From the Hunger in America 2010 report, issued by Feeding America:

In the annual USDA survey on food insecurity, the number of Americans found to be food insecure in 2008 rose sharply to 49 million individuals (17.1 million households), a 36% increase over the prior year. The Hunger in America 2010 analysis reveals that Feeding America’s network of food banks and their partner agencies provide emergency hunger-relief services to an estimated 37 million low-income individuals (14.5 million households) in the United States annually. This represents an increase of 46% in unduplicated annual clients since the Hunger in America 2006 report. The 37 million annual client estimate falls within a 95% confidence interval ranging from 33.7 to 40.2 million unduplicated clients. Even if the true number falls at the lower end of the confidence interval, it still represents a substantial increase over 2005.

Among the key findings of the report:

Many of the client households served by Feeding America food banks report that their household incomes are inadequate to cover their basic household expenses.

--46 percent of client households served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food.

--39 percent of client households said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.

--34 percent of client households report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food.

--35 percent of client households must choose between transportation and food.

One in four client households (24 percent) do not have health insurance and nearly half of our adult clients report that they have unpaid medical and hospital bills.

Thirty percent of households report having at least one member of their household in poor health.

For the entire report, go here. As you might expect, it makes for pretty disturbing reading.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Poverty, Sub-Proletarianization of America

From the Financial Post:

The credit crisis is spilling over into the grain industry as international buyers find themselves unable to come up with payment, forcing sellers to shoulder often substantial losses.

Before cargoes can be loaded at port, buyers typically must produce proof they are good for the money. But more deals are falling through as sellers decide they don't trust the financial institution named in the buyer's letter of credit, analysts said.

"There's all kinds of stuff stacked up on docks right now that can't be shipped because people can't get letters of credit," said Bill Gary, president of Commodity Information Systems in Oklahoma City. "The problem is not demand, and it's not supply because we have plenty of supply. It's finding anyone who can come up with the credit to buy."

So far the problem is mostly being felt in U.S. and South American ports, but observers say it is only a matter of time before it hits Canada.

Gary is getting it wrong. Inability to obtain credit is is a demand problem, and, in any event, there is going to be a severe demand problem going forward, as people lack the ability to pay anything near current market prices. Note also how the credit crunch is preventing shipping companies from moving the commodity to other countries for consumption, the type of thing that I speculated about on Thursday.

Labels: Credit Crunch, Food Crisis, Global Recession, Neoliberalism

From today's Independent:

"Pakistan is going through the worst crisis of its history," according to a leaked letter signed by the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader. It is a view shared by Imran Khan, another opposition leader, who says that the political and economic meltdown "is leading to a sort of anarchy in Pakistan".

"How does a country collapse?" the former cricketer asked. "There's increasing uncertainty, economic meltdown, more people on the street, inflation rising between 25 and 30 per cent. Then there's the rupee falling."

Pakistan is experiencing power cuts that have led to hourly blackouts, a doubling of basic food prices and a currency that has lost a third of its value in the past year. "The awful thing is there's no solution in sight – neither in the war on terror nor on the economic side," Mr Khan said during a visit to London. Heightening the sense of national emergency, the government yesterday turned to the International Monetary Fund for $15bn (£9.3bn) to cope with a balance of payments crisis caused by a flight of capital, after previously saying that applying to the IMF would be a last resort.

Almost every day there are retaliatory attacks against police and soldiers and Western targets. Hundreds of soldiers and an unknown number of civilians are losing their lives. The national parliament rejected the US influence on the government by adopting a resolution last night calling for an "independent" foreign policy and urging dialogue with the extremists.

The credit crunch and the global recession are placing unprecedented pressures upon the fabric of Pakistani society, so much so that the ability of the state to maintain order is now in question. It is apparent that quite a number of major countries, including Pakistan, Mexico, Argentina and possibly even Brazil, among others, face destabilization as the global economy slows. But only Pakistan finds itself involuntarily situated along the front line of the so-called war on terror. Somehow, one doubts that the projection of US force into the country will serve to alleviate the problems there.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Credit Crunch, Food Crisis, Global Recession, Neoliberalism, Pakistan

The Baseline Scenario confirms what you already knew, with an emphasis upon three alarming concerns:

First, there are worrying signs that the credibility of the US authorities is on the decline. Despite passing the $700bn TARP program last Friday, and the Fed announcing it will potentially purchase even more in unsecured commercial paper, plus the provision of $450bn of additional liquidity to banks, credit and equity markets continue to decline. This pattern is reminiscent of the Asian crisis in 1998, when successive IMF programs provided briefer and briefer respite from market routs in emerging economies. . . .

Second, the ramifications of Iceland’s misery are probably more serious than people realize. With bank assets in the country at ten times GDP, and the banks obviously insolvent, the country clearly cannot afford to bail them out. This is going to be a large default, with many counterparties impacted. . . .

There is a broader concern here. When the Icelandic Prime Minister returned empty-handed from Europe on Monday, he commented that it was “now every nation for itself.” This smacks of the financial autarchy that characterized defaulters in the 1998 crisis. When Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2001-2002, the politicians faced enormous pressure to change the rule of law to benefit domestic property holders over foreigners, and they changed the bankruptcy law to give local debtors the upper hand. In Indonesia and Russia, local enterprises and banks took advantage of the confusion during default to grab property, and then found ways to ensure that courts sided with them. . . .

Our third concern is that we seem likely now to see substantially more defaults and credit panics in smaller countries and emerging markets. . . . Much of Eastern Europe, Turkey, and parts of Latin America are obvious risks. The difficulties in Russia show that seemingly solvent countries can be high risk: while the central bank has reserves of $556bn, the non-public sector has recently built up an estimated $450bn of debt. Creditors don’t want to roll over this debt, so the government is using its reserves to do this. The government has already ordered $200bn to be channelled through state banks to companies repaying debt. If the oil price falls further, a seemingly highly solvent country could quickly look near insolvent. Some other rising stars, such as Brazil, and even India, may have similar problems.

The authors of this report, well worth reading in its entirety, are Peter Boone, an associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, and Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, currently a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. One doubts that the US, Europe and Japan are capable of taking the kind of concerted action that Boone and Johnson describe as essential elsewhere in the article.

Even if these countries prove themselves capable of it, Boone and Johnson acknowledge that the immediate economic future remains gloomy:

Finally, it is important for everyone to recognize that we are well past the days where even dramatic steps could have stopped the repercussions of the panic and prevented a major recession. A successful program will not prevent recession, and we will still see many personal, corporate and perhaps even national bankruptcies.

No wonder several members of OPEC are concerned:

Almost half the members of the Opec oil cartel are considering an emergency meeting in Vienna next month as oil prices dropped to their lowest level in nearly a year.

Almost half the members of cartel have in the past few days called on the group to act to halt the slide before their next official meeting scheduled to take place in Algeria in late December.

Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Iraq, Venezuela and Ecuador, whose economies tend to be most dependent on high oil prices and whose ministers are among the most hawkish of the 13-member group, have all lobbied for the cartel to drop output.

Purchasers may also be having difficulty accessing short term credit to pay for their oil supplies.

While Boone and Johnson are mainstream economists, we should not summarily dismiss their insistence upon the urgency of collective action. Instead, as leftists, we should incorporate such a perspective into our own approach to social and political action. Accordingly, we should think seriously about how we are going to work together to help those in immediate need, and how to reach the people that this crisis has only begun to victimize,

Johnson and Boone, as economists, are focusing upon the financial institutions upon which the global economy is financially grounded. We need to emphasize the people that are going to suffer because of the greed and arrogance of the neoliberal generation. Otherwise, this crisis will consolidate the power of the most privileged members of it, subjecting the rest of us to even more insecurity, more impoverishment, more sharply curtailed liberties and political irrelevance. Or, to put it more starkly, a lot of people around the world are going to be pushed to precipice of starvation and death.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Credit Crunch, Food Crisis, Housing Bubble, Neoliberalism

There's always one consistent thing about posting on a blog. You always fall behind. Behind the news, behind that stack of books you've read and want to read, behind that list of movies you've developed based upon the reported buzz at festivals. At least, that's what happens if you are not a full-time, professional blogger, and merely seek to periodically give expression to your political and cultural perspectives.

And, then, of course, there's the fact that I have a 15 month old son who's predictably impatient, intensely observant and gets into everything. I try to post 3 or 4 entries a week, a couple of them more substantive than the others, but sometimes I can't find the time to do it. Accordingly, I thought that I would briefly describe some of the subjects that I intend to post upon the immediate future:

---I haven't posted any book reviews lately, partially because they are more labor intensive than remarking upon current events, but I do hope to post one shortly about Victor Serge's engrossing novel, Unforgiving Years, written in 1946 just before his death, published in French years later in 1971 and finally translated into English and published by the New York Review of Books in 2007. A nightmarish look back at the futile resistance of the anti-Stalinist left to Hitler and Stalin, and the horrible consequences of their failure that they anticipated.

---I am long overdue on this one, but I still plan to post about the importance of the credit crunch and its calamitous consequences from a left perspective. The extensive provision of subsidized credit to the middle and lower middle classes has been an essential feature of the neoliberal project that first emerged in the mid to late 1970s. The loss of it provides a long awaited opportunity for the left to organize around income inequality and the urgency of creating communal alternatives to the now shattered expectation that people can fulfill all of their economic and social needs through the marketplace.

---I have a partial draft of a review of Jia Zhangke's Still Life, an understated cinematic epic about the impact of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam upon Chinese social life as revealed through the personal stories of his two protagonists. Jia tells this story through typically distanced imagery and an elliptical narrative that places the construction of the dam, and the adaptability of the people of the region to it within a broader context of change within Chinese society. Maybe, I'll finish it, maybe I won't, we'll see.

---Perhaps, there will be some other book reviews as well. Peter Linebaugh's recent book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, is quite wonderful, one of his typically creative explorations of resistance to capitalism, as manifested in this instance through an exposition of the enduring influence of the forgotten charters of the Magna Carta that presevered the commons by regulating access to it. If I don't review it, read it anyway. Chris Carlsson's book, Nowtopia, published by AK Press in the spring, can be construed as a response to the challenge put forward by Linebaugh: how do we break the pernicious control of wealth and private property over us and reestablish a commons and sense of community that has long been suppressed? Carlsson also evaluates the activities of his subjects as a way of overcoming the inability to bring about social change primarily through an emphasis upon a class consciousness that has already largely disappeared. Again, don't hesitate to get it and read it even if I never get around to reviewing it. With activist politics dormant, and policies increasingly dictated by an unaccountable elite without any significant opposition (outside of the Middle East and South America, anyway), I tend to think that this is a good time for reflection based upon our interaction with art, sociology and just plain everyday life.

---Finally, there is the ongoing global food crisis. I suspect that we are only witnessing the beginnning of it, and so, I unfortunately expect to post about more horrors to come.

So stay tuned. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Labels: Book Reviews, Credit Crunch, Film Notes, Food Crisis, Housing Bubble, Neoliberalism

With each passing day, the economic news gets worse:

As skyrocketing food and gasoline prices strain budgets, utilities are disconnecting many more customers who fall behind on their bills, and even moderate-income households are getting zapped.

Electricity and natural gas shutoffs are up at least 15% in several states compared with last year. Totals for some utilities have more than doubled.

"We're seeing a record number of shutoffs," says Mark Wolfe, head of the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association, which represents programs that subsidize energy bills.

An NEADA survey this month shows 8% of four-member households earning $33,500 to $55,500 have had their power turned off for non-payment. "It's hitting people in the suburbs with two cars and two kids," Wolfe says.

The disconnects are rising as warm-weather power bills increase, some state moratoriums on winter shutoffs expire, and rates are climbing in many states.

Service is typically restored within days after customers work out payment plans, but even brief outages can pose a health hazard on sweltering days. Still, customers typically pay the mortgage and car payment before utility charges, as they can usually buy more time from the power or gas company.

Locally, here in Sacramento, the food banks are being overwhelmed:

In 18 years of running Francis House, a C street refuge for the down and out in Sacramento, director Gregory Bunker has never seen so many desperate people.

They start forming a ragged line around 8 most mornings, 90 minutes or more before the charity opens its doors.

"For the first time ever, 20 or 30 people are inside the gate before we open for the day," Bunker said. Some wait for hours to get a referral for a bag of food, or a $10 gas voucher. Some get turned away.

Hammered by $50 fill-ups and $3 gallons of milk, more and more people classified as "the working poor" are swelling the ranks of clients at agencies like Francis House. At the same time, charities are struggling with shrinking budgets, higher food and fuel prices and fewer donations, according to Bunker and others.

"It's a vicious circle," said Dave Martinez, interim director of the Placer Food Bank. "More people are coming in, and we have less to give them."

Francis House is facing an unprecedented $80,000 budget deficit and a 25 percent increase in demand for its services, and will soon end its gas voucher program. River City Community Services in midtown has seen a 40 percent jump in clientele since last fall. Wellspring Women's Center in Oak Park is seeing at least 50 more people each day than it did a year ago. Virtually every food pantry contacted by The Bee is feeling the pinch of a poor economy and skyrocketing costs for basic staples.

"Last Saturday, we fed almost 200 families, and a lot of them told us that they were working full time and just not making it," said Blake Young, director of the Sacramento Food Bank. "They need us to help them get through the month."

Construction workers are really struggling:

In Placer County, where the home building industry has been hit particularly hard, "we're seeing mostly construction workers, home industry and home improvement workers," said Martinez. "If we can supplement their food, that means a couple more gallons of gas for them so they can get to jobs."

Meanwhile, we continue to see reports of an imminent attack upon Iran by either the US or Israel, with Israel allegedly carrying out a rehersal earlier this month. And, how does Congress respond? By pushing through a bill that imposes sanctions upon Iran and encourages the US to interdict Iranian shipping on the high seas.

Instead of dealing with the deepening economic crisis that is impoverishing more and more people, the President and the Congress accelerate towards a military conflict with the Iranians. At first glance, it seems irrational, but upon further reflection, there is a perverse logic.

Neither political party is willing to mobilize the public around an agenda that would provide meaningful relief, as that would entail an abandonment of neoliberal policies that substitute the market and the decisions of finance capitalists for the government in the making of economic policy. It would require a level of government intervention for people, instead of banks and brokerage houses, that would be unprecedented since the Great Society, and possibly the New Deal.

So, what is the alternative, when the political elite isn't willing to address growing poverty amongst the populace? The answer is obvious: war. In this instance, a war with Iran would provide an after the fact explanation for the hardship that many Americans are already experiencing. It would also have the grotesquely salutary effect of expanding this hardship across most socioeconomic groups, creating the accurate impression that almost all Americans are in this together.

Of course, there is a downside, most notably the prospect that a lot of Americans would be killed in such a conflict, and that it could spiral out of control. Social conditions could deteriorate so much that it becomes impossible to maintain order. But the President and the Congress have already put measures in place to deal with that, haven't they? And, when someone exposes a gap, like the legal exposure for telecommunications companies when they carry out the President's request for illegal wiretaps, Congress fills it.

Has this been conscious and deliberate? That is a question for future historians. But the practical consequences are clear. As I have said before, it appears that the only people preventing the politicians from leading us over the cliff are high ranking generals within the Pentagon. It's a funny thing for an anti-imperialist, anti-militarist leftist like me to say. The ability of anyone within the political system to resist the march towards war is non-existent.

Labels: American Empire, Democrats, Food Crisis, Neoliberalism, Sacramento, War with Iran

AIPAC Persuaded Pelosi to Drop a Provision Requiring a Congressional Vote Authorizing War With Iran

No Bid Contracts for US Oil Companies in Iraq

Lisbon Treaty Stalled as EU Countries Ponder Future Steps After Defeat in Ireland

Nearly 100 People Commit Suicide a Day in Japan

Same Sex Wedding Album

Sacramento One of the Most Extravagant Users of Water in the World

Are We All North Koreans Now?

Labels: Europe, Food Crisis, Japan, Occupation of Iraq, Sacramento, Same Sex Marriage, War with Iran

From an excellent article by Nicole Colson posted over at Counterpunch:

ANITA RHODES, a single mother of three living in Oakland, Md., who makes $374 every two weeks, recently told National Public Radio that she has been forced to begin shopping at a local grocery store selling expired food and damaged goods at discount prices. "The things there are all way, way past their due date, but I tried it," Rhodes said. "The first box [of cereal] I opened had bugs in it." She returned the box to the store to get her money--$1--back, because she couldn't afford not to.

The family has been forced to cut out paper towels, bottled water, chips, cookies, candy and toiletries. "I don't even look at roast right now, just because it's so expensive. I looked at a chuck roast, and it was $15."

According to Rhodes, if prices continue to rise, she may be forced to take more drastic action. "I can shoot a deer," she says. "I can do that. I can shoot a turkey. So I will feed my kids one way or another."

And it's not just people in rural areas who are being forced to make such choices. High school senior Brighton Early, who lives in Los Angeles, told NPR that she has gotten used to "finding flexibility" in her weekly shopping trips with her mother.

When shopping at the regular grocery store became too expensive, Early and her mother started getting their food at the local Chevron gas station--where the cashier gives them a 40 percent discount on leftover apples and bananas. As she wrote in an essay:

To ensure the best selection possible, my mother and I pile into our 20-year-old car and pull up to the food mart at 5 p.m. on the dot, ready to get our share of slightly overripe fruits.

Chevron shopping started like this: One day my mother suddenly realized that she had maxed out almost every credit card, and we needed groceries for the week. The only credit card she hadn't maxed out was the Chevron card, and the station on Eagle Rock Boulevard has a pretty big mart attached to it...

Grocery shopping at Chevron has its drawbacks. The worst is when we have so many items that it takes the checker what seems like hours to ring up everything. A line of anxious customers forms behind us. It's that line that hurts the most--the way they look at us. My mother never notices--or maybe she pretends not to.

I never need to be asked to help the checker bag all the items. No one wants to get out of there faster than I do. I'm embarrassed to shop there, and I'm deathly afraid of running into someone I know. I once expressed my fear of being seen shopping at Chevron to my mother, and her eyes shone with disappointment. I know that I hurt her feelings when I try to evade our weekly shopping trips.

This is what happens when the financial system unravels because of rampant, corrupt speculation. A lot of people who had nothing to do with it go hungry. And we shouldn't consider Anita Rhodes' remarks about shooting deer and turkey to feed her children bravado.

In the early 1990s, Lake Merritt in Oakland experienced a troubling decline in the population of geese. People were catching them to take home and eat. Just the other day, I read about an apparent decline in the number of geese and ducks in William Land Park near where I live Sacramento. For some reason, no one wanted to talk about what is really happening to them.

Labels: American Empire, Credit Crunch, Food Crisis, Neoliberalism

Given the past record of US abroad and the insistence upon preserving global neoliberal economic policies, the latter is the more probable choice in response to growing hunger and unrest:

Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Indeed, as it roils developing nations, the spike in commodity prices — the biggest since the Nixon administration — has pitted the globe’s poorer south against the relatively wealthy north, adding to demands for reform of rich nations’ farm and environmental policies. But experts say there are few quick fixes to a crisis tied to so many factors, from strong demand for food from emerging economies like China’s to rising oil prices to the diversion of food resources to make biofuels.

Not surprisingly, the reporter, Marc Lacey, avoids interviewing indigenous voices, replacing them with more professional, internationally rspected voices, like Jeffrey Sachs.

If Lacey had done so, he might have discovered that the people in these countries perceive very different reasons for their predicament: the evisceration of public health, education and social services, including subsidies for food, in order to satisfy the demands of finance capital, the inability of their economies to generate employment much beyond the informal sector, or to put it more inelegantly, the street, despite these concessions, the willingness of finance capital and international institutions to permit pliable local elites to amass great fortunes by looting the country's resources, and the willingness of the US, as it has specifically done it Haiti, to promote violent unrest.

But no. As Lacey implies in relation to Haiti, the problem is that these countries haven't become investment friendly enough. Curiously, he doesn't explain what measurs that Haiti, and other countries like it, might undertake to do so. So, again, the question: Feed them or shoot them? The acceleration of events is pressing the question with greater and greater urgency.

Labels: American Empire, Food Crisis, Haiti, Neoliberalism, New York Times, Political Violence