“Work hand and foot, work spade and hand, through the crumbly mould, the blessed fruit that grows at the root, is the real gold of Ireland.” — From ‘The Potato Digger’s Song’
Chapter I
Meals on Wheels SOUNDS Great, but…
On March 16, 2017, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) did seek mightily to defend the proposed budget of the POTUS before a gathering of the press. Explaining what guided them in crafting the plan to increase defense by $54 billion while slashing funding for social welfare programs like student lunches and Meals on Wheels, Mick Mulvaney, displaying the illuminated countenance of the true believer, with fierceness did explain that the changes were inspired by one simple question: can we ask the taxpayer, the coal miner in West Virginia, or the single mother in Detroit, to pay for this?
Scratching his head in puzzlement as to why a ten percent increase in defense spending is intuitively more valuable to a coal miner or a single mother than money spent on early childhood education, public housing, food assistance, job training or even PBS, CNN’s Jim Acosta vociferated thusly: “Surely a coal worker also has an elderly mother who depends on the Meals on Wheels program or who may have kids in Head Start. Isn’t this a hard-hearted budget?” By Jove! Did Mick Mulvaney breezily reply, “No, I don’t think so…I think it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.” Thinking he must have taken leave of his senses, the intrepid Acosta valiantly soldiered on for another try: “Cut programs for the elderly and kids?” His eyes shining, Mick Mulvaney did further exclaim, “You’re only focusing on half the equation, on the recipients! We’re trying to focus on…the folks who give us the money. I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, “we’re not going to ask for your hard-earned money!”
Poor Jim Acosta, for not readily seeing the light. Got himself all confused, he did, trying to figure out how all of this squares with regressive taxation. How does a transfer of funds from programs that directly benefit working families to ones that don’t, somehow protect working class bank accounts, especially since the administration has expressed no interest in cutting payroll taxes or sales tax? But back to Mick Mulvaney. Apparently sensing a possible rhetorical victory in the sea of quizzical expressions, Mick waded in one more time: They’re supposed to be educational programs, right? They’re supposed to help kids that don’t get fed at home get fed so that they do better in school. Guess what? There is no demonstrable evidence that they’re doing that.”
Chapter II
The Irish Lumper, Low on Genetic Variation, Succumbs to ‘Phytophthora Infestans’
With the Union acts of 1800 and 1801, Ireland, which had been in “personal union” with England since the time of Henry the VIII, formally joined with England and Scotland creating the United Kingdom. As part of this agreement, Ireland for the first time sent members to the House of Lords and the House of Commons. As much as 70% of these came from the landowning class in Ireland, who, working with their English counterparts, set about to accelerate the pace at which Ireland became a colonial possession to be worked and squeezed. Absentee landlords collected rents from workaday Irish, who were moved progressively onto less and less productive land, so that cattle could graze the rest to support the English taste for beef. The potato was introduced so that tenant farmers had something to grow to live on in the poor soil they had been made to work, replacing the traditional grains and other staples of the Irish diet.
The Irish landlords also continually subdivided the tenant lots, increasing their profits, and making the sustainability of subsistence agriculture ever more marginal. By the 1840s, these conditions, along with discriminatory laws targeting the 80% Catholic population of Ireland (prohibitions on purchasing and leasing, voting, officeholding, mobility, access to education and certain professions) led the British government to form commissions to study the ‘Irish situation.’ In 1843, the Earl of Devon, serving on such a commission (once again composed entirely of landlords) wrote: “In many districts, the only food is the potato, and the only beverage is water. Cabins are seldom adequate protection against the weather, and a bed and a blanket is a luxury…for many, their pig and manure heap constitutes their only property.”
By 1845, the blight-causing fungus, Phytophthora infestans, had arrived in Ireland. Almost all the potatoes introduced to Ireland were of a single variety, known as the Irish Lumper, which had extremely low genetic variability (the lumpers were clones). The maximization of short term yields through genetic uniformity came with a terrible risk – the risk of losing it all if there was a change in environmental conditions. At first, the crop failures were thought to be isolated events. But over the next four years, the blight ravaged Ireland while the exportation of food to England continued. In “black ‘47” while 400,000 men, women, and children died, Irish landlords exported peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, seed, and butter, as well as shoes and soap, and other commodities.
The remote politicians’ thrashing attempts to do something about the “Irish situation” only made things worse. For example, over one of the worst years, a program was implemented to try to work starving people in winter in exchange for food aid. The weakened, sick population were moved into workhouses, greatly facilitating the spread of typhus, cholera, and dysentery. In all, over one million people died, and one million emigrated, causing the population to fall by 20-25 percent.
Chapter III
Addressing Childhood Food Insecurity: Can We Ask Taxpayers to Pay for This?
Returning to OMB Director Mulvaney and the Trump budget plan: putting aside the most obvious reason for providing school lunches to poor children (because they are hungry) Mick Mulvaney contextualized the end of the HUD Community Development Block Grants program (which go to the states to fund their lunch programs) in terms of Trump’s promise to cut wasteful spending. Since we apparently can’t index the intake of chocolate milk directly to per student improvements in test scores, so the argument goes, the programs can’t be said to work, and so must be regarded as a waste of taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Agriculture reports 3 million households with children were food insecure in 2015, and in that year, the government spent about 3 billion dollars serving 3.7 million students in day care facilities. But as it turns out, the programs affected vary significantly. Some provide lunches in school; some provide healthy snacks as part of after school programs. The National School Lunch program has been in existence since 1946. The Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC) was launched in 1972. When looking at the effects of hunger and poor nutrition, policy makers who are not remote from the issues understand that these programs are targeted in relation to different risks and represent different kinds of interventions.
For example, studies from Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins clearly show the criticality of good nutrition for children age 0-5 with respect to cognitive development, intellectual performance, and even social skills in kindergarten. Also, the Centers for Disease Control reports that poor nutrition and hunger in children is associated with lower grades, higher absenteeism, being held back, and inability to focus in class (test scores are not the only measure of school performance). With respect to after school programs (also on the chopping block) because they deliver nutrition along with supplemental education services, they have been shown to result in statistically significant improvement in test scores in recent UCLA research. Whether it comes from the Journal of Child Development, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or other similar sources, the verdict is the same; children who are hungry are unable to focus, resulting in low attention span and behavioral issues. The proposed cuts to the various programs will result in negative health effects and academic consequences. As Politifact concluded, Mulvaney’s claims are “mostly false.”
Chapter IV
Low Genetic Variability Lumpers Blight Country with ‘Freedomicaucus infestans’
John ‘Mick’ Mulvaney, the grandson of former Ulstermen, attended Catholic school in Virginia, and received his law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Elected to the US House of Representatives from South Carolina in 2011 with the aid of anonymous donors working under the 501(c)4 called “The Commission on Hope, Growth, and Opportunity” Mulvaney was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. During his career in the House, before taking up his post at OMB, Mulvaney was notable for his complete disdain for working with the opposition, his glee in denying the needs of women, his cozy relationship with lobbyists and special interests, his climate denying, and his inability to get along even with his Republican colleagues. No love lost between Mick and Nikki Haley, it appears. Mulvaney’s appointment to the executive branch in December 2016 allowed him to leave the House with a perfect record. Mick Mulvaney never authored a single bill that became law, and never even authored a bill that came to a floor vote, which is astonishing since the chamber has been in Republican hands throughout his tenure.
As for the Freedom Caucus itself, the group was apparently founded because even the Republican Study Committee (RSC) proved to be insufficiently right wing for them. Said one prominent critic of the group, “They’re not legislators…their just assholes…they have such a minority mindset that the prospect of getting something done just scares them away or pisses them off.” Owing to their low genetic variability, this group of lumpers (the young and old just have to lump it) have given rise to a kind of blight that threatens the most vulnerable Americans. The Irish potato famine lasted four years, with devastating consequences. We can only hope that the likes of Mick Mulvaney will somehow hear the rumbling of the hungry stomachs of his ancestors in the quiet of the night before the end of the Pence Administration in 2020.
