Hunger and Homelessness in America

By Tom Turnipseed, Columbia SC

“There’s nothing surer; the rich get rich and the poor get poorer,” was a slogan of the roaring 20s. The famous phrase was adapted from “Ain’t We Got Fun,” a popular song recorded in 1921.  So what’s new in America in the first decade of the 2000s?

Nothing! America’s top 72 wage earners averaged 84 million dollars each in income last year, according to Social Security Administration data.  The richest 1 percent of us earned 24 % of the nation’s total income, the highest since 1928, just before the Great Depression. On the other hand, 14.3 % were living in poverty in 2009, according to the U. S Census Bureau.  50 million people from 17.4 million families are so poor they couldn’t buy sufficient food last year.  About one million children from more than a third of these households missed meals regularly according to a recent study by the Department of Agriculture.  At dinner, families gather to share together. But for the children, dinner time can be the cruelest part of the day. Almost 1 in 4 of them doesn’t know when they will have their next meal.

Because there is a high turnover and many homeless people stay hidden, homeless and hunger counts are only estimates. The Department of Housing and Urban Development reported a count of 643,067 homeless persons nationwide on a single night in January 2008. 1.6 million used emergency shelters or transitional housing during 2007/2008, suggesting that 1 in every 50 persons in the US used the shelter system at some point. 170,000 families lived in homeless shelters. With home foreclosures at record highs and continuing unemployment, homelessness is increasing.

Republicans in the U.S. House have blocked a bill that would have extended jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed beyond the holiday season. About 2 million people will lose their benefits if they are not extended, according to the National Employment Law Project.  The blocked benefits would save the jobless from hunger and homelessness during the most severe recession since the 1930s and boost spending in the economy that will generate more jobs. Long-term unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits right away on rent, food and other necessities, and create jobs in our economy. The Congressional Budget office estimates the “multiplier” effect of spending $65 billion on unemployment insurance extensions will increase gross domestic product $104.7 billion which translates into 488,000 payroll jobs.

The plutocrats controlling our government with campaign contributions and slick lobbyists oppose extending benefits to unemployed people. They fight to keep their unjust tax cuts and sit on the billions in bailout cash they received that we were told would save the economy and create jobs for poor and unemployed people. U. S. companies reported after-tax profits of $1.22 trillion last quarter, the highest on record dating back to 1947, according to the Department of Commerce.

When will some of their government bailout welfare for the rich trickle down to poor and working people?

My wife, Judy, and I are sponsors of an organization called Homeless Helping Homeless and volunteer at the local winter shelter.  And, along with about 35 other people from diverse backgrounds, we have fed an average of 150 mostly homeless and hungry people every Sunday afternoon for the past 7 years at Finlay Park in downtown Columbia. Each server brings a dish or two–turnip greens, mac and cheese, fresh fruit, banana pudding. Pastries are donated by local super markets.  Our picnic provides a nutritious and tasty meal for the homeless and many of the servers.  We are known as Food Not Bombs, a national organization that encourages feeding hungry people rather than supporting military madness.

Our a-frame sign, set up near the entrance to our picnic, has a famous quote from a speech by former General and President Dwight Eisenhower that describes the military industrial complex:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

The U.S. defense budget is $720 billion, which includes the Pentagon base budget, Department of Energy nuclear weapons activities and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We far outstrip the rest of the world in defense spending, surpassing the next closest country by more than eight times.  The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that the U.S. military budget accounts for 43% of the world’s total military spending.

If we heed the words of Eisenhower and stop the madness we call war, if we require the wealthiest to pay their fair share, then perhaps we can end hunger and homelessness in America. There will be food, not bombs, and we will no longer destroy the hopes of our children.

Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and peace activist in Columbia, SC. His blog is tomandjudyonablog.blogspot.com.

By Lt. General Norman Seip

For almost 20 years, the U.S. has had inspectors on the ground in Russia to conduct inspections and surveillance of the Russian nuclear arsenal. Now we don’t. Since December of last year, the treaty that enabled us to keep tabs on Russian warheads expired, and our inspectors came home.

The Senate will have a lot on its plate when it resumes action after the election but their top priority should be to follow the advice of U.S. military leadership, ratify the New START Treaty and put U.S. inspectors back on the ground in Russia.

As a former Air Force Commander, I managed over 30,000 active duty personnel and had to make decisive decisions to protect our nation’s security. This treaty should be ratified for a simple reason—it makes America safe.

The New START Treaty replaces a measure negotiated under the Reagan administration and signed by President George H. W. Bush, which for the first time put into practice President Reagan’s directive that we should “trust, but verify.” In addition to providing a state of the art verification regime that builds on two decades of experience monitoring Russian weapons, the New START Treaty makes modest reductions to both Russian and U.S. arsenals and provides vital transparency and stability the relationship between the countries whose arsenals account for 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.

It is because the New START Treaty makes America safer that it has the overwhelming support of U.S. military leadership and national security experts from both political parties.

Over the course of six months of hearings, senators heard testimony in support of the treaty from the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the Missile Defense Agency charged with overseeing U.S. missiles and missile defense. They heard supporting testimony from officials from the last seven administrations, including George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, among many others.

In addition, seven former STRATCOM commanders wrote to Senators, urging them to promptly ratify the treaty. A recently published open letter in support of the treaty included the names of Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci, Madeleine Albright, Chuck Hagel and John Danforth among its signatories.

Some critics claim that the treaty limits U.S. missile defense capabilities. This isn’t the case. Robert Gates and Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency testified New START “actually reduces constraints on the development of the missile defense program.”

After months of vetting the treaty in more than 20 hearings with hundreds of questions answered, all substantive issues have been addressed.

When the Senate reconvenes it will have been almost an entire year since U.S. on-site inspections of Russian nuclear weapons and infrastructure were suspended.  Our uncertainty grows and our security shrinks as each additional day passes.  In testimony STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton, STRATCOM noted “If we don’t get the treaty, [the Russians] are not constrained in their development of force structure and … we have no insight into what they’re doing. So it’s the worst of both possible worlds.”

Now it’s time for the Senate to act.

A total of 67 votes are necessary to pass the treaty making the votes of all Senators critical for ratification. This treaty is a straightforward, nonpartisan issue of security with overwhelming support from the nation’s military. Senators — it’s time to ratify New START.

Lt. General Seip was the former Commander of 12th Air Force and served as Chief of Standardization and Evaluation at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.