America the hungry

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Food stamp usage at record levels
America the hungry
30 November 2009

A front-page report in Sunday’s New York Times, detailing the
skyrocketing rise in food stamp use, provides a far different picture
of America at the end of 2009 than the complacent assurances of
economic “recovery” voiced by Wall Street and the Obama administration.

The Times conducted a statistical analysis of food stamp use by
county, in an effort to present a more detailed social portrait of the
36 million people currently on the food stamp rolls. “They include
single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the
chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers
whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare,” the report
noted.

Among the significant findings:

    * In 239 counties, more than a quarter of the population receives
food stamps.
    * In more than 750 counties, at least one in three
African-Americans receives food stamps.
    * In more than 800 counties, more than one-third of all children
depend on food stamps.
    * In 62 counties, food stamp rolls have doubled over the past two
years.
    * In 205 counties, food stamp rolls are up by two-thirds.

The geographical dispersal of the mounting social need for food is
staggering, from traditional centers of poverty such as rural
Appalachia and inner-city urban ghettos to the suburbs built up in the
Sunbelt in the last two decades. The map showing the counties where
food stamp usage is growing most rapidly includes the affluent Atlanta
suburbs, most of the state of Florida, most of Wisconsin, western and
northern Ohio, and most of the Mountain West, including large swathes
of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado and Idaho.

While unemployment is the main trigger of rising food stamp usage, the
immediate economic cause varies widely, from the collapse of the
housing bubble in the southwestern states and Florida, to the collapse
of the auto industry in the Great Lakes region, to the layoffs
sweeping through white collar America as the recession worsens.

The Times notes the impact on affluent suburban areas, long dominated
by the Republican Party, where food stamp usage has more than doubled
since the official start of the slump in December 2007, such as Orange
County, California and Forsyth County, Georgia. Food stamp use has
grown more slowly, in percentage terms, in cities like Detroit, St.
Louis and New Orleans, but only because so much of their populations
were already living in poverty and receiving food assistance when the
slump began.

All these figures significantly understate the level of social
deprivation. An estimated 18 million people who are eligible for food
stamps do not receive them, partly because of institutional barriers
like inadequate outreach services, particularly to immigrant
communities—the state of California reaches only half of those
eligible—and partly because of the social stigma attached to receiving
“welfare,” especially in suburban areas where impoverishment has been
a sudden and recent event.

According to a study by Thomas A. Hirschl of Cornell University and
Mark R. Rank of Washington University in St. Louis, half the children
in America will depend on food stamps at some point during their
childhood. The figure rises to 90 percent for black children. The
study was published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and
Adolescent Medicine.

Since it is based on analyzing 29 years of data, the latter study
gives a picture of the levels of social need during a period when
unemployment averaged well below the 10.2 percent mark hit last month.
A protracted period of double-digit unemployment—now widely predicted
by business and government economists—will make more and more children
dependent on federal aid to meet their basic nutritional needs.

The findings of both these studies confirm the conclusions of a US
Department of Agriculture survey released November 16 that found 49
million Americans, including 17 million children, were not
consistently getting enough food to eat in 2008. The vast majority of
the 17 million families struggling to put food on the table had at
least one employed worker in the household, but with wages too low to
ensure basic necessities. The level of food insecurity was the highest
since the USDA began keeping records in 1995.

These figures demonstrate that for American working people, the social
reality today is the worst since the Great Depression. Some 30 million
people are unemployed or underemployed. Nearly 50 million lack health
insurance. Nearly 50 million have difficulty feeding themselves and
their children. Some 40 million live below the official poverty line,
and the figure would rise to 80 million if a realistic family budget
were used as the yardstick.

Young people face the greatest challenge. According to a Pew Research
Center report issued last week, 10 percent of adults under 35 have
moved back with their parents due to the recession. More than half of
men 18 to 24 were still living with their parents, and 48 percent of
young women. The proportion of young people with jobs—46 percent—is
the lowest since records began in 1948.

These figures are an indictment of American capitalism and its
criminal sabotage of the productive forces of society. How is it
possible that in a country whose agriculture is so productive that it
can literally feed the world, tens of millions of people struggle to
feed their children and themselves? It is because production and
distribution take place on the basis of private profit, and feeding
hungry children is far less profitable for the ruling elite than
speculation in the financial markets.

These figures are also an indictment of the political representatives
of big business in the Obama administration and the Democratic and
Republican parties. Apparently hunger, like unemployment, is viewed by
Obama merely as a “lagging indicator”—something that the American
people simple have to endure, but not a crisis, not even a cause to
lift a finger.

Having funneled trillions into the financial system, to ensure a
return to profitability and seven-figure bonuses on Wall Street, and
set his course for military escalation in Afghanistan at the cost of
countless billions, Obama is now declaring that his top domestic
priority is deficit reduction. After Wall Street and war, there will
be little or nothing left over to meet the needs of hungry children—or
their parents.

Patrick Martin

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/pers-n30.shtml

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********