"WHEN YOU SEE A CLOUD RISING IN THE WEST, YOU SAY, 'IT IS GOING TO RAIN,' AND IT DOES. AND WHEN THE SOUTH WIND BEGINS TO BLOW, YOU SAY, 'IT IS GOING TO BE HOT,' AND IT IS. HYPOCRITES! YOU KNOW HOW TO INTERPRET THE CHANGES IN THE EARTH AND THE SKY. HOW IS IT THAT YOU CANNOT ACCEPT THE EVENTS THAT ARE UNFOLDING EVEN NOW?" LUKE 12:54-56

Dreaded Migrant Caravan - The Mobile 'Reichstag Fire' - Be Very Afraid

From Jesse's cafe:

"Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the U.S. stretched out on rain-soaked sidewalks, benches and public plazas in the southern Mexico city of Tapachula, worn down by another day's march under a blazing sun.

The caravan’s numbers have continued to grow as they walk and hitch rides through hot and humid weather, and the United Nations estimated that it currently comprises some 7,200 people, “many of whom intend to continue the march north.”

However, they were still at least 1,140 miles (1,830 kilometers) from the nearest border crossing — McAllen, Texas — and the length of their journey could more than double if they go to Tijuana-San Diego, the destination of another caravan earlier this year. That one shrank significantly as it moved through Mexico, and only a tiny fraction — about 200 of the 1,200 in the group — reached the California border.

Some have questioned the timing so close to the vote and whether some political force was behind it, though by all appearances it began as a group of about 160 who decided to band together in Honduras for protection and snowballed as they moved north.

“No one is capable of organizing this many people,” Mujica said, adding that "there are only two forces driving them: hunger and death.”

Associated Press, October 23, 2018

These poor families are only over a thousand miles away, walking on foot, trying to escape the brutal oppression of a government we help to sustain in Honduras.

And they are coming for your freedom. And maybe to meddle in our elections.  See the usual clickbait and tinpot internet sites for details on this looming menace.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Seriously, if they can make it to Texas in the next couple of weeks, over a thousand miles on foot at the most direct and punishing route, I say let them in.

They may be good prospects for our Olympic teams.  Especially the women and children.

And we could use some resourceful and self-reliant people, because we are obviously becoming a bunch of hysterical nincompoops who will believe just about anything.  And the bigger and more fearful and hate-filled the lie the better we like it.

https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2018/10/dreaded-migrant-caravan-mobile.html

I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

Genesis 28:15

Inside Nikki Haley's Shocking Speech to Secretive Far-Right Group

From Jesse's cafe:

Just days before she resigned as UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley delivered a private speech to the Council for National Policy, a secretive group of influential right-wing figures. Journalist Max Blumenthal obtained exclusive access and reveals shocking details -- including Haley's admission that she threatened the Chinese ambassador with a US invasion of North Korea."

You may see the original article at The Real News Network.

https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2018/10/inside-nikki-haleys-shocking-speech-to.html

Ralph Nader: Effecting Change Is Not Impossible— As You Have Been Taught To Think By 'Divide and Rule'

From Jesse's Cafe:

"Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers.  The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.

The democracy gap in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the least worst every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the least worst gets worse.

We’re told that we’re a polarized society, right? That’s the way the ruling classes have manipulated people for more than two thousand years:  divide and rule.  And, sure, there are differences between the Left and the Right over reproductive rights, school prayer, gun control, government regulation, and now, immigration.

But on at least two dozen issues you’ll find combined Left-Right support from 75 to 90 percent of the population. You’ll find it on breaking up the big banks; you’ll find it on civil liberties [privacy]; you’ll find it on getting rid of corporate welfare and crony capitalism; you’ll find it on criminal-justice reform.  There is huge Left-Right support to crack down on the corporate crooks of Wall Street."

Ralph Nader

How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn’t Too Late to Reverse Course

https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2018/10/ralph-nader-effecting-change-is-not-as.html

"And then many will fall by the wayside, and will hate and betray one another. False prophets will arise, and lead the people astray. And because of the increase in wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.    But those who stand firm in faithfulness to the end will be saved."

Matthew 24:10-14

Is India on Its Way Out of Poverty?

From Naked Capitalism:

Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, discusses a recent UNDP report showing that poverty in India has halved in the last 10 years, and the newly unveiled healthcare plan for the bottom 40% of the population, nicknamed “Modicare.”

Ghosh calls Modicare “a scam that is going to benefit private healthcare companies” by providing healthcare insurance, based on the US model “instead of expanding a public health system which could actually provide [health care] much more cheaply, much more equitably and much more efficiently.”

GREG WILPERT: It’s The Real News Network and I’m Greg Wilpert, coming to you from Baltimore.

The United Nations Development Program, the UNDP, published a report recently showing that according to its multi-dimensional definition of poverty, poverty in India has halved in the past ten years. This comes on the heels of another report earlier this year which found that India stopped being the country with the largest population living below the poverty line in the world with, Nigeria taking first place in 2018. Then last week, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a new national healthcare plan. The plan is said to offer free health care to the bottom 40 percent of the population of India, about 100 million families. Here is how he announced the new program.

NARENDRA MODI: The number of people who will benefit from Ayushmaan Bharat scheme is more than the combined population of the whole United States, the whole of Canada and the whole of Mexico too. More than all three of these countries, and more than even more countries.

GREG WILPERT: The new health care plan is being nicknamed Modicare and is expected to cost 1.6 billion dollars per year. Joining me now to analyze India’s poverty and the new healthcare plan is Professor Jayati Ghosh. She’s professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Thanks for joining us today, Prof Ghosh.

JAYATI GHOSH: It’s a pleasure.

GREG WILPERT: So first of all, to understand what the UNDP really analyzed, what does UNDP mean with multi-dimensional poverty and why is this a better measurement than the more common international poverty line?

JAYATI GHOSH: Well, the international poverty line basically looks at incomes and it assesses whether you have an income that would allow you to meet certain basic necessities. Every country has their own poverty line. It’s not as if there’s one that is a standard across the world. But usually, it’s only based on income. And many people have argued that this actually leaves out a whole lot of the other important dimensions, such as health, education, schooling, nutrition, habitation, where you live, all kinds of things like that. So the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which was developed in fact in Oxford, is supposed to bring in all of those things; access to sanitation, access to water, access to food, access to healthcare, access to basic nutrition, all of these angles.

So definitely, yes, it’s a better measure. The difficulty is that it will rely on different datasets. And so you won’t always get necessarily a consistent time series, because you’re using time series from different variables and different statistical systems that are collecting them. So you may not get a sort of consistent result. The bigger problem is that we don’t really have too much of this data after 2011, 12. So I really don’t know how the UNDP has managed to give us information for the last ten years. It would be remarkable if they managed to do this, because nobody in India knows.

GREG WILPERT: Well let’s turn to the question of what is poverty doing. I mean, is it going up or down? I mean, according to the UNDP, it has been declining. And if that’s the case, first of all, I want to know if you would agree with that assessment. And then, if it has declined recently, what government policies have contributed to the reduction of poverty in India?

JAYATI GHOSH: Well to be completely honest, nobody knows whether it’s declined or not. It may well have declined, because after all, the Indian economy has been growing at seven to eight percent, and it would be remarkable if there had been no decline in poverty over this period. But all of our survey data that would allow us to even get a multidimensional poverty index, the last such survey was conducted in 2011, 12. So we really do not have good data after that. Everything has been based on guesstimates. So maybe the UNDP has a better system of guessing, we don’t know. But all I can say is that there are no hard data that would allow us to say definitively that it’s gone down by this much.

GREG WILPERT: And what would you say are some of the main problem areas in terms of poverty in India at the moment?

JAYATI GHOSH: The biggest area is clearly nutrition. It has been a very important issue in India. We still have very poor nutrition indicators, especially nutrition outcome indicators, which we do have data for more recently. Many of our states are down there with the worst of sub-Saharan African countries in terms of inadequate body mass index, anemia and a bunch of other things. But also, there is a range of other areas of multi-dimensional poverty; access to clean drinking water, access to … I already mentioned food, but access to healthcare, access to decent education for everybody and so on and so forth. So we are still way behind other economies at our similar level of per capita income in terms of providing these very basic goods and services. I would say that, yes, there must have been some improvement in terms of poverty reduction, but it’s nowhere near fast enough and we’re still nowhere near where we should be even at this level of development.

GREG WILPERT: Can you talk also about the relationship between what you mentioned, the nutritional problems, but also you said that apparently there’s a agricultural crisis in India still going on and how that impacts poverty, how it relates to poverty.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/india-way-poverty.html