Which brings us to Gingrich’s racial coding of ‘food stamp president’. Larry Wilmore deconstructs this nicely on The Daily Show.

While Gingrich’s comments are vile and reprehensible, the abandonment of the poor is wholly bipartisan. The fiasco over last year’s Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act demonstrates this amply. I wrote about this in 2010, arguing that, given the 100+billion dollar annual cost of hunger, a watered down $8 billion-dollar-over-ten-years bill to feed children was a bargain. The total amount that the government authorized: $4.5 billion, paid for by raiding the SNAP entitlement funds. Taking money from adults to feed their children is craven, but as Gingrich’s comments, and the rhetoric of deserving and undeserving poor suggests, our politicians are becoming increasingly Victorian.

Beneath this, the conversation that isn’t happening is, of course, about why poverty flourishes, and how to end it. As the documentary ‘Finding North’ – slug line: One Nation, Underfed – points out, that many hundreds of thousands more people want to be on assistance but can’t qualify. One in four children are food insecure in the US, and – I was shocked to learn – half of children in the US will be on assistance at some point in their lives. Hence the documentary’s title. The beautiful title track, written by The Civil Wars tells of a country that has lost its compass, and is having trouble finding north.

[Click herefor the KPFA player's own page]

It’ll give you goosebumps no matter how much you hear but, for the rushed, jump on in at 39:30, which is where he says:

Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it….If there had not been an Nkrumah and his followers in Ghana, Ghana would still be a British colony. If there had not been abolitionists in America, both Negro and white, we might still stand today in the dungeons of slavery. And then because there have been, in every period, there are always those people in every period of human history who don’t mind getting their necks cut off, who don’t mind being persecuted and discriminated and kicked about, because they know that freedom is never given out, but it comes through the persistent and the continual agitation and revolt on the part of those who are caught in the system. Ghana teaches us that.