Genna Saucedo supervises cashiers at a Wal-Mart in Pico Rivera, California, but her wages aren’t enough to feed herself and her 12-year-old son.

Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive because of government handouts in what has rapidly become a food stamp nation.

Altogether, there are now almost 46 million people in the United States on food stamps, roughly 15 percent of the population. That’s an increase of 74 percent since 2007, just before the financial crisis and a deep recession led to mass job losses.

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I have spoken to this many times in public. Those with the capacity to hire American workers”•small businesses as well as large, publicly traded or private”•are immobilized. Not because they lack entrepreneurial zeal or do not wish to grow; not because they can’t access cheap and available credit. Rather, they simply cannot budget or manage for the uncertainty of fiscal and regulatory policy. In an environment where they are already uncertain of potential growth in demand for their goods and services and have yet to see a significant pickup in top-line revenue, there is palpable angst surrounding the cost of doing business. According to my business contacts, the opera buffa of the debt ceiling negotiations compounded this uncertainty, leaving business decisionmakers frozen in their tracks….

…put yourself in the shoes of a business operator. On the revenue side, you have yet to see a robust recovery in demand; growing your top-line revenue is vexing. You have been driving profits or just maintaining your margins through cost reduction and achieving maximum operating efficiency. You have money in your pocket or a banker increasingly willing to give you credit if and when you decide to expand. But you have no idea where the government will be cutting back on spending, what measures will be taken on the taxation front and how all this will affect your cost structure or customer base. Your most likely reaction is to cross your arms, plant your feet and say: “Show me. I am not going to hire new workers or build a new plant until I have been shown what will come out of this agreement.” Moreover, you might now say to yourself, “I understand from the Federal Reserve that I don’t have to worry about the cost of borrowing for another two years. Given that I don’t know how I am going to be hit by whatever new initiatives the Congress will come up with, but I do know that credit will remain cheap through the next election, what incentive do I have to invest and expand now? Why shouldn’t I wait until the sky is clear?”

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It’s not yet 10am and the 64-year-old bishop has already presided over Holy Communion at St Paul’s, hosted an overnight visit from the new bishop of Durham and held a breakfast meeting to discuss diocesan links with Nigeria. He is now on his way to address the pupils of a Church of England secondary school in a deprived part of north London, then it’s a dash to King’s College London to appraise the dean in a meeting with the principal, then back home to counsel a US priest distressed by tensions within the Anglican communion. The previous evening he was up late addressing the General Synod, the legislative body of the Church of England.

“You can’t survive unless you believe in early hours,” he says. “As soon as the morning office starts at 7.30am you are available to people.” He never attends the morning office in the cathedral, however, because the new order of service is used and Chartres, an implacable traditionalist, prefers the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, he rises at 6am and says morning prayer by himself in a back room in the deanery before it fills up with the staff who occupy most of the building.

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Catholic and Anglican Bishops weighed in on economic and security matters at the weekend, as both groups criticised the approach of President Goodluck Jonathan to the menace posed by Boko Haram in the North, and expressed concern over Islamic banking.

Over 20 Bishops of the Anglican Communion who congregated at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Ogharefe Delta State at the First Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Sapele condemned the introduction of Islamic banking. They urged Abuja to review the conditions for the approval of non-interest banking and make all possible amendments that would ensure the interest of every religious group in Nigeria is protected….

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“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”

It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.

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Standing under a funnel here–you know the feeling; KSH.

Check it out–ugh.

(The figures are from May, the most recent available).

No fair clicking until you make your answer.

We discussed this in yesterday’s Adult Sunday school–KSH.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

Like many South Carolinians facing surging medical costs, [Ken] Riddle wants to know why premiums keep rising. Here, annual premiums for private health insurance have risen about 85 percent for individuals and 75 percent for families in the past decade, federal data show.

South Carolina regulators can take at least some of the blame. Many factors contribute to soaring health care costs, but lax state regulation — an area increasingly scrutinized as national health care reform takes effect — has contributed to the problem, critics said.

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Born in Detroit, Mich., on Jan. 10, 1928, [Philip] Levine received degrees from Wayne State University and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and in 1957 was awarded the Jones Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford. As a student, he worked a number of industrial jobs at Detroit’s auto-manufacturing plants, including Detroit Transmission””a branch of Cadillac””and the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory. Levine has said about writing poems in his mid-20s during his factory days: “I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry, I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought, too, that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life””or at least the part my work played in it””I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”

–from the announcement that the Librarian of Congress has appointed Philip Levine Poet Laureate (my emphasis)

1. Love Words 2. Tell the Truth 3. Don’t Tell Lies 4.Read Well 5. Stay in Conversation 6. Share Stories 7. Love the Long Sentence 8. Practice Poetry 9. Attend to Translation 10. Play 11. Pray and 12. Cherish Silence.

You may see more about the book there.

Used by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon–KSH.

Libya’s endgame appears to be at hand, bringing to a climax an uprising against Muammar Qaddafi that just weeks ago appeared to be stalled by inexperience, disunity, and a lack of resources.

For months, Libya has been stalemated as rebels have surged forward, only to be pushed back by Qaddafi loyalists. But aided by NATO airstrikes and better organization, rebels have been steadily building momentum….

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Make us tender and compassionate towards those who are an overtaken by temptation, considering ourselves, how we have fallen in times past and may fall yet again. Make us watchful and sober-minded, looking ever unto thee for grace to stand upright, and to persevere unto the end; through thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous; for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

–Psalm 1

Holy Spirit “Abundantly Present” during Worship in a Converted Garage

Tom Kay can sum up the first Spanish-language Faith Alive weekend in five words: “The Lord was with us!”

Kay, a Faith Alive team leader based east of Dallas, Texas, says the June 10-12 event at Iglesia San Miguel, a burgeoning Anglican mission in the Diocese of Fort Worth, was the best he ever has attended, despite the fact that he does not speak Spanish.

From Kay’s first meeting with San Miguel’s vicar, Fr. Sergio Diaz, “the Spirit of the Lord was abundantly present … and intensified through the planning process.

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