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> I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America

I'm confused. This statement makes it sound like Philip Alston is a third party investigating the US on behalf of the UN, however the top results on Google indicate he's an employee and beneficiary of US-based federally-funded institutions.

No big surprise here. The US is a member of the UN, of course, and the US and the UK were the driving forces behind the inception of the UN, which was first conceived by the US State Department and later worked out in more detail by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins.

Well, yes - but where is the confusion ?

I guess its my fault for being ignorant of how the UN chooses who does these reports, but I didn't expect someone with such close ties to the US to be writing reports about the US. For instance if this was "extreme poverty in Russia" I would be surprised to find Moscow State University faculty as the author. Although now that I know better I probably won't be as surprised in the future.

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