"Food bank representatives agree on one thing: the need for their services is spiking in a way none of them can recall. Again and again, they emphasize that lines at food pantries are growing longer, seemingly by the month, and that those in line are younger and often more middle class than ever before.

"Families who just months ago didn't even know what a food bank was and would never have considered visiting a food pantry now have far more intimate knowledge of both. Embarrassed to approach institutions that they previously identified with the poor and indigent, many, say food bank officials, are also waiting far too long to seek aid. Other formerly middle class Americans who have never dealt with, or even thought about, food insecurity before simply don't know whom to call or where to turn. 

" 'Hunger does not discriminate, but the face of the hungry is growing younger,' says Stanley Bray of the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which distributes food to more than 500 agencies, including food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and emergency food programs in 14 counties in eastern Missouri and 12 counties in southwestern Illinois. Bray's organization has seen a 15% increase in need just since October 2008. Thirty to forty percent of that 15%, he says, are first-time clients. 'Typically, those who would have volunteered at the Foodbank are now recipients of food at local pantries,' he notes.

"Even as Americans who once might have donated food or money now find themselves in need, people still have the urge to help as best they can. At one West Coast food bank, a representative told me of a man who recently came in with a proposition. He needed six weeks of food assistance while he was putting together the money to travel across country and move back in with his parents. Until then, he suggested, he would work for the food bank to pay his way. 

"Tens of millions of Americans were already suffering from hunger and food insecurity before the current depression. In fact, in 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that 35.5 million Americans were "food insecure." Now, however, those numbers are bound to swell, thanks to the growing ranks of America's nouveau needy. 'It's the new face of hunger for us. Before we primarily served the low-income population, the working poor, as people call them,' says the San Diego Food Bank's Chris Carter. 'Now middle class families who were in retail jobs, construction, the real estate industry... are finding themselves in our lines. Some of these people are those who would have donated food to us before, who would never dream they'd be in one of our food lines, and now they need help.'

"From his conversations with clients at the food bank's distribution sites, Carter sees bleak times ahead, especially for the staggering number of people who have, as a last resort, been maxing out their credit cards. 'We've seen the credit crunch on Wall Street and the ripple effect that it's had on more vulnerable industries across the country. I think there's going to be a credit tightening at the consumer level. When that happens we're going to see a huge surge in demand,' he said recently. 'This is going to get worse before it gets better.'

"Such prospects will spell trouble in the years ahead. The Federal government is now 

pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into bailing out broken banks. If hunger and need continue to skyrocket, food banks may be the next banks to break. Who will bail them out?"

Dean Baker at Counterpuch questions why we need a private health insurance industry, anyway.

"These competing views of government are coming to a head in the debate over national health care reform. Those who think that the role of government is to serve the public good are likely to favor some form of universal Medicare. Such a system would almost certainly save a huge amount in administrative costs at the level of insurers, providers and government oversight.

"Private insurers spend more than 15 percent of the money they collect in premiums on administrative costs. By contrast, Medicare spends about 2 percent. Part of the insurers' administrative expenses go toward marketing - an expense that would be unnecessary in a universal Medicare system.

"While we could in principle shift to a universal Medicare system immediately, this would be an extremely difficult task politically and would present some serious practical problems as well. During his campaign, President Obama proposed something far more modest: give employers and individuals the choice to buy into a public Medicare-type program. Under this system, if people are happy with their current health care insurance, they would have the option to keep it. However, if they decided that the plan offered by the government was better, they could buy into it.

"In this situation, insurers would compete with the government plan in the market. If private insurers could offer health insurance that provided better coverage or charged less, then people would have the option to buy into a private plan. Of course, the government would also regulate the market so that private insurers could not cherry-pick their way to profitability by insuring only healthy people and dumping them when they became sick.

"The insurance industry already recognizes that it will lose out in this sort of competition. A government-run plan will be more efficient. We already know this based on the experience with Medicare. When private insurers have competed side by side with the traditional government Medicare plan, in the absence of government subsidies, the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries opted to go with the traditional Medicare plan.

"Okay, call it paranoia -- a state of mind well suited to the Age of Cheney -- but when Abu Ghraib finally came to light, it turned out that our real focus should have been on the administration's program of "extraordinary rendition" and the CIA secret flights to the foreign countries that were serving as proxy torturers for the United States. And when one case of torture by proxy, that of Maher Arar, achieved some prominence, we began looking at proxy torturers for the United States, when we should have been looking at legalized policies of torture by the U.S.

"Several years ago, British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith placed that jewel in the Bush administration's offshore crown of injustice, Guantanamo, in the category of distraction as well -- distraction, that is, from the far grimmer and more important American detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.