Re: FEMA camps AND Debunkers//Verified and PROVEN beyond BELIEF!

Washington's Austerity Plan Threatens the 50 Million Americans Already
in Poverty - Our nurses see dire need every day in the ER, but the
growing gulf of inequality in the US has made such deprivation
ubiquitous

With a compromise on social security now unmasked � costing the
elderly an estimated 6.2-7.7%, according to business writer Doug
Henwood � America becomes more and more a place of poverty. Warnings
that austerity begets poverty will go ignored, but the nation's
deteriorating condition cannot so easily be overlooked.  No surprise,
in this milieu of victimizing the most marginal, that one anniversary
has received far too little attention. This year, 2012, marked the
50th anniversary of a ground breaking book, The Other America, by
Michael Harrington, a searing examination of rampant poverty in the
richest nation on earth. A prominent review of Harrington's work in
the New Yorker magazine, reportedly brought to the attention of then
President John F Kennedy, ultimately helped influence the Great
Society reforms later launched by his successor Lyndon B Johnson.

But half a century later, we seem to be back to square one in this
country. For the past two years, the nation's largest nurses'
organization, National Nurses United, has promoted a program to spur
revitalization of our economy to assist families in financial peril.
Our campaign was largely spurred by an alarming spike in patients
presenting in hospital emergency rooms and clinics across the country
who are forced to choose between paying medical bills, their rent or
mortgage or feeding their families.

The crisis nurses saw was not an aberration. By 2011, with the recent
recession showing scant signs of abating, official US poverty figures
had soared to nearly 50 million Americans. Some in the political arena
tend to pigeonhole poverty by race, but this calamity crosses all
lines of gender, geography, age, and ethnicity.
Last year, almost one in four children lived in a family that
regularly had difficulty affording sufficient food, according to the
US department of agriculture. On the other end of life, 8.3 million
people over 60 in 2010 faced the threat of hunger, up 78% from a
decade earlier � yet another reason to oppose the proposed fiscal
cliff cuts in social security or Medicare. Hunger and malnutrition, as
nurses will attest, lead to a broad array of health problems, ranging
from reduced immunity to disease or even organ failure. For children,
poor nutrition can severely stunt cognitive development and growth.
For adults and seniors, the consequences can include more chronic
illnesses and shorter life spans.

Over 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty � with cash incomes
as low as $10,000 a year for a family of four. Is it any wonder that
the US has the third highest poverty rate out of 30 leading industrial
nations? The problem is exacerbated by decades of economic and
political policies that have resulted in a massive shift of national
wealth from working people to the corporate boardrooms and the yacht
owners. One result: real wage growth for workers has stagnated for 30
years; median household income has steadily fallen since the Wall
Street produced economic crash of 2008. Much of the limited job growth
since then has been in the lowest wage sectors, primarily food service
and retail.

Sadly, the issue remained almost as invisible on the 2012 campaign
trail as it was when Harrington shocked the nation in 1962. But it is
not a surprise to nurses who, every day, see the faces of poverty and
the suffering of families left behind � even as corporate profits once
again soar and the parties and good times are back on Wall Street.
With all the enormous wealth in our nation, we really can do something
about poverty � as well as the overall economic morass that continues
to plague not just the unemployed, or those working two or three jobs,
and flipping hamburgers in Main Street towns and cities from coast to
coast.

Nurses have a solution. Everyone deserves a good job at living wages,
guaranteed healthcare for all based on patient need, not on ability to
pay, and equal access to quality education. And now, with cuts to
social security on the table, and despite the push by some politicians
in Washington and many state capitals to enact more austerity programs
on already hard-hit communities, there is a simple way to keep anti-
poverty programs in place and pay for them.

A modest tax Wall Street on speculation, embodied in HR 6411, authored
by Representative Keith Ellison, could generate up to $350bn every
year, an amount that could save over 1.7m homes from foreclosure, or
finance 9m new jobs at current average wage levels. Or it could fund
the food plans of 24m families of four for a year, or lift all 3.8m
female-headed households out of poverty for nearly a decade.
Increasingly, the "Other America" is becoming all of us. It is up to
all of us to end this disgrace.

COMMENTS: The problem lies not just with the 1%, but with the top 20%
who do not care about the poor. I know a lot of these people and they
"care" about social issues in an abstract way and all buy into the
lesser of two evils position. Few of them do any actual work to help
the poor. These people occupy our state assemblies, district
attorney's offices, city councils, and mayor's offices. They do the
work of the very rich at the local level. These people also occupy the
management positions everywhere - including academia, the non-profits,
and the liberal and progressive organizations. They are the "winners."
They are "realistic" and are simply "playing the game." They are all
doing the work of the very rich - regardless of what they profess as
their "beliefs" or "philosophies" - by preserving, promoting and
defending the system that creates and supports the very rich.

The attacks on SSI, Medicare and all the rest of what is perceived as
the so called Social Safety net have nothing to do with the deficit,
never has. That's not the pt. by focusing on them the focus is taken
away from those elements of the system that are causing the deficits,
like the bloated Defense and Intell. sectors of the Gov't and the
endless Corp. subsidies and tax breaks that have gutted the Gov'ts tax
base. What the 1% want is for the rest of us to fund their game and
they wants left of the Safety net to be part of this funding. That's
not all they want either. They also want an end to the Progressive tax
system. They want it replaced with a much more regressive flat tax,
like ironically Russia now has.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/12/21-2