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New York, 8:11 AM
Tue Dec 1
57 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/30/09
The details historically came under various provisions of the Farm Bill of the moment. Not so much to do with welfare.
11/30/09
So I went down to the office and applied. The look on the woman's face was bad enough, until she said, "Honey, you're white. White girls in college don't go on food stamps. You call your daddy and just have him take you to Albertson's once a week. You'll be fine."
And then she turned back to her coworker to gossip.
I left, ashamed. Didn't even try arguing with her. I ended up surviving on a two-pronged method: prodding my mom to take me to Costco, where I would buy bulk-sized boxes of Bisquick, which would keep me fed through the week, until I'd go out on a date over the weekend and chow down on the dude's dime. It was the only way I survived until I moved in with my boyfriend-now-husband.
Which is what I think about during my monthly donation trips to the pantry. Nobody should have to be that hungry and that desperate.
11/29/09
It isn't logical and it doesn't reflect the reality of poverty in this country, but I'm sure it makes people feel better on some level. Too bad it also means they feel like they can turn their backs on their fellow human beings (while feeling superior, no less).
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11/30/09
And the idea that it's some kind of family planning issue...even assuming that is true, the idea that some child should have to starve or otherwise suffer because of his/her parent's own stupidity is ridiculous. No doubt many of the people chiding the parents in that situation are also staunchly pro-life.
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11/29/09
That's the shame the people who spoke to the reporter felt. Some of these parents were only desperate to feed their kids. While both parents were working. And they felt ashamed at this assistance.
The fact is : the working class has been utterly destroyed, decimated, brought to its knees by thirty years of Reaganism, Republican ideology in the US. And the culture makes the victims feel shame for it. As if it's their own fault.
The tens of millions of working-class people who've lost their jobs due to outsourcing, factory closings, pay cuts, concessions and disappearing blue-collar work are told it's their own fault. If only you went to the right school, did the right thing, pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Tens of millions of workers all thinking it's their own personal failure that they lost their good job when the factory closed.
This is unbelievably cruel. In America, everyone thinks they're middle class. It's impolite to speak of it. But I am appalled and disgusted that our national media scarcely sees fit to look closely at the destruction- the working class, the backbone of American prosperity and industriousness, has been wiped out. Is starved. Is left to blame themselves that they aren't CEO's or highly paid television commentators.
Instead, let's criticize how Obama gave his polite bow to the Emperor of Japan, whether he should have , and next up we'll have a right wing retard make the reasonable case that Obama should have punched the guy out in revengefor Pearl Harbor, by some inordinately respected right-wing warmonger.
In the meantime, the Republican party's long war on the good people of America continues. We have no money for health care but we'll spend ten times that on foreign wars. Sign your son up! We've eradicated your jobs and lives, it's cheaper to enslave overseas. But stop your whining. Not our fault you didn't go to Harvard. Your kids are hungry? Here's your foodstamps, loser. Til we get rid of that too.
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11/29/09
Call what I ask next some form of stupid optimism: how do we de-Reaganize the country?
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if it's policy you're interested in - (again, as small as it may seem) send your congressmen a letter/call them/fax them. even once. (six times works too, btw) :D
optimism is never stupid. non-action when you feel an emotional reaction to a problem is, perhaps, defeatism.
11/29/09
The trickle-down economy is the biggest scam in American history. It's completely nuts that people even bought into it. Considering that wealthy people tend to SAVE far more money, percentage wise, than they spend compared to the middle and lower class (who need to spend that larger percentage of money on food and shelter), it makes no sense just from a numerical standpoint. But even further, it's not like these wealthy people are waltzing into a mom and pop shop to buy their stuff - they buy their consumer goods from huge chains just like everyone else, putting their money into the pockets of other wealthy people, with only 7-10 dollars an hour "trickling down" to the average worker. Then, all these people with their infinite wealth get policy power by either befriending politicians (lobbying) or becoming politicians (Bloomberg, Bush, et al billionaire politicians). Also, the wonders of globalization have made loyalty of American company's to American interests pretty much non-existent, so no company or executive will stick their necks out to help everyone if it even marginally affects their own bottom line, and instead uses tax-deductible charity donations to make it seem like they're helping the people, when they're just cutting back their government expenses. Oh, and let's not forget the wonders of high-priced accounting practices, which cut down the taxes paid by the wealthy and huge corporations back to a tiny percent, whereas the average joe has no access to this and has to pay a monstrous chunk of his income each year.
Shit, that's pretty much a manifesto I just wrote - long and unfocused. I'll probably have the FBI at my house in ten minutes.
11/29/09
All jesting aside, and with sincere apologies to Dylan Thomas, I think it's essential that you continue to "rage, rage against the lying of the right."
I'd like to believe, as Dr. King did, that the arc of history will eventually bend towards justice.
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11/30/09
That's definitely not something you need to work on.
Keep shining!
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11/29/09
[www.informationclearinghouse.info]
Cross of Iron Speech
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
...
If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate
11/29/09
I imagine Eisenhower would be hanging out with Dennis Kucinich on the 'believes in fairies, tree gnomes, social justice and world peace' modern political scale.
Didn't his granddaughter work for Obama's campaign?
11/29/09
Ike would be tried for treason by Beck, Limbaugh and Palin -- the idiot three musketeers that are leading the red state, hate blinded, low IQ masses down the garden path. The smarter richer people who support that agenda are at least working in their own short term interests. The misled masses are just ignorant and hateful. Of course it won't be good for the riches when things here become like in Latin America, where it's all walled compounds and armed bodyguards because the poors have been so completely dispossessed of everything that they really don't give a shit anymore.
11/29/09
Julie Nixon Eisenhower actually married Ike's son and supported Obama:
[thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com]
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11/30/09
These rich, pontificating assholes and their policy think tanks and all their grandiose words? They have no idea at all.
11/30/09
11/29/09
This fucking country.
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Uh, make that the Old Dixie. I live in Utah and, along with Nevada and Idaho, we yield to NO ONE in our redness, but are among the lowest food stamp recipients.
Fortunately, we have lots of roadkill.
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Amen
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There are two types of people in the world. Type 1 thinks that there is enough to go around. Type 2 doesn't.
That tends to drive sharing decisions. Call me a type 2. Life is a limited resources problem. Unless you've discovered a source of unlimited energy?
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I am going to call you an idiot.
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I would, to feed my family. Just never yours.
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What part of "limited resources" don't you understand? Like I said, until you have an infinite energy source, you're stuck finding ways to share. Some of the most efficient ways involve some unfortunate people from bad situations and locations starving to death. Sorry.
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I'm not sure your emotional response to suffering is going to make the rice yields go up, Bookish. I can't engage you in an argument about how you feel about poverty, it's purposeless. All you're going to do is rail at me for being the messenger of the world's unfair realities, and that doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything.
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Well, I'd say that Somalia is an objectively bad place to be born. If it interests you enough we can probably develop an algorithm from per-capita GDP, poverty rates, disease, war, rape, etc. statistics.
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11/29/09
I'm not sure your anger solves more than my mathematics. In fact, I'm positive that 5 minutes of patient analysis can accomplish more than all the undirected anger in the world. There is nothing abstract about starvation, but the solutions to it are. And currently, solutions that exclude starvation don't exist - not unless you have an infinite amount of arable land and potable water or the political will to fix all of Earth at a specific population.
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Of course not. And a few thousand fathers fail to succeed in their wild quest to find sustenance every day. If you think starvation is some sort of "orderly affair" you're wrong. I didn't ask a single person to simply accept fate on an individual level. I spoke in the aggregate.
11/29/09
Who am I showing off for, Bookish? What am I showing off? I don't understand your point of view.
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Correct. I'm not stating that they're responsible for starving through some moral flaw. They were simply born in the wrong location.
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I'm not sure you'd believe my answer if I said yes, and I'm positive the answer is irrelevant.
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Considering that Detroit is a rough approximation of the countries in Africa I'm referring to, the argument seems portable. I know, Michigan humor.
And yes, I believe that luck (or a lack thereof) has a terribly large impact on the ability of the hungry to receive adequate food. Remember that episode of The Wire where the crackhead mom sold the Rice-A-Roni?
11/29/09
You don't know a thing about my qualifications. What's with your need to discuss me? This isn't the first time.
There are a thousand inputs in this discussion, macro and micro. We're talking weather patterns, global warming, whether or not a guy in a market sees a kid stealing, the outcome of a meeting between two warlords huddling over a create of supplies.
Foodstamps are a microcosm of the global mission to determine how we feed the hungry. It's such a general topic! Honestly, ignore me if you want, but my point - which I was general about, because this isn't exactly the forum for a data-driven discussion - is that the commodity everyone chases (food) is limited. It's an unassailable point.
11/29/09
It is. You are still an idiot.
11/30/09
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We have so much food production in this country we put Mexican farmers out of business because we could grow it cheaper and ship it to their country than they could grow it. Food exports are our biggest export, so food obviously isn't the problem.
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What do we pour on those crops to grow them? Food production is the end result of a complex integration of primarily imported products. EG: petroleum-based fertilizer. We are, of course, tremendous importers of oil - the world's largest, by far. American agribusiness is fueled by the interconnectivity of the global trade marketplace. You can't simplify it to "We have X food, let's hand it out."
11/30/09
You want to simplify the world, reduce it to suffering and amelioration. I get that. It cuts through the complexity of the world we actually live in. Your position is easy - people suffer and those that sit "idly" by while it takes place are complicit. You can rain condemnation and insults from your unsophisticated little foxhole like it matters. I hope it brings you the solace you're looking for.
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11/30/09
Aaah, you really shouldn't have gone that far. "your New York apartment" would've been been enough!
By the way, I am not (merely) insulting you, or (God forbid!) condemning you. I am ridiculing you. Which is basically all we ever do, here in my unsophisticated little foxhole.
11/30/09
Food is relatively scarce in poor countries such as Somalia for a multitude of reasons beyond those relating to arable land. So, I'm curious, if we limit the discussion to developed nations like the United States, what data do you have which supports your claim that the supply of food is limited (of course, it is limited, in the sense that it is not infinite) to the extent of being insufficient. I don't think the issue of hunger in this country, for example, is one of supply. The issue, I believe, is one of poverty. Poverty is perhaps inevitable, even in wealthy societies, but responsible governments should make some effort to mitigate its effects. Poverty is the result of societal inefficiencies (ones that may prove ultimately insoluble). It is itself an inefficiency that, when left unaddressed, grows and weighs on the productivity of the rest of society.
Anyway, the danger of presuming starvation as an inevitable condition of society, regardless of its wealth, is that it diminishes the impetus for society to discover the underlying causes and address them. Why make some futile attempt to solve the unsolvable?
11/30/09
There is more than enough food available in the United States to feed the people within our borders. It's a matter of overcoming the various barriers to getting it to them, among them these dipshit ideas that it's some kind of survival of the fittest race to deserve it.
11/30/09
Hunger is more of a distribution problem than a supply problem, particularly in this country.
That's exactly right. In the U.S., anyway, supplies are at such a level that hunger is primarily a problem of political economy, not macro- or microeconomics. For such problems, purely analytical solutions are frequently helpful, but they're rarely sufficient by themselves -- since enduring solutions require us (the problem-solvers) to place values on certain nonquantifiable assets like rights to personal dignity or autonomous decisions on reproduction, etc.
I've respected the points you've made before, but your mistaking problems of political economy for problems of pure macroeconomics seems like a serious analytical oversight. In fact I'd go so far as to say that it's inconsistent with a truly analytical approach to problem-solving.
It's true, many public problems involve optimizing the use of scarce, discrete resources. But certain very complex problems implicate other, harder-to-quantify resources as well. The effort to address those problems analytically is still worth it -- but it's not sufficient, and in fact relying solely on quantitative analysis to address these problems can lead one to some quite regrettable conclusions. I suspect you realize this as well as anyone, actually.
11/30/09
The distribution problem is such a minute point - consider the inputs and outputs relevant to global food production, distribution, and consumption. Poverty isn't even necessarily the result of imperfection in such a system; I could see certain optimizations calling for starvation in certain scenarios. But like I said earlier: we're talking about weather patterns, warlords with crates of supplies, global financial interconnectivity, etc.
The approach to solving such problems, like you said, is to optimize the usage of scarce resources utilizing an analytical approach. But the problem is that the algorithm to solve for hunger is extraordinarily complex. Consider the supercomputer farms used to calculate weather patterns - that's just one variable with incredible importance. It's going to drive your crop yields, which will reconfigure expectations to import or export food resources from one location to another.
Consider that the factory-based production of fertilizers is impacting those weather patterns via climate change. You've got such interdependency, just on the weather and fertilization front. Then you've got issues with currencies, investor and producer expectations in the forward/futures markets, etc. Price discovery, that old evil, is as intrinsic to starvation as a bare cupboard.
My argument was that there isn't enough to go around. That's largely true, given the systems we use to decide how much we have no, how much we will have, and how to best allocate it. Politicians don't have the data or calculation mechanisms NECESSARY - there isn't a computer capable - to solve it, even though I think we all wish hunger didn't exist. Therefore, cynicism is justifiable, no?
11/30/09
But what levels of supply are we talking about? For the supply problem to render the distribution problem "minute," wouldn't you have to show that the Earth produces much less than, say, 3000 calories (of human food) per person per day? I guess that would be about, what, 25 trillion calories produced per day, around 10 quadrillion calories per year? I don't know the data on this, but that level doesn't seem unattainable to me. I think for instance of all the food that's grown simply to feed to animals. Is it your contention that the Earth is simply incapable of producing the number of calories necessary to sustain its current population? I think of myself as being as much a Malthusian (and carnivore) as the next guy, but my suspicion is that this strict interpretation of Malthus falls apart in the modern world when one considers all the grain (and water) that's fed to just one developed-country cow over its lifetime.
11/30/09
I was speaking globally, but to go back to domestic policy:
There are colossal inefficiencies in the current structure. I'm as close to a vegan as I can be, for example, because of the extent to which consuming high-energy-cost meat limits potential sustainable calorie production. Stuffing milk cows full of resources to produce steak is a tremendously destructive food policy, one pursued to its logical schismatic conclusion of fat or dead humans in our bloated nation.
Of course, our panoply of politically facilitated food subsidies (particularly feed grain and corn) and the success of certain multinational restaurant/grocery/production chains are as much to blame for that as the poverty endemic to the human condition. Political involvement in that arena can almost be derided as net negative, no? Not to get all "free-market" and further solidify my status as Most Evilest Gawkerer Thoughtcriminal.
11/30/09
If so, then I conclude that we've found quite a bit of common ground here. (Especially if we leave aside the purportedly "endemic" nature of human poverty.)
11/30/09
I don't view "supply" and "distribution" (demand) as separate concepts. We're close, but probably no cigar. After all, you still appear to have hope.
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Jesus, the general guidelines are really low. $28,668 gross for a family of four?
People should eat. Especially little people who didn't have a say in this whole deal so they don't get rickets and scurvy and beri beri.
Maybe they shouldn't have had those kids--well, why is that any of my fucking concern? Do I want people all up in my womb, telling my ass how to breed? No. Then case closed.
Eugenicists can go fuck themselves and roll around in some Little Debbie Snack Cakes or Beluga caviar or American pie or whatever they eat with all the food and judgment and money and power and smug American Freedom they have, because they aren't in this shitty predicament.
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And so they can concentrate in school and get an education so they can grow up and become engineers or doctors and maybe make my life better by inventing some new technology or curing me if I'm sick.
That's the kind of selfish I subscribe too.
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Also: I suspect that you are the type of Christian that Jesus would actually want to come back for.
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This is still a good idea.
11/29/09
Still not a fan, but: surprising, and made his free-market fetishism a little less monstrous.
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