The Nation

A sign announcing the acceptance of electronic Benefit Transfer cards at a farmers market in Roseville, California. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

To follow the congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the Farm Bill—and media coverage of that debate—you would think that the relevant issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies to eradicate hunger in the United States.

Weill insists that there is plenty that we know about food stamps that Congress and the media are busy ignoring, including from the government’s own data: a January 2013 Institute of Medicine (IOM)/National Research Council (NRC) report clearly described the inadequacy of SNAP benefits for most people struggling with hunger.

“The whole thrust of the report is that this is not a benefit allotment that’s adequate for people in most real world circumstances,” says Weill.

Since the average benefit for a SNAP recipient is just $4.50 per day, this conclusion shouldn’t come as much of a shock. But the authors—who comprised a blue-ribbon panel charged with conducting a scientific analysis of benefit levels—did a good job breaking down exactly why the benefit allotment might come up so short.

For starters, there is the “Thrifty Food Plan” (TFP) itself—a theoretical “market basket of food” that is supposed to represent “a nutritious diet at minimal cost.” The plan assumes that a consumer is able to mostly “purchase less expensive, unprocessed ingredients—such as vegetables and meat to make a stew.” It points out, however, that these ingredients require “substantial investment of the participants’ time to produce nutritious meals…inconsistent with the time available for most households at all income levels.”

But even if one did have time to shop and then slow-cook that family recipe for Granny’s Goodness Stew handed down through the generations—and not many low-wage workers or workers period do—the Thrifty Food Plan also assumes the availability of an assortment of “supermarkets and other food stores that offer a variety of healthy foods at a lower cost.” The authors note that “low-income and minority populations are more likely than other groups to experience limited access to supermarkets and other large retail outlets…that offer a broad range of healthy foods at reasonable cost.… In addition, a lack of transportation infrastructure commonly leads to limited food access in small towns and rural areas.”

There is also a bizarre assumption in the SNAP program that food prices are consistent across the nation—from Snohomish County, Washington, to Neodesha, Kansas, to New York City. Benefits are adjusted only for Hawaii and Alaska.

“SNAP participants who live in locales with higher food prices find it difficult to meet their needs with the current benefit,” reads the report. (I would argue that SNAP participants who live anywhere in America find it difficult to meet their needs with a benefit of $4.50 a day.)

This problem of an unrealistic measure of food prices is compounded by the fact that the inflation cost adjustment for food stamps has a lag time of sixteen months. As the report notes, “Because of the impact of inflation and other factors on food prices, this lag in the benefit adjustment can significantly reduce the purchasing power of SNAP allotments.”

Any one of these factors would be sufficient reason to revise upward the amount of assistance offered to hungry families, but there is more.

Even the way a family’s monthly net income is calculated is flawed. For families with earnings, Social Security or other income, there is a shelter deduction capped at $469 (unless there is an elderly or disabled member of the household). The report notes “considerable evidence that [SNAP] households face housing costs in excess of the current cap on the shelter deduction, which results in overestimation of the net income participants have available to purchase food.” Translated, SNAP families are paying more for housing—and have less income available for food—than the government is assuming; the SNAP benefit is lower for many families than it should be due to flawed assumptions about their net income.

In calculating net income there are also no deductions permitted for out-of-pocket medical costs for nonelderly, nondisabled SNAP participants.

“The fact that these out-of-pocket healthcare costs are not considered particularly concerns me as a pediatrician,” says Dr. Deborah Frank, founder and principal investigator of Children’s HealthWatch, a research organization analyzing the effects of economic conditions and public policy on young children seeking care in emergency rooms and clinics around the country. “Parents with children with special healthcare needs are less able to work many hours and have higher out-of-pocket healthcare related expenses. That means they are at particularly high risk of food, energy and housing insecurity, so there is a reciprocal relationship between children’s poor health and poor nutrition.”

Weill sees a willful ignorance at play “in some corners of Congress” when it comes to examining current benefit levels.

“It’s possible that the inadequacy of SNAP benefits might have better come to Congress’ attention if the House of Representatives—among its numerous hearings on the Farm Bill—had held a single hearing on the food stamp program, which it didn’t,” he says.

Also, for all of the GOP’s talk about designing welfare programs that move people towards self-sufficiency, it is completely ignoring (as are too many Democrats) new research showing that SNAP does exactly that.

University of California at Davis economist Hilary Hoynes and her colleagues looked at adults born between 1956 and 1981 “who grew up in disadvantaged families (their parents had less than a high school education)”, and the impact of access to food stamps early in life. The authors find that “access to food stamps in utero and in early childhood leads to significant reductions in metabolic syndrome conditions (obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes) in adulthood and, for women, increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”

“The power of this study is that it goes all the way back to when the program was first being rolled out, county by county, and it looks all the way forward, to see how children’s decades-long trajectories changed as a result,” says Arloc Sherman, senior researcher, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “A baby girl fortunate enough to be born after food stamps had arrived in her particular county was doing significantly better, years later, in terms of health, education and all around self-sufficiency. Some in Congress may not realize it, but this program hasn’t been stifling long-term self-sufficiency, it’s been building it.”

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And yet here we are, teetering on the edge of cutting $21 billion from a SNAP program that is assisting one in seven Americans; it’s a cut that would remove 2 million people from the program and cause more than 200,000 low-income children to lose access to school meals. Even the Democratic-led Senate is proposing a $4 billion cut, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will result in 500,000 households losing $90 per month in SNAP benefits.

“More than two-thirds of SNAP benefits go to families with children,” says Frank. “This is trying to balance the budget with the bodies and brains of babies.”

“This farm bill is going to hurt poor people as one of the last sacrifices to the short-term deficit hysteria gods,” says Weill. “It reminds me of the famous line from John Kerry, ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’ Well, not atypically, members of Congress are offering up poor people.”

You can let Congress know that current proposals to cut the SNAP program ignore all of the evidence—that we need to protect and strengthen the program. Participate in today’s National Call-In Day to Protect SNAP.

Workers at Guitar Center’s Manhattan location are unionizing. Read Allison Kilkenny’s report here.

Guitars on display at Guitar Center. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Stephen Cummings. Licensed under Creative Commons.)

At the end of May, employees at Guitar Center’s flagship store in Manhattan overwhelmingly voted to form a union of its fifty-seven retail workers. The national Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) organized the win, marking what the union hoped would be the first of many such votes around New York City and the rest of the country.

Brendon Clark, 28, was one of the workers who voted to unionize. Clark has been working at Guitar Center for four years.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Clark. “Our grievances have been at play for at least six or seven years, the main thing being how we’re paid and our compensation. No one ever considered a union, and a lot of that is because of how the company has not necessarily blocked unions, but just kind of blocked any way for employees to maybe press on the issue.”

Clark was hired about a year after Bain Capital bought Guitar Center in 2007, and he says a regular sales person at the store used to have a lot of autonomy, but things started to go awry when Internet sales for guitars and other equipment boosted and workers suddenly had to compete with giant online retailers like Amazon.com. Guitar Center tailored its marketing and discounting to represent the way the market was turning, and workers like Clark say their hourly wage and commission structure have been slashed since the investment firm took over.

“What they started to do was offer sale prices all the time, price-matching Amazon, and basically doing whatever they can to make sure the customer leaves satisfied at the lowest price possible, but with the company doing that, in order for that demand to be met, they have to cut away at pricing, which cuts away at profit, which ultimately cuts away at our pay check because we’re 100 percent commission employees,” he says.

“We’re paid on a pay structure that existed before the Internet existed. The company has modified their strategy in marketing and their web presence, and just about every way they do business, except for how they pay their employees,” said Clark.

Within the past three years, Guitar Center has rapidly expanded. Four years ago, the chain had 200 stores and it was very rare for the company to open another one. Within the past six months alone, it has opened ten stores.

“We’ve seen more stores open, we’ve seen more emphasis on dot com sales, and they were neglecting existing stores and existing markets that were profitable, and the number-one profiting store is Manhattan, and it was falling by the wayside,” Clark says.

Guitar Center management was less enthusiastic about the vote.

“We always want to have a working environment that our folks love, and it’s unfortunate that we now have a third party involved,” says Dennis Haffeman, executive vice president of human resources for Guitar Center, a $2.1 billion retail chain owned by Bain Capital. “We’re constantly listening to our employees’ needs so that Guitar Center can be the best work environment in the music industry and, quite frankly, the best in retail.”

But workers don’t seem to love the working environment at all, which is why they called for the vote. RWDSU started working with workers in late 2012 after workers approached the union complaining of worsening compensation.

Clark describes a payment system called “fading,” which he calls “a way for the company to get away with paying us less without it making it seem like they do.”

Workers at Guitar Center make the legal minimum wage plus commission, but they aren’t paid that commission until they sell a certain amount of product against their base pay.

“Where that becomes an issue is during slower months, like this month for example, or if a sales person has a bad month, which everyone eventually does. Sometimes you don’t sell enough product and you ultimately don’t make enough money for the company to cover minimum wage, even though you’ve worked full-time and you’ve showed up to work on time and did your job to its fullest, you’re making minimum wage that month,” he says.

That’s problematic for a number of reasons. All the money workers make in heavily trafficked months, they hang on to in preparation for months ahead. There’s never a consistent pay check. They’re never fully sure if what they receive in pay is going to cover their bills, because minimum wage in New York City is extremely low.

“We’re in this gray area where we have solid jobs, which are hard to get in New York, and we have benefits, but at the same time, we’re not making enough money to survive, and a lot of us end up selling our instruments to make rent and living off of credit cards.”

And the problem isn’t just in New York.

“There were many weeks where I only ate one meal a day, sometimes none, due to low wages,” said another Guitar Center employee in a Southern state who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for their job. “Some brands pay more than others. Successful sales people sell what makes money, not what is truly needed.”

“It’s a mistake to just focus on Amazon. It’s also Sweetwater, Musician’s Friend, owned by Guitar Center, Direct Factory Sales, and now even Best Buy is selling gear. There is no Internet tax either, so sometimes you have to reduce the price of the product by the tax rate to match your own website. This can often be the entire commission,” the employee added, saying Guitar Center staff are increasingly treated like free consultants.

“Sometimes people buy products on Ebay and then pose as potential buyers, just to get educated.”

The customers come in, ask about a mixer they bought online, get advice from staff, and then leave.

“It’s a dying art and the business is cut-throat.”

“The commission-only model has been a struggle for many of the workers. Some workers make as little as $800 a month while living in New York City, one the most expensive cities to live in,” says RWDSU’s Janna Pea. “Also, with the commission-only model, it creates loopholes for the company. If you have an eight-hour shift, but you spend three of those hours teaching a class, you’re losing money because you’re not on the floor selling products. It’s a tough situation for someone to have to depend on a commission-only wage.”

Despite the successful vote at the Manhattan store, it’s difficult to get Guitar Center workers to go on-record about the unionization effort. Clark explained there have been rumors of retribution by management at a Guitar Center in San Francisco where workers voted to unionize.

“It didn’t go through successfully for a number of reasons, but a number of sales staff that were vocal during that vote, about five or six months afterwards, they no longer worked there. The company tells us they weren’t fired for supporting the union, but they were fired for other tedious things,” he says.

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In Manhattan, workers are protected now because they have unionized and they’re in the midst of formulating a contract, so Guitar Center wouldn’t be able to edge out employees without there being some kind of legal repercussions.

But before the vote, Clark said people were scared.

“[Workers] are afraid to be vocal about their concerns in wanting to unionize because they’re afraid that if they were to do that, management would start looking at them for every possible thing that they could do wrong and fire them for those reasons.”

Clark thought it was worth the risk.

“A lot of people have lost sight of the good unions do, mainly building what is now the middle class today,” he says.

Clark did everything he was supposed to do. He graduated college even though it buried him debt. He immediately looked for a job, but couldn’t find a high-paying one in the terrible market that is oversaturated with college graduates.

“Hard-working, educated people have nothing coming their way because capitalism has driven things into either the high end or the low end. When it all comes down to maximizing profit and the bottom line, there’s no protection for the employee at that point. It’s all focused on the company and how much profit they’re drawing. The less they have to pay someone, the more profit they’re going to make, and the more they can grow their business,” he says.

Clark describes an environment at Guitar Center where there is a hard divide between upper management and Bain Capital, where, he says, “my word means nothing at the end of the day.”

“I feel like the only way to be heard is to have an actual support where we can all collectively sit down and talk things out and I have federal protection. Otherwise, there’s nothing for me. There’s nothing that will make my voice heard.”

Mass protests are erupting in Brazil. Read Dave Zirin’s analysis here.

Election judge watches a voter cast their ballot. (Reuters)

As part of what advocates call the “next step” of the Affordable Care Act, California voters will consider an initiative next year that will empower regulators and consumer advocates to challenge health insurance premium rate hikes.

Though healthcare reform, better known these days as Obamacare, gives the government the ability to shine a spotlight onto insurance rates, it does not in itself enable regulators to block them. That power resides with the states. Currently, about thirty-four states have some laws on the books to give regulators the authority to block unjustified rate hikes; California is not one of them. And while advocates in California are optimistic about the prospects of reform, the health insurance lobby has wasted no time in preparing to defeat the measure.

Californians Against Higher Healthcare Costs, a political group created to defeat the rate review initiative, describes itself as a “coalition of doctors, hospitals, health insurers, and California employers.” Though the group bills itself as a diverse coalition, our review of disclosures with the California secretary of state’s office show that, since last year, the organization has received 99.27 percent of its funds from health insurance companies and health insurance political action committees. Health insurance interests such as UnitedHealth, Anthem Blue Cross, HealthNet and Kaiser Health Plans have raised $1,366,120 to fight the rate review. In addition, the California Hospital Committee on Issues has donated a mere $10,000.

The group has retained a number of consultants to help defeat rate review, including Thomas W. Hiltachk, a Sacramento attorney known for creating deceptive corporate campaigns for oil and tobacco companies. The media company retained by the insurers, Goddard Claussen (now known as Redwood Pacific Public Affairs), gained infamy for helping insurance companies block health insurance reforms in the past, including the advertising campaign known as “Harry and Louise” that many believe helped sink President Clinton’s attempt to overhaul the health care system.

In previous years, thousands of Californians have faced yearly premium hikes as high as 59 percent.

Topher Spiro, the vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress, told The Nation that “every insurance commissioner should have the authority to reject premium rates that are excessive. If insurance companies can publicly justify their proposed rates with an actuarial analysis that stands up to independent scrutiny, they should have nothing to hide or fear.”

Carmen Balber, the executive director of Consumer Watchdog, the leading supporter of the rate review initiative, says the health insurance companies will spent “tens of millions” to defeat the 2014 measure “because their profits are at stake.” Balber points out that last year, Mercury General Corp. chief executive George Joseph spent $16 million on an initiative to unravel car insurance regulations, outspending opponents some 65 to 1, but was defeated.

“California voters are smarter than the insurance industry gives them credit for,” says Balber, arguing that no matter how much insurers spend, the public will see through the insurers’ “smoke screen” of advertisements.

Representatives for Californians Against Higher Healthcare Costs did not respond to a request for comment.

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The initiative is designed to create an intervener process to allow the public, including advocates like Consumer Watchdog, to challenge insurer rate hikes. When a similar measure to empower the California insurance commissioner to review and regulate rate hikes was proposed in the legislature, insurers and their allies, including several dark money organizations, spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to prevent it from passing. Even with Democrats in control of the legislature and the governor’s office, the bill failed. Now, the voters will have a chance to rein in health insurance companies.

Lee Fang writes about the hypocrisy of GOP lawmakers on Obamacare. 

Supporters of Hassan Rohani hold a picture of him as they celebrate his victory in Iran's presidential election. (Reuters/Fars News/)

Here’s a question for the White House: Do you think it’s a good idea to greet the new president of Iran, who might be willing to seek a long-lasting accord with the United States, with a head-on confrontation with Iran and Russia in Syria?

Hint: the answer is no.

Hassan Rouhani, who’ll take over as president of Iran in August, stunned the world with an outright, 50-percent-plus victory in the June 14 election. By all accounts, he’s a thoughtful, centrist cleric with a moderate outlook. As president, Rouhani will have a lot of power, but he will still have to operate within Iran’s very intricate political system—just as, say, President Obama has to do in dealing with Congress, the courts, his own fractious Democrats, the Pentagon and public opinion. In Rouhani’s case, he has to maneuver around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, Iran’s own conservative-dominated parliament, Iran’s judiciary (and the Guardian Council), the entrenched power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other centers of power.

Thus, Rouhani will need all the help he can get. Some of that help will have to come from the United States, including positive signals that Washington is ready to deal. But an American-backed war in Syria, aimed at forcible regime change against Iran’s chief regional ally, can only weaken Rouhani and stiffen the opposition of Iranian hardliners, including the IRGC. And, of course, the best way for the United States to aid Rouhani in his internal battles will be do sweeten the offer in the now-stalled nuclear negotiations, finally making it clear that Washington is ready to endorse Iran’s enrichment program under proper international safeguards.

In his first post-election news conference on Sunday, Rouhani couldn’t have been more explicit. “This victory is the victory of wisdom, moderation and awareness over fanaticism and bad behavior.” And, in a televised debate just before the election, Rouhani explicitly addressed the nuclear issue. “We have to calculate our national interests. It’s nice for the centrifuges to run but people’s livelihoods have to also run, our factories have to also run.” That doesn’t mean that Rouhani is ready to give away the store on the nuclear issue. He won’t. Not only that, he can’t. But it does mean that—like his chief patron, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the billionaire businessman who’s been chafing under economic sanctions—he recognizes that Iran’s hard line on enrichment has led to the country’s political and economic isolation from the West. Unlike Saeed Jalili, the current nuclear negotiator and ultra hardliner—who, in his own, failed presidential campaign, called for Iran to live under a “resistance economy”—Rouhani and Rafsanjani realize that the nuclear program isn’t Iran’s number-one priority, especially when a workable deal can be so easily reached.

The initial response by the United States to Rouhani’s surprise win was mixed. Naturally, in the United States the right, the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby—and Israel itself—are going out of their way to say Never mind the Iran election! Move on—there’s nothing to see here! But the White House reaction has nevertheless been welcoming—in words, at least. Dennis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, said:

“I see it as a potentially hopeful sign. I think the question for us now is: If he is interested in, as he has said in his campaign events, mending his relations—Iran’s relations with the rest of the world—there’s an opportunity to do that.”

Not that the United States was exactly gracious in greeting Rouhani. As Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, notes:

The Obama administration needs to take stock and think hard after this surprise result, especially as its first reaction was full of hasty blunders. It patronised Iranian voters by saying they showed “courage in making their voices heard” and was rude in urging Rouhani to “heed the will of the Iranian people”. If the White House is really “ready to engage the Iranian government directly”, as it said on Saturday, why did it not have the courtesy to send Rouhani a message of congratulations?

In any case, nice words won’t help Rouhani get the upper hand at home. If the war in Syria escalates, the United States—by arming the rebels, authorizing a covert operations project by the CIA, building up US forces in Jordan—could push Iran and Russia to meet the United States on the Syrian battlefield. And unless the United States offers Iran an explicit deal to eliminate sanctions in exchange for a nuclear deal, Rouhani may not have the leverage that he’ll need at home.

The Wall Street Journal, in an important news analysis, says that the United States and Europe are ready to test Rouhani in future negotiations:

The Obama administration and its European allies—surprised and encouraged by Hassan Rouhani’s election as Iran’s next president—intend to aggressively push to resume negotiations with Tehran on its nuclear program by August to test his new government’s positions, U.S. and European diplomats say.

But it’s a one-way test, according to the Journal:

Washington and Brussels are eager to quickly test whether Mr. Rohani’s unexpected victory could pressure Mr. Khamenei into softening his position on the nuclear issue or scaling back Tehran’s broader rift with the West, these officials said.

Nothing, you’ll notice, about whether the United States will itself make a more palatable offer to Iran in the hope that its new leader will respond in kind.

Rouhani, who was Iran’s negotiator under President Mohammad Khatami—the godfather of the reformist movement who, like Rafsanjani, endorsed Rouhani just says before the election—is a shrewd negotiator himself. In his campaign, defending himself against the hardliners (including Jalili), Rouhani often made the point that when, under his watch, Iran suspended its enrichment program, that allowed Iran to forge ahead by quietly building facilities to advance the program later on. Now, Rouhani skeptics in the West are using those statements against him, trying to portray his as sneaky or duplicitous. But the fact is, no deal was reached in 2003–05, and no deal has been struck since. It’s time for a deal.

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Vali Nasr, a former Obama administration insider who’s been critical of the White House, says that now the United States has to negotiate with far more flexibility than its shown so far:

To take advantage of Rouhani’s victory and break the logjam over nuclear negotiations, Washington has to put on the table incentives it has thus far been unwilling to contemplate. It will have to offer Iran sanctions relief in exchange for agreeing to Western demands. At a minimum, the United States would like Iran to accept IAEA demands for intrusive inspection of its nuclear facilities; cap its uranium enrichment at 5 percent, and ship out of the country its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20 percent. Iran in turn wants a formal recognition of its right to enrich uranium and, more immediately, the lifting of crippling sanctions on its financial institutions and oil exports. Ahmadinejad is faulted in Iran for wrecking the country’s economy. Populism, mismanagement, and international isolation have combined to put Iran’s economy into a downward spiral. Between 2009 and 2013, real GDP growth has fallen from 4 percent to 0.4 percent, unemployment has risen to 17 percent, and inflation has grown to 22 percent—and those are official numbers, which tend to downplay the gravity of the economic crisis. It is estimated that 40 percent of Iranians live below the poverty line. Reformists will grow in strength if they are able to show that they can reverse that trend by at least getting the West for the first time to offer negotiating away specific sanctions.

James Harkin chronicles the battle for Aleppo from behind rebel lines.