The Least Of My Brothers

The New York Times Editorial Page tells it like it is:

On two crucial issues this week, the extremists who dominate the Republican majority in the House of Representatives made it clear how little interest they have in the future prosperity of their country, or its reputation for fairness and decency. The House will refuse to consider a comprehensive immigration bill that could lead to citizenship for millions of immigrants, Republican leaders said on Wednesday, and will slowly and casually consider a few border-security measures that have no chance of passing on their own.
And, on Thursday, the House passed a farm bill that stripped out the food stamp program, breaking a pact that for decades has protected the nutrition needs of low-income Americans. It was the first time since 1973 that food stamps haven’t been part of a farm bill, and it reflected the contempt of the far right for anyone desperate enough to rely on the government for help to buy groceries.
These actions show how far the House has retreated from the national mainstream into a cave of indifference and ignorance. House members don’t want to know that millions of Americans remain hungry (in an economy held back by their own austerity ideology), and they don’t want to deal with the desperation of immigrant families who want nothing more than a chance to work and feed themselves without fear of deportation.

 ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."

Ending World Hunger

No, it is not a joke! It is completely doable. The Borgen Project at the UN estimates that the cost to end world hunger is $30 Billion per year (and yes that includes all the people starving here in the USA as well). Consider that we spent $90 Billion last year "winding down" the war in Afghanistan and it puts it in a little bit of a perspective. BTW, don't even think about what it is costing us to listen to everyone's email and phone conversations. Just Sayin'

Just to add a little insult to injury....the estimates are that we throw $ 43 Billion worth of perfectly good food in the bin in the U.S. every year and that it costs us over a Billion dollars to dispose of it.

Hunger Is Growing

While you're (maybe) contemplating your big Memorial Day cookout whether it be burgers or whatever don't think about this article in The Atlantic which discusses the current state of hunger in most of the developed countries of the world. We know, even though we rarely dwell upon it, that people are starving by the thousands in such places as Africa and the Middle East or India but we don't think of the U.S. as a place for hunger....wrong!

Nearly a Quarter of People in Greece and the U.S. Can't Afford Food

Hunger has grown dramatically in Europe since 2007

Olga Khazan May 23 2013, 1:09 PM ET

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A Greek man eats food distributed by the Athens Municipality on January 30, 2012. (Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)

No matter where you're from, not having enough to eat is the ultimate signifier of economic distress. Food is the base of Maslow's hierarchy. It's the first concern in disaster zones. It's usually the last thing to go -- after the car and the nice apartment -- when you lose your job.
If you can't afford food, there's really nowhere to go but up. That's why it's so shocking just how many more hungry people there are now in what were formerly known as the world's well-off nations. According to a new Pew report released today, almost a quarter of people (24 percent) in the United States and Greece answered "yes" to the question, "Have there been times during the last year when you did not have enough money to buy food your family needed?"
The levels in other Western countries weren't quite that high, but the rate at which hunger has swept the eurozone since 2007 is still really dramatic:

Tomorrow You Need To Remember

To put out a bag of canned goods for your local food banks:

You can help “Stamp Out Hunger” this weekend by joining with the Letter Carriers’ (NALC) in the largest one-day food drive in the nation. NALC asks that you collect canned goods and dry food, such as tuna, canned meat, soups, pasta, rice and cereal, and leave them in a bag or box by your mailbox on Sat., May 14. Your letter carriers will pick them up as they deliver your mail. NALC members will deliver the goods to local food banks, pantries and shelters to help needy families in 10,000 cities and towns in all 50 states and U.S. jurisdictions.
This is NALC’s 19th annual food drive, held on the second Saturday in May. National and local NALC food drive coordinators hope to expand on last year’s record of 77.1 million pounds of donations collected along postal routes. Over the past 18 years, NALC members have collected and donated more than one billion pounds of food to help feed hungry Americans.
Demands for food assistance have reached record levels. More than 50 million people—including 17.2 million children—live in households that are hungry or at risk of hunger, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s a 30 percent increase in one year and represents more than one in seven households in the country (14.6 percent).

Down We Go

Thanks to Cookie Jill over at Skippy's place here is a link to a must read over at the Great Orange Satan. It's basically a compilation of articles from the European press about where the U.S. sits in relation to other 'civilized' nations when it comes to health care, and other safety net issues. It will piss you off.

Here is just a sample:

(Daily Mail.co.uk) - America starves as executive pay rockets:
50MILLION people go hungry while Wall Street fatcats take home millions
By Daniel Bates
16th November 2010
A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.
Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as ‘food insecure’ which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat. Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.
The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...

Pig Boy on Hungry Kids

Not to be outdone  by the likes of Alice Waters, Rachel Ray and Michelle Obama, Rush Limbaugh has an answer for all those kids that are going to miss the nutrition provided by school lunches while on summer holiday.

Rush Limbaugh: Let them eat dumpster scraps. What a class act.

h/t BadTux

More Hungry

According to this piece in The Washington Post:

The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children -- more than one in five across the United States -- were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

Absolutely shameful!

This country needs to seriously reconsider the amount of money we are investing in war in light of the growing number of hungry people. The proposed 2010 budget for the DOD is 664 billion dollars and represents a 7% increase(you do the math) over 2009. WTF?

Before my recent 'early retirement' I was trying to make monthly contributions to the Atlanta Community Food Bank but I had to stop for obvious reasons and while such contributions are good and help they are not the answer. I am probably not the only one that has had to trim my charitable contributions and regardless, community food banks are not the solution and only meager stopgap. This shouldn't be happening in the greatest economy in the world, deficits or not. Hungry adults are one thing but children going hungry or being undernourished is criminal. Children deprived of proper nutrition will impact the qualityof the next generation in many ways and while we may not be able to give every child everything they need to "be the best they can be" we can at least not challenge them with hunger on top of the other problems we are 'gifting' them with.

A Billion Hungry!

Even when the world economy is rocking along the wealthy countries of the world have trouble meeting all of the demands for aid to the hungry. Now that we're in a global recession, it will only get worse.

Food aid is at a 20-year low despite the number of critically hungry people soaring this year to its highest level ever, the United Nations relief agency said Wednesday.

The number of hungry people will pass 1 billion this year for the first time, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said, adding that it is facing a serious budget shortfall.

More and More Criminals

Steve at YDD links to one in a series of articles by Barbara Ehrenreich in which she documents the many ways in which municipalities have made it illegal to be poor in America. There are links as well there to the two previous articles in the series. This is not pleasing or rewarding reading but something everyone should read.

As I commented over at Steve's place. There is only so much pain and suffering such a large group of people will take lying down. The ever increasing potential for violent demands for change will break sooner or later and it will be very ugly. The main stream media, when it deals with the trials of the current depression, are focusing on the 'middle class' or what Barbara calls the 'Nouveau Poor' but as she so aptly describes there existed a whole class of already poor when this depression arrived and they are being pushed further and further down the slope. It's absurd that this should be the case in a country with all the wealth of this one that people, through no fault of their own, should be forced to live in such misery.

Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

There are finally some answers on the productivity of GM or "franken foods". We've have been told for years and years by Monsanto and its ilk that with genetically modified foods in our arsenal we can feed the world. The truth, it appears, is not so much. A report just released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, reflects the results of the first long term study of both intrinsic and operational yields for GM crops versus crops from traditional breeding and selection processes. Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops concludes that traditional genetic crosses outperform genetically modified crops by a wide margin.

So what has been done is to release into the biosphere genetically modified plants with an unknown long term impact, produced herbicide resistant weeds and who knows what other disasters and all for naught. Monsanto has made buckets of money and put thousands of farmers out of business and all for naught. Act 5, scene 5 from Macbeth seems all to appropriate.

"Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

If you want to read the report you can read it at the link above and there is a concise FAQ as well. It ought to be very interesting to see how Monsanto deals with this.

h/t Marion

Looking for the Good Life

The right will call it "class warfare" but Kevin Drum at Mother Jones sums up pretty succinctly what the current situation, at least economically, is in the U.S.

This isn't just a matter of social justice. It's a matter of facing reality. If we want a strong economy, we can only get it over the long term if we figure out a way for the benefits of economic growth to flow to everyone, not just the rich. This is, by far, Barack Obama's biggest economic challenge. Until median wages start rising steadily and consistently, we haven't gotten ourselves back on track.

The thing is, and it is hard to understand, that most of America doesn't seem to understand that if we are going to continue to provide a good life for ourselves, our children and their children then there are going to have to be some fundamental changes in how things work.

I surely don't have all the answers but I do know that part of what has to happen in the country is that we have to rethink what the "good life" means. One of the most glaring problems is that we have been taught that the "good life" is a personal measurement. By that I mean we have been educated to believe that as long as I and my immediate family have a roof over our heads, food at every meal, most of the toys we want, and all the other superficial things that have come to define us, then all is cool. We are not taught that the true "good life" is, or should be, a collective measurement. Does everyone in my community, state or country have a secure place to live? Does everyone have enough good food to eat? Does everyone have health care? Does everyone that can have somewhere to work that pays a fair wage and id reasonably secure? Currently, the answer to each of these questions is a resounding NO.

How do we get there? Again, I don't have all the answers but here are some suggestions. National single payer health care that includes everyone, not just the people lucky enough to have a job with benefits. Higher minimum wage. A better educational system. More progressive taxation. A rethinking of national defense. An energy policy that is not insane. A return to sustainable agriculture. And, most of all, a massive cultural awakening to what a truly healthy, progressive and enlightened society should be. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

The disparity between the wealthy in this country and the rest of us is staggering and it is going to have to change. The wealthy in this country, while they control far and away most of the wealth in the country, cannot, by themselves support a truly healthy and vibrant economy. For decades most of the strides made in this country in productivity and the resulting wealth have flowed into the pockets of a tiny minority of the population and while you can call it "class warfare" until you are blue in the face the reality is that until this changes and the wealth of this country is more evenly distributed we are going to continue our spiral into a second rate nation. I am not arguing that everyone should receive the same, just that the gap between the haves and have nots gets narrowed pretty brutally. They rich can still be rich just not so much.

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy your families and the good food that so many of us are blessed and lucky to have. Take a moment and remember those of our fellow Americans that are doing without or needing help this year. Also remember that we have more than 180,000 young men and women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and even though there may be turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce in the chow hall they are far from home and in harm's way.
Maybe next year we can welcome the majority of the them home and share this holiday in person.

I have to go get my pie in the oven and get going on the dressing. See you back here tomorrow maybe.

It's Getting Hungry Out

The following should tell us something...

At a 600-acre farm in Platteville, Colorado, an astonishing 40,000 people from around the USA turned up this weekend ready to partake in the ancient practice of gleaning – the act of collecting leftover crops from farm fields following the harvest.

Joe and Chris Miller, the farm owners, had invited people from neighbouring communities to come and take home the remaining potatoes, leeks and carrots on their land - expecting between 5,000 to 10,000 people to show up.

When an estimated 11,000 vehicles converged on the farm, 37 miles north of Denver, Chris said, 'Overwhelmed' is putting it mildly... People obviously need food’.

The couple decided to open their fields to those suffering hardship and as a thank you to customers after being informed of raids in local churches where food was being stolen.

The farm visitors were so numerous and did such a thorough job of cleaning up the leftover vegetables on the Saturday, that the second day of gleaning had to be cancelled.

As many of us in the U.S. look forward to the traditional Thanksgiving dinner there are an estimated 36 million of our fellow Americans that cannot. There is a real and growing food crisis in what is purported to be the richest nation in the world.

According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger demand is up 28 percent. In Chicago there is 33 percent rise in the number of people who have turned to a pantry for food assistance compared with a year ago. The Los Angeles Regional Foodbank reports that demand is up 41 percent and the quote that "One out of every ten people in Los Angeles County is at risk of hunger." With all of this new demand and a Thanksgiving dinner costing 12 to 15 percent more than it did a year ago, 72 percent of the food banks across the nation are receiving less government funding then they did last year.

Some 28 million Americans now receive some amount of help from the Food Stamp program, known since the beginning of this month as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Soup kitchens everywhere are in tough straits. That's because food prices have increased at a time when the numbers of people in need have risen and the people who donate, hampered by economic difficulties of their own, are contributing less. A family of 4 qualifies for about 28 dollars a week and if you have been to the grocery lately you know what $28 bucks will get you.

This is a big problem and growing bigger by the day. The great majority of us folks are feeling the pinch of the times but many of us not as much as a lot of us. Look real closely at your budget and see what you can spare for your local food bank. Even $10 will help. This is a special holiday week but next week and the week after people will be just as hungry so consider setting aside a small portion of your weekly food budget for those that have a whole lot less. Here in Atlanta and in other large cities the problem is staggeringly large but even if you live in small town America you can find someone that needs help with food. Check with local churches and they can point you to groups that are trying to help. Even if you can't help financially you might be able to help by volunteering.

Hungrier and Hungrier

Not a good morning. Here I am worrying like a silly ass about a few tomato plants that probably got frozen last night all because I am trying to cheat Mother Nature and grow effing tomatoes in effing November and and what is almost the first thing I see this morning on the tiny TV in the elevator?

In 2007, the number of children who went hungry grew 50 percent over a year earlier.

Families with the highest rates of food insecurity were headed by single mothers.

The 2008 numbers are expected to show more hunger because of the economy.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture
Department reported Monday. The department's annual report on food
security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a
substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more
than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since
716,000 in 1998. Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who
struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in
2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn't have the money or
assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives. Almost
a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some
point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The
government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food
supply at some point and classifies them as having "very low food security."
Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was
described as having "food insecurity with hunger."

Here we are giving away billions of dollars everyday to Wall Street fat cats and no one knows how much money to a secret cabal of who knows who and I am reading this in the effing elevator? How are we justifying giving tax breaks to banks to the tune of $140 billion on the sly and yet the number of American children going hungry keeps rising and will rise again this year? Am I just having a nightmare? Are we still spending $10 billion a month killing Iraqis and bombing Afghan weddings? Stop and think about it. This is Insanity with a capital I.

I'll tell you one thing and that is on January 21st, 2009 somebody better have a damn plan to end this once and for effing all. How much money was just spent electing a new American President? Not a good morning.

Oh! And one other thing....Stop calling it "food insecurity" for Goddess' sake it's hunger, it's starving, it's an empty stomach, it's going to bed in pain that will only be worse in the morning, it's not understanding why you're weak, it's not growing, it's not developing a good brain, it's slowly dying, it's destroying a life, it's something much worse that fucking "food insecurity'.