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The Casamira Apartments building

Nearly 100 tenants at the Casamira Apartments in Detroit have been without electricity since Thursday, after their landlord refused to repair the electrical system after a power failure. An electrical transformer outside the building failed on Thursday, damaging the internal wiring of the building along with it.

Tenants were forced to heat their homes with their ovens and to preserve food by hanging it outside their windows in plastic bags. They had no heat, no hot water, and the hallways were pitch dark.

The situation arises just weeks after a tragic fire on Dexter Avenue on the city’s near east side claimed the lives of three people—including two disabled workers—living without utilities after DTE Energy cut them off for non-payment. The fire, which was likely caused by a space heater or electrical failure, highlighted the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in economically depressed southeast Michigan are living without power.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Detroit fire marshal condemned the apartment building as a safety hazard, and ordered the residents to evacuate. They were bussed to a nearby hotel and told they would not be able to return until the landlord resolved the building’s electrical issues.

The “Great Recession” of 2008 and 2009 has spread poverty to millions more US children, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institute. The report, “The Effects of the Recession on Child Poverty,” estimates that a large number of states witnessed marked increases in child poverty in 2009.

In 2008, one in five US children under age 18 lived in families below the official poverty level, according to Census Bureau data released in September 2009. The figure now is significantly higher, according to Brookings researcher Julia B. Isaacs. The census poverty statistics for 2008 “lag considerably behind current economic conditions,” Isaacs writes. “Job losses and wage reductions occurring in 2009 were obviously not captured. In addition, many adverse events in 2008 were only partially captured.”

The report’s estimates are based on the rapid increase in the use of food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is taken as a fairly accurate predictor of poverty growth.

Some six million Americans—one in 50 people in the US—are living on no income other than $100 or $200 a month in food stamps, according to an analysis of state data by the New York Times. The number of people who reported that they are unemployed and receive no cash aid—neither welfare, nor unemployment insurance, pension benefits, child support or disability pay—the newspaper reported, has jumped by 50 percent over the last two years, as the recession has taken hold.

According to the January 3 article, the number of people reporting no income tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in Florida and New York, and increased nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In Wayne County, Michigan—which includes Detroit, where half the population is unemployed or underemployed—one out of every 25 residents reports an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Washington, the figure is one out of every 17.

The figures reveal the vast scale of human suffering in the US as the new decade begins and puts the lie to talk of an economic “recovery.” The 6 million people in households reporting no income—which includes 1.2 million children—is equivalent to the entire population of Indiana or Massachusetts, or the combined populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston.

A protracted cold spell eased somewhat Wednesday, but wide areas of the US—from the Northern Plains to the East Coast and stretching to the South—were bracing for more winter weather and freezing temperatures this weekend. The cold snap has spelled misery for many, especially in areas unaccustomed and ill-prepared for the frigid conditions.

The freezing weather has placed in sharp relief the devastating social impact of mass unemployment, growing poverty and the refusal of the Obama administration to provide any serious relief for the victims of the economic crisis.

The arctic blast began last weekend and has been blamed for a least seven confirmed deaths. The number is likely far higher, and confirmed deaths can be expected to climb as packed shelters turn away people seeking refuge and communities struggle to provide a warm place for the growing ranks of the homeless.

Other households may have a roof over their heads, but have had their utilities shut off due to non-payment. The use of space heaters, fires, candles and other unsafe sources of heating and electricity leaves families vulnerable to house fires.

An important measure of future home sales fell far more sharply in November than economists had expected. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) index on pending home sales—contracts agreed upon but not finalized—dropped by 16 percent in November, more than three times what economists interviewed by the Dow Jones Newswires had anticipated.

The pending home sales index registered declines in every region: 26 percent in the Northeast and Midwest, 15 percent in the South, and 3 percent in the West.

“It will be at least early spring before we see notable gains in sales activity as home buyers respond to the recently extended and expanded tax credit,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the NAR.

The sharp drop-off was caused, in part, by a surge of pending home sales in October, as buyers sought to take advantage of a federal tax credit set to expire on November 30. After Congress reinstated the credit until April 30, the pressure to buy before the deadline was removed and the pool of home buyers shrank.

The US media has been virtually silent on the colossal year-end bonuses for 2009 that will shortly be handed out by major American banks and financial firms. This is doubtless a deliberate response by the corporate-controlled media to popular anger over the financial gains reaped by Wall Street executives, who have been bailed out at taxpayer expense while working people have been left to face depression levels of unemployment and mounting home foreclosures, hunger and poverty.

A brief article published on the inside pages of the business section of the January 1 New York Times (“With Bigger Bonuses, An Upside for Banks”) notes in passing that the three top Wall Street banks will pay out an estimated $49.5 billion in cash bonuses and stock awards.

Those banks—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley—received a combined $45 billion in cash under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in October of 2008. Along with the rest of the banks, they have benefitted from trillions of dollars in nearly interest-free loans, debt guarantees, securities purchases and other subsidies from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

Several hundred high school students, joined by teachers, parents and transit workers, demonstrated in Manhattan Monday against last week’s decision by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to eliminate free bus and subway fares for nearly 600,000 students in New York City.

The demonstration was largely organized by the students themselves using the Internet and the social networking Web site Facebook. At the spirited rally in front of the MTA’s Madison Avenue headquarters, they chanted slogans such as “no transportation, no education,” and “we won’t pay, MTA.” Many held homemade signs bearing slogans that included “Bail out the students, not the banks,” and “Don’t take our transportation or our education.”

The free student fare cards that the MTA has provided to New York’s students for over 60 years are good for three rides a day, allowing students to make it from home to school and back and, if needed, get to sporting events or other extra-curricular activities. Paying these fares out of pocket would cost students and their parents at least $1,200 a year.

Given that the median income of families that send their children to New York City’s public schools is $33,750, paying these fares out of pocket is simply unaffordable for a large section of the population.

A survey shows that more than 8.2 million US households received utility assistance through the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) for fiscal year 2009, about 2.1 million more than the previous year. In a December 18 press release, the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association (NEADA), an organization of state and tribal administrators of LIHEAP, issued the findings of their survey of fiscal year 2009 data.

Disbursed to state governments and administered by a patchwork of local agencies, LIHEAP is the primary program in the United States to help low-income individuals and families struggling with their utility payments. The data released by NEADA shows both the dire conditions faced by millions of American families as well as the callous indifference of the establishment to their situation.

The more than 25 percent jump in households receiving assistance through LIHEAP for 2009 over 2008 is largely the result of an increase in funding for the program by Congress, which raised the total appropriation for LIHEAP from $2.57 billion to $5.1 billion. This is still a wholly inadequate sum to address the utility needs of the population, given the ease with which the government has appropriated funds vastly larger for the Wall Street bailout and the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

David Tepper, manager of the hedge fund Appaloosa Management, is set to pocket more than $2.5 billion this year after successfully gambling that the Obama administration would provide unlimited public funds to bail out the major banks. According to an article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Tepper’s firm, which specializes in buying up “distressed” shares and assets, has already racked up $7 billion in profits this year.

In the early stages of the bank bailout, the Journal reports, investors were fearful that the government might ultimately nationalize major banks, which would have wiped out shareholders. These fears, combined with the virtual collapse of credit markets and huge losses reported by some of the biggest Wall Street firms, led to a sharp fall in bank stocks.

But, according to the Journal, when the Obama administration announced its Financial Stability Plan in early February of this year, including a virtually open-ended commitment to inject capital into the banks, Tepper interpreted the plan as a signal that the government would do whatever was necessary to cover the bad debts of the financial elite. He took for good coin repeated statements by top administration officials that they had no intention of taking control of teetering Wall Street firms.