Living in poverty is a very complicated enterprise that requires vast amounts of emotional energy, time and money. You pay a "food tax" if there are no supermarkets in your neighborhood, because corner stores are more expensive. You pay additional fees to have electricity or the phone turned back on because you couldn't pay the bill on time, and you're at higher risk of losing your job because you have so little control of your environment and anything could happen at any time to keep you from getting to work.

This Washington Post article is one of the few I've seen that does a really good job of separating the strands:

Anajyha, a serious girl with two younger brothers and a mother who has lost two of her three part-time jobs, is growing up with an ebb and flow of food typical of a growing number of families. In her home, in a scuffed neighborhood called Strawberry Mansion a few miles north of the Liberty Bell, food stamps arrive but never last the month. There can be cereal but no milk. Pancake mix and butter but no eggs.

The intricacy of the problem -- and of the Obama administration's task -- plays out here, where Anajyha could have enough to eat but shortchanges herself.

Philadelphia offers a particularly vivid ground-level view of what researchers call a "silent epidemic" of hungry and undernourished youngsters. For years, local civic activists, health experts and politicians have tried some of the nation's most innovative experiments -- and learned how intractable hunger can be. Researchers here have also been at the leading edge in trying to fathom the effects of a scarcity of food.

Even when children are not hungry, studies have found that slight shortages of food in their homes are associated with serious problems. Babies and toddlers in those homes are far more likely to be hospitalized than children in families with similar incomes but adequate food. School-age children tend to learn and grow more slowly, and to get into trouble more often. Teenage girls are more prone to be depressed or even flirt with thoughts of suicide.

Solving the problem is further complicated by its subtle nature. "Most people who are hungry are not clinically manifesting what we consider hunger. It doesn't even affect body weight," said Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University medical anthropologist who is part of Children's HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public health researchers in Philadelphia and four other cities. Hunger cannot be solved by food alone, their work shows, because it is one strand in a web of pressures that trap families, including housing and energy costs.

This more nuanced picture is emerging as the problem has become more widespread. With the economy faltering, the number of youngsters living in homes without enough food soared in 2008 from 13 million to nearly 17 million, the Agriculture Department reported last month.

In Philadelphia, researchers found that, during the first half of this year, one in five homes with a baby or toddler did not have enough food. And one of every dozen young children was outright hungry, a rate twice that of the same period the year before.

My landlady told me a few days ago how surprised she was to hear an interview on the local NPR station with two families from our neighborhood, who were some of the 100 local families using a local church's food bank. When I saw her the next day, she said she'd mentioned the story to a friend who belongs to that church, and the friend told her the story was wrong: There are actually 200 families using the food bank.

I'm going to go through my cabinets and see what I can spare. In the meantime, I thought I'd remind readers how many of our neighbors are struggling through these desperate times. If you can still afford to give anything, please go through your cupboards and donate this week to your local food bank.

If you don't know of one, you can look for them here. You can also contact them if you need help for yourself or your family (in many states, you can also call 211 to see what services are available):

Feeding America

Pantry Net

Angel Food Ministries

Foodpantries.org

The Harry Chapin Food Bank (Northwest Florida)

The Chester County Food Bank (PA)

New York State Regional Food Banks

Food Bank NYC

Northern Illinois Food Bank

North Texas Food Bank

There are, of course, thousands more food banks around the country. If you know of one you'd like to recommend, please leave a link in the comments.

I can just hear Rush Limbaugh now: "If they're so hungry, how did they get so fat?" And our side's not much better, because of course they're going to agree with the Republicans that the best way to handle the problem is with tax cuts and deficit reduction.

I think I need to bang my head against a wall now:

The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.

At a time when rising poverty, widespread unemployment and other effects of the recession have been well documented, the report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture provides the government's first detailed portrait of the toll that the faltering economy has taken on Americans' access to food.

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling."

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

I thought this was the most important finding:

The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work.

Oh. My. God. In the "richest country in the world". There are no words for how unacceptable this is:

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Your neighbor may be using some of these programs but it's not the kind of thing people want to talk about," Rank said.

The analysis was released Monday in the November issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The authors say it's a medical issue pediatricians need to be aware of because children on food stamps are at risk for malnutrition and other ills linked with poverty.

"This is a real danger sign that we as a society need to do a lot more to protect children," Rank said.

Read more

My brother is an elementary school teacher in a mostly minority area, and we've talked about this before. He told me that the school lunch program is often the only meal many children at his school get each day. And we know how healthy those meals are. My brother (and other teachers) have taken to buying fresh fruit out of their own meager salaries to make available to these kids.

The ramifications of this heartbreaking demographic will reverberate over decades: in health statistics, in education levels, in our economy, in crime statistics. And it's a situation for which no one should be complacent.

The problems of poverty keep getting pushed from one place to another (literally). We have so many people out of work and losing their homes. What, exactly, are we going to do about it? Other than criminalize poverty, I mean:

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―A local attorney opened up his private property for homeless campers to have a place to stay, but authorities are already warning they will have to shut it down.

Attorney Mark Merin is leasing his property on 13th Street and C Street in Sacramento to about three dozen homeless men and women for one dollar a year, which is meant to give them the legal rights of lessees and property renters.

"It's a matter of human dignity, and it's life and death," said Greg Bunker, executive director of Francis House in Sacramento.

According to Sacramento police, it isn't legal to live in a tent anywhere in the city for longer than 24 hours. The department wouldn't say when, but did say that they would soon enforce the city ordinance and kick the homeless persons out of the property.

The lot is located in a mostly industrial area, with only one home backing up to the property, but the city has received complaints about the campers from nearby residents.

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(1971 - the brief respite between the World's Longest Party and Our Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Hard to imagine that 1971 was a sort of resting point in our rather skewed history. At the time of course, it didn't seem that way - in 1971 Campuses were still hotbeds of disturbance, Vietnam was still grinding on, cities were falling apart. But we were optimistic all was going to be okay with the world and prosperity was just around the corner.

Sadly, no.

This documentary, part of the NBC Radio series "Second Sunday", aired in April 1971 was concerned about our place in the world. A reassessment of who we were as a society - the old "who am I, what am I doing and where am I going" mantra that was so popular during those years.

And questions are posed to a number of people - Ralph Nader, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Howard Baker, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Francois Revel, John Gardner (founder of Common Cause) and Dr. Milton Eisenhower who offers this interesting observation:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower: “We do seem to have a new kind of violence in this country, we have some people who are actively advocating revolution, which I think is relatively new in America.”

Question: Where do think this will lead? Do you think this is a self-defeating thing?

Eisenhower: “ First let me say that there are nihilists, there are revolutionaries; most of them young. Many of them, in our colleges and universities. But it’s terribly important that the American people understand that they constitute a very small minority. They make a lot of noise and I may say the mass media give them a great exposure to the American people, but they can’t be more than one, two or three percent of the total. Yes, this is something new.”

Question: “How do you answer the argument that we engage in violence in Vietnam, so violence is warranted here in America. And those who argue that the system is so rotten and has such basic defects that the system itself is not worth preserving and hence you need revolution in this country to purify the government.”

Eisenhower: “Well I think that’s a terribly specious argument. If we lived in a dictatorship, and the dictatorship had proclaimed and carried on the war, and therefore citizens could do little if anything about it, one could well argue that in these circumstances revolution, internal revolution would be the corrective measure to take. But once the people themselves have taken possession of the basic social power, which is the situation in our free democratic society, and we exercise this power through a representative form of government, then the only way, the only reasonable way to get action is to work through these political procedures. All other methods are illegitimate and are self-defeating. Margaret Chase-Smith made a speech in the Senate that was worth the attention of the American people, in which she said that, if the left-wing extremists, who are causing a good share of the trouble don’t look out, they are going to drive America to the right. The danger in America is not going too far to the left – the danger in America is going too far to the right.”

That last quote is particularly telling considering where the country would wind up in the next decade.

Of course, at the time no one suspected a thing . . . .

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(Almost that time again)

As you know, one of my biggest guilty pleasures is listening to old live concerts - really old ones. A few weeks ago I posted an excerpt of a New York Philharmonic concert from 1960 featuring Fritz Reiner. This time it's the famous Besancon Festival in France featuring L'Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris Conservatory) conducted by Andre Cluytens from September 1949 performing Dukas La Peri. Summer is festival season in Europe and there are a ton of them going on . They are mostly all broadcast, as is the tradition going back to the beginning of radio. Luckily, for poverty-stricken culture vultures like myself it's a matter of finding the stream or podcast and downloading it. If you're addicted to time travelling, it's a matter of digging into your archive and pulling out what some radio station tossed in the trash.

Either way, it makes for a non-stress afternoon - especially when the regular Sunday diet consists of televised talking heads.

If you've been following the news, you know that U.S. officials are much more worried about the second and third wave of swine flu, which should hit here sometime in the fall. And if that happens - since we have so many people unemployed and without health insurance - I predict we will have people dying here, too:

"In Mexico, we are very unaccustomed to going to the hospital. Here, if someone has a cold or anything else, they buy something in the pharmacy, or they leave it be," Flores said. "This is why Mexicans are dying. Because we are very indecisive about going to a hospital until it's too late."

Several theories have emerged as to why all but one of the confirmed deaths from swine flu have occurred in Mexico. Much of it is speculation -- that Mexico City's 7,300-foot elevation exacerbates respiratory illnesses, that there may be a slight variation between the viral strain prevalent in Mexico and swine flu elsewhere, that Mexico is further along in disease transmission and other countries will eventually see severe cases.

But a critical factor, according to specialists here, is that flu victims have delayed checking into hospitals until their condition has deteriorated so much they cannot be saved. While medicines are plentiful and cheap at Mexican pharmacies, swine flu antiviral medication was often not available or prohibitively expensive.

"Some patients arrive late at the hospitals, and to a certain degree this is a problem of education," José Sifuentes-Osorio, an infectious-disease specialist at the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition, said in a radio interview Monday. "Many of our people, independent of their socioeconomic situation, self-medicate for three or four days, and they lose precious time."

What is clear about the outbreak is that the epicenter is Mexico City, a megalopolis of more than 20 million people where about a third of the population lives in poverty. As of April 30, when there were 397 confirmed swine flu cases, 285 of those people lived in Mexico City, according to the most recent available statistics from the Health Ministry. Of the 26 people it said had died of the virus, 20 lived in the capital.

I know this story is a month old, but I wanted to hit it for a second. I'm always amazed by conservatives' behavior when it comes to their feelings about the poor in this country. Here's K-Lo from the NRO:

Robert Rector has been pointing out for longer than I can remember that America has the wealthiest poor people in the world. And here seems to be a photo illustrating that: Michelle Obama was at a homeless shelter. While distributing lunch, one of the men she was serving lunch to took a picture of her on his cell phone.

I don't envy this man's situation, whatever it is, and don't mean to make light of it. But we are a blessed people when our poor have cell phones.

She has no idea in what context this photo was taken or why this person has a cell phone, but she is just amazed that poor people are running around, eating our food, driving Cadillacs and making calls on cell phones. Wouldn't you like to see her penniless and on her own for 180 days to see what would happen? Andrew Malcolm is an Internet friend of mine, but I see he has the same opinion.

Searching for something (anything) to bitch about when it comes to the Obama's, Andrew Malcolm seizes on Michelle Obama serving food at a homeless shelter in order to point out that some filthy homeless person is taking a picture of the First Lady with a cellphone. Blissfully unaware of cheap disposable cellphones that can be purchased anywhere, Malcolm wonders where the disgusting parasitic poor have their phone bills delivered. Later Malcolm will review older pictures from the last Republican Depression That FDR Was Responsible For and wonder why all the poor guys begging for bread were wearing such spiffy suits and nice hats.

Looking at how they relate to the poor in this country I'm coming to understand that it's not a political position that they hold, but more of a psychological disorder/ Since Jung and Freud are not around, I'll give it a diagnosis from the DSM IV:

"Greed Transference"

I think it can be traced to their early childhood experiences. K-Lo is playing in her sandbox with a new Barbie Doll and another kid wants to touch it and hold it for a minute, but she clutches it tightly to her body and yells: "Mine!" It's a reflexive action triggered from their past, and in K-Lo's experience she's afraid that the poor kid with no shoes will steal her little dollie even though she has 127 brand new ones stacked in her closet -- unopened. It continues on well through Erikson's eight stages of Psychosocial development and results in writings, rantings and beliefs by the wingnut punditry class that are demonstrated by their incessant screams of "Socialism" on my TV.

"Poverty grew sharply between 1979 and 1982. But a study by the Census Bureau claims that official estimates may exaggerate the number of Americans who are poor."

Listening to spin in a historic context can be baffling at times. Buried in the middle of an ABC Radio "World News This Week" broadcast from February 1984 was this report about poverty levels in the U.S. between 1979 and 1982. To hear a spokesman from the Census Bureau come out, matter-of-factly and say the number of people living below the poverty line during that time wasn't exactly true, since many of those people were receiving foodstamps and Medicare and were therefore deemed no longer "at the poverty line" seems rather bizarre to me.

This is the kind of painful spin we've been getting used to over the years. A report like this lends further evidence the Reagan Years were pretty much a sham. The casual disregard for real figures in place of fancied up ones. Mythic feel-good proclamations have done nothing but stave off what has become the inevitable.

To think our current economic situation will be cured by a snap of fingers or wishful thought disguises the fact that our current situation is the result of bad decisions and distracting spin from decades earlier.

Maybe it's not a chicken, but perhaps the Ostrich has come home to roost.

(Nice shiny miracles from that City On A Hill)

My friend John Amato has been asking where are the economists debating what's going on in this country on my television. Well, Fareed Zakaria had just that kind of discussion on his show GPS. This is a debate worth listening to with some actual economists on where we're at right now. The one thing that struck me with watching this clip is just how severe the problem of poverty is that is not being addressed by the media in the US and being ignored as part of our national dialog.

Full transcript to follow:

Continue reading »

[UPDATE: Links fixed now.]

Remember when I wrote about the Darby Free Library, the oldest free library in the country?

They finally have Paypal on their website. It took them a while (small non-profits tend to move at a glacial pace) but you can click and give now.

In the meantime, the local ABC affiliate and USA Today have since covered the story of the library's struggle to stay open in a very poor community.

They're getting donations, but still not enough.

If you're still employed and you love books, go donate!

After 30 long years of Reagan-inspired hatred of government services, we're seeing the policies come to their logical conclusion. Because we didn't so much cut the size of government as we outsourced it. Most people are oblivious to the fact that large numbers of government social services were simply contracted out to local non-profits because it meant towns, cities and states didn't have to pay for the additional benefits of a government employee to do that job.

And now, anyone in need of those services is screwed - because those agencies aren't getting paid:

SCO Family of Services, a nonprofit agency based on Long Island, started the year with a $25 million credit line at its bank, which it planned to use to pay its bills while awaiting government reimbursements and donations.

Now, after its bank has cut its credit line twice and withdrawn a promise to support a critical bond offering, the organization is worried about whether it can pay its employees this month.

“I spend a good part of my day every day just trying to manage cash flow,” said Johanna Richman, chief financial officer at SCO, which provides services to children with developmental disabilities.

SCO is one of hundreds of charities caught in the credit crunch as skittish banks reduce their lines of credit or cut them off entirely at a time when the need for their services is climbing sharply, nonprofit leaders say.

“While nonprofits are working feverishly to accommodate increased demand, they are facing severe financial constraints that are threatening their ability to go on, much less expand their services,” said Diana Aviv, president and chief executive of Independent Sector, a nonprofit trade association.

Almost three-quarters of nonprofits in the United States receive some type of government financing, according to new research by the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and about half of those count on that aid for at least half of their budgets.

As a growing number of states delay payment, nonprofits must rely on lines of credit to help them get by. In Illinois, the state is running as much as 150 days late in making reimbursements, and California has told nonprofits to expect i.o.u.’s in lieu of payment starting next month.

A weary social worker writes:

I have had a ringside seat to the economic downturn this year. It is not an abstraction to me. The folks at the bottom are always the first to feel the pinch, when it comes. Clients of the agency I work at come through our doors every day requesting assistance with basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter and medications. As the year has progressed and New York State has chosen to repeatedly victimize its most vulnerable citizens, it has become more difficult to help people meet these needs. I have visited food banks with empty shelves, been told clients were ineligible for help when I knew they were and had to challenge these decisions. I have sat with clients while their applications for public assistance were reviewed by fraud investigators at social services. Our local social services department actually hired fraud investigators at the same time that it was laying off child protective workers demonstrating conclusively where our values lie and how genuinely mean spirited we are as a people. At the federal level Social Security routinely denies people eligible for benefits in the hopes that they will not reapply. Many people who receive benefits must hire a lawyer before social security will concede that they are indeed eligible. As the resources have become more limited, the level of scrutiny and inhumanity has risen accordingly.

I have, of course read about the rising unemployment numbers and the ensuing uptick in applicants for public assistance and food stamps nationwide like everyone else. It seems the chickens of Bill Clinton's (Best moderate Republican president ever)welfare reform are finally coming home to roost. We always knew that the flaw of his plan was an economy without jobs and here we are. The reform has no provision for an unemployment rate like we are experiencing now. Once again, our policy in practice serves to punish most harshly children and the elderly. Perhaps, it is time to repeal the child labor laws and begin allowing them to work 12 hour days again.

For nearly 30 years we have done our best to dismantle the safety net for the poor and struggling among us. I keep praying that we have reached the end of this folly. At 42, these policies are what I have known my entire work life. I dream about social service programs and rules that would treat people like human beings, rather than as an undesirable applicant to be culled out. I want so badly for us as a nation to stop punishing people for being poor, or elderly or a child of poor people. This holiday season was hellish as I watched scores of our clients navigate the realities of a holiday with nothing but further grinding poverty. Some days I am just weary from the strain of witnessing the suffering that goes on around me. It takes a toll that is more than physical, it eats away at the soul to see people ask for so little and receive far less.

As I contemplate how to pry a few dollars from these systems designed to humiliate and degrade my clients, already struggling with being social outcasts, chronic illness, drug addiction and mental illness I sigh audibly. I read of billion dollar bailouts and disappearing pallettes of cash as I ponder how to help a family with $400.00 so they will not be homeless in three days. I am so very tired.

Just think: It could always be worse. You could be stuck in a shack in the frozen north with nothing but shoe leather for a feast.

Happy Turkey Day, everyone. We'll be back when our distended stomachs have recovered.