UN finds 'extreme poverty' in the USA

He wrote, "In imagining the poor, racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface. The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of colour whether African Americans or Hispanic 'immigrants'." Was any proof advanced to back this claim? None. The message is that the white elites are deliberately oppressing "people of colour".

According to official 2014 US Census data, of the annual household income of families based on their ethnicity, Asian-Americans are number one with an average almost $91,000, Caucasian Americans are second with just over $79,000, Hispanic/Latino Americans are third with an average of just over $55,600 while African-American families received an average income of just under $50,000. None of this suggests that, four years later, that an estimated 41.4 million Americans are living in extreme poverty.

One of my personal favourites in Mr Alston's Report is his bit about "environmental pollution" and he selected two States to prove his point.

He wrote, "In Alabama and West Virginia, a high proportion of the population is not served with public sewerage and water supply services. Contrary to the assumption in most developed countries that such services should be extended by the government systematically and eventually comprehensively to all areas, neither state was able to provide figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any planned government response."

Do we learn from him what this "high proportion" is? Of course not.

It seems that he was unaware of the fact that in rural areas in America people dig their own wells for water and provide their own septic system for sewerage. Even the rich must do it. No government is going to spend taxpayer's money digging a sewer line for twenty or fifty kilometres to serve one house.

And, naturally, Mr Alston didn't pause for a nanosecond to consider that many families living in remote rural areas do so by choice for the peace, quiet and self-sufficiency it affords. Be they hippie types or not, they are causing much less "environmental pollution" by living off the grid – very possibly, a lot get their power from solar panels or windmills also.

Nobody should be surprised by Mr Alston's Report.

On 1 December, 2016, only a short time after Trump was elected (8 November, being sworn in as President on 21 January, 2017), Mr Alston gave a speech in London to the London School of Economics blasting Trump and making all sorts of dire predictions about his administration saying, "He has consistently advocated measures that would abrogate civil liberties for American citizens, not to mention non-citizens, a great many of whom were traumatised by the very act of his election."

So, Trump's election caused some sort of emotional melt-down among non-Americans? Gosh, Trump should be ashamed, right?

But not all the world is ignoring extreme poverty as, allegedly, the USA is. Mr Alston report in his London speech said that he had visited China in August that year and obviously he was impressed by what he called, "the immense and certainly admirable progress it has made towards eliminating extreme poverty." Mind you it was a bit of a shame that people he met there were either arrested or harassed by the government after he left and, remember, China is on the Human Rights Council and is effectively one of Mr Alston's bosses. He managed to tour the USA for ten days without anybody he met being treated that way by the Trump administration which, allegedly, denies civil rights among all sort of awful things.

Perhaps Mr Alston would be happier if the Trump Administration was more like the Chinese communist dictatorship – after all the Chinese are making "Immense and certainly admirable progress towards eliminating poverty".