![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyRepublicans Split On Whether To Give Back Pay To Workers Furloughed In Government Shutdown
http://tinyurl.com/paedo3v
Cutting the Lean From Food Stamps
http://tinyurl.com/q6eh8ju
Many years ago a Korean man named Francis An arrived in New York via Argentina and observed that many communities in the city lacked the sort of grocery stores that could supply immigrants with the foods they were accustomed to in their native countries. He would eventually open a chain of supermarkets under the corporate name Bogopa, which in Korean means “yearning for you,” in low-income neighborhoods.
One of those stores, the Food Bazaar on East 161st Street in the Bronx, is enormous, its shelves so wide and high and full that you feel as if you’re inside an Andreas Gursky photograph. Belying the image of the poor neighborhood as food desert, produce is abundant — star fruit, dinosaur plums, brussels sprouts, organic pomegranate juice — and so too are grains and ground meats free of hormones, additives and so on.
When compared with an outfit like Western Beef, on West 16th Street, which serves the adjacent Chelsea housing projects and has an entrance through the junk-food aisle, the Food Bazaar is inspiring. The prices are considerably more reasonable than they are in Manhattan and much of Brooklyn. And yet what you quickly learn is that it still costs $4 for a clamshell of organic salad greens in the poorest urban county in the country.
If you live alone and receive $200 a month in food stamps (the maximum the government allows for a single person and the equivalent of $2.30 per meal), your budget remains unlikely to accommodate baby spinach and much of the healthy, essential, “good” food that in this city and so much of the country has become its own religion, at the levels of both culinary passion and public policy. We hail the fact that greenmarkets accept electronic benefit transfer cards, but availability and affordability are hardly tandem principles.
According to research by the Food Bank for New York City, the price of food in the New York metropolitan area rose by 16 percent between December 2007, the start of the recession, and the end of last year, with 32 percent of New Yorkers in 2012 reporting difficulty paying for the food they needed. Those dependent on government subsidies to supply their tables will feel these increases more harshly as cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, as the food stamp program is called) go forward.
Before the government ceased operations, as you may recall, House Republicans were busy trying to ensure $40 billion in cuts to the program. Whatever further reductions are promulgated at the Congressional level will come in addition to predetermined cuts already scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1.
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger estimates that these cuts would amount to $205 million in New York City alone, with a family of four, for instance, potentially receiving $36 less a month to spend on food. The cuts essentially scale back SNAP benefits to levels set before the recession. The 2009 Recovery Act provided the program with an increase, which expires next month.
The irony of course, is that in a place like the Bronx, evidence of recovery is not altogether obvious. Although 15,000 jobs were added in the borough between 2007 and 2012, according to a recent report by the state comptroller’s office, the average unemployment rate for the year so far stands at 12.7 percent; in 2009 it was 11.9 percent.
These hardships are easily observed at the city’s SNAP offices near Yankee Stadium, where lines are long (and where, in contrast to the Bloomberg administration’s health-above-all-things ethos, the building housing the offices also hosts an outpost of Checkers, purveyor of burgers, cheese steaks and a cheesecake-layered sundae).
One morning last week, Jermaine Isaac, a father of two, was applying for food stamps because he had lost his job at a moving company. Elina Salama, who described herself as a schizophrenic, spoke of how the end of the month inevitably found her at the food pantry of a local church because despite the efforts she makes at budgeting, her benefits don’t cover the cost of food.
Another woman, who would give her name only as Carmen, was laid off as an administrative assistant at a hospital in November 2011 and has been looking for work ever since, she told me. She has a 10-year-old living at home with her and a 20-year-old on scholarship at Iona College, and the younger child has been gaining weight, she lamented, “because nutritious food is expensive.” Carmen applied for food stamps in May for the first time, after her unemployment benefits ran out and she was granted temporary emergency assistance. But her plea for more prolonged help has been pending and pending. She visits the SNAP offices twice a week to try to move things along and in the interim has relied on friends who have been generous offering food.
As his days in office dwindle, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been reminding us of his unimpeachable faith in the value of attracting the very rich to the city. The more of them there are, he believes, the better off those in the lower rungs will be, a claim challenged by the fact that although more wealthy people moved to New York during his tenure, the poverty rate did not decline. It is doubtful that among the friends helping Carmen are any of the billionaires the mayor calls such a “godsend.”
********
One of the commenters to the latter article doesn't get why we are so upset over a cut that "only" cuts 4 billion a year for ten years. Because we can't think of anything better to cut, right?
http://tinyurl.com/paedo3v
Cutting the Lean From Food Stamps
http://tinyurl.com/q6eh8ju
Many years ago a Korean man named Francis An arrived in New York via Argentina and observed that many communities in the city lacked the sort of grocery stores that could supply immigrants with the foods they were accustomed to in their native countries. He would eventually open a chain of supermarkets under the corporate name Bogopa, which in Korean means “yearning for you,” in low-income neighborhoods.
One of those stores, the Food Bazaar on East 161st Street in the Bronx, is enormous, its shelves so wide and high and full that you feel as if you’re inside an Andreas Gursky photograph. Belying the image of the poor neighborhood as food desert, produce is abundant — star fruit, dinosaur plums, brussels sprouts, organic pomegranate juice — and so too are grains and ground meats free of hormones, additives and so on.
When compared with an outfit like Western Beef, on West 16th Street, which serves the adjacent Chelsea housing projects and has an entrance through the junk-food aisle, the Food Bazaar is inspiring. The prices are considerably more reasonable than they are in Manhattan and much of Brooklyn. And yet what you quickly learn is that it still costs $4 for a clamshell of organic salad greens in the poorest urban county in the country.
If you live alone and receive $200 a month in food stamps (the maximum the government allows for a single person and the equivalent of $2.30 per meal), your budget remains unlikely to accommodate baby spinach and much of the healthy, essential, “good” food that in this city and so much of the country has become its own religion, at the levels of both culinary passion and public policy. We hail the fact that greenmarkets accept electronic benefit transfer cards, but availability and affordability are hardly tandem principles.
According to research by the Food Bank for New York City, the price of food in the New York metropolitan area rose by 16 percent between December 2007, the start of the recession, and the end of last year, with 32 percent of New Yorkers in 2012 reporting difficulty paying for the food they needed. Those dependent on government subsidies to supply their tables will feel these increases more harshly as cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, as the food stamp program is called) go forward.
Before the government ceased operations, as you may recall, House Republicans were busy trying to ensure $40 billion in cuts to the program. Whatever further reductions are promulgated at the Congressional level will come in addition to predetermined cuts already scheduled to go into effect on Nov. 1.
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger estimates that these cuts would amount to $205 million in New York City alone, with a family of four, for instance, potentially receiving $36 less a month to spend on food. The cuts essentially scale back SNAP benefits to levels set before the recession. The 2009 Recovery Act provided the program with an increase, which expires next month.
The irony of course, is that in a place like the Bronx, evidence of recovery is not altogether obvious. Although 15,000 jobs were added in the borough between 2007 and 2012, according to a recent report by the state comptroller’s office, the average unemployment rate for the year so far stands at 12.7 percent; in 2009 it was 11.9 percent.
These hardships are easily observed at the city’s SNAP offices near Yankee Stadium, where lines are long (and where, in contrast to the Bloomberg administration’s health-above-all-things ethos, the building housing the offices also hosts an outpost of Checkers, purveyor of burgers, cheese steaks and a cheesecake-layered sundae).
One morning last week, Jermaine Isaac, a father of two, was applying for food stamps because he had lost his job at a moving company. Elina Salama, who described herself as a schizophrenic, spoke of how the end of the month inevitably found her at the food pantry of a local church because despite the efforts she makes at budgeting, her benefits don’t cover the cost of food.
Another woman, who would give her name only as Carmen, was laid off as an administrative assistant at a hospital in November 2011 and has been looking for work ever since, she told me. She has a 10-year-old living at home with her and a 20-year-old on scholarship at Iona College, and the younger child has been gaining weight, she lamented, “because nutritious food is expensive.” Carmen applied for food stamps in May for the first time, after her unemployment benefits ran out and she was granted temporary emergency assistance. But her plea for more prolonged help has been pending and pending. She visits the SNAP offices twice a week to try to move things along and in the interim has relied on friends who have been generous offering food.
As his days in office dwindle, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been reminding us of his unimpeachable faith in the value of attracting the very rich to the city. The more of them there are, he believes, the better off those in the lower rungs will be, a claim challenged by the fact that although more wealthy people moved to New York during his tenure, the poverty rate did not decline. It is doubtful that among the friends helping Carmen are any of the billionaires the mayor calls such a “godsend.”
One of the commenters to the latter article doesn't get why we are so upset over a cut that "only" cuts 4 billion a year for ten years. Because we can't think of anything better to cut, right?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-10-06 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-07 04:51 pm (UTC)"The politics chosen by the middle class is trickling up to the middle class."
and:
"Now see what happens when those paychecks simply stop coming, in our post-social safety net country. It never seemed to occur to middle classers that the periodic increases in our former welfare rolls were always the result of "hard-working Americans" who lost their jobs and ultimately turned to welfare to keep their families afloat."
.... y'know what, I remember ALL too clearly the prevailing attitudes that many of those with their nice 'secure' Government jobs took toward the Occupy Wall Street movement just two years ago. Why should they get "back pay" for the time during which they were laid off and not working? What about all the other Americans who've been laid off due to the Republican agenda; who's going to pay them for sitting home worrying? All these Federal workers at least have a near-certainty of being re-hired before the year is out, which is a HELL of a lot more than most laid-off Americans can say.
I must admit, I am sitting back and making popcorn, watching the Republicans committing political suicide. I'm cheering for every terrible decision and ignorant, entitled remark they make - yes, let them cram their feet into their big mouths again and again, in front of a million cell-phone video cameras! Especially, let's hear a lot more about how they're God's Own Party, and therefore the wrecking of our economy has been God's Ordained Punishment for womens' rights and marriage equality, rather than the direct result of their systematically dismantling our protections against corporatism for the past three decades. I want to watch those Dominionist bastards go over the top and right over the cliff, over and over again on Youtube.
And yes, schadenfreude: I want to see the smug assholes who've been mocking "the liberals" all this time betrayed and ripped off by their own evil Party. It's like watching the bully's loyal little flunky get sucker-punched by the bully, right? Where were all these Federal workers two years ago, when people were camping in November sleet to oppose the hostile takeover of the Federal government by the rapacious uber-rich?
If any of them like to take this opportunity to stand up in public, apologize to all us 'pinko hippies' for the nasty shit they've talked about us all these years and admit that we've been right all along about the logical consequences of their short-sighted, self-serving agendas, I might have more compassion for their terrible misfortune in suffering a little taste of what a lot of their fellow citizens have had to swallow for a long time now. Is there an echo of "We told you so!" ringing through the land? You damn betcha. About damn time.
I want to see the Greedy Old Parasites burn themselves to the ground with their own hubris, so that everything they've stood for (viz. corporatism and Dominionism) is utterly discredited in the eyes of the populace. I want everyone who's supported them since the Reagan administration to be cursing himself or (especially!) herself for a blind fool, and sincerely regretting having opposed those who tried to prevent things from going this way. I know that's "not very nice", but I don't care. Those evil shits have trashed my country and seriously hurt my planet, and I say they are traitors to everything America ever stood for.
Now would be the best of times for some bright young Independents to run for office on a platform of term limits, restrictions on campaign contributions, denial of citizens' rights to corporations, Medicare for all, restoring of social services, chopping military spending and taxing the rich back to a reasonable level. It would be wonderful if they also took the attitude that the government has no Constitutional mandate to interfere in the private lives of citizens in such matters as whom they marry, what plants they grow or use, or whether or not they remain pregnant, and that the government does specifically have a Constitutional mandate to keep the opinions of religious sects from being made into secular law.