'Starve society to impose unseen poverty': EU chiefs' way out of crisis

Hidden Hunger: Kids in UK rely on food banks

More and more people in the UK are forced to rely on charity food banks to get their daily meal. Thousands of households are left with choice between keeping warm or putting food on their tables, with parents skipping meals to feed their children.

Charity Told to Stop Serving Food to Homeless in City Parks

SEATTLE -- Hot meals served to the city's homeless have now become a hot-button issue after a local charity was told to stop doing it in city parks."Why now? What did we do wrong? 3 years, no one said anything," said Willie Parish, Jr., executive director of the Bread of Life Mission. "We're meeting needs, people are happy."The Mission, a local faith-based charity for 74 years, serves three meals a day to hundreds of homeless from its Pioneer Square headquarters. Once a month, every third Saturday, the non-profit heads to City Hall Park to hand out food and water to the homeless outside the county courthouse ("drive-by foodings," the charity called it).

The Welfare Bill: A government of millionaires just made the poor poorer - and laughed as they did it (Independent)

Old & Helpless: Euro crisis to take food out of mouths of pensioners?

More Abandoned Children as Europe Austerity Wears On

The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out

Before it was deregulated in the year 2000, the agricultural commodities futures market was used mainly by farmers and food buyers seeking to insure themselves against changes in the prices of products such as wheat, maize and sugar. When George W Bush passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act 12 years ago, there was an influx, led by Goldman Sachs, of purely financial players who had no interest in ever buying food, but who sought solely to profit from changes in food prices, says Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food

Land of the free, home of the hungry

Nowhere is the chasm between America's political class and its working poor more vast than in the demand to cut food stamps

On Monday afternoon this week, Rachelle Grimmer went into a Department of Health and Human Services in Texas with her two children, Timothy, aged 10, and Ramie, aged 12, and asked for a new case worker who could assist her application for food stamps. She had first applied in July but had been told she hadn't provided enough information and, by most accounts, had been struggling to get by and get help since she moved from Ohio

US child poverty rate soars to 32%

Middle Class Death Watch: As Poverty Spreads, 28% of Americans Who Were Part of the Middle Class Have Fallen Out of It

“The promise of the American dream has given many hope that they themselves could one day rise up the economic ladder. But according to a study released those already in financially-stable circumstances should fear falling down a few rungs too. The study… found that nearly a third of Americans who were part of the middle class as teenagers in the 1970s have fallen out of it as adults… its findings suggest the relative ease with which people in the U.S. can end up in low-income, low-opportunity lifestyles — even if they started out with a number of advantages. Though the American middle class has been repeatedly invoked as a key factor in any economic turnaround, numerous reports have suggested that the middle class enjoys less existential security than it did a generation ago, thanks to stagnating incomes and the decline of the industrial sector.”

They are known as the last resort. Millions of Americans are staying in budget long-stay motels as the country's economic problems get worse.

The grisly rooms are seen as the lowest of the U.S. housing ladder, only just above a cardboard box.

In tiny rooms with paper-thin walls and nylon sheets, vulnerable Americans are making their homes for a few hundred bucks a month.

Algeria: The Richest Country The Poorest People

How the Government Will Take Control of Your Retirement Account

In the late 1920s, the economy of the Weimar Republic was beset by numerous fiscal troubles. The global depression spread quickly to Germany, undermining the government's ability to make its reparation payments from the Great War.
Fearing a return to hyperinflation, many Germans who had spent the last decade building up a small fortune during the Weimar Republic's own 'Roaring 20s' decided to pack up and leave; they remembered the days when banknotes were used as wallpaper and had no desire to repeat the experience.
In 1931, Chancellor Heinrich Bruning imposed a 'flight tax', which levied a 25% tax on the value of all property and capital for Germans leaving the country.
Total revenue collected from this tax amounted to roughly 1 million Reichsmarks (RM) in its earliest days ($56 million today). By the late 1930s under Hitler's rule, flight tax revenue soared to RM 342 million ($21.5 billion today) as more people headed toward the exits.

Davos Elites Enjoys the Global Depression

When Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum started the yearly pilgrimage to the inner sanctums of the Swiss Gnomes, he could hardly conceive that the ritual would turn into a celebrity bash of the super rich. The Davos venue is appropriate. Only rarified air is suitable for the global Mattoids. Billed as an assembly of business moguls, it really is more of an audition of well-heeled speculators vying for inclusion into the real power elites who make or break governments, economies and political destinies.

Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty

America's home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That's down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998. Homeownership is falling at an alarming pace, despite the fact that home prices have fallen, affordability is much improved and inventories of new and existing homes are still running quite high. Bargains abound, but few are interested or eligible to take advantage.

Goldman Sachs offering average bonuses of $430,000 while a record 43,200,000 Americans receive food stamps.

The U.S. economy is now operating like a finely tuned engine bent on dismantling the middle class and protecting the tiny elites in our nation that have learned to manipulate both political parties to their financial benefit. This did not occur over night but started in the 1970s when the U.S. government and investment banks juiced up the nation with deficit and debt spending. A single family cannot go into debt for a very long time without consequences but a rising housing market hid much of the inequality developing in our system for a very long time. It was an illusion of stability. The top 1 percent in our nation now control 43 percent of all financial wealth

The More Americans That Go On Food Stamps The More Money JP Morgan Makes

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money. In the video posted below, JP Morgan executive Christopher Paton admits that this is "a very important business to JP Morgan" and that it is doing very well.

Serfing USA: Corporate America Is Robbing American Workers

Along with the staggering theft in broad daylight of Americans’ assets that has occurred in the course of the ongoing financial crisis, as taxpayers funded multi-trillion bank bailouts and banks stole homes through foreclosures with the help of fraudulent paperwork, American companies have also been picking the pockets of workers more directly.

This second round of paycheck theft has come in the form of stolen productivity gains.

Historically, the relatively high and rising standard of living of American workers--both blue and white-collar--which once gave the US one of the highest standards of living in the world, has come courtesy of rising productivity, which has allowed US companies to produce more goods with less labor, and to then pass some of the enhanced profits on to workers in the form of higher wages, without having to raise prices. That has been important because, when higher wages are financed by higher prices, it tends to be a kind of zero-sum game: higher wages cancelled out by inflation.

20 Statistics That Prove That Global Wealth Is Being Funneled Into The Hands Of The Elite – Leaving Most Of The Rest Of The World Wretchedly Poor

Today global wealth is more highly concentrated in the hands of the elite than it ever has been at any other point in modern history. Once upon a time, the vast majority of the people in the world knew how to grow their own food, raise their own animals and take care of themselves. There weren't many that were fabulously wealthy, but there was a quiet dignity in having land you could call your own or in having a skill that you could turn into a business. Sadly, over the past several decades an increasingly growing percentage of agricultural land has been gobbled up by big corporations and by corrupt governments. Hundreds of millions of people have been pushed off their land and into highly concentrated urban areas. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly difficult to start a business of your own as monolithic global corporations have come to dominate nearly every sector of the world economy.

Let them eat cheese: anger as Ireland plans handouts of cheddar to the poor

The Irish agriculture minister, Brendan Smith, said the free cheddar scheme was 'contributing towards the well-being of the most deprived citizens'. A caller to RTÉ radio asked, 'have they taken leave of their senses?' Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The Illusion of Pension Savings

Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois approved a plan in April that seemed to help balance the budget, but it may imperil the pension fund.

Actuaries, including some who serve on the profession’s governing boards, got wind of what Illinois was doing and began to look more closely. Many thought Illinois was using an unorthodox maneuver to starve its pension fund of billions of dollars, while papering over a widening gap between what it owed and how much it had. Alarmed, they began looking for a way to discourage Illinois’s method before other states could adopt it.

They are too late. The maneuver, and techniques that have similar effects, are already in use in Rhode Island, Texas, Ohio, Arkansas and a number of other places, allowing those states to harvest savings today by imposing cuts on workers in the future.

The recession may be officially over, but six in 10 Canadians are still surviving from paycheque to paycheque, a national survey showed Monday.

Fifty-nine per cent of Canadian workers say they would be in financial trouble if their paycheque was delayed by just a week – the same proportion as last year when the economy was still mired in a downturn, according to a poll of 2,766 people by the Canadian Payroll Association.

What Happens When Unemployment Happens to You

When your life and your work is as entwined as mine has been—fusing the personal and the political over all these years, it may be stretching things to consider yourself unemployed but that’s what I am as Labor Day approaches.

Most of the media focuses on the big companies that have slashed their work forces (even as they hoard cash.) But small companies are also suffering, cutting back, and closing. They don’t get the subsidies or bailouts or the attention.

People Begin Living Without Electricity and Water in California