Hunger & homelessness soar
By Heather Cottin
Freeport, N.Y.
In the gourmet boutiques of Westhampton, Long Island,
shoppers decide whether to buy crabmeat or lobster for their
guests. But in Mastic Beach, 10 miles away, a woman at a soup
kitchen tells a social worker from Adelphi University: "Our
welfare benefits were cut. My husband lost his job, so we can't
pay our bills. ... Our housing was condemned and social
services did not provide enough rent for new housing. ... When
we lost our jobs, we lost medical insurance."
The new Fairway supermarket in Plainview offers hundreds of
international cheeses to tease the palates of Long Island's
North Shore residents who can afford these delights. But four
miles away, in the Church of St. Kilian Outreach Center in
Farmingdale, a parishioner says, "My biggest fear is not only
going hungry, but ending up on the street because I can't
afford to pay rent. My food stamps have been drastically
reduced."
This was the picture long before the Sept. 11 disaster,
according to the report "Poverty Amid Plenty," published by
Catholic Charities and Adelphi School of Social Work in April
2001.
This is the new face of homelessness. According to Newsday,
in June of 1999 suburban poverty was growing "at a
significantly faster pace than urban poverty."
Community Advocates--a housing-assistance agency--noted in
February that there were 50,000 homeless people on Long Island,
20,000 of them children. Newsday on Nov. 13 reported that "the
homeless population of Nassau and Suffolk counties has sharply
increased in recent months, the highest since the mid-1990s.
There are also hundreds of families on the brink [of
homelessness], including those who work, who have never been on
public assistance."
But now Washington has confirmed that a full-blown recession
is underway. Some 40 miles away, in New York City, the problem
of hunger and homelessness has reached critical
proportions.
Columnist Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times of Nov.
22, "There are more than 1,000 soup kitchens and food pantries
in the city, and they are stretched beyond capacity. Last year
in New York, about 20 percent of the pantries in the city had
to turn people away because they ran out of food. That figure
is expected to reach 30 percent this year, according to Joel
Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against
Hunger."
Four days later the Times editorialized, "Food for Survival,
the city's largest supplier of emergency food, estimated that
more than a million New Yorkers were relying on soup kitchens,
food pantries and shelters to avoid going hungry. The New York
City Coalition Against Hunger, which represents about 1,000
kitchens and pantries, reported a similar upsurge in demand.
Unless more food becomes available, the coalition's members say
they will be forced to turn away hundreds of thousands of
hungry people."
People are hungry and homeless, and the situation is
deteriorating in the recession. But these problems are not
new.
On May 24, the Guardian of Britain did an analysis of
poverty in the U.S. Food bank use back then was "up 75 percent
in some American cities, [and] one in five U.S. children lives
in poverty; 44.3 million are uninsured. ... According to
several new reports, it turns out that the reason for deepening
U.S. poverty is rather simple: it's all those rich people.
Extreme wealth created in the top tier of the economy, rather
than trickling down and making everyone better off, is having a
direct negative impact on those living in extreme poverty at
the bottom."
Ripping up safety net
for fun and profit
Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists are flooding Washington with
a myriad of tax cut proposals that will save the big
corporations billions.
The House on Oct. 26 voted to repeal the Alternative Minimum
Tax on corporations. This is now part of the "economic
stimulus" package before the Senate. The AMT has required
profitable companies to pay at least some tax, no matter how
many loopholes they can find.
If the Senate passes the House version, the repeal would be
retroactive, so companies would get rebates of all the
Alternative Minimum Tax they've paid over the last 15 years.
The repeal would allow many companies to pay zero U.S. income
tax in perpetuity.
Wouldn't we all like to get back the taxes we've paid over
the last 15 years?
Plenty of economists agree that the claims these corporate
tax cuts will "stimulate the economy" are bogus. They know full
well that the corporate moguls have no intention of investing
in an economy that is operating at a recession level.
In a recession, people don't buy much. Inventories are high
and manufacturers still have excess capacity, so tax cut or no
tax cut, capitalists won't invest in expanding production.
What this amounts to is robbery from the workers who don't
have the loopholes that businesses do. These taxpayers will be
obliged, according to the Nov. 18 New York Times, to give $1.4
billion to IBM, $833 million to General Motors, $671 million to
General Electric, $572 million to Chevron Texaco, and $254
million to Enron.
What Congress has accomplished since ending "welfare as we
know it" under Bill Clinton has been the whittling away of the
meager welfare system that was created under the New Deal in
the 1930s and expanded slightly under the War on Poverty in the
1960s. In both these periods, worker militancy pushed the
government to do something for poor people.
But "supply side" economics, which is just code words for
stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, has been
promoted since the 1970s, and has accelerated in this declining
economy.
Cutting assistance to poor families and failing to build
sufficient low-income housing in the past 30 years has had a
devastating effect on the poor. Housing costs are the single
most expensive part of a worker's budget. The Adelphi/Catholic
Charities report noted that poor families spend almost 60
percent of their pay on housing. Finding affordable housing is
growing nearly impossible.
Even the paltry amount of assistance workers have received
for housing is being cut. The federal program known as Section
8, which subsidizes low-income housing, is in grave danger.
Congress, according to the Nov. 17 New York Times, is now
unwilling to provide $800 million for the program. In the
tri-state region around New York City alone, this program has
enabled 62,000 households to afford apartments by offsetting
rent costs. Its disappearance would lead to an exponential
increase in homelessness nationwide, especially affecting the
elderly and disabled.
The capitalist class has its program--maximize profits at
any cost. The workers need to fight for their own program--one
that would guarantee food and decent housing, day care, health
care, culture and education for all.
Reprinted from the Dec. 6, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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Email: ww@workers.org
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