Empty shelves

Things are tough, but they are tougher for some than they are for others.

And with a federal government — for now — offering little help and a state government lacking enough resources to even keep its own park offices open, the local and state food pantries, food banks and soup kitchens are being forced to play an even larger role than normal.

Which is why it is so distressing to read stories like this and this. All four pantries in our coverage area — the South Brunswick Food Pantry, the Deacons’ Food Cupboard in Jamesburg, Skeet’s Pantry in Cranbury and the Monroe Food Pantry — are facing shortages at a time when need is up.

Due to the harsh economic climate across the nation, the food pantry has seen an increase in local families and individuals in need of assistance.

”Compared with last year when we helped on average about 25 families per month the number of people in need of help has grown,” said Social Services Director LouAnne Wolf. “Last month we gave to 53 families.”

In addition, there is no money left in the township’s Human Intervention Trust Fund, which is used to help people who are behind in their rent or utility payments.

The hardships facing many across the community is representative of the current economic situation throughout the U.S., according to Ms. Wolf.

”We’re seen as a nice middle and upper class community but unemployment hits here as much as anyplace else,” Ms. Wolf said. “Businesses and individuals who usually donate have had to tighten their belts. We don’t know what the Human Intervention Trust Fund will look like in 2009.”

Shelves that are usually stocked full are now lacking, which will make it hard for many families to make it through the holidays. Food boxes that are delivered to families once monthly are currently lower in items than usual, Ms. Wolf said. Items that help families enjoy the holidays are also lacking.

”I’d like to have more pancake mix and syrup so families are able to sit together and have a nice breakfast,” Ms. Wolf said. “For us to have some empty shelves means we’re not filling as much as we need to.”

Skeet’s reports some of the same issues,

Skeet’s Food Pantry of the First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury is currently helping about 80 families and is seeing that number increase on a weekly basis, according to food drive organizer Deanna Anderson.

”We’re light on donations thus far, but we’re also seeing more food going out in general than we’re used to seeing this time of year,” Ms. Anderson said. “People in this area are so generous, but everybody has been so involved in the election and the economy. We have to get ourselves jump-started into the holiday spirit.”

If only it were so easy. With unemployment rising to its highest level in years and New Jersey looking at a job deficit for the decade, it is no longer good enough to rely on donations and private agencies to take care of those in need.

Not that it ever was good enough. The problem is that enough of us have been doing fine and the folks hitting hard times tended to live elsewhere — out of sight, out of mind.

So we allowed our social safety net to fray badly so that now, when it is most important that it keep people from crashing to the ground, it isn’t there. And the private agencies that have been serving as the last resort are stressed beyond their capabilities.

The answer seems pretty simple but, after years of anti-government rhetoric, rebuilding the safety net won’t be easy.

We need extended unemployment benefits and a public works program, which President-elect Barack Obama is promising, but we also need a more comprehensive network of public aid (money, clothing, food, etc.). Budgetary issues may stand in the way, which could require new taxes — not something that will be popular. But the question we will need to ask ourselves is whether the cost of temporary economic stimuli and longterm program expansion is more than the cost of doing nothing and watching our economic well being and the economic well being of our neighbors deteriorate further.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Dirty skies

Every week, there is new evidence that we need to make changes in the way we live to prevent us from further polluting the skies and water.

Consider this United Nations report, which found that a “noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia,” The New York Times reports.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.

While the smog may be tempering the effects of global warming, it has some deleterious effects on humans and the environment.

Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.

“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”

Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.

He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Speculative bubbles

The latest name out there as a potential member of an Obama cabinet is Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, another move in the Washington parlor game, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Cabinet?”

It is a big bit of speculation but it is not news unless she is offered the job.

I’d rather talk about real issues — the economy, for instance. We’ll know soon enough if Clinton is offered the job, but right now we have a couple of unnamed floating a name.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Bailing out the wrong folks

The Bush administration on so many fronts has been a step slow.

And in each case, the mix of indecision and outright incompetence has had dire results — Katrina, Afghanistan, infrastructure.

But, perhaps, nothing shows the failures of the administration so clearly as its its resposne to the housing crisis, which it has allowed to get out of control and emasculate the economy. It’s not as if the growiung number of foreclosures, especially in the sub-prime market, was a secret. There were congressional hearings last year and the issue came up during the primary season.

And yet, the administration managed to ignore it until forced to step in and save the lending institutions that acted irresponsibly — selling risky mortgages to homeowners that the banks should have known would default and then breaking the mortgages up and mixing them with other loans so they could be sold on the financial markets.

The plans, so far, have fallen far short of effectiveness, leaving housing prices to continue their downward spiral and taking with them the equity that homeowners were convinced would rise forever. That lost equity means an end to the house-as-credit-card mentality encouraged by the banks, an approach that put a lot of cash in consumers’ hands but masked some real economic problems that were brewing.

Yesterday, the administration unveiled yet another plan to address the crisis — what he called a “redefinition” of the poorly conceived $700 billion federal bailout.

In recasting the program, the Treasury no longer plans to buy troubled assets from financial firms, the idea initially presented to the country, but instead will offer aid to banks and other firms that issue student, auto and credit card loans in part by jump-starting the market that provides financing for these companies.

“This market . . . has for all practical purposes ground to a halt,” Paulson said at a news briefing. “Today, the illiquidity in this sector is raising the cost and reducing the availability of car loans, student loans and credit cards. This is creating a heavy burden on the American people and reducing the number of jobs in our economy.”

The new old plan, however, will not assist the people hurting the most — homeowners. Protecting them directly — by extending unemployment benefits, imposing a foreclosure moratorium or other measures — will have to wait.

Paulson’s revisions followed Treasury’s announcement on Tuesday that it would streamline the mortgage process.

This program attempts to address that by using a simplified process for determining whether someone is eligible for a new loan. Instead of the standard cumbersome loan modification process, which can include reviewing a borrower’s credit report and tax returns, the new plan focuses on the borrower’s income and how much he or she can afford to pay. It also creates a formula for determining what a homeowner can afford, eliminating some guesswork.

Government officials said they expect the effort, dubbed the Streamlined Modification Program, to be able to help “hundreds of thousands” of homeowners.

But critics — including Federal Deposit Insurance Commission Chairwoman Sheila C. Bair — say the program doesn’t go far enough.

The plan announced Tuesday by federal officials and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sounds sweeping in its approach: Borrowers would get reduced interest rates or longer loan terms to make their payments more affordable.

But there’s a catch. The plan focuses on loans Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee. They are the dominant players in the U.S. mortgage market but represent only 20 percent of delinquent loans.

Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said the plan “falls short of what is needed to achieve wide-scale modifications of distressed mortgages.”

With the government spending billions to aid distressed banks, “we must also devote some of that money to fixing the front-end problem: too many unaffordable home loans,” Bair said in a statement.

The New York Times was pretty blunt in its assessment, calling it “another too-little, too-late solution” and part of “the administration’s pathetic responses” to the crisis. The problem, according to the Times, is that the administration has been unwilling to intervene to prevent foreclosures while at teh same time “”intervening forcefully — using taxpayer dollars — on behalf of an ever-expanding cast of bailout recipients” in the financial sector.

That is a huge policy error. The whole point of the bailouts is to stabilize the financial system. But the system will not stabilize until house prices stabilize, and house prices will not stabilize until the government finds a way to stanch foreclosures on a large scale.

The Times offers an alternative: Use the bankruptcy courts.

As a candidate, President-elect Barack Obama favored amending the law so bankrupt homeowners could have their mortgages revised in court, an avenue currently denied them. The next Congress must move forward on the bankruptcy amendment first thing in January.

Hundreds of thousands of homeowners would qualify for bankruptcy, and hundreds of thousands more would be helped if lenders and investors opted to restructure bad loans rather than having to go to court. Better still, bankruptcy restructurings would cost the taxpayers nothing and concentrate the pain on those responsible: borrowers who took on more debt than they could handle, and lenders who made bad loans.

Bankruptcy offers other uses that would be more beneficial to the economy and the taxpayer, as former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich points out:

When a big company that gets into trouble is more valuable living than dead, there used to be a well-established legal process for reorganizing it – called chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code. Under it, creditors took some losses, shareholders even bigger ones, some managers’ heads rolled. Companies cleaned up their books and got a fresh start. And taxpayers didn’t pay a penny.

So why, exactly, is the Treasury substituting government bailouts for chapter 11? Even if you assume Wall Street’s major banks and insurance giant AIG are so important to the national and global economy that they can’t be allowed to fail, that doesn’t mean they have to be bailed out. They could be reorganized under bankruptcy protection. True, their creditors, shareholders, and executives would take bigger hits than they’re taking now that taxpayers are bailing them out. But they’re the ones who took the risk. We didn’t.

A bailout in some form might be appropriate for the auto industry, “because two and a half million households depend directly or indirectly on them for their paychecks.” the best approach, however, is not a no-strings bailout but to put conditions on aid, Reich says.

In exchange for government aid, the Big Three’s creditors, shareholders, and executives should be required to accept losses as large as they’d endure under chapter 11, and the UAW should agree to some across-the-board wage and benefit cuts. The resulting savings, combined with the bailout, should be enough to allow the Big Three to shift production to more fuel efficient cars while keeping almost all its current workforce employed. Ideally, major parts suppliers would adhere to the same conditions.

Remember: The underlying goal is to help Americans through this crisis and come out of it with a stronger economy.

So, enough with the free money to the monied classes. Enough with helping out the people who already have the cash, the people who made bad bets and awful business decisions. Let’s direct our efforts to helping the rest of us.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.