Tag Archives: food stamps

BAH HUMBUG!!!

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Environmental Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Rants

Okay, folks … these are not snarky snippets … these are full-blown, out-and-out rants.  I’m fed up with certain members of our government and …

I strongly object to corporate bailouts during this pandemic crisis.  People who don’t have millions stashed in overseas accounts or investment portfolios ought to be the sole focus of any and all bailouts that use our tax dollars.  Last month, numerous industries including the dying coal industry received stipends from our government, using our money, so that the CEOs wouldn’t have to dig into their own deep pockets.  Now, the auto industry comes crying to us with their hands held out.

Auto sales are down.  Duh … gee, really?  There’s no place to go, so why buy a new car.  Besides, nobody has money for non-essentials at the moment … we’re all trying to figure out how to pay the rent and buy food to feed our families, not how to afford a new overpriced Chevrolet.  So, why is it our problem that the Big Three aren’t making money right now?  We’ve got enough problems of our own without having to spend our money to put money in the pockets of rich dudes!

The argument is that massive losses could leave workers unemployed and stall any economic recovery.  No, those automakers aren’t going to close their factories permanently just because they’re losing money now, and if we bail them out now so that their CEOs can still take their summer vacations, what happens then?  Do they keep making more cars that they can’t sell?  Shut the damn factories down until people can afford to and have a desire to buy cars, stupid!  It isn’t rocket science!

And meanwhile, on the other side of town …

Democrats in Congress want to increase food stamps by 15% in an effort to help families who are running out of food.  They claim that a similar move during the Great Recession reduced hunger and helped the economy.  But, of course, the republicans would prefer to spend our money to bail out the auto industry, airlines, hotel industry and fossil fuel industry than to actually help people who need help.

scrooge-1Bah Humbug to you, too, Scrooge McConnell & Co.  

The United States Postal Service (USPS) that Trump has refused to help out unless they raise their rates, which would hurt every single person in this nation, now has a new Postmaster General.  The former Postmaster General, David Williams, resigned last week due to the meddling by Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, that led to the loan Congress had already approved for the USPS being held up.  The newly appointed Louis DeJoy is a North Carolina businessman who is currently in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.  He just happens to be a top donor to Trump and the Republican National Committee.  What a surprise, eh?

Trump’s ongoing feud with the USPS is largely tied to his hatred of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is also the owner of The Washington Post, a newspaper that calls Trump on his lies and pulls no punches when it comes to reporting on the madman at the helm of this ship.  So, let me sum this up for you.  Because Donald Trump is a lousy president, and certain media outlets call a spade a spade, hold his feet to the fire when he screws up (daily), and because one of those outlets is owned by a man who also owns a company that mails millions of packages to We the People via the USPS, Trump has installed a sycophant to raise postal rates which will cost us all.  Amazon will pay more to ship our packages, and they will pass that cost right on to We the Consumer.  This, friends, is not about the best interests of this nation, this is greed and revenge of the sorry excuse for a human being that resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

scrooge-2Bah Humbug to you, Donald Trump and Steve Mnuchin, you greedy little weasel!

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie … once given kudos by members of both parties and the people of New Jersey for his wise and humane responses to the devastation left behind by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, gets no kudos today!  It seems that his view on the value of a human life has changed since he threw his lot in with Donald Trump.

In a recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, da Gov had this to say …

“Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can ― but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?”

To what end, indeed?  To what end does the Secret Service continue to protect Donald Trump and his family?  Why bother … just accept the inevitable.

And then … then he had the unmitigated gall to compare the coronavirus pandemic to World War II …

“We sacrificed those lives. We sent our young men during WWII over to Europe, out to the Pacific, knowing, knowing that many of them would not come home alive. And we decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life. In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life.”

Not even close to an apples-to-apples comparison!  More like a coconut-to-lasagne comparison.  scrooge-3Bah Humbug to you, Bridgegate Christie!

Does everybody who comes into contact with Donald Trump just lose both their brains and their humanity?  It sure seems like it.  Okay, I’m done ranting for the moment … be thankful you don’t have to live with me!

Okay Folks … ‘TOON Time!!!

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, cartoons, Environmental Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary

There are just so many awesomely apt ‘toons out there in ‘toonland these days … I am truly in awe of these guys and their talent!  Take a look …

To start, I want to pay tribute to two people who made a positive difference in this world, who died last week.  The first, Caroll Spinney, was an American puppeteer, cartoonist, author and speaker most famous for playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street from its inception in 1969 until 2018.

And the second was Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who helped shape American economic policy for decades, notably by leading the Federal Reserve’s brute-force campaign to subdue inflation in the 1970s and ’80s.

A few days ago, Trump went on some strange, unhinged rant about toilets and plumbing, saying people were flushing their toilets 10-15 times instead of once, and so his solution to the made-up problem is to have the Environmental Protection Agency look into ‘rolling back’ water efficiency regulations as he did with energy regulations.  Needless to say, the pundits had fun with this one.

Recently, Trump’s Department of Agriculture announced phase I of a three-phase program that would ultimately take away food stamp assistance to some 3 million people.

snap-1snap-2

Naturally, impeachment is the first thing on everybody’s minds, superseding even thoughts of “oops, I forgot to buy a gift for Aunt Helen”, and “where will we put a tree this year?”, and “did you call the piano tuner?”  It is a serious process, but there are a number on the right-hand side of the congressional aisle that are doing everything in their power to turn it into a three-ring circus.

Well, folks, that’s a wrap for this time, but you know I’ll be keeping my eyes open for more!  If we don’t find a way to poke fun at our situation, we will go nuts for sure, so keep those smiles handy.

A Few Mini-Rants … Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

Posted on by under Bits 'n Pieces, Global Issues, Law and justice, Political commentary, Social commentary

It was going to be just another mildly Snarky Snippets piece, but suddenly I discovered I really felt a rant building up.  And so …

Another unqualified candidate on the bench …

Her name is Sarah Elizabeth Pitlyk, she is 42 years of age, her only judiciary experience was clerking for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, she has never tried a case as a lead or co-counsel, has never examined a witness, and yet now she is a federal judge for the U.S. District Court in St. Louis!  The American Bar Association (ABA) gave her a “not qualified” rating … you can read their letter if you wish.

So, what has she done?  What, exactly, made Trump think she was a good candidate for the federal court?  Did she bat her eyes just right, or swing her hips just so?  Oh no … here it is … “Sarah Pitlyk has spent most of her career defending our most fundamental freedoms, including religious liberty.”

Vanita Gupta, a former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said of Pitlyk’s confirmation …

“She is exactly the type of judicial nominee that Trump promised to fill the courts with: an individual who threatens reproductive rights and access to abortion. With Pitlyk’s confirmation, the administration is betting on her to carry out their agenda for decades to come.”

Another setback to women’s rights!  One lousy republican, Senator Susan Collins, found enough compunction to vote against this woman’s confirmation.  To the rest of you damn republicans … go soak your heads in a vat of boiling oil, please!!!   Hear that low growl emitting from my throat?

Let them eat cake!  Oh wait … they cannot afford that, either

Scrooge McTrump is at it again!

The Agriculture Department gave its final approval to the first of three rules that are ultimately expected to cut more than three million from the food stamp rolls.  According to the Department of Agriculture, the economy has improved under the Trump administration, and assistance to unemployed, able-bodied adults was no longer necessary in a strong job market.

sonny-perdueSonny Perdue, head of the Department of Agriculture and one of Trump’s many yes-men, aka boot lickers, is a millionaire.  Not one night in his worthless life has he gone to bed hungry!  This is the problem with too damn many rich people in this administration … they have no concept … NONE … of what the average person deals with.

Cut food stamps, cut other social service programs, but increase military spending.  Oh yeah … let’s not forget … cut taxes on the wealthy.  Is this any way to run a government?  No, it is not.  Again, as I have said so many times before … this is a government of, by and for the wealthy and to hell with the rest of us.  The growl gets louder …

Jim Jordan …

jim-jordanI think it speaks volumes when one of the Republican Party’s loudest mouthpieces is a man who is implicated in a sex scandal at Ohio State University (OSU).  It says much about the values – or should I say lack of values – of the GOP.

Mind you, Representative Jim Jordan is not accused of sexual abuse himself, but when he served as Assistant Coach from 1986 – 1994, numerous students went to him with complaints that the campus doctor, Dr. Richard Strauss, had abused them.  Strauss has been found to have abused at least 177 male students during his tenure at the university.  Jim Jordan did nothing when students took their concerns to him, but simply blew them off.

Jordan claims that he did not know, but numerous students and even a referee have come forward to say that they went to Jordan, hoping he would help them, but instead he blew them off, saying, “Yeah, that’s Strauss.”  Where there is so much smoke, there is a fire somewhere.

And this is one of the faces of the GOP today.  How low they have sunk since the days when GOP stood for ‘Grand Old Party’.

The laughingstock of the world …

All throughout Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, when nobody thought he could possibly win the election (and for the record, he didn’t), he was the laughingstock of both the nation and our allies.  Here in the U.S., we stopped laughing in the wee hours of November 9th, 2016.  The rest of the world kept laughing until probably mid-March 2017, when they saw that he was not only a threat to the U.S. and its people, but to the entire world.

Now, he is seen abroad as a fool, but a dangerous fool, and world leaders spend a bit of time in the days leading up to a summit or conference he will attend, trying to head off any dramatics, any crisis.

It was reported on December 2nd that NATO leaders had done everything in their power ahead of this week’s NATO summit to ensure that there would be no disruptive incidents.  But, wherever Trump goes, he insists on being the center of attention, and if he isn’t, then he will find a way to make it so.nato-trump.jpgYesterday, he stormed out of the summit in London after seeing a video of a group of leaders, including Boris Johnson, ridiculing him at Buckingham Palace for staging lengthy press conferences.  I suppose it hurt his itty-bitty feelings, punctured that thin skin of his, and he took his toys and went home.  He fully deserved the ridicule, and those who dished it out … Princess Anne, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French president Emmanuel Macron, and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte … were not aware they were being recorded, nor that the recording would be shown to Trump.  But, let’s face it folks … the bully got just exactly what he deserved.  As one commentor noted, the conversation wasn’t even newsworthy until Trump made it newsworthy.

And, I laugh, but at the same time I wonder, for Trump is a bully, he retaliates against those who would mock him.  Perhaps cooler heads will convince him to drop it.  Wait … are there any cooler heads left in the White House???

And Putin smiles …

Okay, well, it’s getting late and what started as a low growl is now a full-throttle roar, so it’s time for me to stop ranting and get a few hours of nice, peaceful sleep.  And I leave you with a bit of chuckle-inducing humour from our friend Jimmy Kimmel …

Another Ball To Keep Your Eye On …

Posted on by under Political commentary, Social commentary

The past week or two has been a three-ring media circus, with news of Rosanne Barr making an ass of herself, Samantha Bee trying to keep up with Roseanne, Trump pardoning the least likely felons, Tuesday primaries, Trump’s tariffs, the feud between Trump and Super bowl winners the Philadelphia Eagles, the upcoming G7 summit, and Trump’s on-again-off-again meeting with Kim Jong-un, to name a few.  So it is understandable that you might have missed something important stuck in one of the back corners of the room.

By now, surely we all understand that one of the goals of Trump and his supporters is to diminish spending on domestic social programs that help people have food to eat, a place to live, and medical care.  Instead, he/they would rather increase such things as military spending, which is a multi-billion-dollar gig for defense industry, and putting extra money into the coffers of wealthy corporations.  Trump has, for the past 16 months, been chipping away at the programs that benefit people, such as his executive orders that put large cracks into ACA and is resulting in a spike in health insurance premiums, especially for those who can least afford it.

But the latest has the potential to do far greater damage than anything he has done so far.  On Wednesday it was announced that the administration is preparing to release a sweeping plan for reorganizing the federal government that includes a major consolidation of welfare programs — and a renaming of the Health and Human Services Department.

It all started back in March 2017, when Trump signed an executive order  directing the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to come up with a plan to overhaul the government to make it more efficient.

There are three major issues I see with this plan.  One, the renaming, two, the consolidation of services under HHS, and three, Alex Azar, the Secretary of HHS.  Let us look at each of these issues.

The name change …

Until 1980, HHS was named Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.  Under President Carter, the Department of Education became a separate department, and the word “Welfare” was dropped from the name because of the stigma.  Many associate ‘welfare’ with ‘lazy poor people—mainly black, single mothers—bilking the federal government’.  A recent study found racial resentment fueled most white Americans’ attitudes toward social safety nets. Other studies have found that public support drops for programs labeled as “welfare” as opposed to when they are labeled as “assistance to the poor.”

The consolidation …

In part, the rationale for consolidating services under one department is explained by …

“You have low-income assistance in a bunch of different shops without one point of oversight and without a whole lot of communication. Why not have one federal agency responsible for execution?”

I see some logic in this, but … we do not have a federal government in place that can be trusted.  Period.  Trump has already proven he has little, if any concern for the poor, the disabled or the elderly.  Congress has already proven that they will basically rubber-stamp whatever legislation Trump asks for.  Consolidate all services, then he cuts the budget by 75%.  What happens then?

The six major programs that would fall under the umbrella of the new department are:

  • Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
  • Medicaid (includes Child’s Health Insurance Program aka CHIP)
  • Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food stamps)
  • Supplemental Security Income
  • Earned Income Tax Credit
  • Housing Assistance

The Secretary …

The Secretary of the current HHS department is Alex Michael Azar II.  From 2012 to 2017, Mr. Azar was President of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company, a major pharmaceutical drug company, and was a member of the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a pharmaceutical lobby.  Under Azar’s leadership, drug prices rose steadily.  In fact, under Azar, the company tripled the price of insulin.  Yet, when Trump nominated Azar, he called him a “star for better healthcare and lower drug prices.”

Azar has long been a critic of ACA and predicts there will be a blanket repeal before the end of this year.  He is also firmly against women’s right to choose in the matter of abortion.

Last year, when Trump announced his choice of Azar, Bernie Sanders said …

“The nomination of Alex Azar, the former head of Eli Lilly’s U.S. operations, shows that Trump was never serious about his promise to stop the pharmaceutical industry from ‘getting away with murder. The last thing we need is to put a pharmaceutical executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.”

I agree, and would also add that the last thing we need is to put the lives and well-being of some 40 million low income people under the direction of an agency headed by a drug czar.  Everything I have read about Azar indicates that he is toeing the party line … or rather, the Trumpian line, saying nothing that resembles fact as regards health insurance.  His goal, like so many others in the Trump administration, is profit.  What is needed to oversee low-income assistance programs is a person whose goal is to help people.  Mr. Azar does not fill that bill.

The reality is that much of this plan to reorganize the federal government, which is said to also include “big changes” in nearly every department, may not likely see the light of day, for much of it will require the approval of Congress.  Then again, the current Congress hasn’t said “no” to much of anything yet. But the intent could not be more chillingly clear:  the more government programs that are rebranded as “welfare” regardless of their function or intent, the easier it will be to cut them.

The full plan is expected to be released in the next few weeks.  I can hardly wait (dripping sarcasm intended).

Let Them Eat Trump Steaks

Posted on by under Political commentary, Social commentary

Paul Krugman is an economist who has taught Economics at MIT, Yale, and the London School of Economics.  In 2008, he won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This man obviously knows of what he speaks. He is also a columnist for the New York Times.  His column today, titled Let Them Eat Trump Steaks, is about the current administration’s efforts to rob low income people of any and all benefits. His words grabbed me and I felt it was something worth sharing. cognitive dissonance

In general, Donald Trump is notoriously uninterested in policy details. It has long been obvious, for example, that he never bothered to find out what his one major legislative victory, the 2017 tax cut, actually did. Similarly, it’s pretty clear that he had no idea what was actually in the Iran agreement he just repudiated.

In each case, it was about ego rather than substance: scoring a “win,” undoing his predecessor’s achievement.

But there are some policy issues he really does care about. By all accounts, he really hates the idea of people receiving “welfare,” by which he means any government program that helps people with low income, and he wants to eliminate such programs wherever possible.

Most recently, he has reportedly threatened to veto the upcoming farm bill unless it imposes stringent new work requirements on recipients of SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, still commonly referred to as food stamps.

Let me be upfront here: There’s something fundamentally obscene about this spectacle. Here we have a man who inherited great wealth, then built a business career largely around duping the gullible — whether they were naïve investors in his business ventures left holding the bag when those ventures went bankrupt, or students who wasted time and money on worthless degrees from Trump University. Yet he’s determined to snatch food from the mouths of the truly desperate, because he’s sure that somehow or other they’re getting away with something, having it too easy.

But however petty Trump’s motives, this is a big deal from the other side. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that new work requirements plus other restrictions proposed by House Republicans would end up denying or reducing nutritional aid to around two million people, mostly in families with children.

Why would anyone want to do that? The thing is, it’s not just Trump: Conservative hatred for food stamps is pervasive. What’s behind it?

The more respectable, supposedly intellectual side of conservative opinion portrays food stamps as reducing incentives by making life too pleasant for the poor. As Paul Ryan put it, SNAP and other programs create a “hammock” that “lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”

But this is a problem that exists only in the right’s imagination. Able-bodied SNAP recipients who should be working but aren’t are very hard to find: A vast majority of the program’s beneficiaries either are working — but at unstable jobs that pay low wages — or are children, elderly, disabled or essential family caregivers.

Oh, and there’s strong evidence that children in low-income families that receive food stamps become more productive and healthier adults, which means that the program is actually good for long-run economic growth.

Is it about the money? The enactment of the budget-busting 2017 tax cut proved once and for all, for anyone who had doubts, that Republicans don’t actually care about deficits.

But even if they did care about deficits, the C.B.O. estimates that the proposed cuts to food stamps would save less than one percent, that’s right, one percent, of the revenue lost due to that tax cut. In fact, over the next decade the entire SNAP program, which helps 40 million Americans, will cost only about a third as much as the tax cut. No, it’s not about the money.

What about racism? Historically, attacks on food stamps have often involved a barely disguised racial element — for example, when Ronald Reagan imagined a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. And I suspect that Trump himself still thinks of food stamps as a program for urban black people.

But while many urban blacks do get food stamps, so do many rural whites. Nationally, significantly more whites than blacks receive food stamps, and participation in SNAP is higher in rural than in urban counties. Food stamps are especially important in depressed regions like Appalachia that have lost jobs in coal and other traditional sectors.

And yes, this means that some of the biggest victims of Trump’s obsession with cutting “welfare” will be the very people who put him in office.

Consider Owsley County, Ky., at the epicenter of Appalachia’s regional crisis. More than half the county’s population receives food stamps; 84 percent of its voters supported Trump in 2016. Did they know what they were voting for?

In the end, I don’t believe there’s any policy justification for the attack on food stamps: It’s not about the incentives, and it’s not about the money. And even the racial animus that traditionally underlies attacks on U.S. social programs has receded partially into the background.

No, this is about petty cruelty turned into a principle of government. It’s about privileged people who look at the less fortunate and don’t think, “There but for the grace of God go I”; they just see a bunch of losers. They don’t want to help the less fortunate; in fact, they get angry at the very idea of public aid that makes those losers a bit less miserable.

And these are the people now running America.

These, folks, are the facts.  Just one more reason we need to ensure some changes happen on 06 November.

Raising the Rent …

Posted on by under Political commentary, Social commentary

Dr. Ben Carson, formerly a pediatric neurosurgeon, is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the Trump administration.  Dr. Carson was, by all accounts, an excellent surgeon, but as I have mentioned before in this blog, he should have stayed in the medical profession and out of politics.

Yesterday’s news, widely reported among the media, floored me – a jaw-dropping moment.   It turns out that Dr. Carson has a plan … a plan to raise rents on subsidized housing, in some cases as much as 300%.  This comes on the heels of an executive order that Trump signed earlier this month to expand work requirements for low-income Americans receiving Medicaid, food stamps, public housing benefits and welfare.

Hey … somebody has to pay for all those tax cuts we gave to the already-wealthy last year, right?

Carson also wants to scrap rules allowing deductions for medical and child-care costs when determining rent, which Carson says gives some tenants an unfair advantage.  Now think about this one.  He wants to impose a requirement that all adults under 60 must be employed, but take away the credit for child care?  If I’m a single mom, and I have to work, most likely at a minimum wage job, and I have to pay for child care … ???

Trump, in his budget proposal, suggested that families on food stamps be given, instead, a box of government-issued non-perishable food.  No fresh veggies or chicken, just canned beans and peanut butter.  Oh yeah, that’s healthy.

Let us not forget that it was just last May when Carson said that “poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind.”  And let’s also remember that Mr. Carson and his wife like to live well … they really like nice things.  Such as the $31,000 dining room set he ordered for his new office.  Once the public became aware of it, he canceled the order, but still …

And let’s take a look again at Ben & Candy’s 6,400 square-foot, five-bedroom house …

Carson-house-1And now, how about, just for comparison purposes, some of the homes he plans to triple the rent on …

I do not suggest that Dr. Carson should live like a pauper, but rather that his lavish lifestyle prevents him from having any sense of what those less fortunate go through simply to survive in the world.  Just how little Dr. Carson understands about anything can be seen in his remarks last December when he offered a prayer at a cabinet meeting that included thanks for “the unity in Congress that presented an opportunity for our economy to expand so that we can fight the corrosive debt that has been destroying our future.”  He was referring to the wealthy donor tax cuts that will dramatically increase our national debt!

Dr. Carson’s own net worth is said to be around $30 million.  And although he claims a ‘rags-to-riches’ story of childhood poverty, I am willing to bet that this man has never missed so much as a single meal in his entire life!

Carson justifies his stance by saying he is doing poor people a favour, because the current system creates …

“perverse incentives, including discouraging these families from earning more income and becoming self-sufficient.”

While nobody expects cabinet members to be selected from among the poorest of poor, it would be nice if they weren’t so far removed from the day-to-day reality most of us live with that they cannot even relate to the very people they are supposed to be helping.

GOP Beliefs About Poor People Are Myths To Justify Tax Cuts For Rich/ Cuts To Entitlement Spending

Posted on by under Political commentary, Re-blogs, Social commentary

Today’s Congress is the richest in the history of the nation. These wealthy men & women have zero concept what it is like to choose between putting food on the table or taking their sick child to the doctor. They have no understanding what it is like to wonder how to pay the rent or electric bill. And thus, since they have no real life experience, they make up myths to justify cutting social services that benefit the lower income groups in order to increase their own wealth via tax cuts for the wealthy. Our friend Gronda has done an excellent job de-bunking those myths and showing our elected representatives for the greedy, self-focused people they are. Please take a moment to read, and remember this on November 6th! Thank you, Gronda!

Gronda Morin

I have observed the resurrection of the racist myth of the “Welfare Queen” as well as other misleading talking points to describe poor people by members of the GOP.

The GOP in the US Congress cannot be allowed to disseminate these myths as an excuse to enact cuts to current safety-net programs for the poor and/ or to justify additional tax cuts for the wealthy.

See: Why the UN is investigating extreme poverty … in America/ Guardian/ December 2017

Here is the rest of the story…

(Source for below AP report published by the Chicago Tribune on the 19th of December 2017 by Michele Gilman, University of Baltimore: (The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Excerpts from “3 myths about the poor that Republicans are using to support slashing US safety net:”

“Republicans continue to use long-debunked…

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