James Weill, the director of the food center that pioneered the report, called it a careful look at an underappreciated condition.Gentle Reader, you just know that any further attempts to help alleviate hunger in this country will be attacked by the party of Hoover and their sycophants in Fox News as "socialism".
“Many people are outright hungry, skipping meals,” he said. “Others say they have enough to eat but only because they’re going to food pantries or using food stamps. We describe it as ‘households struggling with hunger.’ ”
The only government spending that Republicans are in favor of is that which buys things that can be used to slay foreigners. Taking care of the people who did the slaying, well, that's evil government spending as well.
When KO, or was it Rachel mentioned the stat on this last night I cried. Perhaps I was vulnerable since I have been sick lately..but I fucking cried.
ReplyDeleteThen I got every angry. Why is it that fewer and fewer can afford to live here? wtf?
Dusty,
ReplyDeleteBadTux often refers to it as the "serfification of America". I think he is right; the GOP wants to turn back the clock to the 19th Century, when there were a handful of rich "old-money" people and "new-money" oligarchs, a very tiny professional class, an equally small middle class, and everyone else worked crushingly long hours as laborers, whether in factories, on farms, or as servants for the rich, all for very little pay.
The fact that a vast legion of working poor people will not pay enough taxes for a world-class military makes no nevermind to the GOP. The fact that the rise of the middle class was part of the engine of the rise of the USA as a world power doesn't matter one bit. The facts that Russia is a declining power because economic power is concentrated in the hands of a few and that China is a rising power because they are growing a middle class are irrelevant to the GOP.
A serfified USA will eventually fall apart as did the USSR. The GOP does not care.
Nap Flyer
ReplyDeleteThe GOP does not care because they saw that the rich in the USSR stayed rich after the fall. If fact is seems that a lot of them got richer. So in GOP vision they must be doing something right.
Ruckus, but the issue there is that the Russian Federation is facing demographic collapse and is living on borrowed time. Other than weapons and vodka, Russia makes nothing worth exporting. Their exports are extractive only, which gives them plenty in common with the Saudis.
ReplyDeleteWe don't even have that. Thanks to joint production arrangements, China will steal the technology to make airliners, in the same way that they stole Russian technology to start making jet fighters and warships. The domestic consumer market, under the plan the Randites have in mind, will evaporate, idling most American factories.
All we will have left is agriculture and the stuff we export, such as wheat, corn and soybeans, are all farmed by highly mechanized methods.
Even a fascist goon like Henry Ford knew that it took well-paid workers in order to have a market to sell stuff. He was far smarter than the politicians in the Party of Palin.