During our poverty tour last year, we met countless people caught in vicious cycles of looking for nonexistent jobs because their unemployment benefits were expiring or had run out, scraping change together for gas to go on interviews that may or may not pan out, and having to swap food stamps for cash to keep the lights or gas on in the house.

CNN: Promise of the American Dream is broken

But the harm they do as a destroyer of habitat, by ripping up corals and sponges, and wrecking the nurseries of fish species that grow very slowly, seems out of proportion to any gain from scraping the ocean floor: one zoologist has compared it to cutting down virgin forests, full of rare species, to collect squirrels.

ECONOMIST: Marine conservation

By 1996 Kapac decided to get out of the business, and Wynne started scraping together a bid.

FORBES: Magazine Article

It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: History's tragic farce

Add it all up, and Chestnut's married clients shell out practically all of their monthly income on living expenses, scraping to save anything beyond a retirement plan contribution.

FORBES: The Cost Of Being Married Versus Being Single

Day in day out, decade after decade, he is in his studio working away, scraping off and starting again.

ECONOMIST: Leon Kossoff