Dos Estados Unidos

(Ed. note, have but bare clue this means 2 United States, which meant to use as title until thought it would prove progressively ironic and provoke haters, just to get views.  Now, it looks kinda stupid.)


[By HOPE YEN
The Associated Press

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net...


Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.] emphasis addedhttp://www.wftv.com/news/ap/social-issues/us-poverty-on-track-to-rise-to-highest-since-1960s/nPzs3/
See also http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/us-poverty-level-1960s_n_1692744.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics



Thanks for playing the consumerism game, suckers, laughs Goldman Sachs all the way to their vaults and foreign bank accounts.


Banks created liars loans mortgages, ripped off humans and municipalities without mercy nor any hint of remorse their rapacious greed would cause foreseeable evil social consequences, and have their profits coming back now with resulting obscene bonuses for cratering the world economy.


Homeless Children in America:  Not a bug but feature of capitalism without conscience and conservative chowderheads cutting budgets for social services:


[..After hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, advocates for the homeless were horrified to find that the storms had left one in 50 American kids without a home, a record high, according to a report by the Coalition for Family Homelessness. But only a few years later the financial crisis outperformed nature in casting catastrophe on poor Americans. After record foreclosures, layoffs and budget cuts that hit poor families the hardest, America is a country where one out of 45 kids doesn’t have a home. That totals 1.6 million children in 2010 without a permanent place to live, an increase of 448,000 in just three years. Forty percent of the kids are under 6...


The Southern states, which are also some of the nation’s poorest, have the worst access to homeless shelters: Of Mississippi’s (poverty rate 25.87 percent) 82 counties, only 17 offer a family homeless shelter, according to the “Red, White and Blue Book,” which compiles information about services for homeless families. There are 23 in Alabama. Louisiana’s homelessness rate doubled between 2007 and 2009, and that year researchers estimated that 30 percent of the state’s homeless families ended up sleeping in their cars or in abandoned buildings...

“All of a sudden, around the early 1980s we started to see tons of families who were there because of poverty,” Ralph da Costa-Núñez, who worked in Mayor Ed Koch’s administration and is now CEO of Homes for the Homeless, tells AlterNet.

The reasons behind the jump in family homelessness are not complex, Núñez says. “It was the gutting of the safety net. Reagan cut every social program that helped the poor. Then there’s inflation so their aid checks are shrinking. Where are they going? Into the streets, into the shelters.”

The administration was especially keen to cut low-income housing programs. Peter Dreier writes that Reagan created a housing task force, “dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers.” They and the president were in agreement that the market was the best way to address housing for the poor, and instituted cuts in government spending that yielded almost instant results. In 1970, Dreier writes, there were more low-income housing units than families who needed them, but “by 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.”]  http://www.salon.com/2012/07/19/how_america_became_a_country_that_lets_little_kids_go_homeless_salpart/?source=newsletter

So do the math.  Raygunz cuts the budget for social services, his advisers want the magical unicorn of the free market to provide for low income housing, and then noted socialist and America hater William Jefferson Clinton gutted welfare.  Since free markets live and feed on profits and housing for the working poor would yield as high a return on investment, housing stock plummeted for poor folk.

So cuts + unicorn + more cuts = homeless children and trillions in profits for greedy bloodsucking bastards.

[LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses - puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.]  emphasis added because it pisses me off.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics