Poverty

Federal Agents Raid Mormon Food Storage Facility, Demand List Of Customers Storing Emergency Food

December 12, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

As was the plan all along, the so-called “War on Terror” has officially devolved into a war on the American people

This was clearly illustrated by the recent traitorous passage of the egregious National Defense Authorization Act by the US Congress. But in order to fully implement the ultimate goal of total control and tyranny, the federal government is now actively collecting the names of individuals that are preparing for the future by buying and storing emergency food supplies.

Oath Keepers, an association of active servicemen devoted to upholding their oath of guarding the republic and protecting individual liberty, has reported that federal agents recently paid a visit to a Latter Day Saints food storage cannery in Tennessee. Though they had no reason to be there, these agents allegedly interrogated the facility’s manager and demanded to see a list of customers that had purchased, and were storing, food there.

Oath Keepers Tennessee Chapter President Rand Cardwell confirmed the incident, according to reports, as he is in close contact with a fellow veteran who happens to store his own food at the facility in question. According to the man’s account, agents entered the facility and began demanding payment records and personal information for everyone connected with the operation.

“The manager informed the agents that the facility kept no such records and that all transactions were conducted on a cash-and-carry basis,” Cardwell is quoted as saying, concerning the incident. “The agents pressed for any record of personal checks, credit card transactions, etc., but the manager could provide no such record. The agents appeared to become very agitated and after several minutes of questioning finally left with no information.”

This unprovoked act of intimidation is highly concerning, but it is also somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, the federal government has been instilling fear into the American public for years, and has even made announcements urging the public to be prepared. But on the other hand, this same government is now pursuing those who are heeding these precautions as if they are terrorists.

Oath Keepers suggests the government might be trying to gather intelligence on food-storing Americans in order to later come and confiscate that food, or worse — after all, freedom-loving patriots who are preparing for social upheaval are a threat to the power structure that seeks to tighten the noose of tyranny around the neck of society.

Source: https://peopleforfreedom.com/

Filed Under: Financial Crisis, Health, Police, Poverty, Self-Sustainability, USA

Most Britons Believe Children Will Have Worse Lives Than Their Parents – Poll

December 3, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Almost two-thirds of people believe the current generation of children will have a lower standard of living than their parents, as concern about the economic crisis hardens into long-term pessimism, a new poll shows.

The Ipsos Mori survey for the Observer suggests that the traditional postwar assumption that living standards always tend to rise in the medium to long term is being eroded as austerity bites and real incomes stagnate or even fall. The study, conducted before chancellor George Osborne’s grim autumn statement on Tuesday, represents a marked turnaround since 2003, when those who were optimistic about the next generation’s prospects outnumbered the pessimists by almost four to one.

Some 64% of those questioned believed it was unlikely that today’s youth would have a better life than their parents, while just 32% thought it was likely. When asked whether their children would have a higher or lower quality of life when they reached their age, just 23% said they believed it would be higher, while 35% said it would be lower, with 32% saying it would be about the same.

This represents a big change since April 2003, when 43% believed their children would be better off at the same stage of life and just 12% thought they would be worse off.

The findings suggest the British public was drastically readjusting its expectations even before Osborne slashed growth forecasts and made a string of gloomier estimates on unemployment and borrowing in his autumn statement last Tuesday.

The poll comes as leaders prepare for another critical summit this week on the future of the euro, with fears rising that the 17-nation currency zone could break up, with devastating effects for the global economy. It also shows that pessimism about the next generation is now even greater in the UK than in the US. Earlier this year 44% of Americans thought it was likely that young people would enjoy a better life than their parents. This was down from 71% at the end of 2001.

David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, spells out a personal manifesto for putting the country back on track that would involve stimulating investment by enlisting the power of both the public and private sectors. Writing in the Observer, Miliband says: “The central economic issue is how to stimulate productive investment when public finances are constrained. I focus on three economic priorities. The need for financial reform, for example through a British Investment Bank. The need to promote better workplaces that engage employees… And the need to use public sector power… as a coherent driver of the private sector investment equation.”

Miliband, who is still seen by some in the Labour Party as a future leader if his brother fails to make the party electable, says the party needs to “re-engage on social policy – not just the structural questions of inequality but cultural questions of responsibility, to self, to family, to community”.

The polls shows pessimism has fed through to views about Britain as a whole. About 61% now say that Britain is getting worse as a place to live, up from 49% in June 2010, while only 6% say it is getting better.

• The Conservatives have edged ahead of the opposition, with support from 38% of voters, up two points from last month, with Labour down two points on 36% and the Liberal Democrats unchanged on 14%, according to an ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph..

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/03/britons-children-lives-parents-poll

Filed Under: Debt, Family, Money, Poverty, United Kingdom Tagged With: Pessimistic

29 Amazing Stats Which Prove That The Rich Are Getting Richer And The Poor Are Getting Poorer

December 3, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

In the United States today, there is one group of people that is actually living the American Dream. The ultra-wealthy have seen their incomes absolutely explode over the past three decades. Meanwhile, the U.S. middle class has been steadily declining and the ranks of the poor have been swelling. But this is what always happens when an economy becomes highly centralized.

Today, gigantic corporations and “too big to fail” banks totally dominate our economic system. The whole game is rigged. Our system is now designed to funnel wealth away from the bottom 90 percent of the population and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. When you allow a handful of giant entities to run everything, it is going to inevitably create a situation where there are a small number of very big winners and a massive amount of losers. In America today, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Yes, there will always be poor people. Yes, those that work really hard and produce something of great value for society should be greatly rewarded.

The way that our system should work is that it should empower individuals and small businesses to come up with new ideas, start companies, create jobs and produce massive amounts of new wealth. But instead, the number of small businesses in America is rapidly declining. The giant banks and the giant corporations that run everything are constantly running around stomping all of the “little guys” out of existence. This has created an environment where the rich are constantly getting richer and the poor are constantly getting poorer.

Just take a look at banking. The “too big to fail” banks just keep getting bigger and bigger. Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.

If you can believe it, the “big six” U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now control assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America’s gross national product.

But this isn’t just the case in the financial world. The truth is that wherever you look big corporations are getting bigger. This has caused our economy to become very highly centralized, and these monolithic entities are basically gigantic magnets that suck up as much wealth and power as they can.

Meanwhile, life is getting really tough for the “average joe” on the street.

The following are 29 amazing stats that prove that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in America….

#1 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#2 According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1979 and 2007 income growth for the top 1 percent of all U.S. income earners was an astounding 390 percent. For the bottom 90 percent, income growth was only 5 percent over that same time period.

#3 According to a joint House and Senate report entitled “Income Inequality and the Great Recession“, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States brought in a total of 10.0 percent of all income in 1980, but by the time 2008 had rolled around that figure had skyrocketed to 21.0 percent.

#4 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent is the only group that saw its share of our national income increase between 1979 and 2007.

#5 The wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States.

#6 More than 50 percent of all stocks and bonds are owned by just 1 percent of the population.

#7 The poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#8 The top 0.01% of all Americans make an average of $27,342,212. The bottom 90% make an average of $31,244.

#9 Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today,15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.

#10 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 6.7% of all Americans are living in “extreme poverty”, and that is the highest level that has ever been recorded before.

#11 Back in 2001, the ratio of wages to GDP was sitting at approximately 49 percent. Today, it has fallen all the way down to about 44 percent.

#12 According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

#13 According to Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, about 53 percent of all income went to the middle class back in the 1970s, but today only about 46 percent of all income does.

#14 In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”. By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”.

#15 According to a recent report produced by Pew Charitable Trusts, approximately one out of every three Americans that grew up in a middle class household has slipped down the income ladder.

#16 According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of all income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of all Americans.

#17 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

#18 According to a recent report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

#19 Last year, 2.6 million more Americans dropped into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#20 Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.

#21 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

#22 The poverty rate for children living in the United States rose to 22% in 2010.

#23 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#24 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.

#25 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.

#26 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#27 The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer on a global scale as well. According to Credit Suisse, those with a household net worth of a million dollars or more control 38.5% of all the wealth in the world. Last year, that figure was at 35.6%. As you can see, it is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.

#28 According to the same Credit Suisse study just mentioned, the bottom two-thirds of the global population controls just 3.3% of all the wealth.

#29 If you can believe it, more than 3 billion people currently live on less than 2 dollar a day.

Unless something changes, the income inequality that we are seeing all over the world is just going to get worse and worse and worse.

In a previous article, I discussed a recent University of Zurich study that found that a “super-entity” made up of 147 gigantic corporations basically dominates the entire global economy….

“Corporations not only completely dominate the U.S. economy, they also completely dominate the global economy as well. A newly released University of Zurich study examined more than 43,000 major multinational corporations. The study discovered a vast web of interlocking ownerships that is controlled by a “core” of 1,318 giant corporations.

But that “core” itself is controlled by a “super-entity” of 147 monolithic corporations that are very, very tightly knit. As a recent article in NewScientist noted, these 147 corporations control approximately 40 percent of all the wealth in the entire network”

These ultra-powerful corporations make a very limited number of people very, very wealthy.

But those of us that are not connected to “the system” are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Once upon a time, the United States had a thriving middle class unlike anything the world had ever seen.

But now millions of families are scratching and clawing in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.

Just check out what happened in south Florida on Wednesday. Thousands were lined up for a chance at free food. In fact, people were lining up as early as last Friday to get a voucher for five bags of groceries….

By mid-morning, thousands waited in a line which wrapped around the block outside the voucher distribution location. Concerned about safety, the City of Miami Police Department was in attendance to keep order and look after the sick and elderly.

Those who received a voucher Wednesday will return on December 14th and exchange it for bags of food.

Each voucher can be redeemed for five bags of groceries worth $120.

Can you believe that?

Can you believe that there are American families that would stay in line for five days just to get some bags of free groceries?

Sadly, we are starting to see scenes like this all over the nation.

For example, approximately 10,000 people lined up for free turkey dinners in the Los Angeles area last week.

As the U.S. economy continues to decline, people are going to start becoming even more desperate. In some cities we will eventually see rioting and chaos.

Meanwhile, the gigantic corporations that dominate our economy will just keep getting even bigger and even more powerful. They will pay their executives even larger bonuses and they will ship our jobs out of the country at an even faster rate.

This is not how our system is supposed to work. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended.

But until dramatic changes happen, the rich will just keep getting richer and the poor will just keep getting poorer.

Source: https://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/29-amazing-stats-which-prove-that-the-rich-are-getting-richer-and-the-poor-are-getting-poorer

Filed Under: Banks, Income Inequality, Poverty, USA

Corporate Wolf Eats Grandmother Alive

December 2, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

“Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers”
A book by Ellen E. Schultz

Hey, Occupy Wall Street. Here’s a book to rally around. Looking for a study of the wealth disparity that’s sent you to the streets? Ellen E. Schultz offers a guide. “Retirement Heist” is a concise and alarming look at how—in the span of a generation—the 1 percent has looted the futures of the 99 percent.

Schultz wields expertise from years of investigative reporting on the retirement crisis for The Wall Street Journal. Time was, she writes, when pension funds had “such massive surpluses that the companies could have fully paid their current and future retirees’ pensions, even if all of them lived to be ninety-nine and the companies never contributed another dime.”

With slick accounting tricks, Schultz writes, corporate America has funneled billions of dollars out of pension funds. Many companies used the money to pay for downsizing—covering early-retirement buyouts, which are considered voluntary, instead of imposing a layoff and cash severance. Some funds were simply terminated, and the money was used to offset operating expenses. And so, company by company, a great surplus dwindled.

To replenish the pension funds, companies cut benefits, Schultz writes. Their gains were immediate: Earnings got a boost. The companies’ obligations were cut. Their bottom lines were bolstered. It took much longer for workers’ losses to register: In many of the cases Schultz cites, workers realized the damage only once they were old and sick and had little in the way of resources to embark on a protracted legal battle.

It’s utterly depressing, and that’s just the start. Having plundered the pensions, companies exploited 401(k) plans to borrow money cheaply. With pensions underfunded or frozen, they dug into retiree health plans. The trend of tying executive pay to performance only made matters worse, Schultz explains, leading, for instance, to the death-benefit bamboozle, whereby companies take out life insurance policies on their employees. When a worker dies, even if he’s long since found other work or retired, the company cashes in on the death benefit, tax-free. In many of these cases, the payout to the company dwarfs whatever benefit might go to the next of kin.

Schultz provides an anatomy of every abomination and shows how it unfolded in individual lives. The aggrieved were engineers and miners, pro football players and pilots. Distressingly, they appeared powerless to stop this bilking or defend themselves against it. If the retirement industry isn’t reined in, she concludes, we’ll be right back where we were in the 1930s, and “society—and taxpayers—will be paying for services to support the millions of elderly, formerly middle-class Americans.”

Source: https://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/corporate_wolf_eats_grandmother_alive_20111201

Filed Under: Banks, Corporations, Corruption, Crime, Poverty, USA Tagged With: Pensions, Retirement

Fuel Poverty Affects A Quarter Of UK’s Households As Bills Soar And Pay Freezes

December 2, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Figure rises from a fifth of homes last year, meaning coalition will fail to meet its legal duty to end fuel poverty by 2016

A quarter of all households in England and Wales have now fallen into fuel poverty following an autumn of steep increases in energy bills and stagnating incomes, the Guardian can reveal.

The dramatic increase in fuel poverty – up from nearly one in five households last year to one in four now – will be highly embarrassing to the government, which has a statutory obligation to eliminate fuel poverty by 2016. It now looks certain to fail to meet its legal duty.

Previous government projections forecast that this year would see 4.1m households in fuel poverty, which is defined as those who have to spend 10% or more of their income to achieve adequate warmth and light.

But these estimates were calculated before the huge prices rises announced last summer by the big six energy suppliers. New calculations, provided to the statutory consumer body Consumer Focus and seen by the Guardian, based on actual bills, show the figure for England alone is now over 5m households.

The revelation comes as figures show that average families now face the worst squeeze on incomes since records began in the 1950s. In its analysis of George Osborne‘s autumn statement, the influential Institute of Fiscal Studies said median income families would be worse off in 2015 than they were in 2002, pinpointing the relentless rise in fuel prices as one of the main factors, along with stagnating wages and government welfare cuts.

The summer price hikes saw the biggest supplier, British Gas, put its gas and electricity prices up by 18% and 16%, which means that an average annual dual-fuel bill for its 9m customers has risen from £1,096 to £1,288.

The new figures show sharp regional differences in the levels of fuel poverty. In Wales, an additional half a million households, over 40% of the total, are now fuel poor. The north-east and West Midlands have levels of fuel poverty over 30%, while the north west has just under 30%. The figure for the south-east, meanwhile, is just 17%.

Some 2.5m people are already in debt to their energy supplier, and the depth of debt is increasing rapidly. The average debt for gas of those in arrears is now £320.

The main political parties attacked the big six energy suppliers at their autumn conferences this year for price rises that have averaged 21% since last year. Over the past five years, average prices have gone up 88%. At the Lib Dem conference, Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, accused the six suppliers, who provide 99% of UK household energy, of malpractice. In their defence, the companies argue that the price rises reflect the soaring cost of energy on global markets. The regulator Ofgem is conducting an audit of where the companies make their profits and is expected to report by end of the year.

Dr Brenda Boardman, fellow at Oxford University’s environmental change institute, said that the pressure was building on politicians to act against the energy sector, as MPs encounter fuel poverty in their constituencies every week. Each 1% price rise pushes at least another 40,000 households into fuel poverty, forcing people to make decisions about turning heating off or cutting back on food or building up debt, she said. Inadequate heating contributes to “excess” winter deaths, which are already running at 27,000 a year. It also puts more pressure on a health service already strained by cuts, since it contributes to health problems.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change commissioned an independent review of fuel poverty after last autumn’s comprehensive spending review. Its interim findings, published earlier this month, proposed changing the definition of fuel poverty. If adopted, the proposals would halve the numbers of households defined as being in fuel poverty.

The Guardian has learned that the DECC approached various former Labour ministers in 2010 to conduct the review in an effort of defuse the political storm likely to brew over fuel poverty. Lord Whitty, former chair of Consumer Focus, confirmed that he and others had been approached but said he had declined because he felt the Treasury was putting too much emphasis on redefining fuel poverty in an attempt to minimise the problem. The review was eventually overseen by Professor John Hills, a respected poverty expert at the London School of Economics. A DECC spokesperson said the Hills review would help it direct resources to those who needed them most.

Boardman said the government’s “Achilles heel is what it is doing to push up prices itself”. As part of its annual energy review last week, DECC showed that its measures to tackle climate change, such as the new Energy Company Obligation and the Green Deal finance for households to improve energy efficiency, would increase average bills by £280 by 2020. It also calculated that its policies would help bring reductions in energy use and savings of an average £373, so there would be a net decrease. However, fuel poverty campaigners say the averaging of savings across all households is misleading since only some will be beneficiaries. They fear that the measures will be taken up by richer households but paid for in taxes on all households, in effect requiring the poor to subsidise the more affluent.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/01/fuel-poverty-affects-quarter-households

Filed Under: Economy, Health, Politics, Population, Poverty, United Kingdom Tagged With: Fuel Poverty

Over 9 Hectares Of Forests Lost Per Minute: Report

December 1, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

ROME - More than nine hectares of forests were lost per minute between 1990 and 2005, aperiod when the world’s deforestation rate accelerated, shows a UN survey issued onWednesday.

The net loss of forests - deforestation offset by afforestation or natural expansion - totalled 72.9 million hectares during the 15-year period, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In other words, the net loss averaged 4.9 million hectares per year, or 9.3 hectares of forests per minute over the 15 years.

The new data also shows that the net loss of forests increased from 4.1 million hectares peryear between 1990 and 2000 to 6.4 million hectares between 2000 and 2005.

The survey also shows that the worldwide net loss in forest area between 1990 and 2005 was
not as great as previously believed, since gains in forest areas are larger than previouslyestimated.

The net loss was only two thirds of the previous figure of 107.4 million hectares, according to the survey.

The world’s deforestation averaged 14.5 million hectares per year, consistent with previous estimates.

Deforestation, which occurred mainly in the tropics, may be attributed to the conversion of forests to farmland.

“Deforestation is depriving millions of people of forest goods and services that are crucial torural livelihoods, economic well-being and environmental health,” said Eduardo Rojas-Briales,FAO Assistant Director-General for Forestry.

The satellite imagery-based survey shows that the world was covered by 3.69 billion hectaresof forests in 2005, or 30 percent of the global land area.

Source: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2011-12/01/content_14196567.htm

Filed Under: Environment, Food, Health, Politics, Pollution, Population, Poverty, Propaganda Tagged With: Deforestation, Farmland

Day Of Strikes As Millions Heed Unions’ Call To Fight Pension Cuts

November 30, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

The UK is experiencing the worst disruption to services in decades as more than 2 million public sector workers stage a nationwide strike, closing schools and bringing councils and hospitals to a virtual standstill.

• Disruption across UK as many services come to virtual halt
• Airports, schools, rail services and hospitals affected
• Reform of public sector pensions is at heart of dispute

The strike by more than 30 unions over cuts to public sector pensions started at midnight, leading to the closure of most state schools; cancellation of refuse collections; rail service and tunnel closures; the postponement of thousands of non-emergency hospital operations; and possible delays at airports and ferry terminals.

The TUC said it was the biggest stoppage in more than 30 years and was comparable to the last mass strike by 1.5 million workers in 1979. Hundreds of marches and rallies are due to take place in cities and towns across the country.

Pickets began to form before dawn at many hospitals, Whitehall departments, ports and colleges.

The strikes have been called over government plans to overhaul pensions for all public sector workers, by cutting employer contributions, increasing personal contributions and, it emerged on Tuesday, increasing the state retirement age to 67 in 2026, eight years earlier than originally planned.

Union leaders were further enraged after George Osborne announced that as well as a public sector pay freeze for most until 2013, public sector workers’ pay rises would be capped at 1% for the two years after that.

In Scotland an estimated 300,000 public sector workers are expected to strike, with every school due to be affected after Scottish headteachers voted to stop work for the first time.

The UK Border Agency is braced for severe queues at major airports after learning that staffing levels at passport desks will be “severely below” 50% despite a successful appeal for security-cleared civil servants to volunteer.

“We will have the bare minimum to run a bare minimum service,” said a Whitehall insider. Many major public buildings and sites, including every port, most colleges, libraries, the Scottish parliament, major accident and emergency hospitals, ports and the Metro urban light railway around Newcastle and Sunderland will be picketed.

At Holyrood, Scottish government ministers and MSPs in the ruling SNP, the Liberal Democrats and Tories are expected to cross picket lines to stage a debate on public pensions; Labour and Scottish Green party MSPs will join the protesters.

Here are some of the actions across the country:

• In London up to 2,000 schools will be shut or affected, and ambulance crews will strike, there will be pickets in Whitehall, at universities, hospitals and a TUC regional march through the city from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the embankment.

• In Scotland union leaders including Rodney Bickerstaff, general secretary of Unison, will march through central Edinburgh to a mass rally outside the Scottish parliament, with protests at Edinburgh castle, a major march and rally attended by Scottish union leaders in Glasgow, where civil servants will picket MoD and tax offices. There will be marches and protests in Dundee, Inverness and Aberdeen.

• In southern and south-west England and Wales unions will hold marches and rallies in towns and cities including Brighton, Southampton, Bristol and Exeter, while a New Orleans-style marching band will lead a march through Cardiff.

• In the north-west up to 25 Cumbrian schools may open, the Mersey tunnel is expected to be closed, while in Liverpool protesters will be urged to sound car horns, blow vuvuzela horns, clap and shout at 1pm in an action dubbed “One Noise at One”.

• In the Midlands union general secretaries including the TUC leader Brendam Barber and Dave Prentis of Unison will lead a rally at the Birmingham Indoor Arena, while marches will be held in Nottingham.

• In the north-east of England, Metro services will be severely hit and the RMT rail union leader Bob Crow will address a rally.

• In northern England marches are due to be staged in Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield.

• In Northern Ireland there will be no train or public bus services, Belfast’s passport office will be closed along with leisure centres and schools. The main march will be through central Belfast.

The TUC said the strike would also include tens of thousands of border agency staff, probation officers, radiographers, librarians, job centre staff, courts staff, social workers, refuse collectors, midwives, road sweepers, cleaners, school meals staff, paramedics, tax inspectors, customs officers, passport office staff, police civilian staff, driving test examiners, patent officers, and health and safety inspectors.

Unions and employers have struck local deals to avoid disruption to emergency operations and essential medical services at hospitals, mental health units and residential care units for children. Emergency rotas have been introduced by mental health social workers with union agreement.

The Prospect union has exempted staff from strike action who work in 100 essential defence posts, including intelligence analyst posts at British bases in Afghanistan and civil servants supplying frontline troops.

Steve Jary, the national secretary of Prospect, which represents thousands of MoD staff, said: “These people are not the Whitehall bureaucrats of popular imagination. It is ironic that this important work by staff who risk their own lives in supporting the UK’s armed forces only comes to light in a situation like the industrial action.”

Dean Royles, the director of the NHS Employers organisation, which represents NHS trusts in England and Wales, said the unions had agreed to protect emergency services but he warned patients they might still experience significant delays that could spill over into Thursday.

“The absolute priority of everyone in the NHS must be to ensure that patients are safe and we avoid unnecessary distress too patients,” he said. “We believe robust plans will be in place for the people who need urgent care but those needing non-urgent care may experiences delays.”

The Local Government Association, which represents English and Welsh councils, said it was “working tirelessly” to minimise disruption to essential services, and to protect services for the elderly, vulnerable and young. Social workers were operating emergency rotas, children’s residential centres were being staffed as fully as possible and service updates would be posted on council websites.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/30/public-sector-workers-strike-uk

Filed Under: Economy, Employment, Financial Crisis, Poverty, Propaganda, Social Unrest, Unions, United Kingdom Tagged With: Pensions, Public Sector, Strikes

Hunger In America, By The Numbers

November 29, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Last year, 17.2 million households in the United States were food insecure, the highest level on record, as the Great Recession continued to wreak havoc on families across the country. Of those 17.2 million households, 3.9 million included children. On Thanksgiving Day, here’s a look at hunger in America, as millions of Americans struggle to get enough to eat in the wake of the economic crisis:

17.2 million: The number of households that were food insecure in 2010, the highest number on record. They make up 14.5 percent of households, or approximately one in seven.

48.8 million: People who lived in food insecure households last year.

3.9 million: The number of households with children that were food insecure last year. In 1 percent of households with children, “one or more of the children experienced the most severe food-insecure condition measured by USDA, very low food security, in which meals were irregular and food intake was below levels considered adequate by caregivers.”

6.4 million: Households that experienced very low food security last year, meaning “normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”

55: The percentage of food-insecure households that participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs (SNAP, WIC, School lunch program).

19.4: The percentage of food insecure households in Mississippi, which had the highest rate in the nation last year.

3.6 percent: The amount by which food prices increased last year.

30 percent: The amount by which food insecurity grew during the Great Recession.

44: The percentage increase in households using food pantries between 2007 and 2009.

20 million: The number of children who benefit from free and reduced lunch per day.

10.5 million: The number of eligible children who don’t receive their free and reduced lunch benefits.

$167.5 billion: The amount that the U.S. lost in 2010 due to hunger (lost educational attainment + avoidable illness + charitable giving to fight hunger). This doesn’t take into account the $94 billion cost of SNAP and other food programs.

8: The number of states (FL, TX, CA, IL, NY, OH, PA, GA) where the annual cost of hunger exceeds $6 billion.

Last year, “nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.” This Thanksgiving, as you sit down to enjoy a meal with family and friends, please spare a thought for those who, due to the country’s continuing economic woes, may not have enough to eat.

This holiday season, please consider donating to a local food bank. You can find one nearby ordonate online through the Feeding America website. You can also give to Operation Homefront, a group that provides assistance to military families.

Source: https://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/11/24/375776/food-insecurity-by-the-numbers/

Filed Under: Food, Health, Money, Poverty, USA

American’s In Their 50s Becoming Victims Of Extreme Poverty

November 29, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxK_9UZ2R5k&feature=related

Filed Under: Money, Poverty, USA

The Jobs Crisis: What Did Roosevelt Do That Obama Should?

November 27, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

The nation is experiencing the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Princeton economist and former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Blinder, calls the current crisis a “national jobs emergency.”

The official unemployment rate in September was 9.1 percent - nearly twice the rate a decade ago - leaving 14 million people out of work.

It’s not just the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. The American economy has been underperforming for years. Business Week calls 1999-2009 “The Lost Decade for Jobs” as private-sector employment grew by a paltry net 1.1 percent - the lowest increase for any ten-year period since the 1930s.

The original version of President Obama’s increasingly embattled jobs plan aimed to provide a much-needed extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut for working Americans, but outlined only scarce measures to dent the catastrophic rate of unemployment. What we need today is a massive jobs program like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched by President Franklin Roosevelt. The WPA put millions of people back to work in the midst of the Great Depression, restoring their dignity, putting money in their pockets and quite literally saving lives.

Also see: Put 15 Million Back to Work Fixing $2.2 Trillion in Infrastructure: Resurrect the Works Progress Administration

The crisis is much worse than most of us think. According to the US Department of Labor, the underemployment rate is 16.5 percent, if you count part-time workers who want full-time jobs and discouraged workers who have simply stopped looking. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the number of long-term unemployed, meaning those unemployed for more than six months, hovers at a postwar record level of 45 percent. All these figures are much higher for black and Latino workers.

No one is insulated. Workers at every educational level have seen their unemployment rates double since 2007 - high school graduates, college graduates and even those with graduate degrees. The severity of the crisis has overturned conventional wisdom that higher education is a cure for joblessness. The unemployed do not need more education - they need work.

What Did Roosevelt Do That Obama Is Not Doing?

In the winter of 1933, with unemployment reaching 25 percent, Roosevelt established the Civil Works Administration, an emergency jobs program that put 4.2 million unemployed to work within six months. He also started the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ a half-million young men with minimal skills in useful work in the nation’s parks, forests and rangelands. Meanwhile, Roosevelt launched the Public Works Administration, which funded long-term infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, dams and public buildings.

The WPA followed in 1935, employing 8.5 million more between 1935 and 1943. It put those men and women to work on projects requested by state and local governments, such as roads, schools, sewers and airports, and operated local arts, educational and media programs.

Once the New Deal was launched in 1933, the US economy began to grow again by leaps and bounds - at a rate of nearly 10 percent per year. By 1937, production had doubled and the unemployment rate had dropped by half. By 1941, before the war began, the economy was back where it would have been had the Depression never happened. With the wartime build-up, mass unemployment became a distant memory.

To tackle our current unemployment crisis, the federal government should spend $500 billion a year over the next three years on emergency jobs programs like those of the New Deal. The first step would be to give every state and local government the funds to restore their budgets. The loss of 680,000 teaching, police, transit, and other public-sector jobs over the last three years has contributed measurably to the downturn.

The second step would be direct programs to create new full-time jobs for the unemployed - at the median wage of $16.27 an hour - in areas where the need is obvious: in schools (e.g., teachers, school maintenance and enrichment programs); human services (e.g., child care, home care and health care); and energy conservation (e.g., retrofitting homes and public buildings).

To this should be added a third step: financing large-scale public works programs to build schools, bridges, a “smart” electrical grid, zero-emission buses, high-speed rail, wind farms and affordable housing. The pathetic state of our national infrastructure has been decried for years by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives the country a D grade, and the United States ranks 32nd in the world in infrastructure, according to McKinsey Global Institute.

A substantial increase of government spending for public works will create expanded opportunity for youth, women and minority workers to enter state-certified apprenticeship programs in the construction trades and to earn a middle-class income.

How to Pay for Such a Jobs Program?

First, the federal government can run temporary deficits. While the federal deficit is relatively high at 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, it is still dramatically lower than the peak of 30 percent of GDP during World War II. Contrary to popular thinking, government spending in a recession can lower the deficit by taking people off the unemployment roles and putting money in the hands of ordinary people to bolster consumer demand, which stimulates business and returns more tax revenues.

But since we are worried about the current federal deficit and the budget woes of state and local governments, we must heed investor Warren Buffett’s call to “stop coddling the rich” by raising taxes on millionaires and closing corporate loopholes.

The upper 1 percent’s share of national income increased from 9 percent in 1976 to 24 percent in 2007, according to a report by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Nearly half of total income went to the upper 10 percent in 2007, compared to 33 percent 30 years earlier. The top income tax rate on the highest earners was 70 percent between 1940 and 1980 - when the economy was performing much better than it is today - and now it is just 35 percent.

Moreover, corporate profits increased at an annual rate of $1.6 trillion in 2010 - a record for the postwar period. The Tax Policy Center reports that federal revenue from corporate taxes has dropped by half over the last 60 years, while corporations like Verizon, Bank of America and General Electric pay essentially no taxes due to loopholes in the tax code.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 5.6 percent surcharge on incomes exceeding $1 million, as proposed by the Obama administration, will raise $40 billion a year. Ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the upper 2 percent, set to expire in 2012, will generate more than $80 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Economists Robert Pollin and Dean Baker estimate that a 0.5 percent transaction tax on the transfer of stocks and securities will yield $175 billion annually from the largest financial institutions and speculators. The Center for Tax Justice calculates that federal tax revenue will increase by $365 billion a year if corporate tax loopholes and subsidies are eliminated.

Republicans oppose taxing the rich, just as they did in the 1930s. It will take popular mobilization by labor, faith, civil rights, women’s and youth organizations to overcome such resistance - just as it did then. Occupy Wall Street may be the beginning of a movement for a new New Deal. Collective action worked in the 1930s and it could work again now.

Source: https://www.truth-out.org/jobs-crisis-and-new-new-deal-america/1321046261

Filed Under: Employment, Income Inequality, Occupy, Poverty, USA