More than 1.7 million Los Angeles County residents struggled with hunger in 2009, more than in any other county in America, according to new research published by Feeding America, the country’s largest network of food banks.

The study, called Map the Meal Gap, uses statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Census Bureau and other agencies to profile food insecurity across America.

“It’s hard to imagine in a nation that grows much of the world’s food that people cannot always afford to feed themselves or their kids,” said Vicki Escarra, Feeding America’s president and chief executive.

“But the fact is that domestic hunger is a serious problem.”

The study found that there are people in every county who at times can’t provide enough food for an active and healthy life for every household member -- the USDA measure for food insecurity. Rates ranged from 5% in Steel County, S.D. to 38% in Wilcox County, Ala.

At nearly 17%, the rate in Los Angeles was about the same as the national average. But in nearby Imperial County, it climbed to more than 31%.

“Hunger is closer than one might think,” Escarra said at a news conference Thursday in Washington, D.C., to announce the findings.

Matthew Sharp, a senior advocate with California Food Policy Advocates, attributed the high number of food insecure Angelenos to “the extraordinary cost of living and low wages.” Unemployment remains high in California and those returning to the workforce often find that they can’t get the hours or salaries they need.

The study found that many of those at risk of hunger don’t qualify for federal nutrition benefits, including about a third of the more than 6 million food insecure Californians in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available.

More than half of these Californians did not meet the income requirements for food stamps -- known locally as CalFresh -- and an estimated 33% did not qualify for other programs such as free or reduced-price school meals. Eligibility for these programs is linked to the federal poverty level, which advocates of low-income families have long argued is a poor measure of what it takes to make ends meet.

To qualify for food stamps, for example, households cannot earn more than 130% of the poverty level. That was $28,655 a year for a family of four in 2009, the most recent year for which food insecurity data is available. The maximum threshold for most other nutrition programs is 185% of the poverty level, then $40,793 a year for a family of four.

Previous studies only provided state-level food insecurity estimates, which researchers said were too broad to help local organizations address the need in their communities.

In counties like Imperial, Kern and Tulare, the study found that more than 60% of those at risk of hunger could be eligible for food stamps. Such areas might benefit from more outreach about federal nutrition programs, the study said.

While the food stamp rolls have been increasing in California, participation in the program has been among the lowest in the nation. Just half of the eligible Californians received the benefit in 2008, the most recent year for which federal estimates are available.

In counties with a higher proportion of food insecure people who are not eligible for government assistance, the burden to help often falls on family members and local charities.

The number of people fed by the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank increased from about 674,000 in 2006 to more than 1 million last year, said the group’s president and chief executive, Michael Flood. 

Although the food bank has been able to increase the volume of food it provides to food pantries, soup kitchens and other programs, supply has not kept pace with demand. Some have had to turn people away empty-handed, Flood said.

Link to source: http://lat.ms/fIlOIo

Big Banker is watching you—more closely than ever.

With lenders still skittish about making new loans, credit bureaus and others are hawking services that help banks probe deeply into your financial closet. The new offerings include ways to look at your rent and utility payments, figure out your income, gauge your home's value and even rate your banking habits based on details like whether your direct deposits have stopped.

All of this could influence your financial freedom—not to mention the number of junk-mail solicitations you receive.

Ken Lin, CEO of Credit Karma, a credit-score information website, knew he had a good credit score. But when he recently applied for a new credit card, he was rejected: The lender had flagged him as a higher credit risk because the value of his California home had declined and his mortgage principal wasn't declining—giving away that he has an interest-only mortgage.

"It's a lot more than just your credit score today," he says.

Your credit record still matters, of course. But here are some newer ways lenders and financial-services companies are sizing up your financial behavior and credit-worthiness:

• Bank-depositor behavior scores. Fair Isaac, the creator of the widely used FICO credit score, is marketing bank-depositor behavior scores, which are used by banks to assess their own customers.

The scores are based on balances, deposit records and withdrawal activity, says Debb Gordon, a senior principal consultant at Fair Isaac.

Unlike credit scores—which are most affected after payments are late or credit is maxed out—behavior scores can be a leading indicator of credit risk. They also can help banks identify which of their customers might be ripe for additional services and rewards programs and which might need special attention because, for instance, their direct deposits had stopped.

• Income estimation. This business took off earlier this year after the Federal Reserve allowed lenders to use credit bureaus' income estimates to satisfy new requirements that credit-card applicants show the ability to pay their debts.

The bureaus use credit-record information, such as the size of your credit lines and the age and size of your mortgage, and plug it into models to predict your earnings. Those estimates also may be used to double-check the income you report on credit applications or to determine if you should be preapproved for credit.

You can't see those estimates. But if you are denied credit because of them, you must be given a chance to provide additional information.

• Rent payments. An estimated 40 million consumers, including young people and people who prefer to pay in cash, have too little credit experience to generate a useful credit score. But they are likely to pay rent or utility bills, which could help credit bureaus better assess their credit-worthiness.

Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, bought RentBureau—which collects rental-payment data from large property managers—and expects to integrate that information into credit records before the end of the year.

Even if those consumers don't want credit, that information could help them win better rates from insurers, which may use insurance scores based on credit records, and fatten up thin credit files, which some employers check before making hiring decisions.

Credit bureaus say they also would like to offer data on cellphone payments, but have run into concerns over privacy issues, which may require legislation to untangle.

• Collection triggers. If you owe money, you can run, but you can't hide. Credit bureaus can now send daily reports to collection companies when a debtor's financial status changes—say, if new employment information appears or if a debt starts to decline. A drop in credit use would indicate that the consumer has more capacity to pay and a better chance of repaying other outstanding debts.

• Home values. As home values have plummeted and foreclosures have soared in many states, lenders of all stripes have become more cautious, as Mr. Lin found. Using home values as a factor in credit decisions doesn't appear to be widespread, but it may come into play when someone in, say, Nevada or California applies for a new loan. Of course, it also could work in your favor if you are one of the roughly 25 million Americans who owns a home outright.

• Your wealth. Information about your assets other than homes and cars, which aren't part of the credit record, may soon play a bigger role in your financial life. With a better sense of a consumer's balance sheet, lenders might be able to target potential customers better and also have a fuller sense of their likely risk. Equifax, another of the big three credit bureaus, offers financial-service providers an estimate of liquid wealth as part of a financial "suite" of information.

As all of this becomes a widespread practice, those who are prompt and careful in all aspects of their financial life may have more options—and those who have been sloppy with, say, their bank accounts may be penalized for that.

By Giordano Bruno

War, almost every kind of war, is first and foremost a production. A piece of live-action theater with “good guys” and “bad guys” delineated by governments and by media for the benefit of the masses. Most plot-points in most modern conflicts are not genuine. They are written and staged (Gulf of Tonkin, or WMD’s in Iraq anyone?), though we treat the fairytale as if it were reality simply because the story is being told by some corporate mouthpiece wearing a fake smile and a suit on our TV. Very often, we discover after the fact that the wars we witnessed in the dark shadows of our cultural cinema with greasy popcorn and mega-large soda in hand were actually a charade, a farce. We get angry, we get livid, and then we go on with our menial lives because the “damage is done” and what can we do about it now anyway? Very rarely in history do the majority of people have the ability or occasion to see the authentic war going on right in front of their eyes, between the social puppeteers, and those who have broken loose from their strings.

Today, we as Americans have a rare opportunity to step outside the theater, away from the fabricated pageantry of a particular conflict barreling down the horizon, and examine the situation objectively before it fully develops. That conflict is the now increasingly aggressive “global currency war” being readied for implementation and public consumption at this very moment.

For now, the threat of a large scale currency fight is being presented as “minimal” but potentially relevant. In fact, the war has been slowly taking root since at least 2008, right after the initial collapse of the mortgage derivatives bubble when the private Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to near zero and began openly purchasing U.S. Treasury debt. Only this past month has the MSM finally begun discussing the wider implications of these measures, along with the obvious reactions of other nations, including the escalation of trade wars into a full fledged fiat battle royale. But all is not what it seems…

As I hope to demonstrate clearly in this article, not only is the currency war threat utterly unnecessary, irrational, and fiscally pointless, it is also completely engineered to serve a purpose beyond the policy directives of any one sovereign nation, and meant to benefit only a small handful of financial elite…

Currency War Is No Surprise

The mainstream media has lately been treating the currency war concept as somehow shocking and unexpected, as if it fell from the sky out of nowhere to wreak havoc on poor unsuspecting economists. In the article below, the financial analyst even attributes the origin of the phrase “currency war” to Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega, who gauged the issue a week ago:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-09/currency-tensions-may-be-curbed-with-imf-help-strauss-kahn-says.html

Wait! What?! I don’t know who exactly coined the term first, but I know it wasn’t some guy named “Guido” only a week ago. Alternative economists and analysts (including myself) have been warning about this issue for years! In fact, top Chinese economist Song Hongbing, who has also lived and worked in the U.S., wrote a book highly popular in China called (…wait for it…) “Currency Wars”, which was first published back in 2007:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_Wars

Interestingly, Song’s book predicts the crash of 2008, and outlines how Western banking elites were planning to use numerous national fiat implosions to introduce a world currency. But let’s set Song aside for later…

The key here is that the idea and the danger of currency conflicts has been present and warned about repeatedly long before 2010. The reason the media is attempting to paint this topic as a surprise even though many have been loudly cautioning about it is simple; diversion of blame, away from central banks, and away from the establishment. A blithe rewriting of history in ‘real time’, if you will.

Here’s a little secret to telling the future, and you don’t have to be psychic either; just look at the strategies and rhetoric globalists used for the last crisis they created, and then apply them to the next one ad naseum. It works like magic! In 2008 as the credit crisis moved into full-gear, global bankers and MSM pundits everywhere starting shrugging their shoulders in faux denial like four-year-olds who had just raided the cookie jar. “Gee, how could this have happened! It came out of nowhere! We must set up a special commission to get to the bottom of this…blah blah, lies, half lies, quasi-truths, etc.” This is exactly the same kind of distraction we are beginning to hear in terms of the trade and currency tensions evolving today. In 2011, as the U.S. dollar moves towards complete disintegration, and our government and media slather propaganda on the disaster as some kind of unforeseen economic Pearl Harbor, just remember, it’s certainly not a surprise to global bankers, even if they claim ignorance.

Inflation Is So Fun, They Should Make It A Theme Park…

Almost immediately after the credit crisis became visible, establishment economists were calling for a devaluation of the dollar. Here is a Forbes article from 2008 which pretends as if it is anti-banker, then outlines why deliberate inflation is supposedly a “cure all”, which is exactly the kind of disinformation global bankers love:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/12/09/dollar-devaluation-gold-pf-ii-in_fb_1209soapbox_inl.html