In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, ninety-year-old volunteer worker Arnold Abbott was arrested this week for preparing and serving a meal to a group of homeless people. He faces a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail, local news outlet KHON reports.
It's come to my attention that many of our readers believe that if you give anything more than a modest sum of money to a poor person, that person will just go out and waste the money on impulse purchases. Allow me to point out that this is false.
The great service of Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo's film Rich Hill is that it makes accessible stories that are so often willfully ignored. The documentary winner of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize profiles three boys: Andrew, 13, Harley, 15, and Appachey, 12, who live in Rich Hill, Missouri, a town of…
Detroit, a crumbling metropolitan area with America's highest concentration of ruin porn and indignant local journalists, can add another notch to its Bedpost of Horrors: its infant mortality rate is disgraceful.
A man in America's poorest county, Wolfe County, Kentucky, says he "will vote for anybody against Obama... I don't care if it's a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani, even a Frenchman!" Also, Obama isn't running again, and Wolfe County is 98 percent white.
As memories of the harsh recession years are washed away by a wave of stories about the soaring stock market and hot tech IPOs, it is worth noting that the death of America's mythical "middle class" continues apace.
"One-quarter of [American] Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average...Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan."
Good news for America's growing ranks of poor people already plagued by heart disease and diabetes: Twinkies, the industrial spooge-tube cakes that will never become stale, will now be sold by discount retailer Big Lots at up to 40% less than grocery store prices.
"America has always been a nation where hard work and creativity pay off, where upward mobility was the aspired goal," Michele Bachmann blogged Wednesday, appealing "to lift more people out of poverty." Fuck that noise. You know where it's at? The servant-owning leisure class of English lords and ladies, bitches!
The 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" has prompted a bout of national soul-searching about how much progress we've really made. If we're actually interested in helping the poor, we should look even farther back in history, and resurrect the WPA.
Approximately 1.3 million unemployed Americans lost their jobless benefits Saturday as the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program expired. "I don't know what we're going to do," said unemployed case manager Richard Mattos, 59, of Salem, Ore. "We could end up homeless because of this."
How many months does the average full-time McDonald's, Starbucks, Gap, Target or Best Buy worker need to work in order to match what the CEO makes in an hour? Place your bets, then hit the link for knowledge. Depressing, awful knowledge.
A new study that traces the effect of government programs on poverty all the way back to 1967 finds unequivocally that the money the government spends to help the poor does, in fact, reduce poverty. Suck it, Republicans.
Good lord, one of the Treacherous Three is in the New York Times' "Neediest Cases" section today. Give all of your money to the Neediest Cases fund, Puffy.
By now, you have probably heard of Linda Walther Tirado, aka "Killer Martinis," the Gawker commenter gone viral for her first-person "poverty thoughts." You may have also heard people say she's a privileged full-of-crap grifter. The truth is weirder and far more complex.
Poor people, generally, make bad decisions—bad in the sense of their long-term physical, mental and financial welfare. But their bad decisions aren't the reason for their poverty. They're caused by it.
McDonald's has dispensed a whole mess of poor advice to its underpaid employees in recent months — get a second job, sign up for food stamps — but this latest Holiday haul may be its Grinchiest yet.
A photo showing a Walmart food drive asking employees to donate canned goods to help fellow employees who can't afford a Thanksgiving dinner is once again drawing attention to the company's staggeringly low wages.
