From The Ramparts

The Rich Get Richer As Homelessness Abounds

The Rich Get Richer While The Poor Increase

“Last year, the United States found 727,304 homeless people nationwide, meaning about one in every 400 Americans were without a home, according to the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2005 issued by the Information Office of China's State Council Thursday.
The figures came from The USA Today published on Oct. 12, 2005. ‘The Los Angeles County has become 'the homeless capital of America,' with the average number of vagabonds or people in shelters hitting 90,000 a day, including 35,000 people chronically homeless,’ the report quotes an article of The Los Angeles Times on June 16, 2005 as saying. ‘The United States dubs the world's richest country, however, it maintains the highest poverty rate among developed countries,’ the report says, given a study of eight advanced countries by London School of Economics in 2005, which found that the United States had the worst social inequality. On the one hand, the report says, in recent years the fortunes of the rich have continued to rise in the United States. According to two new studies by Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based wealth-research firm, and the Boston Consulting Group, millionaire households (excluding the value of primary residences) in the United States controlled more than 11 trillion in assets in 2004, up more than 8 percent from 2003.” http://english.people.com.

The mainstream media better known as the AmeriKKKan corporate mind control and propaganda apparatus has better things to do than tell the truth, provide meaningful analysis of current events, pertinent economic trends or challenge the status quo. No, their objective is to serve as stenographers and cheerleaders for the NeoCon agenda and for the most part obfuscate the dismal failures and wholesale treason of the Bu$h administration. You'll have to go to the foreign press or the much maligned (by the mainstream media) Blogsphere to find out what’s really going on in AmeriKKKa and around the world. In the March 10th edition of the People’s Daily Online, there is a short story pointing out the increasing numbers of people in AmeriKKKa who are homeless and who are living in poverty in the supposedly the richest nation on the planet. While it is unrealistic to think any society can totally abolish poverty altogether and it is even more naive to think a society like AmeriKKKa which was built upon a predatory system such as capitalism would adopt the moral imperative to reduce poverty, it is disheartening to see poverty on the rise as a deliberate consequence of policies of the ruling elite’s corporate and governmental hydra. The reason more and more folks are slipping into homelessness is due to a myriad of factors: loss of manufacturing jobs, outsourcing of jobs overseas, stagnant wages, resistance to increasing the minimum wage, increasing interest rates, inflation, changes in the bankruptcy laws and uncontrolled consumerism leading to mounting personal debt. The domestic media is not reporting this because they have played a major role in creating the rabid consumerism that is swamping families in debt as Madison Avenue, Hollywood and the pop culture promotes spend spend buy, buy and fads ad nauseam. We have become a nation of sheep, lobotomized Pavlovian spenders obsessed with the bling, the superficial and glitter while eschewing anything of substance or meaning. It is interesting that this year’s Super Bowl a gargantuan circus and pre-packaged hype and distraction was held in Detroit one of the poorest cities in the nation that is plagued with a rising homeless population. The media and NFL took a “let them eat cake” mentality to the residents of Detriot and moved on with their annual bacchanalian shindig totally oblivious to the poverty, suffering and depravation in the city. In fact the media went out of its way not to focus on the poverty and homelessness in Detroit not wanting to conjure up more images of the real AmeriKKKa like those that were splattered on people’s consciousness during Hurricane Katrina.
The last thing the AmeriKKKan corporate media or their ruling elite owners wants is for Joe and Jane Sixpack to see what is really happening and to begin to connect the dots about how and perhaps why their standard of living is ebbing away. They might get up in arms about why it is becoming more expensive to send their children to college, or they might start asking why the CEOs of failing corporations like Ford and GM are making millions of dollars while working class folks are being forced to take massive pay cuts and give back hard fought benefits while their government is selling them out by bankrupting the country through illegal wars abroad and class warfare at home. It would take a foreign online paper to report, “Meanwhile, the income of ordinary employees in the United States has seen a sharp decline, causing the increase of poor population. The data issued by the U.S. Census Bureau said that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 12.5 percent in 2003 to 12.7 percent in 2004, with the number of people in poverty rising by 1.1 million from 35.9 million to 37 million, which means one in every eight Americans live in poverty. Poverty rates in cities such as Detroit, Miami and Newark exceeded 28 percent. These problems indicate that poverty, hunger and homelessness are quite serious in America, worker's economic, social and cultural rights are not guaranteed, the report says.” People’s Daily Online 03-10-06 http://english.people.com.cn
To its credit the latest edition of the AARP Bulletin contains an article entitled The Big Freeze Vanishing Pensions 5 Ways to Save Yours letting folks know that the trend is for more and more profitable companies to freeze or discontinue to their defined benefit pension programs and put the onus on the worker to get their own savings or retirement plans which for the most part will be tied to Wall Street and a volatile stock market. Most working class folks know very little about investing and even if he did, insider trading and fraud are the norm these days so there is no guarantee of a good return on one’s investment. Working class folks can’t turn to organized labor because the fascists in both political parties have waged war on organized labor since the Republican Reagan administration decertified the Air Traffic Controllers Union in the ‘80's and the Democrats have forsaken organized labor except when they need them around election time! Congress has sold the AmeriKKKan worker out with all the international trade agreements that send AmeriKKKan jobs overseas in exchange for foreign goods which exacerbate the trade imbalance further undermining the domestic economy and status of more and more AmeriKKKan working folks.
We are witnessing the reduction of AmeriKKKa to status of a third world nation status with an aging population facing increasing inflation, joblessness, stagnant wages and a citizenry t overwhelmed with debt, eroding safety net and support. The increase in homelessness should be seen as a harbinger for coming events, events that will not be pretty, events that will impact an increasing number of AmeriKKKans on one level or another. The rich will get richer while the poor will get poorer. And the ruling elites are preparing for continued class warfare by building emergency detention centers in case the poor get antsy and start demanding changes the ruling elites are not willing to make. The coming police state repression coupled with the decline in our standard of living will not be pretty.

-30-

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 6:13 AM