'Poor in America
It’s an ancient tradition derived
It’s an ancient tradition derived
from the scapegoat of Leviticus
whereby the wrongs of others
are transferred to an innocent
who’s then sent out alone to die
symbolically bearing others’ sins,
absolving from greed, lust, pride and hate
the community that condemned him.'
Lees verder: http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2007/09/poor_in_america.html
De Guardian bericht:
De Guardian bericht:
'Cash starved
As the US economy heads south, food banks are experiencing severe shortages - just as the number of Americans reliant on them is rising
There's a debate raging in America as we head toward a new year: are we or aren't we in a 1970s-style recession, one involving a stalled economy combined with strong inflationary pressures?
The measures are ambiguous. The housing market is about as deep in the hole as it has ever been, but jobs are still being created - albeit at a snail's pace. The stock market's gone all squirrelly, but depending on the day Wall Street is still capable of delivering stockholders a triple-digit Dow Jones gain. Inflation is rearing its ugly head, largely driven by the upward march of oil prices, and the dollar's lost getting on for 20% of its value in the past couple years. But at the same time consumer spending is pretty robust (albeit sustained, increasingly, by a holiday season reliance on credit cards rather than on refinanced homes and lines of credit tied to house values).
But there's one measure that's not in the slightest bit ambiguous: hunger in America is on the march.
Throughout the 2000s, year in and year out - with the exception of one blip downward in 2005 - the number of hungry people has been increasing. By 2006, the US department of agriculture estimated that 35.5 million Americans worried about how to put food on the table, and over 11 million actually went hungry at times.
Actually, let me rephrase that: in 2006, the US government decided not to call these 11 million people "hungry". Instead, in an Orwellian slight of hand, they were deemed to have "very low food security". Saying there are hungry people in the country, people with bellies rumbling, people who go to bed at night unfed, children whose only hot meal is the lunch they get weekdays at school, might actually result in anger - anger that the richest country on earth is so badly failing its poorest citizens. By contrast, saying there are "food insecure" people tamps down that emotion rather well
No thanks to the government and its language manipulation, until the current economic turmoil threw more people into poverty and reduced the ability of many others to donate to charities, in many instances it actually was true that people were worrying more about hunger than actually experiencing it as a chronic condition of life. The reason was that until this year private charities - churches and food banks, in particular - were doing a pretty good job of throwing up safety nets for all these "food insecure" individuals. Swallow your pride, stand in line at a food bank and ask for free food, and like as not you were going to go home with a box of food large enough to tide you over until your next pay check or welfare payment. A year ago, when I reported on hunger in Sacramento, the city I have lived in for the past three years, the food banks were doling out incredible quantities of food, both fresh and canned, to needy people citywide.
Recently, however, as the broader economy has headed south, the amount and quality of food being donated to food banks has fallen off - just when the number of people reliant on these institutions is rising. And, according to researchers in Georgia and elsewhere, the hungry are not exclusively the unemployed and homeless, but also working, even middle-class folks. Increasingly, people who over-extended themselves to buy houses are finding themselves trapped by the collapsing housing market and unable to raise the cash to feed their families.'
As the US economy heads south, food banks are experiencing severe shortages - just as the number of Americans reliant on them is rising
There's a debate raging in America as we head toward a new year: are we or aren't we in a 1970s-style recession, one involving a stalled economy combined with strong inflationary pressures?
The measures are ambiguous. The housing market is about as deep in the hole as it has ever been, but jobs are still being created - albeit at a snail's pace. The stock market's gone all squirrelly, but depending on the day Wall Street is still capable of delivering stockholders a triple-digit Dow Jones gain. Inflation is rearing its ugly head, largely driven by the upward march of oil prices, and the dollar's lost getting on for 20% of its value in the past couple years. But at the same time consumer spending is pretty robust (albeit sustained, increasingly, by a holiday season reliance on credit cards rather than on refinanced homes and lines of credit tied to house values).
But there's one measure that's not in the slightest bit ambiguous: hunger in America is on the march.
Throughout the 2000s, year in and year out - with the exception of one blip downward in 2005 - the number of hungry people has been increasing. By 2006, the US department of agriculture estimated that 35.5 million Americans worried about how to put food on the table, and over 11 million actually went hungry at times.
Actually, let me rephrase that: in 2006, the US government decided not to call these 11 million people "hungry". Instead, in an Orwellian slight of hand, they were deemed to have "very low food security". Saying there are hungry people in the country, people with bellies rumbling, people who go to bed at night unfed, children whose only hot meal is the lunch they get weekdays at school, might actually result in anger - anger that the richest country on earth is so badly failing its poorest citizens. By contrast, saying there are "food insecure" people tamps down that emotion rather well
No thanks to the government and its language manipulation, until the current economic turmoil threw more people into poverty and reduced the ability of many others to donate to charities, in many instances it actually was true that people were worrying more about hunger than actually experiencing it as a chronic condition of life. The reason was that until this year private charities - churches and food banks, in particular - were doing a pretty good job of throwing up safety nets for all these "food insecure" individuals. Swallow your pride, stand in line at a food bank and ask for free food, and like as not you were going to go home with a box of food large enough to tide you over until your next pay check or welfare payment. A year ago, when I reported on hunger in Sacramento, the city I have lived in for the past three years, the food banks were doling out incredible quantities of food, both fresh and canned, to needy people citywide.
Recently, however, as the broader economy has headed south, the amount and quality of food being donated to food banks has fallen off - just when the number of people reliant on these institutions is rising. And, according to researchers in Georgia and elsewhere, the hungry are not exclusively the unemployed and homeless, but also working, even middle-class folks. Increasingly, people who over-extended themselves to buy houses are finding themselves trapped by the collapsing housing market and unable to raise the cash to feed their families.'
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