An unexpected deluge in homelessness could occur in America, far exceeding any resources available to meet the demand.  In addition to the traditional causes of homelessness, several new factors may combine to create a "perfect storm" of homelessness in 2008:

• Home foreclosures from the subprime mortgage financial crisis - which hasn't peaked yet ─ forclosure victims, who once could have afforded to pay rent, now cannot pass a credit check,
• The ensuing credit crunch, reducing availability of new loans even to the creditworthy,
• Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, some with broken families, mental health problems, and physical disabilities,
• Skyrocketing energy and health-care bills,
• Stagnant wages for the low and middle classes, ensnaring greater numbers of working poor.

Homelessness in America will likely increase as a result of these new factors combining with the traditional causes of homelessness.

James Carville coined "it’s the economy stupid". George H Bush learned that lesson the hard way when he was defeated by Clinton largely because the country was in a recession. 2008 is setting up for a repeat of 1992 but on a much larger scale. I predict 2008 will be remembered for its catastrophic economic events, political surprises, and rise of social unrest. The coming economic catastrophe will ignite social unrest that has not been seen in some time which will cause great change in American politics not seen since the great depression. It was about a week ago a AP headline read "Police, protesters clash in New Orleans". I make these statements based on socionomics use of Elliot Wave Principles which asserts markets are social mood thermometer.  

Someone slipped a little known provision into the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that forbids pharmaceutical companies from selling prescription contraceptives to college and community clinics at steep discounts, causing prices to double or triple for people at the lower income ends.

"What happened here is what happened everywhere: The price went up," said Jeanne Galatzer-Levy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "We are a state institution, so we’re not in a position to do something different."

At the University of Montana, the price of a NuvaRing, another birth control method, rose to $36 from $18, said Allyson Hagen, the state director of Naral Pro-Choice America. "This is a state school where people are on Pell grants and don’t have huge amounts of spending money," Ms. Hagen said. "For them this is like a choice — groceries or birth control."

Here is the best argument I've seen why S-CHIP should be expanded:

Living paycheck to paycheck gets harder

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Definition of Working Poor:

In the United States, according to the government Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 6.4 million working poor in 2000 [1]; by 2003 the number had grown to 7.4 million [2]. In 2004, Business Week suggested that [3] a more accurate figure would be 28 million, counting those at least eighteen, employed, and making less than $9.04 an hour, a full-time salary of $18,800 per year and the federal poverty line for a family of four.

Ref Wikipedia

But I make $65,000 a Year, why don't ends meet?

See the budget

Please recommend to raise visibility. Thanks! - Jeremy

To raise attention about hunger across America, I'm participating in the Minnesota Food Stamp Challenge. The project's partners have a great website that's worth checking out: http://mnfoodstampchallenge.blogspot...

My experience was part of a story on thelocal news and was included in the local Minnesota Public Radio Mid Morning-Show yesterday (around 25-28 mins into the program). MnPublius.com also posted about a few of us taking the challenge.

You can read my first 3 days here:
$3/day - Foodstamp Challenge Day 1, and
$3/day - Foodstamp Challenge Days 2&3

Day 4 and through lunch today, Day 5, are below.

Poor people suck.  When their heat gets cut off in the middle of winter, they get cold.    I mean, what's up with that?  Toughen up, mates.  Cold builds character.  Just ask the Donner Party. Then, they do stupid stuff like use their stoves to heat their apartments to keep warm.  Or, they illegally hook up an electric space heater.  Yeah, it's stupid. I mean, put on another sweater, goddamit.  Make the kids run laps around the kitchen to raise their body temperature - that'll get 'em warm.   Another thing that pisses me off about poor people and winter - when their place catches fire in the middle of the night, they usually don't have smoke detectors that work.  I mean, what the fuck?  And I'm supposed to feel sorry for them when the whole family goes up in smoke?

(The preceding was an imaginary water cooler conversation at a leading conservative think tank. "Personal responsibility" is what conservatives are all about.)  

In reading Jimmy Higgins' earlier post at Fire on the Mountain on anti-immigrant sentiment and the danger of nativism--and the interesting responses there and to the repost here--something struck me sharply. Living for my whole life in New York City, it’s hard for me to analyze or even relate to the fear and loathing of immigrants that grips some parts of the U.S. What we in NYC fear is somewhat different, and was clarified for me by a conversation with a cousin at a recent family gathering.

My cousin, whom I’ll call Tony, has a semi-skilled job with a telecommunications company and recently moved with his wife and kids from Staten Island to a New Jersey suburb. Tony’s widowed mother, now about 70, had made her global proletarian passage from a small town near Naples to the industrial Red Belt of Bologna to a textile factory in Scotland to a laundry in Staten Island—where she met and married my late uncle, and still lives.

So, I was sitting in front of the TV last night, having dinner with my family (the dining room table is COVERED with production debris from our most recent show), slightly sleep deprived and malnourished from HELL WEEK, and trying to recover.  There, in place of my favorite Monday night show, was the Golden Globe Awards show.  Watching all those highly paid actors and film folk, eating their high-priced meals in their designer clothes was a bit like stepping into an alternate universe.  You see, I've been working for many weeks with actors who make only a tiny portion of what they're worth -- no designer clothes for these folks!  But we are all working to spread a message we believe in.  Have I piqued your interest?  Follow me...

Both my mother and father grew up in abject poverty in the rural South.  My father’s family were tenant farmers.  They didn’t even own the land they lived and worked on.  Theirs was a hardscrabble existence.  They plowed vast tracts of Mississippi Delta bottom land by mule, sowed the crops, chopped out the weeds, and harvested the results all by hand.  Their fortunes rose or fell with the weather and the vagaries of circumstance.

(more below the fold...)

by Jason Miller

"Are we not the whores of big business, selling our product for their commercial lust?"

---Arthur Erickson

When George Bush spoke at a maritime training center in Piney Point, MD on Labor Day, 2006, ostensibly he was a respected leader paying tribute to the hard-working men and women forming the backbone of the nation's economy.

Exhausted, lined faces--tired people going somewhere they would rather not be. Stunned or somnolent, most of them, wearing the paltry fashion found at Dee Dee's or hand-me-downs of the Salvation Army: these are the professionals, on their way to work.

They are here in the company of the natives of this underground realm, the homeless. These are easily identified, for each of them has an entire group of seats to himself--sometimes an entire section of the car, depending on their aroma. They are well marked with erythematous skin, whose mottled scabs are the signature of the homeless body. Most are bloated on poor food and cheap booze.

Read more about the program below the fold (Hey, I read the rules, I'm just not very good at following directions ;)

The Pension Piñata
Published: August 13, 2006
There are a lot of goodies in the pension reform bill that Congress recently sent to the White House for President Bush's signature. But it is important not to confuse something-for-everyone with balance. The bill is an almost perfect example of Congress's inability to do anything good without tacking on some bad accommodation for special interests.