'usury'! I grew up in a slum neighborhood, there were many folks who supported their families through criminal activities. My step father was a bookmaker ("bookie"), his best friend & banker was a loanshark, neither were violent & neither used violence as a means in their business, & neither were nearly as deadly as the industry is today, legally, actually both were very hornorable men & reguarded as good men in their community. Ya, you'd have to be there to believe it, I know. The government put both, along with many others out of business by legalizing gambling & the growth of the legal loan industry. The credit & loan industry now charges far more in interest than what was charged back when loaning cash was illegal which I believe over 20% made it usury & illegal.
Anyway, back to poverty.

Yes, companies do need to make profits to continue to stay competive but they don't need to steal from their employees, as in pension funds, by not paying overtime by classifiying many of their workers as management when they're not, by flooding their payrolls with parttime employees so they can skate free without giving benifits.
They also don't need to flood the market with cheap products & crush their competition & manufactures by running what tends to be a monoply that kills both the competition & their employees. The government has corpporations the right to run ramshod over their workers by killing unions, passing laws that advocate watering down workers rights & a host of other agreements that stirp what little the nations employees had fought for since the days of the "Robber Barons", those days are here again! There was a time when the "American Deam" included a retirement with health benifits & a liveable pension when those loyal to the concept gave 30 yrs of their working lives to help make a company strong. They looked forward to spending the rest of their lives relaxing. The combo of big business & goverment has destroyed this dream, this promise, this trust agreement in favor of profits.
There used to be insentives (both their own & goverment) in investing
in their own research & development just as there were incentives for individules & companies to invest in solor power, but here it is 40 yrs later & all is that is missing & we're only not coming back to that. There was a time when companies sold themselves for the benifit of themselves & their workers instead of using bankrupticies & buy outs to strip off the valuables & leave the skeleton & crumbs for the vultures to pick from. The working class as well as the poor have been systematicly stripped of their resources & advantages that were once theirs to use in order to get ahead, that's all gone now. And one wonders why the gap & the trust grows between the rich & poor. Just look for a minute at our present economy. Where's the money going, follow it, it's not going to health, education, social services, housing, food production, enviorment, clean, safe or renewable enegry. It follows the path of least resistence, intro the pockets of big business & it's political machine.

The housing market, sorry I don't have time for that one right now!!

Maybe it'll take a revolution to wake up the sleeping giant. Cause from where I stand not enough people realize that we are their "beasts of burden", their cattle that they feed off of, we are their "bread & butter".

Gotta go

Barry