Angelina Jolie has been isolating in LA with her children during the pandemic. She’s got all six kids home with her, although the younger kids are likely keeping up with their visits to Brad Pitt. This is the first time in a long time where Angelina is just HOME, with no far-flung refugee camp to visit or some movie to film. Which might explain why Angelina has been doing a lot of Time Magazine op-eds, Time Magazine videos, and just general awareness-raising around many issues involving the children of the pandemic. Angelina donated $1 million to No Kid Hungry, and now she’s writing letters to advocate for an increase in SNAP benefits:
Actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie is lobbying Congress to increase food assistance to families across the U.S. as the coronavirus pandemic keeps millions in their homes and children out of schools, where many receive free meals. The Academy Award winner, who is well-known for her work internationally with refugees and conservation and human rights groups, wrote a letter to top congressional leaders, shared exclusively with USA TODAY, asking that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits be increased to help children who she says are going hungry because schools are closed and parents are out of work.
“Many of the most vulnerable children in America have missed nearly 740 million meals at school, due to closure resulting from the rapid spread of coronavirus. With parents facing lost jobs and wages, many of these children are going hungry,” she wrote in the April 20 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“While strengthening SNAP will not alleviate all of the challenges low-income families are facing during the public health emergency, it will help ensure that fewer children go to bed hungry in our country,” she said.
Congress has increased food assistance benefits by more than $15 billion amid the pandemic but Jolie and advocates argue more is needed, a proposal that Democrats have similarly demanded but failed to pass muster with Republicans in the last round of stimulus funding approved late last month. About half of all U.S. public schoolchildren rely on free or reduced-price meals. And while schools across the country have tried to continue providing grab-and-go lunches to those in need, some have halted such programs or limited them as workers have contracted COVID-19.
Yeah, Moscow Mitch won’t do sh-t about it. I doubt many Republicans will care, even though many of them come from districts or states which rely heavily on SNAP benefits. USA Today also says that before Angelina sent the letter, she did a video conference call with local food banks and No Kid Hungry, and they all discussed the very real cuts to food-assistance programs under the Trump administration, and many of those cuts were already in motion before millions of children lost their one meal a day at public school. During the call, Angelina apparently grew more and more upset with the realities of so many American children going hungry. She reportedly said, “I knew that there were problems in America. I knew that there was poverty. I could not believe when I realized how many schoolchildren in America were dependent on a meal to not go hungry. I was so disgusted that we have gotten to this point as a country.” Me too.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid and WENN.
“I knew that there were problems in America. I knew that there was poverty. I could not believe when I realized how many schoolchildren in America were dependent on a meal to not go hungry. I was so disgusted that we have gotten to this point as a country.”
You know what? This exact fact absolutely floored me. I live in a country that’s been on lock down for months now which is just something we all accepted. But the fact that they were discussing whether or not to shut schools in the US because, if they did, millions of children would go without food…I mean, how can any of this be ok to anyone?
I know all the politics. In fact, I often think I know more about US politics than those of my own country, which is kind of annoying. I’ve even lived in the US for a while. And despite all that…I just don’t get it.
We have one political party that truly doesn’t care about people, and unfortunately a lot of citizens who vote against their own self interests and continue putting them in power. They’ve been chipping away at programs and hurting the poor for decades.
I admire Angelina’s efforts here, but unfortunately it was kind of pointless. The GOP only wants to help billionaires and corporations, and any relief to the poor has taken serious arm twisting so far.
But on the plus side … with the schools shut, there have been precious few mass shootings!
As a citizen of a country that just recently banned assault weapons, I have been thinking long and hard about the differences and similarities between neighbours. For one, we aren’t trapped by a document written three centuries ago, and currently interpreted by old men who honestly don’t see that things were all that bad back then. For two, we are more than willing (perhaps too much so) to suppress individual rights for collective rights. I don’t have rose -coloured glasses … I realize that we are mishandling this current crisis, just as we have mishandled indigenous rights for centuries, and that there is too large a gap between the haves and the have-nots here too as well. Maybe it’s better to shine a big blaring orange spotlight on all the things that are wrong so that they can be corrected, rather than to quietly live with them and console oneself that things could be worse, and are worse elsewhere? My socially isolated brain has conflated so many things … all I know is that I cringe when I hear people wanting to go back to normal. I don’t think we can.
I am so sick of hearing the gun nuts harp about their rights. Our founders could have never imagined assault rifles, etc. I think they should hand out three century old muskets and tell the nuts to sit down and shut up. Joy, joy, guess what is selling like hotcakes right now in America? Ammunition. Just what we need in these troubled times.
Let me help….feeding children decreases the amount of money going into the pockets of the 1%. Hence, these children are considered free-loaders. And free-loaders are lazy, just wanting government handouts without pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which the 1% thinks everyone should be able to do on their own, including children. Just because the 1% (mostly) inherited their wealth doesn’t mean they don’t take pride in increasing their wealth. Besides, they’ve taken a financial hit themselves, so need every single penny they would have spent on feeding children so they don’t slip past being one of the top 10 richest persons in the world. It’s that basic. Greed rules….and is winning….in the United States of America. The more that die, the less they have to fake-worry about. What’s not to get????
*please note, this is not my opinion, this is my read on what’s happening and why*
We’ve got Mitch McConnel out here arguing to pass legislation to protect “employers” from lawsuits of employees who catch COVID at work due to lack of safety precautions. And NO ONE can convince me he’s worried about the independent daycare owners (for one example of small independently owned business). He’s worried about Amazon, Ford, GE, the billion/trillion $ corporations. (Only used those examples because in the area where I live these are major employers.) Mitch doesn’t care about starving kids. He cares about corporate profits. The end.
@Ash Chattel slavery and genocide. This country is built completely on those terrible foundations, from that, white patriarchal supremacy is systemic, the toxic thread that runs through every aspect of life in this country. If these are not directly acknowledged and challenged by individuals (white folks since it is not up to BIPOC to solve a problem we have been forced into and continue to die daily at the hands of white supremacists individually and through medical, institutional, and societal racism), then it continues, and it continues in the form of no care for the children and a hatred for any perceived dependency (along with false narratives about who is the recipient of that such as the fact that Black people are portrayed as freeloaders for needing federal and state support such as SNAP but white people are the largest group actually utilizing such government services). It’s no surprise but it continues to be devastating and deeply traumatic for BIPOC and is only getting worse with the current white supremacist administration that is encouraging attacks. I’m scared every day and it only increases. I grew up in military dictatorships so I know the signs and we were there long ago.
I knew there were issues, but hearing how many school systems were feeding kids during the pandemic was shocking. It was a sobering revelation. The abject greed of the GOP and how they wield their power to enrich the wealthy on the backs of the poor is disgusting. No child should be left to depend on a school system for the only meals they’ll receive in a day. It’s gross. It needs to stop.
Gotten to this place? We’ve always been here. Feeing hungry children is for socialists. And what if, god forbid, some black or brown kids got food they didn’t deserve? Because you know their parents don’t want to work and free food will just make them lazier. And if they aren’t documented? Forget it, the world will end. Why should hard working American billionaires have only two yachts instead of three just so some Mexican kids don’t die of hunger? This is who we are, and who we will always be.
Yes. It’s the American Way.
Unfortunately, that’s the truth.
@Aang Exactly
All of the schools in my rural area are sending meals home. It provides work for the lunch ladies and bus drivers as well as feeding kids. My special ed preschool is not affiliated with a school district, but we have a backpack program so families have extra food for the weekends and that’s still going strong too.
But it is terrible that the Us has so many vulnerable families. It’s done nothing but get worse since the Regan administration. Corporations used to pay taxes …
Same thing happening in the UK. Millions of children going hungry cos the schools were shut. There was one news story about a teacher who paid £5,000 out of his own pocket to provide families with food because the food voucher system wasn’t working.
What’s the point in living in the biggest / 5 biggest economy when children are going hungry?
If only those greedy children would stay in the womb they’d be deified.
Schools don’t provide meals in Australia. I mean, I’ve heard of some schools having a sort of “breakfast club” and (I guess?) providing something for vulnerable students from their own budgets. But there’s no government program to provide meals and schools here just aren’t built with the facilities to provide meals. It makes me wonder how many children here go hungry every day, let alone while schools are closed.
NZ is similar to Aus in that regard, but I know low decile schools (schools in poorer areas) are being given breakfasts now, and there’s a push by some to make it the norm for all, so no NZ kids are at risk of hunger.
On top of that, you hear about kids missing school because they cant afford uniform or supplies for every kid in the family (so they take turns using the uniform/supplies between them). Heartbreaking.
We have pretty awful child poverty stats here 🙁
I remember fighting with my Republican sister yelling I would rather have less money knowing a kid isn’t starving out there or unable to have medicine than another pair of Allbirds or whatever other useless shit that I enjoy but have in abundance. She was irate. And the issue is all taxes. Amazon and the like should pay corporate taxes, you shouldn’t have all these loopholes. Just fucking pay . Also love Angie.
Hard agree with everything you said, @Teresa.
God, YES. The taxes.
I don’t have an issue with someone making a ton of money if they invent or create or do something that is a huge success, but they should be taxed fairly on it.
And corporations not paying taxes hasn’t stopped everything from being shipped overseas anyway, it’s just hurt everyone down the chain. We could pay for so much if those corporations would be a fair tax.
100% this is what I happily pay my taxes for!
Good roads, schools, public healthcare etc etc… I want my world a better place
I think for many Americans they wouldn’t have thought this could happen in the U.S. In impoverished nations, but not the U.S. Except that many Americans are barely scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck. What was it that the World Food Bank had said? More than 800 million people in the world go to bed hungry. And with our current situation, we may be looking at famine on biblical proportions.
In New York City, our mayor was given so much grief for delaying school closures to prevent the spread of Covid. But the the NYC public school system — the largest in the country — is the single source of meals and safe haven for many kids. Since the lockdown, we’ve now seen increases in lines at food banks, where there are still shortages, and an increase in child abuse and domestic violence cases. There was one report of a social worker still scouring the city following up on leads, one particular of a mother allegedly verbally abusing her 3 autistic kids. I watch these stupid morning shows and how they go on about doing fun creative activities with your quarantined kids and I want to throw my table at the TV. A lot of families here in New York are not safe. They’re trapped at home, parents can’t work, kids can’t go to school, most don’t know where they’ll get their next meal, some are in temporary living situations because they’re homeless, or living in cramped situations — and all of this adds to fear, anxiety, stress, and anger. They need the bare necessities to survive not advice on how to make baking bread a fun activity for you and your kids. And these are people from all walks of life, regardless of color, religion, sex, economic or immigration status. Many New Yorkers were barely scraping by before the pandemic hit.
New York City is determined to make sure that no on goes hungry, but many of the food banks are not getting the donations that they used to in the past. Increase in demand versus decrease in supply. Many people wait in line for hours only to be turned away when all the food is gone.
The SNAP benefit program is one we utilize here in the city a lot. Prior to the pandemic, at the hospital where I worked, low income families were taught the benefits of health eating and were distributed tickets through the SNAP program to receive free to low cost fruits and vegetable from the local farmers market that were also set up close to the hospital. They also used SNAP benefits to purchase groceries and other foods.
On a small note regarding Angelina. The only other time I’ve ever seen get remotely upset about anything was when she spoke about Joseph Kony. She’s know that doing the work that she does, you need to be diplomatic whenever engaging world leaders, UN officials, etc. even when those same leaders are jerks and aholes. Can’t lose your temper. I can imagine her going home and screaming into the air and banging her head against the wall when it comes dealing with bureaucrats and officials who simply don’t care. Angie, Mitch McConnell does not care. Trump can’t stand you (he’s made negative comments about her looks in the past). Until the Democrats can retake the Senate and the Executive Office, we’re in deep sh*t.
The illusion of “America” …what is it, even? God, it’s infuriating.
These are the same guys who are anti-abortion. They would just rather starve the kids when they’re or or see them shot to death in schools or the streets or wherever
So much respect for her for voicing out .❤❤❤❤
I admire Angelina Jolie’s not stop efforts to not only financially help where she can? But also vocally making sure she uses her platform to gather attention on the causes…
Okay, I have some major questions about what is going on with politics in this country. I am not a republican nor do I find them appealing at all. I am disgusted with the protestors whining about losing their ‘freedoms’ and it is shameful. However, when I found out that De Vos and other republican billionaires were funding some of those protests and encouraging it along with Trump I have been beyond disgusted and confused. Why would the republicans encourage their base to get sick and possibly die? Like how is this a win for them? It’s proven and a reality that this virus is still out there and will definitely still make people sick and kill some. Their party are the ones making the most fuss about lifting lockdowns so how is this going to help in an election year? This won’t help the economy and it will hurt so many people and we’ll end in lockdown again. I just don’t get the political logic behind this. It’s so not a winning strategy. I hope someone can help me figure this out because I just can’t.
It has to do with their businesses + their profits. Republicans low taxes for their own gain & pockets, they don’t help much wit social issues in the country