During bombing raids in Iraq, the media liked to say that Saddam Hussein used people as human shields. That's not accurate. Although it's true they were used as shields, the fact is they were humans already. So if these humans were used as shields, they were human shields. They weren't being used as human shields. Got that?

They're using them as shields. It's a horrible thing. They're using them as shields. But we're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists. You have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives. Don't kid yourself. But they say they don't care about their lives. You have to take out their families.

Don't fear the word "poor," Barber says: If poor people voted in large numbers, that would change everything... What we found were three things: No. 1, don't go into these communities and say, you just need to vote. Say, we honor you, because we respect that some of them have not voted because they never heard anybody call their name.... We need to say the word "poor." If you look at the number of poor people — 52 million without a living wage, 140 million [overall] — you have to talk to them as human beings. Second of all, say to them, "I am not here to ask you to vote. I am here for you to join a movement that says there's something wrong with our policies that this many people can be left disinherited." Thirdly, I am asking you to believe that democracy is not just an idea, but democracy and justice are on the ballot.

My experience with Jobra’s deep tubewell convinced me to turn my focus on the landless poor. Soon I started arguing that wherever a poverty alleviation program allowed the nonpoor to be copassengers, the poor would soon be elbowed out of the program by those who were better off. In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a program, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning. In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.

Not all advice on helping the poor works, so there is a real question of morality, politics, and economics involved here. "Identifying" with the poor is not enough and may well be harmful if ineffective or bad advice is given. We will not help the poor or anyone else, unless we love them. But just because we love someone, it does not follow that how we show this love is a feasible way to help the poor.

It is up to the middle class to swarm to the polls and defeat the poor who are just after government handouts....If they [political parties] use the same old campaign strategy, they will come [to power] with the votes of the poor who want more money to make their life better. The people in the middle- and upper income ranges have to...cast their votes in national polls and the charter referendum too.

It's easy to beat up poor, desperate people. Finding the money to do what they promised is difficult, and they are unable to do so. The government has taken out its frustration on the easy target: the weak.

How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion. ("Look to the Children of the Poor in This Season of Budget-Slashing", 1995)

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship. The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we today.

The poorest population

The really poor cannot be subjected to integration propaganda because the immediate concern of daily life absorb all their capacities and efforts. To be sure, the poor can be pushed into rebellion, into to an explosion of violence; they can be subjected to agitation propaganda and excited to the point of theft and murder. But they cannot be trained by propaganda, kept to hand, channeled, or oriented.

Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems.

Bishops and priests should bring the spiritual dimension to political and social life. The poor will be exploited and used as a pretext for partisan or other agendas.

What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

Let us not underestimate the ingenuity of the poor people in converting what they get from the relief worker to what they want. And that’s just wasteful. They would be far better off if we just gave them the money and let them spend it.