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E.J. Dionne
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Photo illustration from an image by Colin Grey (CC-BY)
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Newt Gingrich blames Fox News; the Justice Department sues Apple; 46 million Americans without a safety net, and a history of Hamas.
Posted on Apr 13, 2012
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This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Newt Gingrich blames Fox News; the Justice Department sues Apple; 46 million Americans without a safety net; and a history of Hamas.
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AP/Jae C. Hong
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By Robert Scheer — Who will speak for the rights of the unborn now that Rick Santorum is gone from the race? Let me give it a whirl from the perspective of one whose own unwed mother had several abortions before yours truly was permitted to emerge.
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By Eugene Robinson — I wish Mitt Romney’s cavalier dismissal of poverty in America could be chalked up as just another gaffe, but it’s much worse than that.
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Still from a CNN video
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Taken out of context, it doesn’t come as a total surprise, and that’s the problem for Romney. It’s not the kind of sound bite the trust fund candidate wants on the record.
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Brad Montgomery (CC-BY)
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California Gov. Jerry Brown has suggested steep cuts to social programs that benefit parents and children on the verge of homelessness. Brown is hoping to close a $9.2 billion hole in the budget (and drum up support for tax hikes) by asking the state’s most desperate families to do without.
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AP / Erich Schlegel
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Here’s a sobering dose of reality: Poverty in America has risen to the 27 percent mark in the last half-decade and, perhaps worse, the prospects for our nation’s poorest won’t necessarily get better as the economy picks up. It’s not news many want to hear, but we’re glad a group of researchers at Indiana University were gutsy enough to release it.
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This study by Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs examines the impact of the Great Recession and its aftermath on poverty in America.
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WeMeantDemocracy (CC-BY)
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The number of Americans living in poverty has grown by 27 percent, or 10 million people, since the beginning of the “Great Recession” in 2006, according to an Indiana University study. And because of continued cuts to welfare programs and an increase in new, poorly paid jobs, those figures will continue to rise.
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C-SPAN goes in-depth with Chris Hedges during this three-hour interview, probing the author’s entire body of work. It is a comprehensive and fascinating discussion with one of the most important reporters on what he characterizes as our collapsing corporate empire. Hedges’ column returns next Monday.
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Flickr / Eric__I_E (CC-BY)
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The general gist of findings from the 2010 census may not be shocking, but the actual numbers detailing the growing problem of the shrinking middle class in America are: Nearly half of all Americans qualify for the poor or low-income categories, making income inequality an issue that now splits the nation down the middle.
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HowardLake (CC-BY)
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Childhood suffering is on the rise in Oakland, where the U.S. Census Bureau found nearly three in 10 children living in poverty, more than double the number recorded three years ago. The city has the highest rate of child destitution in the Bay Area.
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AP / David Goldman
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By Bill Boyarsky — The courageous people who work day and night in overcrowded urban emergency wards are forced to confront society’s failures.
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AP / Matt Rourke
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By Robert Scheer — On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the bounty of the harvest as one in three Americans descends into poverty.
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Packmatt (CC-BY)
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The Census Bureau published a new measure of poverty this month to more carefully count those Americans who are barely getting by. The new income category—“near poor”—is up for grabs to those in the OWS movement, who could use it to better tell their alternative story of broad American hardship. (more)
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WELS.net (CC-BY)
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Father Eduardo Samaniego, the Jesuit pastor of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., protested foreclosures by Bank of America against those in his flock and beyond by moving $3 million of his parish’s funds to a local credit union. (more)
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[casey] (CC-BY-ND)
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By Frances Fox Piven —
We’ve been at war for decades now—not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising.
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Nov 6, 2011
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Carlos Puma / California Watch
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By Patricia Leigh Brown —
Arsenic-tainted water, raw sewage that backs up into the shower and other horrors make one end of Avenue 54, where residents of the eastern Coachella Valley’s roughly 125 illegal trailer park sites make their home, a place of grim housekeeping.
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Brian Auer (CC-BY)
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For those who live there, life at the wrong end of Avenue 54 in Southern California’s eastern Coachella Valley is a hot, rotting hell. As you head east, the “Bermuda shorts, putting greens and picture-window champagne dinners” found in abundance near the Arnold Palmer Golf Course give way to … (more)
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Joe Hall (CC-BY)
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The Census Bureau reports that in 2010, more Americans descended into poverty than in any other time since the government started keeping track in 1959. The 2010 poverty threshold for a family of four was a mere $22,314 a year, and 46.2 million of us have been surviving on that or less.
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Princeton University professor Dr. Cornel West spoke to a crowd of almost 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City on Friday during an evening of remembrance for another sort of 9/11. (more)
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Flickr / Shoshanah
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AlterNet has compiled a list of the 10 worst U.S. state economies by measures of unemployment, time out of work, per capita income, median net worth, poverty, access to health insurance and foreclosure. (more)
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ElvertBarnes (CC-BY-SA)
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By Eugene Robinson — King was a passionate advocate for economic justice, speaking not just for African-Americans but for all Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty and dysfunction. On this score, we haven’t just failed to make sufficient progress. We’ve stopped trying.
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Wikimedia Commons via Miller-McCune
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Although the recession has increased demand for social programs such as food stamps, welfare rolls have not kept pace with the drastic increase in human misery. Long story short: Welfare reform, launched 15 years ago in a booming economy, broke the system … (more)
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Flickr / kallao
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With Hurricane Irene fixing to beat up much of the American Mid-Atlantic, now may be a good time to examine the legacy of Hurricane Katrina and U.S. “government bungling” for many of the still-stunned inhabitants of New Orleans. (more)
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Flickr / Ryan Vaarsi
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Gus Speth, environmental lawyer, former Clinton adviser and founder of the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute, who was arrested Sunday at the White House while protesting a proposed oil pipeline, has some bad news for American optimists. (more)
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AP / Elizabeth Dalziel
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The Guardian put together a database of court cases of those detained during and after the unrest that swept London in early August after Metropolitan Police shot 29-year-old Mark Duggan in the city’s Tottenham neighborhood. (more)
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how will i ever (CC-BY-SA)
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Britain’s riots were not political, we are assured, and looting is simply un-British, but “Shock Doctrine” author Naomi Klein takes a different view: From Iraq to Argentina, when corrupt elites pass the bill to the struggling masses, civil unrest is to be expected.
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Macmillan Publishers Ltd
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Ten years ago, writer Barbara Ehrenreich published “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” a blockbuster book on the state of the working poor in America. (more)
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Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons —
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AP / Nick Ut
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By Bill Boyarsky — The unrest tearing apart Britain greatly resembles that of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and conditions across the U.S. could set off a new explosion of violence.
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Al-Jazeera’s slick video news magazine “Fault Lines” investigates the incredible income disparity in the United States that now sees 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent. Spoiler alert: The rich get richer, and it’s not very pleasant.
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The EU decides to address far-right extremism; education fails to solve poverty and inequality, while Netflix may destroy TV networks. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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Ikayama (CC-BY-SA)
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By Amy Goodman — In the past few weeks, no fewer than 21 people have been arrested in Orlando, Fla., the home of Disney World, for handing out free food in a park.
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Flickr / slynkycat
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Research conducted over the last two decades lends powerful credence to the claim that chronic poverty cripples an individual’s ability to make sound financial choices, with each decision exacting a “psychic cost” that diminishes the mental fortitude needed to make subsequent tough choices. (more)
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AP / Jeff Chiu
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By James Harris — In a recent interview, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Tony Smith shared with me one of the most mind-numbing statistics I have ever heard.
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Wikimedia / Brave New Films
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After it destroyed neighborhood retailers, forced manufacturing overseas and helped bankrupt the middle class, Wal-Mart is suddenly surprised to learn that its customers are too poor to shop ... (more)
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Flickr / jankie
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Due to rising food prices, the Asian Development Bank is forecasting a surge in the number of people counted within the region’s severely impoverished class.
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Jorge Andrés Paparoni Bruzual (CC-BY-SA)
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Food prices shot up 36 percent in the last year, according to the World Bank, adding 44 million people to the ranks of the impoverished. For people who spend most of their money on food, it’s devastating when the price of maize, to take one example, goes up 74 percent as it did this year. (more)
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With the number of kids living below the poverty line closing in on 25 percent, homelessness and hunger are becoming normal for American children, as illustrated by this “60 Minutes” report.
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Patrick Chappatte, Cagle Cartoons, The International Herald Tribune —
Posted on Sep 27, 2010
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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AP / Oded Balilty
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By Steven Hill — How is a country with a lower per capita income than Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation and a dictatorship, besides, hailed by so many as the next global superpower?
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Why you should always do a test run before a presentation, what America’s war dead say about the class divide, and how air travel in coach could get a whole lot worse.
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U.S. Agency for International Development
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Anyone remember the Millennium Development Goals that nations made at the beginning of this millennium? Well, it turns out some people do, and they are meeting Monday to evaluate the efficacy of efforts to reduce poverty, disease, intolerance and inequality.
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Flickr / Misserion (CC-BY)
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One out of every seven Americans lived through 2009 in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. Working Americans haven’t been this poor in 50 years. The poverty line—$21,954 or less annual income for a family of four—is quite low and the number of Americans struggling to get by is much higher still.
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