If you missed this segment on 60 Minutes last night, I highly recommend it. It will remind you of John Steinbeck or Upton Sinclair's depiction of poverty and economic need, except this is really happening in this country right this minute.

Children living in cars with their parents after their parents have lost everything -- employment, their homes, their possessions -- everything. Rick Scott should be ashamed, since both of the families featured live in Florida. He should be ashamed not only because of the cuts and hacks to jobs and Florida's economy, but because at least one of these families was afraid to go and get help from the state government for fear of having their children taken away.

Poverty is not neglect; it is not a failure of the parents. There is no justification for breaking up families because they've fallen on hard times. But we live in a time where there is nothing for them. Nothing.

While conservatives paint these people as ne'er-do-wells who want to sponge off the government resources, the truth is something else again. I recently spoke to an acquaintance who has been unemployed for two years. He is in the construction business. When we spoke in October, he was putting his things in storage because he expected to be evicted after not being able to pay his rent. He couldn't pay his rent because his bank account had been garnished by the state for income taxes he didn't owe -- he didn't make enough to file a tax return (not realizing he was eligible for refunds if he had).

The bank had foreclosed on his house but didn't change the title on the loan, and the second trust deed holder was making payments to save their investment. They reported the interest paid on the loan to the state and the state assumed he had at least enough income to pay the house payments even though he had been foreclosed on in 2008. He filed his tax returns to correct the state issues, but not in time to get the lien lifted to pay his November rent. I haven't heard the end to this story, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to hear that he's living in his car too.

These are people just like the neighbors down the street, or the people you run into at the grocery store. Yet here is what our conservative overlords want us to think of them.

Rand Paul: We shouldn't borrow from China for unemployment benefit extensions to pay people not to work.

David Vitter: Gut the food stamp program. This sentiment has been echoed by Senator Sessions and many Republicans in the House.

Republican Presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich: Deny single mothers any benefits at all. Make them work and if they can't find a job or can't work, well, too bad. Let them starve. From his white paper on how to dismantle the social safety net:

No automatic benefits would be handed out any longer for bearing a child out of wedlock. If the mother has a child without a husband, then the mother must go to work to support the child.

Each one of these statements reflects the attitude of conservatives toward those who are suffering in our society. It's fairly simple: If you are impoverished, you are at the mercy of those who control the pursestrings. Newt, for example, advocates repeal of the capital gains tax, Dodd-Frank, the Affordable Care Act, and privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Nothing says compassion like handing the whole cake to the Wall Streeters so they can gamble it away yet again, right?

This 60 Minutes report highlights the depth of systemic failure in this country. There is no excuse for a country with the wealth this one has to tolerate seeing families live out of their cars as their final option. There is no excuse for flying the middle finger in the face of people who have fallen on hard times. There is no excuse for anyone to fear losing their children because they cannot find a job and are having difficulty providing. These people are human beings, deserving of dignity and opportunity, which they will not find in the austere hallways of corporate and conservative overlords.

Here's a bonus link from PoliticusUSA: Collateral Damage: The GOP’s Obama Hate Pushes 100 Million Towards Poverty

I just sat on my sofa Sunday evening and cried, counting each of my many blessings. I know that the economy was pulled back from the brink of a massive depression by the stimulus bill, as milquetoasty as it was. But no one can possibly argue looking at these kids, who deserve so much better than fate has handed them, that the recovery has been nearly enough and we simply MUST have a jobs program to put people back to work.

Unemployment continues to hover around nine percent and job creation is so slow, it'll be years before we get back the seven and a half million jobs lost in the Great Recession. American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers.

The combination of lost jobs and millions of foreclosures means a lot of folks are homeless and hungry for the first time in their lives. One of the consequences of the recession that you don't hear much about is the record number of children descending into poverty. The government considers a family of four to be impoverished if they take in less than $22,000 a year. Based on that standard, and the government projections of unemployment, it is estimated that the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent.

As we first reported last March, those children would be the largest American generation to be raised in hard times since the Great Depression.

In Seminole County, near Orlando, Fla., so many kids have lost their homes that school busses now stop at dozens of cheap motels where families crowd into rooms, living week to week.

I can't be callous and Randian and write these children off as moochers. In these most critical moments of brain and personality development, these children know hunger, instability and violence. Some, like Destiny's older brother, quit school to find work to help the family. Will his own future be permanently compromised by quitting school? Does that cycle of poverty ever get broken?

Add to that the twist of the knife of having Rick Scott as Governor. These children are nothing more than collateral damage to him.

See more videos at InvisiblePeopleTV.

One of the things that I always keep in mind as I watch these Sunday shows and listen to the elite opine on the state of the world is that very real people are affected by this insular navel-gazing. People that I promise you never cross the mind of Dick Armey or Sarah Palin. Please take a few minutes to look at some of Mark's videos of homeless people--people who are not lazy or entitled or unwilling to work or better their situation--and remember that it is these invisible people who are being affected by our insane trust in Republican economic policies of free markets and deregulation. And we're adding to their rolls every day by not changing.

And it's not a pretty sight:

Hawaii public schools are closed most Fridays, rats scurry across bananas in uninspected stores and there may not be enough money to run the next election.

About the only parts of the state untouched by the foul economy are its sparkling beaches and world-class surfing.[..]

"There is community energy and outrage building up," said James Koshiba, a co-founder of the activist organization and Web site Kanu Hawaii, speaking about the cuts to education. "The people have to play a bigger role. Folks won't forget how this unfolds come election time."

— Hawaii now has the shortest school year in the nation after the state and teachers union agreed to shutter schools for 17 days a year, leaving 171,000 students without class on most Fridays. Negotiations to reopen them collapsed last week.

— Food establishments often go uninspected, a fact highlighted by an Internet video showing rats roaming freely across produce in a Honolulu Chinatown market. The state has just nine health inspectors on Oahu to handle nearly 6,000 markets and restaurants.

— The state Elections Office said it may not be able to afford a pending special election, which would leave half of the state's population without representation in the U.S. House of Representatives until September 2010.

— Homelessness is on the rise as mental health, child abuse, welfare and daycare programs run short on cash.

And next year may be even worse because tax revenues continue to plunge with the economy.

Hawaii is far from alone in cutting the size of government during the global financial downturn, with nearly every state resorting to across-the-board cuts, furloughs or layoffs to make ends meet. This tiny state of 1.3 million residents faces a projected $1 billion budget deficit through June 2011.

But Hawaii stands apart in how its government shrinkage has ripped into what are generally considered to be core functions: education, public health, elections and services for the disadvantaged.

Gov. Linda Lingle warned that government would not look the same after she ordered most departments to slash their budgets by about 14 percent.

I know it's tantamount to heresy amongst the teabaggin' crowd, but the root of "socialism" is also in "society". We pay taxes to benefit our entire society. Cutting taxes simply is not the answer, as should be obvious from what's happening in Hawaii. And what are the long term ramifications to education, and programs to the neediest among us?

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Bill O'Reilly's been on a jag the past couple of months claiming that the mainstream media are dying on the vine because of their "far left" bias, which he think is killing them economically. Last night on his Talking Points Memo segment, he continued this thesis by pointing to a couple of cases.

The first is the swine flu story, which he says so confused him and his staff they just didn't report on it. So up front, we get an admission these may not be the sharpest journalistic tools in the shed.

Then he continues:

O'Reilly: Second example: In early March, reports out of Sacramento, California, said a very important story was a homeless camp featuring hundreds of people damaged by the recession, was a very important situation.

[video clip]

O'Reilly: Wow! Can you believe it?

Guess what? Story's bogus!

The Economist magazine, a British publication, writes, quote: "the tent city had actually been around for close to a decade. There may have been a foreclosed homeowner or two among its denizens, but ... almost all of the people there have problems with mental health, drug abuse or both."

Again, it took a British magazine to tell the truth about a false story generated by the U.S. media.

But if you actually read read the Economist piece, you can see clearly that its intent is not to "debunk" the "tent city" story but to argue that it's not important.

It attempts this with a shoddy and shallow piece of reporting; if the writer was only able to find "one or two" foreclosed homeowners among the tent city residents, he wasn't trying very hard. Indeed, he likely wasn't looking at all; MSNBC's Chris Jansing (in the piece O'Reilly clips) was able to interview three of them for her piece. Indeed, a more honest journalistic effort -- such as that from the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago -- makes clear that it's a complex story, but there's no question that the recession is a major driver in the very real expansion of California's homeless population.

As for the camp having existed in some form or another in that locale for some time, that in fact had already been widely reported -- including by, among others, O'Reilly's arch-nemesis, the New York Times -- over a month ago:

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