Shake a Stick in Post-Financial Collapse America, and One Hits Poverty
Sunday, 08 September 2013 00:00
By Sasha Abramsky , Nation Books
Shake a stick in post–financial collapse America, and one hits poverty. It’s everywhere: tent cities in municipal parks, under freeway overpasses, along river walks. Food lines stretching down city blocks. Foreclosure signs dotting suburban landscapes. Overstretched free clinics providing a modicum of healthcare to people no longer insured. Elderly people whose pensions have vanished and whose hopes for a decent old age have evaporated. Unemployed men and women looking for clothes for their kids at thrift stores and food for their families at pantries. Mothers begging for free turkeys from churches so they can at least partially partake in the national ritual of Thanksgiving.
By the end of 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15.1 percent of Americans were living below the federally defined poverty line, an increase of approximately fifteen million people since the start of the century. Fully 34.2 percent of single mothers and their children were in poverty, up from 28.5 percent in 2000. Some of the poor lived in traditionally deprived communities; many others lived in the suburbs. In fact, according to Georgetown University’s Peter Edelman, in his book So Rich, So Poor, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, suburban poverty increased by fully 53 percent. Much of that was due to an extraordinary collapse in the worth of assets owned by middle-class African American and Hispanic families.
In 1984, the median value of household asset ownership for African American families was $6,679. By 2009, as the recession destroyed the worth of homes, that number had declined to a mere $4,900—thirty years of asset accumulation vanished. White households, despite suffering during the recession, by contrast still had a median net worth of $92,000.
The disparate impact of the crisis could be measured in soaring regional unemployment numbers and age- and race-specific poverty data. In Imperial County, California, for example, residents were experiencing a collapse on a scale that most of the country didn’t witness even at the height of the Great Depression. Nearly one in three workers were unemployed, and for the 68 percent of the working population in the county who had jobs, average income was abysmally low, hovering not far above the poverty line.
much more
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18665-shake-a-stick-in-post–financial-collapse-america-and-one-hits-poverty
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Disgusting.
K&R