Elba Figueroa worked as a nurse’s aide until she got Parkinson’s disease. She lost her job. She lost her health care. She receives $703 a month in government assistance. Her rent alone costs $750. And so she borrows money from friends and neighbors every month to stay in her apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up and down steps and along the frigid sidewalks of Trenton, N.J., to get to soup kitchens and food pantries to eat.
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Trenton, a former manufacturing center that has a 20 percent unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a window into our current unraveling. The financial meltdown is plunging the working class and the poor into levels of destitution unseen since the Depression. And as the government squanders taxpayer money in fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses, citizens are callously thrown onto the street without work, a place to live or enough food.
1 comment:
The people who posted on this thread on truth dig, have, unfortunately, skirted the issue(neo-liberals love to do that) of poverty in the uS, and they are gleefully chatting about Greek philosophy-I just "dont understand"...RIGHT...does anyone think that that is what Hedges had in mind? I dont...anything to avoid the truth.
I understand perfectly that most of them are Ivy Leqague (and I am not). I understand that most of them would rather not hear about starvation, homelessnes, etc. That is why they voted for Obama. And he doesnt care, either.
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