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[theHandpuppet]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030818/lieberman
article | posted July 31, 2003 (August 18, 2003 issue)

Hungry in America
Trudy Lieberman

I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks. --George W. Bush discussing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and US food donations on CNN (January 2, 2003)

Ellen Spearman lives in a trailer at the edge of Morrill, Nebraska, a tiny dusty town near the Wyoming state line. A few years ago she was a member of the working poor, earning $9.10 an hour at a local energy company. Then she got sick and had four surgeries for what turned out to be a benign facial tumor. New owners took over the company and told her she was a medical liability and could not work full time with benefits. For a while she worked part time without benefits until the company eliminated her position. So the 49-year-old single mother of five, with two teenage boys still at home, now lives on $21,300 a year from Social Security disability, child support and payments from the company's long-term disability policy she got as a benefit when she was first hired. That's about $6,000 above the federal poverty level, and too high to qualify for food stamps. But it is not enough to feed her family.

Food is the expendable item in a poor person's budget. With the need to pay for gasoline, car insurance, trailer rent, clothes, medicine and utilities, and to make payments on a car loan and $10,000 in medical bills, Spearman says three meals a day "take a back seat." She says she and her family eat a lot of rice with biscuits and gravy. Their diet is more interesting only when a local supermarket sells eight pieces of chicken for $3.99 or chuck roast for $1.49 a pound. "This country doesn't want to admit there's poverty," she says. "We can feed the world but not our own." MORE

And some links
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20726/
http://mmondlin.home.mindspring.com/No-Child-Hungry-MM.html
http://larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/2005/06/working-and-hungry-in-america.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0603-03.htm