Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High....

San Francisco food bank volunteers

In today's New York Times, this piece by Brian Knowlton caught my eye:

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lacked reliable access to sufficient food shot up last year to its highest point since the government began surveying in 1995, the Agriculture Department reported on Monday.

In its annual report on hunger, the department said that 17 million American households, or 14.6 percent of the total, “had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.” That was an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, the previous year.

The results provided a more human sense of the costs of a recession that has officially ended but continues to take a daily toll on households; it describes the plight not of a faceless General Motors or A.I.G. but of families with too little food on their children’s plates.

Indeed, while children are usually shielded from the worst effects of deprivation, many more were affected last year than the year before. The number of households in which both adults and children experienced “very low food security” rose by more than half, to 506,000 in 2008 from 323,000 in 2007, according to the report.

Overall, one-third of all the families that are affected by hunger, or 6.7 million households, were classified as having very low food security, meaning that members of the household had too little to eat or saw their eating habits disrupted during 2008. That was 2 million households more than in 2007.

In a statement, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack emphasized the administration’s efforts to combat hunger by creating jobs, providing job training, extending unemployment benefits and taking other measures. He called hunger “a problem that the American sense of fairness should not tolerate and American ingenuity can overcome.”

During his campaign, President Obama promised to eliminate hunger among American children by 2015. The administration has yet to offer a detailed plan to do so, and the report on Monday underscored the daunting dimensions of the challenge.

Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America, a nonprofit organization with a national network of more than 200 food banks, said that the Agriculture Department probably understated the problem. With unemployment and other economic indicators continuing to worsen in 2009, she said, “there are likely many more people struggling with hunger than this report states.”

In September, the group found a sharp increase in requests for emergency food assistance; the food banks in its network reported an average increase in need of nearly 30 percent this year over 2008.

“National socioeconomic indicators, including the escalating unemployment rate and the number of working poor, lead us to believe that the number of people facing hunger will continue to rise significantly over the coming year,” added Ms. Escarra.

The Agriculture Department report was issued as a World Summit on Food Security was opening in Rome.

Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, has urged governments to invest $44 billion a year to end chronic hunger afflicting an estimated 1 billion people.

But as Bloomberg News reported, a draft of the session’s final declaration includes promises of reinforced government efforts to sharply reduce world hunger but makes no mention of new financial commitments.

***

There are food pantries in your area, no matter where you live. Take some time this week to find out where they are and what they need and make a contribution. You can give some food, some money, some time, or some combination thereof. In Indianapolis, visit Second Helpings for more information.

Terror or Terrorism....

The recent shooting at the Fort Hood army base have been followed by a rush of various Republicans trying to establish it as an act of Islamic terrorism that has taken place on President Barack Obama's watch. Former NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani - looking like he's been kept in a cold storage unit awaiting some hint of 9/11 - has taken to the cycle of news programs to spout various nonsense with a subtext suggesting that the Democratic Party is somehow responsible for the actions of the lone gunman.

What infuriates me is the unwillingness of the journalists conducting these interviews to ask even the simplest of follow-up questions. Isn't it reasonable to ask: "Do you believe that, had John McCain or yourself won the 2008 election, that this tragedy would not have happened"?

Newly elected Virginia governor, Robert F. McDonnell, is facing questions regarding his close relationship with evangelist Pat Robertson and recent remarks in which Robertson asserted that Islam is "not a religion" but a "violent political system" and that those who practice it should be treated like members of a communist or fascist party.

Journalists need to ask Republican politicians and their supporters serious questions about what specific policies they would want to put in place should they regain power.

If blame is to be assigned, who should receive it? Do we want to reverse the policy of the US military that encourages the recruitment of Muslims into the armed forces? Would - pick one - Giuliani, McConnell, Gingrich, et.al. propose a ban on Muslim Americans serving in the US military?

Why is no one asking these simple questions?

Here's a bigger question: Was the Fort Hood shooting "terrorism"?

The fact is that the shooter was a US-born American citizen and Major in the US Army who targeted uniformed military personnel.

"Terrorism" must, in my opinion, meet three requirements. First, it must be an act of violence. Name calling, racist graffiti, hate mail can be criminal, but are not "terrorist" acts. Second, it must occur in a political context. The office worker who shoots co-workers after being fired; the student who shoots students and faculty at his school because he was bullied; the criminals who take hostages during a failed bank robbery are not "terrorists." Third, the violence must be random. The bomb that kills 100 people in a crowded Jerusalem market place, the 1988 Halabja poison gas attack by the Iraqi government in which thousands of civilians in the Kurdish town of Halabja were killed; these are terrorist acts. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was not.

When the 9/11 attacks took place, there was real evidence that the Bush Administration and the assembled neo-cons had ignored and failed to properly use intelligence data that very well could have prevented those attacks. Today, it seems as if these same neo-cons are desperate to somehow blame the Obama Administration for the Fort Hood shooting. While that's to be expected - these are despicable people - the real question concerns the failure of US journalists to ask the simplest of follow-up questions.

If you can spare a moment, why not email the major news organizations and ask that they do their job. Click on the following links and email CBS News, ABC News, NBC News/MSNBC News.

Stories from the 1960s....

Barnard College was founded as a women's college in 1899 and has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1902. It is named for Frederick A. P. Barnard (1809–89), an American educator and mathematician, who served as then-Columbia College's president from 1864 to 1889. Barnard advocated equal educational privileges for men and women (preferably in a coeducational setting). The school's founding, however, is largely due to the efforts of Annie Nathan Meyer, a student and writer who was not satisfied with Columbia's effort to educate women. Meyer wrote, "I confess to a pride in having defended the affiliated college at a time when it was neither popular or understood. To me nothing in the education of women mattered so much as the creation of right standards, and this was effected by the establishment of the affiliated college."

Fast forward now to the spring of 1960 when Columbia University President Grayson Kirk complained to the President of Barnard College that Barnard students were wearing inappropriate clothing.

The garments in question... were pants.

The administration forced the Student Council to institute a dress code. Students would be allowed to wear pants only at Barnard and only if the pants were not tight. Barnard women crossing the street to enter the Columbia campus wearing shorts or pants were required to cover themselves with a long coat similar to a jilbab.

Jump ahead to March 1968, The New York Times ran an article on students who cohabited, identifying one of the persons they interviewed as a student at Barnard College from New Hampshire named "Susan". Barnard officials searched their records for women from New Hampshire and were able to determine that "Susan" was really 20-year-old Linda LeClair, who was living with 20-year-old Peter Behr, a student at Columbia University. She was called before Barnard's student-faculty administration judicial committee, where she faced the possibility of expulsion. The student protest took the form of 300 other Barnard women signing a petition admitting that they too had broken the regulations. In the end, the judicial committee compromised:

LeClair would be allowed to remain in school, but would be denied use of the college cafeteria and barred from all social activities.

The point I believe is simply that we have rights that we no longer even recognize as rights that were won by the struggles of women and men in the still-recent past.

National Priorities....

If you paid $10,000 in Federal Income Taxes in 2008:

$2,940 goes to Military
$2,130 goes to Health
$790 goes to Interest on Military Debt
$1,190 goes to Interest on Non-Military Debt
$720 goes to Income Security and Labor
$380 goes to Housing and Community
$380 goes to Veterans' Benefits
$360 goes to Food
$310 goes to Government
$300 goes to Education
$280 goes to Environment Energy and Science
$120 goes to International Affairs
$100 goes to Transportation

See more at http://www.nationalpriorities.org/

Al Franken Kicks Ass....

Senator Al takes a lobbyist to the woodshed.

Heroes....

I've heard the people are looking for heroes.

They can stop now. We've found one.

Video from testimony given for and against Maine's marriage equality bill on April 22, 2009. Nearly 4,000 people attended the hearing, with marriage equality supporters out-numbering the opposition 4 to 1.

[Thanks to Tommy D. for sending me this video.]

Volunteer

Volunteers on an Organic Farm

"Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time." - Marian Wright Edelman

I was looking at my friend Carl's blog this morning and saw that he'd added the above quotation. Whenever I see a quotation that particularly grabs my attention and I don't recognize the author I do a quick search.

Born in South Carolina in 1939, Marian Wright Edelman is the president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund.

She was the first African American admitted to the Mississippi Bar when she began practicing law out of the LDF's Mississippi office. During her time in Mississippi, she worked on racial justice issues connected with the civil rights movement and represented activists throughout the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. She also helped get a Head Start program established in her community.

Edelman moved in 1968 to Washington, D.C. where she continued her work and contributed to the organizing of the Poor People's Campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm and also became interested in issues related to childhood development and poverty-stricken children.

In 1973, she founded the Children's Defense Fund as a voice for poor, minority and disabled children. The organization has served as an advocacy and research center for children's issues, documenting the problems and possible solutions to children in need. To keep the agency independent, she saw that it was financed entirely with private funds.

As founder, leader and principal spokesperson for the CDF, Mrs. Edelman worked to persuade Congress to overhaul foster care, support adoption, improve child care and protect children who are disabled, homeless, abused or neglected. A philosophy of service absorbed during her childhood undergirds all her efforts. As she expresses it, “If you don’t like the way the world is, you have an obligation to change it. Just do it one step at a time.”

Many of my favorite quotations about volunteering share this theme. It's central to the anthropologist, Margaret Mead's observation: "A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

The more I involve myself with non-profit organizations, the more I come to believe that it is this network of agencies, fueled by an army of millions of volunteers, that keeps everything from collapsing. If you're currently not involved with some agency in your community, when you finish reading this type the name of your town and the words "volunteer opportunities" into Google and hit "enter."

You're finished.