Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

The new book Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups argues that food banks and pantries don’t chip away at underlying issues that keep people food-insecure.

Source: Why America Can’t Escape the Cycle of Hunger – CityLab

Walmart doesn’t pay its workers very well. And because it pays its workers so poorly, they have to rely on food stamps and food banks to make ends meet. So then, Walmart goes ahead and uses its charitable donations to pay food banks, to pay anti-hunger groups to support SNAP—which enables [Walmart] to pay its workers low wages. And then it also redeems about 1 in 6 SNAP dollars around the country.

Government has, for the most part, abdicated its role in providing for people’s rights to food [through] cutbacks to SNAP and cutbacks to welfare. … What I’m trying to call attention to is that this approach (food banks) solves hunger for today. It gives people three days’ worth of food at the end of the month; next month, they arrive at the same damn situation. It doesn’t solve poverty, much less the issues around economic inequality and power. It doesn’t address the wages that people get paid, so they don’t have to go to the food bank.
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Where we’ve come with this after 35 or 40 years of doing this is that the way the public thinks we deal with hunger is through a food drive. They think that’s a solution to hunger, and it’s not.

Sixty percent of the non-elderly who receive food stamps are in households where there’s at least one person working. The reason they’re on SNAP or visiting food banks is because wages are so low.
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SNAP has become a work support program. Work support programs used to be things like childcare. Now we’re subsidizing part of the cost of employment to companies.

We really need to focus on income inequality as a nation. We need to be raising wages and supporting workers in a way that they can make a decent living. That way, people can feed their families and don’t need to be subsidized by the government because they’re working low-wage jobs. So it’s a rethinking of the way we structure how people work in this country.

A South African human-rights lawyer advises the left on how to seek advancement in a democracy.

Source: How the Left Can Advance Its Cause – The Atlantic

Slavery, Nazism, apartheid and more. … A struggle against them was necessarily existential. They either had to be eliminated entirely, or suffered completely. A contrary view could neither be accepted nor tolerated. Its proponents had to be ruthlessly destroyed. In the battles listed above, that was the correct approach. … The nature of the struggle has changed. The goal is improving the peace that we have, not winning the war we are waging. The goal is to be able to live in the same street, not claim that street as ours.

brokering an agreement in a human rights matter can be the seed needed for trust to grow. That only comes through talking, listening, and respect. It isn’t flashy or dramatic, but it can be enduring.

Seeking the advancement of human rights in a democracy is like seeking a better marriage with your spouse. You should always seek a better marriage.

Sometimes, that results in a fight. The purpose of the fight should never be to destroy your spouse. The purpose of the fight is to keep living with your spouse. To do that, choose your disputes carefully and over only the most vital of matters. Accept that your spouse is seeking certainty and security, just as you are. If you believe in individual dignity, accept that their thoughts and actions may not reconcile with yours and that trying to shame them will make the relationship intolerable. Most importantly, once the fight is over, seek reconciliation. After all, you have to live with one another.

In balmy Goa, from June 14 to June 17,150 Hindu organisations (I did not know there were that many, but this is what they claim) will meet to discuss how their common goal can be achieved—the creation of a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu nation, by 2023.

Source: The silence of the Hindus and the rise of the Hindu nation? — Quartz

Karen Handel faces Democrat Jon Ossoff in a June 20 runoff.

Source: Georgia GOP Candidate For U.S. House: ‘I Do Not Support A Livable Wage’ | HuffPost

Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, but the federal minimum wage of $7.25 applies in most cases. The minimum livable wage for a single adult in the three counties that make up Georgia’s 6th District is $12.01 per hour, according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.

“Look, if somebody’s working a 40-hour workweek, they deserve the kind of standard of living that Americans expect,” Ossoff said. “That’s part of the American dream, and there are too many folks having trouble making ends meet.”

Handel followed up by saying the issue is “an example of the fundamental difference between a liberal and a conservative.”

“I do not support a livable wage,” she said. “What I support is making sure we have an economy that is robust with low taxes and less regulation so that those small businesses that would be dramatically hurt if you imposed higher minimum wages on them are able to do what they do best: grow jobs and create good paying jobs for the people of the 6th District.”

“I think when you insult people, they get insulted.”
— Joan C. Williams

Source: Advice on how to talk to the white working class.

one of the things that a number of sociologists have pointed out is that often elite whites displace blame for racism onto less elite whites.

Do you really think Donald Trump could’ve ever gotten the kind of support he got from the white working class if he had not shown himself to be a bigot?

I don’t know. I’m kind of a data girl, and I just don’t know. He definitely approached a whole group of voters and brought out their worst selves. That’s for sure. The question is if Democrats had addressed the economic concerns and spoken to them with dignity, and attempted to bring out their best selves. I think we would’ve seen, not among everybody, but among a lot of these voters we would’ve seen something very different.