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The Irwindale officials charged Wednesday with misappropriating public funds took lavish business trips to New York City, including meals at five-star restaurants, evenings at Broadway shows, chauffeured rides and nights at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, according to records obtained by The Times. The spending came as leaders in Irwindale spent $87 million in affordable housing funds over eight years, but only built 42 homes. Two trips to New York were for the purpose of discussing bonds for housing for the poor in the San Gabriel Valley city of about 1,500 people.

David Cameron today defended the Government's plans to limit housing benefit, saying it was not fair for working people to see their taxes used to fund homes 'they couldn't even dream of'. The Prime Minister dismissed reports there could be a climbdown over the proposals, telling Labour leader Ed Miliband: 'We are going forward with all the proposals we put in the spending review and in the Budget'.

Democratic Ad: Catholic Church More Concerned About Abortion Than Poor St. Paul, MN -- A campaign postcard the Minnesota Democratic Party sent to voters in the Midwestern state is causing a strong reaction from pro-life advocates. It claims the Catholic Church is more concerned with abortion than helping the poor. http://LifeNews.com/state-5604

Noting that over three billion people lack access to running water and flush toilets, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council declared that “it is the obligation of those with means to rectify this injustice.” Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN’s “Independent Expert” on human rights said that the UN’s declaration means that “the right to water and sanitation is now legally binding for all member nations. Pleading fiscal difficulties does not relieve a government of the obligation to provide this necessity.” Ms. de Albuquerque cited the imbalance between nations as “especially egregious when it comes to sanitation. America, for example has...

School choice, lower taxes, job creation: These, and not welfare payments, are what would really help the poor. In his autobiography, former British prime minister Tony Blair recounts the political epiphany that caused him to break with the old-style class-warfare–based Labour Party that he had grown up with. “In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class,” he writes, “not make them middle class.” In many ways, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats appear to have the same attitude about the American poor. They talk frequently about the poor. They lavish programs upon them. (Last year the Obama administration...

In 2009, 146,365 members of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul served 14,582,339 people. They gave 7,659,373 hours of service to their friends, the Poor.Members made 644,000 home visits, plus more than 910,000 visits to prisons, hospitals, elderly, and to others in need.The Society obtained jobs for more than 8,000 people, gave travelers aid to 83,000, and provided referrals for 382,000 people.Expenditures in service to the Poor totaled $329,447,590. In kind value of food, clothing and furniture totaled an estimated $80 million. The total value of Vincentian services across the USA is more than half a billion dollars....

Progress on meeting U.N. poverty goals by 2015 uneven * France, Spain, Greece urge tax to raise poverty funding * Bhutan proposes making happiness a development goal (Adds details from speeches, quotes, background) By Lesley Wroughton and Helen Popper UNITED NATIONS, Sept 20 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pressed debt-ridden donor countries on Monday not to cut aid to the poor despite their budgetary woes. "We should not balance budgets on the backs of the poor," Ban told 140 leaders at the start of a three-day summit to review progress in meeting U.N. poverty goals by 2015. During their...

US poverty rate hit 14.3 percent last year, up from 13.2 percent in 2008. The jump bring the number of the poor to its highest level since 1959, five years before the Johnson-era War on Poverty. The news from a US Census Bureau report released Thursday underscores how deeply the Great Recession has affected the nation's standard of living. The key findings of report, which compared income, poverty rate, and health-care insurance coverage in 2009 with 2008 numbers, include the following. 1) Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year – the highest number since 1959, five years...

The Obama Administration will be proposing a "Mini Stimulus" plan next week as left-wing economists like Paul Krugman charge that last year's $864 brillion stimulus spending bill was too small.

The media is ripe with hyperbolic aggrandizement of the growing gap between the rich and the poor. The left has made it a false flag to rally troops for class warfare which is neither healthy, productive, or beneficial for anyone involved. If this offends you or sounds counter-intuitive then I encourage you to read on and find a fault on merit rather than tired of mantras like, “the wealthy don't work for their money” or “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” These are examples of bumper sticker economics that aren't substantiated by fact or reason. Consider first...

Do credit card reward systems subsidize the rich at the expense of the poor? There has been a lot of press over the last week about a new research report out of the Boston Federal Reserve that claims that credit card payments are a form of regressive wealth transfer, taking money from the poor in the form of higher prices and giving to the rich in the form of credit card rewards. But before we all start crying foul and cutting up our credit cards, let's put down our pitchforks, take a deep breath, and think about this. It's...

Domino's Pizza pioneered a halal-only menu but has had to ditch the idea because of poor sales.Three of the pizza chain's branches banned pork and brought in meats satisfying Islamic laws 18 months ago but have reverted to their usual menu, including the meateor, pepperoni and Hawaiian. The pilot ‘hasn’t had the impact expected and the company has reluctantly decided to return to a conventional Domino’s menu’, it said in a letter to customers. ‘It did seem pretty unfair on non-Muslim pizza lovers,’ said pizza fan Chris Yates, 31. ‘It was as if I wasn’t allowed ham or pork on...

Hearing reports that Obama & the Dems have lost the confidence and the votes of the majority of the "poor". If true, they're burnt rats. >Bo)

Credit cards appear to be the reverse Robin Hoods of the financial world. A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says merchant fees and reward programs offered by many credit-card issuers essentially take money from those who have the least and give it to those who have the most. The imbalance may have to be remedied via government intervention, the authors, Scott Schuh, Oz Shy and Joana Stavins, argued. The paper was published as part of the bank’s Public Policy Discussion Papers on Monday. It comes amid big changes for the financial industry, as the nation’s bank...

There is much talk and discussion today about helping the poor and downtrodden here in the USA. The only true way to help individuals break free from the tyrannical cycle of poverty, however, is a Conservatism that is rooted in Biblical, Judean/ Christian truths and absolutes. Such values bestow upon these individuals a sense of reality and purpose in what otherwise would be a meaningless, “burned out” existence. Historically, Judean/ Christian values have been the only true advocate and hope for the poor since the fall of man (see Genesis 3:17-19). The word charity - as taught in the Bible...

Sometimes, government programs, subsidies and entitlements need no embellishment. In 2008, TracFone Wireless of Miami began distributing free cell phones to people who get food stamps, welfare or other government assistance. Recipients of the free cell phones are allowed to earn up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or no more than $33,075 a year for a family of four. The phones provide 68 free minutes a month and, in the words of The Philadelphia Inquirer, "they're paid for, in part, by charges on phone bills that the federal government allows carriers to levy." The free cells are...

The Likes of Obama and his Fascists friends have been attacking capitalism for many years, by turning one class of citizens against another.  This relentless class warfare attack has enabled them to finally gain control of every aspect of the government but the Supreme Court.  Thanks to their allies in the public school system, they have been able to convince the majority of Americans to now look down upon those who have prospered due to hard work and perseverance. Sometimes I think I must be living in an alternative universe where evil is good and good is evil.      ...

After all, nothing says "so long, suckers" like a race for glory in which drowsy rodents are steered with brooms and plastic garbage cans across a high school football field. No animals are injured in the annual running of the porcupines, say locals in western Idaho's Adams County. And neither are the humans, though some have been barbed by quills. Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/07/02/1253632/a-prickly-tradition.html#ixzz0sWw4gaoW

Imagine you are an unborn spirit whom God has condemned to a life of poverty but has permitted to choose the nation in which to live. I'm betting that most any such condemned unborn spirit would choose the United States. Why? What has historically been defined as poverty, nationally or internationally, no longer exists in the U.S. Let's look at it. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the 2009 poverty guideline was $22,000 for an urban four-person family. In 2009, having income less than that, 15 percent or 40 million Americans were classified as poor, but...

Shirley Fisher says she was evicted from a hostel near a stadium where soccer's biggest stars train. Natasha Flores says she was driven out of squatters' quarters near a new $450 million stadium in one of Cape Town's busiest tourist areas. Both ended up in Blikkiesdorp, a settlement of corrugated-iron shacks ringed by a concrete fence, home to hundreds of evicted families. Many residents say there is only one reason they wound up in this bleak place, which in Afrikaans means "tin-can town." "The World Cup," said Fisher, 41, without hesitation. Human rights campaigners say South African authorities have forcibly...