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Faced with an unjust rule of Persian king who threatened the very lives of her Jewish people, the Jewish heroine Queen Esther called on the faithful to fast and pray for their rulers to have a change of heart.
Taking their cue from Esther, a diverse coalition of religious leaders — from Bread for the World, World Vision, MercyCorps, Sojourners, the ONE Campaign and the Alliance to End Hunger — are calling on Americans of good faith to join them in fasting and prayer to
protest proposed budget cuts that would jeopardize the poor, sick and hungry at home and abroad.
“What we’re doing is humbling ourselves before God and saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore and I need your help and I’m not going to let go until you do something,”‘ said former U.S. Ambassador Tony Hall, head of the Alliance to End Hunger and co-convener of the fasting effort known as Hunger Fast.
Even before its official launch on Tuesday (March 29), at least 3,000 Sojourners activists had already signed on.
“I’m calling (God) in just like in Isaiah 58,” Hall said. “I’m calling (God’s) power in.”
He’s done it before. Back in 1993, then-Congressman Hall undertook a water-only fast for 22 days to protest similar budget cuts to aid programs for poor and other vulnerable Americans.
The proposed 2011 federal budget reductions include cuts to domestic spending of about $2.3 billion from affordable housing, $1.75 billion from job training, $1 billion from community health centers, $900 million from refugee programs and $390 million from low-income heating assistance.
The budget cuts, announced in mid-February to combat a staggering $1.3 trillion federal deficit, also call for slashing foreign aid by about $5 billion, including $450 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and

Because I am an evangelical Christian and the root of the word “evangelical” is found in the opening statement of Jesus in Luke 4, where Christ says he has come to bring “good news (the ‘evangel’) to the poor.” So to be an evangelical Christian is to try and bring good news to poor people.
Because some very bad news is happening to the poorest and most vulnerable people in Washington’s battle over the budget — both those at home and around the world.
Because budgets are moral documents — they reveal our priorities, who and what is important, and who and what are not. To address excessive deficits is also a moral issue — preventing our children and grandchildren from having crushing debt. But how you reduce a deficit is also a moral issue. We should reduce the deficit, but not at the expense of our poorest people.
Because it is simply wrong — morally and religiously — to focus our budget cuts on the people who are already hurting, and make them hurt

It looks like Halloween has come early this year for Wall Street Democrats. Costume season is months away, but the trend of Third Way types disguising their plans to gut Social Security as “progressive” is hotter than ever. Exhibit A: financial executive Robert Pozen, whose 2005 Social Security proposal was so “progressive” it earned the support of none other than George W.

During her research for the Children’s Defense Fund’s recent report “Held Captive”: Child Poverty in America, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass visited the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban Long Island, New York to profile three different kinds of child poverty. Her trip to Quitman County, Mississippi covered sadly familiar ground: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the Black sharecropping community in Marks, the seat of Quitman County, in the summer of 1966 to preach at the funeral of a friend, and Marks was later chosen as the starting point of the mule train that left Mississippi for Washington,

Last week I wrote about asset poverty and the huge difference it makes to a family’s economic security to have assets — savings, home equity, etc. — that they can tap into during tough times. As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, we should remember what a crucial role the health care reform law is starting to play in protecting people’s financial safety net.
That health and wealth are connected is thoroughly documented. For example, people in the highest income group can expect to live, on average, at least six and a half years longer than those in the

The dominant discourse in national American politics these days is a discourse on deficits. The leadership of the Republican Party, emboldened by their mid-term capture of the House, regularly informs us that “we are broke, and that we need to do something about it.” By “we,” they invariably mean the federal government. By ‘broke,” they mean the scale of borrowing currently necessary to balance the federal government’s books. By “doing something about it,” they mean the wholesale cutting of a swathe of discretionary public programs: $61 billion worth of such cutting if the mainstream Republican politicians have their way, $100 billion if the Tea Party agenda

As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass prepared the recent Children’s Defense Fund’s report “Held Captive”: Child Poverty in America, she traveled to the Mississippi Delta, the ravaged cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Louisiana, and the birthplace of the suburban American dream in Long Island, New York to see several different sides of contemporary American child poverty. Despite the different circumstances children in these diverse communities faced, Cass found that there was something very familiar about the effects of child poverty everywhere she looked. The report’s title came from 13-year-old Audrey, who Cass met in rural Lambert, Mississippi. Cass heard Audrey say something “that captures the feeling of poverty that only those caught in it know and that could have been said by most all the children I met while researching this

Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
The ability to stay away from credit cards is a privilege, as is being offered banking products, including checking accounts. Indeed, minorities and women have historically been shut out of the products others take for granted. And this problem was one of the excuses used by the industry to deregulate and “democratize” credit. But as access to credit and banking expanded, so did predatory

That thing you might have heard, about women’s work, income and property ownership — it’s not true. (And yes, I really am a feminist.)
If you’re a feminist you’ve probably seen this. You may have even repeated it: verbally, on your blog, on a flyer, on Twitter, in your book or an academic article. It goes something like this: “While women represent half the global population and one-third of the labor force, they receive only one-tenth of the world income and own less than one percent of world

Over the past two decades, most developing countries (35 of them in Africa alone) began to make direct cash transfers to their poor. Initially, this was meant to change the recipients’ behavior — say, we give you money if you vaccinate your children. But this social policy tool is beginning to transform the way citizens relate to the state.
To start with, the logistics of the transfer is simple and getting

On March 8, women celebrated 100 years of advances that have changed their lives irreversibly and in the process have made a monumental impact on our world — from the first woman in space, to the growing list of female Nobel Prize recipients and the steadily increasing number of female business and political leaders.
But a closer look at these achievements spotlights a darker truth: by and large they are the successes of women in the developed world. What about the billions of women in the developing world?
The numbers that signpost the societal changes — and the stark contrasts between women in the developed and developing world — are staggering.
In the U.S., for every two men who get a degree, three women will do the

If you’ve watched the opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire, you’ve seen Dharavi, a teeming slum of nearly a million people in the heart of Mumbai. I’m just back from India, including a visit to Dharavi. And, let me assure you, the film was shot on location.
Walking into the slum from Mahim Link Road, poverty slaps you in the face. Ramshackle buildings made of a mlange of found materials and corrugated tin line unpaved

With Brazilians recovering from carnival hangovers, the sports world is feeling the lingering effects of a game fixing case local media are calling the Whistle Mafia. A So Paulo court has fined the Brazilian Football Confederation 160 million Reals ($100 million) in connection with a conspiracy among referees and Internet gamblers. FIFA, the international governing body of football (soccer), has pledged to clean up game fixing and its connection to online gambling and is looking into new allegations involving European referees sent to officiate matches in South America.
The Whistle Mafia rigged the results of 11 games in the Campeonato Brasiliero in 2005. The Mafia do Apito is the first high profile case involving game fixing and internet gambling to get major media attention, making headlines as far away from Brazil as Pravda.
A Brazilian government Sports Tribunal ordered the fixed games replayed and the championship awarded to So Paulo side Corinthinans, instead of the original winners, Internacional of Porto

Last Sunday’s 60 Minutes shed a light on an underreported fact: soon, roughly one in four children in the U.S. will live below the poverty level. The piece, reported by Scott Pelley, highlighted one family living in a motel and another that was taken in by their neighbors after lost income forced them out of their homes.
It’s that face of America that Catarina de Albuquerque witnessed at the end of her

One hundred years ago, a group of courageous women – inspired by the then-unorthodox idea that they deserve the equal right to an education, safe working conditions and the ballot box – organized the first International Women’s Day.
This week, as we celebrate the occasion once again and reflect on the great strides made over the last century, we know their work is unfinished. Millions of women still live in a world in which their rights are limited and their skills are not being fully developed.
Gender inequality prevents us from unlocking the full potential of millions of women and girls around the world. Research tells us that there is a direct correlation between gender equality and economic growth. Decades of experience in developing countries show us that women often hold the greatest potential to lift their families and communities from

Without Social Security, nearly half of Americans age 65 and older would live in poverty. And yet, the very foundation of Social Security is under silent attack.
About 160 million Americans contribute to Social Security through payroll taxes. In New York State alone, Social Security provides over $42 billion in benefits each year to one in every six residents – over 3.1 million people. That is equivalent to 4 percent of the state’s annual GDP in Social Security benefits alone.
In the congressional district that I represent, Social Security benefits total $1.68 billion to over 128,000

It’s okay to warn or complain, but one of the attractive habits in American civilization is to ask: well, what’s your plan? In his recent book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, Lester Brown offers one.
While watching the global life-support system for a few decades, Brown warned us about specific gathering troubles, and more recently he articulated a plan that has gone through several iterations. Now he proclaims that our world is “on the edge” and it will take a “massive mobilization at wartime speed” to prevent economic and environmental collapse. The cover of his latest book shows a glacier calving a hunk into the sea, a sight that I once witnessed in Alaska: a tad awesome if you’re in a kayak.
The chapters on particular troubles are familiar to anyone who has been reading books and reports from World Watch, which Brown founded in 1974, or from Earth Policy Institute, which he started in 2001. I will focus instead on his solutions.
So what does Brown want us to do? After chapters on dealing with failed states and environmental refugees, seeking energy efficiency and alternative sources to replace fossil fuels, trying to feed eight billion stomachs, alleviating (or even “eradicating”) poverty, he ends with a chapter on “saving civilization.” Here, in just 20 pages, Brown delivers his plan in brief:
How do we get there?
Brown starts by proposing a market that would “tell the truth through full-cost pricing.” At present, despite squawks in favor of free markets, many of the costs of burning fossil fuels are not paid by those selling the fuels or doing the

When most Westerners think of East Africa, the initial images that come to mind may be of civil war-torn Somalia, starving families in Ethiopia, and exotic safaris in Kenya. These representations can be traced to various elements in our information and communication streams — such as the last time you looked at a map of the region and saw a mysterious dotted line between Ethiopia and Somalia instead of a typical solid border. Or perhaps you recall the extensive media coverage from a couple of decades ago of Ethiopia’s tragic famine during the 1980s. You may even have a positive impression of East Africa thanks to the 1985 adventure drama, Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep (the film gathered seven Academy Awards and did wonders for Kenya’s tourism

The global financial crisis and the spike in food prices have pushed millions of people into poverty worldwide. By the end of 2010, the financial crisis is estimated to have added some 64 million people to the ranks of the poor who live under $1.25 a day. Meanwhile, social unrest and popular demands for better and fairer societies are echoing across the world.
The concern for inclusive growth, or a growth pattern that includes all income strata, is not

A spate of high-profile corruption scandals has rocked the Indian government in the last few months and is threatening foreign investor confidence. The scams include allegations of graft against officials responsible for last year’s Commonwealth games hosted by New Delhi, a telecom case involving the government underselling mobile-phone licenses for kickbacks that may have cost the exchequer nearly $40 billion, and a housing scam in which politicians, bureaucrats, and military officials are accused of taking over a plush Mumbai apartment block intended for war widows.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose government has come under fire from opposition parties and the media, has vowed to crack down on corruption. But as the BBC’s Soutik Biswas notes, India has a poor record of prosecuting corruption and an even grimmer record on actual convictions.
India ranks 87 out of 178 countries on Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index. A 2010 report from Washington-based think tank Global Financial Integrity blames India’s poor governance for the tax evasion and corruption, which result in illicit financial flows from the country of at least $462

Rosalva immigrated to the U.S. 20 years ago, struggled to get by as a babysitter, house cleaner, and community service worker, while raising children. In 2002, Valarie lost her husband to gun violence in Hayward, leaving her as a young single mother to take care of their two children. And Lupe was a single mom, working full time at a low skill job while coping with her son’s diagnosis of

The green revolution — the post World War II movement that enhanced crop yields with improved seeds and farming technology — dramatically increased staple grain production in Asia and Latin America. From 1975 to 1985, maize, wheat and rice production grew twice as fast as the global population, and today these three grains make up nearly 70 percent of today’s food supply. But the green revolution had little impact in sub-Saharan Africa, the region most crippled by hunger. In addition, the green revolution has largely ignored vegetable crops, a key component of a healthy diet.
However, an abundance of staple crops will not nourish Africans who are without sufficient access to vegetables, which contain necessary micro-nutrients for a balanced

Although they have sharp differences about charter schools, tenure, and other controversial matters, there is at least one issue on which America’s teachers are in almost unanimous agreement: being well fed is critical to academic achievement. A new national survey by Lake Research shows that 98 percent of teachers believe there is a strong connection between eating a healthy breakfast and a student’s ability to concentrate, behave, and perform academically.
That statistic may not surprise you but here’s some that will: 65 percent of K-8 teachers have children in their classrooms who regularly come to school hungry because they have not had enough to eat at home, and 61 percent of these teachers use their own salaries each month to buy food supplies for the hungry children in their class. Overall, six in 10 teachers say hunger in the classroom increased last year. So how did we get to this distressing point? Not by design, but by neglect.
In fact political leaders of an earlier era — Democrats and Republicans — worked together in precisely the kind of bipartisan fashion we long for today, to create school lunch and school breakfast programs, and summer meals for when the schools are closed, to ensure that low income children would not be too distracted by hunger to

On the surface, emphasis in the Hindu and Dharmic (eastern) traditions appears to be primarily on inner self realization. We are encouraged to engage in community service as a transformation practice, sadhana, without personal recognition or publicity. Our underlying Vedic philosophy, often quoted by Mahatma Gandhi is Service to Man is Service to God. (Nar Seva, Narayan