Hunger USA

By Max J. Castro

MIAMI – Today’s reactionary Republican Party isn’t given to literary flights of fancy. But its latest assault on the tattered remains of the always miserly U.S. social safety net—which even after the New Deal and the Great Society never amounted to anything like a full-fledged European-style welfare state—seems ripped out of the pages of one of the great writers in the English language: Jonathan Swift.

Let me back up to set the stage. Congressional Republicans, with the staunch financial support of the various sectors of our mercenary medical system—the pharmaceutical giants, for-profit hospitals, and insurance companies among others—succeeded in turning real health care reform, namely a simple single-payer system, not just politically impossible but virtually unthinkable for “realistic” politicians of both parties.

Consequently, the reform that Obama was able to push through in the afterglow of his 2008 victory, while clearly an advance from the “law of the jungle” status quo ante, is in many ways a complicated, half-baked compromise.

Not satisfied with that, in many states Republicans have been successful in torpedoing Medicaid expansion, the one component of Obamacare intended to help people caught in one the many black holes in our medical system, specifically the near-poor. These are mostly working people and families who earn too little to buy private health insurance but have incomes above the current very low threshold for Medicaid eligibility.

I covered much of this ground in my last article, but some reiteration is essential to avoid failing to see the forest for the trees. Because, not content with sacrificing people’s health and their very lives on the altar of ideological zealotry via the denial of medical care, the GOP is now intent with messing with the most vulnerable among us by denying them an even more essential necessity of life: food.

The latest Republican targets are two programs that should be sacrosanct in any decent society, specifically food stamps and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. The GOP, a party that sells itself as the party of family values and Judeo-Christian morality, is working hard to take billions of dollars—in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman—out of the mouth of babes.

The proposed cuts in food stamps are callous indeed, because they will increase the already scandalous level of hunger in a nation that declares itself the richest in the world. But the proposed cut of the WIC program, which helps pregnant poor mothers and their babies obtain the adequate level of nutrition necessary for the development of healthy, cognitively sound young human beings seems like the kind of thing that only the mordant irony of a Jonathan Swift could conjure up.

The great Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is best known for his novel Gulliver’s Travels, which is part of the English language literary canon more than 250 years after its publication. Somewhat less well known is Swift’s 1729 “A Modest Proposal For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public.”

Swift, sharp-edged tongue concealed firmly in cheek but writing in the vein of a serious essayist, lays out a logical solution to the problem of Irish destitution. Ireland’s poor, he wrote, could escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food…"

“Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients…taxing our absentees…using [nothing] except what is of our own growth and manufacture…rejecting…foreign luxury…introducing a vein of parsimony, prudence and temperance…learning to love our country…quitting our animosities and factions…teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants….”

It takes little imagination and a minimum of substitution to identify the dots connecting Swift’s satire to our own reality. Republican ideology rules out “other expedients” for dealing with among the poor and their children, including taxing billionaires [“absentees”], “using nothing except what is of our own growth and manufacture” [curtailing outsourcing to low-wage countries like Bangladesh where the lives of the workers are the least of concerns], introducing a vein of parsimony…[cutting out the obscene displays of opulence by the beneficiaries of our twenty-first century Gilded Age], “quitting our animosities and factions” [ending Republican obstruction against any measure that is fair, decent, or humane], “teaching our landlords to have at least one degree of mercy  towards their tenants” [teaching our CEOs that they are not entitled to make several hundred times as much as their average employees whose jobs, pay and benefits they are regularly cutting].

Irish history, incidentally, provides a cautionary tale regarding the human cost that a fanatical belief in the deity Market can exact. In 1845, exactly one hundred 100 years after Jonathan Swift’s death, a deadly disease began devastating Irish potatoes, the staple food and main income source for the vast majority of Ireland’s landless rural population.

At the time Ireland produced many other crops as well as plentiful livestock, but all of it went to the landlord elite, which exported most of it to the colonial metropolis, Britain. The potato blight, however, did not cause the British to suspend their worship of the Market God nor the landlords to “have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants” who unable to grow potatoes had no food or money to buy it with.

Rather than providing emergency relief, the British let the “invisible hand” of the market take its course. The result: One million Irish starved to death and another million emigrated as a direct consequence of Britain’s market-based policy.

Although one million people will not starve to death in America because we are not an occupied nation and the country is too rich and the people not heartless enough to allow it, there are disturbing parallels between the logic of British policy during the Great Irish Famine and Republican policy in the wake of the Great Recession.  

According to a recent study by the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University’s School of Law ("Nourishing Change: Fulfilling the Right to Food in the United States,"), one in six Americans lives in a household that cannot afford adequate food. Of these 50 million people suffering hunger, almost 17 million are children. Food insecurity has skyrocketed since the 2008 economic crisis, with an additional 14 million people classified as food insecure in 2011 compared to 2007.

Just as the Irish famine was hardly the right moment for the British to hold fast to their blind belief in laissez-faire instead of doing what basic human decency dictated, there couldn’t be a worse time for the GOP to apply the knife to food stamps and WIC. The attempt, however, testifies to the extent that the Republican Party, like British policymakers in the mid-nineteenth century, is beholden to an inhuman ideology.

Then, like in any good mystery novel, there is one final twist of the screw. For their British overlords, the Irish were not just a conquered people but an alien and perhaps even inferior race whose decimation would be no great loss to humanity. For its part, the Republican Party can politically afford to offer its own “modest proposal” because many of their strongest supporters see food stamps and WIC as undeserved benefits paid for by their taxes for the benefit of alien “others,” mainly Blacks but also “illegal immigrants” and Latinos in general.

The targets of racism change, but racism continues to raise its hideous face.