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03.11.03, 13:13
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Long queue at drive-in soup kitchen
George Bush's America, the wealthiest nation in history, faces a growing
poverty crisis. In the first of a three-part series Julian Borger takes the
pulse of the US with elections just a year away
Monday November 3, 2003
The Guardian
The free food is handed out at nine, but the queue starts forming hours
earlier. By dawn, there is a line of cars stretching half a mile back. In
Logan, it is what passes for rush hour - a traffic jam driven by poverty and
hunger.
The cars come out of the Ohio hills in all shapes and sizes, from the old
jalopies of the chronically poor, to the newer, sleeker models of the new
members of the club, who only months ago considered themselves middle class,
before jobs and their retirement funds evaporated.
Dan Larkin is sitting in his middle-of-the-range pick-up truck. Since the
glassware company he worked for closed its doors this time last year, he has
found it hard to pay his bills. His unemployment benefits ran out six months
ago and his groceries bill is the only part of his budget that has some give.
He and his wife sometimes skip meals or eat less to make sure their six-year-
old daughter has enough.
"I would have a real problem putting food on the table if it wasn't for
this," Mr Larkin said, his car inching towards Logan's church-run food
pantry. As the queue rolled forward, he reflected on the ironies of being a
citizen of the world's sole superpower.
"They're sending $87bn to the second richest oil nation in the world but
can't afford to feed their own here in the States."
George Bush's America is the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world
has ever known, but at home it is being gnawed away from the inside by
persistent and rising poverty. The three million Americans who have lost
their jobs since Mr Bush took office in January 2001 have yet to find new
work in a largely jobless recovery, and they are finding that the safety net
they assumed was beneath them has long since unravelled. There is not much
left to stop them falling.
Last year alone, another 1.7 million Americans slipped below the poverty
line, bringing the total to 34.6 million, one in eight of the population.
Over 13 million of them are children. In fact, the US has the worst child
poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised
countries, and the plight of its poor is worsening.
The ranks of the hungry are increasing in step. About 31 million Americans
were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their
next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised
by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger, defined by
the US department of agriculture as an "uneasy or painful sensation caused by
lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food."
That was two years ago, before the recession really began to bite. Partial
surveys suggest the problem has deepened considerably since then. In 25 major
cities the need for emergency food rose an average of 19% last year.
Another indicator is the demand for food stamps, the government aid programme
of last resort. The number of Americans on stamps has risen from 17 million
to 22 million since Mr Bush took office.
In Ohio, hunger is an epidemic. Since George Bush won Ohio in the 2000
presidential elections, the state has lost one in six of its manufacturing
jobs. Two million of the state's 11 million population resorted to food
charities last year, an increase of more than 18% from 2001.
In Logan, over 500 families regularly turn out twice monthly at the food
pantry run by the Smith Chapel United Methodist Church.
"In all our history starting in the mid-80s we've never seen these numbers,"
said Dannie Devol, who runs the pantry. The food comes from a regional food
bank, which is stocked by a mix of private donations and food bought from
local farmers by the government.
Efficient
Fresh vegetables, cans of meat and tuna, and boxes of cereal are stacked in
the car park and as the line of cars breaks into two queues to edge past the
pallets, volunteers inspect identity cards (customers have to show they live
in the county and are in need) before loading rations of food into the backs
of the vehicles. It is an efficient and peculiarly American solution to
hunger - a drive-through soup kitchen.
Those without cars hitch rides with neighbours. Mothers come with their
children in the back of trucks. Karin Chriss brought one of her three
children in a 10-year-old Chevrolet van. "If they stopped this I'd be hurt
food-wise. I'm cutting down the amount we eat as it is," Mrs Chriss said. Her
husband is a truck driver but does not earn enough to pay the bills. The
people in Washington, she says, "need to come down and see how many people
are in these lines".
Not many Washington politicians do. There was a time when fighting this kind
of poverty was at the core of American politics: Franklin Roosevelt made it
his life's work; Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty with his Great
Society programmes in the 1960s.
There are more Americans living in poverty now than there were in 1965, but
neither party has much to say about it. The Bush Republicans see it as a
matter for "faith-based charities", the status quo before Roosevelt's New
Deal in the 1930s. The trouble is that hard times are drying up donations at
the very time private charities are being asked to take on most of the
burden.
Democrats, meanwhile, are anxious not to appear as class warriors, and most
of the Democratic presidential contenders in this election portray themselves
as champions of the middle class, for good reason. Americans who see
themselves as middle class are much more likely to vote than those who know
they are poor. Mrs Chriss thinks all parties should be abolished. Angela
Cooper, also queuing with a young child, complains that families like hers
have been forgotten. But then again, she has relatives posted in Iraq and
feels she ought to "support our troops" by voting for the president.
"There's resentment down deep but people don't know what to do with it. A lot
of people turn inward, rather than outward. You think it would be ripe for an
outcry. But it's not, it's all kind of dulled," said Bob Garbo, who runs a
regional food distribution centre in this corner of Ohio. "There's a feeling
you can't do much about it, that politicians are all bad. Voting rates are
down, and politicians are taking advantage of that. Here, only 20% turn out
to vote in some counties."
It is hardly surprising the very poor feel they have no one to turn to. A
string of local factories have closed in the past two years to relocate to
Mexico, a delayed consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement
established by Bill Clinton in 1994. And two years later, it was Clinton, in
cooperation with a staunchly Republican Congress, who dismantled much of the
welfare system built in the New Deal and the Great Society. Clinton's welfare
reform set a time limit on how long the poor and unemployed could draw social
security payments. It helped force people back into work with the
encouragement of an array of federally funded job training programmes.
It worked well while the economy was booming, cutting the number on welfare
from 12 million to five million in a few years. But now there are no jobs.
Those who went to work under welfare reform are among the first to be fired,
and often find that welfare is no longer available to them. Some have used up
their lifetime maximum. Some have accumulated too many assets to qualify,
such as a car or a house that they do not want to sell for fear of falling
yet further into destitution.
Others have had difficulty d