The Price of Beans

Nearly 12 million Americans are still out of work. Many for over a year.  Food pantries are starving—they can’t keep up with demand.  In America, almost 17million children cannot consistently get sufficient nutrition to lead a healthy life.  Hunger saps their achievement and development—their future.  When they can get food, healthy food is hard enough to find.  It’s hidden behind the cheeseburgers, sodas, and cream-filled cake treats that we support with advertising tax deductions.  Our industrial food system is failing them.

            And what are congressional politicians talking about?  Jobs?  Prosperity?  Good nutrition in the hood?  Hunger?  Enhhhhh!  You have entered a word or phrase that is no longer in service.  Politicians are talking about interest rates, money supply, the stock market recovery, and how government should let the “free market” go, without meddling to help the sick and hungry.  That’s the same free market that is managed, with government spending on tax relief for the un-hungry, cheap use of federal land assets, and deep financial bows to our planet’s enemies.  You would think all that largess from the public treasury would create some allegiance to America and the citizens who support it.  You would be wrong.  It is fueling another temper tantrum to keep the government from doing anything until it abandons affordable health care.

            What’s all this got to do with the price of beans?  Well, around here, thanks to our “friends” in congress, a whole lot more of us know what it is.