The Growing Sink Hole of Poverty and Injustice.

[IChing]

Business and entrepreneurship have its place in all nations but when the rights of the corporations outweigh the needs of the people then an adjustment needs to be done. World wide corporations whose wealth is greater than many nations wield power in relationship to the number of shareholders far greater power than their benefit to mankind.

The questions of a sustainable economy goes hand in hand with a sustainable environment which needs democracy as it's guardian.
The corporations can never be the guardian of the people. Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.

Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ''uneconomic'' you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.


Since 2000, Americans have been getting poorer, and national rates of severe poverty have climbed sharply, according to a study published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The researchers reported that the growth in the poverty rate is due largely to a rise in severe poverty and that "moderate" poverty has grown little.

The percentage of Americans living in severe poverty--earning less than half of the poverty threshold--grew by 20% between 2000 and 2004, and the proportion in higher income tiers fell. The researchers reported that the number of Americans living in severe poverty increased by 3.6 million between 2000 and 2004.

"These trends have disturbing implications for society and public health," said Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, Professor of Family Medicine, Epidemiology and Community Health, Virginia Commonwealth University, and lead author of the study. The researchers found that the only category of Americans to increase in size were those whose earnings were at least $8,000 below the poverty threshold, who grew by approximately 50% between 2000 and 2004. All other income tiers decreased during these years. The poverty threshold in 2004 for a family of four was $19,307.

The broad societal implications of the increase in poverty. Likely health consequences include a higher prevalence of chronic illnesses, more frequent and severe disease complications, and increased demands and costs for healthcare services. Adverse effects on children carry long-term implications.

"This is not just a problem for the poor," Woolf added. "Except for a small class of highly affluent Americans, income for the entire U.S. population has fallen since 2000." The researchers describe a "sinkhole effect," in which "families and individuals in the middle and upper classes appear to be migrating to lower income tiers that bring them closer to the poverty threshold." U.S. household income, adjusted for inflation, fell by 3.6% between 2000 and 2004. Woolf says that the sinkhole effect and the upsurge in poverty could deeply affect society and calls for the reexamination of policies enacted in recent years to foster economic progress.

Source:"The Rising Prevalence of Severe Poverty in America: A Growing Threat to Public Health" by Steven H. Woolf, MD, MPH, Robert E. Johnson, PhD, and H. Jack Geiger, MD, M Sci Hyg. The article appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 4 (October 2006) published by Elsevier.

The sinkhole will soon affect more and more Americans even those that think they are not affected by the plight of the lower classes leaving only the thin outer rim
of the uber rich.

[FlavaKreemSnak]

1. Yes lots more of us are going to start having a low income lifestyle

I mean like LOTS of us, and lots of big cities will have to be put under clampdown, which will be very expensive. But even though it will mean some big changes in our lives, I don't think that most people will really need the clampdown because they will say these are sacrifices we can make as Americans to help win the war on terror, and nobody wants to be thought of as somebody who is against the war on terror so the main people who will need the clampdown are the ones who were already in the low income group, which is a really big per cent already if you consider that we are the richest country in the world.