Homelessness, hunger and shame: poverty is rampant in the richest country in the world. Over 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line, twice as many as it was fifty years ago. It can happen very quickly. Many people in the United States fall through the social safety net. In the structurally weak mining region of the Appalachians, it has become almost normal for people to go shopping with food stamps. And those who lose their home often have no choice but to live in a car. There are so many homeless people in Los Angeles that relief organizations have started to build small wooden huts to provide them with a roof over their heads. The number of homeless children has also risen dramatically, reaching 1.5 million, three times more than during the Great Depression the 1930s. A documentary about the fate of the poor in the United States today. We closed the commentary section because of too many inapproriate comments. ——————————————————————– DW Documentary gives you knowledge beyond the headlines. Watch high-class documentaries from German broadcasters and international production companies. Meet intriguing people, travel to distant lands, get a look behind the complexities of daily life and build a deeper understanding of current affairs and global events. Subscribe and explore the world around you with DW Documentary.
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So if my math is right aprox. 12% of the population (327 million) of the USA is homeless. And 99% of the National News is about who’s team is making america greater. Sorry Team America looks like we are a bunch of losers. I used to teach “hoods in the woods” outdoor recreation and survival skills (in the 90s) until the field became spoiled by militant and greedy vultures killing kids in the desert and training the vulnerable to do worse. Looks like my training will come in handy. I am shitty at math. We can not really have a 12% homeless rate? Someone correct me, even 1% is horrible, as evidenced by the social problems caused by having an elitist upper 1%. And the president wants to move 700,000 off of food stamps?! I am not a Democrat but my heart does bleed.
OK so I can barely do math and missed out on Zoolander’s school to read good. So it stands currently .16 % of the US population is homeless on a given night. 40 million live bellow poverty and are at risk of homelessness, not actually homeless.
I am currently sitting with a 4000 plus square foot home I don’t use. If it were legal, where I am, I would donate it for a group home for veterans though my neighbors, some quite despicable, would drag the effort into court.
Mr.Duff, so, it turns out that you can’t do anything with your own property? And if you build a 4-meter high fence around, like in a villa? So that the neighbors didn’t stick their nose there.
Travelling in Afghanistan during the summers of 1977 & 1978, men told me they were worried. For the dictator Mahoud (the guy who looked like Cojac) had started counting people. Officially, the dictator — a relative of the king he had kicked out few years before — wanted the populace of each province counted so as to establish proportionallity of representation at the coming elections for a parliament anf/or a constitutional asssembly. The elders i encountered would have none of this, because they saw it as a sceme to institute taxation and thus the control of tribal populace.
Noe, the US tries to just make everyone who is honest and proud poor in that country — justs like at home in those US of North America.
at 19:45 into the video we are made to feel sad because the father only eats once a day. Yet science now tells us that eating once a day will help us live longer.https://lifeforbusypeople.com/2016/07/23/longevity-why-i-eat-once-a-day/
Perhaps what is happening is that America is being forced to give up her consumerism and materialism and learn to chose what is important in life. Perhaps people will need to get used to living in different neighborhoods. Are there no lower cost apartments in neighborhoods with higher number of minorities?
1. We in Russia see thousands of such videos about shadow life in the USA. I looked at this and a bad precipitate formed on my soul. I see people who are not pathological tramps, not drug addicts, not drunkards. I see normal people. And I see that their misfortune is abnormal and cruel. There are probably more homeless people in Los Angeles alone than in all of Russia.
I will quote the parallels between our countries.
In Russia, it is very necessary to try to stay homeless. Since the days of the USSR, all people have had apartments and houses. Free from the state. Absolutely all people. I will not talk about gypsies and pathological tramps who like such a wandering life. In modern Russia, too, all people have their own housing. And no one has the right to expel a person. Even the court does not have the right to take away a person’s housing if it is their only one. If there is no money to pay for utilities, they can turn off electricity and gas. But no one has the right to deprive housing.
2. Yes, we have many people who have lost their homes due to fraud or family disputes. But they do not live on the streets, in cars or in tents. There will always be shelter. You can not have any material wealth, not have enough food, but there will always be a roof over your head. And medical services, most of which we have are free.
And what I see in the USA is not amenable to my mind. I lost my job and there is nothing to pay – you were just thrown out like a dog into the street and then all your personal problems. Just a cruel world … And just crazy housing prices and everything else. Terribly high prices for everything!
In most jurisdictions hotels, motels and store front businesses come under different laws than so called “landlords” which rent longer term. People can be evicted immediately from the former using the so called “criminal procedures”, while eviction from the latter demands using the “civil procedures” can take months or years. The worst States are New York, Florida and California. In Florida it is so bad even Lawyers pay tenants to move! Nearly all landlords have empathy for tenants and their plight and indulge them. No one wants to evict anyone. But all these draconian laws do is make things worse for all concerned especially the tenants. I had one recent example who had not paid rent for over three month, a bill over over $3,000.00. They are basically forcing the landlord to involuntarily loan them money. In New York if a landlord brings an action against a tenant in the Winter, most judges will not allow them to evict tenants until Spring causing the Landlords to foot the bill and likely never be compensated for the losses. Last October we had to pay over $13,000 property tax in just one county. If we do not pay it the government confiscates our property. Again, there are two sides to every issue and controversy. Landlords must follow strict rules for maintaining property but obviously these corrupt governments enforce no rules for the slums in which people live on the streets. America is broken and lying lawyers share much of the blame.
The last time we evicted two tenants from two units, each one owed about $600. Each side presented their piece to the Judge. After the Judge ruled in our favor, she asked the tenants how they would like to pay the bill. Before they could answer the judge exclaimed, “How about $5.00 per month?” Of course the Judge didn’t bother to ask us what we thought of this, only the tenants who loved it. Well, one paid $5.00, the other paid nothing and both disappeared which is about all most landlords expect for totally corrupt proceedings like this example. If we don’t like what the judge did, our recourse is to appeal to another court or forget it. Most Landlords forget it and are just thankful to get the tenants out. The end result of all this is it makes things much more difficult for anyone to rent any place to live. It is difficult to find polite words to describe this massive legal obscenity in America today. There are many more much much worse horror stories than this one too.
wjabbe, landlords are international investors who have close ties to banks and corrupted governments around the World. They know beforehand, when a factory is going to be removed to China within some years and real estate values are going to drop somewhere and somewhere else they are going to rise. There is no unpredictability for them in what they are doing. The loosers are small investors, small business owners and ordinary working taxpayers.
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