Posted on 12/04/2007 7:54:45 AM PST by TimesWatch
It's a holiday tradition: The hunger story. As winter sets in, the media discovers long lines and "critical shortages" at food banks, with blame placed squarely on federal budget cuts and lousy economic prospects.
The latest entree came on Friday's New York Times front page, reported by Katie Zezima: "Food Banks, In a Squeeze, Tighten Belts."
"Food banks around the country are reporting critical shortages that have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close."
"'It's one of the most demanding years I've seen in my 30 years' in the field, said Catherine D'Amato, president and chief executive of the Greater Boston Food Bank, comparing the situation to the recession of the late 1970s.
"Experts attributed the shortages to an unusual combination of factors, including rising demand, a sharp drop in federal supplies of excess farm products, and tighter inventory controls that are leaving supermarkets and other retailers with less food to donate....The Vermont Food Bank said its supply of food was down 50 percent from last year. 'It's a crisis mode,' said Doug O’Brien, the bank's chief executive.
"For two weeks this month, the New Hampshire Food Bank distributed supplies reserved for emergency relief. Demand for food here is up 40 percent over last year and supply is down 30 percent, which is striking in the state with the lowest reliance on food banks.
"'It's the price of oil, gas, rents and foreclosures,” said Melanie Gosselin, executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank."
In the Christmas spirit, the Times didn't question the food banks' liberal methodology but wolfed down every dubious claim about increasing demand -- demand that has, according to statistics from liberal interest groups, increased every single year it's been tracked.
(Excerpt) Read more at timeswatch.org ...
Maybe not the worst economy since Hoover, but surely the worst in 30 years! You'd have to go back to Jimmy Carter to find a more terrible situation. Uh. Wait a minute ...
What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice.
They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character.
None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism.
In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”
I don’t know about where anyone else lives, but around here the food banks are running out of food because of increased demand. The lines at the church giveaways are around the block. I have never seen this many people before needing assistance. ( I volunteer at a food bank ) It’s a great economy for some, but it’s also tough going for others.
We see a lot of kids and families now and it’s heartbreaking. And not just single parent households either. A lot of construction workers up here have no jobs right now- and our largest factories have all been closed and the jobs moved to Mexico and farther south. Places to live here are expensive-and heating costs are going through the roof.
Times like this make me wonder, just why the !!!! does my tax money go to feed starving foreigners, when we could be feeding people here?
so what the hell are they all doing with their foodstamps?
Because we're feeding starving foreigners right here. That and redundant members of the wood pulp media who are to lazy and incompetent for honest work. Plus the Hillary campaign plants.
“wood pulp media”
Love it!
My wife helps out with the local food bank here in Vermont. They are very short of funds.
It’s good to know that the two or three trillion dollars we have spent on LBJ’s War on Poverty has finally overcome hunger.
One problem, of course, is that food prices are skyrocketing. And one reason for that is, pretty certainly, the ethanol scam. When you have a shortage of corn, you have a shortage of basic foods and animal feeds. And in the third world you have people making ethanol instead of planting other crops.
Just curious as to what impact illegal immigrants have on food banks.
If they look hard enough they may also dig up a few homeless people; after all, we are ALL only one paycheck away from homelessness.
My encounters with people who supposedly need help is that they seem to find money for cigs and cell phones, but not food.
“Food Bank Shortages”
If there are such shortages in “Mid-MO” (Columbia, MO), it’s probably
due to two reasons:
1. Public release of the salary of the lady that runs the main food bank:
A COOL $90,000/yr. A KING’s ransom in these woods!
2. The “you can’t make this up” “public service ads” run for the
food bank.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT...one of the families “needing” the food bank
was represented by the wife explaining how even with her husband
and herself working...
after paying for the house, cars and all their children...they just
had to have the food bank fill them up. The advert just smaked of
“after paying for all the goodies...we’re shocked, shocked I tell
you that we’ve spent all our money. Cut back? Are you crazy when we
can get food for free!?”)
That was my sign to never give another donation to that food bank
and just up my donation to my favorite charity (The Salvation Army).
The updated, more modern way of saying this is "whatever".
North GA mountains here, and our local food bank is having the same problems with shortages.
The cost of food, along with everything else, is shooting up. As you noted Cic, we’re burning our food instead of eating it. Too, fuel prices which spawned the rise in ethanol production has been the main contributor to the rise in food prices, as well as prices of products and commodities across the board. It takes fuel to produce and transport.
Back to our local food bank, from what I’ve been told, the majority of its usage comes from the locals who’ve been born and raised here. I know they were running low back in September. It seems some people only know to donate at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Thankfully there’s that, but people need to eat all year.
It’s easy to dismiss the food bank story as propaganda, but one only has to take a trip to the store to see the effect of high fuel prices and idiotic environmentalism in the form of “alternative” fuels.
Gee, the hundreds of NYT employees laid off recently are going hungry at the foodbanks?
(chuckle)
With a country full of fatties who would believe this silly story anyway!
Who did the "Man in the street" where people were asked how many homeless people were homeowners?
"About one million" was one answer.
deep commitment to social justice to launch the San Francisco Food Bank in 1979, just one year after graduating from college. “It is an industry that has kept my attention for 25 years,” she says.
“We have taken the Food Bank from being a charity to a charitable business. It was the only way we could grow.” – Catherine D’Amato, President & Chief Executive Officer
Typical run-up-to-the-primaries column. We get it. Republicans are bad and people are starving. Vote Democrap!!!!
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