US income gap widens in recession

Income gap widens as poor take hit in recession

Census: Income falls for all groups, but those at bottom feel worst effect

updated 1 hour, 16 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – The recession has hit middle-income and poor families hardest, widening the economic gap between the richest and poorest Americans as rippling job layoffs ravaged household budgets.

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Poverty hits 1 in 8 Americans

By Joseph Weber (Contact)

About 2.5 million Americans slipped below the poverty line as recession and layoffs hammered the economy last year, driving poverty to its highest level since 1998, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday.

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Food is Power

Published on Monday, September 7, 2009 by TruthDig.com

Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us

by Chris Hedges

Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.

Food is Power and the Powerful is poisoning it

Hidden Pockets of Elderly experiencing poverty

Hidden pockets of elderly said to be in poverty

‘Still many millions of older people on the edge,’ AARP president says

Simon Norwood, a construction worker who hasn’t found work in months, poses in a garage apartment belonging to a friend in Little Rock, Ark.

updated 9:46 a.m. PT, Fri., Sept . 4, 2009

WASHINGTON – The poverty rate among older Americans could be nearly twice as high as the traditional 10 percent level, according to a revision of a half-century-old formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations in the cost of living.

Hidden Pockets of Elderly

You Are Special Back Pack Giveaway and Food Outreach

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Layaway is back!

Consumer strain: Pens and notebooks put on layaway

Aug 24 01:48 PM US/Eastern
By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO
AP Retail Writer

Consumer strain brings back layaway

Real Cities in Uneasy Truce with Tent Cities

naked capitalism: Real Cities in Uneasy Truce with Tent Cities

As the economy limps along, with jobs still falling (despite keen efforts to call a turn, and with the figures a bit more dodgy if you look under the hood), more and more overindebted and underemployed citizens are out on the street.

Reports of tent encampments or parking lots with cars that serve as shelter have been an occasional and sad sighting for more than a year. What is new is that some cities, with their shelters at their limits, have decided it is better to provide limited services to these colonies than try to send the occupants away.

From the Wall Street Journal:
Last summer, police responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River.

Eviction notices went up — and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first.

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Cities Tolerate Homeless Camps

By JENNIFER LEVITZ

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Last summer, police responding to complaints about campfires under a highway overpass found dozens of homeless people living on public land along the Cumberland River.

Eviction notices went up — and then were suspended by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, a Democrat, who said housing for the homeless should be found first.

A year later, little has been found — and Nashville, with help from local nonprofits, is now servicing a tent city, arranging for portable toilets, trash pickup, a mobile medical van and visits from social workers. Volunteers bring in firewood for the camp’s 60 or so dwellers.

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Josh Anderson for The Wall Street JournalJack Adkins sat in what he calls his “office” at his home in Tent City in Nashville.

Cities Tolerate Homeless Camps

Even Laguna Beach isn’t recession-proof

In the land of hillside mansions and ocean views, there are food banks. And the recipients aren’t all low-income families. Some are white-collar workers who have fallen on hard times.

Andy Siegenfeld, director of the Laguna Relief and Resource Center, says the center is serving more professionals. One such food recipient said, “I always thought I’d be fine, always be able to work and never thought that anything like this could happen.” (Christine Cotter / Los Angeles Times / August 7, 2009)

By Dana ParsonsAugust 13, 2009

Even Laguna Beach isn’t recession proof

Super Clinic finds super need in Los Angeles

This is one of the most effective health care programs verses nationalized health care I have heard of.

Volunteer Medical workers assists the needy

Super-clinic finds super-need in L.A. region

Remote Area Medical Foundation provides free care with volunteer doctors and dentists for unemployed and poor people at an eight-day event at Inglewood’s Forum arena.

By Bob Pool and Kimi Yoshino
August 12, 2009

A homeless man spent the night camped outside the Forum, hoping to finally get glasses to help him see better. An unemployed grocery clerk waited in desperate need of root canal surgery. A former auto mechanic came with an aching back.

One by one, about 1,500 people made their way through the Inglewood sports arena, where dozens of volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and other healthcare professionals are providing free medical services this week.

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  Photos: Remote Area Medical

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