And last week, watching the executives from Goldman Sachs testify before Congress, it was easy to be repulsed by their arrogant sense of entitlement as they profited from their hedged bets against the system they had nurtured to collapse, but those bastards are merely the parasites capitalizing on an economic system that rewards reward and little else.

In order to promote this coming Saturday's National Association of Letter Carriers Food Drive, I had meant for today's column to talk about hunger in this country. Hunger and obesity. Hunger and poverty. Hunger and bonuses. Hunger and oil rig explosions, mine explosions.

Hunger and an economic system that usurps our natural inclination to help one another – our innate sense of fairness – with one that rewards, celebrates, emulates and vindicates those humans who delude themselves into thinking its perfectly acceptable to risk an ecosystem, a regional economic base, the viablity of life for quick returns on investments.

Let me return again to hunger. One out of every eight people in the U.S. now receive food stamps. One in four children in the U.S. are on food stamps, including an alarming and growing number who live in households in which food stamps is the only source of cash income. In Iowa alone, between 2007 and 2009, there was a 32% increase in the number of households who receive no cash income other than food stamps.  New York Times/Food Stamps

According to Feeding America, Iowa has a food insecurity rate of 11.6%, a child food insecurity rate of 17.9%, and an under 5 years old food insecurity rate of 18.8%.

The same study found that altogether one in six Americans struggle with the reality of hunger and food insecurity.

This is a shame in our world, and criminal in a country as rich as ours, at least to me if not to Goldman Sachs executives, or oil executives, or foolhardy idiots who chant “drill baby drill” without having done any research or bothered to google “oil spills” to better understand the issue.

Hunger affects different people differently. Some purchase calorie-dense but cheap junk food with little or no nutritional value to quell the hunger pangs. They grow fat as they become malnurished.

Others live in rural areas with some of the best soil to be found on the planet, but  no jobs or programs promoting locally grown food – just corn and soy monocrops.

Nineteen million hungry live in families in which at least one member is working. They work, yet they are poor. They work, as you do, yet their wage isn't enough to provide for essentials like food.

The likely readers of this blog also work, and you have food, and computers and internet access. Why? Have you ever asked yourself why a school janitor, child care worker, or tomato picker can be paid eight bucks an hour or less, while an actor, baseball player or day trader makes millions? Are they that much better people? Do their mitochondria require that much more compensation for existing? Haven't you ever stopped to wonder what kind of an economic system works like this?

What about those hungry children who get free lunches at school – what are they eating on weekends?

We are most fortunate that our government recognizes the need for a food stamp program, that our communities have wisely figured a way to establish food banking as a way to ensure the flow of food to people who otherwise would have no way to assuage the hunger pangs.

We must always be grateful to those folks, religious as well as secular, who volunteer their time to connect America's hungry to food resources. We are most fortunate that we do not see people in this country with distended bellies from having no access to protein. But until the social and economic system fundamentally shifts so people no longer care more about Tiger Woods' penis than they do about their one-out-of-eight neighbors who depend on food stamps, and the millions more who visit food pantries each week, you can do your small part and leave a food donation by your mailbox this Saturday.

Better yet, you can both leave food donations and volunteer at your local food bank to learn more about hunger in your community. You'd be surprised to learn how rampant hunger is in your town and pleased to meet the many wonderful people who are working to change this mutable reality.

Click here for more info on the Stamp Out Hunger Drive

Tracy Kurowski writes a labor update every
Monday on Blog for Iowa