Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [88]
The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless shelters and food pantries around the country, many of them elderly or single women with children, have grown by at least 30 percent over the last year. General welfare recipients struggle to survive on $140 a month in cash and another $140 in food stamps. This is all many in Trenton and other impoverished pockets now have to survive. Trenton, a former manufacturing center with a 20 percent unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a window into our unraveling. And as the government squanders taxpayer money in fruitless schemes to prop up insolvent banks and investment houses, citizens are thrown into the streets without work, a place to live, or enough food.
There are now 36.2 million Americans who cope daily with hunger, up by more than 3 million since 2000, according to the Food Research and Action Center in Washington. The number of people in the worst-off category—the hungriest—rose by 40 percent since 2000, to nearly 12 million people.
“We are seeing people we have not seen for a long time,” says the Reverend Jarrett Kerbel, director of the Crisis Ministry’s food pantry, which supplies food to 1,400 households in Trenton each month. “We are seeing people who haven’t crossed that threshold for five, six, or seven years coming back. We are seeing people whose unemployment has run out, and they are struggling in that gap while they reapply, and, of course, we are seeing the usual unemployed. This will be the first real test of [Bill] Clinton’s so-called welfare reform.”
The Crisis Ministry, like many hard-pressed charities, is over budget, and food stocks are precariously low. Donations are on the decline. There are days when soup kitchens in Trenton are shut down because they have no food.
“We collected 170 bags of groceries from a church in Princeton, and it was gone in two days,” Kerbel says. “We collected 288 bags from a Jewish center in Princeton, and it was gone in three days. What you see on the shelves is pretty much what we have.”
States, facing dramatic budget shortfalls, are slashing social assistance programs, including Medicaid, social services, and education. New Jersey’s shortfall has tripled to $1.2 billion and could soar to $5 billion. Tax revenue has fallen to $211 million less than projected. States are imposing hiring freezes, canceling raises, and cutting back on services big and small, from salting and plowing streets in winter to heating assistance programs. Unemployment insurance funds, especially with the proposed extension of benefits, are running out of money.
Dolores Williams, fifty-seven, sits in the cramped waiting room at the Crisis Ministry clutching a numbered card, waiting for her number to be called. She has lived in a low-income apartment block known as The Kingsbury for a year. Two residents, she says, recently jumped to their deaths from the nineteenth floor. She had a job at Sam’s Club but lost it. No one, she says, is hiring. She is desperate.
She hands me a copy of the Trentonian, a local paper. The headline on the front page reads: “Gangster Slammed for Bicycle Drive-By.” It is the story of the conviction of a man for