Panhandlers now line NY city streets

New York City has a rising homeless population; it is up nearly 18 percent since 2011. Panhandlers now line city streets, including in Union Square. "I was married, had a wife, house, car, the whole nine yards, middle class," Paul Santo said, "and lost everything."

Santo said he now lives just off 14th Street. Every day he puts up a sign asking for cash. "I've got appointments to try and better my life," he said. "Just getting on a train is $2.25." Amy Moreno, a panhandler, said: "I ask for donations. I want to rent a room to get off the street before winter."

Moreno said she sleeps in Union Square twice a week. The other nights, she stays with friends. She makes bracelets for those who give her donations. "It goes towards the beads, it goes towards my daily food intake," she said.

Patrick Markee, of the Coalition for the Homeless, said: "A lot of times those folks are a couple of paychecks away from becoming homeless. You might see people panhandling who are still in a precarious housing situation, they might just need those few extra dollars to get by." Read more >>

Noam Chomsky, A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?

Tom's Dispatch
If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all.  The stories were generally tucked away, minimalist, focused on a few arrests, and spoke of “hundreds” of protesters in the streets, or maybe, if a reporter was feeling especially generous, a vague “thousands.” 

I did my own rough count on the largest of the Occupy protests that day. It left Union Square in the evening heading for the Wall Street area.  I walked through the march front to back, figuring a couple of thousand loosely packed protesters to a block, and came up with a conservative estimate of 15,000 people. 

Maybe it wasn’t the biggest protest of all time, but sizeable enough given that Occupy, an organization without strong structures but once strongly located, had been (quite literally) pushed or even beaten out of its camps in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere across the country and toward oblivion.

It’s true that if you were checking out the Nation or Mother Jones, you would have gotten a more accurate sense of what was going on.  Still, didn’t the great protest movement of our American moment (on a planet still in upheaval) deserve better that day?

And no matter what you read in the mainstream, here’s what you would have known nothing about: this country is increasingly an armed camp and those marchers, remarkably relaxed and peaceable, were heading out into a concentration of police that was staggering and should have been startling. More...