Published at: 12/11/2025 09:00 PM

(Capitalist Visual Report, October 4, 2025; Life, June 1964 and Time, May 1968 — August 1977)

• According to the U.S. National Bureau of Censuses and Statistics, today there are 57,145,854 people living below the poverty line, of whom 24,727,580 live in extreme poverty, that is, one in five Americans lives on the brink of hunger.
• At the time of reading these lines, 109,000 elderly people live abandoned on the streets, 771,480 families are homeless, 5 people die every five minutes from an opioid overdose and 3 people are killed every hour with firearms, at the rate of 7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
• From 1960 to today, 2025, the old maps that described the geography of hunger, violence and drugs, limited to large cities, have been expanded to 52 federal entities. Hunger in the United States, its collaterals, violence and addictions, are diseases that have been expanding for decades.
• The old belts of misery now encompass entire cities. Former industrial metropolises, such as thriving Detroit, are now ghost towns and the bucolic mountain valleys of the Appalachians are now “ghettos” housing 25 million whites in utter misery. These are known as “White Trash”.
• The scandalous poverty of the 25 million white people living in the greatest abandonment in Appalachia inspired, during the 1964 election campaign, the creation of stamps or food stamps to alleviate the hardships of this population.
• The phenomenon is old, between 1964, 1968 and 1977, the magazines Time and Life, in separate special editions, reported the rise of hunger and drug trafficking, associated with the increase in poverty and violence as structural problems installed within a wildly capitalist and unequal society.
• As early as 1969, the United States had 29,700,000 people living in extreme poverty, three times the population of Belgium and 35 million poor people in general. The crime rate was the highest in the world, and the use of narcotic and psychotropic substances was widespread throughout its 9,147,593 square kilometers of territory.
• At the beginning of that decade, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known by its acronym SNAP, emerged. Welfare measure to feed 13% of the population. At that time, the United States had an estimated population of 192,461,000 inhabitants.
• The SNAP, now deliberately torpedoed by Trump, puts 74 million people at risk of famine.
• Hand in hand with structural poverty, the explosion of structural violence occurred in those 1950s, mainly racial and police violence, combined with illegal trafficking in addition to the massive use of opiates and cocaine.
• By January 1972, 62% of the population, between the ages of 12 and 32, had experienced the use of heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, or marijuana. In other words, within those parameters, 72 million people had ventured into the drug underworld.
• In 2025, when the dying U.S. empire has 347,927,768 inhabitants, 1% of the affluent population accounts for 70% of the national wealth and 74 million Americans (21%) are at risk of being left without a daily plate of food. This is thanks to government policies that allocate $997 trillion to military spending, while the education system, sports fields, free municipal schools and social programs for general welfare are being dismantled.

Mazo News Team