https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/01/31/defunding-unrwa-is-genocide/
Genocide!
January 31, 2024CHOICE not CHANCE
January 20, 2024You may already know that 15 US governors rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item.
But let me ask: if you were governor, could you reject food money for kids, explaining that you opposed “feeding a welfare system with food at home?” Well then you won’t be the governor of Nebraska.
Or, could you turn down the food-for-kids money because “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic?” OK. You can’t be governor of Iowa either.
During the pandemic a federal program that offered a monthly payment to low income families in addition to the child tax credit lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty; reduced child poverty by 30 percent; and helped food insufficiency rates among households with children drop by 26 percent.
That’s over, and hunger in this prosperous country is on the rise—by choice not chance. Pandemic aid programs have ended or are winding down, food costs are rising, and in 2022 food insecurity rates increased, with 17.3 percent of households with children lacking enough food, up from 12.5 percent in 2021 according to the USDA.
If you have a roof over your head and food to eat, good. But recognize that you’re living day-by-day in the USA: Unnecessary Savagery and Abuse.
Happy Birthday, Bernardine!
January 12, 202482-years-old today—still marching for peace and justice. Still risingxoxo
A letter to the New Yorker:
January 5, 2024Gaza is not Starving. Gaza is Being Starved
It’s astonishing that the New Yorker could publish a long and putatively comprehensive article on the imminent famine in Gaza (“Gaza is Starving” January 3, 2024) and fail to mention Israel. The looming mass starvation we are all witnessing is not a natural disaster nor an act of God, but is, rather, the result of a deliberate policy announced in early October by officials of the Israeli government: the Palestinians in Gaza would be denied food and water, medicines and fuel, and Gaza would become a place where no human being could exist. That’s a war crime, and it was immediately embraced by our government, which now stands alone in the world providing a green light for mass annihilation.
William Ayers, Chicago