c***@truthor.not
2008-11-28 16:25:50 UTC
While Some of Us Are Hoping for Change, Others Are Literally Starving
for It
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 27, 2008.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food
pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since
the summer.
Elba Figueroa worked as a nurses aide until she got Parkinsons
disease. She lost her job. She lost her health care. She receives $703
a month in government assistance. Her rent alone costs $750. And so
she borrows money from friends and neighbors every month to stay in
her apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up and down
steps and along the frigid sidewalks of Trenton, N.J., to get to soup
kitchens and food pantries to eat.
Food prices have gone up, the 47-year-old Figueroa said, waiting to
get inside the food pantry run by the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and
Trenton. I dont have any money. I run out of things to eat. I worked
until I physically could not work anymore. Now I live like this.
The pantry, which occupies a dilapidated three-story art deco building
in Old Trenton, one of the poorest sections of the city, is one of
about two dozen charities that struggle to provide shelter and food to
the poor. Those who quality for assistance are permitted to come once
a month and push a shopping cart in a U shape around the first floor
where, clutching a piece of paper with allotted points, they can stock
up on items using the pantrys point system according to the number of
people in a household. The shelves of the pantry hold bags of rice,
jars of peanut butter, macaroni and cheese and cans of beets, corn and
peas. Two refrigerated cases hold eggs, chickens, fresh carrots and
beef hot dogs. All Fresh Produce 2 pounds = 1 point, a sign on the
glass door of the refrigerated unit reads. Another reads: 1 Dozen
EGGS equal 3 protein points. Limit of 1 dozen per household.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food
pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with
children, have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. General
welfare recipients receive $140 a month in cash and another $140 in
food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished areas
have to live on.
Trenton, a former manufacturing center that has a 20 percent
unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a window into our
current unraveling. The financial meltdown is plunging the working
class and the poor into levels of destitution unseen since the
Depression. And as the government squanders taxpayer money in
fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses,
citizens are callously thrown onto the street without work, a place to
live or enough food.
The statistics are already grim. Our banking and investment system,
holding perhaps $2 trillion in worthless assets, cannot be saved, even
with the $700 billion of taxpayer money recklessly thrown into its
financial black hole. Our decline is irrevocable. The number of
private sector jobs has dropped for the past 10 months and at least a
quarter of all businesses say they plan to cut more jobs over the next
year. The nations largest banks, including Citigroup, face collapse.
Retail sales fell in October by the largest monthly drop on record.
Auto companies are on the edge of bankruptcy. The official
unemployment figures, which duplicitously mask real unemployment that
is probably now at least 10 percent nationwide, are up to 6.1 percent
and headed higher. We have lost 1.2 million jobs since January. Young
men of color have 50 percent unemployment rates in cities such as
Trenton. Twelve million houses are worth less than their mortgages and
a million people will lose their homes this year in foreclosures. The
current trends, if not swiftly reversed, mean that one in 33 home
owners will face foreclosure.
There are now 36.2 million Americans who cope daily with hunger, up by
more than 3 million since 2000, according to the Food Research and
Action Center in Washington, D.C. The number of people in the
worst-off category -- the hungriest -- rose by 40 percent since 2000,
to nearly 12 million people.
We are seeing people we have not seen for a long time, said the Rev.
Jarret Kerbel, director of the Crisis Ministrys food pantry, which
supplies food to 1,400 households in Trenton each month. We are
seeing people who havent crossed that threshold for five, six or
seven years coming back. We are seeing people whose unemployment has
run out and they are struggling in that gap while they reapply and, of
course, we are seeing the usual unemployed. This will be the first
real test of [Bill] Clintons so-called welfare reform.
The Crisis Ministry, like many hard-pressed charities, is over budget
and food stocks are precariously low. Donations are on the decline.
There are days when soup kitchens in Trenton are shut down because
they have no food.
We collected 170 bags of groceries from a church in Princeton and it
was gone in two days, Kerbel said. We collected 288 bags from a
Jewish center in Princeton and it was gone in three days. What you see
on the shelves is pretty much what we have.
The largess of Congress to Wall Street bankers and investors does not
extend to the growing ranks of the poor. The U.S. Department of
Agricultures Emergency Food Assistance Program donated $240 million
in surplus food in 2003 to food banks and other programs. Those
donations fell last year to $59 million.
States, facing dramatic budget shortfalls, are slashing social
assistance programs, including Medicaid, social services and
education. New Jerseys shortfall has tripled to $1.2 billion and
could soar to $5 billion for the next fiscal year. Tax revenue has
fallen to $211 million less than projected. States are imposing hiring
freezes, canceling raises and cutting back on services big and small,
from salting and plowing streets in winter to heating assistance
programs. Unemployment insurance funds, especially with the proposed
extension of benefits, are running out of money. Governors such as
Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and David A. Paterson in New York
have called special legislative sessions to deal with the crisis.
If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess,
if he does not radically redirect the nations resources to assist the
working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country. We
will waste gargantuan amounts of money we cannot afford on our
military, our national security state and bloated corporations while
we damn the middle and working class to the whims, idiocy and greed of
an entrenched, corporate oligarchy. Obamas appointments of Timothy
Geithner as treasury secretary and Lawrence Summers as director of the
National Economic Council are ominous signals that these elites remain
entrenched.
Dolores Williams, 57, sat in the cramped waiting room at the Crisis
Ministry clutching a numbered card, waiting for it to be called. She
has lived in a low-income apartment block known as The Kingsbury for a
year. Two residents, she said, recently jumped to their deaths from
the 19th floor. She had a job at Sams Club but lost it. No one, she
says, is hiring. She is desperate.
She handed me a copy of The Trentonian, a local paper. The headline on
the front page read: Gangster Slammed for Bicycle Drive-By. It was
the story of the conviction of a man for a fatal drive-by shooting
from a bicycle. The paper, as I flipped through it, was filled with
stories like these, the result of social, economic and moral collapse.
Poverty breeds more than hunger. It destroys communities. There was a
report about a 56-year-old woman who was robbed and pistol-whipped in
the middle of the afternoon. There was an article about the plight of
four children whose two parents had been shot and seriously wounded.
Libraries OK Now, but Future Is Murky a headline read. Another
announced: Still No Arrests in Hooker Slayings.
It is like this every day, Williams said.
So while our nation crumbles, physically and morally, while our empire
implodes, while our economy tanks, the bankrupt elites who got us here
play the merry-go-round game of power in Washington. They will
continue to oversee our demise, including the obscene drain of our
military and security budget, which now accounts for half of all
discretionary spending. Pentagon officials have reportedly asked the
Obama transition team for $581 billion, an increase of $67 billion.
This increase does not, of course, include the $3 trillion for the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We will pay these loans later.
Banks, automotive companies and investment firms, all sinking under
the weight of their own incompetence and greed, head to Washington,
usually in private jets, to engage in the largest looting of the
treasury in American history. And Congress doles out our money without
oversight in the greatest transference of wealth upwards in modern
times.
As this pitiful march of folly rolls forward, children in Trenton and
across America go to bed hungry.
for It
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 27, 2008.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food
pantries around the country have grown by at least 30 percent since
the summer.
Elba Figueroa worked as a nurses aide until she got Parkinsons
disease. She lost her job. She lost her health care. She receives $703
a month in government assistance. Her rent alone costs $750. And so
she borrows money from friends and neighbors every month to stay in
her apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up and down
steps and along the frigid sidewalks of Trenton, N.J., to get to soup
kitchens and food pantries to eat.
Food prices have gone up, the 47-year-old Figueroa said, waiting to
get inside the food pantry run by the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and
Trenton. I dont have any money. I run out of things to eat. I worked
until I physically could not work anymore. Now I live like this.
The pantry, which occupies a dilapidated three-story art deco building
in Old Trenton, one of the poorest sections of the city, is one of
about two dozen charities that struggle to provide shelter and food to
the poor. Those who quality for assistance are permitted to come once
a month and push a shopping cart in a U shape around the first floor
where, clutching a piece of paper with allotted points, they can stock
up on items using the pantrys point system according to the number of
people in a household. The shelves of the pantry hold bags of rice,
jars of peanut butter, macaroni and cheese and cans of beets, corn and
peas. Two refrigerated cases hold eggs, chickens, fresh carrots and
beef hot dogs. All Fresh Produce 2 pounds = 1 point, a sign on the
glass door of the refrigerated unit reads. Another reads: 1 Dozen
EGGS equal 3 protein points. Limit of 1 dozen per household.
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food
pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with
children, have grown by at least 30 percent since the summer. General
welfare recipients receive $140 a month in cash and another $140 in
food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished areas
have to live on.
Trenton, a former manufacturing center that has a 20 percent
unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a window into our
current unraveling. The financial meltdown is plunging the working
class and the poor into levels of destitution unseen since the
Depression. And as the government squanders taxpayer money in
fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses,
citizens are callously thrown onto the street without work, a place to
live or enough food.
The statistics are already grim. Our banking and investment system,
holding perhaps $2 trillion in worthless assets, cannot be saved, even
with the $700 billion of taxpayer money recklessly thrown into its
financial black hole. Our decline is irrevocable. The number of
private sector jobs has dropped for the past 10 months and at least a
quarter of all businesses say they plan to cut more jobs over the next
year. The nations largest banks, including Citigroup, face collapse.
Retail sales fell in October by the largest monthly drop on record.
Auto companies are on the edge of bankruptcy. The official
unemployment figures, which duplicitously mask real unemployment that
is probably now at least 10 percent nationwide, are up to 6.1 percent
and headed higher. We have lost 1.2 million jobs since January. Young
men of color have 50 percent unemployment rates in cities such as
Trenton. Twelve million houses are worth less than their mortgages and
a million people will lose their homes this year in foreclosures. The
current trends, if not swiftly reversed, mean that one in 33 home
owners will face foreclosure.
There are now 36.2 million Americans who cope daily with hunger, up by
more than 3 million since 2000, according to the Food Research and
Action Center in Washington, D.C. The number of people in the
worst-off category -- the hungriest -- rose by 40 percent since 2000,
to nearly 12 million people.
We are seeing people we have not seen for a long time, said the Rev.
Jarret Kerbel, director of the Crisis Ministrys food pantry, which
supplies food to 1,400 households in Trenton each month. We are
seeing people who havent crossed that threshold for five, six or
seven years coming back. We are seeing people whose unemployment has
run out and they are struggling in that gap while they reapply and, of
course, we are seeing the usual unemployed. This will be the first
real test of [Bill] Clintons so-called welfare reform.
The Crisis Ministry, like many hard-pressed charities, is over budget
and food stocks are precariously low. Donations are on the decline.
There are days when soup kitchens in Trenton are shut down because
they have no food.
We collected 170 bags of groceries from a church in Princeton and it
was gone in two days, Kerbel said. We collected 288 bags from a
Jewish center in Princeton and it was gone in three days. What you see
on the shelves is pretty much what we have.
The largess of Congress to Wall Street bankers and investors does not
extend to the growing ranks of the poor. The U.S. Department of
Agricultures Emergency Food Assistance Program donated $240 million
in surplus food in 2003 to food banks and other programs. Those
donations fell last year to $59 million.
States, facing dramatic budget shortfalls, are slashing social
assistance programs, including Medicaid, social services and
education. New Jerseys shortfall has tripled to $1.2 billion and
could soar to $5 billion for the next fiscal year. Tax revenue has
fallen to $211 million less than projected. States are imposing hiring
freezes, canceling raises and cutting back on services big and small,
from salting and plowing streets in winter to heating assistance
programs. Unemployment insurance funds, especially with the proposed
extension of benefits, are running out of money. Governors such as
Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and David A. Paterson in New York
have called special legislative sessions to deal with the crisis.
If Barack Obama continues to turn to the elites who created the mess,
if he does not radically redirect the nations resources to assist the
working class and the poor, we will become a third-world country. We
will waste gargantuan amounts of money we cannot afford on our
military, our national security state and bloated corporations while
we damn the middle and working class to the whims, idiocy and greed of
an entrenched, corporate oligarchy. Obamas appointments of Timothy
Geithner as treasury secretary and Lawrence Summers as director of the
National Economic Council are ominous signals that these elites remain
entrenched.
Dolores Williams, 57, sat in the cramped waiting room at the Crisis
Ministry clutching a numbered card, waiting for it to be called. She
has lived in a low-income apartment block known as The Kingsbury for a
year. Two residents, she said, recently jumped to their deaths from
the 19th floor. She had a job at Sams Club but lost it. No one, she
says, is hiring. She is desperate.
She handed me a copy of The Trentonian, a local paper. The headline on
the front page read: Gangster Slammed for Bicycle Drive-By. It was
the story of the conviction of a man for a fatal drive-by shooting
from a bicycle. The paper, as I flipped through it, was filled with
stories like these, the result of social, economic and moral collapse.
Poverty breeds more than hunger. It destroys communities. There was a
report about a 56-year-old woman who was robbed and pistol-whipped in
the middle of the afternoon. There was an article about the plight of
four children whose two parents had been shot and seriously wounded.
Libraries OK Now, but Future Is Murky a headline read. Another
announced: Still No Arrests in Hooker Slayings.
It is like this every day, Williams said.
So while our nation crumbles, physically and morally, while our empire
implodes, while our economy tanks, the bankrupt elites who got us here
play the merry-go-round game of power in Washington. They will
continue to oversee our demise, including the obscene drain of our
military and security budget, which now accounts for half of all
discretionary spending. Pentagon officials have reportedly asked the
Obama transition team for $581 billion, an increase of $67 billion.
This increase does not, of course, include the $3 trillion for the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We will pay these loans later.
Banks, automotive companies and investment firms, all sinking under
the weight of their own incompetence and greed, head to Washington,
usually in private jets, to engage in the largest looting of the
treasury in American history. And Congress doles out our money without
oversight in the greatest transference of wealth upwards in modern
times.
As this pitiful march of folly rolls forward, children in Trenton and
across America go to bed hungry.