Muhammad Yunus is visionary economist and Noble Peace Prize winner who believes in the essential goodness of humanity. Stepping down from the ivory tower of academia, Yunus visited the poorest villages of Bangladesh in 1976 and made a personal loan of $27 to 42 women in the village so they could build and sell bamboo furniture. The loan was paid back with interest, and the women took out a larger loan. Thus microfinance was born. In the past 30 years, microcredit has spread to every continent and has benefited over 100 million people. Yunus’ Grameen Bank (literally “village bank”) has loaned money to 1 out of 1,000 people on earth, at 98% repayment rate.

In Bonsai People, The Vision of Muhammad Yunus, Holly Mosher follows the founding of a Grameen Bank branch and several of the women aided by loans.

The Clintonian response to this would be that a rising tide lifts all boats. Grow the economy and you reduce poverty. That’s how it worked in the 1990s. And that’s true to an extent. But the moral crime of rampant hunger, along with rampant inequality (which skyrocketed in the 1990s, by the way), shouldn’t be predicated on what kind of economy we have. There’s no time where it’s “appropriate” for mass hunger.

As Republicans assemble this week and proclaim how they alone have built things — in a place the government built, in a convention delayed because of warnings from the government — it is fitting that we see the fruit of all that individualism’s ruggedness.

An article in Bloomberg describes the adjustments Wall Street denizens are having to make because their average bonuses are down 14 percent this year. Meanwhile, in the real world, one in five people didn’t have enough money to feed themselves in 2011. I know I don’t see a report in Bloomberg about this every other week, but I have to believe it has a bit more news value than whether the investment banker can afford his second home.

We’re spending an average of $55 million a day to bomb Libyans while, as Bittman says, people here are going to bed hungry.

Given the avoidance of the economic crisis and its impact on American families in this week’s State of the Union speech, isn’t “winning the future” just a corporate branding exercise to differentiate America Inc. from India Ltd. and China Corp.?

For some twisted reason, this pompous, fleshy, sheltered windbag Rush Limbaugh is allowed to pontificate to the American public over their own publicly-owned airwaves, persuading them that hungry children are simply too lazy to go to the nearest refrigerator to get food, or unmotivated to dive into a dumpster for their next meal.

I noted last night that today is a good time to remember–and support–those food banks that help ensure that families that are struggling can enjoy a Thanksgiving Dinner, too.

It’s also a good time to reflect on how big and scary our food system has become. (Indeed, the industrialization of our food system may contribute to the rising number of Americans who struggle to get enough food.)

A couple of weeks ago, the USDA put numbers to the reality that has appeared, anecdotally, all over the country: more and more people in this country don’t have enough food. Almost 15% of the country had at least some food insecurity last year. 5 million more kids faced hunger last year than the year before.

That means the food banks that have helped such families fill the gap are slammed, facing far more demand than they can meet.

Joel Berg’s All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? is something of a primer on hunger and food insecurity in America. It traces the fitful history of nutrition assistance programs in America from the Industrial Revolution, when hunger started to become a serious problem, through the Great Depression, when it could not be ignored (although plenty politicians opposed to “the dole” tried) through the sixties and seventies when federal programs made real strides toward the goal of eliminating hunger completely – through the dark days of the 1980s when ketchup became a vegetable and a smiling grandfatherly president made it okay to hate and punish the less fortunate. There is a chapter devoted to the political minefield of Welfare Reform, which saw an immediate decrease in hunger but then faltered under the Bush administration’s much less than compassionate conservatism and yet another decade of Reaganomics.