Froot Loops for Dinner, Again?
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Background
By 1964, the inequities in the American economic system were so appalling that LBJ declared a “War on Poverty.”
That led to a series of reforms, including Medicaid and Medicare.
After the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the ferocity of our fellow citizens who do not want poor people to have access to health care has consumed a lot of bandwidth.
Poverty in our country persists like a malignant tumor.
John Edwards
John Edwards was the last “great white hope” of the poor and homeless.
Then that snake appeared and offered him the fruit of the womb (not to be confused with the fruit of the loom), hubris took over, and self-regulation left on the last train leaving town.
Granted, we have had others, notably Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Still, they have focused their attention on the shrinking middle class instead of those who get evicted from rental properties because of a blip in the volatile system we call the “free market,” only to discover that no one will rent to someone with an eviction on their record.
John had charisma.
John had Bunny Mellon and Dallas asbestos magnate Fred Barron and their mega-bucks behind him.
Rumor has it that John’s marriage was not good, that Elizabeth was a condescending shrew who constantly reminded him in public that she was the smarter of the two.
That is no excuse.
You don’t mess around during a presidential campaign, and you don’t mess around when your wife has cancer.
John’s wings melted, and he crashed into oblivion, leaving an illegitimate child and thousands of families who still don’t get a smidgen of the national pie.
All for sex.
Where are We Now?
Does it not piss you off to read about billionaires paying a non-living wage to someone to trim their putting greens while people wait in line at food banks for a box of necessities that will only last a few days?
For years, the United States has consistently had the most billionaires in the world.
By the last count, we had over 700 billionaires in our country.
Time for a reality check.
All facts stated below are confirmed by ChatGPT unless noted otherwise.
Reality Check
This is who we are: the wealthiest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. More than 38 million people living in the United States cannot afford basic necessities. [1]
More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings. [2]
Tropical diseases long considered eradicated, like hookworm, have reemerged in rural America’s poorest communities, often the result of broken sanitation systems that expose children to raw sewage. [3]
In 2022, the poverty line was drawn at $13,590 a year for a single person and $27,750 for a family of four. [4]
Thirty million Americans remained completely uninsured a decade after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. [5]
For scores of American workers, wages are now wobbly, fluctuating wildly not only year to year but month to month, even week to week. America has welcomed the rise of bad jobs at the bottom of the market – jobs offering low pay, no benefits, and few guarantees. … As a lived reality, plenty of poverty is above the poverty line. [6]
According to the latest national data, one in eighteen people in the United States lives in “deep poverty,” a subterranean level of scarcity. … The deep poverty line in 2020 was $6,380 for a single person and $13,100 for a family of four. That year, almost 18 million people survived under these conditions. The United States allows a much higher proportion of its children – over 5 million of them – to endure deep poverty than any of its peer nations. [7]
The Nobel laureate Angus Deaton reported in 2018 that 5.3 million Americans were ‘absolutely poor by global standards,’ getting by on $4.00 a day or less. ‘There are millions of Americans,’ Deaton wrote, ‘whose suffering is as bad or worse than that of people in Africa or Asia.’ [8]
The number of homeless children, as reported by the nation’s public schools, rose from 794,617 in 2007 to 1.3 million in 2018. There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places of bare feet and swollen bellies. [9]
______________________________
And the Marie Antoinette Award goes to …
David Pilnick, CEO of Kellogg’s.
Consumers are spending the highest portion of their income on food than at any point in the last 30 years. [10]
They have spent 26% more on groceries since 2020. [11]
Pilnick’s solution: LET THEM EAT CEREAL FOR DINNER!
“Give chicken the night off.”
After all, sugar is more nutritious, isn’t it?
Never mind that cereal prices have increased by 28% since 2020.
As of October 2023, the price per unit of Kellogg’s products was up 17.1% compared with the same month a year earlier. [12]
Boxes of popular cereals now cost more than $7.00. [13]
What?
Do you want milk and fruit?
For the “Blame Biden for Everything Group,” how do you hang him for the greed of the private sector? [14]
WK Kellogg owns Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran, and other products.
The solution to what [Liz] Zelnick calls price gouging by the food industry is not for consumers to eat Froot Loops every meal, she said, but for Congress to pressure food companies not to raise prices even as they post near-record profits. [15]
The poorest families bear the brunt of higher food prices … because many live in poor areas where fresh food is hard to come by and spend the highest share of their income on groceries. What those people earn stands in stark contrast to what Pilnik earns. [16]
Pilnick received a base salary of $600,000 for the last fiscal year. [17]
His total compensation approached $5,000,000. [18]
Robert Reich commented: “Do you think he’ll be eating cereal for dinner? I think not.” [19]
A group on TikTok has proposed a three-month boycott of Kellogg’s from April 1 to June 30.
I say “not good enough.”
Mr. Pilnick understands Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand all too well, but he missed the history lesson about Marie Antoinette.
I predict that his head will roll, too, one way or another. [20]
Reject the politics of impotence.
You can make a difference.
Let your voice be heard.
Feed the hungry!
It’s a moral imperative.
[1] Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond (2023).
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] Id.
[10] CNN.
[11] Id.
[12] https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/kelloggs-cereal-for-dinner-controversy-and-price-increases-spur-calls-for-a-boycott-cdbdfd9b
[13] Id.
[14] “corporate profits are behind more than half of the inflation seen from April to September, 2023.” Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.
[17] Id.
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] There is authority for the fact that one of my ancestors led Louis XVI to the guillotine in 1793. I come by this naturally.