On Tuesday, the United States Senate, in a love feast of suspect bipartisanship, passed a long-awaited farm bill that will reduce spending on food stamps by more than $8 billion over the next 10 years. Yes, it reauthorized hundreds of programs for agriculture, dairy farmers and conservation. But ...

 

The reduction in spending on food stamps for the poor and very poor will bring that line item to about 1% of the total cost of the legislation. Even so, it will cause the tightening of the wrong belts, even as Republicans and Democrats are congratulating themselves for putting aside their normal antagonisms.

 

The ghost of Ronald Reagan's fictitious "welfare queen" must have been lurking in the halls of Congress as this betrayal of the nation's most disadvantaged was committed. About 1.7 million Americans will have their benefits reduced by about $90 a month just at the time that corporate profits are at an all-time stratospheric high, as the top tier of the affluent is seeing its plate piled higher and higher.

 

Let me tell you what the maximum food stamp benefit is for the indigent single person in Michigan: $189 per month. Take away $90 of that, and you have $99. Of that amount, he or she can spend not one cent of it to buy toilet tissue, baby diapers, feminine products or over-the-counter drugs -- items that most shoppers add to their grocery carts on a normal trip to the store.

 

To stretch $99 over 30 days when many of those who receive it have at best an undependable hot plate, often no working refrigerator, and no transportation to and from what most suburbanites would call a supermarket is a feat few could manage. They are at the mercy of the corner party store in a war-zone neighborhood that charges hugely inflated prices for past-due-date processed food and high-calorie, low-nutrition snacks.

 

How do I know this? I know this because I volunteer at Crossroads of Michigan, an inner-city Detroit nongovernmental, not-for-profit agency, and over five years have come to know its clientele. The lucky ones actually have food stamps and sometimes even Medicaid. Mostly, they don't, though, because a landlord has evicted them and tossed all of their personal property into a Dumpster.

 

When the letter from the Department of Human Services (DHS) comes to a former address, it joins the other stuff in the Dumpster. The client does not know he is to telephone his caseworker or show up at the office, thus he is cut off from both food stamps and Medicaid. The prospect of getting them restored has all the hope of a peaceful two-state solution in Israel-Palestine.

 

He and others like him come to our agency for help in interceding with the DHS and also for "a little food because I haven't eaten in a couple of days." Such a client is not lying. You can tell it by his weary eyes and sunken cheeks and a sense of near-the-end hopelessness. We provide him and hundreds of others like him with what food we have, which he can readily prepare or eat out of the can. We invite him to join the 1,000 or more persons who flock to our Sunday soup kitchen, where one is likely as not to find roast turkey or ham on the menu with plenty of potatoes and vegetables. If not such a feast, then a really hearty soup and generous sandwiches, fresh fruit and cookies.

 

We at this agency know full well what our junior U.S. senator from Michigan has done to such people as our clients. I speak of Debbie Stabenow, the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who triumphantly announced in a press release on Tuesday that a momentous thing had been accomplished in a bipartisan way, and that we should all offer up our huzzahs.

 

I have known Stabenow since I was a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. She was then a member of our state legislature and seemed to be a right proper Democrat. What she has turned into is the worse kind of compromiser -- prizing across-the-aisle kudos over her duty to provide for the poor of her state and of the other 49.

 

The farm bill is an outrage, and President Obama should veto it unless it is amended to restore food stamps to their current not-all-that generous level. But he won't. He's even coming to Michigan on Friday to sign it into law. Does he not realize that he and some of his more socially conscious fellow Democrats have been snookered by the wolf in sheep's clothing known as bipartisanship?

 

Where is our modern-day Lenin who will ask bluntly: "What is to be done?" And should he show up and tell us, would we do it?

 

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Coming Friday: "Serving Our Country." The phrase means more than serving in the military. Plus: Reader correspondence to the essay of 1/31/14 "That Was Then, But It's Also Now."