industryterm:food stamps

Robert Reich : Hey Uber, the gig is up – Alternet.org
▻https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/robert-reich-hey-uber-the-gig-is-up

https://www.alternet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/uber.jpg

par Robert Reich, ancien ministre du travail sous Clinton

Uber just filed its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. Although it lost $1bn, investors may still do well because the losses appear to be declining.

Uber drivers, on the other hand, aren’t doing well. According to a recent study, about half of New York’s Uber drivers are supporting families with children, yet 40% depend on Medicaid and another 18% on food stamps.

It’s similar elsewhere in the new American economy. Last week, the New York Times reported that fewer than half of Google workers are full-time employees. Most are temps and contractors receiving a fraction of the wages and benefits of full-time Googlers, with no job security.

Across America, the fastest-growing category of new jobs is gig work – contract, part-time, temp, self-employed and freelance. And a growing number of people work for staffing firms that find them gig jobs.

The standard economic measures – unemployment and income – look better than Americans feel

Estimates vary but it’s safe to say almost a quarter of American workers are now gig workers. Which helps explain why the standard economic measures – unemployment and income – look better than Americans feel.

Gig workers are about 30% cheaper because companies pay them only when they need them, and don’t have to spend on the above-mentioned labor protections.

Increasingly, businesses need only a small pool of “talent” anchored in the enterprise – innovators and strategists responsible for the firm’s competitive strength.

Other workers are becoming fungible, sought only for reliability and low cost. So, in effect, economic risks are shifting to them.

Gig work is making capitalism harsher. Unless government defines legitimate gig work more narrowly and provides stronger safety nets for gig workers, gig capitalism cannot endure.

#Travail #Ubérisation #Uber #Gig_economy

How an outdated law is leaving millions of low-income college students hungry
▻https://newfoodeconomy.org/gao-report-food-stamps-snap-college-student-hunger

https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/food-insecurity-college-campuses-food-stamp-snap-january-2019-e1547150281121.jpg

A 2017 survey of the California public university system, for instance, found that 40 percent of its undergraduate and graduate students faced food insecurity

[...]

The data check out: Since 1975, college attendance among low-income high school graduates has more than doubled from 31.2 to 65.4 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That’s about the rate at which high-income high school graduates were already attending college back in 1975.

So a typical student body in the 1980s is no longer emblematic of college campus demographics today. The trouble is, our perception of college students as middle- and upper-class kids with parental support persists. That’s why some school officials perpetuate the misconception that college students are ineligible for SNAP, and why many believe it.

To make matters worse, food stamps laws are also stuck in the past.

#etats-unis #sous_alimentation #étudiants

Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam
▻https://medium.com/s/powertrip/universal-basic-income-is-silicon-valleys-latest-scam-fd3e130b69a0
▻https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/focal/1200/632/51/47/0*pksYF4nMsS3aKrtD

Par Douglas Rushkoff

To my surprise, the audience seemed to share my concerns. They’re not idiots, and the negative effects of their operations were visible everywhere they looked. Then an employee piped up with a surprising question: “What about UBI?”

Wait a minute, I thought. That’s my line.

Up until that moment, I had been an ardent supporter of universal basic income (UBI), that is, government cash payments to people whose employment would no longer be required in a digital economy. Contrary to expectations, UBI doesn’t make people lazy. Study after study shows that the added security actually enables people to take greater risks, become more entrepreneurial, or dedicate more time and energy to improving their communities.

So what’s not to like?

Shouldn’t we applaud the developers at Uber — as well as other prominent Silicon Valley titans like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, bond investor Bill Gross, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman — for coming to their senses and proposing we provide money for the masses to spend? Maybe not. Because to them, UBI is really just a way for them to keep doing business as usual.

Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.

Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps.

Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely. Instead of merely rewriting the law like colonial corporations did or utilizing the power of capital like retail conglomerates do, digital companies are using code. Amazon’s control over the retail market and increasingly the production of the goods it sells, has created an automated wealth-extraction platform that the slave drivers who ran the Dutch East India Company couldn’t have even imagined.

Of course, it all comes at a price: Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.

To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.

Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.

To venture capitalists seeking to guarantee their fortunes for generations, such economic equality sounds like a nightmare and unending, unnerving disruption. Why create a monopoly just to give others the opportunity to break it or, worse, turn all these painstakingly privatized assets back into a public commons?

The answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is because all those assets are actually of diminishing value to the few ultra-wealthy capitalists who have accumulated them. Return on assets for American corporations has been steadily declining for the last 75 years. It’s like a form of corporate obesity. The rich have been great at taking all the assets off the table but really bad at deploying them. They’re so bad at investing or building or doing anything that puts money back into the system that they are asking governments to do this for them — even though the corporations are the ones holding all the real assets.

Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running. They don’t see the economic operating system beneath their programs, and so they are not in a position to challenge its embedded biases much less rewrite that code.

Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.

written by
Douglas Rushkoff

#Revenu_de_base #Revenu_universel #Disruption #Economie_numérique #Uberisation

US Gross National Debt Soars $1.27 Trillion In Fiscal 2018, Hits $21.5 Trillion.
▻https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-02/us-gross-national-debt-soars-127-trillion-fiscal-2018-hits-215-trillion
▻https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/US-Gross-National-Debt-2011-2018-10-01.png?itok=S7kv07bn

But wait — these are the Boom Times!
The US gross national debt jumped by $84 billion on September 28, the last business day of fiscal year 2018, the Treasury Department reported Monday afternoon. During the entire fiscal year 2018, the gross national debt ballooned by $1.271 trillion to a breath-taking height of $21.52 trillion.

Just six months ago, on March 16, it had pierced the $21-trillion mark. At the end of September 2017, it was still $20.2 trillion. The flat spots in the chart below, followed by the vertical spikes, are the results of the debt-ceiling grandstanding in Congress:

These trillions are whizzing by so fast they’re hard to see. What was that, we asked? Where did that go?

Over the fiscal year, the gross national debt increased by 6.3% and now amounts to 105.4% of current-dollar GDP.

But this isn’t the Great Recession when tax revenues collapsed because millions of people lost their jobs and because companies lost money or went bankrupt as their sales collapsed and credit froze up; and when government expenditures soared because support payments such as unemployment compensation and food stamps soared, and because there was some stimulus spending too.

But no – these are the good times. Over the last 12-month period through Q2, the economy, as measured by nominal GDP grew 5.4%. “Nominal” GDP rather than inflation-adjusted (“real”) GDP because the debt isn’t adjusted for inflation either, and we want an apples-to-apples comparison.

The increases in the gross national debt have been a fiasco for many years. Even after the Great Recession was declared over and done with, the gross national debt increased on average by $954 billion per fiscal year from 2011 through 2017.

And the regular debt-ceiling fights in Congress, rather than accomplishing something noticeable in terms of fiscal rectitude, are just political charades that leave some flat spots in the chart above followed by some dizzying spikes right afterwards.

But now we have even more profligacy: Increased spending combined with tax cuts. As a result, the surge in the debt in fiscal 2018 of $1.27 trillion was 33% more than the already mind-blowing average surge in the debt over the past seven fiscal years ($954 billion).

For the first 11 months of fiscal 2018, through August, total tax receipts inched up by only $19 billion, or by 1%, according to the CBO, though the economy, as measured by nominal GDP, grew at an annual rate of about 5.4% (none of the figures are adjusted for inflation).

https://scontent.fbru2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/42687644_1963750817019945_1234127129877151744_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&oh=fc6552fb9b1a965b1e585b3ff8b0d79b&oe=5C5BCA7F

This is a good time to remember that manufacturing false hierarchies based on race and gender in order to enforce a brutal class system is a very long story. Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state-sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively “unseen” by European explorers - visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land - and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied ad therefore fair game on an absurd “finders keepers” basis.

It was these same systems of human ranking that were deployed to justify the mass kidnapping, shackling, and torturing of other human beings in order to force them to work that stolen land - which led the late theorist Cedric Robinson to describe the market economy that gave birth to the United States and not simply as capitalism but as “racial capitalism.” The cotton and sugar picked by enslaved Africans was the fuel that kick-started the Industrial Revolution. The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States - so why would it suddenly be today?

As the civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander wrote in her book The New Jim Crow, the politics of racial hierarchy have been the ever-present accomplices to the market system as it evolved through the centuries. Elites in the United States have used race as a wedge, she writes, “to decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people” - first in the face of the slave rebellions supported by white workers, then with Jim Crow laws, and later during the so-called war on drugs. Every time these multiethnic coalitions have become powerful enough to threaten corporate power, white workers have been convinced that their real enemies are darker-skinned people stealing “their” jobs or threatening their neighborhoods. And there has been no more effective way to convince white voters to support the defunding of schools, bus systems, and welfare than by telling them (however wrongly) that most of the beneficiaries of those services are darker-skinned people, many of them “illegal,” out to scam the system. In Europe, fearmongering about how migrants are stealing jobs, exploiting social services, and eroding the culture has played a similarly enabling role.

Ronald Reagan kicked this into high gear in the United States with the myth that food stamps were being collected by fur-wearing, Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” and used to subsidize a culture of crime. And Trump was no small player in this hysteria. In 1989, after five Black and Latino teenagers were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park, he bought full-page ads in several New York daily papers calling for the return of the death penalty. The Central Park Five were later exonerated by DNA evidence, and their sentences were vacated. Trump refused to apologize or retract his claims. No wonder, then, that his Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is arguing that social services and infrastructure in cities such as New York and Chicago are “crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime” - conveniently moving the subject away from years of neoliberal neglect toward the supposed need to crack down on crime, and to bar these cities from declaring themselves “sanctuaries” for immigrants.

Excerpted from No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein

Thousands of #Amazon workers get food stamps. #Bernie_Sanders wants Amazon to pay for them
▻http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bernie-sanders-food-stamps-20180824-story.html

http://www.latimes.com/resizer/NBMBDliTGDbZ2FRBct3SYjFsOxg=/1200x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-tronc.s3.amazonaws.com/public/OXRSMH36AZARBKQVMHYQUME6PM.jpg

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants large employers such as Amazon, Walmart and McDonald’s to fully cover the cost of food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their employees. The goal, he said, is to force corporations to pay a living wage and curb roughly $150 billion in taxpayer dollars that go to funding federal assistance programs for low-wage workers each year.

#oligarques #Etats-Unis

Amazon’s ’ambassador’ workers assure Twitter: we can go to the toilet any time | Technology | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/23/amazon-fc-ambassadors-twitter-working-conditions

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f2e24d8f170d5bf719abbcaac7e48467b513da94/0_0_3226_1937/master/3226.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly9hc3NldHMuZ3VpbS5jby51ay9pbWFnZXMvb3ZlcmxheXMvZDM1ODZhNWVmNTc4MTc1NmQyMWEzYjYzNWU1MTcxNDEvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=25106c81bfd2304fb7a51b3ff8a3f9fa

Anxious consumers worried about the welfare of Amazon’s thousands of warehouse employees will be relieved to discover that they do in fact get to occasionally use the toilet. They’re also allowed to drink water on the job, work in well-lit spaces with really big fans, and don’t need food stamps to make ends meet.

And, for at least one of them, “Olive Garden is life”.

We know all this thanks to Amazon’s “FC ambassadors” – employees at the e-tailer’s fulfillment centers who spring to the company’s defense on Twitter when it’s being dragged for poor working conditions.

#amazon #droits_humains #travail

The Greatest Crimes Against Humanity Are Perpetrated by People Just Doing Their Jobs
▻https://truthout.org/articles/the-careerists

https://truthout.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Greatest-Crimes-Against-Humanity-Are-Perpetrated-by-People-Just-Doing-Their-Jobs.jpg

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.

Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.

#politique #pouvoir #carrièrisme

Trump Wants Families On Food Stamps To Get Jobs. The Majority Already Work : The Salt : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/24/529831472/trump-wants-families-on-food-stamps-to-get-jobs-the-majority-already-work

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/05/24/foodstamp_wide-32d861b51bb9081cb5100e2badf921ac3d65ca19.jpg?s=1400

... the reality is, many people (44 percent) who rely on SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps is now known — have at least one person in the family working, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And when it comes to families on SNAP with kids, a majority — 55 percent — are bringing home wages, according to USDA. The problem is, those wages aren’t enough to actually live on.

#président_de_la_ripoux_clique #Etats-unis #salaires #pauvreté #bons_alimentaires

#Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars | New Republic
▻https://newrepublic.com/article/146540/amazon-thriving-thanks-taxpayer-dollars

The tech giant has received more than $1 billion in tax breaks. The government is also funding food stamps for many of its workers.

#impôts #bons_alimentaires

Ben Carson Says Poverty Is A ’State of Mind" : NPR
▻http://www.npr.org/2017/05/25/530068988/ben-carson-says-poverty-is-a-state-of-mind

When it comes to #poor #Americans, the #Trump administration has a message: #Government# aid is holding many of them back. Without it, many more of them would be #working.

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney said as much when presenting the administration’s budget plan this week to cut safety net programs by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years. The administration also wants to tighten work requirements for those getting aid, such as food stamps, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“If you’re on food stamps, and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work. If you’re on disability insurance and you’re not supposed to be — if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work,” he said.

#USA #pauvreté

Meet YouTube’s Hidden Laborers Toiling to Keep Ads Off Hateful Videos
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/04/zerochaos-google-ads-quality-raters

Taken together, the scope of the work and nuance required in assessing videos shows Google still needs human help in dealing with YouTube’s ad problems. “We have many sources of information, but one of our most important sources is people like you,” Google tells raters in a document describing the purpose of their ad-rating work. But while only machine intelligence can grapple with YouTube’s scale, as company execs and representatives have stressed again and again, until Google’s machines—or anyone else’s—get smart enough to distinguish, say, truly offensive speech from other forms of expression on its own, such efforts will still need to rely on people.

“We have always relied on a combination of technology and human reviews to analyze content that has been flagged to us because understanding context in video can be subjective,” says Chi Hea Cho, a spokesperson for Google. “Recently we added more people to accelerate the reviews. These reviews help train our algorithms so they keep improving over time.”

#digital_labor #google #publicité #IA

How the 2% lives
▻http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21702190-temping-increase-affecting-temps-and-staff-workers-alike-how-2

In 1970 8% of temporary workers lived below the poverty line; in 2014 it was 15%.

[...]

The proliferation of ill-paid temp work affects temporary and permanent workers alike. Many of the costs that employers of temps avoid, including prevailing wages and health-care costs, are now borne in part by taxpayers in the form of increased spending on Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare schemes.

#intérim #intérimaires « #flexibilité » #pauvreté

If Olive Garden gives millions of meals to the needy, a waitress asks, why am I on food stamps ? - Quartz
▻http://qz.com/637156/if-olive-garden-gives-millions-of-meals-to-the-needy-a-waitress-asks-why-am-i-on

Ditson herself has had to rely on county assistance for medical care and food, even as she works about 30 hours a week serving the pasta dishes, deep-fried appetizers, and famous breadsticks the restaurant chain dishes out.

donc si on résume : tu bosses dans une chaîne de restaurant, tu n’as pas de quoi te payer à bouffer, tu n’as pas le droit de prendre la bouffe qui reste dans les cuisines, et ton patron se faire de la pub parce qu’il donne des repas gratuits aux « nécessiteux »

#travail #États-Unis #inégalités

In One Month We Will Begin Intentionally Starving Poor People
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/in-one-month-we-will-begin-intentionally-starving-poor-people

At the end of March, 22 states will begin imposing work requirements on people who want food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose their food aid.

The Wall Street Journal...

The cost of military domination - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/08/mili-m08.html

Classique, mais toujours bon à rappeler.

http://www.wsws.org/asset/24992b73-f3e1-4c21-9288-4e976497972P/world-military-expenditures-2014.jpg?rendition=image480

Every passing year in America brings news of cutbacks to essential social programs, from food stamps and home heating assistance to research and infrastructure. The public is told there is no choice because “there is no money” for such programs. What is never questioned in the political establishment is how a country with crumbling bridges and mass poverty can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the military.

#armement #dépenses_militaires #militarisation #armes #états_unis

The numbers are staggering: US is ‘world leader’ in child poverty
▻http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/the-numbers-are-staggering-us-is-world-leader-in-child-poverty

America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.

Financier and CEO Peter Schiff said, “People don’t go hungry in a capitalist economy.” The 16 million kids on food stamps know what it’s like to go hungry. Perhaps, some in Congress would say, those children should be working. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” insisted Georgia Representative Jack Kingston, even for schoolkids, who should be required to “sweep the floor of the cafeteria” (as they actually do at a charter school in Texas).

The callousness of U.S. political and business leaders is disturbing, shocking. Hunger is just one of the problems of our children. Teacher Sonya Romero-Smith told about the two little homeless girls she adopted: “Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food..”

America is a ‘Leader’ in Child Poverty

The U.S. has one of the highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world. As UNICEF reports, “[Children’s] material well-being is highest in the Netherlands and in the four Nordic countries and lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the United States.”

Over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies, and almost half of black children under the age of six are living in poverty.

#Etats-Unis #pauvreté #enfants #enfance #racisme #leadership

Why Big Business Loves Desperate Workers | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
▻http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/07/17/why-big-business-loves-desperate-workers

... business and their elected allies fight efforts to expand food stamps or unemployment insurance or TANF [because a] desperate worker is a cheap and compliant worker.

#exploitation #misère

The War on the Poor and Working Families in less then 3 mins.
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-war-on-the-poor-and-working-families-in-less-then-3-mins

Robert Reich connects the dots to show how a range of positions, on issues ranging from the minimum wage to unemployment insurance to food stamps, work together to keep poor and working families...

Millionaires’ Club: For First Time, Most Lawmakers are Worth $1 Million-Plus
▻http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2014/01/millionaires-club-for-first-time-most-lawmakers-are-worth-1-million-plu

For the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires, according to a new analysis of personal financial disclosure data by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Members of Congress have long been far wealthier than the typical American, but the fact that now a majority of members — albeit just a hair over 50 percent — are millionaires represents a watershed moment at a time when lawmakers are debating issues like unemployment benefits, food stamps and the minimum wage, which affect people with far fewer resources, as well as considering an overhaul of the tax code.

Is the Safety Net Just Masking Tape?
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/opinion/edsall-is-the-safety-net-just-masking-tape.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0&pagewa

It’s easy for liberals to explain away setbacks to programs and policies that they favor — ranging from infrastructure investment to food stamps to increased education budgets — as the result of the intransigence of the Republican Party, with its die-hard commitment to slashing government spending on nearly every front.

But that explanation is too facile.

A mix of economic, social and political forces have weakened the clout of those in the bottom half of the income distribution. The list of forces is long, but its signal features are the decline in manufacturing jobs, the strengthening of the bargaining power of corporations, the gutting of middle income employment and competitive pressures to limit wage growth.

How did the Democrats let these developments gain momentum? It depends on how you see the world. Some progressives argue that the Democratic Party stood by and let it happen passively; others suggest that key segments on the left simply sold out to #Wall_Street.

The same forces that have pushed the country to the right are attempting to define those on the bottom rungs – the infamous 47 percent — as mired in “dependency,” “an army of moochers and slackers.”

In the conservative worldview, social insurance programs undermine initiative and self-reliance and encourage those out of work or struggling to make ends meet to turn to the state for support.

In fact, structural economic obstacles to upward mobility for the bottom half are as important as personal behavioral decisions like dropping out of high school or not getting married when you have children. Such decisions often originate in or are reinforced by a lack of economic opportunity. Behavioral norms and structural economic issues are clearly intertwined, but in my view, structural issues have pride of place.

The economics of survival have forced millions of men, women and children to rely on “pity-charity liberal capitalism.” The state has become the resource of last resort consigning just the people progressives would like to turn into a powerful force for reform to a condition of subjugation — living out their lives on government subsidies like Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and now, Obamacare.

In many respects, the safety net has worked to hold society together, and it has the backing, explicit or implicit, of Democratic elites. This system also has the support of much of corporate America, especially of major low-wage employers like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. These companies are themselves subject to brutal market competition and use government programs that benefit their employees as a means of sustaining inadequate wages and fringe benefits.

The call of Konczal and his colleagues on the progressive left for an empowerment agenda — for structural economic reform — faces roadblocks far higher than many people realize. The loss of a political movement (economic liberalism) and its political vehicle (a stable progressive coalition) has put the left into a position of retreat, struggling to protect besieged programs that are designed explicitly for the poor and which therefore lack strong public backing.

The shift of the Democratic Party from economic to “#pity-charity” #liberalism has put the entire liberal project in danger. It has increased its vulnerability to conservative challenge and left it without a base of politically mobilized supporters. Progressives are now dependent on the fragile possibility that inequality and socioeconomic immobility will push the social order to the breaking point and force the political system to respond.

▻http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2013/12/18/opinion/18edsall-chart3.html?ref=opinion

#politique #politiques

How McDonald’s and Wal-Mart Became Welfare Queens - Bloomberg
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/how-mcdonald-s-and-wal-mart-became-welfare-queens.html

According to one study, American fast food workers receive more than $7 billion dollars in public assistance. As it turns out, McDonald’s has a “McResource” line that helps employees and their families enroll in various state and local assistance programs. It exploded into the public when a recording of the McResource line advocated that full-time employees sign up for food stamps and welfare.

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private sector employer, is also the biggest consumer of taxpayer supported aid. According to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, in many states, Wal-Mart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. Wal-mart’s “associates” are paid so little, according to Grayson, that they receive $1,000 on average in public assistance. These amount to massive taxpayer subsidies for private companies.

#précariat #pauvreté #travail #profitation #subvention #exploitation #capitalisme

Food stamps will get cut by $5 billion this week — and more cuts could follow
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/28/food-stamps-will-get-cut-by-5-billion-this-week-and-more-cuts-could-

Un impact important sur le plan humain mais négligeable sur le plan économie budgétaire, ▻http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/why-npr-is-not-the-new-york-times-really-big-numbers-on-food-stamps

it is just awful reporting on NPR’s part when it tells listeners about a $5 billion cut to food stamps this year or a Republican proposal to cut benefits by $40 billion over the next decade.

This provides no information whatsoever to the overwhelming majority of NPR’s listeners. On the other hand, it would be informative to tell listeners about a cut to food stamps equal to 0.14 percent of the budget this year and the Republican proposal to cut benefits by an amount equal to 0.09 percent of projected spending over the next decade. (Both numbers immediately available through use of CEPR’s extraordinary Responsible Budget Calculator.)

The key point that many NPR listeners likely missed is that these cuts could be a big deal for food stamp beneficiaries, but they are trivial in terms of total federal spending. Many NPR listeners may wrongly been led to believe that the decision on these cuts will have a substantial impact on the budget and the deficit.

On the Edge of Poverty, at the Center of a Debate on Food Stamps - NYTimes.com

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/us/as-debate-reopens-food-stamp-recipients-continue-to-squeeze.html?nl=todaysh

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — As a self-described “true Southern man” — and reluctant recipient of food stamps — Dustin Rigsby, a struggling mechanic, hunts deer, doves and squirrels to help feed his family. He shops for grocery bargains, cooks budget-stretching stews and limits himself to one meal a day.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/09/04/us/20130905_FOODSTAMPS-slide-ORDN/20130905_FOODSTAMPS-slide-ORDN-articleLarge.jpg

#états-unis #pauvreté

Americans on food stamps - The Washington Post
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/food-stamps

The number of people using food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) increased by an average of 13 percent a year from 2008 to 2012. House Republicans dropped funding for food stamps from a new version of the farm bill. Voting takes place Thursday ▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07/11/house-republicans-drop-food-stamps-from-new-farm-bill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/food-stamps/media/keycolors@2x.png http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/food-stamps/media/usmap@2x.png