Tag: poverty

Highly-contagious infection spread by feces breaks out in Portland as homeless crisis sparks disease common in Third World

A highly contagious infection that is spread through tiny particles of fecal matter has broken out in Portland – with officials warning that the homeless population are most at risk of catching the illness.

Shigella is a bacteria that spreads through human feces. People transmit the infection after getting the microbes on their hands and then touching their mouths.

People can also spread the intestinal infection through sexual intercourse. 

Multnomah County in Oregon has warned that homeless people and same-sex male partners are most at risk because of their lack of access to hygienic facilities.

In the last month, 45 cases have been found in Portland, bringing the total from 2023 to 218. The influx of infections were reported among unhoused people in downtown Portland’s Old Town neighborhood.

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Homelessness In U.S. at Highest Level Since 2008 Financial Crisis, Federal Report Reveals

Spurred on by the rising cost of living and the end of pandemic aid, U.S. homelessness this year reached a level not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, according to one influential annual metric released by the The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Friday.

HUD’s annual homelessness count, which is called the “Point In Time,” or P.I.T., count, is not a count of all cases of homelessness throughout the year, but a snapshot of who was homeless on a single day in the last ten days of January. 

This year, HUD said 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness, the highest number since HUD began issuing the report in 2007 and a 12 percent increase from 2022. Nearly one-third, or 143,105 people, of those experiencing homelessness reported that they were chronically homeless, also the highest number ever counted.

In a press release, HUD said that the increase in homelessness was a result of the expiration of pandemic-era expansions in the social safety net, like eviction moratoria and rental assistance.

“The rise in homelessness at the beginning of 2023 continued a pre-pandemic trend from 2016 to 2020, when homelessness also increased,” HUD said. The agency said the American Rescue Plan had prevented a rise in homelessness between 2020 and 2022, but many of its resources have now expired. 

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Senate fails to overturn Biden’s plan to withhold lunch aid from schools that don’t let boys use girls’ bathrooms

School lunches in America are on the chopping block for K-12 schools that don’t enforce gender ideology. In an attempt to comply with Joe Biden’s executive order requiring all agencies to implement equity programs for LGBTQ+ inclusion, the Department of Agriculture decided that it would hold free school lunch aid hostage unless schools allowed boys to use girls’ bathrooms and implemented other actions showing their compliance with the wacky, progressive gender theory that says boys and girls can become girls and boys just by declaring it to be so.

Senate Republicans tried to overturn it in voting against the USDA reinterpretation of Title IX via the Congressional Review Act, but that vote was short at 47 to 50. “Don’t be fooled here, the Biden Administration is the only player in this policy fight that is taking away lunches from children,” said Kansas Senator Roger Marshall. “There is real-world evidence that USDA’s policy has already taken away school lunch funding from low-income children. Weaponizing school lunch money in pursuit of their radical agenda and putting students in the crosshairs is unconscionable, and we will not stand for it.”

That rule, proposed in 2022, blasted by attorneys general and lawmakers across the US, has now gone into effect. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made the proclamation in May 2022, saying that it would “interpret the prohibition on discrimination based on sex found in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972… to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The Department of Agriculture then went on to explain their bizarre reasoning, saying that in light of the Supreme Court decision that allowed a man who claimed to be transgender to appear at work in a funeral home wearing women’s clothing, and to use the women’s restroom at his workplace, they would prevent schools from receiving federal school lunch aid if those schools didn’t allow boys to use girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, or other facilities.

Vilsack said this was a way to “root out discrimination.” His goal in withholding lunch aid from schools that do not put girls at risk of potential male aggression was to “help bring about much-needed change.” It was shortly after this proclamation that it was revealed that a female student in Loudon County, Virginia was raped in a “gender-neutral” school bathroom by a male student who wore women’s clothing.

Biden signed the executive order as soon as he took office on January 20, 2021. It read that “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” It was this that Vilsack was trying to tackle. 

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After Xi Jinping visit to San Francisco, city falling back into drug use and homelessness: business owner

With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference over and done with in San Francisco, some business owners are complaining that the city is reverting into a den for homelessness and drug use. 

Restaurant owner Tony Pankaew said in a local media interview.that San Francisco rushed to clean up the city for Chinese President Xi Jinping and other foreign dignitaries for APEC.

“They cleaned up the people, they cleaned up the streets,” he told CBS News Bay Area. “They made the city look good and look impressive for the foreigners, for the politicians.”

“Now they have started to come back,” Pankaew said. “Slowly but surely. [In] a couple weeks [the city] will be back to where [it was] before.” 

Pankaew said he was hopeful that things will turn around in San Francisco, adding that a new skating rink near his business might attract more people, and therefore more business. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., was criticized on social media after admitting that San Francisco timed a massive cleanup effort ahead of the summit.

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San Francisco Clears Homeless And Cleans Sh*t-Covered Streets For World Leaders Next Week

Progressive city leadership in crime-ridden San Francisco has undertaken a massive effort to improve the city’s image, which has been tarnished with shit-covered streets, homelessness, and open-air drug markets. These measures have been implemented as a temporary solution ahead of the global trade summit that will flood the city with world leaders and corporate executives beginning today. 

The annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is San Francisco’s largest international event since world leaders gathered in the town in 1945 to sign the charter creating the United Nations. A lot has changed in the metro area in 78 years, including radical leftists in City Hall that have pushed failed ‘defund the police’ policies that have transformed parts of the region into an out-of-control, crime-infested hellhole. 

The New York Post confirmed the wonderful folks in City Hall began pushing “drug addicts, dealers, and homeless” from the downtown area to other parts of the city, an effort that some believe is to conceal their failed policies from the international community during APEC. 

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Ticking Time-Bomb: Food Inflation Is Crushing Millions Of Low Income Americans

In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”  The sentiment was expressed right on the heals of a banking crisis which led to the Panic of 1907.  The event was widely blamed on a liquidity crunch, and this same crisis was used as a rationale for the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913-1916.  Of course, it is the central bank and its ability to generate fiat money from thin air (unbacked liquidity) that has led the US to the stagflationary disaster we face today.  The “solutions” offered by establishment elites are often worse than the problems they are supposed to solve.  

The total inflationary damage done to Americans consumers since 2020 varies according to who you ask.  Stats from the Federal Reserve and government are muddled in a series of creative mathematics in order to make the situation look much better than it is.  CPI is not a valid indicator of true inflation given it is watered down with over 80,000 items and services, and many of them are not necessities for the common US household.  If we look only at necessities like housing, food and energy, the economic picture looks increasingly bleak.

Food, as Alfred Lewis noted, is particularly vital to civil cohesion.  The human body can in fact survive up to three weeks without a meal, but the vast majority of people in the first world are not acclimated to such conditions and might just panic after one or two days without sustenance.  

The potential for this scenario might sound exaggerated to those in a higher income bracket, but it’s important for these people to understand that a 25%-50% increase in food costs for them is not the same as a similar increase for people on a low or fixed income.  For example, food price increases for the average middle-class to upper-middle-class households amount to around 11% of their annual income in 2023.  However, for people in the low income bracket, food costs now amount to 31% of their annual income.  That’s a pile driver to the wallet.

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Los Angeles Spends $44,000 Per ‘Temporary’ Tent For Homeless Village

Los Angeles is reportedly spending $44,000 for each individual tent in a temporary tent village for homeless people in East Hollywood, The Messenger reports.

All told, it cost about $4 million to put up fencing, bathrooms, and staffing facilities for the village. Catering services and 24-7 staffing cost an additional $3 million per year, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Despite the high costs, the site is only temporary. It’s located on a parking lot that will eventually be turned into public housing. But because it will take years for construction to commence on that project, the city decided to fill the space with tents in the meantime.

San Francisco-based nonprofit Urban Alchemy maintains the encampment. Launched in 2018 with a small grant, the group hires mostly former prisoners because they have the “ability to read people in unpredictable situations.”

According to several lawsuits, however, some of those employees have engaged in abusive behavior.

After expanding to Portland and Austin, the group brought in $51 million in 2021.

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Homeless Program in Washington State Has Burned Through $143 Million to House Less Than 1,000 People

Washington State has been trying to deal with their homeless problem, but they haven’t had much success.

A program designed to close down tent communities and get homeless people into housing has already spent $143 million dollars to house less than a thousand people. That’s a horrible ratio.

And now they want more cash, because they think this program has been so effective.

FOX News reports:

Blue state’s $143 million homeless program got less than a thousand people housed. Now governor wants more

An initiative to remove homeless camps from roadways needs more money to continue next year, according to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, after burning through $143 million in a little over a year.

“You can’t do this with zero dollars,” Inslee, a Democrat, told KOMO News. “We’ll need the legislature in January to step up to increase funding so we can continue the progress we’re making.”

Inslee’s statewide Rights-of-Way Safety Initiative began in June 2022 with the goal of removing homeless camps from state property near roads and offering housing to the people living in the camps.

On Friday, Inslee toured a tiny home village in Olympia funded by the initiative that will soon provide shelter to 50 people who previously lived in an encampment along I-5, KOMO reported. The governor said during the tour that the safety initiative is out of money and, come January, camps will remain on state lands if the legislature does not allocate more funds.

“We’re very proud of the work state agencies have done in our right of way initiative working alongside local officials and service providers,” a spokesperson for the governor told Fox News in an email. “We will take as much funding as we can get to continue this work.”

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