While Republicans Play Politics Over Food Stamps, New Film Focuses on Hunger in America

Amy Goodman and Raj Patel discuss the 49 million people who are struggling to get enough to eat in America, and why GOP candidates' posturing isn't helping.

January 23, 2012

The new documentary "Finding North" premiering here at the Sundance Film Festival exposes how one in every four American children suffers from hunger, despite living in the wealthiest nation in the world, and nearly 30 percent of American families, more than 49 million people, often go without meals. 

While Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich decries President Obama as "the food stamp president," author Raj Patel says what is really needed is a conversation about poverty and why the need for food stamps is so high. "It’s true that disproportionately people of color are affected by food insecurity. 

But what Gingrich is doing, of course, is racially coding poverty by calling President Obama 'the food stamp president,'" Patel said. "He’s invoking these ideas of racialized poverty. Of course, if you look at the people who are on the food stamp program, you see that the majority of them are white and poor." Patel is author of the popular book, "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System." 

AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival for independent cinema. I’m Amy Goodman. Continuing with our South Carolina Republican primary coverage, we turn now from the wealthy, whose influence on elections has been multiplied by Citizens United, to the poor, who could be greatly impacted by this influence.

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PA's Gov. Tom Corbett To Bar Food Stamp Recipients For Having Assets

By Susie Madrak Everything Gov. Tom Corbett does comes right out of the ALEC playbook. But because he rarely speaks to the press, preferring to fly under the radar, there are no outrageous sound bytes on the local news and public outrage is hard to generate. Maybe this latest decision will finally get Pennsylvanians to speak up. From the Philadelphia City Paper: READ MORE

Screwing Over Urban America: Why the GOP's Top Contenders Hate Cities

For the Republican contenders, urban areas are out of sight and out of mind.

January 3, 2012

The Republican presidential primary has covered significant ground. Against a backdrop of Iowan cornfields, candidates have debated socialism, capitalism, immigration and American exceptionalism, and have even touched on the finer points of Shariah law and the Federalist Papers. One thing you don’t hear about is America’s cities and the ongoing, and growing, urban crisis.

There are some oblique references, like Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that child labor laws be modified so that poor children can work as school janitors. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods,” mused Gingrich, “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works … They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

Gingrich’s comment is a surviving dog-whistle politics that include new state laws to drug-test those on public assistance and the ongoing effort to cut food stamps (and Gingrich did call Obama the “food stamp president”). The specter of the black ghetto still scripts urban dwellers as villains (often as thieves robbing the citizen either directly, or as in this Rick Santorum comment, indirectly: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money”). But unlike the era of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, today cities are more ignored than attacked. And this goes well beyond Iowa.

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