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For Immediate Release
September, 18 2013, 03:03pm EDT
Contact:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
With Record Number in Poverty; Food Stamp Cuts?
McClatchy reports: "Republicans in the House of Representatives want to cut food stamp funding by $40 billion, despite a government report earlier this month that showed 17.6 million households had trouble putting enough food on the table last year."
WASHINGTON
McClatchy reports: "Republicans in the House of Representatives want to cut food stamp funding by $40 billion, despite a government report earlier this month that showed 17.6 million households had trouble putting enough food on the table last year."
TIMOTHY CASEY, ELIZABETH GRAYER, tcasey at legalmomentum.org
Casey is senior staff attorney with Legal Momentum, "the nation's oldest legal defense and education fund dedicated to advancing the rights of all women and girls." He said today: "The poverty report for 2012 just released by the Census Bureau indicates that the poverty rate was 15.0 percent in 2012, the same as in 2011, but well above the 12.3 percent rate in 2006, the year prior to the beginning of the 'Great Recession.' The 15 percent rate was the fourth highest in the past 45 years. The 40.9 percent poverty rate for single mother families was tied for the highest since 1997. The number of poor people, 46.5 million, was the highest ever.
"Adult women had a higher poverty rate than adult men in 2012 as they have had in every year since official poverty measurement began in the 1960s. The poverty rate for women was 14.5 percent compared to 11.0 percent for men."
Legal Momentum just issued a report: "Women's Poverty in the United States, 2012 -Poverty Rate Remains High, Gender Poverty Gap Persists."
Legal Momentum President Elizabeth Grayer states: "The Census data highlight the serious hardship facing many American families in the current economic crisis. The data indicate a high poverty rate and a continuing gender poverty gap in the United States -- facts that underscore the need for a social safety net that is accessible and adequate. Congress must reject the proposals for cuts in Food Stamps as those cuts would increase hunger and hardship. And it is time for Congress to enact sorely needed improvements in the TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families] program that would raise sub-poverty benefit levels and reduce the barriers that prevent eligible families from accessing benefits."
A nationwide consortium, the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) represents an unprecedented effort to bring other voices to the mass-media table often dominated by a few major think tanks. IPA works to broaden public discourse in mainstream media, while building communication with alternative media outlets and grassroots activists.
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Emily Heller, a Minneapolis resident who witnessed the shooting, told Minnesota Public Radio that she saw a federal agent confronting a woman who was sitting in her car and telling her to leave the area during an immigration enforcement operation in the neighborhood.
"She was trying to turn around, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in," Heller told MPR. "And he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times."
The identity of the woman shot by the agent has not yet been released, but US Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) wrote in a social media post that the woman was a US citizen.
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US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) echoed Smith and Frey's calls for ICE to get out of Minneapolis.
"ICE must stop terrorizing our communities and leave our city," she wrote in a social media post.
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"In the meantime, I ask folks to remain calm," Walz added.
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Trump, meanwhile, has misled the public about what drugs were supposedly on the boats. He has publicly stated that the ships were carrying fentanyl, a drug that has caused hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths in the US, dubbing it a "weapon of mass destruction."
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One bombed-out ship that washed up on the shores of Colombia in late December with two mangled corpses aboard was found to have only been carrying marijuana, which is legal in more than half of all US states. Other investigations have found that some of those killed in the strikes were fishermen or others not connected to the drug trade.
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