In the past I’ve noted that Missouri hasn’t been doing so well when it comes to specific measures of qualilty of life. It has also seemed apparent to me that the state’s often low rankings in crucial areas have lots to do with the quality of government its citizens have selected – and here I’m talking – mostly – about the legacy of Republican Governor Matt Blunt as well as the antics of the GOP circus that has disabled Jefferson City over the past few years.

Consider these important rankings:

— The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2013 Report Card on American Infrastructure gave Missouri a grade of C-.

— Education Week ranked Missouri 41st in education.

— America’s Health Rankings put Misouri in 42nd place in their 2012 report. Its 2013 report on senior health outcomes put Missouri 33rd among the states.

— The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks Missouri the 7th worst state in the nation when it comes to food insecurity.

Not very flattering to say the least. And now there are two more very sad rankings that can be added to the list above.

First, the Center for American Progress (CAP) recently put out a report on the state of women in America. The report measures issues surrounding economic security, health and leadership. Missouri ranked 31 overall in comparative terms and received a grade of D+; the particulars were economic factors: rank 39/grade D-; health factors: rank 35/grade D; leadership factors: rank 24/grade C.

Second, The Opportunity Index just put out its most recent report. The Index is predicated on the proposition that “if you work hard and play by the rules, your zip code shouldn’t determine the amount of opportunity available to you.” Its goal is to identify:

… the conditions present in different communities and [it] is designed to connect economic, academic, civic and other factors together to help identify concrete solutions to lagging conditions for opportunity and economic mobility.  From preschool enrollment to income inequality, from volunteerism to access to healthy food, expanding opportunity depends on the intersection of multiple factors.  Developed by Measure of America and Opportunity Nation, the Index gives policymakers and community leaders a powerful tool to advance opportunity-related issues and work, advocate for positive change and track progress over time.  The Index measures 16 indicators, and scores all 50 states plus Washington DC on a scale of 0-100 each year.  In addition, more than 3,000 counties are graded A-F, giving policymakers and leaders a useful tool to identify areas for improvement and to gauge progress over time.

And guess what? Once again Missouri, ranked 28th, falls into the bottom half of the fifty states. You can look at the details here.

The message from all these rankings is pretty clear. Missouri might not be one of the most attractive states in which to live. Who, given a choice, would want to relocate to Missouri? Or, given a choice, remain in the state?  

But there is a further message; folks get the government and the concommitant policies that they deserve. Think of the last legislative session in Jefferson City. Bills were put forward to please the gun nuts (and I do mean nuts), conspiracy theorists, nullificationists, anti-abortion fanatics, corporate lobbyists and other influence peddlers. Nothing was done to address any of the issues addressed by the various reports discussed above – actually, by refusing to expand Medicaid, the legislature moved Missouri backwards. Yet it’s very likely that many of the same legislators who were braying loudest about utter nonsense will be returned after the next election. Draw your own conclusions.

Addendum: Upon reflection it strikes me that there’s a third message to be derived from this data. Remember when red-meat eating Texas Governor Rick Perry was touring the state trying to persuade all and sundry that he  had the key to prosperity? Well Texas ranks at about the same or lower in all the measures discussed above – infrastructure: C+; education: 39th; food insecurity: 2nd worst in the U.S.; state of women: ranking 45/grade F; opportunity index: 38th. Goes to show that all that Texas has going for it is oil reserves and the related jobs, and, consequently, when it comes to government, the red state solution might not be what’s called for if Missouri wants to fix its problems.

Two interesting stories caught my eye today:

First, a  new report from the  U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service on hunger in America ranks Missouri high up on the list of states where a significant number of people experience serious issues with hunger. Our fair state is in the 7th place over all :

7. Missouri

>Low food security homes: 16.7%

> Very low food security homes: 7.6% (2nd highest)

> Median household income: $45,247 (15th lowest)

> Pct. obesity: 27.2% (21st highest)

According to a 2012 Gallup-Healthways survey, residents of just two other states were less likely than Missourians to eat healthily. The falling food security of many of the state’s residents may play a role in their poor diets. Nearly 8% of households faced very low food security, the second highest percentage in the nation. This was up significantly from 3.3% in 2002, and the largest increase in the nation over the 10-year period.

Today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered an insightful editorial on the topic, drawing the lines between the increase in food insecurity in Missouri over the past decade, which has been the fastest in the nation,  and the ascendency of the strange breed of hyper-ideological Republican that has taken over the running of the state, concluding that:

Missouri’s low-tax, no-services philosophy has taken us right to the top.

We’re number one in growing the percentage of our population that is hungrier today than a decade ago.

But there might be even more to the issue of food insecurity in the state than just a bunch of idiot ideologues – which is where the second story comes into the picture. Progress Missouri has been drawing attention to an article in the Kansas City Star about Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones’ “side” business, a limited liability company called the Missouri Freedom Alliance. When questioned about what he did through that business, Jones hemmed and hawed, gave first one answer and then another, finally resorting to invoking the confidentiality of his legal clients. So far, lots of questions, few substantive answers.

This type of behavior on the part of politicians is not new to Missourians. Remember Rod Jetton who during his time as speaker “ran a political consulting firm where he worked for the campaigns of the same lawmakers whose legislation depended on his blessing”? Nor were many of us surprised when Jetton got off with a slap on the wrist from the toothless state ethics commission which, nevertheless, essentially admitted that his actions stank.

Ho-hum, some of you are saying. This is news? This is a state, after all, where politicians don’t bother to hide the fact that they’re for sale. The proof? Their unwillingness enact ethics legislation or campaign reform, while they pull in money from billionaires like Rex Sinquefield and industries with legislative axes to grind in Missouri – and don’t forget the dainty little perks like fancy meals and athletic tickets from well-heeled lobbyists. There’s a reason the State Integrity Investigation gives Missouri a C- when it comes to corruption risk – with grades of F when it comes to political financing and public access to information; D+ and D- respectively for legislative accountability and lobbying disclosure.

How do possible governmental corruption and hunger statistics fit together? Lots of academics have studied the link between governmental corruption, income inequality and poverty. A 2003 literature review (pdf)  summarizes the “governance model” often used to explain the relationship:

The Governance Model asserts that corruption affects poverty by influencing governance factors,which, in turn, impact poverty levels. First, corruption reduces governance capacity, that is, it weakens political institutions and citizen participation and leads to lower quality government services and infrastructure. The poor suffer disproportionately from reduced public services. When health and basic education expenditures are given lower priority, for example, in favor of capital intensive programs that offer more opportunities for high-level rent taking, lower income groups lose services on which they depend. Corruption is consistently correlated with higher school dropout rates and high levels of infant mortality. Secondly, impaired governance increases poverty by restricting economic growth and, coming full circle, by its inability to control corruption. Thirdly, corruption that reduces governance capacity also may inflict critical collateral damage: reduced public trust in government institutions. As trust – an important element of social capital – declines, research has shown  that vulnerability of the poor increases as their economic productivity is affected. When people perceive that the social system is untrustworthy and inequitable, their incentive to engage in productive economic activities declines.

Sound like someplace we know about? It only remains to point out that lots of people may have made the linkage between our Republican-dominated state government and the low quality of life in the state in a very practical way: with their feet. According to the data gathered from moving companies, more people have been moving out of Missouri than have been moving in. These are not people moving to low paying jobs in Texas either – they are, after all, the folks who can afford a commercial mover, people who have choices about where they want to live and, increasingly, they don’t seem to want to live in a third world economy.

I walked to the Warrensburg Farmer’s Market this morning. I bought some wonderful local produce. The weather was wonderful.

And, then I read this editorial in today’s St. Louis Post.  

Missouri is No. 1 in the nation in hunger.

This distinction can be found in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual report on food insecurity, released on Wednesday.

. . .  nearly 1 in 6 Missourians, or 16.7 percent of them, are food insecure.

The editorial notes this depressing fact too.

Every Missouri Republican member of Congress voted for the Farm Bill without food stamps. Pitiful.

Of, this includes Vicky Hartzler who receives money for her farming operation.  I’m sure that after reading this depressing rank of Missouri that she will bake an extra hot dish.

Of course, there is a reason why we are now Number One in this depressing statistic.

Missouri’s low-tax, no-services philosophy has taken us right to the top.

We’re number one in growing the percentage of our population that is hungrier today than a decade ago.

What a shameful distinction.

What a depressing distinction!

Remember when Cynthia Davis was busy worrying that a summer food program sponsored by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services would undercut the motivating effect of hunger on young people? Or her more recent perorations on how using part of the marriage license fee to aid domestic abuse victims, who might have been living together without benefit of matrimony, is an insult to couples wishing to marry?

You thought it would be impossible to top Davis for sheer mean-mindedness, right?  And that may be true, but South Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Andrew Bauer is at least in the same category. He recently compared feeding hungry children to “feeding stray animals,” adding that:

You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better

Davis and Bauer are soulmates maybe, heartless for sure, but sadly familar. Remember Dicken’s Oliver Twist and the cruel workhouse matron, Mrs. Corney and the corrupt Beadle, Mr. Bumble? Self-righteous meanness never seems to go entirely out of style, no matter how far we think that we have progressed since the horrors of the 19th century workhouse.

One of the books that shaped my outlook and the person I eventually became was Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugnam. A lot of people list that book as one of those that shaped them, but I have yet to meet a person who was affected by it in the same way I was, and by the same minor character. Indeed, many people don’t even remember the character Fanny Price. But she is the character I remember best…

Then one morning when he was going out, the concierge called out to him that there was a letter. Nobody wrote to him but his Aunt Louisa and sometimes Hayward, and this was a handwriting he did not know. The letter was as follows:

Please come at once when you get this. I couldn’t put up with it any more. Please come yourself. I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. I want you to have everything.

F. Price

I have not had anything to eat for three days.

Philip felt on a sudden sick with fear. He hurried to the house in which she lived. He was astonished that she was in Paris at all. He had not seen her for months and imagined she had long since returned to England. When he arrived he asked the concierge whether she was in.

“Yes, I’ve not seen her go out for two days.”

Philip ran upstairs and knocked at the door. There was no reply. He called her name. The door was locked, and on bending down he found the key was in the lock…

“Oh, my God, I hope she hasn’t done something awful,” he cried aloud.

He ran down and told the porter that she was certainly in the room. He had had a letter from her and feared a terrible accident. He suggested breaking open the door. The porter, who had been sullen and disinclined to listen, became alarmed; he could not take the responsibility of breaking into the room; they must go for the commissaire de police. They walked together to the bureau, and then they fetched a locksmith. Philip found that Miss Price had not paid the last quarter’s rent: on New Year’s Day she had not given the concierge the present which old-established custom led him to regard as a right. The four of them went upstairs, and they knocked again at the door. There was no reply. The locksmith set to work, and at last they entered the room. Philip gave a cry and instinctively covered his eyes with his hands. The wretched woman was hanging with a rope round her neck, which she had tied to a hook in the ceiling fixed by some previous tenant to hold up the curtains of the bed. She had moved her own little bed out of the way and had stood on a chair, which had been kicked away. it was lying on its side on the floor. They cut her down. The body was quite cold…

…The story which Philip made out in one way and another was terrible. One of the grievances of the women-students was that Fanny Price would never share their gay meals in restaurants, and the reason was obvious: she had been oppressed by dire poverty. He remembered the luncheon they had eaten together when first he came to Paris and the ghoulish appetite which had disgusted him: he realised now that she ate in that manner because she was ravenous. The concierge told him what her food had consisted of. A bottle of milk was left for her every day and she brought in her own loaf of bread; she ate half the loaf and drank half the milk at mid-day when she came back from the school, and consumed the rest in the evening. It was the same day after day. Philip thought with anguish of what she must have endured. She had never given anyone to understand that she was poorer than the rest, but it was clear that her money had been coming to an end, and at last she could not afford to come any more to the studio. The little room was almost bare of furniture, and there were no other clothes than the shabby brown dress she had always worn. Philip searched among her things for the address of some friend with whom he could communicate. He found a piece of paper on which his own name was written a score of times. It gave him a peculiar shock. He supposed it was true that she had loved him; he thought of the emaciated body, in the brown dress, hanging from the nail in the ceiling; and he shuddered. But if she had cared for him why did she not let him help her? He would so gladly have done all he could. He felt remorseful because he had refused to see that she looked upon him with any particular feeling, and now these words in her letter were infinitely pathetic: I can’t bear the thought that anyone else should touch me. She had died of starvation.

That scene from that book haunted me when I read it the first time at about 13 or 14, and it never stopped haunting me. Because Somerset Maugham painted that image in my young mind all those years ago, I have never stopped living by the dictum “feed the hungry.” So far as I am concerned, that is a commandment that must not be broken.

Hunger is not a motivator. Hunger is a scourge. A scourge for which there is no excuse in this country. When I read in today’s New York Times, while reaching for a second Biscotti, that hunger in the United States is at the highest point it has been since the Department of Agriculture started indexing the food security of Americans in 1995, according to a report released today.

The number of Americans who lacked reliable access to sufficient food shot up last year to its highest point since the government began surveying in 1995, the Agriculture Department reported on Monday.

In its annual report on hunger, the department said that 17 million American households, or 14.6 percent of the total, “had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year.” That was an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, the previous year.

The results provided a more human sense of the costs of a recession that has officially ended but continues to take a daily toll on households; it describes the plight not of a faceless General Motors or A.I.G. but of families with too little food on their children’s plates.

Indeed, while children are usually shielded from the worst effects of deprivation, many more were affected last year than the year before. The number of households in which both adults and children experienced “very low food security” rose by more than half, to 506,000 in 2008 from 323,000 in 2007, according to the report.

Overall, one-third of all the families that are affected by hunger, or 6.7 million households, were classified as having very low food security, meaning that members of the household had too little to eat or saw their eating habits disrupted during 2008. That was 2 million households more than in 2007.

Unconscionable.

There is something deeply, fundamentally wrong when so many people in this, the richest nation in the world, have so little security in the knowledge of where their next meal is coming from.

Crossposted from They Gave Us a Republic  

Rep. Mary Still (D-Columbia) just joined the growing group of critics calling on Missouri Speaker Ron Richard to remove Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-O’Fallon) from her chairmanship of a committee dedicated to families and children because of her comments on hunger and motivation.

In the newsletter, Davis wrote that “people who are struggling with lack of food usually do not have an obesity problem” and “hunger can be a positive motivator” for older teens capable of getting jobs.

“To say that this would have an effect on the obesity problem, that’s just cruel,” Still said. “It’s incorrect, wrong and cruel, and I’m not comfortable with her in a leadership position.”

Good for Still for keeping the pressure on Richard to hold him accountable, since he’s the one who named Davis to the chair.

But yet again, Davis managed to say something in this article that really bothered me.

Davis said her role as a mom and foster parent makes her qualified to lead the families and children committee. “I am an expert on family values,” she said. “I’m a huge advocate of the family, and I understand families in a deeper sense than most other legislators in the Capitol.”

Excuse me? She understands families in a deeper sense than most other legislators? What a self-important jerk! She has more children than the average legislator, I’ll give her that, but a deeper sense of understanding? Perhaps it was earned by lessons learned from allowing small children to play on a highway median.