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Les Leopold: Wall Street's 10 Biggest Lies of 2009

2009-12-21T16:06:43Z

Say goodbye to 2009, the worst economic year since the Great Depression.

Say hello to the billionaire bailout society in which the super-rich gamble, lose and get bailed out by the rest of us.

To save the system from total collapse we poured trillions of dollars into the financial sector. The result? Banks still are refusing to lend. Thirty million Americans are looking for full-time jobs and 49 million are skipping meals including one out of four children. But Wall Street again is reaping record profits and bonuses.

Not only are we richly rewarding those who wrecked our economy, but also, we have to put up with hundreds of fabrications about how the big banks got us here. Here is my biggest, fattest lies list for 2009:

1. "Government programs for low-income home buyers caused the financial crash." Wall Street defenders were quick to blame the Community Reinvestment Act, which urges banks to loan money in minority communities. In fact, almost none of the CRA loans are sub-prime and the vast majority are doing well, thank you. Blaming government programs deflects us from the real cause: Wall Street's incredibly reckless creation, marketing, selling and trading of "innovative" new securities that supposedly removed the risk from pools of risky debt. It didn't work. Wall Street, not the poor, crashed our economy.

2. "Income inequality is good for everyone." Lord Brian Griffiths, Vice-Chairman of Goldman Sachs at least had the nerve to say what so many of the super-rich really believe:

"We have to accept that inequality is a way of achieving greater opportunity and prosperity for all."

Unfortunately, the facts suggest otherwise. There is a high correlation between the mal-distribution of income and economic crashes. The last time our wealth and income distribution was as skewed as it is today was 1929, and that's not an accident. When too much money is in the hands of the few it runs out of real world investment and gravitates towards speculative investments. This inevitably creates asset bubbles and crashes. Record pay and bonuses on Wall Street and high unemployment are connected. (See The Looting of America Chapter 11).

3. "The rising number of billionaires is a sign of economic health." It's accepted media wisdom that the more billionaires the better. China with 130 billionaires now trails only the US, which has 359, according to Forbes magazine. But in our billionaire bailout society, the rising number of billionaires signals a collapsing middle class. Ponder this statistic: In 1970 the ratio of the compensation of the top 100 CEOs compared to the average production worker was 45 to 1. By 2006 it was an astounding 1,723 to one. Does that look healthy to you?

4. "Paying back TARP means banks are no longer on government welfare." Bank after bank is rushing to repay TARP funds during the worst economic year since 1937. They want to get out from under the Pay Czar (not that he's been sufficiently tough on the banks under his purview.) Banks that were insolvent only a few months ago now say they have the financial strength to refund tens of billions of dollars to the government. Where did all that money come from? Much of it comes from other government welfare programs for Wall Street (over $12 trillion worth) that aren't publicized. (See Nomi Prins's excellent accounting.) It may be the case that our banks are paying us back with our own money. Now that's financial innovation.

5. "Wall Street's freedom to innovate must be protected." Congressional leaders are tripping all over themselves to say new regulations will not discourage Wall Street innovations, something they claim is vital to our economy. Oh really? Do those "innovations" add anything useful to our country other than new casino games for the super-rich? Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volker, recently blew the whistle on this fabrication:

"I hear about these wonderful innovations in the financial markets and they sure as hell need a lot of innovation. I can tell you of two - Credit Default Swaps and CDOs - which took us right to the brink of disaster: were they wonderful innovations that we want to create more of?

.... I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information....

The most important financial innovation that I have seen in the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine... How many other innovations can you tell me of that have been as important to the individual?" ("What Has Financial Innovation Done for You?")

6. "To retain critically needed talent, Wall Street must be free to pay top salaries and bonuses." Where would they flee if they just got paid like normal people rather than like gods? The British are putting in place a 50 percent tax on bonuses. Also, compensation is much, much lower in the European Union. But the real lie is that we need such "talent" in the first place. That kind of "talent" just crashed our economy. That kind of "talent" is widely overpaid - no way should bond traders receive 10 to 100 times what is earned by the best neurosurgeons in the world. Something is really wrong and it starts with the lie of banking "talent."

7. "Overpaid American workers are the real cause of unemployment." The New York Times writers who concocted this argument didn't think they were lying. But this is one of the most preposterous ideas put forth during 2009. ("American Wages out of Balance" New York Times November 11, 2009) Edward Hadas, Martin Huchinson and Antony Currie informed us that:

"American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance."

They don't mention that the average non-supervisory worker has already taken an 18 percent cut in real wages between 1973 and 2007. What's worse, they claim that if workers don't take these additional cuts, these "overpaid" working stiffs will be the cause of another Great Depression. They write:

"But if American wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching Depression-era levels of unemployment."

Not a word is mentioned about how Wall Street's gambling caused all of this unemployment and how the continued failure of Wall Street banks to lend is stalling job growth, right now.

8. "I'm doing God's Work." Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman of Goldman Sachs said what too many Wall Street leaders truly believe: that they are so privileged and entitled that it seems as if the heavens bless their work. Why else are they earning hundreds of millions of dollars? Mr. Blankfein believes he is creating a virtuous circle by raising capital for corporations who create jobs and help our society prosper. But Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and the rest of the apostles helped to bring the entire world economy to its knees. Does that mean God likes unemployment and widespread hunger?

9. "We're out of money." Who's we? Yes, the middle class is tapped out but the super-rich haven't even begun to pay their fair share for the mess they created. Yet the top 400 richest Americans alone are sitting on $1.27 trillion or so in wealth. Here's a dangerous thought. What if we had a very steeply progressive wealth/income tax that reduced the net worth of the super-rich to "only" about $100 million each? You wouldn't be suffering if you had $100 million kicking around. Now do the math: The 400 richest x $100 million each would equal $40 billion. That would leave about $1.23 trillion to help pay back the country for the Wall Street meltdown that we, our children and their children will be subsidizing.

10. "We are becoming a socialist economy." Somewhere between 68 and 78 percent of the US GDP is private sector activity, the highest among developed nations. And much of the government expenditures go to private contractors as well. But there's a kernel of truth in the socialist scare: What do you call a society that encourages the private accumulation of wealth without limit, and then when the super-wealthy get into serious trouble, we bail them out with taxpayer funds - largely from a declining middle-class? That's not free-enterprise. That's not socialism either. It's something new and it deserves to be called the billionaire bailout society.

Here's hoping that in 2010 we can begin to undo it.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009. u

Danielle Nierenberg: Cultivating a Passion for Agriculture

2009-12-16T13:48:13Z

The following is a three-part series about Danielle Nierenberg's visit with DISC project schools in Mukono District, Uganda. Crossposted from Nourishing the Planet.

Part I: How to Keep Kids "Down on the Farm"

In Mukono District, about an hour outside of Kampala, Uganda, agriculture used to be considered a "punishment" for young people at school if they didn't behave and something they would be forced to do if they couldn't go to university or find jobs in the city, according to Edward Mukiibi and Roger Serunjogi, coordinators of the Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) project. Edward, 23, and Roger, 22, started the project in 2006 as a way to improve nutrition, environmental awareness, and food traditions and culture in Mukono by establishing school gardens at 15 preschool, day and boarding schools. And over the last year, DISC has received global attention for its work -- DISC is now partly funded by Slow Food International.

They started with Sunrise School, a preschool taking care of children between the ages of 3 and 6. By teaching these kids early about growing, preparing, and eating food they hope to cultivate the next generation of farmers and eaters who can preserve Uganda's culinary traditions. In addition to teaching the children about planting indigenous and traditional vegetables and fruit trees, DISC puts a big emphasis on food preparation and processing. "If a person doesn't know how to cook or prepare food, they don't know how to eat," says Edward. The kids at Sunrise--and the other schools working with DISC -- know how to grow, how to prepare, and how to eat food, as well as its nutritional content.

As a result, these students grow up with more respect -- and excitement -- about farming. At Sirapollo Kaggwass Secondary School, we met 19 year-old Mary Naku, who is learning farming skills from DISC. This was her school's first year with the project and Mary has gained leadership and farming skills. "As youth we have learned to grow fruits and vegetables," she says, "to support our lives."

Betty Nabukalu, a 16 year-old student at Kisoga Secondary School, manages her school's garden and explained how DISC has taught the students "new" methods of planting vegetables. Before, she says, "we used to just plant seeds," but now she and the other students know how to fertilize with manure and compost. And, she says, they've learned not only that they can produce food, but that they can also earn money from it. DISC is also helping build leadership skills. Betty represents students from her on the local Slow Food Convivium, groups of Slow Food members that are dedicated to preserving local food cultures.

Thanks to DISC, students no longer see agriculture as an option of last resort, but rather as a way to make money, help their communities, and preserve biodiversity.

Part II: Conversations With Farmers: Discussing the School Garden with a DISC Project Student

Mary Naku is a 19 year-old student at the Sirapollo Kaggwass Secondary School and is learning farming skills from DISC. In just the one year that her school has worked with the project, Mary has already gained enthusiasm for farming, along with a new sense of leadership and agricultural skills. "As youth we have learned to grow fruits and vegetables," she says, "to support our lives."

Part III: Cultivating a Passion for Agriculture

One thing you immediately notice upon meeting Edward Mukiibi and Roger Serunjogi is their passion for kids and agriculture. Their eyes both lit up whenever they talked about the students who are part of DISC, Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, a project they founded after graduating from Makere University in Kampala. When we met Edward, he had just gotten back from the World Food Summit in Rome, where he was representing Slow Food International's Youth Delegation. He works during the week at the Ugandan Organic Certification Company. Roger is a school teacher and administrator at Sunrise School, where DISC launched its pilot project in 2006.

Edward says that after fulfilling their goals of being able to go to university, he and Roger wanted to "help other people realize their dreams." And they wanted to spread their "passion for producing local foods to the next generation." By focusing on school gardens, Edward and Roger are helping not only feed children, but are also revitalizing an interest in -- and cultivation of -- African indigenous vegetables. The schools don't use any hybrid seeds, but rely on what is locally available. Students and teachers at DISC project schools are taught how to save seed from local varieties of amaranth, sumiwiki, maize, African eggplant, and other local crops to grow in school gardens. They learn how to both dry the seeds and how to store them for the next season. With support from Slow Food International, DISC is establishing a seed bank to, according to Edward, "preserve the world's best vegetables."

Improving nutrition is especially important for boarding school students, who eat all of their meals at school. These children come from all over Uganda and DISC tries to make them feel at home by growing varieties of crops that are familiar to them from both the lowlands and highlands. According to Edward, "a child needs to see what she's used to" in order to appreciate its importance.

At both day and boarding schools, students work with school chefs to learn how to cook foods -- giving them the opportunity to understand food production literally from farm to table. And unlike most other schools in Uganda, DISC project schools get local fruits with their breakfast and can harvest their own desert at lunchtime. DISC is planning the "Year of Fruits" for the next school year, which begins in January or February depending on the school -- each school will be planting its own fruit trees on campus.

Roger explained that in addition to the monkeys who live around Sunrise School and who like to eat some of the crops from their garden, the biggest challenges for DISC involve transportation and equipment for the schools. Because DISC doesn't have its own vehicle, the coordinators, who need to evaluate gardens and make sure that the children are actually getting the food they help grow, often have to scramble to find transportation. And they lack good ways for the schools to communicate with one another about disease outbreaks and other problems.

But as the project receives more interest -- from teachers, students, parents, and policy-makers (the local extension officer for the National Agricultural Advisory Services is a member of the local Slow Food convivium) -- and more funding, they're likely to overcome these challenges and make farming a more viable option for youth in Mikuni and other parts of Uganda.

Sebastian Siegel: Hunger, Learning and Making Mistakes...

2009-12-15T14:28:43Z

Q: It takes tremendous discipline to be so fit, what motivates you?

SS: I'm hungry, hungry for life, hungry to feel, hungry to do. It just feels right. If you look at your hands, these hands, they were meant to DO things with - to work, to play, to struggle, to fight for it, to care. Like the sun shines, we are born each day to do - I just like giving in to it, heeding that call to live. Sweat is evolutionarily integral to that call, it's part of our makeup. Animals just run sometimes, even when they're not hunting or fleeing, they just run. We are people, and before that, beneath that, we are animals. That thought excites me, and so exercise excites me in that way - like honoring the progress of time within my biological being; expressing its manifestation in this physicality by playing the instrument, by pushing it to the limit. In terms of discipline, discipline is freedom. Giving in to whatever you want, to laying around, to eating garbage, to not treating people with care let's say, that is slavery, slavery to our weakest, lowest being. Discipline breaks us free from that. It is the freedom to decide what we want to become, and the commitment to become that. A slave does only what is required. You're free the moment you step beyond.

Q: What advice would you give today's generation for building self-esteem, forgiveness, and making mistakes?

SS: For me making mistakes was paramount, it still is. I'm the king of mistakes. I think in identifying your own individuality you have to feel out what fits and what doesn't. Driving your own personal growth means reaching beyond your current capacity - but in that, you might find something greater than yourself that you aspire to. I think this is the essence of growth, and so for me it's where I found, and still find a lot of esteem; reaching beyond myself to grow into more than I am. Of course pushing the envelope means that you'll go too far sometimes, so you've got to be comfortable with that - with making mistakes, being judged and disappointing yourself - if you really want to live, really want to grow, really want to explore what it is to be you. Forgiving other people is magical, is beautiful, and it's easy to do - you just do it and then you see how great it feels. Forgiveness is a mark of personal evolution, of courage, of love, and of intellect. Forgiving yourself can be more difficult. But if making big mistakes is part of growth, then you've got to see them, learn from them, and then use them as tools to become better. Compassion for people makes sense to me, but I got comfortable as a kid in taking risks where I might hurt myself. So then the idea is to improve.

Q: Knowing James Whitmore has obviously affected your life - has this relationship helped you as an actor, in terms of building character?

SS: Building a character, as an actor, and having character, as an individual, are two separate things. We'd play chess and talk about acting and politics, and I was certainly inquisitive about his methods as an actor, and I certainly learned from him. The man has tremendous character. He wasn't nice but he was kind. Meaning he cared deeply for life and for people, but he wouldn't sit around and waste the day. As an actor I was able to show him the things I was working on. I spent many hours in his yard spinning material I was exploring - from Hamlet to Mamet. His response and interest was an incredible gift for me, and as a man he's an incredible reference point for what's possible with care and commitment.

Q: I see the way you light up when you talk of your father as well. Where does that come from?

SS: The man's so fun, and he's outrageous. I only got to see him during the summers growing up but I could always tell him anything - and that makes for authentic relationship. He's manifested this incredible life where he travels the world, and lives on the beach in Hawaii writing books and teaching. His class is the most requested. I've been sitting in on it since I was 2 years old, and I'll still go sit in when I'm there. He's a great story teller, and when he talks about religions (he's a professor of comparative religions, and specializes in India) it's romantic and funny, it's metaphorical and actual - to me it's like poetry. There's nothing better than seeing someone masterful at what they do. Even if you don't like basketball, you can't help but appreciate the way Michael Jordan moves. My father is like the Michael Jordan of educators on the world's religions - he makes it seductive and cool, comprehensible and relevant...and often he's hilarious. It seems he lives in some sort of groove with the rhythm of life -- like he's living in the Tao. And his sense of humor is awesome. There was a time when I was about 9, when we'd go up to the University in the middle of the night and take the video player home to rent a movie, and so we rented the film, and he cooked something, and there was this big excitement about the doing of the whole thing. Then when we got home he spilled a beer into the top of the TV and the glass burst out the front, and the whole thing lit on fire. He was a bit panicked about it but laughing, laughing the whole time. I mean this is the adventure, this is humor, seeing it in all the ridiculous things that happen. I mean it's a choice, you can find the humor or not, and isn't the world cool when you do.

Footage on Sebastian at Movie Teaser.

(The interview above was excerpted from an interview at the Examiner.)

Recession Hits Kids Hard Too

2009-12-14T13:54:32Z

Children aren't immune to the myriad effects of economic stress due to the recession an Arizona Daily Sun article reported Sunday.

Kids naturally adopt the emotions of their parents, which in times of financial upheaval, can lead to them acting out, losing focus at school or getting involved in criminal behavior, the article describes.

Teens are also having a harder time finding after-school work and numbers of homeless students in the Flagstaff area, as in other parts of the country, have jumped significantly.

Karen Wilson-Morris, who is a liaison for the school district's HeadStart program to help families who fit the homeless criteria, said she is seeing up to three families a day consistently who are looking for assistance. The stories are consistent, too, she added: People are losing jobs or are getting cuts to their paychecks to the point where they can't afford adequate housing.

Mentoring and after school programs, as well as food banks and homeless shelters, are attempting to pick up the slack from financially strapped parents who can't cover all their childrens' needs.

To read the full story about how children in Arizona are coping with a tough economy, visit AZdailysun.com.

You can also look for volunteer opportunities with organizations that work to help youth in tough financial times. National organizations such as 826 National and Feeding America have local branches in many cities and work individually with children and families to improve their situations.

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Linda Milazzo: Invictus Kicks Off New Campaign for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

2009-12-14T12:53:29Z

Los Angeles gets a bad rap. It's assailed for being shallow and rarely acknowledged for its good heart. But Los Angeles has a huge heart - at the center of which is pulsating non-stop activism dedicated to ensuring all people are granted human rights. Just name any of the 30 human rights designated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I guarantee you there are groups and individuals in Los Angeles who are working to enforce them - locally, nationally and globally.

Too often Angelenos are ridiculed for overindulgence and unacknowledged for their efforts to better humankind. Yes, there are divergent communities in Los Angeles of extreme wealth and poverty, but this affliction of extremes isn't endemic to L.A. It's endemic to our world. Most nations are home to the hungry and the overfed, to huts and palaces, to the ill and the well-tended, to the free and the enslaved. These are our planet's inequities - the casualties of a world that finds convenience in ignoring when rights are usurped, and dwells on achievers of power. There's more interest when Tiger Woods falls from grace than when a child dies from hunger.

There is apathy here in Los Angeles as well, but not in the community I'm part of. Not in the community of heart-workers I watch give their lives to the service of others. I bear witness to their goodness everyday. They're the hub of love in Los Angeles - the palpating heart of the activist community that works to bring peace, sustainability and equality to this planet we share.

This past Wednesday, December 9th, that palpating heart of Los Angeles pounded loudly to the beat of humanity when the city of West Hollywood and TheCommunity.com joined forces to host the premiere screening of INVICTUS starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon at the landmark Pacific Design Center.

Pacific Design Center (photo from njrfilms)

Event attendees (photo by Jim Reid)

The event was to kick off TheCommunity.com's inspired December 11th campaign to raise new awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Below is the list of the organizations participating in this event.

It's fitting TheCommunity.com served as principal host and organizer for this event featuring a film about Nobel Peace Laureate Nelson Mandela. Since 2002, TheCommunity.com has been a focal outlet to dispense information on Nobel Peace Prize winners. It has been widely successful at uniting highly recognizable celebrities with the Laureates and their causes to foster greater awareness and involvement.

It's equally fitting that the City of West Hollywood co-hosted this event. Since its inception 25 years ago, this fiercely independent 1.9 square mile city centered within the giant metropolis of Los Angeles, has been a national leader in promoting human rights. According to Larry Gross, Executive Director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, who was instrumental in helping West Hollywood achieve City-hood in 1984:

"In its 25-year history, West Hollywood has provided leadership in the state and the nation on progressive legislation such as on LGBT issues, HIV/AIDS, gun violence, domestic violence, women's issues, and animal cruelty."

West Hollywood was a city built on rent control to provide affordable housing to its residents. From its very beginning, perhaps more than any other independent community in metropolitan Los Angeles, the City of West Hollywood has exemplified the implementation of all 30 Rights ordained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - in particular Article 7, which honors diversity and quashes discrimination, and Articles 20 and 27 which ordain the freedoms of assembly and participation in the cultural life of the community. West Hollywood can take pride in its banner of freedom.

Unfortunately, far too many of our brothers and sisters who share our planet don't share our human rights. For them the privileges and luxuries of the residents of West Hollywood aren't even a distant dream. They endure torture, defying Article 5. They are slaves and victims of trafficking in defiance of Article 4. They bear discrimination in opposition to Article 7. They have no shelter, health care and food as required by Article 25. They're denied education as guaranteed in Article 26. All across the globe, these 30 basic rights are routinely and systematically denied to millions upon millions of people.

Since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was first introduced under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, these rights have been acknowledged but not enforceable by law. To draw attention to the continued global denial of these rights, Mary Wald and Bonnie Abaunza of TheCommunity.com have launched this new campaign. In Mary and Bonnie's own words:

The drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not only envision a world where every man and woman has rights. They also envisioned a world where every man and woman had responsibility - responsibility to educate others on the rights of the UDHR, and to uphold them in their governments, in their communities, and neighborhoods.

On Friday, December 11, TheCommunity.com will launch a new campaign to raise awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to educate the public on the articles. The website will feature actions that people can take with our partner organizations to uphold the rights outlined in the UDHR. The campaign begins with billboards displaying photos of artists and activists highlighting articles of the UDHR, throughout Southern California. It will expand through 2010 to include video PSAs with Nobel Peace Prize winners and internationally recognized artists.

One of the most important documents of our time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stands as a beacon of hope in a world where people suffer from cruelty and injustice.

If you would like to be a part of the campaign, contact us at udhr@thecommunity.com

As I hear of the shocking human rights abuses across our globe each day, it becomes ever more apparent that nations must standardize the principals of human rights and apply them equally to all.

Here are the words of Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu who delivered a video message Wednesday evening prior to the screening of INVICTUS, that began with the greeting "Hello West Hollywood from Johannesburg.":

"The UDHR may be to some just a document that was written a long time ago. In fact, it represents the first time our world came together to make a statement about the value and dignity of human life. The nations that had gathered in the U.N. said in one voice: "We think that all men, all men and women, are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

This voice has rippled outward for more than 60 years. It has become something that a prisoner, imprisoned for nothing more than his beliefs, can take and say, 'Look. I have rights.' A mother can look at a child and say, 'My child has a right to education.' And it has given birth to organizations like yours [those represented at the event], groups of good-willed people saying: 'I am going to spend my time making sure that these rights continue to exist in our world. I'm going to make sure a young girl gets an education. I'm going to stand up for someone whose rights are being violated.'

Friends, I've made my vow to stand up for the rights of others and for the implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights across our globe. I'm only one person but I'll do the best I can. Please join in this most important cause. To get involved, please contact Mary Wald and Bonnie Abaunza at udhr@thecommunity.com

'Silent Epidemic': Number Of US Children Going Hungry Soars

2009-12-12T08:12:10Z

Three weeks before he was elected president, Barack Obama set an audacious goal: end hunger among children in the United States by 2015.

Since his inauguration, Obama has seldom broached the subject. His aides brainstorm weekly with several agencies, but their internal conversations so far have not produced fundamentally new approaches. The president's goal could prove daunting: Childhood hunger is more complex than previously understood, new research suggests, and is unlikely to be solved simply by spending more money for food programs.

David Rock: Are Our Minds Going The Way Of Our Waists?

2009-12-11T17:46:33Z

The average waistline of people in the developed world has increased
400% in 25 years, with three-quarters of adults now overweight or obese. For the first time in history, there are literally more people overweight than there are starving.

One part of the problem is the food distribution system. In the absence of any oversight, the industrial food system has evolved to give people exactly what they want, and exactly what they don't need - the immediate gratification of high-calorific food. My breakfast muffin on a recent flight across the US was so insanely sugar-rich, a few crumbs of it would sweeten your coffee.

The other part of the problem is that our brain has terribly weak circuitry for inhibiting impulses, especially impulses that look delicious. The brain network involved in impulse control sits inside the smallest, most easily overwhelmed region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. Like our limited ability to do complex calculations in our heads, impulse control is a limited resource that tires with each use.

Put these two issues together, cheap resources available everywhere and poor self-control, and you get a weight problem literally of epidemic proportions. The trouble is, this same phenomenon may be happening with our minds. If current trend continues, we could see millions of people's minds becoming as unhealthy and dysfunctional as their stomachs. The reason? Social media.

Social Issues Are Primary

My hyper-sugary muffin contained what is sometimes called 'empty calories'. Empty calories make you feel better short term, but your brain then craves more, and there's no nutritional goodness like this is in more complex foods. I have sense that we are rapidly moving toward giving people 24/7, easy access to 'empty neural calories'. These calories, in the form of perceived social connectivity, increase the overall stimulation of the brain, but may not do much to make our brain more integrated, adaptive or functional. In fact, just like sugar, some types of neural stimulation have you wanting more and more, without ever feeling satisfied. The result can be a reduction in healthy neural functioning.

The reason for this comes down to the way the brain processes social interactions. Social connections, literally feeling you are in a positive social exchange with another person, are classed as primary rewards by the brain, something essential for survival. As a result, your brain craves social connections using similar circuitry to how it craves sugary food.

Both sugary foods and positive social connections activate the reward circuits activate the reward circuits in the ventral striatum, releasing dopamine into the prefrontal cortex.

One way to understand this is to explore what happens in the absence of social connections. University of Chicago social neuroscientist John Cacioppo led a study of 229 people between 50 and 68 years old, finding a 30-point difference in blood pressure between those who experienced loneliness and those with healthy social connections. Loneliness, the study showed, could significantly increase the risk of death from stroke and heart disease.

As Cacioppo tried to understand the data, he realized that loneliness might be more important than society generally realizes. "Loneliness generates a threat response," Cacioppo explains, "the same as pain, thirst, hunger, or fear." Being connected to others in a positive way, feeling a sense of relatedness, is a basic need for human beings. An absence of glucose in the blood occurs as hunger, which makes you feel anxious until resolved with a good feed. The absence of social connections also generates a type of hunger, it's a hunger otherwise known as 'loneliness' that also makes you feel anxious until it's resolved.

It's this hunger that starts to explain the incredible success of organizations like Facebook and Twitter. When you connect with people online, you're getting a little zing in your reward center, which makes you want to stay there and keep zinging. Don't blame Facebook - like the food distribution system, they have just worked out what people most want, and are giving it to them as richly and intensely as possible. Social media sites are like an online candy store for your brain.

Empty neural calories

So far, so good. The trouble is, like a syrupy muffin, connecting socially online may be like eating empty calories. The circuitry activated when you connect online is the 'seeking' circuitry of dopamine. Yet when we connect with people online, we don't tend to get the oxytocin or seratonin calming reward that happens when we bond with someone in real time, when our circuits resonate with real-time shared emotions and experiences. As a result, you want more and more social connections. On Twitter, you rarely get to feel satisfied and 'full' the way you might if you chatted in person with 50 people at a conference (after which you'd want nothing more to do with people for a while as your circuits recovered.)

This problem was further explained in a story in Slate magazine.

In summary, there's a circuitry for 'seeking' and a circuitry for 'liking'. The 'liking' response settles down the excitement of the 'seeking' circuitry. Without the 'liking' response, we end up looking like the rat that keeps pressing the level over and over to get a little dopamine hit, forgetting all about food and rest.

To the brain, simply receiving new information tends to activate the reward circuitry: information itself can be rewarding, which prompted neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer to coin the term 'information craving.' Thus people can easily become addicted to getting information quickly and often. The social circuitry does the same thing, only sometimes more intensely. One new study, (still under review) showed that a computer saying 'good job' in an experiment activated people's reward circuitry more intensely than financial rewards.

Too much social seeking isn't good for you

The trouble with such ready access to empty social rewards is that we just keep wanting more. As this reward-seeking circuit fires up, our ability to hold more subtle ideas in mind diminishes: intense activation of the limbic system, which fires up with strong rewards or threats, results in the de-activation of prefrontal regions needed or executive control. An overabundance of dopamine, while it feels good on one level as sugar does, creates a mental hyperactivity that reduces your capacity for deeper focus. It is also likely to reduce one's ability to have more subtle insights, the kind required to solve complex problems. The ability to have insights is linked to one's capacity to notice 'weak activations,' which can be easily overwhelmed by the intense neural activity of a dopamine rush.

I am sensing a dramatic upswing in people's sense of overwhelm in the last three years. I don't think it's just the uncertainty of the economy. It's social media. Like delicious deserts, it's hard to say 'no' to. The brain loves it so (my brain included). Getting any work done these days with Twitter on in the background is like putting a 10 year-old child in a candy story and telling them they can't touch anything; they will be constantly distracted. What happens when you're distracted a lot? Your IQ goes down, one study (while funded by a tech company, was still a study) showed that leaving a communication device always on drops IQ by 15 points for men, same as taking up marijuana or losing a night's sleep.

If your job is to stay 'high' all the time and make tons of new connections, like a reporter on an entertainment show, then this hyperactive, dopamine-high state of mind isn't a problem - it can actually help. But if you're trying to focus, do any deeper thinking, or perhaps learn something, it's not such a good thing. Consider this from a blogger on Psychology Today.

A study this year by psychology students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more gregarious, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile or depressed. Almost a quarter of today's teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors media's impact on families.

Self-regulation is a limited resource

All this wouldn't be a problem if our brain had stronger self-regulation systems. While people should in theory be able to regulate their own behavior, our self-regulation circuits are built out of the newest, most easily overwhelmed and easily tired region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. We only have one circuit for inhibiting, which if used up for an inhibitory processes (like trying to diet, or not say the wrong thing) becomes diminished when used again. With ready, cheap and easy access to such immediate rewards, it's very tempting to be distracted, and very hard not to. And if you're tired or hungry, it may take more effort to inhibit a distraction like twitter than to just lose yourself in it - you brain's braking system is metabolically expensive.

The good news is it's possible to step out of this paradigm. The bad news is it's about as hard as practicing eating well. It takes discipline. It takes learning to switch off regularly from social media the way an overweight person has to learn to walk past a fast food outlet. We need to reduce the likelihood of distraction, not beat ourselves up for our distractability, which is only human after all. Limiting yourself to a specific amount of time on social media, while not easy, is one good plan to focus on.

The mental pyramid?

As a society, we should be studying the effects of new technologies more deeply, and making people aware of how they impact brain functioning. I am not saying we should regulate internet start ups, but we should be more proactive about understanding emerging technologies that take over people's attention. If nothing else, to ensure our children develop the right habits.

With food, there are worldwide efforts to educate kids about the 'food pyramid'. The food pyramid essentially says it's okay to eat cakes and sweets, but only one daily serving, and you need many more servings of fruits and vegetables in comparison. While we're not doing a great job on the food education front, at least we're trying. When it comes to the internet, it's a free-for-all, with no education or awareness of what a good mix of mental activities might be required for a healthy mind. I propose that we need to start thinking about the mental health pyramid. In the end it's going to be some combination of focused mental time (perhaps less than we'd like), mental resting time, plus allowing just a small serving daily of social hyper-connectivity.

It's time to develop a concerted approach to understanding the impact of these new technologies on ourselves, and on future generations of adults. Let's do this before we find ourselves battling an epidemic with even wider reaching implications.

For more on how your brain functions during everyday activities, see my new book 'Your Brain at Work'.

Martin Cruz: Music, Hunger and Phoebe

2009-12-09T18:15:14Z

Music can elicit many different kinds of responses in people. For me, the response was charitable. Music is my true love and as an aspiring filmmaker that is not something to easily admit to. I've flown across the Atlantic to experience the greatness of a song. Great music can be powerful, enough so that I think it can help feed the many who are hungry in New York. My inspiration for using music to feed the hungry came from a 5-year-old girl from San Francisco who asked a very loving question: "What can we do to help?"

The story of young Phoebe from San Francisco is pretty amazing. I I first came across her story on the Huffington Post, days after my birthday, and only months later would I have an answer to her question. Phobe, on her way to preschool, saw a homeless man holding a sign asking for food and started asking questions. Questions so thoughtful, that they would be surprising even if they came from adults. Phoebe's questions eventually led to her feeding, in her words, "Seventeen-thousand something" people. The story and video is something not to be missed if you haven't seen it already.

So "What can we do to help?" I guess when you read a story like that, about a little girl making a difference and you know you've done nothing that like that, it makes you reassess your life. I've always been the volunteer type, helping out at soup kitchens, the Salvation Army, the Christmas in April program, even at a suicide hotline but I haven't done much of anything the last couple of years. So hearing Phoebe's story inspired me months later to come up with an idea called Music vs Hunger. The concept is nothing new, have a concert and ask the audience for donations and to bring canned food to the show, but this idea has a very New York sound to it. Anyone who knows about indie music knows about what's going on in New York right now. Bands are flocking here from everywhere, trying to make a name for themselves. Not unlike Greenwich Village's jazz era, music in New York is at a special moment. Every night, in small cramped spaces throughout the city, music is being made or played. I've seen so many amazing bands and heard such great music and I can't get enough. And because it's such a big part of my life, I want to somehow combine my passion for music with the need to help.

The numbers are staggering: one in five people rely on a soup kitchen or food bank in New York City, and The Food Bank for NYC is reporting that 93 percent of food pantries and soup kitchens in the city have seen an increase in first-time visitors over the past year. With unemployment at record highs, I think it's important that we don't let people fall through the cracks and become unnecessarily hungry. Music vs Hunger's goal is to use the draw of great music, with exciting up-and-coming bands, to make sure those who are hungry are not forgotten.

Music vs Hunger's first show was in late November. Featuring three great bands HolidayHoliday, the Senors of Marseille and (appropriately) Food Stamps, the show raised $70 and collected about 50 non-perishable food items. I think we can do much better, but just $1 donated to The Food Bank of NYC can provide 5 meals. So our first show helped feed more than 300 people.

Music vs Hunger's second show is on December 22 at the great Cake Shop on 152 Ludlow here in New York. More Info can be found on our Facebook event page.

Elizabeth Sepper: Obama's Chance to Fix Food Aid

2009-12-09T16:54:23Z

Food aid is in desperate need of change. Despite repeated international pledges to tackle world hunger, food aid fails to reach the most vulnerable and usually arrives late, in insufficient quantities, or not at all -- even in response to international appeals. When it does arrive, its quality often falls below basic nutritional standards.

What's more, food aid can even increase -- rather than reduce -- hunger. Development organizations that receive U.S. food aid often are required to "monetize" it, which means selling food on local markets in competition with the poor and hungry farmers aid is meant to help. Countries often donate when food prices are low, instead of when prices are high and the need is most critical. Even in the face of emergencies caused by conflict or natural disaster, governments fail to deliver the minimum food aid needed for basic survival. Food aid can also be wasteful and inefficient; some donors buy and ship food from their own national stores at high cost, instead of buying food locally or in the region.

Commitments to help the hungry will be put to the test at the bi-annual Food Aid Committee meeting in London this week, which will bring together several donor countries, including the world's biggest contributor to food aid, the United States. Hanging in the balance is the much-needed reform of the Food Aid Convention, a treaty that is unique in obligating donors to provide minimum levels of food aid. Unfortunately, the convention lacks the tools it needs to meet its goals.

Under the Food Aid Convention, food donors collectively must provide at least 5 million metric tons of food (or cash equivalent) annually to fight hunger in developing countries. This amount, however, falls far short of what is needed to fight food insecurity. It's a symbolic minimum with perverse incentives built in: it's far below the 10-13 million tons a year that the international community already donates; countries suffer no consequences when they don't deliver; and the tonnage requirement induces countries to donate food when prices are low, instead of when the hungry most need it.

For the past six years, donor states have lacked the will to renegotiate the expired convention. The United States and the European Community have squared off over trade, delaying a reform process by invoking long-stalled World Trade Organization negotiations on agriculture, ignoring the pressing issue of hunger.

Now, however, the European Community has indicated its willingness to renegotiate the Food Aid Convention. Whether the United States follows suit will be a test of the Obama administration's dedication to fighting world hunger. The administration has indicated it will improve U.S. development assistance to fight hunger. It should now commit to reforming the Food Aid Convention, making it a powerful tool to fight hunger and promote the right to food worldwide.

Reform should put the people who receive food aid at the center of food assistance. Their needs, rather than those of donor countries, must drive the process.

Donors should agree to comply with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and to adopt a human rights-based approach to food assistance. This approach guarantees transparency and accountability and mandates the participation and empowerment of people receiving aid, with the goal of ensuring that they can feed themselves.

Current annual commitment levels should be significantly increased. Failure to live up to minimum food assistance commitments should lead to meaningful consequences for donor states.

In recent years, some donors have adopted food assistance policies proven to work better, such as buying local or regional food for distribution, donating cash instead of food, and ending monetization. The United States should now join them.

The world's one billion hungry -- and the 8 million people expected to die this year from hunger and malnutrition -- cannot afford to wait. This week, their needs -- not those of donor countries -- should be at the heart of discussions at the Food Aid Committee.

Allen S. Levine: World Hunger Requires Research, Not Rancor

2009-12-08T11:01:11Z

While many Americans are worrying about not gaining weight during the holiday season, one-sixth of our planet's population is in danger of malnutrition, not obesity. As the U.N. World Food Program recently reported, more than a billion people do not get enough food to be healthy. Even more alarmingly, as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared, some six million children die of hunger every year. Even here in the United States, in the midst of the recession, almost 50 million Americans are having a hard time feeding themselves and their children.

A half-century ago, when similar problems loomed, the Green Revolution -- and the worldwide network of research agencies that grew out of it -- created new higher-yielding, disease-resistant food crops for the areas of the world that most needed them.

But today, rather than uniting in a global effort to end hunger, we're settling into the same old "I'm right, you're wrong" camps. Environmentalists see only the negatives from the first Green Revolution: heavy use of environmentally unfriendly pesticides and fertilizers, and fewer options for small farmers in poor countries. Agriculture advocates point out that hunger and starvation would be even more widespread today without the advances from the 1960s and '70s and call for more of the same.

As with most other controversial issues, the debate is not so much about the final goal but about how to get there. Global food issues, however, are so urgent that we cannot afford the luxury of lengthy ideological arguments. With so much starvation and an ever increasing world population, we simply need more nutritious food, especially in developing countries, plus a viable distribution network. At the same time, the amount of land devoted to agriculture worldwide is decreasing for a variety of reasons, and climate changes could create droughts or floods in some now-arable land.

The answer, it seems obvious, is to produce more and better food from the available land, or in economic terminology, to increase agricultural productivity. One of the keys to solving the hunger problem over the last 40 years has been agricultural productivity growth, or the rate at which productivity increases each year. It has slowed dramatically from the glory days of the mid-20th century. Innovation and research back then enabled farmers around the world to grow enough food for an expanding population. Much of that research was funded by the U.S. government as well as other nations, NGOs and private foundations, and history shows that such investments do pay off in new crops and higher productivity.

Since then, in the U.S. and other developed-world countries, the burden for funding agricultural research has largely shifted to the private, for-profit sector. While such funded research can make important discoveries, those discoveries tend not to be shared with others, for competitive or profit-based reasons. That's understandable, but unfortunate for the parts of the world that have unique or persistent problems feeding their citizens and that can't afford to conduct their own research.

Economists who study food issues say the worldwide drop in productivity is a red flag: potential shortages of soybeans, rice, wheat and maize, the world's primary grains, are a real possibility. Add in ballooning populations in poor countries, and you have the potential for a global disaster.

Philanthropists are making positive change. At the recent World Food Prize symposium, for example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke eloquently about making small-holder farming more productive and profitable, and about finding ways to make the next Green Revolution truly sustainable and environmentally sound. He and his wife, Melinda, have made agricultural development a key initiative in their Gates Foundation, which is funding hundreds of innovative new ideas. The work of the Gates Foundation and other philanthropists can help make progress, but as a nation, we also must contribute for this greater global good.

Federal investment in agricultural research for the 21st century is critical. Research funding must be targeted specifically for food productivity research, and it must also take into account environmental concerns about the use of pesticides and fertilizers as well as how water supplies can most wisely be used. And the investment must come soon; new agricultural innovations can take years, even decades, to be widely adopted.

If, for once, Americans can avoid the usual bickering and personal attacks, we won't be too late.

Allen S. Levine is dean of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and Director of the Minnesota Obesity Center at the University of Minnesota. J. Brian Atwood is dean of the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota and a former Administrator of USAID. The views the authors express are their own and do not reflect an official position of the University of Minnesota.

Billy Shore: Obama and Governors Must Lead on Hunger Crisis

2009-12-07T15:06:06Z

The holiday season is a time when Americans traditionally remember those who are hungry. But news reports of the last few weeks make the plight of many of our fellow citizens particularly unforgettable. With the participation in the food stamp program currently increasing by a shocking 20,000 people a day, the hunger crisis now warrants direct intervention by President Obama. Though formidable, the hunger problem is solvable, especially if the president provides stronger leadership and coordination with the nation's governors than we have yet seen.

Consider this troubling new data:

Last week the US Department of Agriculture documented record increases in the number of American families who experienced hunger between 2007 and 2008, finding that 49 million Americans were struggling to put food on the table. 17 million of those affected are children.
Share Our Strength released a survey of 740 K-8 public school teachers conducted by Lake Research Partners finding that 62 percent of teachers see kids who are hungry because they do not get enough to eat at home, and an equal percentage of teachers use personal funds from their own teacher salaries to regularly buy food for the kids to eat in class or take home for weekends.
The New York Times found that 1 in 4 American children are on food stamps and in St Louis, Memphis and New Orleans among other places half of the children or more receive food stamps. In many counties the number of people on the food stamp rolls has doubled in just two years.

The recession has brought the issue of hunger into sharp relief but is also producing some effective responses.

America, in its abundance, does not lack food. That is not why kids are hungry. Nor do we lack public food and nutrition programs. They have existed and expanded for decades with strong bipartisan support. Kids who are hungry in America are hungry because they lack access to such programs. That is a solvable problem.

Governors Martin O'Malley in Maryland and Bill Ritter in Colorado are solving it by directing state agencies to work with community organizations to identify and eliminate institutional barriers to accessing such programs. That might mean moving school breakfast, which has roughly half the participation of school lunch, from the cafeteria before school to first period when students don't face the same transportation challenges or stigma of arriving early. It often means organizing alternative summer feeding sites to provide meals when the schools are closed. The result can be tens of millions of already authorized and appropriated federal dollars flowing into states that have otherwise suffered massive budget and program cuts.

Just imagine if a defense contractor in a state knew that millions of dollars had been appropriated for a project in its state and could be accessed if the Governor made an effort to bring it in. Do you think a lobbyist might bring it to the Governor's attention? Hungry children in America have no such lobbyists.

To their credit, Governors like O'Malley and Ritter are acting aggressively even in the absence of such pressures. They are proving what a little ingenuity can achieve even during a recession, or perhaps especially during a recession. And they are finding ways to promote programs they care about even if they don't have dollars in their state budget to fund them.

But not all Governors have hunger on their radar screen. Others bristle at and resist any type of funding that comes with administrative strings attached, even though the Administration has been willing to waive burdensome regulations to increase participation during this time of hardship.

When the USDA report was issued President Obama repeated the pledge he made during the campaign to end childhood hunger by 2015. And he has staffed the Agriculture Department that oversees such programs with talented and committed people. But with hunger reaching the epidemic scale documented in recent reports, even more must be done. The president should urgently convene the nation's governors to personally educate, persuade, and if necessary shame them into action.

The president's ambitions for health care, education and a host of other issues are tied to the opportunities our children have to access the nutritious food they need to learn, grow, and compete. Food and nutrition programs are already in place to do that. But it will take leadership and coordination with the governors who have the responsibility to make those programs work. Failing banks and auto companies warranted the president's personal engagement. The growing epidemic of hungry children deserves no less.

Bill Shore is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength.

Paul Raushenbush: Struggling For The Soul Of Religion: Why The Parliament Of The World's Religions Matters

2009-12-04T10:52:44Z

"World leaders are listening to us and waiting to see what we have to say." Such was the rallying cry of Dr. William Lesher, Chair of the Parliament of the World's Religions, as he welcomed thousands of religious people from around the world to the opening plenary of the Council's 2009 meeting in Melbourne, Australia last night.

World leaders are listening carefully to religious people, but not always to these religious people. While religion has re-emerged as a visible and potent force in domestic and international politics, it is often the extremists, the self serving, and shrillest individuals and groups that dominate the religious narrative. Rabbi David Saperstein, a mainstay in American politics and one of the three keynote speakers, told the crowd that this had to change. The Rabbi insisted that it is the people at this gathering, and others like them, who must be the authors of new approaches to the world's challenges that reflect the values of what Martin Luther King, Jr. described as 'the beloved community.'

Rescuing religion from the sole domain of reactionary politics and theologies while simultaneously insisting that religious voices need to be heard within the political conversation are two important undercurrents within the Parliament. The list of participants from the United States is a who's who of religious leaders functioning within the political sphere such as Rabbi Saperstein, Rev. Jim Wallis, Sister Joan Chitister and Imam Feisal Rauf. They are joined by counterparts from other countries around the world including Dr. Sakena Yacobi, founder of the Afghan Institute of Learning which provides educational opportunities for girls.

Dr. Yacobi reminded us that just to stay alive day after day is a struggle for the people of Afghanistan. In defense of Islam, Dr. Yacobi reminded us that it was her religion that helped her to to survive and equipped her with the compassion and determination to educate young girls to think critically, ask questions, stand up for themselves. Unfortunately, as Dr. Yacobi was speaking the audience couldn't help but be reminded that it is religious fundamentalists who are most opposed to her work and the young girls she is dedicated to helping. The great struggle of the 21st century is not between the religious and secular, it is among religious people themselves and how the power of religion will be harnessed in resolving conflicts and challenges around the world.

In addition to a celebration of religious pluralism, the Parliament is focused on areas of global concerns such as poverty, the environment, aboriginal peoples and peace and justice. There is no place for cynicism or nihilism in these halls. In an early panel on ending poverty it was repeatedly emphasized that for the first time in history the world has the ability to feed the entire population and to not do so does not indicate a technical failure but a moral one. The underlying assumption of the Parliament is that religion can be a positive force for moral suasion of individuals and society by providing a vision of a better world and promoting the necessary values of sacrifice, peace and compassion; and that the challenges that confront the world will not be solved without religious actors. In addition, the Parliament holds that no single religion is capable of solving global problems on their own and so cooperation among the traditions to solving common challenges is not only good, but crucial.

Outside the convention center stand the predictable four or five people with their "Jesus is the only way" sign; and beyond them are the tens of thousands of citizens who have no interest in the beliefs or concerns of the gathered community of the Parliament of the World's Religions. Yet for this week, the Parliament has convened adherents of many traditions who are eager to share their spiritual, artistic and moral riches with one another. As they gain a deeper appreciation for 'the other' and a renewed commitment to working across religious divides, they will hopefully have brief experiences of the 'beloved community' to take back to Jerusalem, Kabul, Washington D.C., or wherever they call home, to inspire them to do the hard work of making their positive religious voices heard in the effort to create a better world.

The Parliament of the World's Religions Website

Give Thousands Of Dollars In Free Food To Friends, Family Through Feed It Forward

2009-11-30T20:44:05Z

Is your heart full of goodwill but your wallet empty at the start of this holiday season? Restaurant.com has you covered for hundreds of dollars in free food to share with others with its Feed it Forward 2009 campaign.

The service seems too good to be true -- simply register for an account on Restaurant.com or via facebook and then you're free to send $10 gift certificates to up to 30 people each day until Christmas day. That's $300 in free money every day to send to friends, family, and even some of those awkward acquaintances on your holiday shopping list.

The hitch? None that we can find, if you're okay with the free registration and inevitable online newsletters. Feed it Forward 2009 has reserved $30 million in free restaurant vouchers provided by corporate sponsors to be used for the month of December. It's a refreshing way to pay it forward during a winter that has already left many feeling the recession's financial chill.

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Anne Mai Bertelsen: Hunger in America: More Than Money is Needed

2009-11-30T12:09:36Z

This week, Michelle Obama, in conjunction with the Corporation for National and Community Service, launched Feed A Neighbor to combat hunger in America. While
laudable, we need to do so much more to reduce hunger in America. We need to revisit our food policy, which provides financial and in-kind food subsidies but does little to help Americans produce or stretch their food dollars. Stretching a dollar is something my parents knew how to do well. This helped them feed a family of nine on $125 a week during the 1960s and 70s.

My parents were able to do this, in part, because my mother learned how to plan, shop and cook for a family in her high school home economics class. She learned how
to stretch a gallon of whole milk by mixing it with a gallon of water and instant milk powder. Or using fillers -- like bulgur wheat -- with ground beef to make eight instead of four hamburgers from a pound of meat. In a night adult course, through the local college extension program, she learned how to incorporate inexpensive vegetarian dishes like black bean chili and pinto bean casserole into our diet. Granted, there were many meals us kids hated -- the pinto bean casserole was a particularly wretched experience. But, we never went hungry. And my mom stayed on her budget.

My dad helped in the summer with his version of the Victory Garden: tomatoes, lettuce, beans; staples that could be planted in a small, four by four plot. Occasionally, there was a surfeit of tomatoes or beans, which my mom would can or freeze for later use.

I have been thinking about both my mother’s home economics
classes and my father’s Victory Garden since the release of the USDA’s report on hunger in America. According to the report, there are now over 49 million Americans who are food insecure -- in other words, unable financially to feed their family -- a 36 percent increase from the previous year. It is the single largest increase in one year since the agency began keeping records in 1995 and an embarrassment in the richest of nations.

Since the 1960s, our food policy has treated hunger as a temporary condition. But those who work with the food insecure know that hunger is a stubbornly persistent
problem; that many who are food insecure have been so for years and even,
generations; and that families who are food insecure also have the greatest
incidence of obesity because the cheapest food is the least healthy. They know, in short, that more is needed. That food insecurity can only be temporary if we give Americans the tools to prevent hunger; to better connect them to the production and preparation of their food. The tools my parents had.

There are a number of efforts to do just that including the Good Food Gardens, a
joint venture of the Food Network, Share Our Strength and Teich Garden Systems.
Initiated in 2008, there are now 13 community gardens across the country and
more are planned. In each of these gardens, Good Food Gardens partners with community organizations to teach children and their families how to grow and prepare fruits and vegetables.

In San Francisco, a partnership between the city and Garden for the Environment created Victory Gardens, which kicked off with a garden on the grounds of City Hall and then moved
into individual resident’s backyards, teaching them how to install and care for
their own gardens. Outside of Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a rooftop community garden which donated a portion of the harvest to a local food bank.

But these efforts are too small on their own to reduce hunger in America. We need the full support of the Obama Administration to push for widespread gardening and
economical food preparation education. It can start by raising awareness of a little known or utilized Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit: SNAP monies can be used to purchase seeds and plants to grow food. Just as there are notices in grocery stores and farmer’s markets that SNAP funds can be used to purchase certain food items, so too should there be notices at home gardening stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s that fruit and vegetable seeds and plants can be purchased with SNAP
funds. While there, participants can learn how to plant and care for their vegetable gardens at the free gardening clinics these types of stores routinely offer. The Administration can also leverage the expertise and resources of the USDA to educate Americans on how to preserve the food they produce. And, it can learn from Franklin Roosevelt, who called on Americans during World War II to plant Victory Gardens and preserve their produce. The response? Over 20 million Victory Gardens were planted in 1943, producing one-third of all the vegetables consumed in that year. They purchased some 315,000 pressure cookers that year to can their produce.

The Administration can go even further by pushing for the inclusion of economical,
nutritious food planning and preparation at schools that receive funds through
the National School Lunch Program. While my mother learned how to stretch her
food dollars in home economics, my own school district, which has a significant
food insecure population, eliminated home economics classes in a cost-cutting move a few years ago.

I am sure there are even better ideas to significantly reduce the number of hungry in America. But, we need to move beyond just aid and handouts. We need to give Americans the tools to ward off hunger; to help the hungry feed themselves and their families with low cost, healthy food.

40% Of Food Produced Goes To Waste, While One In Six Go Hungry

2009-11-28T11:43:06Z

Vicki Escarra, the president and CEO of Feeding America, calls hunger America's "dirty little secret." Mara Schiavocampo from NBC Nightly News discovered America's hunger problems first-hand as she visited a struggling family in Branford, Connecticut.

Though the mother of this family says her three kids always used to have three meals a day, they skip breakfast most days and she eats at a soup kitchen since being laid off from her job in purchasing.

Food pantries across America have seen demand rise as times have gotten tougher, and Schiavocampo interviewed several other diners who said things have never been so bad for them. Meanwhile, studies estimate that 40% of all the food produced in America ends up in the garbage.

WATCH:

Food Banks Go High-Tech To Feed The Hungry

2009-11-27T08:04:46Z

SEATTLE — Food banks across the country are undergoing a high-tech revolution, adopting sophisticated databases, bar coding, GPS tracking, automated warehouses and other technologies used in the food industry that increasingly supplies their goods.

It's a long way from handing out macaroni and canned soup from a church basement.

Students Eat 600 Doughnuts For Charity, Internet Commenters Express Disgust

2009-11-26T17:20:07Z

In an era in American history when much attention is paid to the plight of the unemployed, impoverished and hungry, one Illinois high school is a causing a stir with a gluttonous fundraiser.

Video published to YouTube shows high school students devouring doughnuts as part of a charity event. The winning contestants ate a calorie-filled 19 doughnuts.

Internet commenters are having a bit of a feeding frenzy of their own, criticizing this type of campaign at a time when so many Americans are going hungry. As Impact has reported, 49 million Americans experience food insecurity at some point during the year, including six million seniors.

Some of the comments on the YouTube video of the event:

This is both disgusting and ridiculous. Pass out those bloody donuts at a homeless shelter and let those college kids donate money instead! Even just a few dollars would be more effective than this nonsense.

Wow, Americans are becoming brain dead! Who the f--- thought this would be a good idea for charity!?

This is terrible. I feel bad for all the homeless people and the lower class who barely makes enough to eat 3 meals...

WATCH:

Frances Moore Lappe: A Thanksgiving Hymn For 2009

2009-11-26T12:09:26Z

For a world of unprecedented hunger where more than one in seven of us now go without the food we need...

As we come together to offer Thanksgiving for all of the plenty we share here today, our hearts seek the courage to end the growing hunger that kills so many millions and makes us all poor.

We know how to do it, for hunger is needless. Our world harvests plenty for all to eat well. Together let's now use our common human caring to take the thrilling risks to be champions for life.

To the tune of "We Gather Together," a common Thanksgiving hymn based on a 16th century Dutch song; with new words by Richard Rowe and Frances Moore Lappe

Read more HuffPost Thanksgiving coverage and commentary

Bob Franken: Thanksgiving: When There Is Humane Treatment for All

2009-11-26T09:55:12Z

Those Humane Society commercials on behalf of neglected, abused and hungry dogs and cats are heart wrenching to me. No one loves animals more than me, dotes more on his own pets.

HOWEVER: Don't we need a similar campaign for human children? Given the new study that shows one fourth of young Americans face the possibility of going to bed hungry every night, could we show video of just some of them with someone to somehow touch our sadness and anger over their circumstance too?

How can we be blase about their plight? How could those of us more fortunate not rush out and share our bounty? This is not sharing wealth, this is about guaranteeing the right to basic sustenance. And Thanksgiving is the very day we should think about this.

This is when we some of us make a such a to-do about our conscience-salving holiday contributions to a food bank so the deprived are able to partake of a holiday meal. This is one of the two days a year where we might head to a soup kitchen and dole out food to the needy, preferably when the local TV cameras are there, before we go home and gorge ourselves on ridiculous feasts and then make jokes in the days ahead about using up the leftovers.

Tragically, for one fourth of our children there is nothing from which to be left over, or enough scraps for all those other days and nights besides Thanksgiving, and oh yeah, Christmas. Time after time we're told that the last-resort food banks in our nation of plenty, no longer are receiving what they need to feed those who have plenty of nothing. Blame the economy, we're told for reducing contributions just when more people are desperate for anything to eat.

It's not acceptable. True, times are tough, but frankly, most of us consume way more than we require while others simply don't get enough...far too many others What we don't overindulge, we throw away. If it is too much to get the wealthy to share their prosperity, maybe we can at least come up with a better system to collect what is discarded and set up a network that provides it in some non-demeaning way to the parents who simply want their children to be properly nourished. Would that be asking enough?

There is a special place in Hell for those who are cruel to animals. But what about those of us to neglect our own vulnerable young? Don't we have a moral obligation to them? Every day of the year? So they can share in the Thanksgiving.

Arianna Huffington: Sharing the Privilege of Abundance

2009-11-26T08:51:53Z

Thanksgiving always evokes memories of the days when, as mothers of young children, we would bundle them up to deliver turkey baskets -- family to family -- to those in Washington, DC who couldn't afford a holiday dinner of their own.

That simple act connected our children to the original spirit of Thanksgiving -- where families stop not only to give thanks for plenty, but to share with strangers in need. Thanksgiving is one of the few days where soup kitchens and food pantries around the country burst at the seams -- not just with turkey and stuffing, but with volunteers eager to serve.

Americans, in fact, are the most generous people in the world when it comes to private philanthropy: 85 percent of American families give their time or money, with private giving averaging $300 billion a year.

This year Thanksgiving strikes at a critical hour for families everywhere who have been hit hard by the global financial meltdown.

In the United States, one in nine people rely each month on food stamps. Demand at food pantries and homeless shelters is at record levels. And 17 million American households have had difficulty putting food on the table during the last year -- a 14-year high.

Yet while we concentrate our efforts on addressing hunger at home, we must remember another face of hunger in our world -- one that's largely invisible until we glimpse it on our TVs from some distant country, when a typhoon, earthquake, flood, drought or conflict makes the evening news.

It's easy to forget the silent tsunami of hunger that rips an ever-greater swath through the places where there are no streets, where mothers wonder if their malnourished babies will survive and fathers despair that they cannot provide even a single meal for their desperate families. The compounding impact of the food, fuel and financial crises has pushed the numbers of those suffering chronic hunger past one billion -- one in six people on earth -- for the first time in history.

Those in the "Bottom Billion" subsist on a dollar a day or less. Each day, hunger and related ailments claim 25,000 lives, mostly children -- making hunger the world's No. 1 public health threat. Even when chronic hunger does not kill, it maims -- shattering health, longevity, and hope.

Malnutrition in children under age two causes irreversible damage to their minds and bodies. In countries like Ethiopia, Pakistan and Guatemala, one in two children is stunted. Not only is this an incalculable human loss, but it is a quantifiable financial loss to these nations. Studies show malnutrition causes tens of billions of dollars in losses to poor countries -- or as much as 11 percent of GDP.

As we've traveled the world, the two of us have shared stories and tears with other mothers -- far from Washington -- who have watched, helplessly, as their children slipped from their grasp into the maws of hunger. For them, Thanksgiving never comes.

Although the mind reels with the huge needs of the world, the solutions are surprisingly achievable. Many nations -- Ireland, China, Brazil, and a growing number of African countries -- have beat back the worst of hunger. Inexpensive nutritional interventions can dramatically improve the health -- and lives -- of women and children. For just 25 cents a day, we can feed a child at school, giving them a real shot at forging a better future.

And with $3.2 billion a year -- or $1.5 billion less than Americans spend on Halloween annually and a fraction of America's private giving -- we can feed the 66 million children worldwide who go to school hungry. This alone won't end hunger, but it would be a huge step forward.

If we are to solve hunger, it will take the political will and resources of governments. It's encouraging that the Obama administration and Congressional leadership recognize that a sustainable, comprehensive food security strategy is vital to ensure our planet's future peace and prosperity.

Yet every one of us, at all levels, can make a difference -- especially if we work together. The World Food Programme's first Internet citizens' campaign, www.wfp.org/1billion, is mobilizing the online community: if a billion Internet users donate a dollar a week, we could transform the lives of a billion hungry people across the world.

As we enter the season of colossal Wall Street bonuses and a frenzy of holiday spending, it is time for us to once more share the privilege of plenty. It is time to declare, once and for all, that not a single child should die from -- or be irrevocably stunted by -- hunger.

Not on our watch.

Read more HuffPost Thanksgiving coverage and commentary

Mark Shriver: Serving Healthy Thanksgiving Plates, Not Just Full Ones

2009-11-25T15:31:44Z

Just in time for Thanksgiving, a new government study revealed that 183,000 more American households with children suffered from low food security last year than the year before, meaning that finances likely forced parents to cut children's portions or entire meals altogether.

That striking and alarming development is, at first, hard to reconcile with a childhood obesity crisis in which almost one third of American children are overweight or obese.

Are America's children suffering from too much food or too little? They answer is: both.

Children in low-income families are simply getting too little of the right foods and too much of the wrong foods. Families that are struggling to put food on the table resort to "cheaper" calories like soda instead of healthy -- and more expensive ones -- like fruits and vegetables.

Thus, the childhood hunger crisis in America doesn't contradict the childhood obesity crisis: it's connected to it. A toddler who experience food insecurity is more than three times more likely to become obese when she reaches four and a half years old, which puts her at a greater risk for obesity than having an obese parent would.

What can we do? Here are two first steps:

First, make it easier for families to afford healthy food. Expanding eligibility to programs like WIC (Women, Infants and Children) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) [while increasing the incentives for families to purchase healthier foods would go a long way toward fighting both hunger and obesity.

Second, we need to offer healthy choices to families in the vast swaths of America where there is limited access to robust grocery stores and fresh food. Public-private partnerships can make a difference: urban communities like Hartford, CT have started programs where retailers receive assistance for shifting a portion of their shelf space to healthier options.

One innovative rural initiative is Iowa's Farm to Folk program, where rural consumers can order food produced by local farmers and pick it up at a neighborhood church.

Indeed, bringing healthy choices to more American families is a challenge that can be solved with the partnership of the private and public sectors.

As we gather around the table for Thanksgiving, our prayers and call to action for everyone around the table shouldn't simply be about food on the plate for every American man, woman and child, but food that leads to healthy, vibrant and full lives.

Gordon Campbell: Let's Get Serious About America's Hunger Crisis

2009-11-24T13:54:18Z

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual report on 'food insecurity' in America. What it showed is astounding. Forty-nine million Americans do not have dependable access to adequate food. That's nearly 15 percent -- or one of every 7 Americans -- who struggle to get enough to eat, up from 11 percent a year earlier.

Even more staggering is that 17 million kids in the United States don't have access to adequate food; a huge increase from the 12 million children only a year earlier.

If nothing else, the USDA report shows conclusively that the economic recession continues to take a toll on our nation's most vulnerable populations. And action is needed to halt the drastic increase in the number of Americans going hungry each and every day.

At the city and local level, there are several important steps the public and nonprofit sectors can, and must, take to reverse this trend.

First, it's clear that the greatest impact can be achieved by improving outreach and education about eligibility for the USDA Food Stamp program. To put it in perspective, the Food Stamp program alone reaches over 27 million low-income people every month (all of the nonprofits nationwide combined don't even come close to providing food aid to that many people). That's significant, but evidently not enough.

Only about half of those reporting a level of 'food insecurity' in the USDA report said they had participated in a government funded anti-hunger program in the last month. The most common barriers to the utilization of Food Stamps include: a lack of information and misperceptions about eligibility, confusion about immigrant eligibility, and limited access for working families due to inflexible office hours. With these barriers in mind, outreach and education programs need to be taken to 'scale' by convening and engaging a collaboration of partners such as community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, and government agencies.

Second, healthy and nutritious foods need to be made readily available (and affordable) in underserved communities. Low-income families often don't have access to nutritious fresh foods and are forced to buy lower quality, lower cost options. Study after study has shown that access to healthy food is a key ingredient to improving food security levels in low-income communities.

This is one area that his received a significant amount of attention over the past few years. In New York City for instance, the city has introduced the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) Food Stores initiative. FRESH provides financial incentives to existing food retailers, encouraging their investment in capital improvements and renovations to increase capacity to sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Although the initiative is in the early stages, it is a promising step in the right direction and many other cities have been successfully with similar programs.

Finally, it's important that emergency food programs -- like those supported by City Harvest, the Food Bank of New York, and United Way of NYC -- continue to increase their capacity. Local soup kitchens and food pantries help feed thousands of individuals throughout the five boroughs of New York and millions nationwide. As essential partners of government, emergency food providers have a critical role to play in reducing food insecurity.

It's time to get serious about ending the problem of hunger in America. In this week of thanks giving, we must not rest on our laurels. Rather, we should take concerted steps to address and eradicate the hunger crisis in this country.

Vermont Is Hungry, Ranked The Sixth Hungriest State In U.S.

2009-11-24T12:00:48Z

BARRE, Vt. — A federal government report ranking Vermont the sixth hungriest state in the country may come as a surprise to many, but officials say they have seen signs the problem is growing in Vermont.

In the new report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said 12 percent of Vermont households struggled to get enough food on the table in 2008, and one in 20 Vermonters was "severely hungry," U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, said Monday at a news conference at the Vermont Foodbank.

More Than Half Of Teachers Report Buying Hungry Students Food With Their Own Money

2009-11-23T18:08:13Z

We often hear about U.S. teachers being paid poorly for all the work they do to educate children. But did you know that 63 percent of teachers report buying food for the classroom each month with their own money? That's just one statistic from a report put out by Share Our Strength, which surveyed teachers across the country about hunger in America's classrooms.

You can download the full Teachers report and learn more surprising facts about hungry kids and the teachers trying to help them at the Share Our Strength site.

Share Our Strength also interviewed two teachers in New York City about their personal experiences with students who have come to depend on them for enough food to get them through the day.

WATCH THE VIDEO:

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