Ali Ismail - Homelessness and Despair in New York City

The number of homeless people living on the streets of New York City increased by 23 percent in one year according to an annual survey conducted by the city’s Department of Homeless Services.

On January 30, volunteers for the organization counted an estimated 3,262 people living on the streets— a 23 percent increase from the 2,648 counted in 2011. The 2,925 volunteers walked approximately 15,000 miles while surveying the city. The largest numbers of homeless people living on the streets were found in Manhattan and Brooklyn. About half of the total number of people accounted for in the survey were living inside the city’s subway system.

When the results of the survey were released late last month, Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond said in a statement that the greatest challenge facing the agency was finding more housing options for people without homes.

In a cynical attempt to limit press coverage of the survey, the agency released the data late on a Friday afternoon. This was in stark contrast to a year earlier, when the city’s survey had shown a 30 percent decrease in the street homeless population since 2008. The results for that survey were announced with great fanfare, complete with an elaborate news conference attended by volunteers, formerly homeless people and Linda Gibbs, the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human services.

While the latest survey shows a significant increase in street homelessness, advocates for the homeless believe the actual number of people sleeping rough in the city is much higher and have criticized the survey for failing to count large numbers of homeless individuals, especially those sleeping in non-visible areas like abandoned buildings or alleyways. The Department of Homeless Services itself acknowledges that it only surveys a portion of the city’s surface area (about 20 percent) and only a portion of subway stations.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30868

Dominique de Kevelioc de Bailleul - “We are Preparing for Massive Civil War,” Says DHS Informant

In a riveting interview on TruNews Radio, Wednesday, private investigator Doug Hagmann said high-level, reliable sources told him the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing for “massive civil war” in America.

“Folks, we’re getting ready for one massive economic collapse,” Hagmann told TruNews host Rick Wiles. 

“We have problems . . . The federal government is preparing for civil uprising,” he added, “so every time you hear about troop movements, every time you hear about movements of military equipment, the militarization of the police, the buying of the ammunition, all of this is . . . they (DHS) are preparing for a massive uprising.”

Hagmann goes on to say that his sources tell him the concerns of the DHS stem from a collapse of the U.S. dollar and the hyperinflation a collapse in the value of the world’s primary reserve currency implies to a nation of 311 million Americans, who, for the significant portion of the population, is armed.

Read More:

http://www.beaconequity.com/we-are-preparing-for-massive-civil-war-says-dhs-informant-2012-05-03/#ixzz1uJaSflhX

Eric Holt-Giménez - We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People… and Still Can’t End Hunger

A new a study* from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. Researchers found that on average, conventional systems out-yielded organic farms by 25%—mostly for grains, and depending on conditions.

Embracing the current conventional wisdom, the authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet “the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts.”

Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—can’t afford to buy this food.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/08-2

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez - Welcome to the Knowledge Factory

The lead article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review is titled “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps.”

More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010, part of “an often overlooked, and growing, subgroup of Ph.D. recipients, adjunct professors, and other Americans with advanced degrees who have had to apply for food stamps or some other form of government aid since late 2007.

“Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions. Others are trying to raise families or pay for their children’s college expenses on the low and fluctuating pay they receive as professors off the tenure track, a group that now makes up 70 percent of faculties. Many bounce on and off unemployment or welfare during semester breaks. And some adjuncts have found themselves trying to make ends meet by waiting tables or bagging groceries alongside their students.”

And the numbers of impoverished Ph.D.s may actually be much higher than this.

“Leaders of organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think that the number of people counted by the government does not represent the full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report their reliance on federal aid.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/09-1

Arun Shrivastava - India's Urban Slums: Rising Social Inequalities, Mass Poverty and Homelessness

Former World Bank and UN official Manmohan Singh was never projected as India’s Prime Minister; he was imposed on 1.2 billion hapless Indians. Former World Bank [WB] major domo Montek Singh was never elected yet lives a lavish life in Delhi. As one insider says he is very happy in Delhi because he doesn’t have to fetch a glass of water himself. Chauffeurs, servants, cooks, and officially employed attendants make life easy for this economaniac who thought that Rs. 32 [60 cents] per day of spending power is sufficient for urban Indians to be called ‘Above Poverty Line.’ These two minions of the neo-liberal gangsters in Washington and London will do India in unless booted out soon.

A roll of good quality toilet paper that perhaps Montek uses costs more than Rs. 32. A mini McDonald’s potato burger that would barely fill a small corner of a typical American tummy costs Rs. 20 in Delhi and a 200 millilitre bottle of water Rs. 5. Perhaps that is what Montek and his cronies had in mind. The poor want to hang them; the European bankers want them at any cost.

When I shared this “32 rupee joke” with the slum-dwellers they said: “these peope should be paid Rs 32 per day to live if they want us to live on Rs 32.” Many journalists were so incensed that they called for dismantling the Planning Commission which is currently headed by Montek.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30756

INCOME INEQUALITY LEADS TO MORE U.S. DEATHS, STUDY FINDS

A new study provides the best evidence to date that higher levels of income inequality in the United States actually lead to more deaths in the country over a period of years.

The findings suggest that income inequality at any one point doesn’t work instantaneously - it begins increasing mortality rates 5 years later, and its influence peaks after 7 years, before fading after 12 years.

“This finding is striking and it supports the argument that income inequality is a public health concern,” said Hui Zheng, author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

The study appears online in the journal Social Science and Medicine and will be published in a future print edition.

Many other studies have examined the impact of income inequality on mortality and have come up with mixed results, according to Zheng. But he thinks that this study overcomes problems in previous research by using a different data structure and statistical model (called a discrete-time hazard model).

Zheng used data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey from 1986 to 2004 with mortality follow-up data from 1986-2006. His final sample included more than 700,000 people aged 30 and up.

Read More:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/incmort.htm

Rebecca Solnit - Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175536/

Groups to World Bank: Stop the Land Grabs!

As the World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty takes place in Washington DC this week, farmers and environmental groups have organized to push back against the Bank's pro-corporate, pro-privatization land grab attempts and the rights and environmental violations they bring.

Screen grab from film (see below) from La Via Campesina and Friends of the Earth International on the devasting impacts of the World Bank's land grabs on Uganda. The groups -- including Focus on the Global South, Friends of the Earth International and GRAIN -- say the World Bank is a leading force behind the land grabs, which allow giant global corporations to gobble up land and resources from local communities. 

In a group statement on the Bank's conference, the protesting groups say, "The World Bank is playing a key role in this global land grab by making capital and guarantees available for big multinational investors, providing technical assistance and support to 'improve the agricultural  investment climate' in so-called recipient countries, and promoting policies and laws that are corporate-oriented rather than people-centered."

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/24-3

Greg Kaufmann - This Week in Poverty: Will Pennsylvania Rip Another Hole in the Safety Net?

If you’ve never heard of state-funded General Assistance (GA) programs, you’re hardly alone. A “safety net of last resort” for very poor people—often childless adults—who don’t qualify for other forms of public assistance, there aren’t too many of them still in existence. Not too long ago most states offered them, but in recent decades they have been eliminated or severely restricted. Now, only thirty states maintain GA programs, and the benefit level for most falls below one-quarter of the poverty line, or less than $2,750 per year.

In a recent report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Liz Schott and Clare Cho call this trend “especially troubling” since “a growing number of jobless and elderly” are exhausting their unemployment benefits and continue to be unable to find work.

“Poor, childless adults are becoming even more vulnerable to severe hardship than in the past and are doing so in greater numbers,” write the authors.

One state that still maintains a GA program is Pennsylvania where 68,000 people—or just about one in every 200 residents—receive about $205 per month (five counties offer a little more, twenty-eight counties a little less). But when Republican Governor Tom Corbett released his budget in February he proposed eliminating the program entirely as of July 1. A final budget must be passed and signed by that date, and with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, legal aid lawyer Michael Froehlich of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia says, “It’s not looking good.”

Read More:

http://www.thenation.com/blog/167381/week-poverty-will-pennsylvania-rip-another-hole-safety-net

Alexander Cockburn - The Myth of the “Knowledge Economy”

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,”  President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were embarking on the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with parents in tow, gazing ashen faced at the prospective fees.

The image is of the toiling students springing from lecture room to well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the arts that can make America great again – outthinking, outknowing  the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, South Koreans and Germans in the cutting edge, cut-throat high tech economies of tomorrow.

Start with the raw material in this epic knowledge battle. As a dose of cold water over all this high-minded talk it’s worth looking at Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum’s recently published  “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” The two profs  followed more than 2,300 undergraduates at 29 universities, selected to represent the range of America’s 2000-plus four-year college institutions. As resumed by Steven Kent in Daily Finance:

Read More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/23/the-myth-of-the-knowledge-economy/print