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TechnoratiThe Hunger News
It's more than newsprint that leaves newspaper junkies feeling filthy these days. It's the news being reported. It's dirty.
Take today's Wall Street Journal. In the National Section there's a story on states cutting Services for the Elderly and disabled. With the economy shrinking, the state of Alabama, for example, has stopped funding homemaker services for 12,000 people. All those cuts are making it harder for some vulnerable people to stay in their own homes. In one New York county, the waiting list for homecare has tripled because of lack of funding from the state. Many states expect to make many more cuts ahead.
So that's one story.... Turn the page to the Business section and there's a long story about the cash contributions that American corporations are giving to food banks instead of canned goods. The idea is that fresh food can be purchased, reflecting America's better eating habits. This Wednesday, Wal-Mart begain offering food from their stores but also cash; the Ford Motor Company's giving money too. It's a pretty warm and fuzzy piece, buried at the end of which are these statistics: Feeding America says demand at food banks is up about 25% across the country over a year ago, including a surge in first-time clients. More than one-third of those Feeding America serves live in a household where at least one person is employed; about a third of its clients are children, 10% elderly and only about 12% are homeless.
The grubby, not so fuzzy reality is those food banks wouldn't need more cash if companies paid American workers enough to feed their families.
Think the companies can't afford it? Think again.
The Journal's blockbuster feature today reports that while regular people's wages have remained stagnant for almost thirty years, even as productivity and the economy grew, corporate America made out. And even CEOs heading up the industries now looking for a handout from us left their jobs with millions.
Home-building exec, Dwight Schar, for example, of homebuilders Ryan Homes made more than $625 million in the last five years, nearly all of it from selling stock, the same stock that's plummeting now. Mr. Schar's own home these days is an 11-acre oceanfront compound in Palm Beach, Fla., with a tennis court, and two pools, purchased in 2004 and 2005 for $85.6 million from billionaire investor Ronald O. Perelman.
So much shameful stuff in one single issue of one paper. I wish cleaning this imbalance up was as easy as washing newsprint off our hands.
Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv on Free Speech TV (Dish Network ch. 9415) and online at Firedoglake.com.
16 Comments so far
Show AllAaaahhh (sigh)! …but hunger is a personal choice in America according to the classical neo-con mindset!
That's part of being free.
After all, corporate America also offers up free, long-term accommodation at a multitude of private-for-profit penitentiaries for such minor offences as buying your drugs from the wrong guy on the block (Walgreens vs. Barry the Blade, Percodan vs. pot) or burning the wrong flag!
Does prison sound a little harsh?
The public sector still offers opportunities as well,
like enlisting in the Army where the government will pay you over $1,200 a month to start,
just to sit in the middle of a desert,
10,000 miles from home,
guarding an oil pipeline from possibly having its rightful owners blow it up.
Or maybe the DEA could sign you up for some crop eradication program in South America?
Want to stay close to home?
Try Homeland Security where you can earn close to minimum wage ordering 300,000 people a day to...
take of their shoes,
hand over all their Christmas booze (liquids in containers)
and perhaps even an anal cavity search,
all to make sure they’re not going to suddenly explode after boarding their flight from Kalamazoo to Milwaukee.
There are two types of hunger in America today. The first hunger is the one we feel when our stomach churns and anxiety takes over as we worry whether we will get enough calories in us to make it through another day. The second hunger, which is even more common in America these days, is the hunger to eat like the healthy/wealthy do. Real food. Fresh fruits and vegetables organically grown, non-radiated and non-engineered. Stuff that doesn’t come in a box or has been refrigerated for eons. Beverages than don’t have glucose-fructose, color and flavoring added to make it filling and palatable. Unprocessed meats and dairy products. We have had enough of our convenient, low cost, well marketed, candy-coated breakies, brunches and midnight snacks. No more carcinogenic, mass produced, insecticide laden prepared meals.
Boy, that's what I call eating rich!
Sioux Rose
SPACE CADET: Interesting post founded upon well-earned cynicism. I'd add a 3rd hunger: for lives of meaning as opposed to quiet desperation. I was musing to myself what society would look like if we were seen each as an ARTIST rather than a competitive consumer, and where possible, warrior. Work then would involve making the world more pleasing to our senses, whether through taste/food, or sound/music, spoken literature, opera, concerts; visually--through all forms of graphics, painting, sculpture, and dance; and smell: through the cultivation of gardens, herbal ones for our healthier locally grown produce, and flowers to remind us that the Creative forces that have nurtured this planet and its long evolving ecosystems celebrate beauty AND these senses, and only fools would have taken of this Eden and in their greed to steal from their brother, rendered more and more of it into dead zones: fallen forests, dying plankton--the foundation to the food chain of life, areas littered in live land mines when not polluted into near-eternity with radioactive detritus, and a plethora of vanishing species.
The I ching in describing the fundament of nourishment in hexagram 27 points out that food is also what we take in and express as beliefs, as in food for thought! Modern society needs a dietary change on multiple levels.
What are we going to do about this situation?
No food, no homes. (even Pat Robertson is reporting on this!)
This is going to be a rough winter for a lot of people.
Where are the screaming protesters?
The floods of letters to our Congresspeople?
We're a corn-fed nation that will never stop getting hungry. Like the famous cartoon cat Garfield, we'll just keep slopping up everything in sight. Sometimes I wonder if we the people have gotten sloppier than the pigs.
I donate to charities, but have a bad feeling about doing it. A world in which charity is necessary has already failed, and I suspect it has been forced to fail by the USA--as usual to make money for those who least need it.
I hear it now and then, as if in a joke. It's no joke. Capitalism is dead. The question is how much longer will the government, i.e. the taxpayer prop them up?
As long as we keep buying crap....
Thank you! Anyone out there heard of pre-cycling (think before you buy)? I swore off retail (OK, I'm a Jew) for the new millennium, except for underwear, which I order from one catalog only. My big monthly retail rush! Well, since the crash, I haven't ordered and, guess what? Yesterday, I cleaned out my underwear drawer and found at least a dozen pairs I hadn't worn yet and, needless to say, didn't need. Ouch!
Paying a decent living wage to ones workers is a "poor business decision".
Donating to charities to feed those same people demonstrates how "compassionate and caring" these businesses are.
Its all in the spin.
It can make for a great advertising campaign. "Buy at wal mart 1 of every three dollars you spend will go to a food bank to feed our workers". I can picture the bean counters going "hey if we go with this we will draw in an extra 20 million customers each spending 6.75 per store visit..They might not spend just because they need new plastic toys from China, but if we tell them they are feeding the hungry they will open their wallets!"
Carry it further. The work we provide our workers are acts of Charity! Trickle down is working!!'
PK
"Buy at wal mart 1 of every three dollars you spend will go to a food bank to feed our workers".
HaHaHaHa ..that's a good one!
Sioux Rose
I just had a flash of how to enact "Enlightened Karmic Therapy" that resemble a scene out of the interesting film, "Minority Report." The individual who is a repeat offender, continues to make decisions that cause direct harm to others, is forced to see a set of moving pictures with the caption, "This could be YOUR future life." Each one of the images represents the type of suffering this individual has helped to cause others. Behavior mod for the 21st century? The next Clockwork Orange initiative?
Sioux Rose
Maybe it's my background in literature, but when I read an article like this one the Ghost of Scrooge comes and taps me. I really believe those who were in positions to pass policy that would mean less hunger & homelessness, and instead chose to win favor with wealthy elites or swarm on the defenseless to one way or another seize their assets WILL have to face what they elected to do, that there is a reckoning. Whether it's the Judeo-Christian perception of a judgment day, the Buddhist idea that one's karma catches up with them, or the astrological idea that your "reward" is graphed as the natal chart, blueprint you re-enter this world to fulfill. I have always hoped that making people aware of this infallible force of universal justice would incline them to behave better. Without this belief, those who own power too often think just passing money to the "right hands" will guarantee them safe passage and impunity. If the law of karma was understood, we'd have a more pervasive fall-back system for when and if human justice systems fail.
What? You sound a bit too abstract here. Got a simpler version?
Update: I saw your website so I take back that question. Sorry.
"Wal-Mart begain offering food from their stores but also cash>"
Yeah, ain't Capitalism Great!
Aside from the abuse of factory workers in China and environmental destruction - which costs everyone....
Wal-Mart gets tax breaks for destroying local businesses with price competition, and free construction of roads and highway off ramps to their parking lots. If they don't get what they want from city governments - they build just outside the city and pay less tax. They don't pay decent wages or offer their workers healthcare. Instead they tell the workers and their families to go to social services if they want medical care or food stamps (paid for by local property taxes). Anyone caught eating the food on the job ("grazing") is immediately fired. They close stores whenever they want and put thousands of people out of work - who then can't find jobs because the competitors have also gone out of business.
Then get tax breaks and write-offs for giving out food and cash!
And this is legal!!!!
Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world, bigger than most countries. The airport of its headquarters in Bentonville, AK, has more flights than any other in the US. Oh, and guess who is in bed with them-- Hillary, of course!
Capitalism is failing. When will the news report on that?