First things first
Though he spoke on their behalf during nearly two brutal years of campaigning, for whatever reasons the audience he hoped to serve did not connect with him.
That may be because the poor don’t vote and the middle class, though its members are never more than a pink slip or a Wall Street panic attack away from joining the ranks of the underclass, doesn’t associate itself with the poor or their problems.
So Edwards’ stand as defender of the poor and the middle class didn’t resonate in a country where most people are busy dreaming of a better life and spending every last dime to reach it.
If the country does fall into recession or worse, Edwards’ ideas, like health care for all, may yet mean something to people who lose their incomes and benefits. But by then he will have to settle for being a prophet, not a savior.
Like the good Democrats they are, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama assured Edwards they will consider the needs of Americans whose bootstraps don’t reach as high as the Republican Party’s standards.
For purely political reasons, they will not turn their campaigns into a referendum on helping the poor.
It’s the sheer numbers of the middle classes, after all, who elect presidents. And the middle classes are divided by differing income levels, political views and lifestyle expectations. They may feel for the poor, but they want their own needs tended to first.
And that is what Congress and the president promise to do to win their public paychecks, their swell health insurance coverage and their generous pensions that they don’t think everyone should have.
President Bush has shown little interest in helping poor people during his seven years in office. With his trillion-dollar wars and enormous deficit spending, he hasn’t shown much interest in the middle class either, preferring tax breaks that benefit the circles of the rich in which he revolves.
So his motives are understandably suspect over his call for Congress to change the law that mandates food the United States donates to poor countries be grown in this country.
The law is designed to help American farmers, grain dealers, futures buyers and shippers. They all profit from the $1.2 billion in food aid the U.S. distributes worldwide.
It’s not a bad law. But it can be cumbersome, delaying emergency food deliveries by many months.
The charities that distribute U.S. aid would at times like the U.S. to buy food directly from Third World countries that are closer to the people who need help.
This is not a popular idea in Washington and farm states. Opponents say buying grain from poor countries would drive up prices and make food more expensive for their own people.
The charities argue back that not buying food aid from poor farmers leaves them no chance to pull themselves out of the very poverty that requires countries with consciences to help them and their countrymen.
In a rare and brief flash of intergalactic harmony, Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, said he agrees with Bush that the delivery system is too slow and that “allowing some local purchase of food in poor countries seems to have promise, but let’s be careful about wholesale change.”
The Senate is considering a four-year, $25 million test program to see if buying food crops abroad works. Even in the unlikely event it passes, the ploy conveniently puts the issue on the back burner where politicians like to bury controversy.
Poverty has always been relative. The poor in America are well off compared to those in Africa, Latin America, or say, in Haiti, a disaster of a country not two hours by jet from the opulence of Miami.
The rise of world food prices, in part from the conversion of so much grain into SUV fuel and the destruction of crops in the Third World by more frequent hurricanes and floods, has made food much more costly.
In Haiti, the poorest of the poor are now eating mud cookies to survive. Made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening and allowed to dry in the sun, they cost a nickel apiece, far cheaper than the 60 cents it takes to buy two cups of dry rice.
Why America is not rectifying that obscenity in our own backyard seems not to cross anyone’s mind, rich or poor.
Tags: barack obama, dirt, Food, food price, food prices, ups