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 49Million Amerecans faced Hunger
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A record 49 million Americans faced hunger in 2008
By Barry Grey
17 November 2009
A yearly survey on hunger released Monday by the United States Department of Agriculture reported that a record 49.1 million Americans in 17 million households lacked dependable access to adequate food in 2008.
The government reported a sharp rise both in what it calls “food insecurity” and “very low food security,” i.e., outright hunger, noting that the rates recorded last year in both categories were the highest since the Agriculture Department began its annual surveys in 1995.
Those suffering food insecurity in 2008 made up 16.4 percent of the US population. Of these, 12.1 million adults and 5.2 million children lived in households with very low food security.
The report’s chief author, Mark Nord, pointed out that most families with a scarcity of food contain at least one adult with a full-time job. This is a reflection of the assault on both jobs and wages carried out by the American corporate elite in response to the financial crisis. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in the summer of 2007, big business has sought to place the burden of the financial breakdown on the working class, a process that has accelerated under the Obama administration.
Corporations, taking their lead from the Obama administration’s assault on auto workers at General Motors and Chrysler, have been systematically shedding jobs and slashing wages, benefits and work hours, utilizing the crisis precipitated by Wall Street to effect a permanent reduction in working class living standards and an intensification of the rate of exploitation of labor.
The result is a social catastrophe with no parallel since the Great Depression.
The Agriculture Department report pointed out that just half of the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, while most of the rest survive on something less than twice that level.
This only demonstrates the fraudulent nature of the official poverty level, which excludes tens of millions who live in poverty. The real poverty level in the US is likely double the official estimate for 2008 of 13.2 percent, itself an increase from 12.5 percent in 2007. According to the US Census Bureau, there were 39.8 million people in the US in poverty in 2008, up from 37.3 million the previous year. The real figure is likely in the range of 70 million to 80 million, at least a quarter of the population.
The US Census Bureau announced last September that real median household income in the United States fell 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008. That trend has undoubtedly accelerated this year.
The official jobless rate in December of 2008 was 7.2 percent. The rate for October of this year was 10.2 percent. This means the hunger epidemic reported on Monday significantly underestimates the current situation.
President Obama on Monday issued a perfunctory statement in response to the Agriculture Department report. Released from Beijing, where Obama is meeting with Chinese leaders, the statement called the report “unsettling.” It referred to “many communities across our nation where food stamp applications are surging and food pantry shelves are emptying.”
Obama focused his concern to the impact of growing hunger on children, noting that “there were more than 500,000 families in which a child experienced hunger multiple times over the course of the year.” He said nothing about adults who are suffering from inadequate nutrition.
In fact, the Agriculture Department report stated that nearly 17 million children—more than one in five across the US—were living in households where food ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million the year before. The report also noted than the number of children who experienced outright hunger rose from about 700,000 to nearly 1.1 million.
Obama placed the greatest emphasis not on the human tragedy of such levels of hunger, but rather on its implications for “our future competitiveness as a nation,” i.e., the global competitive position of American capitalism.
He made a pro forma reference to restoring “job growth,” and touted his administration’s sponsorship of a measure signed into law last month that “invests $85 million in new strategies to prevent children from experiencing hunger in the summer.” This paltry allocation goes toward maintaining school lunch programs during the summer vacation.
It is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars—estimated by one government agency at up to $23.7 trillion—which the government has made available to bail out the banks. And it pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars in bonuses that will be handed out to bank executives next month.
Obama concluded his brief remarks by reiterating that providing children with the “healthy meals they need to grow and succeed” is necessary to “keep America competitive in the decades to come.”
The Agriculture Department reported that among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent (17 million households) last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with 11 percent in 2007. This is the greatest decline in access to food during a single year in the history of the annual survey.
Of this 15 percent, 5.7 percent (6.7 million households) experienced “very low food security”—meaning food intake of one or more family members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money. The figure for this category was up from 4.1 percent in 2007.
The report also noted that food insecurity had increased from 1999 to 2007, that is, during the bumper years on Wall Street before rampant speculation and fraud precipitated the near-meltdown of the US and world financial system.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in a briefing to reporters said, “It’s no secret. Poverty, unemployment, these are all factors.” He acknowledged that “there could be additional increases” in the figures for 2009, due out a year from now.
The report indicated the inadequacy of existing government food programs. Just more than half of those surveyed who reported they had experienced food shortages said they had, in the previous month, participated in one of the government’s largest anti-hunger programs and nutrition programs—food stamps, subsidized school lunches, or WIC, the nutrition program for women with babies or young children.
In 2008, people in 4.8 million households used private food pantries, up from 3.9 million in 2007, an increase of 23 percent. Some 625,000 households resorted to soup kitchens, nearly 90,000 more than the previous year.
Food shortages are particularly common among women raising children alone. Last year, more than one in three single mothers reported struggling to provide food and more than one in seven said someone in their home had gone hungry. The report also found that African-Americans and Hispanics were more than twice as likely to report that food in their home was inadequate.
On average, households reporting food scarcity had the problem seven months out of the year, while about one-fourth said the problem occurred almost every month. Among the questions asked in the survey were whether, in the past year, food sometimes ran out before they had money to buy more, whether they could not afford to eat nutritionally balanced meals, and whether adults in their family at times reduced the size of their meals, or skipped them, because of a lack of money.
Regionally, food insecurity was most prevalent in the South. Rates increased significantly in 13 states, with the largest increases in Nevada and West Virginia.
Monday’s report underscores the refusal of the Obama administration to take any serious measures to deal with the jobs crisis and the growth of poverty. As the report was released, Obama was reassuring the Chinese government, which holds some $800 billion in US Treasury notes, that his administration would protect Beijing’s dollar assets and make good on its pledge to slash health care costs and impose major cuts in social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Growing hunger is one of the costs being borne by the American people for the single-minded determination of the Obama administration, Congress and both big business parties to empty the public treasury and slash working class living standards in order to protect the wealth of the American financial aristocracy.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/hung-n17.shtml
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Re: 49Million Amerecans faced Hunger (Re: Al-Mansour Jaafar)
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US debt tops $12 trillion, Obama calls for austerity
By Bill Van Auken
19 November 2009
At the end of his visit to China Wednesday, President Barack Obama warned that the US economy faces the threat of a “double-dip recession” unless the government carries out fiscal austerity measures designed to slash the mounting public debt.
Obama’s remarks came just a day after the Treasury Department announced that the US public debt had passed the $12 trillion mark, a record high. The debt has soared from $10 trillion in September 2008, at the outset of the world the financial meltdown. The unprecedented rise reflects above all the massive deficit spending that the government has used to bail out Wall Street and to assume responsibility for the bad debts of major banks and finance houses.
“Our first job was to get the economy to recover. And we’re seeing that,” Obama told Fox News in an interview conducted in Beijing.
He continued, “I think it is important, though, to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”
In reporting the remarks, the Financial Times noted pointedly that their timing, coming at the end of his three-day trip visit to China, raised the question of whether “his Chinese counterparts delivered stern warnings to Mr. Obama about the consequences of continuing high US budget deficit spending.”
China, which holds nearly $800 billion in US Treasury bonds, is the US economy’s biggest creditor. As the Financial Times noted, “some presented his [Obama’s] state visit to China as that of a debtor visiting his banker.”
In a separate interview with NBC News, Obama defended his policy when asked whether he should have acted sooner on jobs, asserting that his administration’s policies had been designed “to make sure we didn’t slip into a Great Depression.”
Obama went on to qualify his boast about economic recovery, acknowledging that “people are really hurting right now” because of the unemployment crisis. The only proposals that he raised for spurring employment growth, however, were providing corporations with a tax incentive to hire new workers and boosting US exports, which he cited as “an example of something we could do without spending money.”
The administration continues to rule out any direct job creation measures by the government itself.
Top officials in the Obama administration also stressed deficit reduction in a conference of CEOs held by the Wall Street Journal this week. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said that a plan for slashing federal deficits will be “a key component” of Obama’s annual State of the Union address in January. “It is foremost on his mind and the mind of his economic team,” he told the assembled corporate executives.
Speaking at the same conference, White House budget director Peter Orszag stressed that the administration’s so-called health care reform will add nothing to the deficit. He acknowledged that the current deficit, which reached $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended in September―roughly 10 percent of gross domestic product―is unsustainable. Orszag said that the administration would present a plan for slashing it to 3 percent of GDP, but declined to spell out what measures would be taken.
Meanwhile, the administration will be compelled to ask Congress to once again raise the federal debt limit beyond the $12.1 trillion ceiling that it established earlier this year in order to stave off a government shutdown.
That the US debt is unsustainable is beyond question. According to the Treasury Department, Washington was compelled to pay $383 billion over the course of the last fiscal year just in interest on the public debt. Given that total revenues from individual federal income taxes amount to $904 billion, 40 cents out of every dollar paid by US taxpayers is going to service the debt.
Meanwhile, the tensions with China are indicative of global concerns over record US deficits and Federal Reserve lending rates of near zero that are driving central banks internationally to shift their holdings from the US dollar to other currencies such as the euro and the yen, as well as to gold.
The rise in US debt and the fall of the dollar are both symptomatic of the protracted decline of American capitalism and its shift from being the world’s manufacturing leader to the center of global financial parasitism and speculation.
The Obama administration’s focus on fiscal austerity is not designed to avoid a “double-dip recession”; in terms of the real economy, slashing government funding will make one all the more likely.
Rather, it is aimed at placing the full burden of the economic crisis on the backs of working people.
That this process is already well advanced was made clear in Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s unusually frank assessment of the “jobless recovery” presented in a speech to the Economic Club of New York earlier this week.
“Since December 2007, the US economy has lost, on net, about 8 million private-sector jobs, and the unemployment rate has risen from less than 5 percent to more than 10 percent,” Bernanke told his audience of business and financial executives. “Both the decline in jobs and the increase in the unemployment rate have been more severe than in any other recession since World War II.”
According to the government’s more comprehensive figure, encompassing involuntary part-time workers and so-called “discouraged” workers, the real unemployment rate has topped 17.5 percent, a depression level.
Bernanke also noted that the number of part-time workers who cannot find full-time jobs has doubled since the onset of the crisis, while the average workweek has fallen to 33 hours, the lowest level since the Great Depression.
“With the job market so weak, businesses have been able to find or retain all the workers they need with minimal wage increases, or even with wage cuts,” the Fed chairman continued. “Indeed, standard measures of wages show significant slowing in wage gains over the past year. Together with the reduction in hours worked, slower wage growth has led to stagnation in labor income.”
Bernanke pointed to the sharp growth in productivity―a 5.5 percent annual rate so far this year―attributing it to employers carrying out layoffs and then “asking their remaining workers to provide extra effort.”
He concluded, “The best thing we can say about the labor market right now is that it may be getting worse more slowly.”
The truth of even this limited claim was called into question by the release of subsequent figures showing US housing starts falling to their lowest level in six months―a 30.7 percent decline since October of last year―and a fall in factory production in October, the first such decline since June.
One sector of the economy is booming, however. New York State’s comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, released a report Tuesday stating that profits on Wall Street will set a new record in 2009, with its four largest investment firms―Golman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase―having already earned $22.5 billion in the first nine months of the year.
As the New York Times pointed out, “Fueling the gains were extraordinary profits from the firms’ own securities trading accounts as they borrowed at near-zero interest rates and put the money to work in the securities markets.”
The report also predicted that bonuses paid at six of the top bankholding companies―Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo―are likely to top their 2007 record of $162 billion. Given that Wall Street will have eliminated 35,000 jobs by the end of this year, this means substantially richer year-end paydays for the top executives and traders.
This is the reality of the Obama administration’s policy. Massive bailouts and cheap credit policies are fueling a new financial bubble and even greater fortunes on Wall Street, while the working class is facing mass unemployment, growing impoverishment and increased exploitation.
The promises of fiscal discipline and austerity amount to the kind of structural adjustment program that Washington, through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, previously imposed upon indebted countries from Latin America to the former Soviet bloc. Now, similar measures are being prepared against working people in the US.
The proposed health care “reform,” designed to cut costs and ultimately the life expectancy of American workers, is only the first phase of a planned destruction of the limited social gains won by working people in the US since the 1930s.
The conditions described by Bernanke―mass unemployment being used as a bludgeon to extract wage cuts and increased productivity from workers―is, from the standpoint of America’s ruling oligarchy, not the problem but the solution. Combined with the fiscal austerity and budget cutting policies being championed by Obama, this assault on living standards and basic rights is aimed at making American workers pay for the crisis created by capitalism.
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