Free Republic

One of New York City's most well-to-do streets is not immune to the growing panhandling problem. It is a sunny summer morning on E. 29th St. and Park Ave. Business is brisk for panhandlers who zero in on drivers stopped at the light on the busy crosstown route. It's almost like an unofficial toll. There's no shame to them as they panhandle, knowing Fox 5 News cameras are right there. A man who says he's an Army veteran works the corner by day and sleeps in a city shelter by night.

Propaganda is about telling a good story. So when the media wants to tell a story of how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, they ignore inconvenient facts, such as the value of the various federal, state, and local transfer payments as well as the value of charitable contributions from private groups such as soup kitchens. That would interfere with the story that is needed to justify higher taxes and higher spending.

It’s an express train — to the bad old days. Cops are giving homeless people and panhandlers in the subways the kid-glove treatment, arresting subterranean scofflaws far less frequently than just two years ago, data show. The ranks of the homeless, meanwhile, have swelled to 1,841 this year — a 13 percent increase over last year’s tally, the city’s Department of Homeless Services says. For straphangers, it has created an atmosphere of fear. “I feel threatened, especially taking the train at night,” explained Brooklynite Lortashia Smith, who said she has been followed off trains several times. “The police can definitely...

Low wages lure Mr. Coffee to Mexico, far East Lillie Scott said goodbye to more than just workplace friends and her job of 26 years when Mr. Coffee shut the doors of its cavernous gray factory in a tidy Glenwillow industrial park. When Scott's $9-an-hour job making coffee makers four years ago was transferred to Mexico and Mississippi with 338 others, she and many workmates also bid farewell to financial security. Her sporadic jobs as a home health aide never last long enough to get benefits, and the $800 she gets in monthly unemployment between jobs doesn't cover her rent...

Johannesburg (CNSNews.com) - An American free market advocate calls the Earth summit now under way in South Africa, "a collection of advocates gathering to attack wealth." Chris Horner, an analyst with the free market advocacy group Competitive Enterprise Institute, said it is obvious that after two days, delegates to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development view wealth "as the root of evil behind environmental problems, when in reality, all evidence is to the contrary." Horner told CNSNews.com the summit participants have referred to economic growth using terms such as "greed" and "rapacious," and those who seek wealth as...