Hunger in the land of plenty

Ezra Klein had a nice little piece on the significance of the recent decision to cut spending on SNAP (or what used to be called food stamps). During the debate, the point was raised that the recession has brought grocery prices down a little. SNAP benefits stretch further than they used to. This kind of talk makes my blood boil! Only people with no assets and very little income benefit from this program. The amount of help given can often be less than $125/month. So what is the reality? The shelter/soup kitchen where I help out has to turn away folks seeking shelter every night. But the demand for meals changes dramatically about halfway through the month. The same folks return to the soup kitchen for the latter half of every month because their food stamps run out. The kitchen knows this will happen, and therefore puts out more tables and lays in more food to meet the increased demand. The inevitable consequence of this cut will be to strain even further the overwhelmed charities that struggle to meet basic human needs for those left behind in this land of plenty.

Focus on Poverty & Public Policy

One of the great blessings in my life has been the opportunity to travel to different parts of the world. In every place I have found myself, I have also found the poor, in cities, in remote rural surroundings, in small pockets of deprivation surrounded by suburban abundance. My own family has seen moments of more and less abundance, but we have always had a roof over our heads and food on the table. We have been sheltered by a loving extended family, and even the shock of involuntary unemployment has brought few dramatic changes to our comfortable life. The bill collectors don't call after 9:00 p.m., or before 8:00 a.m., we enjoy clean running water, electricity, and my parents even financed a wonderful family excursion to Pennsylvania. I have so many advantages in my experience and education that I know any economic setbacks, while unsettling, are not everlasting. However, for millions of Americans, poverty is a hard, grinding trudge through an endless tunnel of despair.

A recent ballot initiative here in Rhode Island roused many of the poor to get behind the Narragansett Indian proposal to build a casino in South County. It's not that folks didn't understand the arguments against it, they simply couldn't afford to let an opportunity to trade their lousy $7/hr. job for a slightly less lousy job, at $10/hr. plus tips, get away from them. The entry of these infrequent voters into the process made the casino's defeat a much closer thing than anyone anticipated.

Conventional political wisdom has held lately that fighting poverty does not win many votes. Nonetheless, John Edwards has made this a central issue of his campaign. He unabashedly embraces the right of workers to organize into unions, promotes access to health care and education for all, while refusing to accept contributions from corrupt corporate special interests. Naturally most of the narcissistic media elite can't stand this rabble-rouser.

Kudos to E.J. Dionne for giving Edwards some credit in today's Washington Post:

Democrats have lost enormous ground by allowing a myth to take hold that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a failure. "In the 1960s, we waged war on poverty, and poverty won" is one of the most powerful bits of rhetoric in the conservative arsenal.
Edwards took on this falsehood directly in his speech Wednesday in Prestonsburg, Ky., at the end of his tour of impoverished regions. "We accomplished a lot," he said of LBJ's time, "civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and Head Start and Title I aid for poor schools. The Great Society and other safety-net programs have cut the number of people living in poverty in half."
Edwards understands that unless the country is given hard evidence that government can succeed, it will never embrace government-led efforts at social reform....
Edwards put forward a pro-labor agenda to increase wages and benefits. He would also step up the recruitment of good teachers for poor children and create 1 million housing vouchers to allow "all families -- not just wealthy ones -- the freedom to move to the communities they choose."
As one of the shrewdest students of poverty has said, "the poor are politically invisible," removed as they are "from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middle-class Americans."
Those words were written in 1962 by the late Michael Harrington in "The Other America," the book that helped launch the War on Poverty. In 2007, the poor are less politically invisible than they have been in a long time. That gives a new war on poverty at least a fighting chance. Edwards deserves some credit for that.

Less Philanthropy, More Profit-sharing.

Barbara Ehrenreich, writing for The Nation, has this pithy critique of "mainstream" political economics in the U.S.

"But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein.... Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?

In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem..."
Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.
First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?
Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy."

Nowhere on Earth is the political process not tilted in favor of the wealthy. But when the super-rich gobble up an ever-larger share of the pie, they begin to command an ever-larger amount of the political classes' attention. Thus, all but one of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate so identified with big money that they just voted to block consideration of the Employee Free Choice Act. This Act doesn't seek to dramatically redistribute the nation's wealth, or to impose "confiscatory" levels of taxation on the incomes of the most wealthy. It merely seeks to allow some of those who work very hard to generate huge profits--now exclusively enjoyed by the wealthy-- to band together and seek modest improvements in their wages, benefits, and working conditions.