Nearly 46 million Americans are now taking food stamps. Those numbers are up 8.1 per cent over the past year. Indeed, nearly 15 per cent of people living in the world's richest country were dependent on food stamps in August.
At the same time, a new study out of the Brookings Institution shows that the number of Americans living in communities of extreme poverty soared by one-third between 2000 and 2009. The clustering of the poor has a devastating impact on the broader society because it spills over. It has fuelled the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
As David Graeber writes in The Guardian, it could mark the beginning of a political shift that will transform the world. "When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire."
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