Something’s moving out thereAN OUTSIDERS VIEW Ken Fuller 12/07/2010

Something’s moving out thereAN OUTSIDERS VIEW

Ken Fuller

12/07/2010

After a while, some of the items that have landed in this outsider’s inbox, along with various saved newspaper pieces, begin to resemble a jigsaw puzzle, and I start to wonder if I can put the pieces together. This is one of those times.

One piece informs me that in 2001 the homeless numbered 99,900 homeless in Australia and 14,145 in Canada, while in the USA the Urban Institute published a study in 2000 (using 1996 data) which estimated that 3.5 million Americans, 39 percent of them children, experienced homelessness every year.

This was, of course, prior to the current economic crisis. Nowadays things must be much worse, an assumption born out by an article from Global Research E-Newsletter (Patrick Martin, “Hunger in America”) which cites a Department of Agriculture report that last year 15 percent of households (that’s 50 million Americans) were unable to purchase sufficient food — a threefold increase since 2006.

The misery caused by the economic crisis in the USA will now probably be deepened by the measures contemplated by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. But traditional Republicans are, of course, being pushed into extreme positions by Tea Party enthusiasts. In this respect, former Reagan trade official Robert E. Lighthizer (Throwing Free Trade Overboard, New York Times, Nov. 13) notes that, while the leaders of both major parties favor “free trade,” 61 percent of Tea Party supporters believe it has damaged the USA.

Lighthizer thinks they might have a point, given that over the last decade 5.6 million US manufacturing jobs have been lost and the country’s trade deficit in manufactured goods has amounted to $4.3 trillion. Moreover, he says, the value of foreign investments in the USA exceeds that of its own overseas investments by $2.74 trillion.... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

 URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20101207com5.html