The Empty Promise

By David McCall
USW International President

The clients begin arriving at the Lansing Community Food Pantry, about 25 miles southeast of Downtown Chicago, before the doors even open on Tuesday mornings.

Some line up in their cars. Others arrive on bicycles. These days, clients are even known to bring suitcases to carry away the fruits, vegetables, canned goods and other items that Jim Lange and other volunteers ready for them.

While all of these signs of need and struggle sadden Lange, he’s bothered most of all by the sight of seniors who trudge to the pantry pushing empty carts, their shoestring budgets stretched to the breaking point by America’s growing affordability crisis.

Donald Trump won election last year with a promise to bring down costs of  groceries and other items on “day one” of his administration.

He failed. Instead, he’s making life harder, observed Lange, a longtime member of the United Steelworkers (USW).

Americans spend more on groceries and other essentials today that they did a year ago. The cost of beef alone soared 15 percent while the prices of bananas and coffee jumped about 7 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

Yet it’s more than food. Electricity bills spiked 5 percent, and families also have to dig more deeply into their pockets to pay for cars, homes, household goods, house insurance, mortgages, baby supplies and many other items.

In all, the average U.S. household shelled out an additional $700 monthly between February and September due to inflation under Trump.

Rather than honor his pledge to ease the pain, Trump denies it even exists, calling the cost-of-living crisis a “con job” that he doesn’t want to discuss. Lange knows the growing demand at the food pantry tells the true story.

“It’s a real thing,” declared Lange, calling the lines there the longest he’s seen in the decade or so he’s served as a volunteer. “When you see older people walking six or eight blocks to get food, you know it’s a real thing.”

“People don’t want to ask for food,” he added. “It’s a tough decision to have to come here. But when the time comes, they’re going to come here.”

As a union member, Lange learned to look out for others and leave no one behind. That’s why he joined the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) and began volunteering at the food pantry after he retired 12 years ago, after a 28-year career in Republic and LTV steel mills.

It angers him to see Trump not only abandoning his own obligation to help working families but using the power of his office to inflict additional harm.

“Everything he’s done has aggravated it,” Lange said of food insecurity, referring to cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as well as large-scale layoffs of federal workers and the slashing of child care programs that helped to keep families in the work force.

In addition, Trump’s ham-handed economic policies—such as indiscriminately applied on-again, off-again tariffs—continue to kill jobs and investment while fueling higher prices. At the same time, his mass deportation campaign is shrinking the economy, imperiling businesses and gutting still more jobs.

It’s only going to get worse, Lange said, noting that the Republicans’ unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and refusal to address skyrocketing Affordable Care Act premiums will devastate millions more families.

“They’re going to skip health care as long as they can. Eventually, it will get them,” he said, describing Lansing as a largely middle-class town.

If people here are already struggling, he pointed out, that means the economy in much of the country also is slipping.

“It’s got to be close to catastrophic elsewhere,” he said.

Yet Trump brags about having “solved” inflation. He blithely dismisses growing public concern about affordability as “fake.” He claims Thanksgiving dinners from Walmart cost less this year, when that patently isn’t the case.

His incompetence and callousness make the efforts of good-hearted Americans like Lange and his fellow union activist, Gerry Parzino, ever more important.

Parzino, president of the Twin Cities SOAR chapter in Minnesota, asked members to bring donations of canned goods and other staples to an upcoming meeting. He plans to transport the food to one of a number of local food banks, all of which he described as “tapped out” and needing help.

Parzino benefited from strong union contracts during his career in the paper industry. His children are employed and doing well. He doesn’t have to support his grandkids.

But he knows that many families aren’t as fortunate.  They’re resource-strained and hanging by a thread, just one financial hit away—like an unusually severe winter that pushes up heating costs for Minnesotans—from financial disaster.

In addition to all of the other rising costs, Americans find it tougher and tougher to cover mounting utility bills, according to research by The Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers. Some families already went into debt trying to keep the lights on, the study found.

“These are the things on seniors’ minds,” Parzino said.

But while everyday Americans struggle, Trump prefers to party with the rich.

He hosted a tacky Roaring Twenties party at his Florida golf club during the government shutdown last month, a perfect metaphor, in Parzino’s view, for a billionaire who exploited working people all his life and has no intention to start helping them now.

“That’s completely obscene,” Parzino declared. “It’s robber baron. It’s Gilded Age. It’s such a slap in the face.”