California is Headed For Some Dismal Times Indeed
Blog By: Frank Tamborello
Trump garnered significant support from individuals who may face challenges from his policies, highlighting the resilience and courage of those who seek hope for a better future.
The entry of a Republican congress and/or presidential administration has for decades indicated slashes to social safety net programs including food assistance (the interesting exception being the George W. Bush years which saw benefits restored to categories of immigrants who were booted off of food stamps under the “Contract on America” of 1996.) The Trump administration in 2019 attempted an executive order to force states to remove waivers on rules limiting SNAP benefits to able-bodied adults between age 18 and 50; only the Covid crisis kept those rules from being implemented.
With the return of Donald Trump to the helm of US foreign and domestic policy, food security in the US and particularly in California is headed for some dismal times indeed. And it’s going to be across the board, not just impacting the SNAP program
In a way, the election just completed was about food security. Grocery prices had hit all time highs due to the inflation that set in after the worst days of the pandemic. While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sought to reassure Americans that the “rate of inflation” had gone down, this was very bad optics politically as no one cares what the difference is between the “rate of inflation” and the fact that something costs a lot more than it did while your wages stayed the same. Everyone was paying more for food than they were before, and it doesn’t offer much consolation to know that the price will go higher less dramatically. Even Trump’s clumsy attempt to talk about grocery prices was much better than Biden and Harris either trying to tell people everything was OK or just ignoring the topic altogether. One could argue Biden had the misfortune of this happening during his time in office, but in fact his failure to connect with people and show empathy was what hurt the campaign. Remember that when FDR initiated the New Deal , it was hardly successful in its early years. Yet he got re-elected precisely because people felt he was on their side and doing something about it. No one got that impression from Biden and Harris.
While Trump had the edge on economic issues, that may turn to dust once the impacts of his policies kick in, as long as people do understand the connection. The first of those policies that will have an enormous influence on food prices is his promise to deport 20 million Americans. He has selected to carry this out former ICE director Tom Homan as “border czar” and likely also Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, both of whom have the approximate charm and empathy of Darth Vader. The Guardian recently posted an article (see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/11/mass-deportations-food-chain-california) showing what anyone who knows the slightest bit about American agriculture already knows; the vast amount of work of harvesting our crops is done by immigrant labor, of all sorts of documentation status, and chasing those workers off won’t result in any kind of replacement by home-grown labor. Homan’s casual comments that he will go after immigrants legally here as well just adds to the fact that America’s bounty will collapse as crops will go unharvested, unplanted once the big farms go out of business, and America will ironically have to become a net food-importing nation, the precise opposite of Trump’s Made in America type philosophy. Expect food prices to go up, up, up.
The other policy issue is of course Trump’s support of tariffs---borrowed from the Democratic party of the early 1990s which was much more aligned against free trade policies (if you’re of a certain age you may recall a TV debate in which former presidents Bush, Ford and Carter helped NAFTA advocate Bill Clinton spar against a fascinating left-right coalition of Pat Buchanan, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Jerry Brown, and Ross Perot.) But in the current environment in which China dominates much of the manufacturing field (as it did not do in 1990), Trump’s tariffs are going to result in higher prices for a vast array of goods, and unemployment for workers at businesses that do a lot of importing.
Those are the huge blows to affordability that will come with Trump and his minions but that’s only the beginning. On the food assistance side, Stephen Miller and his cohorts are only too eager to implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the unpopular blueprint for a quasi-fascist America. Trump disavowed Project 2025 during the campaign---well aware that it would have sunk his election if anyone associated him with it---but the votes were barely finished being counted before J.D. Vance, unable to control his glee, declared that “Project 2025 is the agenda.”
We can probably expect to see attacks on the SNAP program that have already been included in recent House proposals for the Farm Bill. We may see the return of the Trump “Treasure Box”, which will be offered as an option to families instead of SNAP benefits, taking away needy households’ choice as to what they can get to feed their kids while tossing a prize to Trump fans in the corporate ag world. It’s hard to imagine that there won’t be attacks on current rules allowing immigrant participation in SNAP and other food programs. States may be able to step in to mitigate the damage to some degree, but it will take a serious budgetary consideration and a lot of courage and resilience from advocates.
In this election Trump got a lot of votes from people who will be hurt by his policies. While fighting courageously for what is right to keep those policies from being implemented, it will be interesting to see if Trump will turn out to be more skillful at gaslighting Americans than Biden was and telling them that everything is alright. You may vaguely remember the website that recorded “Trumpgrets”, the reactions of Trump votes who soon found out he wasn’t what they had thought they were voting for. It’s back in business: https://www.reddit.com/r/Trumpgrets/rising/ .
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Everyone expected 2024 to be a critical year, due to the U.S. presidential elections and the continuing wobbling of the economy as the world gets back to some kind of “normal” after COVID (which hasn’t stopped making people sick by the way.) Our country and the state of California continue to face the fallout of the pandemic and the food price inflation of the past two years. The destructive wars in Gaza, Ukriane, in Sudan, and South Sudan among other places have only exacerbated tensions further and made the dream of ending hunger in the world an even more distant reality.
California:
The Governor announced his proposed budget for California on January 17, under the shadow of a deficit that is anywhere from $38 billion to $58 billion depending on who you ask. Remarkably most human services funding was left unscathed---no cuts, but no increases either---with some glaring exceptions. His budget is poised to deal a death blow to the Market Match program, which has been built up for the last 14 years into a remarkable hunger- and inflation-fighting program as well as a revenue source for our family farms in the state, which provide the lion’s share of the country’s fruits and vegetables.
Of the $35 million allocated for 2025 through 2027 for the California Nutrition Incentive Program (CNIP), which funds Market Match, he proposed axing $33.2 million leaving not even enough for a symbolic gesture. You can learn more about Market Match at https://marketmatch.org or on the Market Match section on this very website. People who care about fighting hunger need to move fast. While it’s true that the final budget is negotiated in May and June between the Governor and the legislature, our Assemblymembers and Senators are being bombarded with pleas from competing priorities.
It should be noted that some other programs that help farmers, especially beginning farmers and healthy food hubs for cities, will be slashed as well.
Governor's Budget Would Destroy Market Match
The Governor is also cutting some of the supportive services in the CalWORKs program, including programs that ensure families can maintain housing and find employment for people with very difficult challenges to getting a job:
Governor Proposes Cuts to CalWORKs Services
The World-SAY NO TO GENOCIDE IN GAZA AND ETHNIC CLEANSING IN THE WEST BANK
Meanwhile in Gaza starvation is the cruelest weapon that continues to be used in spite of international pressure on the Israeli government to let sufficient food in to bombarded civilians, 25,000 of whom have been killed up to this point but with many thousands more at risk of famine.
UN Warns of Starvation in Gaza
As we speak, an entire population of two million people are trapped in a completely human-made crisis. Israeli military forces are preventing survival food and water assistance from reaching a civilian population, this time in Gaza. While the US and Egypt have urged the opening of the Rafa crossing from Gaza into Egypt, Israel is only allowing water and not food or medicine through, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Palestinians. As has happened in the past months in Ethiopia (Tigray), and Armenia (the forced exodus from Nagorno-Karabakh), the world seems to be standing by while genocide, ethnic cleansing and war-related starvation are happening.
HALA speaks out against the dehumanization being spread by media and politicians including Israel’s ambassador to the UK claiming against all evidence that there’s “no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, Senator Tom Cotton’s remarks that Israel can “bounce rubble”, and Israeli characterization of Palestinians as animals (even while 20% of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian)
HALA speaks out against anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment that’s already led to the murder of a six year old boy in Illinois.
HALA speaks out against the depopulation of innocent Palestinian farmers in the West Bank who are being threatened, harassed and chased out by settlers in illegal settlements.
The crisis in Gaza did not begin with the events of Saturday October 7. For 56 years Palestinians have lived under a brutal occupation that takes their land, destroys their livelihood, builds roads around their villages that they are not allowed to travel on, and imprisons thousands of them without trial or even formal charges. During the years-long siege of Gaza which began in 2007, the government of Israel even restricted the amount of food going into the territory, in which 2 million people live compressed in an area the size of Detroit, with neither Israel nor Egypt allowing them passage.
Israel for many years has actually supported strengthening Hamas (citation) and weakening the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which collaborates with Israel. 'Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a meeting of his Likud party's Knesset members in March 2019. "This is part of our strategy - to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (https://www.vox.com/23910085/netanyahu-israel-right-hamas-gaza-war-history )
In the West Bank for the past several years, residents of illegal settlements have assaulted innocent people and harassed them, in attempts to empty their villages of people. These people have nothing to do with Hamas. But the international community has said nothing. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed and 20 communities have been forced to flee entirely from armed, rampaging settlers, who are being supplied with automatic weapons and are committing atrocities with no restraint from the Israeli Defense Forces. These attacks have intensified since last week:
https://www.salon.com/2023/10/17/with-all-eyes-on-gaza-israeli-soldiers-and-settlers-dozens-of-west-palestinians_partner/
We are in no way justifying the attacks that sparked the current situation. But currently a literal genocide is underway as Israel refuses to open the Rafa crossing to allow food, water or medicine to the 2 million Gazans, half of whom were ordered to leave their residences in the North with an impossible only 24 hours notice.
See action alert from Jewish Voices for Peace https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/take-action/#act-now
Sadly there are other places where hunger is used to push non-combatants to the brink of death, for example the Sudan:
War Causing Famine-Like Conditions in Sudan
Federal Government:
A bipartisan Child Tax Credit proposal has been released in the U.S. Senate. This program helped millions during the pandemic but ended in 2021. It represents one of the most efficient means ever undertaken to get funds to low income families at a minimum of bureaucratic hurdles. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that “In the first year, the expansion would lift as many as 400,000 children above the poverty line. 3 million more children would be made less poor as their incomes rise closer to the poverty line.”
Child Tax Credit Could LIft 400,000 Kids Out of Poverty
The Child Tax Credit can lift millions out of poverty, but it has some flaws---major flaws according to Global Womens’ Strike, including that it leaves out the poorest people and it’s paid annually not monthly---allowing debt to accumulate rather than helping families stay out of debt:
Child Tax Credit Leaves Many Vulnerable Kids Behind
Poor Peoples Campaign
The Poor Peoples Campaign on March 2, in 30 states, will activate thousands of people in 30 states to march in their state capitol cities to demand just solutions to a comprehensive range of policies impacting poor people, including policies on housing, health care, income support, food, justice and other issues. Find out more here----the LA Contingent is organizing now!
Poor Peoples Campaign March 2 Events
Why Is It So hard To End Hunger?
In most cases hunger is an issue of the will. People in war torn countries aren’t eating because food is being blocked by their enemies. In the U.S., elected officials don’t feel enough pressure to retain funding for anti-hunger programs compared to pressure they feel from wealthy donors to maintain breaks and perks for the wealthy.
You can even get in trouble for feeding unhoused people out of your own pocket:Houston has a $500 fine for feeding the homeless. But there’s hope: recently in a case brought up under these charges, they couldn’t find enough jurors willing to issue the fine in case the defendant was found guilty:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/food-not-bombs-trial-busted-jury-panel-homeless-18617041.php
Let’s be like those jurors and reject the criminalization of poor people, and of helping the poor.
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