12 The Nation. passing on the pain to the poor. Ten states have cut unemployment benefits; numerous others are paring back childcare and work-related assistance; Medicaid is facing deep cuts; and help for the neediest families under TANF (which replaced welfare in 1996) has been sharply reduced, by 20 percent in South Carolina, for example—leaving benefits for a family of three at a mere $216 per month, bringing them to just 14 percent of the poverty line. (For more on the hardship imposed by ClintonGingrich welfare reform, see Diana Spatz’s article on page 21.) Drumming up outrage about the expiration of a bunch of technical-sounding tax credits and state budget fixes is not easy. It’s tougher because President Obama has done so little to own what is arguably the biggest progressive accomplishment of his presidency, the Recovery Act. While there may be disagreement about the reasons for this failure, there’s no doubt about its effect: emboldening the Republicans in their relentless, decades-long, billionaire-backed assault on the Great Society, which has succeeded in moving the policy and rhetorical frame far to the right. Having embraced House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan’s plan to eviscerate programs for the poor, the sick and the elderly last spring, the GOP now takes seriously a 2012 presidential candidate who proposes child labor as a solution to child poverty. Clearly, a safety net caught between the contesting forces in today’s Washington will not survive intact. As Lizzy Ratner notes in this issue, “Obama does seem to have some kind of social contract vision, but it is based largely on compromise, on the social contract as process, not values. This is all well and good until you’re forced to go up against a pack of social Darwinists who have no values or belief in process.” This dynamic was manifest in last summer’s debt ceiling deal, which has already led to cuts in the 2012 budget nearly unfathomable to people January 2, 2012 who work in fields like low-income housing (gone: $3.8 billion), to be followed by even deeper gashes as a result of the supercommittee failure. All this is enough to induce a combination of trepidation and despair, not exactly prime ingredients for the huge, fearless protest movement that must take shape if disaster is to be averted. Here is where the movement to end poverty could gain inspiration from the proudly unprofessional activists who have seized spaces and occupied the national discourse these past few months. Historically, like OWS, successful poor people’s movements have preferred justice to charity, pursuing goals set not by policy shops but by the people who know most intimately what kind of change they need, and on whose vigorous participation the movement depends. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 as part of his War on Poverty, it contained a provision calling for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor—a provision that “grew out of the mass civil rights mobilizations in the 1950s and early 1960s that, with blood and sacrifice, had won basic political rights for African Americans across the South,” writes historian Annelise Orleck in her introduction to The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980. The law secured funding for more than 1,000 community action agencies across the country, which helped engage and politicize poor mothers, who fought many battles over the ensuing decade for better food, schools and healthcare for their families (and won some of them). Imagine that: a president signing a law that asked for, even paid for, grassroots participation to shape policies and decide priorities. It sounds utopian now— even under a president who once worked as a community organizer—but as OWS has reminded us, sometimes the size ■ of the demand is the measure of a movement. Food Stamps vs. Poverty Facing vast and sudden need, the food stamp program responded as a safety net should. by LIZZY RATNER ust past Fifth Avenue, where the gourmet food shops shift into dollar stores and Fourteenth Street turns suddenly seedy, there is a squat, metal-sided building that looks like a relic from a half-familiar past. Coated in grime so thick it’s hard to tell whether the striped siding is green or blue, it still bears boxy traces of postwar optimism (it was built in 1946), but mostly it looks haggard, a smile snaggled with broken teeth. This is the home of the Waverly Food Stamp Center, one of eighteen such centers in New York City. On a recent Monday morning, it was choked with visitors—men, women and kids in strollers—heading to appointments, picking up applications and pressing to get cases reopened. They came in waves, big and constant, which got sucked upward in two tin-can eleva- J Lizzy Ratner is a contributing writer to The Nation who lives in New York City. tors and then spit out into a room that one applicant, Erica, described as “really hot,” “crowded” and “loud.” It was the kind of place where no one seemed to be in control, and where anyone who might be in control didn’t seem to care. And yet somehow, Erica said, the place functioned. Despite hoops and hurdles, visitors frequently walked out with the help they so desperately needed when they came in. “They do assist you, they do,” said a middle-aged man who asked to be identified by his nickname, Mr. Monk, as he breezed out of the Waverly Center. Mr. Monk had lost his job, then his home, to the recession and had decided to apply for benefits because “I have to eat.” Still waiting to see if his welfare application would be accepted, he’d already received an emergency food stamp disbursement. “Every red penny goes to food.” Welcome to the food stamp system: decaying, inundated and one of the most unexpectedly effective safety net pro- 14 The Nation. January 2, 2012 caused by the attack on other entitlement programs. Call it the safety net’s safety net. “In terms of food security in this country, food stamps really are the foundational component of the safety net,” says Triada Stampas, director of government relations and public education for the Food Bank for New York City. “It is a program that by and large works.” The fact that the program remains as successful as it does is remarkable given the beatings it has taken since Ronald Reagan began sweeping away the buttresses of the welfare state. Since the Reagan revolution, funding has regularly been slashed, eligibility tightened and, during the Gingrich years, most immigrants banned from the program. And yet, even amid these attacks, food stamps have enjoyed enough bipartisan support to avoid the radical disemboweling experienced by, say, the welfare system. The reason, at least in part, is the way the program has historically been framed: as a voucher (always Republican-friendly) supporting the working (and hence “deserving”) NUMBER OF NEW YORKERS, IN MILLIONS, WHO USE FOOD STAMPS ON poor. As a result, funding has often been restored, ANY GIVEN DAY (NEARLY 1 IN 4) some categories of documented immigrants have been readmitted to the rolls, and the program has NUMBER OF AMERICANS, IN MILLIONS, WHO USE FOOD STAMPS ON retained sufficient flexibility to respond quickly ANY GIVEN DAY (1 IN 7) when the need is greatest. The past few years provide a textbook illustration of how the food stamp program works when it functions people. And thanks to an infusion of $45.2 billion in stimulus best. In 2007, before this country’s economic engine gave out, the money, SNAP has helped millions of unemployed and undernumber of people receiving food stamps hovered at 26.3 million, employed recession victims. In 2010 alone, food stamps lifted a number that had crept up steadily since the start of the decade, 3.9 million people above the poverty line, the Census Bureau thanks to the 2001 recession and stagnating wages. In the almost reports. And it did this, continues to do it, despite decades of onfour years since, the number of people participating in SNAP again, off-again neglect, budget cuts and Republican attacks. exploded, nearly doubling as unemployment and underemploy“Food stamps are really the only functioning part of the ment rocketed ever higher. Obviously it would have been far betsafety net,” says Joel Berg, executive director of the New York ter if the economy had improved and the need evaporated. But Coalition Against Hunger. “It’s the only thing left.” given today’s unhappy economic reality, the spiking SNAP rolls The question now is, how much longer can the food stamp are one of the clearest signs of a functioning food safety net. program withstand the conservative assault on the nation’s safety “The program’s almost a model countercyclical program, in net? And why haven’t Obama and the Democrats done more to the sense that as more people are unemployed, as more peodefend such a vital program? ple’s wages fall, food stamps can step in quickly and effectively to pick up some of the slack and ameliorate some of the pain,” he modern-day food stamp system is, in many ways, a says James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action model entitlement program—far from perfect, but as Center (FRAC), one of the country’s most prominent national good as it gets in social welfare–wary America. Born of anti-hunger organizations. the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which in turn was born of Today’s food stamp legions are a diverse group, a cross-section the anti-hunger movement of the 1970s, it is accessible, of ages, ethnicities and biographies. They include recession far-reaching, resilient and lean, with an overhead that concasualties like Rosalinde Block, 59, a middle-class single mother sumes less than 10 percent of its budget. True, its benefit levels in Manhattan, who lost nearly half her piano students as well are so stingy that many recipients are forced to survive on little as her freelance gigs and medical coverage at almost the same more than $1 a meal. True as well that it fails to reach three of every ten people who are eligible, helping explain how some moment in 2008 when her son became seriously ill. They are 14.5 percent of this country’s households experienced food double-barreled hardship victims like Carmen Perez-Lopez, who insecurity in 2010. Among those denied: a desperate mother suffered a stroke followed almost immediately by a breast cancer of two who walked into a Texas food stamp center earlier this diagnosis in the fall of 2009 and quickly ran through her savings month and took a supervisor hostage, ultimately killing herself as she slogged through treatment. They are disproportionand two kids. ately women; roughly half of them are children. And for many of And yet, for all these stunning and starved beast failings, them, food stamps have made all the difference. SNAP remains the best of the bunch, a program whose “They actually rescued me—they gave me food when I had essential effectiveness has enabled it not only to stave off none,” says Perez-Lopez, a former office manager who was food insecurity for millions but to catch the overflow of need reduced earlier this year to subsisting on the free nutrition grams still standing. Indeed, like the crumbling Waverly Center, the food stamp program, more formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, still stands, still works—remarkably well, all things considered. It may not look pretty, but while other social safety net programs, like public assistance (more commonly called welfare), public housing, Section 8 and even unemployment insurance, have been so thoroughly hobbled that they can no longer respond to the struggles of millions of Americans, the food stamp program has remained surprisingly sensitive to people’s needs. It is one of the defining reasons more Americans were not as immiserated by this recession as they were in eras past. The statistics tell the story. On any given day, nearly 1.8 million New Yorkers participate in the program, using electronic benefit cards to buy bread, milk, cheese and other staples. Across the country, the number is 46.3 million, or one out of every seven 1.8 46.3 T January 2, 2012 The Nation. 15 bars handed out by her cancer clinic. Unable even to afford issued in May and repeated in December, was his slam calling bananas, she was weak and losing weight—until an advocate at Obama the “food stamp president”—a declaration of barely the Food Bank for New York City helped her navigate the food coded racism that harked back to decades of racially inspired stamp application process. “Oh, I went to buy milk, I went to attacks on food stamps, most notably Reagan’s slur about “strapbuy broccoli and cabbage and eggs… it feels so good,” she says ping young bucks” dining out on T-bone steaks. Equally trouof her first food stamp shopping excursion. bling, Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican with a record of “I guess food is essential, huh?” she half-jokes. racebaiting, led a charge in the Senate this past fall to “reform” Yes, food is essential. But it is also something else: a source of food stamps by restricting eligibility and undoing a planned economic growth, a stimulus. As a 2008 study by Mark Zandi, $9 billion budget increase, supposedly to crack down on fraud chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, found, every govand government excess. (Notably, food stamp errors have reached ernment dollar spent on food stamps lifts GDP by $1.73, makrecord lows in recent years: only 2.7 percent of program costs in ing it the most effective way to inject money into the economy. 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.) The reason is simple: “People who receive these benefits are The deep racism at the heart of conservative food stamp hard-pressed, and will spend any financial aid they receive very critiques offers at least one clue as to why the Obama adminquickly,” writes Zandi, one of John McCain’s economic advisers during his presidential campaign, AMOUNT, IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, IN THE 2009 STIMULUS PACKAGE hardly a bleeding heart. This money, in turn, FOR FOOD STAMPS disperses outward to the store clerks, store owners, truckers and farmers, who then feed it back into NUMBER OF PEOPLE, IN MILLIONS, LIFTED ABOVE THE POVERTY LINE BY the economic loop. FOOD STAMPS IN 2010 Small wonder, then, that the program is widely popular. In a 2010 poll of registered voters by FRAC, 74 percent said food stamps are “very or fairly important istration has been unable or unwilling to champion SNAP as a for the country” and 71 percent said that cutting food stamps valuable recession antidote: as the nation’s first African-American would be the “wrong way for Congress to reduce spending.” president, Obama is vulnerable to racist innuendo, which his opponents are only too happy to exploit. Just two months after iven the program’s popularity, to say nothing of its Gingrich made his “food stamp president” comment, another strengths as an anti-poverty program and recession-buster, would-be president, Rick Santorum, picked up the theme, accusone could be forgiven for assuming that food stamps are ing Obama, absurdly, of “pushing more people on food stamps.” enjoying widespread government support right now: that Moreover, and in fairness, it’s not easy to sell the positive Congress would be debating funding increases, not cuts, side of skyrocketing food stamp enrollment. That food stamps and that the administration would be working hard to bolster and have performed admirably during the recession, catching those even boost one of its more effective stimulus initiatives. in need and stimulating the economy, is small consolation And yet. when the economy continues to stagnate and unemployment In recent months, the nation’s food stamp program has hovers at just under 9 percent. Certainly we can agree that come under increasing pressure—from the reverse Robin living-wage jobs would be far preferable to an economy so Hoods who have taken aim at the government and the broken that 46 million people need food stamps. And yet, none of this exactly explains the Obama administraDemocratic leaders who quake before them. tion’s failure to defend a clear policy success. And it certainly House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was doesn’t explain why the administration along with Congressional the first to empty his quiver with his Path to Prosperity plan in Democrats bargained away some $14 billion in food stamp funding April, in which he recommended garlanding the rich with yet in 2010, hacking more from the program than George W. Bush more tax cuts while carving $127 billion (or almost 20 percent) ever did. Or why the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee from the food stamp program over the next ten years, imposing agreed to recommend $4 billion worth of SNAP cuts to the mertime limits on benefits and converting the system into block cifully failed “supercommittee.” Or why Democratic leaders like grants. Echoing the arguments used to attack welfare fifteen Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer and Patrick Leahy failed to sign years earlier, Ryan warned against transforming the safety net on to a passionate letter by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand imploring into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of comthe supercommittee to protect SNAP. placency and dependency.” If passed, the Center on Budget and “Who are the liberal lions anymore?” one advocate laments. Policy Priorities cautioned, the Ryan plan would have thrown Liberal lions do seem woefully scarce these days. More “millions of low-income families off the rolls, cut benefits by precisely, full-throated defenders of a common, socially conthousands of dollars a year, or some combination of the two.” tracted good seem woefully scarce. Obama does seem to have Ryan’s proposal, and the House budget that grew out of it, some kind of social contract vision, but it is based largely on were defeated, but not without winning the support of almost compromise, on the social contract as process, not values. every Republican in the House. And now there’s the sudden This is all well and good until you’re forced to go up against surge of Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich, a pack of social Darwinists who have no values or belief in which can only portend ill for food stamps. Gingrich has been lobbing anti-SNAP bombs for months, but his most infamous, process. No wonder he’s had a hard time defending even the 45.2 3.9 G The Nation. January 2, 2012 most basic, necessary and successful programs. Then again, maybe the fight was never completely up to him. Maybe it’s been up to us all along. When the Food Stamp Act was passed in 1977, making food stamps free and nationwide for the first time, it bore the distinct traces of the blood and sweat of the newborn antihunger movement. “Most of the nation’s leading antihunger groups were founded during a fourteen-year period starting in 1970,” writes Joel Berg in his book All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? “Not coincidentally, the nation’s greatest advances in reducing hunger came in the same decade.” 17 Many of the groups that helped fight for the Food Stamp Act still exist and are still fighting valiantly, but there hasn’t been much of a movement surrounding them in years. In fact, as progressives dived into the culture and terror wars and all but forgot the anti-poverty wars, there’s barely been the glimmer of a movement—until now. Until a ragged group of young, old, utopian, hard-luck, some-luck visionaries began occupying the country’s squares and minds with their calls for a society based on shared, mutual good rather than rogue individualism. As the Occupiers plot their next moves, here’s one sugges■ tion: occupy the safety net! Out of Work and Out of Luck With long-term joblessness at record levels, unemployment insurance offers only spotty relief. by KATE KAHAN AND GEORGE WENTWORTH he Great Recession officially began four years ago In the midst of this crisis, there are huge gaps in our patchDecember, and although we may be in the third year of work system of state and federal unemployment insurance. Many recovery, for more than 13 million Americans without of the jobless don’t get any benefits: only 29 percent receive jobs it doesn’t much feel state benefits, with federal like a recovery. Even as benefits covering an additional the national unemployment 32 percent. More than half of rate inches down below 9 perthose who do get state benefits NUMBER OF WORKERS, IN MILLIONS, cent, the massive job hemorexhaust them before they can WHO HAVE BEEN UNEMPLOYED FOR MORE rhaging that began in 2008 find a job (they typically max THAN SIX MONTHS—43 PERCENT OF ALL has left a legacy of widespread out at twenty-six weeks). Then, JOBLESS WORKERS suffering. Of the 8.7 million depending on state unemployjobs lost since December 2007, ment rates, the federal governfewer than 2.5 million have ment provides anywhere from PROPORTION OF THE UNEMPLOYED been recovered. With populathirty-four to seventy-three WHO HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO FIND WORK FOR tion growth factored in, we are weeks of additional compensaA YEAR OR MORE 10.9 million jobs short of what tion—hence the plight of the we need to get the nation back “99ers,” for whom the federal to pre-recession levels, when program often represents the AVERAGE DURATION OF the unemployment rate was last chance to avoid plunging UNEMPLOYMENT, IN WEEKS (A RECORD LEVEL) 5 percent. into poverty. For the ninth time Perhaps the most striksince June 2008, Congress is ing feature of this economstaring down another deadline PERCENT OF JOBLESS AMERICANS ic catastrophe is the nation’s to keep the system of extended WHO RECEIVE STATE OR FEDERAL continuing crisis of long-term unemployment benefits from UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS unemployment. There are expiring. With roughly 3.5 mil5.7 million workers who have lion relying on federal benefits, been unemployed more than why is renewal of the program NUMBER OF AMERICANS, IN MILLIONS, six months—an unprecedented once again a political question? RELYING ON FEDERAL BENEFITS TODAY 43 percent of all jobless workReauthorizing the Emergency ers. Even more alarming is that Unemployment Compensation a third of the unemployed have program was once treated as been unable to find work for a year or more. The average duraemergency spending that didn’t need to be paid for. In today’s tion of unemployment is at a record level: 40.9 weeks. highly politicized, deficit-focused climate on Capitol Hill, the Republicans are already insisting that the projected $44 billion cost be offset by cuts from other programs, even though unemKate Kahan is the legislative director for the Center for Community ployment benefits stimulate local economies and reauthorizing Change. George Wentworth is a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project (NELP). them would create approximately 530,000 jobs. T 5.7 ¹⁄³ 40.9 61 3.5 Copyright of Nation is the property of Nation Company, L. P. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Purchase answer to see full attachment