s "the worst defeat for the British Empire ever,"

8,000 people which produced a short-list of five men to compete for the title of Britain's greatest military enemy

widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.

t things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.

earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes -- though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.

-- the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans -

The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.

many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained

a healthy diet wasn’t always an option.  And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.

and and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recessi

suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job los

Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” -- formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.

were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappea

cut back on health care.

e to moves and suspensions of telephone service

Food i

“food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.

urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

ncrease the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space -- by doubling up or renting to couch-surfer

“people who’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope by doubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or by paying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.”

g members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.

- a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitutio

The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels.

? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they h

elp you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.

Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.

ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs -- only to find that those skills are no longer in demand.

44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.

When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”

40 jobs a week

miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, wh

were “frankly a joke.”

, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.”  There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welf

fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.

The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.

Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.

Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges...”

the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty.

ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.

ban on begging

grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.

“They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”

, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leadi

way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

e government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement.

 Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, then penalize people for falling into debt.

The experience of the poor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks. And if you should try to escape this nightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.

r staggering level of incarceration,

g. And what public housing remains has become ever more prison-like, with random police sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposed drug tests for residents.

The safety net, or what remains of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

official level of poverty increasing -- to over 14% in 2010 -- some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

clear case for independence

directly attacked the political, economic, and ideological obstacles to achieving it.

British rule was responsible for nearly every problem in colonial society

Challenging the King's paternal authority in the harshest terms, he mocked royal actions in America and declared that "even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their own families."

unified action.

only be resolved by colonial independence.

in the most graphic, compelling and recognizable terms the suffering that the colonies had endured, reminding his readers of the torment and trauma that British policy had inflicted upon them.

resonated with their firm belief in liberty and determined opposition to injustice

blunt language that colonists of different backgrounds could understand.

write in plain language

accessible to colonists rich and poor.

powerful, dramatic and often scathing -- especially when describing the monarchy. Paine described the kings of England as mere usurpers who, like criminals, had seized power by force:

sold over one hundred fifty thousand copies in its first printing

profits instead turning his share over to the American cause. *

irrefutable argument for separation from England

revolution as not only achievable but inevitable.

  The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure is.

stole copies of top-secret documents and bugged the office’s phones.

As the prowlers were preparing to break into the office with a new microphone, a security guard noticed that they had taped the building’s lock

August, Nixon gave a speech in which he swore that his White House staff was not involved in the break-in. Most voters believed him, and in November the president was reelected in a landslide.

provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars.

abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice

Early in 1974, the cover-up began to fall apart. On March 1, a grand jury appointed by a new special prosecutor indicted seven of Nixon’s former aides on various charges related to the Watergate affair. The jury, unsure if they could indict a sitting president, called Nixon an “unindicted co-conspirator.” 

s voted to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up and several violations of the Constitution. Finally, on August 5, Nixon released the tapes, which provided undeniable evidence of his complicity in the Watergate crime

Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They w

he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he had committed while in office. Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They w

Some of Nixon’s aides were not so lucky: They

fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media.

In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon

In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1. For the U.S. effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok; they tested the craft with chimpanzees, and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin's launch. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit).

Later that May, President John F. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and by the end of that year, the foundations of NASA's lunar landing program--dubbed Project Apollo--were in place.

500 percent

budget was increased

After landing successfully on July 20, Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon's surface; he famously called the moment "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

By landing on the moon, the United States effectively "won" the space race that had begun with Sputnik's launch in

ublic's attention was captivated by the space race, and the various developments by the Soviet and U.S. space programs were heavily covered in the national media. This frenzy of interest was further encouraged by the new medium of television. Astronauts came to be seen as the ultimate American heroes, a

Soviets, in turn, were pictured as the ultimate villains, with their massive, relentless efforts to surpass America and prove the power of the communist system.

Soyuz vehicle. When the commanders of the two crafts officially greeted each other, their "handshake in space" served to symbolize the gradual improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations in the late Cold War-era.

Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response, President Truman announced

that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or "superbomb." Stalin followed suit.

the nuclear age could be. It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan. Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.

ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life as well. People built bomb shelters in their backyards

attack drills in schools and other public places

Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.

first man-made object to be placed into the Earth's orbit.

Sputnik

1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army

Space Race was underwa

creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space. Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.

U.S. would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. His prediction came true on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became the first man to set food on the moon, effectively winning the Space Race for the Americans.

hearings designed to show that communist subversion in the United States was alive and well.

forced hundreds of people who worked in the movie industry to renounce left-wing political beliefs and testify against one another. More than 500 people lost their jobs. Many of these "blacklisted" writers, directors, actors and others were unable to work again for more than a decade

include anyone who worked in the federal government. Thousands of federal employees were investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As this anticommunist hysteria spread throughout the 1950s, liberal college professors lost their jobs, people were asked to testify against colleagues and "loyalty oaths" became commonplace.

military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south

but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.

. The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial "Third World" Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north. Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the re

new approach to international relations.

Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004). Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywher

nstead of viewing the world as a hostile, "bi-polar" place, he suggested, why not use diplomacy instead of military action to create more poles? To that end, he encouraged the United Nations to recognize the communist Chinese government and, after a trip there in 1972, began to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. At the same time, he adopted a policy of "détente"–"relaxation"–toward the Soviet Union. In 1972, he and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old threat of nuclear war.

, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the worl

redefined Russia's relationship to the rest of the world: "glasnost," or political openness, and "perestroika," or economic reform

the Berlin Wall–the most visible symbol of the decades-long Cold War–was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart. The Cold War was over.