Hunger Action Network members at their annual meeting in Albany this week voted to make political reform their top organizational priority for 2009.
While issues such as making rental housing affordable, universal health care, and enacting a soda tax to fund nutrition programs all received high priorities, the group believes that political corruption and the lack of democracy remains the major impediment to ending poverty and hunger.
“Anti-hunger, anti-poverty, labor and faith groups should join with good government groups to radically reform political institutions and the political process,” said Prof. Steve Breyman, a former board member of Common Cause NY. “Campaign contributions are little more than legalized bribery, giving us the best government money can buy. Economic policy is a product of political power. Political power enables those with it to set the rules for and substance of economic policy. Political competition is stacked against us through a series of rules that favor the rich and powerful. Until we change those rules, we are unlikely to be able to enact the overdue economic reforms and policies we desperately need," added Breyman, a professor at RPI.
"Here on Long Island, the five-party-boss cabal robs voters of choice each November by cross-endorsing their most pliable candidates. The end result is a cesspool of corruption, cronyism and patronage that ignores the crisis faced by low-and moderate-income Long Island families" said Terri Scofield.
In addition to campaign finance reform, other issues supported included same day voter registration, enacting lobbying restrictions and ending “corporate personhood.”
The group, meeting at Westminster Presbyterian Church, did applaud Governor Paterson and state lawmakers for raising the welfare grant after 18 years of inaction, allocating $50 million plus for job programs targeting welfare participants, and enacting the Greens Jobs bill to create jobs and lower energy bills by energy retrofitting hundred of thousands of homes. But wages and welfare benefits remain far below the income level need to provide families with decent housing, food and other basic necessities.
Frank Mauro, Executive Director of the Fiscal Policy group, told the group that the Real unemployment rate is now 14.1 percent statewide - 27 percent for black men – and is expected to continue to rise. Mauro noted that the state’s maximum unemployment benefits for workers is just $405 per week - lower than all our neighboring states. New York has one of the country's lowest wage replacement rates (the ratio of average unemployment benefits to average wages.).
“Hunger in America is a political and economic problem, not a supply problem,” noted Mark Dunlea, Executive Director of Hunger Action. “New York continues to lead the nation and the industrial world in income inequality. We need to raise the state minimum wage and unemployment benefits. We need a single payer health care system that controls cost, particularly insurance company costs, while ensuring every American has an absolute right to quality health care. And we need to overhaul our food and agriculture policies to provide good nutrition, not cheap calories that lead to obesity and other health problems.”
The group is calling upon federal lawmakers to use the pending reauthorization of child nutrition programs such as school meals to fulfill President Obama’s pledge to end child hunger in America by 2015. They also want the state to increase support for fruits, vegetables and other nutritious foods at emergency food programs.
Hunger Action Network, started in 1982, is a statewide membership organization of emergency food programs, faith groups, advocates and low-income individuals whose goal is to end hunger and its root causes, including poverty, in New York State.
