Archive for January, 2009

Joel on Leonard Lopate: Hunger in the Land of Plenty

Posted on 23 January '09 by Joel, under Blog. 1 Comment.

Progressives Should Stop Carping and Start Fighting

By Joel Berg
Fri Jan 16, 2009 at 07:01:21 AM PST (Daily Kos)
Posted January 16, 2009 | 11:47 AM (EST) (Huffington Post)

Now’s the time for progressives to put our actions where our big mouths are.

Now that President-elect Obama and the House leadership have teamed up to propose a economic recovery package that is the most far-reaching piece of major domestic legislation in a generation, it’s time for bloggers and grass-roots activists to stop nit-picking every decision and utterance of Obama and his team and instead focus our energies on helping implement his courageous agenda.

Now’s the time for progressives to put our actions where our big mouths are.

Now that President-elect Obama and the House leadership have teamed up to propose a economic recovery package that is the most far-reaching piece of major domestic legislation in a generation, it’s time for bloggers and grass-roots activists to stop nit-picking every decision and utterance of Obama and his team and instead focus our energies on helping implement his courageous agenda.

Within hours of Obama winning the election, erstwhile supporters made great sport out of finding fault in seemingly everything he did (or didn’t) say or do. Even though Obama was months from taking office and actually exercising power, the long knives of the Left were already carving him up.  Obama was derided for supposedly appointing too many moderates, not automatically adopting every suggestion penned by Paul Krugman, charging for some inaugural events (gasp!), and not committing to immediately placing anyone who worked for President Bush in front of a firing squad. It’s as if many of Obama’s supporters expected him to undo eight years of damage in eight hours.

Besides, few of the criticisms of the new President-elect had anything to do with matters that would impact the actual day-to-day living conditions of average Americans.

The first truly meaningful test of the new Administration is the economic recovery package it hammered out with the House leaders. Obama and his team have passed this test with flying colors. Their proposal would dramatically shift resources from the federal government – which, in the last eight years, have been used overwhelmingly to make the rich wealthier, the middle-class poor, and the already poverty-stricken even more destitute – to helping working families and the unemployed not only weather this current economic storm but to actually prosper in the long run.

Keeping their promise to usher in historic levels of openness and transparency, the Democrats have rapidly placed the entire text of the proposed bill – and the Committee report language supporting the bill – online.

The proposed tax provisions are remarkably progressive. They would boost the Earned Income Tax Credit for working families still in poverty and provide serious tax relief for low- and middle-income families. Yet, despite entreaties from conservatives, the bill does not include a reduction in the estate tax paid for by the nation’s wealthiest heirs.

As an anti-hunger advocate, I am overjoyed that the bill would provide the largest investment in new nutrition assistance funding in decades, including a huge hike in food stamp (recently re-named SNAP) benefits, more funding for after-school meals for kids, a large increase for senior meals, and a boost in dollars for emergency food and shelter programs. That funding would provide a very meaningful down payment towards reaching the goal – set by President-elect Obama and recently reiterated by USDA Secretary-designate Tom Vilsack – of ending child hunger in America by 2015.

When it comes to non-nutrition money, the bill would fund a virtual “wish list” of items and causes activists have long-championed but which have been under-funded or not funded at all during the decades of conservative Presidents and Congresses. Here are just a handful of the hundreds of vital programs to be funded under the House proposal:

• $16 billion to repair public housing and make key energy efficiency retrofits;

• $6 billion to weatherize modest-income homes;

• $31 billion to modernize federal and other public infrastructure with investments that lead to long term energy cost savings;

• $19 billion for clean water, flood control, and environmental restoration investments;

• $10 billion for transit and rail to reduce traffic congestion and gas consumption;

• $79 billion in state fiscal relief to prevent cutbacks to key services, including $39 billion to local school districts and public colleges and universities;

• $15.6 billion to increase the Pell grants to make higher education more affordable;

• $4.1 billion to provide for preventative care and to evaluate the most effective health care treatments;

• $43 billion for increased unemployment benefits and job training;

• $39 billion to support those who lose their jobs by helping them to pay the cost of keeping their employer provided health care under COBRA and providing short-term options to be covered by Medicaid;

• $8 billion for loans for renewable energy power generation and transmission projects;

• $300 million to provide consumers with rebates for buying energy efficient Energy Star products to replace old appliances, which will lower energy bills;

• $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas to strengthen the economy and provide business and job opportunities in every section of America with benefits to e-commerce, education, and health care;

• $100 million for rural business grants and loans to guarantee $2 billion in loans for rural businesses at a time of unprecedented demand due to the credit crunch;

• $300 million to upgrade job training facilities serving at-risk youth while improving energy efficiency;

• $20 billion for school construction and modernization, including $14 billion for K-12 and $6 billion for higher education;

• $2 billion to provide child care services for an additional 300,000 children in low-income families while their parents go to work;

• $2.1 billion to provide comprehensive Head Start development services to help 110,000 additional children succeed in school; and

• $2.5 billion for block grants for public assistance to help states deal with the surge in families needing help during the recession and to prevent them from cutting work programs and services for abused and neglected children.

As a senator once said, apocryphally perhaps, “a billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” This package is indeed real money.

Significantly, the Democratic proposal makes good on Obama’s promise to make an increase in national service a centerpiece of his Presidency.  It would provide an extra $200 million to put approximately 16,000 additional AmeriCorps members to work doing national service, meeting needs of vulnerable populations and communities during the economic crisis.

If enacted, these measures would go a long way toward placing America on the road to recovery and prosperity. Their importance dwarfs the importance of every speech, appointment, or event of Obama to date.

But their implementation is by no means secured. House Republicans will try to chip away at the package, and Senate conservatives will try to derail it entirely.

Now is the time for all good progressives to come to the aid of country. Now is the time to rally around this forward-thinking economic plan and work our hearts out to get it passed.

This is no time to continuing carping about some perceived imperfections in the new President’s policies or statements.  This is a rare window of opportunity to enact massive, meaningful change. It would be a crime for us to allow our eternal quest for the perfect to halt a real chance at the very, very good.

Nothing any of us could possibly be doing right now could possibly be nearly as important as ensuring that members of the House and Senate pass the full recovery package.

It’s time for progressives to stop whining and get to work.

Bill text

Committee report language supporting the Bill

If you would like to see the original on the Daily Kos website, click here or on The Huffington Post, click here.

Posted on 16 January '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.

Vote Now! Joel’s Daily Kos Poll on What Obama Should Do about Hunger

Please vote and ask your friends to vote!

 

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/15/54757/0526/174/684285

 

Posted on 15 January '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.

Joel Berg on The Huffington Post, January 19, 2009

The Huffington Post
January 8, 2009
To Be Posted January 19, 2009 | 10:55 AM (EST)

Dr. King’s Other Dream: Ending Poverty

by Joel Berg

Dr. Martin Luther King had more than one dream.

Of course, King dreamt of racial reconciliation, and tomorrow’s inauguration of Barack Obama demonstrates the nation’s enormous, albeit inconsistent and incomplete, racial progress.

King also called for making service to others a centerpiece of American life, saying “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.” The Obama inauguration is perfectly honoring that legacy by marking Dr. King’s birthday as a national day of community service.

But the King dream that was perhaps the most fiercely opposed during his time - and has been most overlooked since his death - was his call to slash poverty in the U.S. and ensure that all Americans had enough to eat. As King said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger?”

Ralph Abernathy, who led the Poor People’s Campaign in the wake of King’s assassination, lamented how white northerners, sympathetic when southern African-Americans were violently attacked for sitting at lunch counters, had notably less sympathy when they tried to dramatize the extent of poverty and hunger nationwide. Said Abernathy: “It was easy enough to blame a southerner for barring his restaurant door…but who was the northern white man to blame for nationwide hunger, except himself, and who would have had to pay for the cure?”

Ironically, had America ever chosen to do so, it could have wiped out domestic poverty and hunger far more rapidly than it could have achieved King’s goals of racial equality or world peace. As King also said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

Although conservatives have convinced most Americans that the War on Poverty was a failure, that’s just not true. Between 1960 and 1973, as a result of both broad-based economic growth and government anti-poverty initiatives, the nation’s poverty rate was cut in half, and more than 16 million previously poor Americans entered the middle-class. While the Great Society surely had flaws and excesses, it succeeded spectacularly in achieving its main goal of reducing poverty.

But the nation lost the political will to continue fighting the War on Poverty, and its programs were subsequently under-funded, gutted, or abandoned entirely. Our country’s economic policies fostered the replacement of lifetime living-wage jobs with temporary employment at poverty wages. By 2007, fully 37.2 million Americans lived below the meager federal poverty line, 14 million more than in 1973. Childhood poverty now costs our nation’s economy $500 billion per year, equivalent to four percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.

Is the answer to simply resurrect and re-fund all the Great Society Programs? No. Since the nature of poverty and the American economy have changed since the 1960’s, our anti-poverty strategies must also change.

A good place to start would be finally meeting a central demand of King’s Poor People Movement: enacting a federal nutrition safety net robust enough to end domestic hunger. The federal government currently sponsors more than a dozen food assistance programs, but each has its own application and eligibility determination system, and each serves too few people, with too little in benefits. President-elect Obama has already pledged to end domestic child hunger (which now affects more than 12 million American children) by 2015. To achieve that goal, the President and Congress should streamline the existing nutrition programs and use modern technologies to allow eligible families to access all of them with one application, which would save money through decreased bureaucracy. The money saved should be pumped directly into increased food benefits.

Beyond that, we need an entirely new framework for addressing domestic poverty. While our political leaders still tend to choose ideological sides — and flatly declare that either faltering economics or personal irresponsibility alone is responsible for poverty — that’s a false choice. Increased government support, economic growth, community involvement, and a focus on personal responsibility are all needed to solve the problem. The country should enact an “Aspiration Empowerment Agenda” that gives all families the opportunity to advance their dreams through hard work and responsible choices, enabling them to earn, learn, and save their way out of poverty.

True, this will take additional government spending. Since the most fundamental feature of poverty is a lack of money, trying to fight poverty without money is like trying to fight a drought without water. But no matter the price tag, it won’t come close to the dismal cost of doing nothing. If we truly want to honor Dr King’s full legacy, and if President Obama wants to start building his own in a practical and immensely meaningful way, the time for new action against poverty is now.

To see the original article on The Huffington Post, please click here.

To see the article reproduced on the Daily Kos, please click here.

Posted on 8 January '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.