This past week, Nassau County Executive Edward P. Mangano joined Rockville Centre-based Mid Island Collision owner Bob Jesberger and Long Island’s two largest food donation organizations, to mark Jesberger’s generous donation of $75,000 in turkeys and other foods for the Holiday Season.
“I have always believed that local businesses are the heart of our communities, and this is a great illustration of why they are so important,” said Mangano. “Bob Jesberger understands that charity begins at home, and he is taking care of his own. We thank him for his generosity and hope other businesses follow this incredible example of giving.”
The donation made by Jesberger will make a big difference this year. According to Randi Shubin Dresner, president and CEO of Island Harvest, donations of turkeys are down this year while requests are nearly double that of last year’s among the 570 agencies supported by Island Harvest.
“We’re fortunate to have the support of local companies like Mid Island Collision in our fight against hunger,” said Dresner. “Thanks to their continued generosity, thousands of Long Island families who otherwise would have gone without will enjoy a brighter, more hopeful holiday.”
Island Harvest provides food support for 285,000 Long Islanders – including 110,000 children – who face the risk of hunger every day.
“Long Island Cares is grateful for the generosity of Bob Jesberger and the team at Mid-Island Collision for their generous support of hunger relief efforts on Long Island,” said Paule T. Pachter, executive director of Long Island Cares. “Bob’s generous donation of food to Long Island Cares and Island Harvest will go a long way in helping the more than 320,000 Long Islanders who are hungry and/or food insecure.”
Jesberger believes that the business community must increase its charitable giving. “If every local business just gave a little, there would be no shortage of anything-food, clothing, or shelter. Businesses need to do more, and they are not,” said Jesberger.
Frankly, that portrait of poverty on Long Island is shocking. What is more troubling is to think that a community has to rely on the kindness of a wealthy businessman, which even Jesberger acknowledges is an “iffy” thing.
All of a sudden, there is an imperative to make sure that needy families have a turkey for Thanksgiving, and toys for Christmas – perhaps to avoid the pre-repentant Scrooge’s fate.
What bothers me about the Season of Giving is that it seems designed to inoculate from responsibility the very people who are the architects or the enforcers of policies that have made a sham of the American Dream.
I don’t know Jesberger or his business specifically, but there are many, many prosperous businesses who make charitable gestures while refusing to pay a living wage to workers, or who fight to block new technology and businesses that might bring down the cost of living for families and create jobs.
Take for example Wall Street, and particularly Goldman Sachs, which is having yet another record year for bonuses. In 2006 Wall Street handed out $38 billion in seasonal bonuses, a record at the time. Your average Goldman Sachs associate netted $600,000. But that year, Goldman Sachs and two other major investment companies owned a chunk of Burger King, which refused to pay migrant workers a one-cent increase per pound of picked tomatoes. One cent! Just one of Goldman’s $600,000 bonuses alone would have paid the total increase.
The same people who are repulsed by the idea of government creating opportunities for people – grants for college or job training, food stamps to get a family through a rough patch, unemployment check of $290 a month to keep a family of four from becoming homeless, even assistance in having access to health care, just love the idea of charity, which in essence is a way of lording over the less fortunate, of exerting the power to bestow gifts on chosen causes or types of people.
Instead of creating opportunities that would set people free of poverty, America is increasingly becoming like unMerrie Olde England – with a rich, privileged and powerful aristocracy and the impoverished increasingly made up of those who have fallen from the middle class.
This season, you can see a real-life “Christmas Carol” being played out on the floor of Congress with Republicans on the one hand taking a firm stand against extending unemployment benefits – thrusting some 2 million people off the rolls and onto the streets by Christmas – while demanding that the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent continue
What would the American Scrooge see reflected in the mirror?
She would see the greatest gap between rich and poor since the Gilded Age. Between 1979 and 2007, the chasm separating the after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of Americans from the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled, according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Over the three decades ending in 2007, the top 1 percent of the nation’s total after-tax household income more than doubled, from 7.5 percent to 17.1 percent. During this time, the share of the middle 60 percent of Americans dropped from 51.1 percent to 43.5 percent, and the bottom four-fifths (that is, 80 percent) declined from 58 percent to 48 percent. Oops, there goes the middle class .
Reviewing the Census data, David Cay Johnston of the New York Times concluded that the Bush tax cuts which have already drained the Treasury of $2.3 trillion were a major contributor to the record US income gap (as reported at Perrspectives.com): “Of the total increase in income in 2007 over that in 2005, nearly 30 percent went to taxpayers who made $1 million or more. One of every eight dollars of the tax cuts went to the 1 in 1,000 taxpayers in the top tenth of 1 percent, the annual threshold for which was in the $2 million range throughout the last administration.”
Meanwhile, there are more Americans living in poverty than in the 51 years for which the government has collected data: 43.6 million people were living in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 – the third consecutive annual increase.
In 2009, the nation’s official poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 – the highest since 1994.
More than 50 million Americans lived in households that had a hard time getting enough to eat at least at some point during 2009. That includes 17 million children, and at least 500,000 of those children faced the direst conditions. They had inadequate diets, or even missed meals, because their families didn’t have enough money for food (and what does that do to test-taking and public school performance?)
“Household food insecurity remains a serious problem across the United States,” says U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Kevin Concannon.
Given the economy, the rates of hunger would have been even higher, he noted, were it not for the Food Stamp program. Alas, the government was forced to cut back the Food Stamp program as a “compromise: to get unemployment benefits extended the last time. And now, a $4.5 billion bill to reauthorize and expand the school lunch and child nutrition programs has stalled over a proposal to pay for the expansion by – you guessed it – further trimming future food stamp benefits.
How’s that picture of America for you?
The Republicans claim that their darkest vision of the future, the thing that scares them the most is the prospect of growing national debt, and insist that extending the Bush tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires will address the bigger problem: jobs creation. Except that it hasn’t happened in the 10 years that the Bush tax cuts helped move the largest amount of wealth to that narrow top 2 percent since before the Wall Street Crash, which is not coincidentally what Bush’s trickle-down, laissez-faire economics brought us to.
What is proven is that extending unemployment benefits provide one of the biggest “bang for the buck” in terms of stimulating the economy (whereas tax cuts for the uber-wealthy are the weakest way). That’s because 100 percent of what families get in unemployment benefits (amounting to a mere $290 a month) are spent on the necessities of living, and would thus help create jobs (and ending the cycle that has kept unemployment rates stuck at 9.6 percent).
On the other hand, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof calculated that “Republicans would give the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an average tax cut of $370,000. Does anybody really think that those taxpayers are going to rush out and buy Porsches and yachts, start new businesses, and hire more groundskeepers and chauffeurs?”
But in this season, the very people who make these policies and profit from these policies and soothe their souls and their clear their consciences by tossing some coins to the poor. They will make contributions to favorite philanthropies – probably faith-based ones which are an even better guarantee of getting into heaven.
I don’t delude myself into thinking that poverty can be eradicated – after all, there is always a bottom percentage.
But the condition should not be a damnation to hell. There should be the hope and the possibility of a better life, if you strive for it.
