BILL MOYERS: 50 MILLION AMERICANS GO HUNGRY EVERY DAY.

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Encore: The Faces of America’s Hungry
July 31, 2013

Kristi Jacobson and Mariana Chilton reveal tragic truths about hunger and food insecurity in America.

Encore: The Faces of America’s Hungry
July 31, 2013                                                                                                                        Original and transcript here

Here in the richest country on earth, 50 million of us — one in six Americans — go hungry. More than a third of them are children. Debates on how to address hunger – in both Congress and the media — are filled with tired clichés about freeloaders undeserving of government help, living large at the expense of honest, hardworking taxpayers. But the documentary A Place at the Table paints a truer picture of America’s poor.

On an encore broadcast, Kristi Jacobson, one of the film’s directors and producers, and Mariana Chilton, director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, join Bill to break these stereotypes apart and share how hunger hits hard at people from every walk of life.

“The cost of food insecurity, obesity and malnutrition is way larger than it is to feed kids nutritious food,” Jacobson tells Bill.

“There’s no opportunity for people who are low-income to really engage in our democracy,” says Chilton. “I think they’re actively shut out.”

Also on the show, Bill shares a short film that first aired on Bill Moyers Journal in 2008, telling the story of an urban garden and farmers market in the East New York neighborhood of New York City called East New York Farms! To this day, the project provides healthy produce to community residents who must otherwise travel miles to the nearest supermarket, and addresses food justice by promoting local sustainable agriculture and community-led economic development.

Producer: Candace White. Editor: Rob Kuhns. Associate Producer: Julia Conley.

Many of the nearly 48 million Americans now on food stamps work extremely hard but are paid such low wages that they can't make ends meet without them.

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Greg Kaufmann on the Truth About American Poverty
June 28, 2013                                                                                                                          Original Here

Greg Kaufmann, poverty correspondent for The Nation, says the poor in America are stereotyped and demonized in an effort to justify huge cuts in food stamps and other crucial programs for low-income Americans.

“People are working and they’re not getting paid enough to feed their families, pay their utilities, pay for their housing, pay for the healthcare… if you’re not paying people enough to pay for the basics, they’re going to need help getting food,” Kaufmann tells Bill. “There are a lot of corporations that want to be involved in the fight against hunger. The best thing they can do is get on board for fair wages.”

Producer: Gina Kim. Editor: Sikay Tang. Associate Producer: Lena Shemel.

Greg Kaufmann
Poverty Correspondent

Greg Kaufmann, poverty correspondent for The Nation, covers hunger, politics and policy in America. Through his blog, This Week in Poverty, Kaufmann informs his readers about America’s ongoing struggle to address poverty, and offers solutions to eradicate the suffering of those living under its painful conditions.

Kaufmann has been a guest on NPR programs including Here & Now, Your Call, Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, and local programs including The Matthew Filipowicz Show. His work has also appeared on BillMoyers.com, Common Dreams, Alternet, Tikkun.org, NPR.org, CBSNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, and MichaelMoore.com.

Kaufmann serves as an adviser for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and the Institute for Policy Studies. Kaufmann graduated from Dickinson College and studied creative writing at Miami University in Ohio.

College Students Are Going Homeless and Hungry -- And Corporate America Is Trying to Exploit Them

A look at the growing numbers of homeless and hungry college students trying desperately to make ends meet--and those who are willing to exploit them.

 
August 27, 2012 | Socialist Worker / By Adam Turl  Original here


As the mainstream press frets that the much-touted "economic-recovery" appears to have lost steam, the economic crisis continues to escalate for ordinary people.

Photo Credit: Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock.com

With official unemployment holding steady at 9.5 percent (real unemployment is much higher), and with the state budget cuts producing yet more tuition increases, a growing phenomenon is sweeping the nation: homeless and hungry college students.

National Public Radio (NPR) reported in late July: "For many college students and their families, rising tuition costs and a tough economy are presenting new challenges as college bills come in. This has led to a little-known but growing population of financially stressed students, who are facing hunger and sometimes even homelessness."

While no exact figures are available, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth reports a large increase in homeless students.

"We're hearing from the college presidents and leadership that more and more students are struggling," Michelle Asha Cooper of the Institute for Higher Education told reporters. "Some are taking out pretty large amounts of student loans to finance their education as well as their living costs. Some are enrolling part time, some are even dropping out."

The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) even created an "Economic Crisis Response Team" to help homeless and hungry students stay enrolled. NPR reported the story of one such UCLA student, Diego Sepulveda, who ended up homeless after losing his full-time job at Subway. Now Sepulveda alternates between sleeping in the library, student center and friend's couches, catching occasional showers in a school gym.

With tuition being jacked up and social services being cut, it has often been left to students--such as Sepulveda's friends--to help each other out. For example, Abdullah Jadallah, a 22-year-old UCLA engineering student, started a food pantry after noticing how many of his classmates were going hungry.

Last year, Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak chronicled the story of two homeless D.C.-area students, Ronnell Wilson and Miracle Lewis.

Lewis--in her late twenties--had worked as a flight attendant for United Airlines, but decided to go back to school after mass layoffs in 2008. She got a scholarship to study business and took temp jobs to make ends meet. But when temp work "dried up," she found herself living in the Calvary Women's Shelter in Northwest Washington, D.C.

Wilson--also in his twenties--was a forklift operator before he decided to go back to college. He took classes at the University of the District of Colombia during the day, and worked at California Pizza Kitchen at night. Then he got laid off and ended up homeless. Wilson continued to take classes, but had to reorganize his schedule to make sure he could get to the shelter on time to get a place to sleep.

The New York Times similarly reported the story of 22-year-old Fallon Coffer, a homeless college student who worked as a taxi dispatcher at night, and went to class during the day, taking care of her young son in-between.

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While hard data on the exact extent of homelessness among college students has not been collected, broader trends are sure to push even more students up to and over the edge.

As Kathryn Edwards and Alexander Fernandez argued in their recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) briefing paper, "The Kid's Aren't Alright: A Labor Market Analysis of Young Workers," official unemployment for workers aged 16 to 24 peaked at 19.2 percent after the 2008 recession. This is the highest rate since records started being kept in 1948.

Real unemployment--counting involuntary part-time workers and those who have given up looking for work--is probably twice that rate.

"Though young adults represent only 13.4 percent of the workforce," Edwards and Fernandez wrote, "they now account for 26.4 percent of unemployed workers." The unemployment rate for young Black workers stands at 32.5 percent and 24.2 percent for Latinos. Unemployment for teenage workers--aged 16 to 19--stands at more than 50 percent.

This high level of youth unemployment has a major impact on college students, as so many students must also work in order to make ends meet. In 2008, 45 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in high school or college as well as employed (or looking for work).

With students and their family members losing jobs as tuition increases escalate and social services are cut, more and more students will fall through the tattered social safety net.

Moreover, since the 2008 recession, hunger and homelessness has mushroomed among all age groups. Late last year, the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported up to 30 and 40 percent increases in homelessness in several U.S. cities.

One in eight Americans now relies on food donations from the relief charity Feeding America--an increase of 1 million people each week in 2010 over 2006, and a 50 percent increase in the number of children. Similarly, one in eight people in the U.S. rely on food stamps for their daily bread.

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Times were already tough before the recession. But before 2008, family members and friends could take up more of the slack. If the parent of a student lost their job, the student could drop out of school for a while and work in order to help the family. Conversely, if students found themselves in trouble, loans and help from family could keep things going until graduation. The breadth of the crisis is sabotaging this privatized welfare system.

To make matters worse, Corporate America is looking for even more ways to take advantage. Business Week has reported an increase in for-profit "educational" outfits--such as the University of Phoenix and Chancellor University--targeting homeless people to fleece them of financial aid money, often leaving them with a mountain of defaulted student loan debt.

These predatory "colleges" are big business. One of Cleveland-based Chancellor University's major investors is "Neutron Jack" Welch, former CEO of General Electric, who got his nickname by firing some 100,000 GE workers. Goldman Sachs owns 38 percent of the for-profit Education Management Corporation in Pittsburgh.

Chancellor and Phoenix have sent recruiters into homeless shelters to sign people up for classes, regardless of their ability to pay or even attend school. After they get tuition money--paid for by student loans and financial aid--these companies can churn through yet more students, never worrying about pesky facts like graduation rates or what happens to their would-be students.

As Business Week notes, this type of predatory "education" isn't new. In past recessions, there was a proliferation of for-profit "trade schools"--which more often than not failed to provide any real training for unemployed blue-collar workers.

"In the Cleveland shelters, you can still find people with trade school debts from 20 years ago," Business Week wrote. "Those who don't repay their student loans [today] may forfeit their chances for public housing and are also ineligible for deferral financial aid to return to college."

As Ardetra Jones, from the Tacoma Rescue Mission told Business Week, "If the homeless have a bad student loan, they can't find a place to live, they can't go back to school. And in this economy there's not a lot of work. That leaves a person with no options."

On the one hand, college students are being driven into homelessness and hunger. On the other, the homeless and hungry are being preyed upon by for-profit "educational" vultures. George Clinton best summed up this sort of thing when he coined the phrase "America eats its young."

Enough is enough. Education--including higher education--is a human right. Not only should tuition be paid in total, the living expenses of students should be subsidized. Until we win that greater victory, we must meet every instance of cutbacks and tuition hikes with protest and action. Some of our fellow students' very lives are on the line.

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Adam Turl writes for the Socialist Worker.

Record US poverty, hunger. Real unemployment rate: 22%. "Leadership" ignores obvious solution

November 19, 11:09 AM
LA County Nonpartisan Examiner Carl Herman

If a government has useful jobs to do and unemployed workers, the obvious solution is for the government to be the employer of last resort and create fiat currency to pay the workers. The added currency creates higher GDP, negating inflation. Problem solved.

Napoleon did it after ten years of chaos from the French Revolution. Germany did the same after their tragic-comic hyperinflation. In both cases, the two economies quickly became the most successful on the planet. Many of America’s brightest minds have argued for government-created currency, including Benjamin Franklin citing direct experience with the prosperity of the Pennsylvania colony with almost zero taxes. Government-created money can be used to directly pay for government goods and services rather than taxes.

But in America today, we have record poverty and hunger: 50 million Americans, 17 million households, one in every six Americans. We have a real unemployment rate of 22% when discouraged and part-time workers are added; close to the highest levels in American history. The so-called stimulus of job creation is symbolic. The numbers of new jobs claimed versus the number of unemployed make the odds of getting one of these jobs about as likely as getting into Harvard. And according to our government’s report on stimulus spending, $6.4 billion went to job recovery in “phantom” congressional districts that do not exist. Remember, this is the same government that regularly steals 25% of the Department of Defense budget that by their own admission becomes “unaccounted for.”

With crumbling US infrastructure, we could put the unemployed to work, but our political leaders tolerate poverty, hunger, homelessness, despair, and crime instead from political fear and feigned compassion, change and hope.

A Harvard study reports that 45,000 Americans die every year from unnecessary causes due to lack of health insurance. This, when Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care than all other developed countries and would save us money (and here). This too is a cruel hoax of leadership.

On our planet, we tolerate a million children dying every month from preventable poverty, when the investment to solve all related problems is less than one percent of US income. Ending poverty in every historical case reduces population growth rates, decreases crime and terrorism, and improves environmental quality. Our political “leaders” of both parties spend trillions on wars, but only fund our commitment in UN Summits to end poverty at about 20% of our promises. We spend trillions on US banksters, but won’t solve Americans’’ problems of poverty, hunger, unemployment, death from lack of basic health care, and do even less for the billion human beings living in poverty around our world.

The ONE campaign to make poverty history has an accurate and powerful slogan: We don’t want your money, we want your voice.

A starting place for Americans is recognizing that your leadership doesn’t represent your interests. We must discover a way for our will to be represented using our 1^st Amendment right:

Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Following are 1-minute and 3-minute videos from One.org, then a 4-minute video reminding us who the people we save from poverty are.

As always, please share this article with all who claim civic competence. If you appreciate my work, please subscribe by clicking under the article title (it’s free). Please feel free to use my archive of work to help build a brighter future.