Starving People into Economic Submission

may not be so wise after all, for eventually people will get angry and look to violence as a solution, as both our political parties are whores to the elites. These parties think that because Americans tend to be apathetic about their own self-interest, that they will always be that way.

Currently, some 15 percent of households are considered too poor to buy adequate food, yet Congress wants to slash food stamps and other programs to help those of us survive.

Hunger in America

Unbelievably, one in eight Americans needs some kind of emergency food assistance. This is according to a new report.

It's 431 pages long, if readers want to read the whole report.

From the executive summary:

76 percent (10 million) of client households served are food insecure, meaning they do not always know where they will find their next meal.
36 percent of these client households are experiencing food insecurity with hunger, meaning they are sometimes completely without a source of food.
79 percent (11 million) of households with children served are also food insecure.
Of the 37 million people the Feeding America network serves:
70 percent of households have incomes below the federal poverty line.
The average monthly income for client households is $940.
36 percent of households have one or more adults who is working.
10 percent of client households are homeless.

Tough Choices

Many of the client households served by Feeding America food banks report that their household incomes are inadequate to cover their basic household expenses.
46 percent of client households served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food.
39 percent of client households said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.
34 percent of client households report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food.
35 percent of client households must choose between transportation and food.

One in four client households (24 percent) do not have health insurance and nearly half of our adult clients report that they have unpaid medical and hospital bills.

Thirty percent of households report having at least one member of their household in poor health.

Of course Hunger and Homeless is Up

thanks to the worsening economy, but don't count on anybody to do much about it.

After all, the more unemployed and desperate people there are, the better it is for employers.

Miscellaneous Articles

The shit finally hit the fan for David Truscott. At least he wasn't arrested for having sex with a horse.
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Food banks are seeing more first time visitors, thanks to a worsening economy.
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Sanford and Sin: While the governor's political fortunes are going into the ditch, his long-suffering wife's career appears to be taking off:

She is writing a memoir, “Staying True,” to be released in April by Ballantine Books, about grappling with her husband’s marital infidelity. She has applied to trademark her own name in order to sell clothing, mugs and other items. She will appear next month on a Barbara Walters special on ABC as one of the “10 Most Fascinating People of 2009.”

She has set up a privately financed personal Web site, JennySanford.com, complete with news releases and photographs. And she has endorsed a candidate to succeed her husband, State Representative Nikki Haley, a Republican and the only woman in the race.

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The Education Wars

Most teachers spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year buying supplies for their rooms, but far too many of them are also supporting their students by paying for their lunches or buying food for them.

And Because a New Report Says

hunger or "food insecurity" has risen among the American public, the elite from the "think tanks" pooh-pooh the idea, trying to say the problem isn't very serious.

Anything so they don't have to have their taxes increased, which is what is going to have to happen.

By the way, these people no doubt subscribe to what Ronald Reagan once said in a speech October 27, 1964:

We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.

Quoted in Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error (1983), page 84.

Miscellaneous Articles

The WSWS mentions the report noting the incidence of hunger has gone up, according to a recent report.
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Now this is odd: Although Sarah Palin is anti-abortion to the point of having had a Down syndrome child, one anti-abortion group is going to protest an appearance she makes Thursday.

I suspect the group is mad not because of her stance on abortion but the fact that she has been a non-traditional mother. And it maybe it's over her recent family woes i.e., Levi Johnston.
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So isn't the Pledge of Allegiance, that foundation of Republican Party principles (not), un-American?

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)

The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with "the Bellamy salute," a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.

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This economist's prediction things will get worse before they get better is no surprise to anybody who is jobless:

Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.

While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.

Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.

So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.

In other words the jobs aren't being created to absorb the multitudes of people who are out of work.
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Things Continue to Get Much Worse

More Americans are suffering from hunger, according to a USDA report.

From the summary of the report:

Most U.S. households have consistent, dependable access to enough food
for active, healthy living—they are food secure. But a minority of American
households experience food insecurity at times during the year, meaning
that their access to adequate food is limited by a lack of money and other
resources. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) monitors the extent
and severity of food insecurity in U.S. households through an annual, nationally
representative survey and has published statistical reports on household
food security in the United States for each year since 1995. This report presents
statistics on households’ food security, food expenditures, and use of
food and nutrition assistance programs in 2008.

And:

In 2008, 85.4 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the
year. Food-secure households had consistent access to enough food for active
healthy lives for all household members at all times during the year. The
remaining 14.6 percent (17 million households) were food insecure. These
households, at some time during the year, had diffi culty providing enough
food for all their members due to a lack of resources. The prevalence of food
insecurity was up from 11.1 percent (13 million households) in 2007 and was
the highest observed since nationally representative food security surveys
were initiated in 1995.

About one-third of food-insecure households (6.7 million households, or
5.7 percent of all U.S. households) had very low food security, up from 4.7
million households (4.1 percent) in 2007, and the highest level observed
since nationally representative food security surveys were initiated in 1995.
In households with very low food security, the food intake of some household
members was reduced, and their normal eating patterns were disrupted
because of the household’s food insecurity. The other two-thirds of foodinsecure
households obtained enough food to avoid substantial disruptions in
eating patterns and food intake, using a variety of coping strategies, such as
eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food and nutrition assistance
programs, or obtaining emergency food from community food pantries or
emergency kitchens.

The Booming Economy

Hunger continues to increase in this country, according to a new survey:

In a nationwide survey of 160 local food assistance programs, with operations covering virtually every county in the US, Feeding America found that there has been a 30 percent increase in requests for emergency food assistance, and that every food bank has seen an increase in demand for food relief. An opinion poll commissioned by the organization and released simultaneously found that a growing number of low-income families lack sufficient nutrition.

In a chilling statement on social conditions in the US, 72 percent of surveyed food charities said that they are unable to meet the current demands of local communities for assistance. In most cases, the charities have responded by offering smaller distributions to the hungry, and some have been forced to close down.

And from the Feeding America site:

160 food banks responded
• 100% reported increases in demand for emergency food assistance over the last year
• The rate of estimated increases in demand ranged from 28.6% - 37.7%
• When food banks were asked what were the most prominent contributors to increases in
demand:
o 91% cited rising cost of food
o 90.5% cited increasing unemployment
o 67% cited increasing underemployment
o 63% cited the cost of fuel
o 62% cited mortgage/rent costs
o 52% cited inadequacy of food stamp benefits
• When food banks were asked what populations they and their agencies were seeing:
o 99.4% reported seeing more first-time users
o 74% reported seeing more newly unemployed persons
o 73% reported seeing increased need among existing clients (more repeat visits)
o 59% reported seeing more employed persons
o 48% reported seeing more children
• 72% of food banks do not feel as though they are able to adequately meet the needs of their
communities without adjusting the amount of food distributed

It shouldn't surprise anybody there is more demand for food banks with the worsening economy.

More Booming Economy

Reno is discovering more people are going hungry and need the help of food banks and places like St. Vincent's to survive, or special events like free Thanksgiving dinners put on by local businesses and churches.

Incredible, isn't it, when Nevada was once considered recession proof.

Reed said she hopes to find a job in a casino, but someone stole her identification cards and she is waiting for new ones.
Johnson said he worked as a day laborer until August, when temp jobs began to dry up.

“There’s no work right now,” he said. “Even if you can find something, you need a car and I don’t have a car. So we’re just trying to survive.”

That's my problem right now, even though I am applying for jobs because I have to in order to continue to get UI, despite the fact I am still technically employed but have no income from there as yet. But it's impossible without a car, absolutely and totally impossible when all of the jobs, what few there are, happen to be clear out on the edge of town and require a long commute. It's not practical to take the buses when the jobs are so far out.

Our dictator proved he is a compassionate conservative by signing into law extension of jobless benefits. Mine run out in mid-February. I don't expect the hearing officer's decision to come down before then.

The U.S.: The New Third World Country

It should be no surprise at all that our country, allegedly the wealthiest on earth, has a rise in child hunger. It shot up 50 percent in 2007. This isn't including the current economic mess, either.

"There's every reason to think the increases in the number of hungry people will be very, very large," Weill said, "based on the increased demand we're seeing this year at food stamp agencies, emergency kitchens, Women, Infants and Children clinics, really across the entire social service support structure."

The USDA study covered about 45,600 households, selected as representative of the approximately 118 million households in the US. Households were classified as being "food secure," having "low food security" or having "very low food security," according to their answers to a set of questions, including:

• In the last 12 months, were you ever hungry, but didn't eat, because there wasn't enough money for food?

• Did you or other adults in your household ever not eat for a whole day because there wasn't enough money for food?

Households with children up to 18 years of age were asked additional questions, such as:

• In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of any of the children's meals because there wasn't enough money for food?

• In the last 12 months, did any of the children ever skip a meal because there wasn't enough money for food?

Here is the USDA report:

Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. Food-insecure households include those with low food security and very low food security.

* 11.1 percent (13.0 million) of U.S. households were food insecure at some time during 2007.
* Essentially unchanged from 10.9 percent in 2006.

Low food security—These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.

* 7.0 percent (8.3 million) of U.S. households had low food security in 2007.
* Essentially unchanged from 6.9 percent in 2006.

Very low food security—In these food-insecure households, normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. In previous reports, these households were described as “food insecure with hunger.” For a description of the change in food security labels, see “Definitions of Hunger and Food Security.”

* 4.1 percent (4.7 million) of U.S. households had very low food security at some time during 2007.
* Essentially unchanged from 4.0 percent in 2006.

The Booming Economy

The number of hungry increases in southern Oregon and probably everywhere else.