( Tomdispatch.com) – Various versions of the aphorism “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” have been making the rounds ever since the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. The quip (which, despite legend, appears not to be attributable to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or any other famous person) has proven all too accurate when the war in question directly involves American troops. When, however, non-U.S. combatants and civilians suffer and die from conflicts relatively unrelated to Washington’s “strategic interests,” our media outlets tend to avert their eyes, aid agencies get stingy, and Americans learn no geography whatsoever. Oh, and given this country’s power and position on this planet, millions suffer the consequences of that neglect.     

Terror Days in Khartoum

Let’s start with Sudan. A civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) is now dragging into its seventh month with no end in sight. Since the conflict erupted, Washington has issued only a few token calls for the fighting there to end, while providing insufficient aid to desperate millions of Sudanese. The assistance that did go out has proven microscopic compared to the vast quantities of humanitarian, economic, and military aid our government has poured into similarly war-torn Ukraine.

In the first five months of brutal fighting in Sudan, 5,000 civilian deaths and injuries to at least 12,000 more were reported — and those were both considered significant underestimates. Meanwhile, more than a million people have fled that country, while a staggering 7.1 million have been displaced in their own land. According to the International Office of Migration, that represents “the highest [number] of any internally displaced population in the world, including Syria, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Human Rights Watch reports that “over 20 million people, 42% of Sudan’s population, face acute food insecurity and 6 million are just a step away from famine.” 

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Try to take that in for a moment and wonder, while you’re at it, why you’ve heard so desperately little (or nothing at all!) about such an immense human tragedy. Worse yet, the Sudanese people are hardly the only ones being treated shabbily by Uncle Sam and other governments of the rich North while suffering deadly deprivation. Sudan is, in fact, at the center of a region stretching from the Middle East deep into Africa in which countries suffering some of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies are largely being ignored by the Global North.

Given the near vacuum of news on the Sudan conflict in our media, we contacted Hadeel Mohamed, an educator we know who fled Sudan for neighboring Egypt, but is still in frequent contact with her neighbors who stayed behind in the capital city, Khartoum. We asked her for an update on what people still living there were telling her they were enduring after six months of unending civil war.

Every house in their neighborhood, she’s heard, has been looted by combatants. In the process, her friends and neighbors say that they’ve experienced “terror days when their houses were being invaded or even re-invaded to see if there’s anything left.”

“When it starts to get dark outside,” she told us, “that’s scariest, because you never know who’s going to come in and attack.” If female household members are there, what grim fates are they likely to suffer? And she adds, “If you have males in the house, are they going to be abducted and what’s going to happen to them?”

We asked whether atrocities were being committed by both the Sudanese Army and the RSF? “Yeah, both sides,” she responded. “Listen, I’m not validating any side, but when you’re in war, you really don’t know who’s coming at you or who’s a threat to you. So, everyone is seen as a threat.” And that, she adds, leads the combatants to act violently toward the civilians who’ve stayed behind.

Food is especially scarce in Khartoum, because travel in and out of the city is so dangerous for the usual suppliers and, as Hadeel points out, “Most of the stores have been looted, but in certain areas, some bread and other food is available for a few hours per day per week. There’s no fixed schedule, though.” Worse yet, wherever there’s active fighting, electricity and water supplies are normally cut off. “Some people can have electricity for weeks, while others will not have it for weeks.” Some engineers have bravely remained in Khartoum trying to keep power and water supplies flowing, but it’s often a hopeless task.

“People are on such unstable ground,” Hadeel concludes. “They really don’t know when their next food supplies are going to come in or when they’re going to be able to refill their water.” They have to watch for opportunities to slip outside in relative safety to “find something to keep them and their neighbors going.”

And what exactly has been Washington’s response to this ongoing horror? Well, the State Department issued a toothless admonishment that the army and RSF “must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, including obligations related to the protection of civilians.” And that was about it, other than ineffective sanctions applied to the leader of the RSF. Meanwhile, international efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting have collapsed, and humanitarian aid efforts have been hopelessly bogged down. Anyway, who has time for Sudan when arming and backing the Ukrainians has the attention of everyone who matters in the United States?

“Severe, Extreme, or Catastrophic Conditions”

Mind you, that paucity of interest is anything but unique to the crisis in Sudan. For example, U.N. World Food Program (WFP) Director Cindy McCain recently told ABC’s This Week that there isn’t enough food-assistance money for desperate Afghanistan, filled with starving people, to “even get through October.” In addition, the WFP has had to cut food aid to other countries in desperate need, including Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Somalia, and Syria. As for explaining that shortfall, McCain was blunt, blaming the rush of rich nations of the Global North to support Ukraine which, she says, “has sucked the oxygen out of the room.”

Typically, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that its famine-prevention program for war-ravaged Yemen is now receiving just 30% of the funds it needs, putting millions of Yemenis at risk. OCHA points to the peril facing Fatima, a 60-year-old woman living in the village of Al-Juranah. The program supplies her family with wheat, peas, and oil, but delivery is sporadic, a reality about which Fatima is all too matter-of-fact. “We receive a sack of wheat,” she says, “and sometimes we get only half a sack. They also give us roasted peas and oil. If this support stops, we will starve to death.” And sadly enough, that support is now anything but guaranteed.

Two years after a ceasefire in that brutal civil war fed by Saudi Arabia (with U.S. support), a conflict that received only the scantiest media coverage in this country, more than half of Yemenis — 17 million people — are food insecure. U.N. forecasters predict that without massive intervention, a quarter of those people will experience “acute food insecurity” by year’s end, with three-quarters of them reaching “crisis levels of hunger.” Such massive intervention is decidedly not in the cards, however, and the continuing neglect is having horrific consequences. National Public Radio’s Fatma Tanis did, in fact, report on this from a Yemeni hospital in August:

“We head next to the intensive care unit for newborns, often born with complications because of malnutrition. As we enter, a nurse pulls a sheet over a baby who just died. The parents aren’t here. Often, families use all their resources to bring their child to the hospital but can’t afford to return again. So the hospital has to take care of burials too, without them.”

The people of Syria are similarly striving to recover from the civil war that erupted in 2011 and was finally put on hold with a 2020 ceasefire, but only after a full decade of ferocious warfare and terrible suffering. Like the Sudanese and Yemenis, they remain largely unnoticed and uncovered these days in the American media. In addition to extreme water shortages, a catastrophic 55% of Syrians are officially in the crisis phase of acute food insecurity. In late 2022, OCHA reported that “severe, extreme, or catastrophic conditions” were affecting 69% — yes, you read that right! — of the country’s population. Furthermore,

“Basic services and other critical infrastructure are on the brink of collapse… Over 58 percent of households interviewed reported accessing only between three to eight hours of electricity per day, while almost seven million people only had access to their primary water source between two and seven days per month in June.”

Is the world paying attention? In one respect, Syria is more fortunate than Sudan or Yemen, enjoying its very own annual conference of donor nations. At this June’s conference, hosted by the European Union, donors pledged an increase in total aid, but the amount still fell $800 million short of what the U.N. was seeking for that country. Worse yet, just before the conference kicked off, the World Food Program announced that it would cut food aid to almost half of Syria’s 5.5 million current recipients just when they’re most in need.   

The Democratic Republic of Congo, another country in deep distress, finds itself in the global spotlight, but not for the suffering its people are experiencing. Its huge deposits of cobalt, copper, and other mineral elements essential to future renewable-energy economies have finally brought it some attention. However, the Global North, transfixed by those priceless minerals, has remained remarkably blind to the wave of human misery now sweeping the Congo.

Last month, Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, just back from a trip there, told Democracy Now, “It’s the worst hunger catastrophe on Earth. Nowhere else in the world is there more than 25 million people experiencing violence, hunger, disease, neglect. And nowhere in the world is there such a small international response to help, to aid, to end all of this suffering.”

As in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, hunger and war have gone hand-in-hand in the Congo. Today, Egelend said, an almost unbelievable 150 or so armed groups vie for power in the cobalt-rich eastern part of the country. In the early 2000s, cobalt was valued for its role in mobile phones and laptops. The stakes are far higher now, with vastly larger quantities required to produce the lithium-ion batteries essential to the development of sprawling new power grids and a vast global fleet of electric vehicles.

Collateral damage radiating from the Congo’s ongoing violence includes a hunger crisis, an epidemic of sexual assault by combatants on tens of thousands of civilian women, and so much more. The U.N. sought $2.3 billion in humanitarian assistance for the Congo in 2023. It has, however, only received a measly one-third of that sum, enough to help just one of every 18 people now in desperate need.

On Democracy Now!, Egeland put his finger on the terrible calculations of global economics and diplomacy: “Congo is not ignored by those who want to extract the riches of that place. It is ignored by the rest of the world… As humanity, we’re really, really failing Congo now, because it’s not Ukraine, it’s not the Middle East.”

As a refugee from Sudan, Hadeel Mohamed worries every day about these kinds of terrible calculations being made in the North. As she puts it,

“This war has really opened our eyes to a lot of things. Although we saw the news of what’s happening in Yemen and Syria, and all these countries where wars erupted, we never really understood the depth of it. A worry of ours is that what’s happening to Syrian refugees is going to happen to Sudanese refugees… where your prospects are not going to mean anything… where you’re limited in your work transactions, you’re limited in your educational abilities.”

Because organizations like the U.N. and the International Red Cross were activated “quite late” in Sudan, she points out, some who fled the country, especially youth, “started forming groups to help people cross borders to get out, to find jobs, and to raise funds for food and water aid for those still in Sudan.” Hadeel herself is involved in such efforts. “But progress is a bit slow, because we’re still trying to rebuild our own lives in parallel.”

“If the war is not contained in Khartoum,” she adds, “the chances of it spreading are very high and we’ve seen a lot of spreading recently, whether it’s in Port Sudan or Madani or surrounding cities.” Violence has been raging for months in the Darfur region of western Sudan as well. The conflict could also be significantly prolonged by the desire of both sides to control northeastern Sudan’s vast gold deposits, which play a role analogous to that of cobalt in the Congo.

With no relief in sight, says Hadeel, the people of Khartoum, understand that lacking true humanitarian aid, “you really come back to more of community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” Nevertheless, for refugees, “there are only two possible outcomes here: either you go back and fight for your country and potentially die or you go on living and establishing yourself outside of Sudan.”

Meanwhile, on the Outskirts of Democracy…

Tyranny, civil war, systemic breakdown — it can’t happen here, right? Or can it? We privileged folk in the United States may still think we live in a democracy, but so many of us don’t. In truth, the 140 million poor and low-wage folks, Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous, along with about one-third of White people, live on the outskirts of our “democracy.” Like the people of Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, they dream of being in a country where there’s equality and justice, and where democracy, while not complete, is at least not dying.

The United States never was, and by the looks of it, now has little chance of becoming a truly pluralistic, multiracial democratic system. If we were, we’d be spending every free hour raising hell to make sure the possibility of democracy doesn’t die in next year’s election. The media are replete with dystopian scenarios of its end and the rise of Trumpistan. We’re scared shirtless about that, too, and it’s a gut punch to realize that, if we had a truly functioning democracy, there’d be no way it could be toppled by a single guy like Donald Trump.

Ask a Sudanese or a Syrian or an Egyptian or an Afghan what it’s like to live under autocracy. Then ask marginalized Americans what it’s like to live on the outskirts of democracy. For the latter, democracy is like Sudan’s gold and the Congo’s cobalt. There may be a lot of it, but very few get any.

Copyright 2023 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox    

Tomdispatch.com

Eventually, we acquired Macintosh computers, trekking to a local copy shop to pay 25 cents a page for laser-printed originals. We still had to paste them together the old-fashioned way to create our tabloid-sized pages. The finished boards would then go to a local commercial printing press where our run of 2,000 copies would be printed.

This was, of course, before ordinary people had even heard of email. Our entire editorial process was mediated through the U.S. Postal Service, with letters flying constantly between our two cities. On the upside, through 12 years and 48 issues, we only had to hold four in-person meetings.

All of which is to say that I’m old. That fact — and recent events in the lives of several friends — have brought to mind the first article I ever published in LesCon: “Who’s Going to Run the Old Dykes’ Home?” It’s a question that’s no less pertinent today, and not just for lesbians. My worldview was more parochial back then; I naively believed that someone — the state or their families — would look out for heterosexual elders, but that we lesbians were on our own. It turns out that we — the people of this country — are all on our own.

Playing Aging Roulette

These days, my partner and I seem to be doing a lot of elder care. Actually, I’ve long been a source of tech support for the octogenarian set, beginning with my own father. (“OK, you’re sure you saved the file? Can you remember what name you gave it?”) With our aging friends, we also help out with transport to doctors’ offices, communications issues (with landlines, cell phones, and the Internet), and occasionally just relieving the loneliness of it all.

In recent months, elderly friends of ours have faced losing their housing, their spouses, their mobility, or their cognitive abilities. I find it terrifying and ache because there’s so little I can do to help them.

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I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m daily reminded that getting older can indeed be frustrating and frightening. It pains me to know that my bones are weakening, that I don’t hear as well as I used to, that my skin’s drier and wrinkling, that my once familiar face in the mirror is growing ever stranger. I’m lucky that — like my father who used to say, “After 70, it’s all maintenance” — I’ve managed to maintain a fair amount of brown hair on my head. I especially hate the way words that used to leap down my tongue in merry cadence now frequently lurk sullenly in the backwaters of my brain.

In a piece about our aging political class, Robert Reich, secretary of labor for President Bill Clinton, has written charmingly about the “diminutions” that come with growing older and his own decision to stop teaching after decades of doing so. His take on anomic aphasia is similar to mine. He laments his trouble remembering people’s names, noting that “certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again.” I know what he means. For some years now, whenever I want to talk about cashew nuts, all I can initially think of is “carob.” Some devious gremlin has switched those words somewhere in the card catalog of my brain.

But even as I grieve for capacities lost and departing, I’m still not ready to come face to face with the only true alternative to aging: not some tech bro’s wet dream of eternal life, but the reality of death. I’m opposed to dying and, had the universe consulted me, I’d have left mortality out of its design completely.

No One Else Is Going to Do It for Us

Written more than 40 years ago, parts of my piece “The Old Dykes’ Home” are flat-out embarrassing now. Getting old seemed so strange and far off before I was even 30. When I imagined being aged then, I think it was with the piercing sorrow of Paul Simon’s song “Old Friends/Bookends”:

“Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy”

In other ways, my article was depressingly prescient about just how much this country would expect aging people to shift for themselves by the time I reached that strange period of my own life. Not only old dykes, but pretty much anyone who isn’t affluent, can find that old age brings economic desperation.

Yes, U.S. citizens and permanent residents over 65 can get medical attention through Medicare, but the standard program only covers 80% of your bills. Beginning in 2006, we gained access to some prescription drug coverage, but that requires sifting through an ever-changing menu of medications and the ability to predict today what meds you might need tomorrow.

Most people who live long enough will receive some monthly income from Social Security, although the amount depends in part on how much they were able to earn during their working lives. But we’re constantly staving off attacks on Social Security, including attempts to privatize it, reduce benefit amounts, or increase the age at which people can collect because Americans are living longer. That last proposal, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, is really another way of penalizing low-wage workers. As he wrote,

“Life expectancy has indeed risen a lot for the affluent, but for the less well-paid members of the working class, it has hardly risen at all. What this means is that calling for an increase in the retirement age is, in effect, saying that janitors can’t be allowed to retire because lawyers are living longer. Not a very nice position to take.”

Suppose the disabilities of age mean you can no longer safely live in your own home. Well, you’re on your own. Unless you can afford to move to some kind of assisted-living facility, you’re in real trouble. Your main alternative is to spend down most of what you own, so you qualify for the pittance that your state Medicaid program will pay a (most likely for-profit) nursing home to warehouse you until you die.

The threat of being old and unhoused is very real. A recent major study of unhoused people in California found that almost half of them are over 50 and 7% over 65. As housing costs continue to rise, we can only expect that more old people will find themselves on the street.

Back then, I wrote that, under capitalism, we could expect the “owners of wealth” to do very little for people who are no longer creating profits through their labor — or indirectly, by doing the work “to make it physically and emotionally possible for the paid laborers to go out in the world and work one more day.” Why, after all, should capital take any interest in people who are no longer a source of profit?

These are the people — old, disabled, permanently unemployed — who, according to the political philosopher Iris Marion Young, experience a particularly sinister form of oppression: marginalization. “Marginalization,” writes Young, “is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”

There were some other missing pieces in that article. I left out the fact that it’s easier to justify low pay for the art (and science) of caregiving when most of its practitioners are women. I failed to envision caretakers organizing on their own. I never imagined that, decades later, a National Domestic Workers Alliance would arise to represent the interests of the poorly paid, disrespected workforce of immigrants and women of color who largely do the work of caring for the aged in this country.

I had just lived through an episode in which on the bus to work I suddenly fainted from pain caused by a herniated disk in my back. I found myself lying on my bed for several months recovering while living on a monthly welfare check of $185 and food stamps. Still, the lesson I drew was that the solution to caring for people with chronic disabilities was what had then worked for me: drawing on a community of volunteers, a roster of almost 30 women who took turns shopping for groceries, doing my laundry, and ferrying me to doctors’ appointments. Why couldn’t that work for everyone?

That network of support existed, however, because I belonged to a lesbian community self-consciously constructing a parallel society tucked inside the larger city of Portland, Oregon. It was packed with institutions like a women’s bookstore, a drop-in community center, a women’s mental health project, and a feminist credit union, among others. I acted with a women’s theater company and, at times, worked as a secretary at a women’s law cooperative.

In reality, though, we weren’t nearly as independent as we thought we were. Most of those institutions were staffed by women paid through the Comprehensive Education and Training Act, passed during the presidency of Richard Nixon and continued under Jimmy Carter. When Ronald Reagan and his new brand of Republicans took over in Washington in 1981, those salaries disappeared almost overnight — and with them, most of our community’s infrastructure.

So, my answer to the problem of aging then was to endorse an ethic of volunteerism rooted in specific communities, like our lesbian one. “Feminists,” I wrote, “are rightly uneasy about asking each other to perform any more unpaid work in our lives than we, and centuries of women before us, have already done.”

Nevertheless, I argued, “the truth is… no one is going to pay us to take care of each other… and we can’t afford to believe the capitalist and patriarchal lie that we are cheating each other when we ask each other — even strangers — to do that work for free.”

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that I was then inching my way toward an ethos that could free the project of caring for each other from the claws of capitalism. But I was naïve about the amount of time and energy people would be able to spare outside of their day’s labor — especially as real wages were about to stagnate and then begin to fall. I didn’t imagine a time to come when people without much money would need to work two or even three jobs just to get by. I didn’t think, as I do now, that it would be better, instead, to focus on raising the status and pay of caring work.

Even back in the 1980s, however, I recognized the limits of volunteerism. I knew that I’d been lucky during my period of temporary disability. I was an outgoing person with quite a sizeable set of acquaintances. With a reasonable levity of spirit and a dependable store of gossip, I knew then that I could make taking care of me relatively pleasant.

But I also knew that no one’s survival should depend on having a winning personality. Instead, as I wrote at the time, we needed to “develop simple, dependable structures to serve those among us who require physical care.”

How hard could that be, after all? “A file of volunteers and a rotating coordinator could do the job,” I wrote then. Here, too, I was more sadly prescient than I even realized. In recent years, the market for aging care has indeed found a way to commercialize volunteer efforts like the ones I imagined in the form of Internet-based options like Lotsa Helping Hands and Mealtrain.

On Our Own?

My point back then was that, as lesbians, we were on our own. No one was going to run the Old Dykes’ Home if we didn’t do it ourselves. (Perhaps I should have foreseen then that someone might indeed run it, if they could make money doing so!) I figured we had 10 to 15 years to develop “formal networks of support to deal with illness and disability,” because eventually each of us would need such structures. We lesbians would have to look out for ourselves because we lived then “on the edges of society.” I didn’t realize at the time that we shared those edges with so many other people.

Building volunteer structures was, I thought, just the short-term goal. The longer-term project was something much more ambitious: to build “a world in which the work of caring for each other happens not at the fringes of society, but at its heart.”

I still believe in that larger goal, and not because it’s a lovely fantasy, but because it’s a response to a fundamental reality of life. It’s a fact that human beings, like all beings, live in a web of interdependence. Every one of us is implicated, folded into that web, simultaneously depending on others, while others depend on us. The self-reliant individual is an illusion, which means that constructing societies based on that chimera is a doomed enterprise, bound in the end (just as we’ve seen) to fail so many on whom — though we may not know it — we depend.

Aging really is a roulette game. My partner and I are gambling that good genes, regular exercise, a reasonable diet, and sufficient mental stimulation will keep our limbs, organs, and minds hale enough to, as they say, “age in place.” We plan to stay in the house we’ve occupied for more than 30 years, in the neighborhood where we can walk to the library and the grocery store. We don’t plan to get Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or congestive heart failure or (like yet another friend) take a life-changing fall down a flight of stairs. Having somehow forgotten to have children (and never wanting to burden even our hypothetical offspring in any case), we’re planning to take care of ourselves.

Talk about hubris!

The truth is that we have much less control than we’d like to believe over how we’ll age. Tomorrow, one of us could lose the disability lottery, and like so many of our friends, we could be staring at the reality of growing old in a society that treats preparation for — and survival during — old age as a matter of individual personal responsibility.

It’s time to take a more realistic approach to the fact that all of us lucky enough to live that long will become ever more dependent as we age. It’s time to face reality and place caring for one another at the heart of the human endeavor.

Copyright 2023 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

Here’s the kicker: Russia is not on the invitation list.

It’s quite an embarrassment that all the BRICS countries except Russia are poised to attend the Saudi event. It’s also telling that Saudi Arabia, which has long collaborated with Russia on setting the price of oil, is deliberately snubbing its erstwhile petro-ally.

True, Saudi heir apparent Mohammed bin Salman has been looking for ways to salvage his international reputation after ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A very public effort to end the war in Ukraine could go toward rehabilitating the murderous prince (at least among those countries willing to excuse the heinous crime).

But the decision to work with Ukraine on such a summit is likely more about Saudi anger over Putin’s recent decision to destroy the grain deal that facilitated the delivery of Ukrainian agricultural products to global markets.

Wealthy Saudi Arabia is not so much worried about feeding itself in the wake of the deal’s demise. But it is worried about the impact of higher prices elsewhere in the region. The Arab Spring protests, after all, were triggered by the rising cost of basic commodities in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Saudi influence in the region depends on the maintenance of a conservative political order anchored in despotic regimes that can manage the discontent of their own populations. In its blind ambition to destroy Ukraine, Russia is ignoring the more far-reaching consequences of its military policies.

It’s not just Saudi Arabia that’s angry about these consequences.

Recently, the Kremlin hosted a second summit of African leaders in Moscow. Back in 2019, 43 leaders showed up for the first such gathering. Last month, a mere 17 bothered to make the journey.

Here, too, multiple factors are at play. African leaders are understandably put off by Putin’s high-handed treatment of the African delegation led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that visited St. Petersburg in June, which turned into a dressing down of the visitors for their presumptuousness at including a Russian troop withdrawal in their peace plan.

But another major reason for the no-shows was Russia’s reckless rejection of the grain deal. African countries are particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of grain and have relied a good deal on relatively inexpensive Ukrainian imports.

At this point, Vladimir Putin is willing to suffer any number of self-inflicted wounds in order to beat Ukraine into submission. He will alienate a close ally like Saudi Arabia. He will anger an entire continent of people (where Russia already had a low reputation prior to the 2022 invasion). He will make it more difficult for millions of poor people to afford food. He will even complicate the efforts of Russian grain producers to bring their product to market.

Threats by Russian leaders to use nuclear weapons jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone on the planet, but such scenarios are highly speculative and constitute a future risk. The Russian campaign to undermine the world’s food supply, meanwhile, jeopardizes the livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable people in the here and now.

Russian Actions in Detail

Because of the grain deal inked last summer, Ukraine managed to get to market more than 20 million tons of wheat, corn, and other grains that had been stuck in the country’s southern ports. In all, Ukraine managed to export 36.2 million metric tons of food during the year the deal was in place. Over half of those exports went to the developing world.

These shipments brought down the prices of food, which had spiked immediately after Russia’s invasion last February. The end of the deal did not quite reverse all the progress in keeping food affordable but it did lead to the largest one-day increase in wheat futures since the war began in February 2022. According to The Washington Post, “Unless Russia reverses course, this will make low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East more dependent on slightly more expensive Russian wheat, which produces about 20 percent of the world’s supply.”

Image by Сергей Канавин from Pixabay

Russia didn’t just destroy the deal. It has also set out to destroy Ukrainian grain directly by bombing silos and other agricultural infrastructure. In this way, it has managed to remove 60,000 tons of grain from the global food supply. Most recently, it has begun to target ports and storage facilities along the Danube river, an alternative route to get Ukrainian products to market. The latest attacks pushed wheat prices up around 3 percent and corn prices around 2 percent on world markets.

Russia is thus deploying two strategies to undercut its agricultural competitor: prevent grain from getting to markets and destroying it in storage facilities.

It’s not just the Middle East and Africa that will be affected by Russia’s agricultural warfare. The biggest importer of Ukrainian foodstuffs over the last year was actually China, which received one-quarter of the shipments. So, add China to the list of countries pissed off at the Kremlin for its tactics.

And while we’re at it, let’s expand that list to include the UN and everyone at risk of starvation wherever they live in the world. Over the last year, Ukraine supplied the World Food Program with 80 percent of its grain, which was up from 50 percent before the war. With its strategy of bomb and blockade, Russia is literally taking the food out of the mouths of the hungry.

But what about the supposed advantages that Russia received from signing the deal in the first place?

A parallel deal facilitated by the European Union made it easier for Russia to export its own grain, despite the thicket of economic sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last year, Russia exported a record 45.5 million metric tons of wheat, with an even larger amount expected this year. As the world’s largest wheat exporter, Russia could even take advantage of the moment to raise export taxes.

The bottom line: Moscow doesn’t need the deal any longer, especially if its dual strategy of bomb and blockade effectively eliminates a chief competitor.

War and Hunger

The food-insecure portion of the global population has been hit by a triple whammy: pandemic, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. According to the World Food Program, the number of people facing acute hunger in 2019 was around 135 million. By 2022, that number had risen to 345 million.

Ukraine faces significant food insecurity as well. One in three families—or 11 million people—are vulnerable. In the 1930s, Stalin’s regime used hunger as a tool to suppress Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule and the collectivization of agriculture. Around 3.9 million people died during the Holodomor (death by famine).

Putin can’t use the same tools as Stalin did to punish Ukraine’s rebelliousness. But the current Russian government is certainly attempting to destroy or otherwise undermine Ukraine’s capacity to feed itself. By so doing, the Kremlin is also forcing millions of other people around the world to go hungry.

Russia is flexing its muscles because it thinks it’s self-sufficient. It is the world’s second largest producer of fossil fuels (after the United States), third largest grower of wheat, fifth largest producer of iron and of steel, and eighth largest manufacturer of cement. The world needs what it produces, and large importers of energy and grain like China and India are willing to overlook what’s happening in Ukraine despite the occupying army’s ongoing violations of international law.

But Russia’s self-sufficiency is illusory. If the war were taking place in the nineteenth century or even the 1950s, Russia could indeed ignore the world’s anger. It can feed itself, power its factories, build its infrastructure. But in today’s modern society, advancement—or even, treading water—requires high-tech. And here, Russia is falling behind, thanks to corruption, sanctions, and war-related brain drain.

So, Russia pisses off the world—Saudi Arabia, Africa, China, the UN—at its own peril. The only question is: how many people will have to suffer for Putin’s grandiose ambitions before their collective representatives force the Russian government to give back the land it stole?

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

In fact, the Times did have daily figures until March 23rd when, noting that data on the pandemic from state and local health officials was fast disappearing, it added: “After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, the New York Times is ending its Covid-19 data-gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish virus data from the federal government weekly on a new set of tracking pages, but this page will no longer be updated.” Still, if you do look at those weekly figures, there were 94,000 weekly cases reported in this country and — yes — 1,160 weekly deaths as of the moment I wrote this introduction. It’s true that, at least for now, those numbers continue to decline, adding ever fewer Americans to the — hold your breath for a moment — 1,123,836 deaths the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported on March 10th of this year when it, too, stopped collecting data.

And yes, there is indeed a new Covid booster (which I plan to get) for older adults and the immunocompromised, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that ever fewer Americans are even bothering. Of course, since Donald Trump and crew made the pandemic into a deeply divisive issue, for many of us, including significant numbers who died, not boosting or masking was part of our politics, not our health. Grimmer yet, the figures do show that Republicans died of Covid at a significantly higher rate than Democrats.

So, today, I felt a certain kinship with TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign Liz Theoharis when she reminded us of the devastation the pandemic brought our way and the even more devastating urge now to cancel what was done in the midst of its horror to help the poor. One thing should be clear from her piece today: however the Covid crisis ends, our crisis will certainly continue. Tom

The Pandemic Portal View

Lessons for Moral Standard-Bearers in a Sick Society

By Liz Theoharis

“In order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick.”

I can still hear those prophetic words, now a quarter-century old, echoing through the Church Center of the United Nations. At the podium was David, a leader with New Jerusalem Laura, a residential drug recovery program in North Philadelphia that was free and accessible to people, no matter their insurance and income status. It was June 1998 and hundreds of poor and low-income people had gathered for the culminating event of the “New Freedom Bus Tour: Freedom from Unemployment, Hunger, and Homelessness,” a month-long, cross-country organizing event led by welfare rights activists. Two years earlier, President Bill Clinton had signed welfare “reform” into law, gutting life-saving protections and delivering a punishing blow to millions of Americans who depended on them.

That line of David’s has stuck with me over all these years. He was acutely aware of how one’s own health — whether from illness, addiction, or the emotional wear and tear of life — is inextricably connected to larger issues of systemic injustice and inequality. After years on the frontlines of addiction prevention and treatment, he also understood that personal recovery can only happen en masse in a society willing to deal with the deeper malady of poverty and racism. This month, his words have been on my mind again as I’ve grieved over the death of Reverend Paul Chapman, a friend and mentor who was with me at that gathering in 1998. The issue of “recovery” has, in fact, been much on my mind as the Biden administration prepares to announce the official end of the public-health emergency that accompanied the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic.

For our society, that decision is more than just a psychological turning of the page. Even though new daily cases continue to number in the thousands nationally, free testing will no longer be available for many, and other pandemic-era public-health measures — including broader access to medication for opioid addiction — will also soon come to an end. Worse yet, a host of temporary health and nutrition protections are now on the chopping block, too (and given the debate on the debt ceiling in Congress, the need for such programs is particularly dire).

When the pandemic first hit, the federal government temporarily banned any Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) cuts, mandating that states offer continuous coverage. As a result, enrollment in both swelled, as many people in need of health insurance found at least some coverage. But that ban just expired and tens of millions of adults and children are now at risk of losing access to those programs over the next year. Many of them also just lost access to critically important Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, as pandemic-era expansions of that program were cut last month.

Of course, the announced “end’ of the public-health emergency doesn’t mean the pandemic is really over. Thousands of people are still dying from it, while 20% of those who had it are experiencing some form of long Covid and many elderly and immunocompromised Americans continue to feel unsafe. Nor, by the way, does that announcement diminish a longer-term, slow-burning public health crisis in this country.

Early in the pandemic, Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, warned that the virus was exploiting deeply entrenched fissures in our society. Before the pandemic, there had already been all too many preconditions for a future health calamity: in 2020, for instance, there were 140 million people too poor to afford a $400 emergency, nearly 10 million people homeless or on the brink of homelessness, and 87 million underinsured or uninsured.

Last year, the Poor People’s Campaign commissioned a study on the connections between Covid-19, poverty, and race. Sadly, researchers found the fact that all too many Americans refused to be vaccinated did not alone explain why this country had the highest pandemic death toll in the world. The lack of affordable and accessible health care contributed significantly to the mortality rate. The study concluded that, despite early claims that Covid-19 could be a “great equalizer,” it’s distinctly proven to be a “poor people’s pandemic” with two to five times as many inhabitants of poor counties dying of it in 2020 and 2021 as in wealthy ones.

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The pandemic not only exposed social fissures; it exacerbated them. While life expectancy continues to rise across much of the industrialized world, it stagnated in the United States over the last decade. Then, during the first three years of the pandemic, it dropped in a way that experts claim is unprecedented in modern global history.

In comparison, peer countries initially experienced just one-third as much of a decline in life expectancy and then, as they adopted effective Covid-19 responses, saw it increase. In our country, the stagnation in life expectancy before the pandemic and the seemingly unending plunge after it hit mark us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but even among some poorer ones. The Trump administration’s disastrous pandemic response was significantly to blame for the drop, but beyond that, our track record over the last decade speaks volumes about our inability to provide a healthy life for so many in this country. As always, the poor suffer first and worst in such a situation.

The Pandemic as a Portal

In the early weeks of those Covid-19 lockdowns, Indian writer Arundhati Roy reflected on the societal change often wrought by pandemics in history. And she suggested that this sudden crisis could be an opportunity to embrace necessary change:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway, between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

There was hope in Roy’s words but also caution. As she suggested, what would emerge from that portal was hardly guaranteed to be better. Positive change is never a certainty (in actuality, anything but!). Still, a choice had to be made, action taken. While contending with the great challenges of our day — widespread poverty, unprecedented inequality, racial reckoning, rising authoritarianism, and climate disaster — it’s important to reflect soberly on just how we’ve chosen to walk through the portal of this pandemic. The sure-footed decisions, as well as the national missteps, have much to teach us about how to chart a better path forward as a society.

Consider the federal programs and policies temporarily created or expanded during the first years of the pandemic. While protecting Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP, the government instituted eviction moratoriums, extended unemployment insurance, issued stimulus payments directly to tens of millions of households, and expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Such proactive policy decisions did not by any means deal with the full extent of need nationwide. Still, for a time, they did mark a departure from the neoliberal consensus of the previous decades and were powerful proof that we could house, feed, and care for one another. The explosion of Covid cases and the lockdown shuttering of the economy may have initially triggered many of these policies, but once in place, millions of people did experience just how sensible and feasible they are.

The Child Tax Credit is a good example. In March 2021, the program was expanded through the American Rescue Plan, and by December the results were staggering. More than 61 million children had benefited and four million children were lifted above the official poverty line, a historic drop in the overall child poverty rate. A report found that the up to $300 monthly payments significantly improved the ability of families to catch up on rent, afford food more regularly, cover child-care expenses, and attend to other needs. Survey data also suggested that the CTC helped improve the parental depression, stress, and anxiety that often accompany poverty and the suffering of children.

How extraordinary, then, that, rather than being embraced for offering the glimmer of something new on the other side of that pandemic portal, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2022 ended. The oppressive weight of our “dead ideas,” to use Roy’s term, crushed that hopeful possibility. Last year, led by a block of unified Republicans, Congress axed it, invoking the tired and time-worn myth of scarcity as a justification. When asked about the CTC, Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX) claimed that “the country frankly doesn’t have the time or the money for the partisan, expensive provisions such as the Child Tax Credit.” Consider such a response especially disingenuous given that Brady and a majority of congressional Republicans and Democrats voted to increase the military budget to a record $858 billion that same year.

In so many other ways, our society has refused to relinquish old and odious thinking and is instead “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred” through the portal of the pandemic.

There are continued attacks on the health of women and the autonomy of those who can get pregnant; on LGBTQ+ people, including a wave of anti-trans legislation; on homeless people who are criminalized for their poverty; and on poor communities as a whole, including disinvestment, racist police abuse, and deadly mass incarceration at sites like New York City’s Rikers Island and the Southern Regional Jail in the mountains of West Virginia. And while weathering a storm of Christian nationalist and white supremacist mass shootings, this country is a global outlier on the issue of public safety, fueled by endless stonewalling on sensible gun legislation.

To add insult to injury, economic inequality in the United States rose to unprecedented heights in the pandemic years (which proved a godsend for America’s billionaires), with millions hanging on by a thread and inflation continuing to balloon. And as pandemic-era protections for the poor are being cut, ongoing protections for the rich — including Donald Trump’s historic tax breaks — remain untouched.

Another World Is Possible

In the office of the Employment Project where I worked upon first moving to New York City in 2001, there was a poster whose slogan — “Another World Is Possible” — still stays with me. It hung above my head, while I labored alongside my friend and mentor Paul Chapman.

Paul died this April and we just held a memorial for him. He was an activist in welfare rights and workers’ rights, director of the Employment Project, and one of the founders of the Poverty Initiative, a predecessor to the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice that I currently direct.

Paul did pioneering work to bring together Protestant and Catholic communities in Boston, organized delegations of northern clergy to support civil rights struggles in small towns in North Carolina, and sponsored significant fundraisers for the movement, alongside his friend, theologian Harvey Cox. He also spent time in Brazil connecting with liberation theologians and others who went on to found the World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of social movements from across the globe whose founding mantra was “Another World Is Possible.” Over the course of his long life, Paul would do what Black Freedom Struggle leader Ella Baker called “the spadework,” the slow, often overlooked labor of building trust, caring for people, planting seeds, and tilling the ground so that transformative movements might someday blossom. His life was a constant reminder that every organizing moment, no matter how small, is a fundamentally important part of how we build toward collective liberation.

Paul explained many things, including that powerful movements for social change depend on the leadership of those most impacted by injustice. Right next to the WSF poster there was another that read: “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.” Paul spoke regularly about how poor and oppressed people had to be the moral-standard bearers for society. He was unyielding in his belief that it was the duty of clergy and faith communities to stand alongside the poor in their struggles for respect and dignity. As a young antipoverty organizer and seminarian, I was deeply inspired by the way he modeled a principled blending of political and pastoral work.

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from him was about the idea of “kairos” time. Paul taught me that, in ancient Greece, there were two conceptions of time. Chronos was normal, chronological time, while kairos was a particular moment when normal time was disrupted and something new promised — or threatened — to emerge. In our hours of “theological reflection,” he would say that during kairos time, as the old ways of the world were dying and new ones were struggling to be born, there was no way you could remain neutral. You had to decide whether to dedicate your life to change or block its path. In some fashion, his description of kairos time perfectly matched Roy’s evocative metaphor of that pandemic portal and when I first read her essay I instantly thought of Paul.

In antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. The image of the vigilant archer remains a powerful one for me, especially because kairos time represents both tremendous possibility and imminent danger. The moment can be seized and the arrow shot true or it can be missed with the archer just as quickly becoming the target. Paul lived his life as an archer for justice, ever vigilant, ever patient, ever hopeful that another better world was indeed possible.

Despite our bleak current moment, I retain the same hope. However briefly, the pandemic showed us that such an American world is not only possible, but right at our fingertips. As the public-health emergency draws to an “official” end, it’s hardly a surprise to me that so many of those in power have chosen to double down on policies that protect their interests. But like Paul, it’s not the leadership of the rich and powerful that I choose to follow. As our communities continue to fight for healthcare, housing, decent wages, and so much more, I believe that, given half a chance, the poor, the hurting, and the abandoned, already standing in the gap between our wounded old world and a possible new one, could help usher us into a far better future.

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

According to a report published by the WFP yesterday, around 12.1 million Syrians are suffering from food insecurity, while almost three million more are at risk of sliding into hunger.

That number is almost double the amount of food insecure people in Syria back in 2018, proving a sharp decline in the situation of much of Syria’s population.

CBS News: “How World Food Programme is helping Turkey and Syria after deadly earthquakes”

The Agency also noted the rise in malnutrition within the country, citing recent data, as showing that 28 per cent of children are being stunted in their growth and development, as a result.

The WFP Country Director in Syria, Kenn Crossley, stated that Syrians have endured “Bombardment, displacement, isolation, drought, economic meltdown and, now, earthquakes of staggering proportions. Syrians are remarkably resilient but there’s only so much that people can take.” He asked, “At what point does the world say ‘enough’?”

In a country where the average monthly wage is reported to currently cover only around one-quarter of a family’s food needs, the vast majority of Syrians have already been dealing with spiking food prices and shortages in fuel and wheat supplies over at least the past few years.

Currently supporting around 5.5 million people across Syria with assistance such as food distribution, nutrition programmes, school meals and cash provision, the WPF urged the donation of $450 million to continue those operations in the country throughout the rest of this year.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The definition of food insecurity has been added by Informed Comment.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – My long-dead father used to say, “Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake.” Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then — the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City’s South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.

In our South Bronx apartment, given the lack of food, there was no breakfast. It was simply a missing meal, so my sisters, brother, and I never expected it. Lunch was usually a sandwich and sometimes a can of juice, though none of us used the whole can. We knew enough to just put a little juice in our glass and then fill it with water. Dinner, which one of my sisters called the “real food,” would invariably be cheap and starchy servings meant to fill us. There wasn’t any cooked fish, salad, or fresh fruit. Rarely was anything left over. Most of our neighbors faced similar food scarcity and many suffered physical problems at relatively young ages: dizziness, fatigue, loss of strength, and other maladies, including asthma and diabetes.

Why Food Should Be a Basic Right

Food is to health as air is to breathing. One thing I learned from the world I grew up in was that if you get little or no food for long periods of time, medical attention is likely to be needed. Children, in particular, must have enough food to thrive, grow, think, and perform then as well as later in life.

Only recently, we saw how a pandemic of unwellness — thanks to Covid-19 — could overwhelm a hospital system, leaving doctors, nurses, and health services in general overworked and in danger of collapse. Think of hunger as another kind of pandemic that, however little noticed, can also overwhelm a health-care system (or at least that modest part of ours devoted to the neediest among us). Without enough nutritious food, emotional and physical needs only continue to proliferate along with a growing demand for ever more health care.

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For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.

Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It’s a problem that, in possibly the world’s richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?

Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since.

Food Inequity in America

In 1969, the Black Panther Party responded to food scarcity in its communities by introducing a breakfast program for children. One aim was simply to fill their stomachs, the other to help them do well in school, since those who are hungry find it difficult to concentrate.

Having visited their Harlem Breakfast Program in New York City, I was moved then by the sense of joy in the room and the healthy food being offered, which most of the children seemed to be eating with delight. At the time, recognizing the deep-seated need for food and finding a way to meet it seemed like a revolutionary act. Unfortunately, when the political winds changed in the early 1970s, the program ended. Many children of color there once more went to school hungry as so many still do in communities across this country.

Decades later, during the Covid pandemic, the Brotherhood Sister Sol organization began providing food to people in Harlem. Once a week, boxes of it were available to anyone who came to pick them up and many did. Recognizing an emergency, that group acted to try to resolve it, something deeply appreciated by the community. Eventually, however, money and contributions ran out and the effort ended. In Harlem today, there is still hunger.

During the pandemic, at a national level, Congress acted in a significant fashion to increase the Supplemental Nutrition (SNAP) benefits to households already receiving food assistance. Effective March 1, 2023, however, depending on family size and income, the monthly allowance of an extra $95 to $200 in food stamps for tens of millions of households, a majority of which have children, ended. The loss of that extra money and so of nutritional upgrades comes at a time when inflation has sent food prices soaring. As if that weren’t bad enough, the federal law passed to provide free school lunches during the pandemic ended last year. (Pre-pandemic free lunches were offered in some schools, but not everywhere.) If the government was able to provide such free meals as well as extra food subsidies in those pandemic years, the question is (or at least should be): Why won’t it continue doing just that?  After all, wealthy people ate well before and during the worst of the pandemic and will undoubtedly continue to do so.

Available food pantries and food banks gather supplies from farms, shops, and contributions. They then package and deliver them to the needy or provide places where such food can be picked up. Helpful as they are to many, though, they aren’t accessible to so many others in need. Even more important, they, too, represent temporary fixes that rise and fall in relation to the political and economic moment. Sadly, people’s food needs in this country are anything but temporary and should be assured in the same way social security (so far) is for seniors and those unable to work. That drugs like heroin and fentanyl are sometimes easier to come by in poor communities than nutritious, affordable food should be considered deeply shameful.

For a country that projects itself as the richest in the world, hunger remains hidden by design. It’s true that the United States doesn’t have the in-your-face version of malnutrition seen in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan (to name just two of the food-desperate lands in this world). Yet according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, more than 34 million people in this country, including nine million children, were food insecure, including 1,280,000 adults 65 or older who lived alone.

There Is No Medicaid of Food

Having enough food shouldn’t be a matter of charity. Food, like healthcare, should be a basic and necessary human right in a wealthy country like ours, which, of course, lacks a food version of Medicaid. Being able to put enough on the table is treated as anything but a right here. Instead, food is, at best, doled out to the needy in weekly or monthly packages, one at a time, no guarantees for the future and no midnight snacks allowed or the food will be gone before the month is up.  

The irony or, better said, the tragedy of our situation is that food insecurity, no less hunger, needn’t occur, especially in a country as wealthy as ours. But to change the situation would involve altering far more than the way food is both distributed and priced. A move to greater economic equality would certainly be a starting point, since the ultimate health of a society depends on the health of its populace and a lack of adequate food on a daily basis will continue to affect all aspects of a social order that only continues to fray.

For a while now, progressive mayors and other government officials have been trying to introduce a guaranteed (or basic) annual income into their communities. At present, these are just pilot programs being tested out in various parts of the United States and Canada. They guarantee perhaps $500 to $1,000 dollars a month annually to low-income individuals and/or families. In some areas, this is run as a lottery, in others not. Individuals or families accepted into such a program receive a prepaid Mastercard once a month that allows them to buy food as needed (as well as other essentials) without going to a food bank.

Los Angeles has created one of the country’s largest basic-income pilot projects. It provides 12 no-strings-attached monthly payments of $1,000, which, unsurprisingly enough, low-income recipients report to be helpful and genuinely reassuring. However — and there always seems to be a however, doesn’t there? — these are just experimental pilot programs and so subject to the political or economic winds of the moment. The word “guaranteed,” even when used, should be considered a misnomer until the temporary becomes permanent, making it a guaranteed right like social security.

For those who presently benefit from such programs, there appears to be no downside, except of course the fear that they will end, as the SNAP program just did, returning so many impoverished Americans to their earlier level of need.

In truth, however, food equity for all should be on everyone’s political agenda, even if it is a goal that won’t be reached without a struggle. This should not be a country filled with empty tables. Unfortunately, short of a loud and continuous hue and cry from the rest of us, hunger will continue apace and only those who experience it will see its effects.

I regularly pass many homeless men and women on the streets of New York City where I live. Recently, I was stopped by a woman who held out her hand and said that she was hungry. I believed her. The homeless are the least hidden example we see of food insecurity.

Copyright 2023 Beverly Gologorsky

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Food prices in the UK are at their highest for 15 years and something similar is happening in almost every country around the world.

The situation is set to get worse as high fertiliser prices, and resulting lower yields from reduced use, may cause further food inflation in 2023. My co-authors and I recently published research in Nature Food which suggests these price rises will lead to many people’s diets becoming poorer, with up to 1 million additional deaths and 100 million more people undernourished.

This isn’t just happening because of reductions in food exports from Ukraine and Russia, which are less of a driver of food price rises than feared. And unlike previous food price spikes higher food prices may be set to last. This could be the end of an era of cheap food.

Disruption to food and fertiliser markets

While commodity prices have come down from the peaks of mid-2022, they remain high. At the end of 2022, the global price of maize was up 29% and wheat up 34% since January 2021. This has fed food price inflation, for example in the UK 16.8% inflation in the year to December 2022. Two of the main drivers for these increases are higher energy prices and disruptions to international trade, both with strong links to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sanctions and other war-related trade disruptions were high profile, yet appear to have diverted attention away from the more important issue. Energy prices affect food prices directly by increasing the costs of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers, since natural gas is used to make nitrogen fertiliser and accounts for 70%-80% of the total cost of fertiliser production. Additionally, farmers may respond by using less, which leads to lower crop yields, pushing up food prices further.

From 2021 to 2022, urea (a common nitrogen fertiliser) almost doubled in price and natural gas more than doubled, although both are below their mid-2022 peaks. These changes led to cuts in nitrogen fertiliser production as plants became uneconomic, particularly in Europe where 70% of production capacity has been curtailed.

Impacts in 2023 and beyond

In our study, we attempted to better understand how energy and fertiliser price rises and export restrictions affect future global food prices. And we wanted to quantify the scale of harm that hikes in the price of food could have on human nutritional health and the environment. We did this using a global land-use computer model (LandSyMM) which simulates the effects of export restrictions and spikes in production costs on food prices, health and land use.

We found that surging energy and fertiliser prices have by far the greatest impact on food security, with reduced food exports from Ukraine and Russia having less impact on prices. The combined effect of export restrictions, increased energy and fertiliser prices could cause food commodity prices to rise by 81% from 2021 levels.

Such a rise would imply wheat prices increasing in 2023 by the same percentage again as they did in 2022. While the cost of wheat is only a part of the cost of bread, in the UK the average price of a large wholemeal loaf of bread rose from £1.09 at the start of the year to £1.31 at the end. If the inflation rate continues through 2023, that loaf would cost £1.57.

Export restrictions account for only a small fraction of the simulated price rises. Halting exports from Russia and Ukraine would increase food costs in 2023 by 2.6%, while spikes in energy and fertiliser prices would cause a 74% rise.

Too expensive to eat well

Food price rises will lead to many people’s diets becoming poorer, especially those with the lowest incomes. Our findings suggest there could be up to 1 million additional deaths and more than 100 million people undernourished if high fertiliser prices continue. The greatest increases in deaths would be in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, as people become unable to afford sufficient food for a healthy diet.

Our modelling estimates that sharp increases in the cost of fertilisers – which are key to producing high yields – would greatly reduce their use by farmers. Without fertilisers more agricultural land is needed to produce the world’s food. By 2030 this could increase agricultural land by 200 million hectares, an area the size of much of Western Europe – Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain plus the UK combined. This would mean lots more deforestation and carbon emissions, and a huge loss of biodiversity.

While almost everyone will feel the effects of higher food costs, it’s the poorest people in society, who already struggle to afford enough healthy food, who will be hit hardest.

Subsidising fertilisers may seem an obvious solution to a problem created in large part by the high cost of fertiliser. However, this just maintains a food system which has given us an obesity epidemic, left millions malnourished, contributes to climate change and is the main factor in the loss of biodiversity.

Targeted actions to ensure healthy and nutritious food is affordable for everyone may be more cost effective in reducing negative consequences from higher food prices and help to transform the food system to a healthier and more sustainable future.

Peter Alexander, Senior lecturer in Global Food Security, The University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And yet, despite those changes and a Pentagon budget that’s gone through the roof, many U.S. troops and military families will continue to struggle to make ends meet. Take one basic indicator of welfare: whether or not you have enough to eat. Tens of thousands of service members remain “food insecure” or hungry. Put another way, during the past year, members of those families either worried that their food would run out or actually did run out of food.

As a military spouse myself and co-founder of the Costs of War Project, I recently interviewed Tech Sergeant Daniel Faust, a full-time Air Force reserve member responsible for training other airmen. He’s a married father of four who has found himself on the brink of homelessness four times between 2012 and 2019 because he had to choose between necessities like groceries and paying the rent. He managed to make ends meet by seeking assistance from local charities. And sadly enough, that airman has been in all-too-good company for a while now. In 2019, an estimated one in eight military families were considered food insecure. In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, that figure rose to nearly a quarter of them. More recently, one in six military families experienced food insecurity, according to the advocacy group Military Family Advisory Network.

The majority of members of the military largely come from middle-class neighborhoods and, not surprisingly perhaps, their struggles mirror those faced by so many other Americans. Spurred by a multitude of factors, including pandemic-related supply-chain problems and — you guessed it — war, inflation in the U.S. rose by more than 9% in 2022. On average, American wages grew by about 4.5% last year and so failed to keep up with the cost of living. This was no less true in the military.

An Indifferent Public

An abiding support for arming Ukraine suggests that many Americans are at least paying attention to that aspect of U.S. military policy. Yet here’s the strange thing (to me, at least): so many of us in this century seemed to care all too little about the deleterious domestic impacts of our prolonged, disastrous Global War on Terror. The U.S. military’s growing budget and a reach that, in terms of military bases and deployed troops abroad, encompasses dozens of countries, was at least partly responsible for an increasingly divided, ever more radicalized populace here at home, degraded protections for civil liberties and human rights, and ever less access to decent healthcare and food for so many Americans.

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That hunger is an issue at all in a military so wildly well-funded by Congress should be a grim reminder of how little attention we pay to so many crucial issues, including how our troops are treated. Americans simply take too much for granted. This is especially sad, since government red tape is significantly responsible for creating the barriers to food security for military families.

When it comes to needless red tape, just consider how the government determines the eligibility of such families for food assistance. Advocacy groups like the National Military Family Association and MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger have highlighted the way in which the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), a non-taxable stipend given to military families to help cover housing, is counted as part of military pay in determining the eligibility of families for food assistance. Because of that, all too many families who need such assistance are disqualified.

Debt-Funded Living, Debt-Funded Wars

The BAH issue is but one part of a larger picture of twenty-first-century military life with its torrent of expenses, many of which (like local housing markets) you can’t predict. I know because I’ve been a military spouse for 12 years. As an officer’s wife and a white, cisgender woman from an upper-middle-class background, I’m one of the most privileged military spouses out there. I have two graduate degrees, a job I can do from home, and children without major health issues. Our family has loved ones who, when our finances get tight, support us logistically and financially with everything from childcare to housing expenses to Christmas gifts for our children.

And yet even for us, affording the basics has sometimes proved challenging. During the first few months after any move to a new duty station, a typical uprooting experience for military families, we’ve had to wield our credit cards to get food and other necessities like gas. Add to that take-out and restaurant meals, hotel rooms, and Ubers as we wait weeks for private contractors to arrive with our kitchen supplies, furniture, and the like.

Tag on the cost of hiring babysitters while we wait for affordable childcare centers in the new area to accept our two young children, and then the high cost of childcare when we finally get spots. In 2018, during one of those moves, I discovered that the military had even begun putting relocated families like ours at the back of wait lists for childcare fee assistance — “to give others a chance,” one Pentagon representative told me when I called to complain. In each of the five years before both of our children entered public school, we spent nearly twice as much on childcare as the average junior enlisted military service member gets in total income for his or her family.

Our finances are still struggling to catch up with demands like these, which are the essence of military life.

But don’t worry, even if your spouse isn’t nearby, there are still plenty of social opportunities (often mandated by commanders) for family members to get together with one another, including annual balls for which you’re expected to purchase pricey tickets. In the post-9/11 era, such events have become more common and are frequently seen as obligatory. In this age of the gig economy and the rolling back of workplace benefits and protections, the military is, in its own fashion, leading the way when it comes to “bringing your whole self (money included) to work.”

Now, add the Covid-19 pandemic into this fun mix. The schedules of many military personnel only grew more complicated given pre- and post-deployment quarantine requirements and labor and supply-chain issues that made moving ever less efficient. Military spouse unemployment rates, which had hovered around 24% in the pre-pandemic years, shot up to more than 30% by early 2021. Spouses already used to single parenting during deployments could no longer rely on public schools and daycare centers to free them to go to work. Infection rates in military communities soared because of travel, as well as weak (or even nonexistent) Covid policies. All of this, of course, ensured that absenteeism from work and school would only grow among family members. And to make things worse, as the last Congress ended, the Republicans insisted that an authorization rescinding the requirement for military personnel to get Covid vaccines become part of the Pentagon budget bill. All I can say is that’s a bit more individual freedom than this military spouse can wrap her brain around right now.

Worse yet, this country’s seemingly eternal and disastrous twenty-first-century war on terror, financed almost entirely by national debt, also ensured that members of the military, shuttled all over the planet, would incur ever more of it themselves. It should be no surprise then that many more military families than civilian ones struggle with credit-card debt.

And now, as our country seems to be gearing up for possible confrontations not just with terror groups or local rebel outfits in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, but with other great powers, the problems of living in the U.S. military are hardly likely to get easier.

The Fire of War Is Spreading

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has at least publicly acknowledged hunger as a problem in the military and taken modest steps to alleviate the financial stresses on military families. Still, that problem is far larger than the Pentagon is willing to face. According to Abby Leibman, MAZON’s chief executive officer, Pentagon officials and military base commanders commonly deny that hunger exists among their subordinates. Sometimes they even discourage families in need of food assistance from seeking help. Daniel Faust, the sergeant I mentioned earlier, told me that his colleagues and trainees, concerned about seeming needy or not convinced that military services offering help will actually be useful, often won’t ask for assistance — even if their incomes barely support their families. Indeed, a recently released RAND Corporation investigation into military hunger found that some troops worried that seeking food assistance would jeopardize their careers.

I’m lucky that I haven’t had to seek food assistance from the government. However, I’ve heard dozens of officers, enlisted personnel, and family members shrug off such problems by attributing debt among the troops to lack of education, immaturity, or an inability to cope with stress in healthy ways. What you rarely hear is someone in this community complaining that military pay just doesn’t support the basic needs of families.

Ignoring food needs in the military is, in the end, about more than just food. Individual cooking and communal meals can help individuals and families cope in the absence of adequate mental healthcare or… well, so much else. The combat veteran who takes up baking as a tactile way of reminding himself that he’s here in the present and not back in Afghanistan or Iraq or Somalia or Syria is learning to conquer mental illness. The family that gathers for meals between deployments is seizing an opportunity to connect. In an age when military kids are suffering from widespread mental-health problems, eating together is one way parents can sometimes combat anxiety and depression.

Whatever is life-enhancing and doesn’t require a professional degree is vital in today’s stressed-out military. Heaven only knows, we’ve had enough excitement in the years of the war on terror. Perhaps in its wake you won’t be surprised to learn that military suicide rates have reached an all-time high, while mental healthcare is remarkably inaccessible (especially to families whose kids have disabilities or mental illnesses). And don’t let me get started on sexual assault or child abuse, or the poor school performance of so many military kids, or even the growth of divorce, not to speak of violent crime, in the services in these years.

Yes, problems like these certainly existed in the military before the post-9/11 war on terror began, but they grew as both the scale and scope of our disastrous military engagements and the Pentagon budget exploded. Now, with the war in Ukraine and growing tensions with China over Taiwan, we live in what could prove to be the aftermath from hell. In other words, to quote 1980s star Billy Joel’s famous record title, we did start this fire.

Believe me, what’s truly striking about this year’s Pentagon funding isn’t that modest military pay raise. It’s the way Congress is allowing the Department of Defense to make ever more stunning multi-year spending commitments to corporate arms contractors. For example, the Army has awarded Raytheon Technologies $2 billion in contracts to replace (or even expand) supplies of missile systems that have been sent to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia. So count on one thing: the CEOs of Raytheon and other similar companies will not go hungry (though some of their own workers just might).

Nor are those fat cats even consistently made to account for how they use our taxpayer dollars. To take but one example, between 2013 and 2017, the Pentagon entered into staggering numbers of contracts with corporations that had been indicted, fined, and/or convicted of fraud. The total value of those questionable contracts surpassed $334 billion. Think of how many military childcare centers could have been built with such sums.

Human Welfare, Not Corporate Welfare

Policymakers have grown accustomed to evaluating measures meant to benefit military families in terms of how “mission ready” such families will become. You would think that access to food was such a fundamental need that anyone would simply view it as a human right. The Pentagon, however, continues to frame food security as an instrument of national security, as if it were another weapon with which to arm expendable service members.

To my mind, here’s the bottom line when it comes to that staggering Pentagon budget: For the military and the rest of us, how could it be that corporate weapons makers are in funding heaven and all too many members of our military in a homegrown version of funding hell? Shouldn’t we be fighting, first and foremost, for a decent life for all of us here at home? Veteran unemployment, the pandemic, the Capitol insurrection — these crises have undermined the very reasons many joined the military in the first place.

If we can’t even feed the fighters (and their families) decently, then who or what exactly are we defending? And if we don’t change course now by investing in alternatives to what we so inaccurately call national defense, I’m afraid that there will indeed be a reckoning.

Those worried about looking soft on national defense by even considering curbing military spending ought to consider at least the security implications of military hunger. We all have daily needs which, if unmet, can lead to desperation. Hunger can and does fuel armed violence, and has helped lead the way to some of the most brutal regimes in history. In an era when uniformed personnel were distinctly overrepresented among the domestic extremists who attacked our Capitol on January 6, 2021, one of the fastest ways to undermine our quality of life may just be to let our troops and their families, hungry and in anguish, turn against their own people.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Minnesota Reformer ) – Of the 20 states that have failed to raise the minimum wage above the federal $7.25 an hour standard, 16 have more than 12% of their children living in poverty, according to a States Newsroom analysis of wage and poverty data. Anti-poverty advocates say that’s a sign that there’s an urgent need for lawmakers to increase the federal minimum wage and do more to help struggling families.

Congress had the opportunity to achieve the latter by expanding the child tax credit before the end of the year, but lawmakers did not arrive at a deal with Republicans to include it in the omnibus spending package. The expansion, which was part of the American Rescue Plan, provided as much as $3,600 in monthly installments to qualifying families and is credited with lifting 3.7 million children out of poverty at least temporarily.

Raising the minimum wage would not lead to as fast or drastic an improvement, but a 2019 Congressional Budget Office analysis found that increasing the amount to $15 an hour would lift more than 500,000 children from poverty. And the Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2021, that if Congress passed a $15 minimum wage increase by 2025, up to 3.7 million people wouldn’t have to live in poverty — 1.3 million of those being children.

Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said there is a strong connection between the minimum wage and poverty.

“It’s not a 1-1 connection, but there is a pretty strong connection,” said Zipperer, whose expertise is on the minimum wage, inequality, and low-wage labor markets. “The main determinants of poverty in this country are whether you work and how much you work, so whether you have a job during the year and how many hours a week or weeks per year you work at that job. … And then the third [determinant] is how much you were paid for an hour of work at your job. If you’re getting paid relatively low wages, the minimum wage affects that.”

Congress last raised the minimum wage in 2009, but 30 states now require employers pay more than the federal standard, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Numerous municipalities have also passed living wage laws for city or county workers.

Twenty-seven states, including New Jersey, Florida, California and Missouri, will raise their state’s minimum wage in 2023, after passing legislation or voter-approved ballot measures that gradually increase the state minimum wage over several years or tie it to inflation. Washington ($15.74), California ($15.50) and Massachusetts ($15) will have some of the highest state minimum wages in 2023, although the high cost of living in those states mitigates the effect on poverty rates.

In Missouri, where the minimum wage will be $12 next year, a 2018 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that Proposition B, the ballot measure that is responsible for raising the wage, would increase wages for 677,000 people in Missouri.

States where legislatures have not raised the minimum above the federal $7.25 an hour include Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. All have child poverty rates of 20% or higher, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, a financial news site. Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the United States, at 27.6%, with Louisiana following at 26.3%.

Zipperer said that many of these low minimum wage states are concentrated in the Southern United States for a reason. He pointed to the political deals lawmakers made to leave Black workers out of 1930s labor rights gains, which were done for the benefit of Southern Democrats.

“That legacy of racism plagued the initial years of the national minimum wage and labor law generally in the United States, and while it was somewhat improved and overcome through the civil rights movement, you see the parallel to that now where you have a lot of places in the South that don’t have minimum wages and or have very low minimum wages, and so they follow the federal standard which Congress has refused to raise over the past 13 years,” he said.

He added, “That kind of decline in the cost-of-living adjusted value of the minimum wage disproportionately harms the people who are paid the lowest wages in the U.S. economy and because of our sexist and racist labor market, that is women and people of color.”

In Louisiana, for instance, 64% of women of color earn less than $15 an hour, while 58% of Black workers and 50% of Hispanic workers also earn less than $15 an hour, according to Oxfam America’s analysis of U.S. Census data.

The results of that disparity can be seen in an analysis of data on Lousianans’ standard of living done by Talk Poverty, a project of the Center for American Progress. It found:

• 19% of people in Louisiana had incomes below the poverty line in 2019.
• 20% of working age women and 29% of Black Lousianans in 2019 lived below the poverty line.
• Louisiana ranked 42nd in the nation in high school graduation rates and 45th in higher education attainment during the 2017-2018 school year.
• In 2018, 20% of young people aged 18 to 24 without high school degrees were not in school or working.
• From 2017 to 2019, 15.3% of Louisiana households were food insecure.

Peter Robins-Brown, executive director of Louisiana Progress, said several factors contribute to the number of Louisianans living in poverty. Louisiana hasn’t prioritized putting funding into programs that would provide economic relief, has focused its tax reform on benefits for the wealthy and for businesses, and has a particularly unjust criminal justice system that punishes the poor, he said.

“Social services in Louisiana are largely underfunded, making it easier for generational poverty to continue,” Robins-Brown said.

The state also favors landlords’ rights over tenants rights and people living in the southern parts of the state that experience the most severe weather disasters have to live with high premiums for homeowners insurance, which further contribute to economic inequality, Robins-Brown explained.

Although Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is a Democrat, and has expressed support for raising the minimum wage, both chambers of the Louisiana Legislature are controlled by Republicans. Louisiana is one of 24 states without a process for citizens to offer ballot initiatives and voter referendums.

“Both the House and Senate committees that deal with labor issues are low-priority for Republicans and Democrats because industry interests usually predetermine the outcomes in those committees,” Robins-Brown said.

For these reasons, Robins-Brown says Louisianans are depending on the federal government to take action to raise the minimum wage. He said his organization supported expanding the child tax credit because it was been a powerful tool in reducing child poverty.

Congress last failed to increase the minimum wage in 2021, when it was proposed as part of a larger pandemic relief package. Fifty Senate Republicans and seven Senate Democrats voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025. The exclusion of the expansion of the child tax credit in Congress’ omnibus bill is one more lost chance to reduce child poverty.

“The child tax credit enormously reduced poverty during the recent expansion of that program and unfortunately that was temporary,” Zipperer said. “But I think that’s a very clear demonstration that we actually have, to some degree, the capacity to eliminate a lot of poverty in this country. All it takes is overcoming the political opposition to do that.”

Casey Quinlan is an economy reporter for States Newsroom, based in Washington D.C. For the past decade, they have reported on national politics and state politics, LGBTQ rights, abortion access, labor issues, education, Supreme Court news and more for publications including The American Independent, ThinkProgress, New Republic, Rewire News, SCOTUSblog, In These Times and Vox.

Via ( Minnesota Reformer

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