Of the Abyss

20/09/2022

“Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act is being wrongly compared to The Purge—the movie franchise where all crimes, including murder, are allowed for a 12-hour period. But what the law actually does is end the cash bail system in the state to ensure that people are not being incarcerated simply because they’re poor.”

There is no such thing as a “purge law.” Illinois’ Pretrial Fairness Act is being wrongly compared to "The Purge."

16/09/2022

“NEW: income inequality in US & UK is so wide that while the richest are very well off, the poorest have a worse standard of living than the poorest in countries like Slovenia https://t.co/gtHvhNsnuT Essentially, US & UK are poor societies with some very rich people. A thread:”

15/09/2022

Staff at an Omaha shelter cleared out the nearby homeless camps. They say it’s for the safety of the residents and neighborhood.

31/05/2022

“Along the busy US Route 192 that runs past the direction of the theme park, dozens of brightly-painted motels line the highway and desperate families and single residents who are falling through the cracks.

Tented encampments are springing up nearby, while in historic downtown Kissimmee people are living in their cars or in bus shelters.

Among them are the newly homeless locals, hit by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic that saw them lose their modest apartments when their finances couldn't recover from job losses.

Others are newcomers that moved to the Sunshine State believing their lives would improve in an area dominated by Disney's wealthy economy, only to find rocketing rent prices beyond their reach.

They are young, old, white, black, Latino. Some have worked hard all their long lives and are stunned to find themselves facing life on the street. There is little discrimination in this dilemma.”

Thousands of homeless people are estimated to be living in the shadow of Disney World near Kissimmee, Florida after falling on hard times during the pandemic, DailyMail.com can reveal.

27/05/2022

Kevin Lee called this artwork “Invisibility of Poverty”. Photos and more about it: https://streetartutopia.com/2022/05/25/the-invisibility-of-poverty-street-art-by-kevin-lee

The child is depicted sitting on steps, being stepped on & stepped over to illustrate how invisible the poor living among us can be.

16/05/2022

“The 2020 census missed nearly 1 of every 17 Native Americans who live on reservations, an undercount that could very well lead to insufficient federal funding for essential health, nutrition, and social programs in remote communities with high poverty rates and scarce access to services.

The census counted 9.7 million people who identified as a Native American or an Alaska Native in 2020 — alone or in combination with another race or ethnicity — compared with 5.2 million in 2010. But the Indigenous population on the nation’s approximately 325 reservations was undercounted by nearly 6%, according to a demographic analysis of the census’s accuracy. Indigenous people on reservations have a history of being undercounted — nearly 5% were missed in 2010, according to the analysis.

At least 1 in 5 Native Americans live on reservations, according to previous census data. More detailed Native American population data from the 2020 census will be released over the next year.”

The 2020 census undercounted people living on Native American reservations. The money for many needed federal aid programs is tied to those population numbers.

21/04/2022

17/09/2021

All you need to know: “The share of people living in poverty in the United States fell to a record low last year as an enormous government relief effort helped offset the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.”

When government benefits are taken into account, a smaller share of the population was living in poverty in 2020 even as the pandemic eliminated millions of jobs.

12/08/2021

“Soon after the pandemic shuttered the U.S. economy, food banks were overwhelmed by demand, with cars lined up for miles as people in need waited to pick up groceries. As the hunger crisis worsened, the federal government stepped in to increase food stamp benefits.

Now that enhancement is set to expire at the end of September, just as many states are also rolling back an additional boost to food stamp payments. The extra funding has helped expand the daily food stamp benefit to $7 per person, up from $4 before the public health crisis…”

A 15% hike in nutritional aid ends next month. Experts say that will increase food insecurity for millions of Americans.

04/08/2021

“The program has caused many disabled people to live in forced poverty and in fear of getting a job or saving money…”

Disabled people and seniors must accumulate less than $2,000 in their bank accounts in order to receive Supplemental Security Income.

22/07/2021

“When Michele Martinez saw three cities in Orange County being sued for not providing adequate services for the homeless, she brainstormed a radical idea.

She wanted her city to be sued, too.

It was 2018, and Martinez had been on the Santa Ana City Council for 12 years, the last two of which she’d spent as vice mayor. Now that her term was coming to an end, she’d have to act quickly if her plan was to become a reality. And so, at her urging, Santa Ana City voluntarily entered the lawsuit, leading to a snowball effect with far-reaching consequences. Three years later, an additional two dozen cities have volunteered to be sued, too, culminating in a pivotal moment, as the country’s homelessness crisis finds footing at the federal level.”

Michele Martinez, the former vice mayor of Santa Ana, willingly entered her city into a lawsuit to help solve homelessness. Since, dozens of cities have followed suit culminating in a pivotal moment, as the country’s homelessness crisis finds footing at the federal level.

08/07/2021

“Annually, more people in the United States die of hyperthermia (more than 600, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) than from any other weather event. And the poorer you are in D.C., the hotter you are.

That’s because parts of the District are urban heat islands, spots within a city that are hotter than the reported temperature based on landscaping and architecture. And that’s usually the same map that shows the disparities in income, crime and health.”

Urban heat islands make parts of a city even deadlier as temperatures rise

01/07/2021

Perpetual renting: today’s serfdom...

Working Americans are being priced out of the housing market, rent is skyrocketing, and investment firms are snatching up all the homes to turn into rental p...

27/06/2021

“Only roughly 10 percent of everybody in poverty in the United States is living in a high-poverty neighborhood. Ninety percent of folks are not. There’s more poverty now in suburban areas than in central cities. And some of the deepest-seated poverty is in rural America. So Appalachia, the Deep South. The point of all of this is to say that the reach of poverty is really wide. It affects a lot of different people in a lot of different situations. And it’s not just this one image that we often have.”

Mark Robert Rank discusses our denial about poverty and the other myths that block our understanding of it.

23/06/2021

“Lowing the transaction costs of remittances is just the tip of the iceberg. DeFi applications can make access to capital simpler and cheaper in places where getting a loan is anything but. Despite the major role of small and midsize businesses in African economies, the World Bank estimates that in sub-Saharan Africa there is $245 billion in unmet financing needs for small and medium-sized enterprises. When loans are available, the interest rates can be usurious. In some countries in Africa, assuming small business entrepreneurs satisfy all their credit criteria, they can expect a small business loan with an interest rate of greater than 20 percent—sometimes far greater. Using a DeFi platform, anyone anywhere in the world can provide a loan, and the loan can be locked into a ‘smart contract’ in which its terms self-execute without requiring an intermediary.

Perhaps most tantalizing for the global development community is the potential for DeFi to provide financial identity to people without access to banks or traditional financial institutions. ‘Banking the unbanked’ has long been a goal of the global development community; today, 1.7 billion adults around the world lack access to modern financial services...”

The blockchain holds the key to sustainable development for the world’s poorest people.

14/06/2021

“With the forests gone and the rivers polluted, the only way for the longhouse people I knew in Sarawak to make a living is by working for meagre wages on the palm oil plantations.

A whole generation of young men had grown accustomed to life in the lumber camps. After the timber was worked out in one area, they moved on with the camps – if given the chance. The ones that weren’t hung around in the longhouse, idle and disoriented. Many went off to the cities on the coast, where they live in squatter settlements and comprise a new lumpen proletariat.

For the longhouse people, food sovereignty and economic independence has been traded for a cash dependency that they cannot now escape. Their resource base has been destroyed, the farming skills of their grandparents are forgotten, and their invaluable stocks of seed rice – every family once had its own unique varieties – have long since been consumed. The longhouse has turned into a labour barracks, built at no expense to the employers.

The astonishing thing is that all this is smugly reported as development, as ‘growth’, but this glossy narrative hides a much darker reality. The World Bank reports that poverty has been reduced. But rising incomes don’t come anywhere close to compensating for the livelihoods that the longhouse people have lost. Nothing can compensate for the loss of food sovereignty and economic independence, and of course the loss of the rainforest. The whole narrative of poverty reduction is a charade.”

Simplistic stories of GDP growth are blinding us to the social and ecological destruction it so often entails.

10/06/2021

“The justice system looks different for people who can afford to pay their way out of jail, hire a lawyer or quickly settle court debts...”

Colorado bills would forgive millions in court debt and permanently scrap a slew of fines and fees that burden the poor.

04/06/2021

“Every time a credit card is swiped, the bank charges a fee. It seems trivial, but those fees add up — enough to help pay for rewards like points-funded hotel rooms and cash back. To compensate, businesses raise prices, and so cash users (who tend to be poorer) are often subsidizing the perks going to credit card users (who tend to be richer). And the higher the rewards, the bigger the cost to the unsuspecting people paying for it.”

America’s poor foot much of the bill for credit card points, miles, and cash back.

03/06/2021

“Customers who overdraw their accounts will no longer face a $25 penalty, the bank said Wednesday. The change applies to the roughly 3.6 million checking, savings and money-market accounts at Ally’s online bank...Ally decided to eliminate the fees after positive customer feedback when it temporarily suspended the charges in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic...Last summer’s protests for racial justice also drove the decision to nix the fees, she said. The charges disproportionately affect people who are living paycheck to paycheck...and the bank also studied research that found that overdraft fees disproportionately affect Black and Latino households.”

Ally decided to eliminate the fees after positive customer feedback when it temporarily suspended the charges in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

01/06/2021

“Get elected, create more poverty; rinse, wash, and repeat.”

The Republican Party is running a huge scam right now, similar to the one they ran in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush was setting up phony co***ne busts across the street from the White House having achieved his position by running his infamous Willie Horton ad four years earlier.Here's the ess...

30/05/2021

“Punishing people for being down and out and homeless is not the answer. Increased and sustained funding for safe, affordable, supportive housing, well-connected with primary health care that is inclusive of mental health and substance use treatment, is what works to address homelessness. Policies and programs led by people with the lived experience of homelessness make them more innovative and effective.”

The historical roots of criminalizing poverty and homeless run deep.

27/05/2021

“In a healthy, nondiscriminatory housing market, buyers will compete for homes by raising their bids. American housing markets are neither healthy nor nondiscriminatory, and with supply at historic lows, sellers have increasing power to legally and illegally discriminate among buyers.”

As buyers scramble to prove they are "nice, normal people," the door opens to increased fair housing violations.

26/05/2021

“It’s expensive to be poor.”

Latrish Oseko and her daughter, Ka’laya, have found out all about the holes in our unemployment system.

25/05/2021

“...poor Americans and even middle-class Americans have virtually no say in public policy when their opinions diverge from their well-heeled counterparts... The framers of the constitution were especially concerned that poor people might have undue influence over public policy. As social scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter observe, the framers ‘tended to equate socioeconomic status with civic ability.’”

The US political system is set up to limit the influence of the poor. Why should we blame them when it does exactly that?

24/05/2021

“Among the many obstacles to providing shelter and housing for homeless people is finding available land. Private property is often too expensive for the city of Los Angeles to buy for housing, so there is a constant search by city officials to locate publicly owned land that is empty or underutilized and can be transformed into safe camping grounds, tiny-house villages or more permanent housing.”

The L.A. City Council should support City Councilman Mike Bonin's proposal to study temporarily housing homeless people at a couple of beach parking lots.

23/05/2021

“Contrary to lawmakers’ assertions, a growing body of research has found unemployment benefits have little to no impact on people’s motivation to seek work.”

A total of around 3.5 million workers will lose supplemental funding.

21/05/2021

“Food prices have jumped by nearly a third over the past year...even as pandemic-related job losses are making it harder for families to afford basic staples. Corn prices are 67% higher than a year ago...while sugar is up nearly 60%, and prices for cooking oil have doubled.

Overall prices have risen for 11 consecutive months to the highest levels since 2014...Many, though not all, of the causes are linked to Covid-19. Global food supply has largely held up after some initial disruptions last year...But pandemic-related restrictions on movement have added to logistical costs. Weaker currencies in many developing countries that are struggling to rebound from Covid-19 have made food imports more expensive—-and conversely, in countries such as Brazil, led to greater exports of food, which are now cheaper for foreign buyers, restricting domestic supply.”

Some 270 million people are suffering from acute malnutrition during the Covid-19 pandemic, double the number in 2019, according to the World Food Program.

19/05/2021

“Tucked under a highway overpass in West Oakland, just beyond a graveyard of charred cars and dumped debris...There’s a collection of beautiful, small structures built from foraged materials. There’s a hot shower, a fully stocked kitchen and health clinic. There’s a free ‘store’ offering donated items including clothes and books, and a composting toilet. There are stone and gravel paths lined with flowers and vegetable gardens. There’s even an outdoor pizza oven...’Cob on Wood’ center has arisen in recent months to provide amenities for those living in a nearby homeless encampment...But most importantly, it’s fostering a sense of community and dignity, according to the unhoused and housed residents who came together to build it. They hope their innovative approach will lead to big changes in how the city addresses its growing homeless population.”

Under a highway, beautiful structures offer food, healthcare, showers and a free ‘store’ – as well as a strong sense of community

17/05/2021

“Today, 1.3 billion people still live without electric light. Light poverty is defined as one’s limited access to artificial light. Those in light poverty seek non-electric lighting methods, including kerosene, candles and flashlights with disposable batteries. These alternatives present alarming drawbacks apart from inconvenience. The open flame and soot from kerosene lamps cause 1.5 million deaths annually. Light poverty is an imperative issue in need of global action.”

More than one billion people live in light poverty. However, two companies in particular are working to alleviate light poverty through solar power.

16/05/2021

“Critics say the food charity industry has become a key part of the capitalist economy, which is why it shies away from advocating for systemic anti-poverty solutions such as a livable minimum wage and universal healthcare which some corporate donors lobby against.”

The pandemic has raised awareness of the US food insecurity crisis and highlighted the reliance on corporate food philanthropy