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Buckwheat Failure - Do-Nothing DemocRATs Force Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
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Patriot Games (http://www.democrathallofshame.com/)
Dec 24, 2011, 9:33:08 AM12/24/11
to
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE7BM1CY20111223
Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
Fri, Dec 23 2011
MIAMI (Reuters) - As her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown
Miami, talking about her economic struggles and loss of faith in the
U.S. political system, 3-year-old Aeisha Touray blurted out what
sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
"How dare you!" the girl said abruptly as she nudged a toy car across
a conference room table at the Chapman Partnership shelter in Miami's
tough and predominantly black Overtown neighborhood.
There was no telling what Aeisha was thinking as her 32-year-old
mother, Nairkahe Touray, spoke of how she burned through her savings
and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier
this year.
But how dare you indeed? How does anyone explain to kids like Aeisha
and countless others how they wound up homeless in the world's richest
nation?
In a report issued earlier this month, the National Center on Family
Homelessness, based in Needham, Massachusetts, said 1.6 million
children were living on the streets of the United States last year or
in shelters, motels and doubled-up with other families.
That marked a 38 percent jump in child homelessness since 2007 and
Ellen Bassuk, the center's president, attributes the increase to
fallout from the U.S. recession and a surge in the number of extremely
poor households headed by women.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau provided a sobering backdrop.
Based on new or experimental methodology aimed at providing a fuller
picture of poverty, the data showed that about 48 percent of Americans
are living in poverty or on low incomes.
Under the bureau's so-called Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2010,
issued last month, the poverty level for a family of four was set at
income anywhere below $24,343 per year.
"I see it every day," said Alfredo Brown, 73, a retired army officer
and deputy director of the non-profit Chapman Partnership, when asked
about child homelessness.
The organization, funded largely by a 1 percent food and beverage tax
on larger restaurants to bankroll homeless programs, operates two
sprawling homeless shelters in Miami-Dade County.
"I see so many children and mothers that are homeless and sleeping in
their car or an abandoned building, an old bus. It's a sad situation
that we live in a country that has so much and many people have so
little," Brown said.
Child homelessness is a relatively new social problem in the United
States, where being on the street and the stigma attached to it has
long been associated with adults with alcohol or drug dependency
issues.
IMPOVERISHED MOTHERS
Families accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. homeless
population in the mid-1980s, according to Bassuk, but they now
comprise about a third of the homeless population. A lot of children
are dependent on poverty-stricken single moms.
"There's sort of a Third World emerging right in our backyard. You
know, we talk about developing countries but look at what's going on
here," Bassuk said.
To put a face to the breadth and depth of the homeless problem, a team
of Reuters journalists fanned out across the country in the past week,
for interviews with parents and children who are down on their luck.
From Skid Row in Los Angeles to the South Bronx in New York, a common
thread of economic devastation from the recession ran throughout many
of the stories these people told.
But there also was a common thread of hope running through their
compressed life stories.
Little Aeisha in Miami got visibly upset as her mother spoke tearfully
about the wear and tear on her children amid her struggles with a bad
economy, severe depression, diabetes and chronic foot problems
stemming from torn ligaments.
Touray sounded like an Occupy Wall Street protester herself, as she
complained about bailout money for banks but not people. "You get
treated like an animal because you're homeless," said Touray, who said
she lives on just $583 a month in child support after going through a
divorce last year. Her parents, who live separately in Atlanta and
Chicago, are also homeless.
"Just because I'm homeless it doesn't mean that I was like nothing
yesterday," said Touray, who said four small businesses she owned in
Atlanta only went bust due to the recession.
She also complained about the tone-deafness of many politicians,
saying they were doing nothing to ease the unemployment and inequality
that have come to dominate the national conversation.
"I'm living the real deal," Touray said. "I don't need for somebody to
come up here and tell me what the economy's doing. They (the
politicians) need to get out here and see these children, see these
parents."
RIDING THE RAILS
Across the country in Los Angeles, Reuters came across Luis Martinez,
34. A single parent, he lives with his three children at the Union
Rescue Mission on a trash-strewn city block where homeless men and
women stand vigil over plastic shopping carts.
But the shelter is an improvement over the time when Martinez passed
nights on the L.A. subway with his children, riding the rails to
nowhere.
A junior high school dropout who became unemployed after he injured
his back on construction site job about six years ago, Martinez spoke
proudly about how well he said his kids were doing in school.
They have a laptop computer, which they use to help do homework
through free wireless connections at McDonalds and Starbucks. They
also have an Xbox video game system and Martinez, who wears a necklace
that says "My Kids First," has a cell phone to stay in touch with
family and potential employers.
"I mean, I'm homeless but not hopeless," Martinez said.
"(It) gets easier as you go," said Jesse, Martinez's 8-year-old son.
Highlighting the shrinking middle class in America, a reporter found
Tracy and Elizabeth Burger and their 8-year-old son, Dylan. The
Burgers said they once earned nearly $100,000 a year combined but saw
their middle-class lifestyle evaporate when Tracy lost his job in
audiovisual system sales.
Unable to pay rent, they were evicted from their apartment in early
2009 and had to move into a motel. In March they moved into a cramped
converted garage at Elizabeth's mother's house in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth, a former medical assistant, said she has less than six
weeks left on her unemployment insurance and was anxiously watching
this week's standoff in Congress over extending those payments, along
with the payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.
The congressional debate highlighted the partisan bickering that has
made this a tumultuous year in U.S. politics, while throwing
Washington's ability to make sound economic policy into doubt.
In central Florida, Justin Santiago, 15, said he was not surprised
when he, his parents and three younger siblings landed in a downtown
Orlando shelter last September.
Since the national economic collapse in 2008, his out-of-work family
bounced from one relative's home to another, and left California in
search of employment and stability.
"I wasn't shocked. When the economy's going down and it just drops,
it's out of control," Justin said.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
In 16 years of marriage, his parents, Theresa and Timothy Santiago,
managed to provide for their family by working multiple jobs, earning
about $20,000 in their best year. But work dried up and the family set
out for Florida last spring in search of cheaper living expenses.
After a run of more bad luck, they found their way to the Coalition
for the Homeless of Central Florida shelter. But Justin is taking
eighth grade honors classes now and says his family's recent
experience will not keep him from pursuing his dream career in video
game production and becoming an Internet success story.
"It will get better for me and my family," he said. "I'll be making
billions, I know that."
Antonio Dixon, 26, knows all about things getting better. His mother,
Corenthia, said he bounced between at least a dozen homeless shelters
growing up in Miami and Atlanta.
He eventually won a football scholarship at the University of Miami
and fought dyslexia to become the first person in his family to
graduate college.
"They had me study hard every hour," Dixon told Reuters.
He has since gone on to play defensive tackle for the NFL's
Philadelphia Eagles, making good on his boyhood dream.
Dixon has been sidelined by a torn tricep since early October. But he
seems confident about overcoming adversity yet again and plans on
being in the starting lineup next season.
His advice to homeless kids is to stay in school and get focused on
whatever it is they really want to do in life.
"Just keep on doing something you like and don't give up," Dixon said.
I had to work myself up from the bottom to the top. I did that. Don't
let nobody stand in your way. You just got to go and get it. You can't
be afraid to take a chance on life."
Bassuk, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, said
medical problems and under-achievement in school were among the things
that often go hand in hand with childhood homelessness.
"These are kids who don't have any opportunities," she said. "If you
look at some of the educational variables, they're doing really
poorly. And they're kids who can do OK. They just don't have
appropriate support.
"It just seems that on every front this is a very vulnerable group of
kids," she said.
--
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Siobhan Medeiros, Snakehawk, Spike Lee, Stile4aly, Tab182, Tater Gumfries,
Tim Crowley, Tim Howard, Tom Sr, Tom Wheat
Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
Fri, Dec 23 2011
MIAMI (Reuters) - As her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown
Miami, talking about her economic struggles and loss of faith in the
U.S. political system, 3-year-old Aeisha Touray blurted out what
sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
"How dare you!" the girl said abruptly as she nudged a toy car across
a conference room table at the Chapman Partnership shelter in Miami's
tough and predominantly black Overtown neighborhood.
There was no telling what Aeisha was thinking as her 32-year-old
mother, Nairkahe Touray, spoke of how she burned through her savings
and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier
this year.
But how dare you indeed? How does anyone explain to kids like Aeisha
and countless others how they wound up homeless in the world's richest
nation?
In a report issued earlier this month, the National Center on Family
Homelessness, based in Needham, Massachusetts, said 1.6 million
children were living on the streets of the United States last year or
in shelters, motels and doubled-up with other families.
That marked a 38 percent jump in child homelessness since 2007 and
Ellen Bassuk, the center's president, attributes the increase to
fallout from the U.S. recession and a surge in the number of extremely
poor households headed by women.
Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau provided a sobering backdrop.
Based on new or experimental methodology aimed at providing a fuller
picture of poverty, the data showed that about 48 percent of Americans
are living in poverty or on low incomes.
Under the bureau's so-called Supplemental Poverty Measure for 2010,
issued last month, the poverty level for a family of four was set at
income anywhere below $24,343 per year.
"I see it every day," said Alfredo Brown, 73, a retired army officer
and deputy director of the non-profit Chapman Partnership, when asked
about child homelessness.
The organization, funded largely by a 1 percent food and beverage tax
on larger restaurants to bankroll homeless programs, operates two
sprawling homeless shelters in Miami-Dade County.
"I see so many children and mothers that are homeless and sleeping in
their car or an abandoned building, an old bus. It's a sad situation
that we live in a country that has so much and many people have so
little," Brown said.
Child homelessness is a relatively new social problem in the United
States, where being on the street and the stigma attached to it has
long been associated with adults with alcohol or drug dependency
issues.
IMPOVERISHED MOTHERS
Families accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. homeless
population in the mid-1980s, according to Bassuk, but they now
comprise about a third of the homeless population. A lot of children
are dependent on poverty-stricken single moms.
"There's sort of a Third World emerging right in our backyard. You
know, we talk about developing countries but look at what's going on
here," Bassuk said.
To put a face to the breadth and depth of the homeless problem, a team
of Reuters journalists fanned out across the country in the past week,
for interviews with parents and children who are down on their luck.
From Skid Row in Los Angeles to the South Bronx in New York, a common
thread of economic devastation from the recession ran throughout many
of the stories these people told.
But there also was a common thread of hope running through their
compressed life stories.
Little Aeisha in Miami got visibly upset as her mother spoke tearfully
about the wear and tear on her children amid her struggles with a bad
economy, severe depression, diabetes and chronic foot problems
stemming from torn ligaments.
Touray sounded like an Occupy Wall Street protester herself, as she
complained about bailout money for banks but not people. "You get
treated like an animal because you're homeless," said Touray, who said
she lives on just $583 a month in child support after going through a
divorce last year. Her parents, who live separately in Atlanta and
Chicago, are also homeless.
"Just because I'm homeless it doesn't mean that I was like nothing
yesterday," said Touray, who said four small businesses she owned in
Atlanta only went bust due to the recession.
She also complained about the tone-deafness of many politicians,
saying they were doing nothing to ease the unemployment and inequality
that have come to dominate the national conversation.
"I'm living the real deal," Touray said. "I don't need for somebody to
come up here and tell me what the economy's doing. They (the
politicians) need to get out here and see these children, see these
parents."
RIDING THE RAILS
Across the country in Los Angeles, Reuters came across Luis Martinez,
34. A single parent, he lives with his three children at the Union
Rescue Mission on a trash-strewn city block where homeless men and
women stand vigil over plastic shopping carts.
But the shelter is an improvement over the time when Martinez passed
nights on the L.A. subway with his children, riding the rails to
nowhere.
A junior high school dropout who became unemployed after he injured
his back on construction site job about six years ago, Martinez spoke
proudly about how well he said his kids were doing in school.
They have a laptop computer, which they use to help do homework
through free wireless connections at McDonalds and Starbucks. They
also have an Xbox video game system and Martinez, who wears a necklace
that says "My Kids First," has a cell phone to stay in touch with
family and potential employers.
"I mean, I'm homeless but not hopeless," Martinez said.
"(It) gets easier as you go," said Jesse, Martinez's 8-year-old son.
Highlighting the shrinking middle class in America, a reporter found
Tracy and Elizabeth Burger and their 8-year-old son, Dylan. The
Burgers said they once earned nearly $100,000 a year combined but saw
their middle-class lifestyle evaporate when Tracy lost his job in
audiovisual system sales.
Unable to pay rent, they were evicted from their apartment in early
2009 and had to move into a motel. In March they moved into a cramped
converted garage at Elizabeth's mother's house in Los Angeles.
Elizabeth, a former medical assistant, said she has less than six
weeks left on her unemployment insurance and was anxiously watching
this week's standoff in Congress over extending those payments, along
with the payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.
The congressional debate highlighted the partisan bickering that has
made this a tumultuous year in U.S. politics, while throwing
Washington's ability to make sound economic policy into doubt.
In central Florida, Justin Santiago, 15, said he was not surprised
when he, his parents and three younger siblings landed in a downtown
Orlando shelter last September.
Since the national economic collapse in 2008, his out-of-work family
bounced from one relative's home to another, and left California in
search of employment and stability.
"I wasn't shocked. When the economy's going down and it just drops,
it's out of control," Justin said.
EYES ON THE PRIZE
In 16 years of marriage, his parents, Theresa and Timothy Santiago,
managed to provide for their family by working multiple jobs, earning
about $20,000 in their best year. But work dried up and the family set
out for Florida last spring in search of cheaper living expenses.
After a run of more bad luck, they found their way to the Coalition
for the Homeless of Central Florida shelter. But Justin is taking
eighth grade honors classes now and says his family's recent
experience will not keep him from pursuing his dream career in video
game production and becoming an Internet success story.
"It will get better for me and my family," he said. "I'll be making
billions, I know that."
Antonio Dixon, 26, knows all about things getting better. His mother,
Corenthia, said he bounced between at least a dozen homeless shelters
growing up in Miami and Atlanta.
He eventually won a football scholarship at the University of Miami
and fought dyslexia to become the first person in his family to
graduate college.
"They had me study hard every hour," Dixon told Reuters.
He has since gone on to play defensive tackle for the NFL's
Philadelphia Eagles, making good on his boyhood dream.
Dixon has been sidelined by a torn tricep since early October. But he
seems confident about overcoming adversity yet again and plans on
being in the starting lineup next season.
His advice to homeless kids is to stay in school and get focused on
whatever it is they really want to do in life.
"Just keep on doing something you like and don't give up," Dixon said.
I had to work myself up from the bottom to the top. I did that. Don't
let nobody stand in your way. You just got to go and get it. You can't
be afraid to take a chance on life."
Bassuk, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, said
medical problems and under-achievement in school were among the things
that often go hand in hand with childhood homelessness.
"These are kids who don't have any opportunities," she said. "If you
look at some of the educational variables, they're doing really
poorly. And they're kids who can do OK. They just don't have
appropriate support.
"It just seems that on every front this is a very vulnerable group of
kids," she said.
--
The DemocRATs Hall of Shame©!
http://www.democrathallofshame.com/
12/3/11: Galleries Updated!
Over 150 New OBAMA & 'RAT Cartoons, Pics Added!
4/8/11: Clipboard Manager v3.5.1! (Still FREE!)
Added Spam Warnings!
FREE Windows® Screensavers! Muzzy Screensaver, 15Mb; DemocRAT Screensaver, 18Mb!
FREE Windows® Gadgets! Including: Bumpersticker Slideshow, Obama
Cartoon Slideshow, Take Back America 2010 & 2012!, Are DemocRATs
Ugly?, Is Helen Thomas Ugly?, Is Nancy Pelosi Ugly?, Disco Muzzy
(1 & 2)!, Obama's Lies!, "Uh-Oh! Something's Burning!", and the
Racial Slur Database.
Learn the TRUTH about: BSWS, Bob LeChevalier, Bret Cahill, Brian Wraith,
Chom Noamsky, Clams Casino, Cop Welfare, Curly Surmudgeon, Dakota,
Dave Fritzinger, David Johnston, Freestyle, Gandalf Grey, Iarnrod,
Igor, Joe Steel, Juanjo, Kevin Cunningham, Kurt Lochner, Lorad,
Lamont Cranston, Lookout, Lickin Ass' and Fakin' Names, Malcolm Abel,
Lubow, Major Debacle, Michael Coburn, Mitchel Holman, Phlip, Peter
Principle, Ramon Herrera, Ramrod, Ray Fischer, Rightardia, RobW, Rod
Speed, Roneal, Sanders Kaufman, Scotius, ShittingDuck, Sid9, SilentOtto,
Siobhan Medeiros, Snakehawk, Spike Lee, Stile4aly, Tab182, Tater Gumfries,
Tim Crowley, Tim Howard, Tom Sr, Tom Wheat
NaturalBornCitizen
Dec 24, 2011, 10:37:09 AM12/24/11
to
On 12/24/2011 9:33 AM, Patriot Games
that's what happens when you have chirrens outside of a family
environment. ie da baby daddy is not part of the fambly.
environment. ie da baby daddy is not part of the fambly.
Patriot Games http://www.democrathallofshame.com
Dec 26, 2011, 10:20:52 AM12/26/11
to
On Sat, 24 Dec 2011 10:37:09 -0500, NaturalBornCitizen <n...@t.invalid>
wrote:
for that last hundred or so years they're pretty much all just one big
family of sub-humans...
wrote:
>On 12/24/2011 9:33 AM, Patriot Games
>(http://www.democrathallofshame.com/) wrote:
>> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE7BM1CY20111223
>> Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
>> Fri, Dec 23 2011
>(http://www.democrathallofshame.com/) wrote:
>> http://mobile.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE7BM1CY20111223
>> Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
>> Fri, Dec 23 2011
>that's what happens when you have chirrens outside of a family
>environment. ie da baby daddy is not part of the fambly.
If you consider all the inbreeding that has gone on in ghetto-America
>environment. ie da baby daddy is not part of the fambly.
for that last hundred or so years they're pretty much all just one big
family of sub-humans...
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