Salem-News.com Poverty articles Page 34

Local Groups Lose Over 5,200 Pounds to Help Fight Hunger

The group was inspired to take action when they learned startling statistics; more than 1.6 BILLION adults worldwide are overweight; and 862 million people went underfed in 2007.

(SALEM, Ore.) - Weight Watchers groups from Salem and Keizer have teamed together to join the fight against two global epidemics – hunger and obesity – by participating in the Lose for Good Campaign.

According to Feeding America, 99% of food banks surveyed experienced an increase in the number of low-income American’s turning to soup kitchens and food pantries for assistance this year. Even the nation's most affluent areas have been affected; thirty-nine percent of the adults requesting emergency food assistance in the last year were gainfully employed.

As part of Lose for Good, the Weight Watchers groups coordinated food drives – donating food for each time members lost weight - to support the Marion Polk Food Share. The food share collects, sorts, stores and distributes over 4.8 million pounds of food each year to a network of 73 local service providers who distribute food to hungry people in their neighborhoods.

SEIU Members Launch New TV Ad on Gordon Smith`s Role in Digging Our Economic Hole

SEIU says members are holding Senator Smith accountable for his Washington record that gave CEOs golden parachutes but left Beaver State families stuck in a hole and holding the bill.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - Today, SEIU announced a new television ad, titled "Hole," that will air on cable and broadcast across most of Oregon through the end of October.

The ad highlights Gordon Smith's legislative history of siding with CEOs and housing lenders that made off with millions of dollars while hard working Americans across the country are struggling to survive foreclosure and make it through the economic recession.

The independent ad buy of more than $400,000 is in response to Smith's efforts to portray himself as a champion for working families and Main Street businesses after years of voting in support of the Bush-Cheney agenda.

The Price of Capitalism Without Ethics: The U.S. Credit Crisis

The credit crisis is the direct result of leadership not effectively creating a culture of ethical action and system of management that demands accountability.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - The world’s most powerful economy is in peril thanks to another bout of deception, denial, greed and collusion. Two powerful forces -- the pressure to continually grow earnings coupled with wildly competitive markets supercharged by the internet –have revealed a fissure a mile wide in CEO morality, leadership and management skills.

Employment-Based Health Coverage Shrinks in Oregon and Nation

Oregon has also failed to make headway in providing health insurance coverage to children this decade.

(SILVERTON, Ore.) - New data shows that even before the economy turned down, the share of Oregon workers receiving health coverage from their employers was in decline.

This decade, employer-sponsored health insurance coverage has fallen 7.5 percent among non-elderly Oregonians, according a study released today by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI). As of 2006-07, employers covered 61.4 percent of non-elderly Oregonians, down from 66.4 percent in 2000-01.

OCPP Says Thousands of Oregonians Still at Poverty Level With No Health Insurance

In 2007, one out of eight Oregonians was officially poor despite a slight income gain.

(SILVERTON, Ore.) - As the last economic expansion hit its peak, the typical Oregon household's income reportedly rose slightly in 2007 over the previous year.

Yet, Oregon was unable to reduce poverty or the percentage of Oregonians lacking health insurance, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and analyzed by the Silverton-based Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP), a nonpartisan research institute.

"The typical Oregon household saw its income improve somewhat last year," said Michael Leachman, a policy analyst with the public policy research institute, "but the household was no better off than it was at the end of the last expansion in 2000."

Immigration Reform - Business Begins to Find its Voice

OBA Provides Perspective on the Diverse Needs of Oregon Employers.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - This is a statement submitted for publication by the Oregon Business Association. The OBA says their mission is to continue to represent their industry-diverse, state-wide members within a coalition of employers and to work to protect Oregon's long term economic vitality.

From Three Mile Canyon Farms, Oregon's largest agricultural operation to The Standard Insurance Company, that recruits many of its actuaries from Canadian universities through the federal visa program, OBA members desire a rational conversation about immigration and meeting the workforce needs of our employers.

OBA participated in a media roundtable and editorial board meeting along with other members of the Coalition for a Working Oregon (CWO). The event, covered by television and print media from around the state, provided the opportunity for CWO to release a new study that predicts potential disruption to Oregon's economy.

Op Ed: `Econ 101` Corrupted
By Corporate Design:
Part Two: Conclusions

Natural fact: what Franklin, founders knew in 1779.

(EUGENE, Ore.) - As early as Revolutionary days, canny Ben Franklin put it potently, as well as succinctly: "Private property is a creature of society and is subject to the calls of that society, whenever its needs may require it." --Ben Franklin - 1789.

The Founders, prescient men-all, knew a natural fact when it was completely obvious from their long-continued study of famed philosophers over centuries.

What Founder Ben was telling us-all even then is now, more than ever after 150 years of the American Experience, is natural fact, long recognized. It is the most-essential fact on which much, if not most, of our "Revolutionary concept of shared complicit and essentially cooperative governance" has come to be based.

Op Ed: `Econ 101` Corrupted
By Corporate Design
Kills Demo-Dreams

"Wealth-Creation" Demands Continuing "Worker/Capital" Cooperation For Competitive Success.

(EUGENE, Ore.) - Here we make no pretense to more than natural understandings of "the dismal science" of economics. There are, however, some few "natural facts" from which common-sense can deduce the most-damaging situations also highly visible to many others; then checkable vs multitudinous Internet resources.

Start with this single inevitable, inescapable natural fact: "Private property depends on the rule of law."

Without that rule of law, nobody can achieve the excess-beyond-natural/need from which cometh "the capital for cooperative application" (read "investment") --from which all wealth doth necessarily flow, in this 21st Century.

Low-Income Advocates Support Whitehouse on Climate Change

The OCPP says that without adequate protections such as those proposed by the Whitehouse amendment, carbon emissions controls could increase the hardship faced by low-income families,

(SILVERTON, Ore.) - Legislation proposed by Rhode Island U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse capping carbon emissions can protect low-income Oregonians while fighting global warming, advocates told Oregon's U.S. Senators Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden today in a letter presented prior to a vote on the issue.

The letter from the Oregon Center for Public Policy urged the Oregon senators to support the Whitehouse amendment to the Climate Security Act of 2008. Also known as Lieberman-Warner, the Climate Security Act would cap carbon emissions.

`Toxic Trader` Street Theater Protesting Free Trade Premiers Outside Gordon Smith`s Office

Gordon Smith is being called out by American workers over his record on facilitating unsafe imports.

(PORTLAND, Ore.) - The United Steelworkers will present a primary election day premier of "The Toxic Trader," a street theater production designed to hold elected officials accountable for facilitating unsafe imports. It happens tomorrow, May 20th at noon.