- 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
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- In Logan, over 500 families regularly turn out twice
monthly at the food pantry run by the Smith Chapel United Methodist Church.
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- "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.
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- Efficient
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Others have had difficulty dealing with the welfare system's
more demanding requirements. A few in the line at Logan said they were
struggling without success to extract vital documents from former employers,
who have either gone bankrupt or gone abroad.
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- Decline
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- So, while poverty rates have been rising in the past
few years, the number of Americans on welfare has been steadily declining.
Another impact of the 1996 welfare reform was that the unemployed were
obliged to take service jobs at the minimum wage (now $5.15 per hour) without
benefits such as paid holidays or health insurance. On paper they were
part of the success of the welfare-to-work project, but the jobs stocking
supermarket shelves or cleaning offices usually left them worse off, especially
if someone in the family fell sick.
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- In Ohio, according to Lisa Hamler-Podolski, more than
40% of the people in the food lines are the working poor.
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- The harsh impact of welfare reform was initially mitigated
by the 90s boom and Clinton-era social programmes to support the working
poor and retrain the unemployed. Those programmes are now disappearing
under an administration which fundamentally does not believe government
should have a direct role in alleviating poverty.
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- Melissa Pardue, a specialist on poverty at the market-oriented
Heritage Foundation, reflects the beliefs of many in the administration
when she argues welfare reform has not gone far enough. "The impact
of the recession would have been far greater without welfare reform,"
she said. "The people who continue to be affected are not working.
People who choose not to get a job are not going to see more income. It's
all the more reason to give greater incentives to looking for work."
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- The government still distributes food stamps, but they
are worth on average only about $160 (£100) a month, not enough to
buy food for a family with no other income. Furthermore, more than 10 million
"food insecure" Americans, at risk from hunger, do not apply
for them. Often they are unaware they are eligible. Welfare reform pushed
them out of a system that they have lost contact with.
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- A study this year by Washington-based think tank the
Urban Institute found that 63% of this forgotten category sometimes or
often run out of food each month. All these factors explain why, although
the current slump in America has not been as deep as the last major recession
a decade ago, the food lines this time are longer. They also explain why
hunger remains a largely invisible problem. The Americans in the food lines
often do not show up in the statistics and usually do not turn up for elections.
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- "Hunger is a hidden thing," said Lynn Brantley,
who runs a food bank in Washington where the very poor live within sight
of Congress. "It's something we don't really want to look at. We don't
want to admit it."
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- * Tomorrow: The chronic health crisis facing America's
poor and uninsured
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1076608,00.html
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