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New York, 8:47 AM
Mon Nov 30
21 posts in the last 24 hours
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01:30 AM
The details historically came under various provisions of the Farm Bill of the moment. Not so much to do with welfare.
01:01 AM
So I went down to the office and applied. The look on the woman's face was bad enough, until she said, "Honey, you're white. White girls in college don't go on food stamps. You call your daddy and just have him take you to Albertson's once a week. You'll be fine."
And then she turned back to her coworker to gossip.
I left, ashamed. Didn't even try arguing with her. I ended up surviving on a two-pronged method: prodding my mom to take me to Costco, where I would buy bulk-sized boxes of Bisquick, which would keep me fed through the week, until I'd go out on a date over the weekend and chow down on the dude's dime. It was the only way I survived until I moved in with my boyfriend-now-husband.
Which is what I think about during my monthly donation trips to the pantry. Nobody should have to be that hungry and that desperate.
11/29/09
It isn't logical and it doesn't reflect the reality of poverty in this country, but I'm sure it makes people feel better on some level. Too bad it also means they feel like they can turn their backs on their fellow human beings (while feeling superior, no less).
05:02 AM
And the idea that it's some kind of family planning issue...even assuming that is true, the idea that some child should have to starve or otherwise suffer because of his/her parent's own stupidity is ridiculous. No doubt many of the people chiding the parents in that situation are also staunchly pro-life.
11/29/09
12:00 AM
11/29/09
Watch it happen: the next popular game/reality show will be around debt. You'll have to humiliate yourself on camera, let everyone know what your credit history is, outwit and outlast all the other debtors in a newfangled, televised debtors' prison. The winner will have all his/her bills paid off and have his/her credit score raised to 700!
11/29/09
That's the shame the people who spoke to the reporter felt. Some of these parents were only desperate to feed their kids. While both parents were working. And they felt ashamed at this assistance.
The fact is : the working class has been utterly destroyed, decimated, brought to its knees by thirty years of Reaganism, Republican ideology in the US. And the culture makes the victims feel shame for it. As if it's their own fault.
The tens of millions of working-class people who've lost their jobs due to outsourcing, factory closings, pay cuts, concessions and disappearing blue-collar work are told it's their own fault. If only you went to the right school, did the right thing, pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Tens of millions of workers all thinking it's their own personal failure that they lost their good job when the factory closed.
This is unbelievably cruel. In America, everyone thinks they're middle class. It's impolite to speak of it. But I am appalled and disgusted that our national media scarcely sees fit to look closely at the destruction- the working class, the backbone of American prosperity and industriousness, has been wiped out. Is starved. Is left to blame themselves that they aren't CEO's or highly paid television commentators.
Instead, let's criticize how Obama gave his polite bow to the Emperor of Japan, whether he should have , and next up we'll have a right wing retard make the reasonable case that Obama should have punched the guy out in revengefor Pearl Harbor, by some inordinately respected right-wing warmonger.
In the meantime, the Republican party's long war on the good people of America continues. We have no money for health care but we'll spend ten times that on foreign wars. Sign your son up! We've eradicated your jobs and lives, it's cheaper to enslave overseas. But stop your whining. Not our fault you didn't go to Harvard. Your kids are hungry? Here's your foodstamps, loser. Til we get rid of that too.
11/29/09
11/29/09
Call what I ask next some form of stupid optimism: how do we de-Reaganize the country?
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11/29/09
if it's policy you're interested in - (again, as small as it may seem) send your congressmen a letter/call them/fax them. even once. (six times works too, btw) :D
optimism is never stupid. non-action when you feel an emotional reaction to a problem is, perhaps, defeatism.
11/29/09
The trickle-down economy is the biggest scam in American history. It's completely nuts that people even bought into it. Considering that wealthy people tend to SAVE far more money, percentage wise, than they spend compared to the middle and lower class (who need to spend that larger percentage of money on food and shelter), it makes no sense just from a numerical standpoint. But even further, it's not like these wealthy people are waltzing into a mom and pop shop to buy their stuff - they buy their consumer goods from huge chains just like everyone else, putting their money into the pockets of other wealthy people, with only 7-10 dollars an hour "trickling down" to the average worker. Then, all these people with their infinite wealth get policy power by either befriending politicians (lobbying) or becoming politicians (Bloomberg, Bush, et al billionaire politicians). Also, the wonders of globalization have made loyalty of American company's to American interests pretty much non-existent, so no company or executive will stick their necks out to help everyone if it even marginally affects their own bottom line, and instead uses tax-deductible charity donations to make it seem like they're helping the people, when they're just cutting back their government expenses. Oh, and let's not forget the wonders of high-priced accounting practices, which cut down the taxes paid by the wealthy and huge corporations back to a tiny percent, whereas the average joe has no access to this and has to pay a monstrous chunk of his income each year.
Shit, that's pretty much a manifesto I just wrote - long and unfocused. I'll probably have the FBI at my house in ten minutes.
11/29/09
All jesting aside, and with sincere apologies to Dylan Thomas, I think it's essential that you continue to "rage, rage against the lying of the right."
I'd like to believe, as Dr. King did, that the arc of history will eventually bend towards justice.
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12:18 AM
That's definitely not something you need to work on.
Keep shining!
12:22 AM
12:34 AM
11/29/09
[www.informationclearinghouse.info]
Cross of Iron Speech
Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
...
If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate
11/29/09
I imagine Eisenhower would be hanging out with Dennis Kucinich on the 'believes in fairies, tree gnomes, social justice and world peace' modern political scale.
Didn't his granddaughter work for Obama's campaign?
11/29/09
Ike would be tried for treason by Beck, Limbaugh and Palin -- the idiot three musketeers that are leading the red state, hate blinded, low IQ masses down the garden path. The smarter richer people who support that agenda are at least working in their own short term interests. The misled masses are just ignorant and hateful. Of course it won't be good for the riches when things here become like in Latin America, where it's all walled compounds and armed bodyguards because the poors have been so completely dispossessed of everything that they really don't give a shit anymore.
11/29/09
Julie Nixon Eisenhower actually married Ike's son and supported Obama:
[thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com]
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11/29/09
This fucking country.
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11/29/09
Uh, make that the Old Dixie. I live in Utah and, along with Nevada and Idaho, we yield to NO ONE in our redness, but are among the lowest food stamp recipients.
Fortunately, we have lots of roadkill.
11/29/09
11/29/09
Amen
11/29/09
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11/29/09
There are two types of people in the world. Type 1 thinks that there is enough to go around. Type 2 doesn't.
That tends to drive sharing decisions. Call me a type 2. Life is a limited resources problem. Unless you've discovered a source of unlimited energy?
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11/29/09
I am going to call you an idiot.
11/29/09
11/29/09
I would, to feed my family. Just never yours.
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11/29/09
What part of "limited resources" don't you understand? Like I said, until you have an infinite energy source, you're stuck finding ways to share. Some of the most efficient ways involve some unfortunate people from bad situations and locations starving to death. Sorry.
11/29/09
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11/29/09
I'm not sure your emotional response to suffering is going to make the rice yields go up, Bookish. I can't engage you in an argument about how you feel about poverty, it's purposeless. All you're going to do is rail at me for being the messenger of the world's unfair realities, and that doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything.
11/29/09
11/29/09
Well, I'd say that Somalia is an objectively bad place to be born. If it interests you enough we can probably develop an algorithm from per-capita GDP, poverty rates, disease, war, rape, etc. statistics.
11/29/09
11/29/09
I'm not sure your anger solves more than my mathematics. In fact, I'm positive that 5 minutes of patient analysis can accomplish more than all the undirected anger in the world. There is nothing abstract about starvation, but the solutions to it are. And currently, solutions that exclude starvation don't exist - not unless you have an infinite amount of arable land and potable water or the political will to fix all of Earth at a specific population.
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11/29/09
Of course not. And a few thousand fathers fail to succeed in their wild quest to find sustenance every day. If you think starvation is some sort of "orderly affair" you're wrong. I didn't ask a single person to simply accept fate on an individual level. I spoke in the aggregate.
11/29/09
Who am I showing off for, Bookish? What am I showing off? I don't understand your point of view.
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11/29/09
Correct. I'm not stating that they're responsible for starving through some moral flaw. They were simply born in the wrong location.
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11/29/09
I'm not sure you'd believe my answer if I said yes, and I'm positive the answer is irrelevant.
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11/29/09
Considering that Detroit is a rough approximation of the countries in Africa I'm referring to, the argument seems portable. I know, Michigan humor.
And yes, I believe that luck (or a lack thereof) has a terribly large impact on the ability of the hungry to receive adequate food. Remember that episode of The Wire where the crackhead mom sold the Rice-A-Roni?
11/29/09
You don't know a thing about my qualifications. What's with your need to discuss me? This isn't the first time.
There are a thousand inputs in this discussion, macro and micro. We're talking weather patterns, global warming, whether or not a guy in a market sees a kid stealing, the outcome of a meeting between two warlords huddling over a create of supplies.
Foodstamps are a microcosm of the global mission to determine how we feed the hungry. It's such a general topic! Honestly, ignore me if you want, but my point - which I was general about, because this isn't exactly the forum for a data-driven discussion - is that the commodity everyone chases (food) is limited. It's an unassailable point.
11/29/09
It is. You are still an idiot.
12:09 AM
12:11 AM
We have so much food production in this country we put Mexican farmers out of business because we could grow it cheaper and ship it to their country than they could grow it. Food exports are our biggest export, so food obviously isn't the problem.
12:23 AM
12:48 AM
What do we pour on those crops to grow them? Food production is the end result of a complex integration of primarily imported products. EG: petroleum-based fertilizer. We are, of course, tremendous importers of oil - the world's largest, by far. American agribusiness is fueled by the interconnectivity of the global trade marketplace. You can't simplify it to "We have X food, let's hand it out."
12:53 AM
You want to simplify the world, reduce it to suffering and amelioration. I get that. It cuts through the complexity of the world we actually live in. Your position is easy - people suffer and those that sit "idly" by while it takes place are complicit. You can rain condemnation and insults from your unsophisticated little foxhole like it matters. I hope it brings you the solace you're looking for.
01:03 AM
01:20 AM
Aaah, you really shouldn't have gone that far. "your New York apartment" would've been been enough!
By the way, I am not (merely) insulting you, or (God forbid!) condemning you. I am ridiculing you. Which is basically all we ever do, here in my unsophisticated little foxhole.
05:13 AM
There is more than enough food available in the United States to feed the people within our borders. It's a matter of overcoming the various barriers to getting it to them, among them these dipshit ideas that it's some kind of survival of the fittest race to deserve it.
08:06 AM
Hunger is more of a distribution problem than a supply problem, particularly in this country.
That's exactly right. In the U.S., anyway, supplies are at such a level that hunger is primarily a problem of political economy, not macro- or microeconomics. For such problems, purely analytical solutions are frequently helpful, but they're rarely sufficient by themselves -- since enduring solutions require us (the problem-solvers) to place values on certain nonquantifiable assets like rights to personal dignity or autonomous decisions on reproduction, etc.
I've respected the points you've made before, but your mistaking problems of political economy for problems of pure macroeconomics seems like a serious analytical oversight. In fact I'd go so far as to say that it's inconsistent with a truly analytical approach to problem-solving.
It's true, many public problems involve optimizing the use of scarce, discrete resources. But certain very complex problems implicate other, harder-to-quantify resources as well. The effort to address those problems analytically is still worth it -- but it's not sufficient, and in fact relying solely on quantitative analysis to address these problems can lead one to some quite regrettable conclusions. I suspect you realize this as well as anyone, actually.
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Jesus, the general guidelines are really low. $28,668 gross for a family of four?
People should eat. Especially little people who didn't have a say in this whole deal so they don't get rickets and scurvy and beri beri.
Maybe they shouldn't have had those kids--well, why is that any of my fucking concern? Do I want people all up in my womb, telling my ass how to breed? No. Then case closed.
Eugenicists can go fuck themselves and roll around in some Little Debbie Snack Cakes or Beluga caviar or American pie or whatever they eat with all the food and judgment and money and power and smug American Freedom they have, because they aren't in this shitty predicament.
11/29/09
11/29/09
And so they can concentrate in school and get an education so they can grow up and become engineers or doctors and maybe make my life better by inventing some new technology or curing me if I'm sick.
That's the kind of selfish I subscribe too.
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Also: I suspect that you are the type of Christian that Jesus would actually want to come back for.
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