You are thinking of Somalia, when you should be thinking of an entirely different set of symptoms. The problem facing poor people in the US is not starvation, but disease brought on by malnutrition. This is a nation-wide epidemic which is on the upswing due to cutbacks in food stamps.
I don't think that you or Withrow are neo-Nazis. I think you are liberals who rely on anecdotal evidence. This is how most Americans think. Ronald Reagan represented this sort of thinking raised to the level of absurdity. The purpose of an Internet mailing-list like LBO-Talk should be to dig beneath superficial impressions and anecdotal material to uncover hard evidence about our society. This means taking trips to the library, reading authoritative daily newspapers like the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal front-page, or doing searches on the world-wide-web.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)