Census: No Sign of Economic Rebound for many

English: US Census map of poverty across US (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Depending on education, race, income and even marriage, not all segments of the population are seeing an economic turnaround.

Poverty is on the rise in single-mother families. More people are falling into the lowest-income group. And after earlier signs of increased mobility, fewer people are moving as homeownership declined for a fifth straight year.

"We're in a selective recovery," said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed the numbers.

Nearly 2.2 million children were poor in California last year, the most of any state, but the child poverty rate was highest in Mississippi, where more than 1 in 3 children was poor. Nationwide, child poverty stood at 21.8 percent, unchanged from the previous year.

"Stubbornly high child poverty rates in the wake of the Great Recession suggest we have not yet turned the corner three years after its official end," said Marybeth Mattingly, director of research on vulnerable families at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute.

The numbers also reflect widening economic inequality, an issue President Barack Obama has pledged would be a top priority of his administration to address. Upward mobility in the U.S. has been hurt by a tight job market and the longer-term disappearance of midskill jobs due to globalization and automation.

The new census data shows that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Read more >>

Crude oil spills into Mississippi River after oil barges crash

Mississippi River at Vicksburg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Two oil barges pushed by a tugboat slammed into a railroad bridge in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Sunday, causing one to leak crude oil into the Mississippi River, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Officials used an "absorbent boom" to contain the undetermined amount of oil that leaked into the river after the collision, which occurred shortly after midnight and damaged both barges, Lieutenant Ryan Gomez said. The barge that is leaking was holding 80,000 gallons of light crude oil, he said.

"A towing vessel was pushing two barges side-by-side and they struck one of the Vicksburg railroad bridge piers," Gomez said.

No one was injured in the accident. Federal, state and local officials, as well as the industry's Oil Spill Response Organization, were on the scene. Gomez said he did not have information about any of the companies involved in the oil transport. Read more >>

Drought Hits Shippers on Great Lakes

The Midwest drought is lowering water levels in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to near-record lows, putting pressure on the shipping industry and turning some beaches into long mud flats. It is also intensifying a debate over a decades-old dredging project near Detroit that permanently reduced the lakes' levels by nearly two feet.

The two lakes, which meet at the Straits of Mackinac, were down nearly a foot in August from a year earlier and nearly two feet below the average for the past century. The levels could break a record low set in 1964 in the next few months, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projections.

The drought has lowered water levels in lakes and rivers throughout the Midwest, including the Mississippi, which has experienced periodic closures to barge traffic. But even the vast Great Lakes, which represent a fifth of the earth's surface fresh water and are hundreds of feet deep, are being hit by the lack of rain.

Great Lakes water levels are especially important to the shipping industry, which moves some 200 million tons of cargo each year, since the depth of water near ports and shipping channels dictates how much coal, iron, grain or other cargo can be loaded on ships. Read more >>

1 in 5 Americans cannot afford to buy food

The results of a new poll show that American citizens are still experiencing difficulty in affording food for themselves or their families, a sign which proves that the country’s economy is not on the road to recovery. A total of 177,662 adults from across the United States responded to the poll conducted by Gallup organization via phone from January through June 2012.

According to the findings, which were made public on August 21, almost one in five Americans in 15 states say they had trouble buying food at least once during the past 12 months. “Nationwide, 18.2 percent of Americans so far in 2012 say there have been times when they could not afford the food they needed, on par with the 18.6 percent who had trouble affording food in 2011,” the Gallup poll results also stated.

The poll further highlighted that residents in southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama are among the most likely to struggle to afford food. The development comes as worsening drought in the United States has pushed grain prices to new highs as crops are withering and the temperatures are rising. At the same time, corn and soybean production in the US has slashed to a six-year low due to the drought. Read more >>

1 in 7 on food stamps - in some states 1 in 5

Image via Wikipediahe use of food stamps has increased dramatically in the U.S., as the federal government ramps up basic assistance to meet the demands of an increasingly desperate population.

The number of food stamp recipients increased 16% over last year. This means that 14% of the population is now living on food stamps. That's about 43 million people, or about one out of every seven Americans.

In some states, like Tennessee, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oregon, one in five people are receiving food stamps. Washington, D.C. leads the nation, with 21.5% of the population on food stamps.

Idaho saw the biggest increase in its food stamp program, with a spike of 39% compared to last year, followed by Nevada, at 29%, and New Jersey, at 27%. More...

Food Stamp Rolls Continue to Rise

More people tapped food stamps to pay for groceries in September as the recession and lackluster recovery have prompted more Americans to turn to government safety net programs to make ends meet.

Some 42.9 million people collected food stamps last month, up 1.2% from the prior month and 16.2% higher than the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Nationwide 14% of the population relied on food stamps as of September but in some states the percentage was much higher. In Washington, D.C., Mississippi and Tennessee – the states with the largest share of citizens receiving benefits – more than a fifth of the population in each was collecting food stamps. More...

Corn prices surge to record high

Image via WikipediaCorn prices surged to a record high for the year Friday as traders questioned whether crop yields will fall short of expectations.

Corn for December delivery rose 17 cents, or 3.8%, to settle at $4.6450 a bushel. The price was just shy of the June 2009 record of $4.70 per bushel for the December contract, Telvent DTN analyst John Sanow said.

As the nation's harvest gets underway, there have been some signs that the number of bushels per acre will be less than the government's forecast of a record 165 bushels per acre, analysts said.

East of the Mississippi, the weather has been hotter and drier, which could have affected the crop, Frontier Ag analyst Larry Glenn said.

The situation could change as more farmers begin to pull crops from the field. Meanwhile, supplies remain tight and global demand continues to grow, Sanow said. More...

BP still using dispersants - whistleblowers receiving death threats

Image by Geoff Livingston via Flickr

Excerpt from Truthout:
Birren also told Truthout that fishermen she knows, who are speaking out against BP dispersant practices, "are getting death threats and notes on their cars saying you better watch out, because there are people above us who want to keep this quiet. But I know entire families who are sick because of the dispersants."

Birren does not believe the crisis is over and believes the Gulf and inland waters have been "prematurely re-opened to fishing."

She and the coalition of commercial fishermen she and Guidry are a part of are concerned about the credibility of Gulf Coast fishermen being damaged by contaminated seafood being delivered to the market. Birren also wrote, "As fisherman, we know that the use of dispersants has made this crisis vastly worse for everyone. It is time that government step up and protect us, our Gulf and the American public from further and possibly irreversible harm."

"It's now down to regular people like me trying to do what the government should be doing to take care of us," she told Truthout. "It's awful, it's really bad. If Obama is not going to be a strong enough president to protect us, we'll have to do it ourselves. We're on our own down here." More...

Obama cuts deal to shield BP assets

Image by Floyd Brown via Flickr

Tom Eley
President Barack Obama reiterated his defense of oil giant BP after a White House meeting with the company’s CEO Tony Hayward and board chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg.

After the meeting, Obama and BP announced the establishment of an independently operated escrow account, the Independent Claims Facility, funded by up to $20 billion paid out over the next four years. BP said it would delay dividend payouts over the remainder of the year estimated at $10 billion. Other details of the escrow account remain vague.

The US media presented the meeting and announcement as a humbling of BP. It was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the meeting was a choreographed event with two purposes: to diffuse popular anger against both BP and the Obama administration, and to assure the financial markets that BP is in no danger of bankruptcy or criminal prosecution. There will be no serious consequences for the disaster that killed 11 workers on April 20 and has since pumped upwards of 60 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even were it clear that the $20 billion will really be made available to the blowout’s many economic victims—and it is not—this is a preposterously small sum for a catastrophe whose real cost will run into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions. All the costs of environmental cleanup are to be paid out of this fund, according to the Financial Times. There can be no doubt that this alone will far surpass $20 billion.

The deal ensures that the overwhelming burden of the costs of the disaster will be borne by the government, and ultimately the working class.

“I’m absolutely confident BP will be able to meet its obligations to the Gulf Coast and to the American people,” Obama said in a short press conference after the meeting. “BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all of our interests that it remain so.”

With these words, the Obama administration indicated that it would not seek to force a BP bankruptcy, let alone seize the company, and its goal is that BP continue to be a profitable concern, paying out dividends and gargantuan executive salaries for years to come.

The financial markets were cheered by Obama’s comments. In the hours after the press conference BP’s share price increased sharply, then finished the day up about 22 cents.

Though the administration had done nothing to punish BP, Obama had been under pressure from financial circles to throw it a lifeline. The preceding weeks had seen BP shares tumble by half and on Tuesday Fitch downgraded the company’s credit rating by six notches.

The escrow account is meant to shield BP from potentially hundreds of billions, or even trillions, in damages. While both Obama and BP promised that the account did not mean a $20 billion cap on liability had been put in place, the Independent Claims Facility is a preemptive blow against the tens of thousands of lawsuits BP is likely to face over the coming years.

While it remains extremely vague, the escrow account will be BP’s first line of defense in determining what are “legitimate claims,” a phrase both Obama and company executives have repeatedly used. Those claimants deemed “illegitimate” might turn to the court system for redress, but having been ruled unfounded by a supposedly neutral observer, they will have a black mark hanging over them, and US courts are already notorious for defending corporate privilege.

This is the fate that awaits the blowout’s financial victims. Millions of Gulf Coast residents are likely to suffer financially through layoffs which will ripple through the economy far beyond the fishing and tourism industries, through declining home values in a region already devastated by the real estate collapse, and through, in all probability, an epidemic of health problems.

If there are 10 million such victims—less than the combined population of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the three states hardest-hit so far—the miserly $20 billion escrow account would mean a mere $2,000 per person. More...

Mystery plague killing TN crops near Mississippi River bottoms

WREG News, Memphis TN

A mystery is unfolding across MidSouth farms. Something is killing crops, trees, even weeds and nobody can explain why. Farmers are scratching their heads and some are worried their crops may be lost to the mysterious plague.

It's happening along a large swath of land near the Shelby and Tipton county border along Herring Hill Road and elsewhere near the Mississippi River bottoms.

Tiny dots appear to have burned onto leaves of all types of plants, and they appear different depending on the plant. On corn stalks, the dots seem to turn white in the center. On other plants, a white dust speckles the leaves and then destroys the green life underneath.

"We found it all in the herbs, in the flowers, in the plum tree, in the weeds," said organic farmer Toni Holt. "It's apparently in everything."

Holt grows organic produce that she sells at area farmers' markets. As she and other farmers inspect the new growth covered in the perplexing plague, they fear their entire crop may be lost.

Less than ten miles from Holt's crops, the damage could possibly hit hundreds of acres of corn at Wilder Farms. It appears to have hit everything in its path.

There does not seem to be anything in common with the affected plants. The Holts raise organic crops, so they don't spray pesticides on any of their fruits and vegetables.

The first thought among some was a new parasite or insect caused the damage, but Wilder farms sprays pesticides and the damage there is exactly the same. Farmers first noticed the damaging dots over the weekend.

Then Holt came home to find baby birds dead in their nests.

"There are two dead birds hanging out of two different bird houses, so we're concerned about that. We don't know if it's related, but it's alarming," said Holt. "We've got horses, we're concerned about the horses on the grass. We've got chickens. We sell our eggs at the market."

Farmers we spoke with are convinced something in the air caused this damage. They're asking the USDA and other experts to look into the problem, and so are we.