I woke up this morning thinking about food banks. They are advertising now.
Food banks are a relatively new phenomenon. I think they meant well. I think what ended up happening though is that food banks allowed the government to ignore poverty.
Food bank use in Canada has escalated by 25 % since the banks crashed the world economy in 2008. Our politicians in Ottawa and Victoria could not give a shit about poverty. Not one shit. By the way, FinMin in BC Carole Taylor, banished Bank taxes in BC circa 2003. That’s right, banks pay no tax in BC. On profits. It’s not like income tax.
I try to avoid the local food bank. It is stretched to the max. If you are forced to go there, you will get two or three days worth of “food”. Not much of it is nutritious. KD. beans, soup. Noodles from China. All high in sodium. Loaded with nitrates and MSG and whatever else they use to preserve “Food products” these days. Exactly the type of diet that produces obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
This is a bad policy. Here’s why.
. This was an experiment conducted in Daphine Manitoba in the 1970’s. Yes. For a few years in that decade, they provided people in this town with a minimum income. It was modest, but adequate to meet minimum requirements for survival. The program was killed suddenly, and all of the data shelved before it could be collated. Finally though, the data came out. It proved spectacularly that it was an idea worth pursuing. They found that they saved money on policing, emergent health care and cleared much needed court costs as crime rates fell. Costs did rise in public education, as more students opted to stay in school and graduate.
Imagine if you will, if this were applied for an experimental decade, across Canada. Here’s what I think would happen. Food Banks would disappear. Welfare would become extinct, saving provinces millions for infrastructure and health and education. Policing budgets could be diverted to fighting white collar crime and gangs, which would shrink as youth would be busy getting educated. Emergency health care would save money as well, as more people would be able to afford preventative care and domestic abuse would shrink as pressure eased on families economically. Better quality food would help lower rates of degenerative disease.
Here’s the kicker. The economy would grow. Yes, Poverty is BAD FOR THE ECONOMY. Here’s why. If you inject money into the lowest economic demographics, they will in turn spend that money immediately into the local economy. They will buy better quality food, more often. They will replace and repair their stuff. Cars, appliances, shoes, tires. Once they are up to date with that stuff, they will invest in the future, sending the kids to college or university. This would be the ultimate investment Canada could make to ensure future prosperity.
When economists tout lowering taxes for people who are already affluent, what do they do with the money? They save it up for a trip somewhere warm, or they hide it from the taxman. Or buy a fancy foreign car or yacht. Does not trickle down into the real local economy.
This is not rocket science. What is so hard to understand about the concept? It’s a sign of just how sick our “civilization” has become. We don’t desire to end poverty. It’s not a priority. Bif Naked, a Vancouver musician, recently took the welfare challenge, where the participant lives for a month on $3 a day for food. She had an interesting observation, most people are so afraid of poverty that they blame the poor as a sort of emotional defense mechanism. “It couldn’t happen to me, because I am [smart, motivated, better than the poor].” I think that observation is very astute. I also think that mincome is a big idea who’s time has come. Let’s apply some pressure and see what we can do.
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I too recall a time when there weren’t many food banks around, a bit vaguely because, unlike you, I recall then making their debut decades ago, not just recently— back when the relatively sudden arrival of regular nutritive charity first coined many urban mythimes, like, “I remember when food banks were just for civic emergencies; now they’re open full-time…” or, “I remember when soup-lines were just for winos, hoboes and bums; now ordinary people, families and seniors, use them all the time…”
And that was about 25 years ago, back during the ascent of “reaganomics”, “thatcherism” and, in Canada, Brian Mulroney.
But I’ll agree that the curve has had at least one notable steep section: excepting todays fast-but-steady ascent, it happened soon after Gordon Campbell and his remodelled Liberal party —which we now distinguish from real liberals with the prefixed “BC Liberals”—took control of government and began his insidious, neo-right infestation of the public apparatus. That’s when Gordo’s massive personal provincial income tax cuts were matched with even more dramatic cuts to social welfare like some kind of midway carny trick: for people on perennially parsimonious public penury pensions, the cuts weren’t sum-zero—they were sub-zero. And that’s when food bank days and hours of operation became what we’d recognize as full-time, with patrons queuing down the street outside, shivering street people awaiting opening time on the early shift, mothers with pre-schoolers discreetly biding until mid-morning, and working people, often parents, catching the late-afternoon shift after finishing low-paid jobs.
So that was 13 years ago. I’d estimate this sector’s growth as fairly steady ever since, measured by shameful stats like child-poverty rates which have been the worst in Canada in BC for 13 years running, and would have been more discernible but for two very effective perpetrated illusions: first the BC Liberals’ occasional and typically reluctant reaction to periodic horror stories involving children in crisis, like so many cynical bandaids; the second, for which you cited Biff Naked, is the ultimate illusion: the widespread self-delusion of the mythic middle-class which hallucinates the golden ring tantalizingly just a hair beyond reach, denies the painfully plain penury lapping at its knees and assiduously avoids any rational analysis of job security, personal debt, health crises or unforeseen events because that’s all just too frightening. In short the delusion is “everything’s fine”.
I too sense a recent blip in the curve—upwards, of course—which correlates to the transition from the ideological hubris of a careful neo-right strategist (and saboteur of the public weal) to the self-confident exhibitionism of a reckless neo-rightist tactician (and inept squanderer of a public weal mortally diminished by her disgraced predecessor.) Gordo’s arrogance contrasts with Christy’s venality, but they’re both sycophants who crave the approval of stateless profiteers who endemically cull society from their shadowy, bacterial ubiquity—almost everything for the one-percenters, and almost nothing for the rest—who approved Gordo’s chronic infection of the once-plentiful public weal, but who must now be getting nervous about Christy’s acute and febrile boosting with flashy get-out-of-debtor-jail-free cards and enticing, let’s-pretend resource monopolies.
Yet Christy reigns like a Princess Warrior over spot-lit stage-bites (parades, disasters, apologies, election campaigns and other photo-opportunate apparitions) while Gordo languishes like a piece of realty jet-trash in a suit, in infamous exile. While one has to wonder how these barely disguised sociopaths prevail over the moderate and prudential policies of their political rivals in the first place, the effectiveness of tactical fantasizing over strategic practicality is apparent, at least when it’s timed just right, and probably shown best by contrasting these two otherwise perfectly chauvinistic neo-rightists: Christy’s patently fantastic boosterism assuaged the fretful tumult that followed a decade of control-freak ideological transfixation, until Gordo’s evil genius was finally exposed. The preposterousness of her LNG fantasy measured by its convincing electoral success the principal fears of her important middle-class constituency: the fear that their mirage of prosperity isn’t real, and the terror that the rising debt they’ve been sloshing through will soon overtop their hip-waders. Christy simply put the emphasis on mirage instead of its volatility, and let the pipe-dreams do what they do so well, morphing “debt-free BC” into debt-freedom for everybody, a misattribution that soothed most of the middle-class’s worst nightmares. Food-banks ironically prop this illusion up.
I used to wonder how the BC Liberal government got away with ignoring disturbing fundamentals like child-poverty and the growing resort to food-charity—until I wised up to the fact that poor citizens aren’t BC Liberal supporters, so they can’t withdraw it to any positive effect for themselves; they’re more accurately stage props that effectively calm the greatest fear of the one-percenters—who fear that the starving masses will revolt against their lack of number—augmented by the fact that the poor are probably too busy standing in soup lines, and too fatigued by malnutrition to threaten the elites in any organized way. As for the middle-class, when they see people, who look for all the world like they do, resorting to food-banks, they take some comfort that if they ever should end up there too, there’ll be no shame—and if it’s understandably because they needed all their income to service debt that keeps mounting anyway, then there’ll also be no blame. But even that consolation makes them shudder whenever it nags the edges of their collective consciousness.
Food-banks initiates naturally stave off starvation for themselves and their families, but their greatest fear isn’t necessarily hunger: most often it’s the circumstances that made a visit to the food-bank necessary that they fear: unemployment, homelessness, violence… For them the food-banks don’t provide a fantasy that soothes those fears, like they do for the more fortunate—food-banks are a reality. That doesn’t mean the poor don’t have their fantasies and delusions, one of which is something that should be a fear: disenfranchisement, which millions around the world fear they will either lose or never get in the first place. But here the poor are most likely to be deluded into thinking their votes don’t really matter anyway, so why bother?…an attitude that comforts the neo-right governments that would never get their support anyway. Fear and psychological narratives—fairy tales and fantasies—have their manipulative effect on all human minds, but have been most effective when manipulated by powerful interests and the governments they paid for. Ideologically, neo-rightists regard food-banks as a measure of success, a sign that forcing people to “get off welfare”, infirmity, disability or lack of skills training notwithstanding, “saving public funds” to subsidize private profits, and “creating the ideal society’ of a massive servile class obedient to an oligo-plutocracy—is really working, slowly but surely.
The poor are nevertheless like the middle-class and the one-percenters in the sense that deluding fantasies, self- or otherwise imposed, that are deployed to allay fear, can actually precipitate those fears when overused, meaning if there get to be to many soup-lines and food-charities, social unrest will follow. Yet, if the “Dirty Thirties” are anything to go on, we have a ways to go yet today before reaching such a level.