anonymous submission –
The government shutdown looms large in the minds of the hungry. Two opposing poles of power – both against the poor – playing games. One one hand the republicans are more than happy to keep the government shutdown and continue on with what they’re doing. It’s a PR event for them, accusing the democrats of playing with peoples lives and taking away SNAP, never mind that so many of them have cut SNAP programs in their own states. The democrats, eternally embarrassed by their refusal to address the US-backed genocide of the Palestinian people get to pretend like they have a spine standing up to Trump and MAGA. While these games are played some 40 million people across the US won’t be getting SNAP next month.
And these truly are games – the funding doesn’t even have to run dry. The Department of Agriculture has reserve funds that could fully fund SNAP for the month. They could release those funds but Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the reserves can only be used in “true emergencies”. I guess 40 million peoples going hungry isn’t enough of an emergency for the state…yet. To add insult to injury the state authorized $20 billion in financial aid to prop up the rapidly collapsing capitalist wonder-land of Argentina during this shut down, not to mention the extravagant vanity project of the new Trump white house ballroom.
In Washington, some 900,000 people are set to go without as SNAP and the immigrant Food Assistant program will be without funding come November 1st, as well as the stop-gap The Emergency Food Assistance Program which funds food banks. For now, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program still has funding through the middle to the end of the month.
There are two conclusions, two courses of actions, that can be drawn from this. The first is an outrage that the loving sovereign has left its children out to hang and that we must beg – even if it is a forceful begging – to stop the squabbling, to put more funds into social services.
Or? We recognize this as an expression of class war and go from there. A hungry people is an angry people and an angry people is less inclined to beg for someone else to secure their means of existence, but to secure it themselves. There are ways to get by, the middle class moralists always turn their noses up at it but still dumpsters are full of excesses of perfectly good food – and a conspiracy of people working in grocery stores can superficially damage food packaging so it gets thrown out for others to come grab that very night. Then again, if people are feeling daring they could also run up into grocery stores and <a href=”https://magpie.noblogs.org/post/2023/12/02/athens-greece-if-you-were-invisible-would-you-rob-a-supermarket/“>loot them en-mass</a>, the distribution centers too.
anonymous submission –
The government shutdown looms large in the minds of the hungry. Two opposing poles of power – both against the poor – playing games. One one hand the republicans are more than happy to keep the government shutdown and continue on with what they’re doing. It’s a PR event for them, accusing the democrats of playing with peoples lives and taking away SNAP, never mind that so many of them have cut SNAP programs in their own states. The democrats, eternally embarrassed by their refusal to address the US-backed genocide of the Palestinian people get to pretend like they have a spine standing up to Trump and MAGA. While these games are played some 40 million people across the US won’t be getting SNAP next month.
And these truly are games – the funding doesn’t even have to run dry. The Department of Agriculture has reserve funds that could fully fund SNAP for the month. They could release those funds but Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the reserves can only be used in “true emergencies”. I guess 40 million peoples going hungry isn’t enough of an emergency for the state…yet. To add insult to injury the state authorized $20 billion in financial aid to prop up the rapidly collapsing capitalist wonder-land of Argentina during this shut down, not to mention the extravagant vanity project of the new Trump white house ballroom.
In Washington, some 900,000 people are set to go without as SNAP and the immigrant Food Assistant program will be without funding come November 1st, as well as the stop-gap The Emergency Food Assistance Program which funds food banks. For now, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program still has funding through the middle to the end of the month.
There are two conclusions, two courses of actions, that can be drawn from this. The first is an outrage that the loving sovereign has left its children out to hang and that we must beg – even if it is a forceful begging – to stop the squabbling, to put more funds into social services.
Or? We recognize this as an expression of class war and go from there. A hungry people is an angry people and an angry people is less inclined to beg for someone else to secure their means of existence, but to secure it themselves. There are ways to get by, the middle class moralists always turn their noses up at it but still dumpsters are full of excesses of perfectly good food – and a conspiracy of people working in grocery stores can superficially damage food packaging so it gets thrown out for others to come grab that very night. Then again, if people are feeling daring they could also run up into grocery stores and <a href=”https://magpie.noblogs.org/post/2023/12/02/athens-greece-if-you-were-invisible-would-you-rob-a-supermarket/“>loot them en-mass</a>, the distribution centers too.