(Kilde ukjent)
HUNGER AND POVERTY IN AMERICA
By Jack A. Smith
While the Bush administration pursues policies intended to benefit the
wealthy, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, poverty and income
inequality are swiftly increasing in the United States.
Over 23 million Americans received emergency hunger relief from private
charities so far this year, two million more than four years ago,
because of government cutbacks in social programs under the last several
administrations. On any given day, some 300,000 people are homeless in
the U.S., and cities such as New York are experiencing marked increases
in recent months. “Official” unemployment has shot up to 8.2 million
workers, a jump of 2.6 million in a year. Poverty is deepening
throughout the country as poor families are being thrown off welfare
upon reaching time limits imposed by the Clinton administration.
Income inequality--the difference between the wealthy and everyone
else--has reached a 50-year high.
These statistics derive from recent reports by government agencies and
established private-sector organizations fighting poverty. As expected,
African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans suffer
disproportionately in all the categories, as do women and children
generally. Meanwhile, President Bush-- taking advantage of temporary
high approval ratings as he leads the country into several wars “on
terrorism”-- is seeking more tax breaks for the rich, an economic
incentive package to help corporations, and the privatization of Social
Security, among a host of measures to further widen the gap between the
richest 20% of the American people and the remaining 80%.
“Seldom in the last half-century has the U.S. been so poorly prepared to
assist individuals and families struggling with the effects of a
recession,” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote Nov. 19.
“Example: the unemployment insurance system, which was established to
ease the pain of temporary joblessness, covers less than 40% of the
people who are out of work. Example: the food stamp program, which was
supposed to slam the door on hunger in the world’s greatest nation (and
which once served 90% of eligible families), now serves just 60% of the
poverty-stricken folks who qualify for help.”
America’s Second Harvest--a network of over 35,000 private food banks,
soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless and emergency
shelters--reported in December that 9% of the U.S. population, 23.3
million people, turned to its private charities for hunger-relief
because government programs were inadequate to keep them fed. It is not
known how many millions received food from the 20% of charities not
members of the Second Harvest network, which itself acknowledges “we are
still not meeting the incredible demand.”
In an exhaustive survey of 35,000 individuals called “Hunger in America
2001,” the organization says its study “punctures the myth that hunger
is only a problem of the inner cities, homeless or the chronically
unemployed.... Nearly 40% of households that received assistance from us
in 2001 included an adult who was working. Fully 19.7% are seniors [up
16% since 1997]. The facts about children are equally disturbing. More
than 9 million children received emergency food assistance this
year....” Women represent “two-thirds of adults seeking food
assistance.... Nearly half of all emergency food recipients served by
food banks live in rural or suburban areas of the country.”
Other findings reveal, some “31 million Americans live in households
that are food insecure, meaning they are either hungry [about half of
them] or at risk of hunger.” Over 62% of emergency food recipients “have
attained high school diplomas or above.” About 30% “of all client
households have been forced to choose between paying for food [or for]
medicine in the past 12 months.” About 64% “of clients or anyone in
their household have applied for -- and 29.8% are currently receiving --
food stamps,” indicating that even those able to penetrate the
bureaucratic “keep out” signs surrounding the food program need
additional nutrition from charities. And the worst part of all is that
many private food kitchens -- often the meal of last resort -- report
not having enough food to go around. In New York City, for instance,
the New York Coalition Against Hunger is now turning away 30% of people
showing up for food. The coalition also noted in November that hunger
in the city has jumped considerably since the Sept. 11 attack on the
World Trade Center because of all the additional jobless workers.
Homelessness is hunger’s handmaiden. According to the Coalition for the
Homeless last month, the number of children and adults populating New
York City shelters has reached the highest ever -- over 30,000 at one
time, not counting those who locate substitute shelter rather than bed
down for the night in overcrowded and sometimes dangerous city-run
facilities. The Census Bureau reported last year that 280,527 Americans
needed shelter during the three days it conducted a survey. Since most
homeless people suffer this condition for weeks or months, several times
that number were without an abode of their own at one point during the
year. The figure clearly has increased this year due to the recession,
greater unemployment, and the government’s continuing reduction in
welfare support, especially for women and children. Locally in the
Mid-Hudson region, housing advocates reported recently that 2,000 people
are now homeless in Dutchess county,
Contributing to both hunger and homelessness is recession-driven
unemployment, officially reaching 5.7% in November according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics. This figure is expected to jump in the next
half-year because well over a million more jobs are expected to
disappear. The official figures, incidentally, are misleading because
they do not include several categories of workers including those
classified as “discouraged,” that is, workers who have given up seeking
a full-time job or any work at all because of months and years of
fruitless searching.
According to the experts, ever-tightening government restrictions result
in jobless benefits now being available to somewhat less than 40% of
unemployed workers. For example, a laid-off part-time worker, one who
has held the job only a few months, or a worker who quits or is fired,
is not eligible for benefits. In recent years, states frequently have
limited jobless distributions in concert with reductions in welfare
payments and foodstamp availability. Many of those fortunate enough to
obtain a jobless income are plunged into poverty because the benefits
are so paltry, unless they have supplemental savings. On average, the
weekly benefit for an unemployed American worker who qualifies amounts
to about $230 a week for up to a half-year. In some states it’s higher,
but the benefits are lower in such states as Alabama, Arizona,
California, Mississippi and South Dakota. In addition, the jump in
unemployment has been accompanied by a considerable increase in the
number of Americans without health insurance. Since in most cases
insurance is tied to the job, some 40% of workers losing employment will
also will likewise end up without the means to obtain healthcare.
Government programs to transfer health insurance to the unemployed
through the COBRA program are proving to be thoroughly inadequate.
In New York City, because of Sept. 11, scores of thousands of workers
are now looking for jobs in an exceptionally tight market. Some 60% of
the lost jobs were in the low-wage area--restaurants, hotels, retailing
-- paying about $23,000 a year. Many of these workers are ending up
poor, hungry and/or homeless while the media tends to focus public
attention on the police, firefighters and higher paid financial services
employees.
The official federal poverty level is set at an absurdly low $14,630 a
year for a family of three. As all working people know, it takes double
this amount for three people to survive without extreme discomfort in
most cases. Indeed, some 40% of those living at and below twice the
poverty rate experience food insecurity and nearly as many cannot afford
health insurance. According to the Census Bureau, almost 12% of the
American people--33 million people--live below the official poverty
level. This figure includes 20% of the nation’s children, or 16 million
kids. Many tens of millions of adults and children live between the
poverty level and twice the poverty level, and the living is hardly easy
for most of them, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy
Institute.
As trends continue, millions more Americans will descend into poverty in
coming years, confronted as they do so by the dismantling of what
remains of the government’s commitment to social services. Millions of
poor people have been dropped from federal welfare program over the
years as a result of the 1996 Clinton welfare reforms--known by the
deceptively uplifting title of the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The act terminated almost six decades of
Washington’s cash payments to the poor to help them survive. Most of
these workers have found that the jobs they obtained paid such low wages
(averaging $7.15 an hour, or $14,872 a year) and include so few benefits
that they continued to exist in poverty. Now, those workers who managed
to remain on welfare -- mainly women with young children receiving Aid
to Families with Dependent Children -- are being dumped because of
mandatory five-year limits imposed by the 1996 law.
The United States today is increasingly transforming into a society
where the bulk of the nation’s wealth is possessed by small proportion
of the population. Some 5% of the American people control over 60% of
the country’s considerable assets, while the bottom 80% holds about 16%
of the assets. The upper-middle 15% take the rest. The Census Bureau
reports that in 2000 half the nation’s total income went to the top
fifth of the population, while 3.6% went to the bottom fifth. In the
last decade, the top fifth of U.S. families have substantially increased
their share of the country’s income and assets while the bottom
four-fifths has experienced a decline in its share.
There is nothing on the agenda of the two political parties which
alternate in governing the United States to indicate they have any
intention of deflecting this trend toward the concentration of ever
greater wealth and privilege in the bank accounts of an ever smaller
minority of the population.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
QUOTES: HUNGER AMIDST PLENTY
There are billions of people in the world, including many millions in
the United States (see accompanying article), who do not have the
resources to obtain sufficient food for themselves and their families.
They are the hungry. Around the world each day, 24,000 of them die from
starvation. In a year, almost 9 million people succumb to a slow and
painful death from hunger, mainly in the former colonized countries of
Africa, Asia and Latin America. According to the United Nations, it
would cost $40 billion a year to provide adequate food for all the
people on the Earth who are hungry, PLUS provide universal access to
basic education for all who need it, basic health care for all,
reproductive health care for all women, and clean water and safe sewers
for all. This amounts to about 4% of the combined wealth of the 225
richest people in the world. The annual cost for insuring the
availability of basic food and health services only, for those lacking
adequate nutrition and minimal healthcare, is $13 billion a year. This
amounts to $4 billion less than North Americans and Europeans spend
annually on pet food. The material resources to end hunger and
starvation are available in abundance. Just look at the money the U.S.
throws away in wars, or the multi-billions in tax cuts for the wealthy,
or the unfair trade practices and corporate wage exploitation the
developed world imposes upon the poor countries. The wretched plight of
these hungry people, and the relative ease with which their travail
could be alleviated, is a damning indictment of the leading capitalist
economies which preside over the international economic system with
utter indifference toward the sufferings these fellow human beings. How
many editorials critical of this the socio-economic source of world
hunger have you ever read in your local newspaper? It’s the Great
Unmentionable of our age. Following are a few thoughts about hunger
amidst plenty.
BERTOLT BRECHT (1898-1956), the anti-fascist German poet and dramatist:
“Those who take the meat from the table/Teach contentment./Those for
whom the contribution is destined/Demand sacrifice. Those who eat their
fill speak to the hungry/Of wonderful times to come./Those who lead the
country into the abyss/Call ruling too difficult/For ordinary men.”
WILL ROGERS (1879-1935), the American humorist, actor, and Wild West
rope artist, as the Depression deepened in 1931: “Ten men in our
country could buy the whole world and 10 million can’t buy enough to
eat.”
ANDY WARHOL (1928-87), the U.S. pop artist, while volunteering at a soup
kitchen in New York City on Thanksgiving Day 1986: "If there's this
many hungry people there's really something wrong."
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890-1969), a General of the Army and 34th U.S.
president: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every
rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who
hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This
world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of
its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its
children.... Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging
from a cross of iron."
CARSON McCULLERS (1917-67), American novelist and short-story writer,
from her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a parable on
fascism: “We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty
and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition
to this our country was founded on what should have been a great , true
principle -- the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh!
And what has come of this start? There are corporations worth billions
of dollars--and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.
ANONYMOUS (1912), written on placards carried by mill workers during the
famous Lawrence, Mass., textile strike: "We want Bread and Roses Too."
Also, a slogan from the same strike: “Better to starve fighting than to
starve working.”
ANONYMOUS (1917), the Bolshevik slogan: “Bread, peace and land!”
ANONYMOUS (circa 1905), from the preamble to the constitution of the
Industrial Workers of the World: “There can be no peace so long as
hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few,
who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.”
WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-87), the English economist, journalist and
essayist: “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult
[for them] to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”
ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744): But still the great have kindness in
reserve,/he help’d to bury whom he help’d to starve.”
EUGENE DEBS (1855-1926), the great union leader, speaking to striking
workers during the Pullman strike in 1884: “If it is a fact that after
working for George M. Pullman for many years you appear two weeks after
your work stops, ragged and hungry.... You are striking to avert slavery
and degradation.”
THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743-1826), third president of the U.S., in his
inaugural address in 1801: “Take not from the mouth of Labor the bread
it has earned.”
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1908- ), the U.S. economist: “In a rich
society, no one should be allowed to suffer from deprivation such as
homelessness, starvation and illness. This ideal is essential, not
simply as a matter of human good, but as the price we pay for a measure
of domestic tranquillity.
JOE HILL (1879-1915), the IWW organizer and working class poet, from his
song, The Preacher and the Slave: “Long haired preachers come out every
night,/Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;/But when asked
about something to eat,/They will answer with voices so sweet:/You will
eat, bye and bye,/In that glorious land in the sky:/Work and pray, live
on hay,/You'll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie!)”
(end)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 11-07-02 MET DST