genuine help, and are truly in need, it is the Christian thing to do to help them.  However, this help cannot become a way of life for these people, and it cannot become something that they begin to expect, as if it is some kind of entitlement.  When the entitlement mentality launches into existence, it does more harm than good.

Government is not charity, and the redistribution of wealth is not a voluntary, individual decision.  Taxing the rich and giving to the poor by the government is theft.  In the private sector, if I was to rob someone comfortable in life, and give those ill-gotten items or monies to someone less fortunate, it would not be charity.  It would be criminal.

In this topsy, turvy world, government has convinced the populace that not only are the ruling elite the benevolent crusaders for stamping out poverty, but while everyone is distracted with failing economies and saving the world from global warming (as declared by their allies in science. . . or should I call it "pseudo-science) they have been working on also convincing the people that private charities are failures.

The United Nations pumped $5.7 billion in its United Nations Development Program, also known as the U.N.’s anti-poverty agency.  Yet, while funneling all that money into what we have been told is a good cause, it turns out the agency has done little to help the world’s 1.3 billion desperately poor people.  In fact, the agency seems to be a facade, having “only remote connections with poverty.” Its anti-poverty programs are “disconnected,” and are frequently “seriously compromised” by a lack of follow-up to help poor countries learn “what works and why.”

After spending more than $8.5 billion on anti-poverty activities between 2004 and 2011, the UNDP has only “limited ability…to demonstrate whether its poverty reduction activities have contributed to any significant change in the lives of the people it is trying to help.”

The UNDP is yet another worthless governmental entity failing to live up to its declared identity as “the United Nations anti-poverty organization—a world partnership against poverty.”

Poverty has been the least of the agency's concerns, instead spreading itself across a growing range of activities in the name of promoting “development” that have little to do with actual development, and everything to do with the creeping incrementalism of gaining a powerful foothold in these regions for other reasons, often in the name of "sustainability."

You know, like Agenda 21.

The agency doesn't even fully know how much money they are spending on its anti-poverty efforts.  Many of the activities may be tagged for "development," but are not necessarily being implemented in relation to fighting poverty.  In other words, many of the projects reported as contributing to poverty reduction, are not designed to do so.

As they claim to be working to reduce poverty, in reality, poverty worldwide is worsening.

Rather than reducing poverty, the agency is simply a bureaucracy that operates for its own perpetuation, and its own benefit.  It exists for the sake of existing, and the power players act solely to keep their positions of status.

In the end, the agenda is not the reduction of poverty, but the spreading of the socialist agenda where individualism and the free market are stamped out, only to be replaced by a system of totalitarian governmental control where everyone is made to be equal. . . equally miserable.  One clue to this fact is that the UNDP’s top management is headed by Helen Clark, a former socialist prime minister of New Zealand.

Evil often clothes itself in a mask of purity and light.

Globalism, a New World Order, under a powerful worldwide socialist system, is their goal.  Their own statements tell us such: “UNDP work on poverty reduction towards transformational change is based on a belief in universalism, universal rights, universal coverage and access to social services, which is anchored in a recognition of the complexity of the development process – the longer-term context of it (it is a marathon rather than a sprint), the whole-of-society type of intervention (it is a treatment for general well-being rather than micro-surgery). Gender equality [sexual immorality], sustainability [agenda 21] and the rights-based approach [what they deem as rights, not natural rights] are its bedrock.”

After reading something like that, the liberals have to go into a different room to straighten their clothes and catch their breath - minus my brackets, of course.

While the people behind this massive governmental scheme to fight poverty can't seem to figure out how to force the people to accept the concept of a Marxist inspired equitable society (which is presumably for their own good, I might add), they frown on individual efforts to feed the poor, and homeless.  The global mind-set can't suffer any competition, because private charities might actually succeed, and reveal the fascist globalists for what they are.

Meanwhile, in the State of Washington. . . 

The Bread of Life Mission has served the homeless community in Pioneer Square for more than 70 years.  However, after three years of feeding the homeless every third Saturday of every month at City Hall Park, the city has directed the charity organization to stop feeding the hungry in downtown parks.  The meals at the park once a month have been in addition to the three meals a day they serve inside their building elsewhere in the city.

The Seattle Human Services Department does not allow groups of people to feed the homeless outdoors without approval.  However, rather than work with the organization by giving them approval, or helping them keep the events organized, the city simply told them to stop.  A representative of Seattle's Human Services Department, David Takami, said, "This has happened in the past where there are a lot of meals served in a short period of time on the same day. It's a little chaotic and it can also lead to wasted food."

Wasted food?

Chaotic?

I thought these government types want to wage war on poverty. Isn't teaming up with allies, and helping them attain the same end, a legitimate battle tactic?

Feeding the poor seems not to be the driving force here.  In line with Michelle Obama's concerns about how people eat, it seems in this case the big brains of Seattle's local government believe that when it comes to the homeless, healthy is better.  Either you go completely hungry, or you will eat healthy.

By requiring that all food be served at the site, Takami said the city can control the nutritional value of what the homeless eat and can prevent litter from being left behind at parks after meals.

Notice the word "control" in that quote?

He said the controlled (oh, there it is again!) environment is also safer for volunteers.

"For example, there was one group of middle school students who, out of the goodness of their hearts, wanted to serve meals to homeless people and we were concerned [...] because of possible safety issues," Takami said.

Nevertheless, Bread of Life is upset about the restriction and hopes to continue serving meals to homeless individuals who do not come into their shelter.

If only the controllers of government would let them help the poor in more ways than inside the four walls of the mission.

Could it also be because the charity is religious in nature?


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