Here's a signpost, pointing along the road many are doomed to follow since Clinton's attack on welfare. I found it planted in a dispatch from Ohio by Julian Borger in the London Guardian on Nov. 3. By way of heralding Bush's impending visit to Britain, Borger was edifying his readers with an account of Bush's America, in the form of a visit to a soup kitchen in Ohio, where he reports that "hunger is an epidemic."
Since Ohio went for Bush in 2000, Borger narrates, the state has lost one in six of its manufacturing jobs, many of them on account of the trade policies espoused by Clinton and now Bush. Two million of Ohio's 11 million population resorted to food charities last year, up 18 percent from 2001. In 25 major cities across the country last year the need for emergency food rose an average of 19 percent.
Last year, another 1.7 million Americans slid below the poverty line, bringing the overall total to 34.6 million, one in eight as a proportion of the population. Over 13 million are children. The U.S. has the worst child poverty and the lowest life expectancy of all the world's industrialized countries.
