PRIVATE CHARITY IS NOT ENOUGH
OR
GOP RULE IS STARTING TO REALLY HURT

Two from AlterNet:

Where the Working Poor Eat

After all, most of us have seen the hungry, the shuffling homeless under the interstate bridges. There didn't seem to be all that many of them, and they didn't look as if they would eat all that much.

But the people who had been doing the actual work of collecting and distributing food to the poor for years in this town were quick to inform us that stereotypes are simply wrong.

It has become increasingly difficult to work at small-town food banks because often one knows the client not as a beggar from beneath the bridge, but as a neighbor or colleague. Food banks today cater increasingly – and a sociologist's survey of our town bore this out – to people who are employed, the class we now call the working poor. These people earn so little they barely get by. Catastrophic medical bills or Missoula's escalating housing costs can chew up their inadequate paychecks so that by the end of the month there is no money left for food.

If we are to really do anything about the shameful matter of hunger in our town, we must address these larger issues. What at first looked like a little hole to plug now appears to be a bottomless chasm, ever widening.

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Communities in Crisis: A New Student Study

According to the survey, roughly 39 percent of food providers and 43 percent of emergency shelters that had to turn people away for lack of resources also reported cuts in funding.

As Pamela Bachilla puts it, “It's going in the wrong direction in both ways." The 23-year-old student helped distribute the survey forms and collect results as a volunteer with CalPIRG at UC Berkeley. All of the agencies she spoke to said they had to turn people away. "I expected that to be a high number, but I was devastated to hear that all the agencies had had to turn people away," Bachilla says.

And

“I used to think it was an individual problem, but it’s not. It’s institutional.”

Since working on the survey, Gibert has found that there are several misconceptions about poverty, including the idea that people choose to be homeless, or that they can get out of it by themselves. “People say, ‘Why don’t they just get a job? This is America, there are opportunities,’” she says. “But there are so many social forces working against them. They can’t do it on their own. They need contacts and a support structure.”

At other times, Gibert says she's talked to people who think that that the government is already spending too much on programs for the hungry or homeless.

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