Liberal Hypocrisy: Food Advocacy and Ethanol
Tue June 24th, 2008 20:14 MSTOne brand of liberal charity involves food - urging us to donate to end hunger in America.
So, with corn ethanol usage causing huge price increases in food, one would think these groups be shouting from the rooftops “Stop Burning Food!”
But…. do we hear such pleas? Have you heard one? I haven’t.
These charities are run by the left, and ethanol is sacred to the left - even if it causes hunger or starvation. Riots among the Mexican poor over the doubling of the cost of corn tortillas are ignored by these self-acclaimed champions of the poor and oppressed.
So what does one major hunger advocacy group, America’s Second Harvest, say about corn ethanol? The only statement on its website says (emphasis added):
“On Monday, October 29, Hormel Foods Corporation and America’s Second Harvest – The Nation’s Food Bank Network issued a news release sharing the results of the Hormel Hunger Study 2007: A National Perspective.
“While the study contains useful information about public perceptions regarding the problem of hunger in America, the release issued to the media states that a certain percentage of the public believes that domestic hunger is worsening due to ethanol use. America’s Second Harvest takes no position on ethanol use, nor do we suggest any linkages between ethanol and hunger. America’s Second Harvest regrets the inclusion of what may be considered as an endorsement of this claim in the news release.
“America’s Second Harvest - The Nation’s Food Bank Network is the largest charitable domestic hunger-relief organization in the United States. Our focus lies with getting food to hungry Americans.”
Got it? No position on burning food, by a group supposedly dedicated to ending hunger.
But this is hardly unusual. The left is constantly in a state of dissonance - between the consequences of its own goals. When confronted with a contradiction between goals, they simply advocate both, and to heck with logic!
Liberalism is truly a cognitive disorder.
Food prices have doubled in three years, according to the World Bank,
sparking riots in Egypt and Haiti and in many African nations. Brazil,
Vietnam, India and Egypt have all imposed food export restrictions.
In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty”
Every year 15 million children die of hunger
For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
Throughout the 1990’s more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could be prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days!
The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving- Since you’ve entered this site at least 200 people have died of starvation. Over 4 million will die this year.
One in twelve people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. United Nations Food and Agriculture
The Indian subcontinent has nearly half the world’s hungry people. Africa and the rest of Asia together have approximately 40%, and the remaining hungry people are found in Latin America and other parts of the world. Hunger in Global Economy
Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion - a majority of humanity - live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people. UNICEF
3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on US$2/day.
In 1994 the Urban Institute in Washington DC estimated that one out of 6 elderly people in the U.S. has an inadequate diet.
In the U.S. hunger and race are related. In 1991 46% of African-American children were chronically hungry, and 40% of Latino children were chronically hungry compared to 16% of white children.
The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women. The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants.
One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the U.S. goes to bed hungry every night.
Half of all children under five years of age in South Asia and one third of those in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.
In 1997 alone, the lives of at least 300,000 young children were saved by vitamin A supplementation programmes in developing countries.
Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide - a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
About 183 million children weigh less than they should for their age
To satisfy the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
The assets of the world’s three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger
It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.
This is a little bit like the liberals’ grand scheme to further school integration–kill neighborhood schools in favor of cross-town school bussing, which instead resulted in greater segregation after parents got fed up with kids catching busses at 6:30 AM to catch a bus to bad areas then get home late. So, they moved their kids to private and suburbian schools. In addition, the outward movement of white, middle-class families started the decay of major cities. Of course, liberals thought, and probably still think, that bussing should have continued. They are incapable of thinking beyond today into tomorrow and unwilliing to admit what history teaches us.
Aditi, Sadly, there is lots of suffering in the world.
Did you notice that the posting you are responding to discusses how the silly ethanol craze is part of what is driving up those costs?
Are you aware of the huge amounts of money the western nations, through government and private (NGO) organizations, have given over the years to combat poverty, hunger and disease in the fourth world nations?
Have you ever asked yourself why those nations stay mired in poverty, even with all this aid?
Perhaps, for a start, you should educate yourself about the recent history of Zimbabwe.
Then you might be on the way towards the knowledge needed to understand the policy implications of various actions rather than just throwing around silly tropes like:
You might also educate yourself about the incorrect or misleading statistics you use:
Do you know why this is? Here’s a few clues… Many of the countries above the US do not count a child as a live birth unless it lives for 24 hours, and most infant mortality occurs in the first day of life; African-Americans in the US have access to better quality OB care than in almost any other nation; but many are caught in a dependency trap (created by liberals who thought they were doing a good thing) and their resulting behavior is often hazardous to infants.
That simply is not true. And let’s say it were… then how do you explain the fact that 97.3% of poor households in the US have color TV? Do they prefer TV over feeding their kids?