Archive for February, 2009
January 1: Next American City, “Cities break out the piggy bank,” by Ariella Cohen.
January 8: Huffington Post, Joel Berg blog, “Dr. King’s Other Dream: Ending Poverty”
January 16: WNYC (NPR affiliate, NYC), Leonard Lopate Show, “Hunger in the Land of Plenty”
January 16: Huffington Post, Joel Berg blog, “Progressives Should Stop Carping and Start Fighting.”
January 26: Metro NY, “Feeding the hungry halfway,” by Neil deMause.
January 27: Grit TV/The Nation Presents, “The Politics of Hunger,” with Laura Flanders.
February 3: The Brooklyn Rail, “How Hungry is America? VERY.,” by Eleanor Bader.
February 3: Philadelphia City Paper, “Just Do It: All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?” by Natalie Hope McDonald.
February 4: Alternet.com, excerpt, “Hunger in the U.S.: A problem as American as apple pie.”
February 6: Center for American Progress, “All You Can Eat? How Hungry is America in Good Times versus Recession?”
February 9: Philadelphia Inquirer, “Hunger expert says government must lead the fight,” by Alfred Lubrano.
February 11: WHYY (NPR affiliate, Philadelphia), Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane, “Food Insecurity” episode.
February 11: Daily Pennsylvanian, “Berg discusses ‘food insecurity’ in America,” by Matt Grady.
February 12: Philadelphia Inquirer, “Nutter backs anti-hunger efforts,” by Alfred Lubrano.
February 13: WILL (NPR affiliate, Urbana, IL), Focus 580 with David Inge, “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?”
February 18: NY Times, “Despite U.S. offer, city stands firm on food stamps,” by Julie Bosman.
February 18: KTBC-7 (Fox affiliate, Austin, TX), Good Day Austin, “Solving the U.S. hunger problem.”
Posted on 18 February '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
February 18, 2009
Despite U.S. Offer, City Stands Firm on Food Stamps
By JULIE BOSMAN
The New York Times
A provision in President Obama’s stimulus package, extending food stamp benefits for able-bodied adults, has revived a dispute in New York City between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and advocates for the poor.
The provision overturns a 1996 rule limiting able-bodied adults who have no dependents to three months of food stamps in a three-year period. But the Bloomberg administration said on Tuesday that nothing had changed and that it was not obligated to extend benefits to anyone not enrolled in the Work Experience Program, a workfare program that provides temporary jobs, usually in city agencies.
While cities and states are allowed under the stimulus provision to require participation in such workfare programs, advocates for the poor decried the policy as unwise and counterproductive, particularly as the recession swells the ranks of the jobless who need help buying groceries.
“They are wasting city funds to force people to do sometimes ‘make-work’ jobs in order to get fully funded federal benefits,” said Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.
“Saying that in order to get a measly portion of food you have to work extra hours just doesn’t seem like a way to promote economic growth and promote self-sufficiency,” he added.
City Councilman Bill de Blasio, a Brooklyn Democrat and chairman of the General Welfare Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday, “Instead of putting hungry New Yorkers on a path out of poverty, the city is placing them in unpaid jobs before they can receive federal food aid they would be entitled to anyway.”
But Robert Doar, commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, which oversees food stamps and workfare, said the city was ready to expand the Work Experience Program rather than allow people to collect food stamps without working or looking for work.
The program, which currently has about 12,000 participants, teaches job skills, like résumé preparation, and places people in jobs — or, sometimes, internships — with government agencies or the private sector.
The mayor “believes in sending a message that work is the best way to escape poverty,” Mr. Doar said. “It’s a strong principled message that he wants to reaffirm.”
In 2006, Mr. Bloomberg overruled a decision by two of his top aides to seek a federal waiver that would have allowed New Yorkers, along with others in areas with high unemployment, to receive food stamps beyond the time limit.
The provision in the federal stimulus package essentially nationalizes that waiver until October 2010, to encourage spending during the recession.
Ellen Vollinger, the legal director for the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger policy organization in Washington, said that each dollar in federal food stamp benefits generates nearly double that in economic activity.
Individuals qualify for $176 in food stamps each month if their gross monthly income does not exceed $1,127, according to a city Web site.
It is not clear how many people would have benefited from the extension. According to the Human Resources Administration, there were 1.3 million food stamp recipients in New York City in December, a 19.4 percent increase over the year before. About 47,000 of them are able-bodied adults without dependents. In 2006, when there were about 43,000 able-bodied adults receiving food stamps, city officials estimated that if the three-month limit were waived, at least 13,900 more people would become eligible.
At the time, Mr. Bloomberg said he had quashed the city’s waiver application because he was “a believer that people should have to work for a living.”
“You have to have a penalty if there’s a requirement to work, and this penalty is one that’s appropriate,” he said. “The city has a whole host of programs to make sure that nobody goes without food.”
Mr. Berg, in his 2008 book, “All You Can Eat,” compared the mayor’s position to the standpoint of Charles Trevelyan, the British officer in charge of famine relief during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s; he blamed the poor and their “selfish, perverse and turbulent character” for their own plight.
Mr. de Blasio called the mayor’s approach an “ideological hang-up” that “felt to some extent like a carryover from the Giuliani administration.”
Ms. Vollinger of the Food Research and Action Center questioned why New York would not take full advantage of food stamps, which are paid for by the federal Agriculture Department, and instead expand the workfare program, which is partly funded by the city. (Mr. Doar could not say on Tuesday how much the city spent on it.)
“If they were really interested in maximizing federal resources and minimizing the cost of handling this, then eliminating the time limit would be the cost-effective approach,” Ms. Vollinger said.
To see the actual article, click here.
Posted on 18 February '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Hunger expert says government must lead the fight
by Alfred Lubrano
Inquirer Staff Writer
Fighting hunger without the weapon of big federal dollars is like fighting drought without water. That’s nationally known hunger expert Joel Berg talking, championing change in how America helps the poor. “The belief that charity does it better than government only ensures hunger will persist,” Berg says. “When people get food from a pantry, that’s not a success. It’s a failure of American policy.”
Berg, 44, is the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and a Clinton administration antihunger official who’s written a new book, All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?
He’ll be all around town tomorrow and Wednesday, visiting a West Philadelphia food cupboard, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, and participating in a hunger and homelessness discussion at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia, among other events.
Berg is prone to saying things like, “We are a country that’s giving nearly a trillion dollars to Wall Street. How about a few bucks to keep people from being hungry?”
It’s pure Berg: pointed and up-to-the-moment, with a hint of lefty anger that makes him the darling of hunger fighters everywhere.
Berg makes it clear that he wants one thing: to end hunger in America. Really.
He says it can be done with an approximate 41 percent increase in federal nutrition-assistance programs (about $24 billion) - mostly in food stamps.
“It’s a big deal that he’s visiting,” said Rachel Meeks, director of the food-stamp enrollment campaign at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. “In a way, he’s a catalyst for all the work we’ve been doing lately.”
“His coming to town is a spark, and it’s getting hunger awareness going,” said Bill Clark, executive director of Philabundance, the largest hunger-relief agency in the area.
Berg is seizing on the change in administrations to make his push. President Obama, who has used food stamps, is already on record pledging to end child hunger by 2015.
“You can’t misunderestimate having a president who cares about this,” Berg said in his mischievous fashion during a phone interview last week, using an old George W. Bush malaprop to illustrate the difference in Oval Office occupiers.
All kidding aside, that difference is real, Berg insists. He cites Bush’s much-quoted preference for using charities, not government, to help the poor. Obama, on the other hand, has said he’s open to using more government monies to battle poverty.
In granular detail, Berg’s book shows that even if all charities in the United States could double food distribution, the number of food-insecure Americans (a new way of saying hungry) would diminish only from the current 35.5 million to 32 million.
Yet, reliance on religious and social-service agencies such as food pantries and food kitchens is growing, Berg said.
This is akin to using bucket brigades of private citizens to put out fires, while eschewing government-bought fire trucks, he added.
Instead, Berg said, if the federal government boosted its nutrition safety net - more money for school breakfasts and lunches, women and infants, and the most important antihunger tool of all, food stamps - then “we would entirely eliminate food insecurity.”
That wonkish term, by the way, is meant to help people understand what hunger really means.
Many Americans hear the word hunger and flash on Biafran babies with bloated bellies and flies in their eyes.
That’s starvation, and it rarely happens here. But that doesn’t mean we’re not in trouble, advocates say.
Food insecurity is the lack of access to enough nutritious food for an active, healthy life. In any given year, a food-insecure person has had to skip meals because the food wasn’t there.
Even the mildest forms of food insecurity are associated with poor child development and health, higher child-hospitalization rates, and maternal depression, according to Mariana Chilton, a professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, and principal investigator for the Philadelphia GROW Project, which deals with nutrition among poor children.
In Philadelphia, 145,000 people are considered food insecure, according to 2006 estimates, Meeks said. Newer figures will only be higher, she added.
“Expanding food stamps is the single best way to fight hunger,” Berg said. “And it’s better for people to receive $239 a month in food stamps than getting $50 in groceries from a pantry in a month.”
Besides, he said, food cupboards are meant to be for emergencies, not frequent use, as has lately been the case.
Clark can testify that supplies are dwindling while demand skyrockets in the dismal economy. “This economic meltdown has us pushed against the wall,” he said.
Currently, 24 percent of Philadelphians - nearly 352,000 people - are on food stamps, Meeks said, but an additional 100,000 are eligible and not getting them - in part because the application process is complex.
“Americans believe government can’t do big things,” Berg said. “But between 1960 and 1973, the poverty rate was cut in half. You need money to do it. Our best solution is for the government to ensure that people never go hungry.”
Contact staff writer Alfred Lubrano at 215-854-4969 or alubrano@phillynews.com.
See the original article here.
Posted on 9 February '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
Posted on 4 February '09 by Joel, under Blog. No Comments.
