Grassroots/Hank Kalet

System Failures

Charity is not a substitute for government action. nnDespite conservative and libertarian efforts to convince Americans otherwise, the philanthropic community has never been equipped to address the kind of economic uncertainty that grips more Americans than we are willing to admit. Access to good housing, quality food, and a stable income cannot be provided by small pockets of do-gooders raising pennies from their neighbors and distributing canned goods collected by Scout troops. These are systemic failings and can only be addressed through systemic solutions, ones that require government action and intervention.

The latest Census data tell us that about one in 10 American live below the poverty line, while food groups say about 1 in 8 cannot be sure whether they will have enough healthy food available on a day-to-day basis. These are more than just numbers, of course. These are real people facing real hardship who are forced to seek help from charitable organizations that themselves are left to the vicissitudes of corporate capitalism.

Consider the Little Pantry in Nashville profiled in the Washington Post recently. Shifts in tax law and increases in basic costs — rent and food — have made its own survival impossible. It is closing, one of many around the country squeezed out by the inescapable logic of capitalism.

As the Post writes, the “country’s nonprofit infrastructure has been hit both by recent changes to the tax law that have altered donation patterns and by the stress of the pandemic and its economic aftershocks.”

“Right now I’d say nonprofits are facing a confluence of crises,” Tim Delaney, the president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, told the Post. “We’re out here fighting, trying to find some balance with increasing demand, rising costs, and declining donations — holy cow! It’s too much for a system to bear.”

The closure of individual food pantries is a tragedy for local communities that rely on their assistance, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone. The nonprofit sector was never intended to provide the kind of safety net it has been forced into being, and the pressures that caused the closure in Nashville — increased food acquisition costs, skyrocketing rent, a desire by landlords to make more profit from their properties — are the same ones pantries, soup kitchens, and other nonprofits are facing.

These pressures, according to Delaney, “threaten the ability of nonprofits to serve people in their local communities,” and while lawmakers assume they’ll continue to “make it work,” they can’t. “(A)t a certain point,” he says, “the laws of economics take over.”

The laws of economics. It’s a phrase that carries a kind of inevitability with it. The roiling of the economic waters. The ebb and flow of economic fortune. These things, the phrase implies, are out of our control. And it can feel that way when you are working on shoe-string budgets to try to feed, clothe, and treat thousands and thousands of those in need.

I’ve covered poverty and the nonprofits that try to help those in need for more than a decade. What I’ve learned is that the way we frame this discussion has been warped by decades of neo-liberal economic thinking that has uprooted and destroyed much of the safety net created during the New Deal and Great Society eras, safety nets that were incomplete but that functioned well and helped keep millions from poverty and starvation.

Free-market dogma treats the safety net as though it were an infection, a disease eating away at our economic health. Government, the free-marketers argue, is the problem. Freeing the economy from a coercive government authority will allow the economy to bloom.

This is nonsense. Government is and always has been a central player in national and international economies — through the use of its military and police forces, its regulatory power, and its distribution of subsidies. We dump trillions on industries we favor (gas and oil, defense contractors, the prison-industrial complex) and withhold government subsidies from those we don’t (alternative energy, health care, and human needs). These are choices. We choose to consign the poor to poverty, to withhold the kind of large-scale government help that would make a real difference in their lives. And we choose to do this because doing so would require an uncomfortable admission: The market is a scam. The market is the problem.

In the long term, we have to move away from corporate capitalism. In the short term, however, we have to abandon the shibboleth of the market’s invisibility. We need federal and state intervention in the market — through regulations designed to keep corporate excesses and bad behavior in check, and through broadly distributed direct assistance and universal programs of free health care and college.

We cannot rely on the nonprofit sector to address systemic needs. Give what you can to help, but agitate. Fight for change. It’s our only real hope.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; See columns at hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2022

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