The dirty secret of America under Trump: 1 in 5 children goes hungry

Andre Damon

Bryanna, waits in line for food with her mother Agapita, left, during the opening of the Florida City Community Fridge and a food distribution, Aug. 31, 2023, in the Florida City neighborhood in Miami. [AP Photo/ Lynne Sladky]

Earlier this month, US President Trump boasted in an interview with Fox News that, under his leadership, America had the “best economy we’ve ever had.” Any worker watching the interview would have wondered what America the president was talking about.

But Trump quickly explained what he meant. “We have the best stock market we’ve ever had.” And that is true. The stock market, and the wealth of the financial elite that owns most financial assets, keeps hitting records. The NASDAQ has surged 27 percent in a single month. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made $100 billion in a single day. NVIDIA, whose chips power the AI boom driving layoffs throughout the country, has seen its stock price increase by 50 percent, mirroring the dizzying heights of the dot-com boom a quarter-century ago.

Trump never ceases to boast about the fortunes created for the financial oligarchy. Left unsaid is that these fortunes are predicated on the impoverishment and ever greater exploitation of the workers of the United States and the world.

In an indication of what the ruling class is planning and its implications, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Saturday announced the “termination of future Household Food Security Reports,” which have been released every year for 30 years to document the state of hunger in the country.

The office of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins declared that the USDA’s reports—considered by researchers the gold standard for measuring hunger in America—“do nothing more than fear monger.” They are, in her words, “liberal fodder.”

Rollins asserted, “Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged.”

But this is simply a lie. Last year’s report showed that in 2023, 19 percent of America’s children were classified as “food insecure,” meaning they lived in households that “had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources.” In simple language, nearly one in five of America’s children were hungry.

Last year’s report showed a sharp increase in hunger from 2021, when 13 percent of America’s children were classified as food insecure.

Hunger in America has increased further due to the combination of soaring food prices, stagnating wages, growing unemployment and the Trump administration’s unrelenting assault on social programs.

This year, the administration has cut millions of dollars in federal aid to food banks, and Trump’s “big beautiful bill” included the largest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, in years.

The most palpable driver of hunger is the surge in food prices. Since February 2020, the price of steak has increased by 54 percent and ground beef by 51 percent.

As a result, Americans are simply buying less beef. “We’re seeing people opt away from beef,” Chris Dubois of the spending research firm Circana told National Public Radio.

Instead, more Americans are turning to Hamburger Helper, a filler food marketed to stretch smaller quantities of meat into larger portions. Sales of the product are up 14.5 percent over the past year. Sales of rice are up 7.5 percent as are sales of canned beans. “Beans and rice,” popularized by the self-help guru Dave Ramsey, are becoming the national diet.

But it’s not just the soaring cost of food straining workers’ budgets, it’s the money to pay for it. Despite the dizzying rise of stock prices and cryptocurrencies, the real economy is stalling.

The Labor Department’s monthly jobs figures have shown a marked trend downward over the course of the year, and, for the first time since the 2020 recession, the US economy actually lost jobs in June. The trend is driven by mass layoffs throughout the economy.

The current spate of layoffs is targeting the white-collar workforce, particularly in the technology sector, as companies implement AI tools to increase productivity, and, in turn, slash their workforces. In September alone, XAI, Rivian, Oracle and Salesforce announced hundreds of layoffs despite these companies’ surging share values. Amid these layoffs, Newsweek commented, “It’s the Worst Time to Be a College Graduate in Years.”

But analysts warn that while the white-collar workforce has been targeted first, often because their jobs are easier to automate using AI tools, AI-driven automation will lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs among the blue-collar workforce in the coming months and years.

Once workers lose their jobs, they are staying unemployed longer than at any time in recent memory. This month’s jobs report showed that 26 percent of jobless Americans have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, the highest share since the 2021 recession. There are 1.9 million long-term unemployed Americans, up from 1.1 million in January 2023.

The combination of soaring prices, stagnating wages and declining job prospects are driving a surge in poverty across the US. Detroit, hailed as undergoing an economic turnaround, saw its poverty rate increase to 34.5 percent last year, the highest level since 2007. A report published by Columbia University found that one in four New Yorkers could not afford food and housing, and that the poverty rate had increased by seven percentage points in just two years.

But at the other pole of society, things have never been better. The Trump administration has been a bonanza for America’s oligarchy.

Since the November 5, 2024 election, America’s 10 wealthiest individuals have seen their combined wealth soar by $703 billion, or 41 percent, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Ellison, who owns the sixth-largest Hawaiian island, saw his wealth soar by $180 billion. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, saw his wealth increase by $176 billion over this period.

In 1975, the top 1 percent of income earners received 10 percent of the national income. Today, they take in over 20 percent. And the share of national income earned by the bottom 50 percent has collapsed—from 20 percent in 1975 to just 13 percent today, according to figures from the inequality researcher Gabriel Zucman.

The vast wealth of the financial elite was put on display last week when US President Donald Trump, flanked by billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, traveled to the UK’s Windsor Castle to attend a banquet as the guests of the British monarchy.

The Trump administration’s frontal assault on social programs is an attempt to defend and enrich the wealth of this oligarchy amid a deepening and escalating crisis. All social programs, from food assistance to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, are on the chopping block.

The White House is seeking to cover up the prevalence of hunger in America because it knows its policies will lead to a vast rise in all forms of social misery. Reducing the health, well-being and longevity of the American population is not a byproduct of Trump’s policies; it is the goal.

The move by the Trump administration to suspend the USDA’s hunger report is ultimately an action of desperation and fear. Despite facing no meaningful opposition from the Democratic Party, the White House knows that the deepening economic crisis, and the uncontrollable increase in the cost of living, is putting America’s oligarchy, and its state, on a collision course with the working class.

It is this fear that is driving the Trump administration, speaking for the financial oligarchy, to attempt to erect a dictatorship in the United States. Social antagonisms in America have reached such a vast level that they cannot be contained within democratic forms of rule. Trump faces no opposition by the Democratic Party because the entire political establishment speaks for the oligarchy whose wealth Trump has pledged to defend and expand.

More and more, Trump is speaking the language of civil war, with the target of this war being the American population.

Major protests against corruption in the Philippines

John Malvar

On Sunday, September 21, massive protests against corruption were held in cities throughout the Philippines, crowds of tens of thousands assembling despite the rain. The protests were organized and took shape in response to recent revelations of widespread corruption surrounding flood control infrastructure projects, involving kickbacks to government officials and elected representatives, and the theft of billions by private contractors.

Thousands of protesters gather at the EDSA People Power Monument to rally against government corruption, in suburban Mandaluyong, east of Manila, Sunday Sept. 21, 2025. [AP Photo/Basilio Sepe]

The protests were the largest seen in the Philippines in two decades—one hundred thousand people demonstrated in Manila, and tens of thousands rallied in other cities throughout the country. The protests occur in the context of other expressions of social unrest targeting corruption, including mass demonstrations in Indonesia, and rioting in Nepal that led to the ouster of the government.

2025 has been one of the worst years for flooding on record in the Philippines. Over 31 people died in the typhoon flooding in July. Particularly devastating was a record-setting rainfall in August, 4.8 inches fell in one hour, exceeding the record set by Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) in 2009. The deluge overwhelmed drainage capacity and produced widespread flooding in Quezon City.

Typhoons and catastrophic damage caused by flooding, particularly during the rainy season of June to August, have plagued the Philippines throughout the history of its post-war urbanization. The sprawling, densely crowded communities of urban poor, their homes built on the worst land, combined with an utterly unplanned and underfunded system of public infrastructure, produces an annual cycle of inundation and misery.

Scores of the impoverished residents of Manila and Bulacan die every year in the floods. Homes are washed away and children wade to school through stagnant floodwaters contaminated with human waste. Leptospirosis, a disease borne in rat urine, spreads through the communities of the urban poor.

Mass flooding and unaffordable rice prices have historically been the two recurring issues most likely to produce widespread social unrest in the country. It was partly to suppress the social anger at the catastrophic level of flooding in August 1972 that Ferdinand Marcos Sr declared martial law in September of that year.

The flooding, and the human misery that it causes, are fundamentally the fault of capitalism, not corruption. The unplanned and unregulated growth of Greater Manila, the complete absence of any system of public housing, the formation of vast shantytowns along canals and riverbanks without sewage or running water, the profit-mad speculations of real estate developers, the immense chasm of social inequality between the mansions of Forbes Park and the inundated homes of Marikina—these are all the products of capitalism.

It is anger at the misery produced by capitalism that fuels the protests in the Philippines, but the protests have gathered behind banners targeting corruption. The emergence of the corruption charges over the past four months is bound up with the political volatility of the Asia Pacific region as it confronts the uncertainty and immense economic havoc of the Trump tariffs, and the increasingly imminent danger of war between the United States and China.

This volatility is sharply expressed in the Philippines, both because of the colonial legacy of its intimate economic ties with the United States and because, under the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the Philippines has been placed on the frontlines of Washington’s preparations for war with China. The tensions in the Philippine elite take shape in two dominant factions: the Marcos camp, deeply integrated with Washington’s war drive against China, and the camp of former president Rodrigo Duterte, which seeks to moderate Philippine ties to the United States in order secure greater economic investment from China.

The seismic tensions between these two camps has produced a series of earthquakes since Trump took office in January. Rodrigo Duterte was arrested and extradited to the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. His daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, was impeached in the House, but the impeachment charges were withdrawn in the Senate on grounds of unconstitutionality. The Marcos camp suffered a significant setback in the midterm election and Marcos responded by launching a sweeping overhaul of his entire cabinet.

The Duterte camp sought, above all through social media, to accuse the Marcos administration of corruption. In what seems to be a maneuver to preempt these attacks, and seize control of the corruption allegations as a political weapon, Marcos announced during his State of the Nation Address on July 28, that he was aware of kickbacks, rackets, and conspiracies to steal government funds, in the flood control projects. Marcos, the son and inheritor of the wealth of the most corrupt political figure in the nation’s history, declared that those guilty should be ashamed: “Be especially ashamed to our children who will inherit the debts you created, from the money you pocketed!”

Marcos launched an investigation into corruption surrounding flood control projects that he is personally overseeing. The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, headed by forces allied to Duterte, launched a parallel investigation. The outcome has been a political bloodbath.

The investigations revealed details of massive corruption, that are to anyone familiar with Philippine history and politics, utterly unsurprising. Over $US2 billion dollars had been allocated in the past decade to so-called “ghost projects,” non-existent infrastructure projects, the money pocketed by contractors with massive kickbacks paid out both to elected representatives and to members of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).

The allegations have hit allies of Marcos and of Duterte, and the political landscape is shifting rapidly, although in what direction remains to be seen. The Secretary of the DPWH resigned. Senate President Francis Escudero, who headed the majority pro-Duterte bloc, was ousted on September 8 by a new majority bloc of the Liberal Party and forces loyal to Marcos. With the ouster of Escudero, control of the Blue Ribbon investigation was handed to Sen Ping Lacson, a far-right figure who shares Marcos’ orientation to Washington. Speaker of the House Martin Romualdez, loyal to Marcos and responsible for orchestrating the ultimately unsuccessful impeachment of Sara Duterte, resigned his post on September 17. The political warfare being conducted behind the pretext of corruption charges is far from resolved.

The Liberal Party, long the political vehicle of the Aquino family, with a half-century old rivalry with Marcos, is increasingly forming a bloc with Marcos. While the Liberal Party presents its increasingly open support for the President as a tactical alliance against the Duterte faction, it is in fact fundamentally driven by their shared orientation to Washington.

Protests over corruption erupted on campuses, particularly at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, on September 12. Multiple coalitions staged announcements that there would be nationwide protests held against corruption on September 21, the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr’s declaration of martial law. The Taumbayan Ayaw sa Magnanakaw at Abusado Network Alliance (The People Opposed to Thieves and Abusers Network, known as Tama Na), is a coalition of various groups associated with the Stalinist organization BAYAN. They announced that they would head a rally in Luneta Plaza in Manila. Perhaps as many as 80,000 people attended that rally. While Tama Na stated that it would not support “destablization” in favor of either faction of the elite, it has led charges against Duterte, including the filing of an appeal to reinstate the impeachment charges against Sara Duterte.

A separate collection of organizations tied the pseudo-left Akbayan party and its allied Liberal Party announced that they would be staging a protest on Edsa Avenue in Metro Manila on the same day. Approximately 30,000 people joined this demonstration.

Marcos announced days before the events that he supported the protests as long as they were peaceful. This was more than political posturing; the ultimate orientation of the leaders of the various demonstrations, despite some anti-Marcos slogans and banners, is towards an alliance against the forces of Duterte.

BAYAN and Akbayan, which formed in the 1990s out of the break-up of the front organizations of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines, have long been engaged in political warfare with each other. They are coming into ever closer alignment with each other out of their shared orientation to sections of the Philippine bourgeoisie hostile to China.

Pro-Duterte forces staged protests in some cities demanding the return of Duterte from the Hague, but these events were dwarfed by the anti-corruption rallies.

The political line of Sunday’s protests had a markedly middle-class character. The old, empty slogan of the Liberal Party under the Benigno Aquino III administration, 2010-16, “If there were no corrupt, there would be no poor,” was widely deployed. Celebrities, movie stars, and talk show hosts, were given the stage and the microphone, to curse corrupt politicians and corruption.

A great many of the tens of thousands who thronged the streets of Manila, Cebu, Bacolod, Baguio, and numerous other cities throughout the country were not drawn to the protests by an orientation to a particular faction of the bourgeoisie. There is a marked and growing social anger that fuels these demonstrations. The ultimate target of their hostility, whether they are conscious of it or not, is the social inequality and misery produced by capitalism.

But the banner of an anti-corruption campaign is a political dead-end. It is politically amorphous and can serve as an umbrella for bringing together a wide range of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and organisations, including those of the far-right.

It was on the basis of an anti-corruption platform that the JVP in Sri Lanka exploited the overwhelming public hostility to all the traditional political parties to come to power last year for the first time and implement the IMF’s austerity diktats.

The mass protests in Nepal this month that brought down the government were exploited by the military in league with middle class protest leaders to sideline all political parties and install a technocratic interim government headed by the former Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Ford cuts a further 1,000 jobs in Cologne

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Warning strike at Ford Cologne on 2 April 2025

Ford’s Cologne plant faces a slow death. Two weeks ago, the IG Metall union and works council pushed through the elimination of 2,900 jobs there. Last Tuesday, the company informed the workforce that from January 2026, production would be cut from two shifts to just one. As a result, a further 1,000 jobs are to be shed this year.

At a works meeting, management cited poor sales of its electric Capri and Explorer models, which are built in Cologne, as the reason for switching to single-shift operation. The company had invested €2 billion in converting the plant to e-mobility. While the IG Metall and works council helped to wind up the Ford plant in Saarlouis, the investment in Cologne and the supposed “secure future” of the plant were supposed to keep the workforce there quiet.

Now the entire site is under threat. The works council, led by IG Metall, announced “negotiations” with management to work out the terms and mechanisms of the latest round of cuts. In recent years, IG Metall and the works council have drawn up one job-cutting programme after another. Each time they claimed this would “safeguard Ford’s competitiveness” and survival in Germany—until the next round. Of what were once over 20,000 employees in Cologne, around 11,500 remain. With the cuts just announced, this is soon to fall to only 7,000. Every agreement concluded by the works council and IG Metall brings the plant closure a step closer.

After thousands of production jobs in Cologne were eliminated up to 2019, subsequent waves of rationalisation and downsizing primarily targeted jobs in administration as well as research and development. Now production is back in the firing line. This carving up of the workforce is entirely in the interests of IG Metall and the works council officials. At the beginning of this month they pushed through a “social contract” that cost 2,900 employees in areas other than production their jobs.

Because 660 jobs from the preceding round of cuts could not be eliminated via “voluntary” severance or retirement, IG Metall and the works council have now explicitly left the door open for compulsory redundancies. A perfidious three-stage process is to be used to drive workers out of the plant. Anyone who rejects the first severance offer receives a second, lower one—only 75 percent of the first. Anyone who rejects that as well will be made compulsorily redundant.

“These perfidious Mafia-like methods are designed to divide the workforce,” we wrote in our statement against the “social contract.” We also warned about the reduction to single-shift operation. The “overall solution” touted by IG Metall and the works council is the basis for the gradual shutdown of the plant. “Only recently, management announced that the second shift at the plant would be abolished. One-shift operation will then be used to justify the next round of job massacres, since it is unprofitable from the corporation’s point of view.”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Ford in the United States decided long ago to largely withdraw from production in Europe. The “America First” policy of President Donald Trump will dispel any remaining doubts about that decision—if there were any at all.

Ford has already closed or sold numerous plants in Europe over the past 12 years: in the UK—Southampton, 2013, and Bridgend, 2019; Belgium—Genk, 2014; France—Blanquefort, 2019; Slovakia—Kechnec, 2019 and Russia—Naberezhnye Chelny, St. Petersburg and Yelabuga, 2019 to 2022. Production of the Focus in Saarlouis ends in two months; 1,000 jobs will remain there at most until 2032. The future of Ford’s plant in Almussafes (Valencia), Spain—which “won” the internal bidding war against Saarlouis—is also uncertain. At present only the Kuga model is produced there; the start of production for new electric or hybrid models has been postponed from 2025 to 2027. Of the plant’s 9,300 employees three years ago, fewer than a third remain.

In Turkey and Romania, Ford has spun off vehicle production into the joint venture Ford Otosan with the Turkish industrial group Koç Holding. Each holds a 41 percent stake. Ford Otosan builds the transporter models at four plants in Turkey. At the Craiova plant (Romania), internal combustion and electric versions of the Puma are also built.

Wages in Craiova are less than one-third of those in Germany and Spain; in Turkey they are lower still. It is obvious that jobs in Cologne or Almussafes can only be defended if the European workforces unite and then reach out to their colleagues in the United States and worldwide.

But the officials of IG Metall and the works council have no intention of doing that. “The Ford site in Cologne needs a new concept,” said shop steward leader David Lüdtke to broadcaster WDR. The e-models were good cars, he said, but simply too expensive for the market.

The first costs Ford will cut to build cars more cheaply are labour costs. A “new concept” for cars that only a few can afford therefore means a “cost-saving concept.” The works council will develop one and present it to management in the upcoming negotiations. As Lüdtke put it, the works council must decide “with which demands we enter these negotiations.” From the outset, IG Metall has ruled out defending jobs.

Yet at the beginning of the year, the Cologne workforce proved it wanted to fight for their jobs. Over 93 percent of members voted in favour of a strike. But IG Metall—having reluctantly organised the strike ballot in response to demands from the workforce—called off the strike after just 24 hours in order to enter so-called negotiations with management, in which the notorious “social contract” was then drawn up.

In the subsequent ballot, IG Metall called on its members to rubber-stamp the elimination of a further 2,900 jobs and not to resume the strike. “Unfortunately, a viable future strategy cannot be forced through a strike,” claimed Lüdtke.

“A transfer of operations, or even the closure of entire areas, cannot be prevented by strikes,” added IG Metall’s lead representative for Cologne/Leverkusen, Kerstin Klein, warning against rejecting the “social contract”: “Renegotiating individual points is out of the question. Further negotiations and strikes could therefore ultimately lead to significantly worse conditions.”

The IG Metall and works council had their members vote on an agreement, the terms of which were withheld from them and where most of the details have not even been fixed but will continue to be coordinated by the union with management. When IG Metall obtained the 93.5 percent approval it sought for the “social contract”, it crowed: “A safety net for everyone!” The “safety net” did not even last two weeks.

It could hardly be clearer: The jobs and the entire plant—which provides the livelihood for many thousands of people—can only be defended against the IG Metall apparatus and its works council representatives. Their mandate for any further negotiation must be withdrawn. All the details of the “social contract” and all its sub-agreements must be disclosed. On this basis, workers who truly want to fight must organise independently in the rank-and-file Ford Action Committee.

Ford is an international corporation with 171,000 workers in plants on four continents. They must be contacted—in Germany, in Europe and worldwide. The same applies to colleagues at other companies in the automotive, supplier and steel industries, and so on, who face the same problems.