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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
December 11th 2011
World Bank creating poverty (BBC Newsnight)
US child poverty rate soars to 32%
The US Census Bureau says the number of poor children in America has surged by one million in 2010, reflecting the country's worst economic woes since the Great Depression.
In 2010, the Census survey indicated that over 32 percent of children across the country were living in poverty, compared to nearly 31 percent in 2009, bringing the number of poverty-stricken US children to 15.7 million from the previously recorded 14.7 million, Reuters reported on Thursday.
November 19th 2011
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.
Septembber 7th 2011
The number of laws criminalizing poverty increased during the recession as the housing and homelessness crisis in America worsened.
Since 2006, there's been a 7 percent increase in laws prohibiting camping out in public places, an 11 percent increase in laws prohibiting loitering, a 6 percent increase in laws prohibiting begging and a 5 percent increase in laws prohibiting aggressive panhandling, according to a recent report by The National Coalition for the Homeless.
August 16th 2011
Algeria: The Richest Country The Poorest People
February 17h 2011|
 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.
February 12th 2011|
 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.
Using a combination of a Hollywood press agent, Madison Avenue ad firm and a media business channel the CNBC cheerleaders, the Davos clan relishes in their ill-gotten privilege and influence. The too big to fail mantra fits into the nihilism of their cult devotion of manipulated markets.
Globalism is god in Davos. Genuine entrepreneurial business creation shares the wealth across a broad spectrum of contributors. Not so, with those who revere monopolies and use the tools of derivative financing as a means of cabal consolidation. Globalism has achieved one dominant objective; namely, the separation of most depraved from the stark reality of those who pay the price of Free Trade oppression. Feed and fuel the appetites of the Masters of the Universe are on the permanent agenda of the Davos screen
February 2th 2011
 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.
More concerning than the home ownership rate is the vacancy rate. The Census tables don't tell the entire story, but they tell a lot of it. Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30 thousand in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year over year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.
February 1th 2011
People Begin Living Without Electricity and Water in California
January 31th 2011
 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
January 21th 2011
 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.
January 20th 2011
 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.
January 3th 2011
 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.
December 1th 2010
 Obama Forces 700,000 Seniors Out Of Med Coverage
Obama said while trying to pass his government takeover of your health care that you would be able to keep your doctor and health care plan. Like Jon Lovitz of Saturday Night Live, he lied and he knew it.
Last year we heard it over and over, I'm talking of course about President Obama's promise that if you like your plan you can keep it. Well forget it. Today it was discovered that another 700,000 Seniors will have to change plans, because health insurers are shutting down certain types of plans because of legislative changes and looming cuts to federal funding. That is on top of the announcement in August that three million seniors would have to get new providers.
Ncvember 21th 2010
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 country may be a few heartbeats away from intervention by the International Monetary Fund but today the Irish government had a novel message for the public: let them eat cheese.
Brendan Smith, the agriculture minister, announced a European Union-funded scheme today that will enable the country to tuck into the EU's cheese mountain. 53 tonnes of fresh cheddar will be distributed from 15 November with collection centres in towns and cities around the country.
The minister said the scheme was "an important means of contributing towards the well-being of the most deprived citizens in the community".
Ncvember 9th 2010
The U.S. government is now spending roughly $5.6 billion per month on food assistance helping out 41,836,000 Americans. How bad is it for the lower economic strata of families in our economy? In January of 2007 we had 26,000,000 Americans on food assistance. The economic crisis has added 15,800,000 Americans onto the food assistance program now known as SNAP. These numbers are incredible and demonstrate how deep the recession has gotten. Even though on paper the recession ended in the summer of 2009 these numbers show a very different economic climate. Where did these 15 million people come from? Many have fallen off the middle class treadmill and have been sucked into the ever growing invisible class of people in the U.S.
October 21h 2010
Nancy Pelosi says that food stamps and unemployment insurance will grow the US economy and lift it from the recession that Barack Obama has helped to worsen. Pelosi, that genius and all-around brilliant analyst of the US economy and everything financial, spoke Wednesday in an overly defensive response to Newt Gingrich’s right-on-the-mark salvo against Pelosi and her Democrat Party. In recent comments, Gingrich correctly advised Republicans to make a contrast between Democrats who promote food stamps as their economic policy, and Republicans who actually promote the useful concept called paychecks to grow the prosperity of Americans. Confusingly, Pelosi reacted to Gingrich’s assertion by actually admitting that, yes, Democrats are indeed the party of food stamps (okay, and unemployment for everyone, too)!
October 10th 2010
A series of reports released by the Census Bureau this month make clear the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans is widening, as free-trade globalism destroys the U.S. middle class.
Red Alert has consistently warned that the current high rate of unemployment and the shrinking of the middle class are not the result of a current recession.
Instead, the main argument of my book "America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty" is that this is what globalism looks like.
In a global economy, where U.S. workers are forced to compete with Chinese workers who make less than $1 an hour, the jobs outsourced to countries like China and India are not returning.
Equally, while the United States is exporting high-paying jobs, the nation is importing an underclass across open borders, providing additional pressure on salaries and benefits in lower-paying jobs.
Inevitably, the cycle of poverty deepens as the economic downturn reduces job opportunities and forces more of the middle class into poverty.
October 6th 2010
After the economy slipped into recession in 2008, millions of Americans received unemployment benefits to make ends meet -- including almost 3,000 millionaires.
According to IRS data, 2,840 households reporting at least $1 million in income on their tax returns that year also collected a total of $18.6 million in jobless aid. They included 806 taxpayers with incomes over $2 million and 17 with incomes in excess of $10 million. In all, multimillionaires reported receiving $5.2 million in jobless benefits. ...
“Getting an insurance payment doesn’t depend on need but only on suffering an insured loss,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow and expert on tax policy at the Urban Institute, another Washington policy research organization. “We don’t say that your homeowners’ policy shouldn’t pay off if you’re a millionaire.” [Click on chart to enlarge.]
October 4th 2010
 Thousands of Nigerian women 'found in Mali slave camps'
Nigerian girls are being forced to work as prostitutes in Mali "slave camps", say officials in Nigeria.
The girls, many of them under age, have often been promised jobs in Europe but ended up in brothels, said the government's anti-trafficking agency.
The brothels are run by older Nigerian women who prevent them from leaving and take all their earnings.
The agency said it was working with Malian police to free the girls and help them return to Nigeria.
There has been no official comment from the Mali authorities.
Nigeria's National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (Naptip) said officials visited Mali this month to follow up "horrendous reports" from victims, aid workers and clergy in Mali.
They said there were hundreds of brothels, each housing up to 200 girls, run by Nigerian "madams" who force them to work against their will and take their earnings
September 30th 2010
The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession.
The top-earning 20 percent of Americans — those making more than $100,000 each year — received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent earned by those below the poverty line, according to newly released census figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.
A different measure, the international Gini index, found U.S. income inequality at its highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among Western industrialized nations.
September 28th 2010
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.
September 22th 2010
The Palestinians under blockade in Gaza are calling upon the international community to intervene to end the blockade and collective punishment which is imposed on one million and a half persons since 2006 by israel. The Blockade is against international laws, treaties and accords. The Palestinians in Gaza are reminding the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the United Nations anti-poverty campaign that they must act to end the inhuman blockade of Gaza, and this not only in order to open the borders for humanitarian aid deliveries, but also to allow all Palestinians to live their life as human beings, what is being denied them by the criminal Israeli occupation and siege, and the silent complicity in this abject crime against humanity by the international community.
September 20th 2010|
The Obama administration has responded to reports of an epidemic growth of poverty in America to levels not seen since the 1960s by categorically ruling out any anti-poverty programs like those initiated under the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.
In the midst of a week-long campaign of speeches and events aimed at packaging the administration’s pro-corporate policies as populist measures to aid the “middle class,” Obama exhibited callous indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans when he was queried at his Friday press conference about possible anti-poverty measures.
A reporter asked, “On the economy, could you discuss your efforts at reviewing history as it relates to the poverty agenda, meaning LBJ and Dr. King?”
September 15th 2010
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.
September 14th 2010
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.
Companies like ours!
Last May, we decided to close our Globalvision office when the lease was up. Our costs remained too high while revenues had dropped. We realized that we ourselves had become victims of the economic calamity that I had been warning about, and urging who ever would listen to respond to. It was, suddenly, not about someone else’s problems. They had literally come home.
There was no escaping it: after nearly 24 years in a business that sometime seemed more like a crusade, the handwriting was on the wall as the coffers shrank and threatened to become a coffin.
Like most of our countrymen and women, we had lost confidence in the economy. Taking on a new lease would have meant personally guaranteeing it. That seemed like a road to bankruptcy.
Our option: go virtual with a post office box (POB 677, New York l0035) while revamping the Globalvision.org website.
It took us a month to pack up our lives, our gear, edit rooms, tapes and archive. There were also our awards and memorabilia, and other artifacts of a video production company that was always churning new videos and films. The market for what we had always done seemed to have vanished; the foundations that sometimes bankrolled our work had lost millions in the markets and had turned to new flavors of the week
September 4th 2010
40 Million Americans Live On Food Stamps
A record number of people are living on government handouts in the US, as one out of six Americans now gets various anti-poverty supports, including food stamps.
A survey of state data by daily USA TODAY released on Monday showed that more than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid -- the federal-state program designed mainly to help the poor. That is an increase of at least 17 percent from December 2007, when the economic recession started.
August 31th 2010
New Yorkers fight for jobs, nation battles over NYC mosque
August 25th 2010
People Begin Living Without Electricity and Water in California
July 27th, 2010
The National Coalition for the Homeless has issued a report detailing laws and ordinances in a couple of dozen localities across the nation that prohibit charities – churches, civic organizations, charities, etc. – from feeding the homeless. Or, at least, inhibit their ability to do so with burdensome regulation.
July 11th, 2010
Food prices are set to rise as much as 40% over the coming decade amid growing demand from emerging markets and for biofuel production, according to a United Nations report today which warns of rising hunger and food insecurity.
Farm commodity prices have fallen from their record peaks of two years ago but are set to pick up again and are unlikely to drop back to their average levels of the past decade, according to the annual joint report from Paris-based thinktank the OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The war against the middle class is silent and has grown since the recession started. We don’t hear much about this because in large part, those falling out of the middle class don’t have the funds to purchase airtime with the media who is wedded to Wall Street. 40 million Americans now receive food assistance. How often do we hear about this?
Disasters are Big Business
There are 10,000 ‘NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations) in Haiti, one for every 900 inhabitants and each one of them has no doubt at least one Westerner working within, yet aside from the Cuban health workers, it seems they could do nothing until the gringos arrived with their Blackhawks and nuclear-tipped aircraft carrier and of course, the 82nd Airborne, paying yet another ‘visit’ to this benighted and super-exploited land to ’secure’ the place for the locust storm of aid to come (too late for too many).
Now I’ve never been a fan of ‘NGOs’ not only because my own experience with them has been less than edifying but because they are the direct result of ‘benign neglect’ on the part of the state. In other words they initially appeared to fill a void left when states washed their hands of the mess they’d left behind or they just ditched their responsibilities.
But unlike governments who are, in theory anyway, answerable to their electorate, ‘NGOs’ are answerable to no one. They are not elected, they are not representative. In their way they are more like neo-colonial ‘stand-ins’ for the former colonizers, at least at the ‘social services’ end of things. Well, it seems many of the 10,000 have been tested and found wanting.
Macy Clinton, 18, the daughter of Bill Clinton's brother Roger,tells "Inside Edition" she needs government assistance to eat.
"It's hard because I'm a Clinton too, but I have to be on food stamps just to try to make it day by day," she said in the interview.
The teenager says Roger Clinton, who was confirmed as her father by DNA testing when she was 6, has only met her a handful of times and has given her nothing to live on. "My father told me that he would have a trust fund ready for me whenever I turned 18 for college," she said, "and I don't have any of that money."
For the time being, Macy Clinton is using a government benefits card to get free food at her local grocery store. Her mother, Martha Spivey, claims that trust fund or no trust fund, Roger owes $30,000 in back child support. She has an old voicemail message from him expressing regretful attempts to send money.
Thousands of homeless people are being forced off the streets of South Africa to hide the scale of poverty there from World Cup fans.
More than 800 tramps, beggars and street children have already been removed from Johannesburg and sent to remote settlements hundreds of miles away.
And in Cape Town, where England face Algeria on June 18, up to 300 have been moved to Blikkiesdorp camp where 1,450 families are crammed in a settlement of tin huts designed for just 650 people.
Johannesburg councillor Sipho Masigo was unrepentant. "Homelessness and begging are big problems in the city," he said. "You have to clean your house before you have guests. There is nothing wrong with that.
In recent years, the idea of giving small loans to poor people became the darling of the development world, hailed as the long elusive formula to propel even the most destitute into better lives.
Actors like Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas lent their boldface names to the cause. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who pioneered the practice by lending small amounts to basket weavers in Bangladesh, won a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 2006. The idea even got its very own United Nations year in 2005.
 Iceland's new poor line up for food
The crisis that brought down Iceland's economy in late 2008 threw thousands of formerly well-off families into poverty, forcing people like Iris to turn to charity to survive.
Each week, up to 550 families queue up at a small white brick warehouse in Reykjavik to receive free food from the Icelandic Aid to Families organisation, three times more than before the crisis.
Rutur Jonsson, a 65-year-old retired mechanical engineer, and his fellow volunteers spend their days distributing milk, bread, eggs and canned food donated by businesses and individuals or bought in bulk at the supermarket.
"I have time to spend on others and that's the best thing I think I can do," he said as he pre-packed grocery bags full of produce.
In a small, close-knit country of just 317,000 people, where everyone knows everyone, the stigma of accepting a hand-out is hard to live down and of the dozens of people waiting outside the food bank in the snow on a dreary March afternoon, Iris is the only one willing to talk.
Native Americans living in desperate poverty
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota is the poorest reservation in the United States. Nearly half of its nearly 30,000 residents live below the poverty level, and life expectancy is among the lowest in the Western world. Housing at Pine Ridge was the worst seen by UN Special Rapporteur for Housing Raquel Rolnik in her recent tour of the United States.
Oglala Sioux tribe president Theresa Two Bulls says about 80 percent of the people who live on the reservation are unemployed. Even those looking for work find that there are few jobs available to them. There are a few outreach organizations as well as a Subway sandwich shop.
The Prairie Wind Casino employs about 300 people from the tribe. When it opened the goal was to draw people in from surrounding counties to gamble, but so far this plan has failed.
Ivan Sorbel with the Pine Ridge Area Chamber of Commerce says that they are working on building an economy, encouraging entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. source RT.cpm
Don't look now. But even as the bank bailout is winding down, another huge bailout is starting, this time for the Social Security system.
A report from the Congressional Budget Office shows that for the first time in 25 years, Social Security is taking in less in taxes than it is spending on benefits.
Instead of helping to finance the rest of the government, as it has done for decades, our nation's biggest social program needs help from the Treasury to keep benefit checks from bouncing -- in other words, a taxpayer bailout
 The worst is yet to come: Unemployed Americans should hunker down for more job losses
Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.
While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.
Read more >>
 Ireland – One in four families living on less than €20k
Experts warned the striking statistic, based on pre-downturn figures, had worsened as recession-hit households saw their incomes plunge.
The study, published by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and equality think-tank TASC, found while 5% of families lived on earnings exceeding €134,000, more than half got by on €40,000 or less. Report author Professor Terry McDonough said incomes had fallen further since the data was gathered in 2006.
“We’re not looking at the consequences of the downturn, what we’re looking at is really the best picture,” he said.
“Anything that’s happened subsequently will have tended to make things worse.”
The Hierarchy of Earnings, Attributes and Privilege (HEAP) report shows the average income of those with only primary education or no formal education was just €13,489, compared with an average of €45,707 for those with a university degree.
One in seven Americans short of food
More than 49 million Americans -- one in seven -- struggled to get enough to eat in 2008, the highest total in 14 years of a federal survey on "food insecurity," the U.S. government said Monday.
While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said programs such as food stamps softened the impact of an economic recession, anti-hunger groups pointed to the huge increase from the preceding year when 36.2 million people had trouble getting enough food and a third of them occasionally went hungry
More Mexicans Are Sending Money to Help Out Relatives in the U.S.
For decades, money sent home by Mexicans working in the United States has been a key pillar of the Mexican economy. Now, scattered reports are surfacing of Mexicans sending money to support relatives in the United States hard hit by the economic crisis north of the border. Latinos, especially immigrants, are suffering a disproportionate share of the joblessness that is officially rising to engulf close to 10 percent of the overall U.S. population
More bodies go unclaimed as families can't afford funeral costs
The poor economy is taking a toll even on the dead, with an increasing number of bodies in Los Angeles County going unclaimed by families who cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones.
At the county coroner's office -- which handles homicides and other suspicious deaths -- 36% more cremations were done at taxpayers' expense in the last fiscal year over the previous year, from 525 to 712.
One in 10 Americans gets help from U.S. to buy food
(Reuters) - A record 32.2 million people -- one in every 10 Americans -- received food stamps at the latest count, the government said on Thursday, a reflection of the recession now in its 16th month.
Food stamps, the major U.S. anti-hunger program, help poor people buy groceries. The average benefit was $112.82 per person in January. The January figure marks the third time in five months that enrollment set a record.
"A weakened economy means that many more individuals are turning to SNAP/Food Stamps," said the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group, using the acronym for the renamed food stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
The jailers of the 19th century even in the pre-Civil War South largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and 80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who cant pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution.
Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors prisons of the 21st century.
Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son, the New York Times wrote in an editorial.
 Thousands Dying Right Now & Everyone Looks Away...
I've been reading about this a**hole dictator in an African nation called Zimbabwe for a couple of years now. First he tore down and burned all the homes of his country's inhabitants, then he forced them off their farm land so the whole country starved to death, and now there's a cholera epidemic and he closes the hospitals and shuts off the water wells. This guy makes Hitler look like Mother Theresa. He's so blatant about what he does that he now will not allow anyone in to the country to see how f**ked up he's made things. Not even the UN can help. Meanwhile thousands -- likely hundreds of thousands -- are right now dying of starvation and cholera because of his policies and what's the world doing? Is it because these are people with black skin? Is it because it's happening in Africa, far away and easy to forget?
Food stamp enrollment jumps to record 31.8 million
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A record 31.8 million Americans received food stamps at the latest count, an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession, government figures showed on Thursday.Food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries, are the major U.S. anti-hunger program, forecast to cost at least $51 billion in this fiscal year ending September 30, up $10 billion from fiscal 2008."A weakened economy means that many more individuals are turning to SNAP/food stamps," said the Food Research and Action Center. Last summer food stamps were renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Read more >>
 Homelessness Is at Record Highs: Let's Show Some Real Compassion
On January 14, as the combined forces of recession and foreclosure continued their long, cruel assault on the Rust Belt, Cleveland's public school system marked the new semester with a troubling piece of data: the number of students who had been homeless at some point during the school year had jumped to 1,728. Compared with the same date in 2006, this number represented a spike of nearly 150 percent and served as further confirmation that, for all the whingeing of Wall Street executives, the poor and vulnerable have been hardest hit by the flailing economy. Not that Cleveland's poorest students needed reminding. In December, when Project ACT, a social service program for homeless students run by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, asked a group of homeless parents what they wanted for Christmas, the parents responded with wish lists worthy of Little Dorrit: toilet paper, bleach, paper towels, food.
"We figured they'd be asking for some nice things, [but] they were asking for basic, basic household things," said Marcia Zashin, Project ACT's director. "Times are tough. They're very tough."
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If you ever hear of Haiti, it is usually because of something frightening. It is famous for hurricanes, deforestation, poverty, drug smuggling, violence, dictatorships, voodoo and slavery. Half a century ago, when it was under the tyranny of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his “zombie” militia, Graham Greene called Haiti the “nightmare republic”. Though Papa Doc has long gone, the nightmares have never ended in this Caribbean dystopia. Haiti is the poorest country and only Third World nation in the western hemisphere, and it’s getting worse
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