MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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The Company We Keep

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greece_3402538bMy son asked me a question the other day that still cuts very deep.

“How are you comfortable being in league with racists, xenophobes and reactionaries?” he asked.

What prompted the question was my support for Brexit.

I’ll admit it is true that the likes of Boris Johnson, the idiotic and racist former London mayor, and Nigel Farage who leads the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing political party, stoked anti-immigrant fervor to sell their successful campaign to get Britain out of the European Union.

And, let’s not forget our own resident bigot, one Donald Trump, the next president of the United States, was ecstatic at the outcome. Just yesterday, Marine Le Pen of the French racist National Front political party wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times praising the Brits’ courage for their Brexit vote.

The reactions to Brexit, especially in the media, have been hyperbolic. In a highly emotional editorial yesterday, the Times castigated Brexit proponents for “backing away from the false claims and dubious promises that they made in the run-up to the referendum to take Britain out of the European Union.”

I know the financial markets have been tantrumy since the vote but everything is going to be all right. The world on Friday and since has been no different than it was on Wednesday, the day before the Brexit vote. Despite corporations and the markets behaving the way they are, nothing is really being lost.

Let me rephrase that. Read More

June 29, 2016
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Millions in Hunger

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Food Crisis Is Depicted As ‘Silent Tsunami’
Sharp Price Hikes Leave Many Millions in Hunger

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 23, 2008; A01

LONDON, April 22 — More than 100 million people are being driven deeper into poverty by a “silent tsunami” of sharply rising food prices, which have sparked riots around the world and threaten U.N.-backed feeding programs for 20 million children, the top U.N. food official said Tuesday.

“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program (WFP), said at a London news conference. “The world’s misery index is rising.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, hosting Sheeran and other private and government experts at his 10 Downing Street offices, said the growing food crisis has pushed prices to their highest levels since 1945 and rivals the current global financial turmoil as a threat to world stability.

“Hunger is a moral challenge to each one of us as global citizens, but it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of poor nations around the world,” Brown said, adding that 25,000 people a day are dying of conditions linked to hunger.

“With one child dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes, the time to act is now,” Brown said, pledging $60 million in emergency aid to help the WFP feed the poor in Africa and Asia, where in some nations the prices of many food staples have doubled in the past six months.

Brown said the “vast” food crisis was threatening to reverse years of progress to create stronger middle classes around the world and lift millions of people out of poverty.

Prices for basic food supplies such as rice, wheat and corn have skyrocketed in recent months, driven by a complex set of factors including sharply rising fuel prices, droughts in key food-producing countries, ballooning demand in emerging nations such as China and India, and the diversion of some crops to produce biofuels.

Sheeran noted that the United States, which she said provides half of the world’s food assistance, has pledged $200 million in emergency food aid and that Congress was considering an additional appropriation.

Holding up the kind of plastic cup that the WFP uses to feed millions of children, Sheeran told reporters that the price of a metric ton of rice in parts of Asia had risen from $460 to $1,000 in less than two months.

“People are simply being priced out of food markets,” she said.

The WFP has budgeted $2.9 billion this year — all from donor nations — to conduct its feeding programs around the world, including large efforts in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and other nations that could not otherwise feed themselves.

Sheeran said soaring prices mean that the WFP needs an additional $755 million to meet its needs. That “food gap” jumped from $500 million just two months ago as prices keep rising, she said.

“We hope we have reached a plateau, but this is a rapidly evolving situation,” she said, adding that the WFP was urgently seeking contributions to make up the difference as the situation becomes more dire in poor countries such as Bangladesh and Afghanistan that are heavily dependent on imported food.

Sheeran said the WFP’s main focus was on the “ultra-poor,” those who earn less than 50 cents a day. She said rising food prices meant millions of people earning less than $2 a day were giving up health care and education. Those living on less than $1 a day were giving up meat and vegetables, and those living on less than 50 cents were facing increasingly desperate hunger.

Hunger and anger have led to violence recently in Haiti, where food riots this month resulted in several deaths, as well as Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia and Senegal. Argentina’s attempt to control rising prices led to a strike by producers.

The WFP is already being forced to cut back on school feeding programs that serve 20 million children, Sheeran said. Without more emergency funding, she said, a feeding program in Cambodia would be eliminated and programs in places such as Kenya and Tajikistan would be cut in half.

“These are heartbreaking decisions to have to make,” Sheeran said. “We need all the help we can get from the governments of the world who can afford to do so.”

Sheeran said rising fuel and fertilizer prices were adding to the misery. She said she recently returned from a trip to Kenya’s Rift Valley, where the cost of fertilizer has climbed 135 percent since December.

That increase, along with rising prices for seed and diesel, led farmers to plant only one-third the crops they planted last year — a pattern being repeated around the world, she said.

“Farmers have no access to credit, so when prices go up, they can’t afford to plant,” she said, urging governments, particularly in developing nations, to invest more in programs to support domestic agriculture.

“I think much of the world is waking up to the fact that food doesn’t spontaneously show up on grocery store shelves,” she said.

In some parts of the world, Sheeran said, the WFP needs to provide food to people who have none. In other countries, she said, food is plentiful but prices have risen so much that people cannot afford it. She said the WFP is considering programs in those countries to provide cash assistance or emergency food vouchers.

Food experts have said such programs could help lower domestic food prices without hurting local farmers — the kind of balance Sheeran said WFP officials are trying to strike as they deal with a crisis that has different faces in different parts of the world.

The increasing use of crops to produce biofuels has been criticized as contributing to food shortages. While Britain and the European Union have called for greater use of biofuels, Brown said Tuesday that “we need to look closely at the impact on food prices and the environment.”

“If our U.K. review shows that we need to change our approach, we will also push for change in E.U. biofuels targets,” he said.

Rising Prices, Rising Anger

Wednesday, April 23, 2008; A13

Surging food and fuel prices have sparked protests in many countries. Here are some key events this year:

Cameroon

At least 24 people were killed during protests that erupted in February and were linked to rising living costs. In response, the government raised state salaries and suspended customs duties on basic foodstuffs.

Mozambique

At least six people died in February in unrest over high fuel prices and living costs. The government agreed to cut the price of diesel fuel for minibus taxis.

Peru

Farmers, upset by rising fertilizer costs and seeking debt relief, blocked key rail and road links in February.

Ivory Coast

Police fired tear gas in Abidjan last month to disperse demonstrators angry over steep price increases.

Burkina Faso

Unions called a general strike earlier this month over soaring costs of food and fuel that had triggered riots in February. The government extended a suspension of import duties on staple foods.

South Africa

Thousands of members of the national labor federation marched through Johannesburg earlier this month to protest higher food and electricity prices.

Haiti

Protests over high rice prices brought down the prime minister April 12. At least six people were killed in two weeks of riots and demonstrations in the poorest country in the Americas.

SOURCE: Reuters

April 23, 2008
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SENIOR CITY-ZENS; They left only to find there’s no place like home

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, October 26, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Horst Liepolt left New York City in 1995 for Berlin, where he was born 70 years ago, only to discover his heart belongs to the Big Apple.

Ditto for Dolores White, now retired, who yearns to live in the city again.

Howard and Arlene Sommer, in their 50s, are giving the city another whirl after their children flew the coop. And, two years into their return from a 40-year sojourn in suburbia, Mort and Sonia Goldstein are loving every second of life in the city.

In all the good notices New York City is getting for its historic reduction in crime and improved quality of life, not to mention the burgeoning economy, a little-remarked-upon but growing trend is that the city is also becoming haven to a group that appreciates the big town’s excitement: retirees and the so-called “empty nesters.”

Although statistically difficult to measure, anecdotal evidence confirms that a growing number of retirees, especially former New Yorkers, are choosing the city and spurning such traditional retirement locales as Florida, California and Arizona.

Commissioner Herbert Stupp of the city Department for the Aging said he is not surprised.

“It’s a very senior-friendly city, perhaps the most in the country,” he said.

New York is a good place to grow old because of all its conveniences, including access to health care, the most developed mass transit network in the Western Hemisphere and discounts everywhere for seniors, Stupp said.

Retirees themselves cite the ease with which they can live, the excitement of the city and its cultural offerings.

But Charles Longino Jr., a demographer at Wake Forest University, was brutally blunt on the reason the elderly are returning to the city.

“They are coming back because they’ve gotten old and widowed in Florida, and their health is failing, and they want to be near their families,” he said.

Andrew McPherson, a junior equity research analyst at Salomon Brothers, concurs.

Seniors often move to warmer climates when they retire, he said. But as they hit their mid-80s, especially when one spouse dies, they have a harder time getting along on their own.

“The kids still live up in the Northeast. Then the issue is, every time Grandma slips and falls or has a problem, the kids have to hop on a plane and fly down to Florida,” McPherson said.

It makes more sense for Granny to be near the family.

And, sensing a need, developers in the city are offering upscale continuing care and assisted-living apartment buildings, where older residents receive personal care, including help with getting dressed, bathing and medication.

Glenn Kaplan, chairman of the Kapson Group, which owns and operates 20 such facilities in the region, said his firm has another 22 on the drawing board or under construction, including five scheduled to open in the city within three months. Other developers recently opened senior care apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Other evidence supports retirees who say they are returning because of their love of the city and what it offers. Real estate firms, which are on the front line of selling and renting homes and apartments to the returnees, say they are experiencing a boom.

Andrew Heiberger, president of Citi Habitats, which rents more than 3,500 apartments a year in the city, said returnees make up about 6% of his business, up from about half that just a few years ago. His firm found an apartment for Horst Liepolt just this month.

Liepolt was a Grammy-winning jazz record producer who ran the Sweet Basil jazz club in Greenwich Village for 10 years before returning to Berlin with his wife, Clarita, two years ago.

“I thought with the Wall coming down, and with the whole rebuilding thing, it was going to be like the Wild West and honky-tonk, something happening, excitement,” Liepolt said.

He found quite the opposite.

“In those 2 1/2 years, there was no excitement, only Doomsville.”

Contrast that to an awestruck Liepolt visiting New York for the first time almost 40 years ago.

“You see it in movies, you see it in pictures, but it was another thing to actually be here. It was amazing. That was it. I felt very good and right at home,” Liepolt said.

It’s a sentiment Howard Sommer, a 57-year-old president of an investment fund who was born and reared in the South Bronx, understands.

Sommer’s journey took him briefly through Chicago before plopping him down in Long Island for 30 years of the whole suburban treatment: two children, a big house on 31 /2 acres, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

But when the kids grew up and went to college and, upon graduation, moved to Manhattan, Howard and Arlene Sommer, 55, found themselves with too much house. Howard was itching to get back to the city, but his wife was not too sure she was ready to give up the space and comfort of their home and the bonds she formed over the years.

They sold the home anyway and have been renting a Manhattan apartment for seven months now. Arlene is back in school studying to become a psychoanalyst. And Howard is having a terrific time.

“At this point in my life I want to be in the middle of everything,” Sommer said. “I love stepping out of my apartment and being on the streets and all the people and the energy and the excitement. . . . It’s good to be a New Yorker again.”

When she turned 65, Sonia Goldstein decided it was time that she and her husband, Mort, leave Plainview, L.I., and return to the city, where he was reared.

The dossier: 40 years in the suburbs, three children, a dog and a large house that had an office for Mort, a psychologist. He needed some convincing because the move meant ending his practice. Solution came in the form of a two-day-a-week practice on Fire Island. He feels now he has the best of both worlds.

And Sonia is just loving it.

“New York is the place to be when you are retired,” she said. “You are not dependent on a car. You can get to wherever you want to go with mass transportation, and you are not locked in isolation in your home.”

The couple has subscriptions to practically all the cultural institutions in the city.

“The way we get together with friends that we don’t see as much anymore is we have subscriptions with them,” Sonia Goldstein said. “So, I have a subscription to Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, the Roundabout and then in between, my daughter and I love the ballet so we go to that, either traditional ballet or Alvin Ailey.”

The older-than-60 crowd numbers 1.3 million in a city of 7 1/2 million people, so cultural institutions, even as they court families and younger audiences, find their base is highly dependent on retirees.

At the Roundabout Theatre Company, for instance, more than 30% of the 35,000 people on its subscription roll identify themselves as retired, said marketing director David Steffen.

“It’s important that everyone realize that there is this huge influx of people coming back into the city,” he said.

Dolores White, for one, has been to all the retirement places and thought they were nice — but not for her.

And when she says “I’m a city girl,” she doesn’t mean just any city.

“I’ve been to Chicago, which I liked. I was in San Francisco. I liked it. I’ve been to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, but I like New York the best,” White said.

The 68-year-old former teacher grew up in Brooklyn, and remembers cutting class to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount in the 1940s. She remembers Harlem, Little Italy and Chinatown.

She is now working on exchanging her rambling East Northport, L.I., home for an apartment in the Tribeca-Battery Park area, or in Brooklyn Heights.

“There’s such an array of cultural activities, restaurants, shopping . . . you could just sit on the stairs of some of the office buildings and people-watch for hours,” White said.

The city’s rejuvenation recalls for her the old days.

“We felt very free in those days, traveled in the subway with ease. I see that coming back. I see it coming back again. That is what is drawing me back to moving back to the city,” she said.

Original Story Date: 10/26/97

October 26, 1997
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