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Famine, as visualized by sculptor Rowan Gillespie on Custom House Quay in Dublin, Ireland. Famine is what the food stamp program prevents. And the food stamp program is showing signs of breaking down. (Photo by William Murphy/Flickr)
There are stories that confirm our worries that the whole industrial system is about to come apart; and then there are stories that scare the crap out of us because they indicate that the collapse is ongoing and accelerating. This is one of those latter stories, one of those pre-apocalyptic cracks of doom that, like thunder, tell you it’s time to get ready. A Google search this morning finds no mention of this story in the industrial media, but it rages in the alternative sources (many of whom are weaving it into their previously established conspiracy theories as a deliberate act, not another triumph of ineptitude).
The story? All over the country, especially since June 1, the SNAP card system, which is how we get food stamps to people now, is failing. Curiously, the failures seem to be selective, not blacking out areas-or states or regions, but cherry-picking individuals all over the county. Hundreds of people all over the country so far this month, and thousands this year, are experiencing late funding of their SNAP cards — some people are still waiting for funds that were supposed to be available on June 1. Many hundreds more are finding their SNAP cards won’t work at all.
According to a website that tracks these things, people are reporting problems at a rate that for parts of the day exceed 200 per hour. Fifty million individuals, including one out of every five American children, receive food stamps. If you know any families who rely on them — personally I mean, not through the viewpoint of the snarling “get-a-job” trolls who populate every online discussion of this subject (including, amazingly, the website designed to collect reports of problems in the system) — you know that the last few days before the stipend comes through are often hungry days. (The trolls sneer at that, but would you really be unaffected by a one or two week delay in your paycheck?)
But you do not have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to find this problem appalling. The SNAP, or EBT, card is how we deliver food assistance to people who otherwise would be in line at some government agency, lines whose size and desperation would dwarf anything seen in the Great Depression. There is virtually no margin for error here before people start to starve. (What’s that you say? A huge government computer system with no margin for error? What could possibly go wrong?)
And if you have no pity for the starving (because obviously if they had good character they would be successful like you), consider this: before they starve they are going to burn your country down around your hard of hearing ears.
People who have not read history and who have no empathy and are childishly simplistic in their comprehension of the world — you know, people like Donald Trump — have no idea what has happened in the past (“Let them eat cake!”), what is happening right now (People are dying in massive riots around empty grocery stores in Venezuela.) or what could happen any minute if another lit match is thrown into that tinder box (“Drug test them!” “Reduce and restrict benefits!” “Make ‘em work for it!”)
So move the second hand on the doomsday clock a little closer to midnight, and pray that the government that designed and built a computer system for the FBI that had to be scrapped entirely on opening day — the government that designed and built the original Obamacare website — can fix this problem before….
Oh, never mind. I gotta find my bugout bag.
It isn’t just TrumpTards that think stupidly like this. I think it got really popular with the DittoHeads ( Rush Limbaugh blind followers ). As long as there has been money and cities and agriculture there has been a need for charity for the poor. Which isn’t charity when it keeps them from rioting. It is insurance.
Mr. Lewis, you keep knockin’ ’em out of the park! Great essay.
Yeah – it isn’t going to take much. Once the heat hits the east coast this summer we’ll see things start to come to a head. Everyone thinks the militarized police are so powerful that they can quell any riot or uprising, forgetting things like Watts, that couldn’t be contained. There are MILLIONS of angry people out there, but the worrisome ones are the out of work people, armed to the teeth and desperate, the gang populations (which, by the way, isn’t diminishing), the militia types, and of course the completely wacko, Alex Jones listening, seething paranoid ‘preppers.’
Since the powers that be want to keep us fighting each other instead of going after them, I wouldn’t be surprised at some “stirring of the pot” to instigate, oh, like a race war or some other nonsense that would require something like, say, MARTIAL LAW, that the government thinks they can enforce. The only problem is the cops LIVE IN the communities they work in, so they are SOMEBODY’S neighbor, and they can’t be home all the time with fomented craziness going on, so their families will be targeted. They have to sleep sometime, so it’ll be one off-duty cop against a mob planning on burning down his house or running gun battles with no reinforcements.
Drones, cameras, all their high-tech crap will be worthless as the electrical infrastructure (not to mention the rotting and neglected water, gas and sewage systems) is damaged beyond repair, and their precincts will be become a modern day Alamo when it all gets going. Get a people angry enough and the government will fall. Then what do we have – chaos, disorder, mob violence, looting, burning and non-stop panic. The best they can hope for is to JOIN the mob in order to save their own skins.
The military too is in for a rude awakening. Right now the war hawks are trying to provoke Russia into WWIII. Russia by itself has the power to destroy us and combined with China it’s suicidal to prod them into confrontation. We’ve seen how inept our military has become in the last bunch of hegemonic wars – lost in Viet Nam, lost in Iraq, losing in Afghanistan – and the equipment we’re paying for DOESN’T WORK (the F-35, the new “stealth warship” and on and on, the weapons cost too much and don’t live up to the hype and are plagued by glitches).
I see I’ve strayed far from the essay’s point.
Since I’ve gone this far, i’ll just add that none of this is going to matter because climate change has other plans for humanity – good riddance to us by taking away our ability to feed ourselves.
I just want to know how many things will survive the unattended 500 plus nuclear reactors around the world as they gradually “pop off”. We’ve pulled the pin on that handgrenade and as soon as we can’t hold it in any more… A sterilizing End for the species and not just us, unfortunately.
It would be interesting to know if there is a pattern to the SNAP “failures.” Ideally, the FedGov would want a program that can selectively turn them off, at least geographically if nothing else. It would then be a form of “riot” control for localities that were uprising – like the seiges of old, cutting off the food supply to starve them out. I’d be amazed if they are not experimenting with that.
Conspiracy.
The very word elicits polarizing emotional reactions.
Conspiracies are, on the one hand real enough to have their own word, yet on the other dismissed as paranoid fantasy. It seems that at least some of what qualifies as conspiracy is a matter of interpretation, of building a certain narrative.
The discomfort found in those who oppose such narratives is apparently due to a particular world view that doesn’t allow for either the interpretation, or the narrative.
I have found that wherever money and power intersect, there are always those who seek to corner both, on small and large scales. We know, for example, that our cities in the late 19th century were electrified, and that replacing trolleys with oil burning buses, and electric cars with more oil burners was accomplished due to pressure, manipulation, and outright lies by a pretty small group working largely outside of public scrutiny. To some, this historic event represents business as usual, and to others, conspiracy.
What if they are both right?
I don’t doubt there are examples of collusion and control-freakery in the highest echelons of our society that are quite deliberate. That said, conspiracy-theory types on the Internet have a way of being just a tad too “tinfoil-hattish” for those of us who try to retain some modicum of critical thinking. I saw a classic example the other day on a YouTube video whose narrator volunteered the observation that “they’re putting nano-tubules in vaccines to beam mind-control thoughts into our heads”, and this was apropos of nothing in the main theme of the video, this little tidbit was just offered up out of the blue for who knows what reason. To which I could only respond in my best “Church Lady” voice, “Well isn’t that spe-cial!”
We can all have fun at the expense of those who indulge a bit too much in their personal realities. What is generally the case here is that evidence is optional.
What of those myriad cases where evidence is present?
Here’s another example; Significant evidence exists that the US role in the onset of WW2 was hardly neutral. From FDR’s special envoy John Bullit, to the McCollum plan, to actions of provocation spanning military and economic agitation. Indeed, reviewing the evidence certainly makes it pretty difficult to accept the official party line of neutral good guys pulled into WAR by a “surprise” attack.
Now, my point is that the history we are spoon fed is at the very least, completely inaccurate. How then does one explain the continuing obfuscation?
I find the effort to propagate completely unsupported perspectives as factual historic events impossible to explain without that nasty word…Conspiracy.
Once the fight or flight reflex is excited in host populations… those who are receiving unlike people at a rate they are unable to absorb and identify with… [Hamilton’s Rule}
Once this hard wired reflex is excited, no amount of cajoling, shaming or persuasion will quell the directive…. empathy is confined to those who look and act like us.
Sympathy is a luxury for environments not stretched beyond their carrying capacity.
We are, still animals. And 20th century advances in providing for ever larger populations of homo sapiens… has happened at the expense of everything else.
You can holler and scream about relative footprints… la la la la la … nobody will hear you when the music stops and there are not 7 billion chairs.