The Sudden Decline Of The Middle Class

The Article: The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone.

The Text: Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van’s roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot’s remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn’t always­ have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn’t need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.

Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed – she’d worked for 40 years, through three major recessions. During her first year of unemployment, in 2010, she wrote three or four cover letters a day, five days a week. Now, to keep her mind occupied when she’s not looking for work or doing odd jobs, she volunteers at an animal shelter called the Santa Barbara­ Wildlife Care Network. (“I always ask for the most physically hard jobs just to get out my frustration,” she says.) She has permission to pick fruit directly from the branches of the shelter’s orange and avocado trees. Another benefit is that when she scrambles eggs to hand-feed wounded seabirds, she can surreptitiously make a dish for herself.

By the time Adkins goes to bed – early, because she has to get up soon after sunrise, before parishioners or church employees arrive – the four other people who overnight in the lot have usually settled in: a single mother who lives in a van with her two teenage children and keeps assiduously to herself, and a wrathful, mentally unstable woman in an old Mercedes sedan whom Adkins avoids. By mutual unspoken agreement, the three women park in the same spots every night, keeping a minimum distance from each other. When you live in your car in a parking lot, you value any reliable area of enclosing stillness. “You get very territorial,” Adkins says.

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The Human Cost Of Corruption

The Article: The Human Cost Of Corruption In The US Senate: Cutting Food Stamps While Giving The Sugar Lobby Billions by Zaid Jilani in The Republic Report.

The Text: The everyday corruption of our government by Big Money has real consequences for Americans, many of whom are struggling to feed their families.

Take the farm bill that Congress spent time working on this week. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced an amendment to restore $4.5 billion in funding for the food stamp program, which assists some of the poorest Americans, by cutting “guaranteed profit for crop insurance companies from 14 to 12 percent and by lowering payments for crop insurers from $1.3 billion to $825 million.”

Her amendment, which would help poor Americans at the expense of corp insurers, was defeated along a 33-66 vote. The cuts to the food stamp will be going ahead in the name of deficit reduction.

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That’s My Mitt!

The Article: Mitt Romney Visits Subsidized Farms, Knocks Big Government Spending by Wayne Barrett in The Daily Beast.

The Text: The black-and-white cows lumbering behind Mitt Romney during his sit-down with Bob Schieffer last Sunday on Face the Nation actually feed off the same big government the presidential candidate spent much of the interview deriding. When Romney told Schieffer that “the only solution to taming an out-of-control spending government is to cut spending,” the bovines in the background could be forgiven for worrying.

Jeff and Karen Zuck, who own the 160-acre, 117-head dairy farm that was Romney’s chosen backdrop for the rare non-Fox interview, have collected $195,631 in federal subsidies since 1995. The $44,549 in grants they got in 2009, Barack Obama’s first year in office, was almost twice their previous high in 2002, and was a consequence of the heightened subsidies the Obama administration rushed to deliver as milk prices plummeted in the recession. Only 20 farms in subsidy-rich Lebanon County, Penn., received more federal aid than the Zucks in 2009, and only 30 exceeded the Zuck subsidy over the prior decade and a half. But the farm didn’t even appear on the top 50 list in George W. Bush’s final year in office, when they received a measly $1,177 in subsidies, less than three percent of what Obama gave them the next year.

Regardless, Karen Zuck told The Daily Beast that she and her husband back Romney. “I haven’t liked Obama since before he was president,” said Zuck, who had a hard time pinpointing exactly what she likes about Romney, other than her belief that he’s “going to do more” about “keeping regulations down.” Acknowledging that 2009 and 2010 were their “darkest years,” Zuck admitted that “maybe we did get something from it,” a reference to the Dairy Economic Loss Assistance Program (DELAP) that Obama jump-started in 2009 ($10,243 for the Zucks), and the Milk Income Loss Contract Payment Program that Obama infused with new funding ($34,944 for the Zucks). “We get enough,” said Zuck. “But we’d rather not,” she added, insisting that she’d prefer to let milk prices rise on their own.

Despite their cows’ starring role on the CBS set, the Zucks were never invited to join the Saturday afternoon taping. In fact, Romney never actually set foot on the farm, even though it was billed as a farm visit. Instead he sat in the front yard of Dave and Ceal Bamberger, who own a car-repair and heating-oil delivery company, and whose house is across the way from the Zuck farm. The Bambergers’ son-in-law, Mark Thomas, is the Cornwall Borough Mayor, and Romney’s staff reached out to him for tips on a good secluded location. He picked his in-laws’ house.

“It seemed like a closed set,” Karen Zuck said. “We watched the bus back in and the Secret Service was there on the Bamberger yard.” Since they were at church the next morning when the interview aired, the Zucks never saw their cows’ star turn.

The awkward staging was reminiscent of Romney’s April appearance at an empty Ohio factory that, it turned out, had closed seven months before Obama took office. Or his February rally at Detroit’s 65,000-seat Ford Field, before an audience of about 1000 people.

“We get enough,” said Zuck. “But we’d rather not,” she added, insisting that she’d prefer to let milk prices rise on their own.

Lebanon may seem like a funny place for Romney to take his swipe at big government: out of Pennsylvania’s 64 counties, it’s the fifth largest recipient of federal farm subsidies, and the Zuck farm is right across the border from the No.-1 recipient, Lancaster County (Romney’s already visited there too). Romney’s six-state tour—carrying the message he announced at the outset that “Washington’s big government agenda should not smother small-town dreams”—is actually a reminder of how much small towns, too, depend on big government aid.

Maybe Romney was happy he missed meeting the Zucks and their cows. He recently endorsed the Paul Ryan budget, which cuts $30 billion in farm subsidies over the years.

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Introducing The Robin Hood Tax

The Article: Mark Ruffalo and Tom Morello launch Robin Hood tax plan to outlaw Wall Street excess by Adam Gabbett in The Guardian.

The Text: Actor Mark Ruffalo and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello have launched a new US campaign for a “Robin Hood tax”, a small levy on Wall Street transactions that organisers say could generate hundred of billions of dollars a year.

The campaign, backed by National Nurses United, the largest nursing union in the US, has already launched in 14 countries, including the UK, France and Germany.

Organisers of the campaign, which also features Coldplay singer Chris Martin, are calling for a tax of “less than half of 1%” on Wall Street transactions, which they say would not affect most Americans’ financial activity.

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Russia’s Fading Tsar

The Article: Russia’s Fading Tsar by Dakota Smith in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: For the last seven months, Russia has been a nation on the edge. Thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg in the country’s largest display of political agitation since the early 1990s. The spark was the legislative election of December 2011 where allegations of widespread voter fraud by Putin’s political party, United Russia, sent a diverse array of groups into the streets.

Putin is more than just the Russian president; he considers himself the personal embodiment of the Russian state and has therefore taken the protests very personally. He has mocked the protesters, comparing their white ribbons to condoms, and has derided them as “agents of the West” who seek to destroy Russia. And via Twitter, state media has even accused U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul of being the hidden force behind the protest movements.

The cracks in Putin’s aura of invincibility first started to appear in 2008 when Putin was serving as Prime Minister. Only a few months removed from his second term as President of the Russian Federation, Putin was a man as big as Russia itself. He had single-handedly saved the country from the chaos of the 1990s and was everything that his predecessor Boris Yeltsin had not been. Most of Russia was grateful.

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