The party of the plutocrats is marked by its loathing for many things, among them food stamps. If you search the public record over the past two years it’s clear the Republican Party, as it exists now, thinks people on food assistance are vermin.
From Newt Gingrich to Ted Nugent, it is abundantly clear.
DD came up with some eye-popping statistics to frame the astonishing number of people on food stamps in our nation.
By itself, the number is huge. Still, it becomes even more depressing when the magnitude of it is put in context.
Food stamp usage in the US is a symbol of national economic failure so systemic it takes your breath away. It is rock solid proof the US economy does not provide jobs which earn a fair living for a polyglot cohort that dwarfs entire western nations.
Between 44 and 45 million Americans use food stamps.
Let’s look at the populations of selected western countries:
Population of Norway 4.8 million
Sweden 9.3 million
UK 61.8 million
Spain 45.9
Greece 11.2
Three quarters of England fit in the US basket of food stamp recipients. Or Sweden, Norway, and Greece combined with a good surplus left over. Or 99 percent of Spain.
If you add up the populations of the 50 states, starting with the least,
the number of people on food stamps in the US is a number that roughly includes the summed populations of:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas,
Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky.
That’s 26 states.
Food stamp use cuts across a wide swath of American society.
This shows that even when one excludes the unemployed, a mass of jobs large enough to fill foreign nations provide work which is not compensated well enough to make a decent living.
Such jobs are essentially slave labor in which ruinous corporate wages are offset by government subsidy.
One can look at it as a process in which corporate America depressed wages for a fair day’s work, maximizing profit by shoving part of the cost of a barely subsistence wage onto the government, and by extension, the taxpayer.
This can only be seen as entrenched predatory behavior.
Take, for example, the national security machine. Since the onset of the war on terror, US defense contractors enjoyed an immense boom. They are among the biggest and wealthiest companies in the world.
Lately a lot of complaints have been made about the food stamp program. Let’s take a look a one group that gets food stamps — 14,000 military families were on food stamps in 2000.
The Pentagon does not keep track of any military families that are on food stamps. President Bush in 2001 decided to authorize a $500 subsistence pay increase that was taxable in order to help military families get off food stamps. It did not work. Military families increased on food stamps because food stamps are non-taxable.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
President Obama, in the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, increased the food subsistence program for military families to $1,100 and made it non-taxable to help get families off food stamps. But will it?
The military pay scale does not match cost of living anywhere in America. So if the U.S can only pay men and women who volunteer to serve and protect our freedom a wage that reflects poverty, how can anyone complain about someone else getting food stamps?
15.9 percent of the population of Texas is on food stamps. If you believe the opinions of the GOP, they are all leeches.
The GOP’s view of food stamp use can be summed in various repellent quotes from Ted Nugent.
Nugent: The America [Obama] doesn’t … people are using food stamps for something other than good nutrition. You gotta be kidding me. We got a bunch of idiots out there that are absolutely raping and pillaging an otherwise positive humanitarian system.
Morgan: My issue about you and the welfare thing is it showed — to me it showed no sense of compassion for people who have genuine problems. Who genuinely need it.
NUGENT: Well, you see –
MORGAN: Your judgment, if you don’t mind me saying, is all encompassing. All sweeping. You think they’re all on the fiddle.
The food stamp program in the US serves a great purpose. And as a result not too many Americans think of ours as a place where violent food riots could erupt.
Credit Occupy Wall Street with its non-violent hostile encampment on Wall Street, symbolically drawing a long overdue bullseye on the backs of the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the country.
It is no surprise then that hackers would be after their private information.
The addresses of the Goldman Sachs CEO and similar material pertaining to Chase’s Jamie Dimon were posted to Pastebin by a hacking group called CabinCr3w.
“The group did not explain why it had targeted Goldman Sachs, one of the most prominent investment banks in the world,” reported a seemingly slow-witted reporter for ABC News on-line.
Months ago I posted that the Wall Street banksters remained relatively safe from overt demonstrations of anger because of their anonymity.
Outside of journalists who wrote best-selling books on the economic collapse, average America remained largely ignorant of their names and faces.
Even if there’s an appetite for a lynching in the public, if nobody knows the names of the to-be-lynched … then the latter are probably safe.
That may be changing thanks to the NYC protests and the crews of cyber-paupers who show no reluctance in getting after the plutocrats on the Internet.
While they still enjoy the protection of the government and the rule of law — which, as many have figured out, only gets applied for the benefit of the top one percent, they enjoy no public sympathy. And it cannot but help to continually put their names in front of growing crowds of angry people.
We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local labor markets, exploiting cross market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by industry to other high-income countries. Rising exposure increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in US manufacturing employment. Transfer benefits payments for unemployment, disability, retirement, and healthcare also rise sharply in explosed labor markets. The deadweight loss of financing these transfers is one to two thirds as large as US gains from trade with China.
Gustavo Fring, Walter White’s boss in meth manufacturing, is one of the finest characters on current television.
Let’s give Giancarlo Esposito, the fellow who plays him, a big round of applause.
However, for last night’s episode it pains me slightly to note a lapse in reality in scripting.
Jesse Pinkman thinks the little boy, Brock, has been poisoned by his vial of ricin, produced by Walter, secreted away in a cigarette, for use at some future date on Gus.
The entire episode revolves around this. And at one point Jesse pleads with Brock’s mother, Andrea, to tell the doctors at the hospital about ricin.
In the real US, the moment she does, the jig is up for Jesse, Walter and Gus’s meth operation.
That’s because suspicion of ricin reported in the hospital at any state activates the national security network. Homeland Security and the FBI get called in, no matter how small the connection.
Five years ago I wrote about how it works here, for the Register.
In this case, an Arizona man named Casey Cutler was rounded up and convicted on a terror charge when his roommate went to the emergency ward with a respiratory illness, but reported he thought he might have been poisoned with ricin because Cutler was fiddling around with castor oil.
It doesn’t even really matter if no ricin is present. When the national security infrastructure is tripped, all Hell breaks loose.
I wrote:
[Once] the word ricin was uttered, it had to be reported to the federal network. When that happens, an array of responses is tripped, including the summoning of a Phoenix SWAT team, and WMD units from the Arizona National Guard and the FBI.
And that standard overwhelming federal response would assuredly mean the end for Jesse Pinkman, Walter White, Gus Fring and the high tech super meth production facility they run.
The only way out for the script writers: Having Andrea never mention ricin to Brock’s doctors at hospital. Or leaving the question in limbo for the final episode, probably a cliff-hanger, next week.
A recent investigative feature from a Denver newspaper goes into the case of Najibullah Zazi, the failed terrorist who wished to make subway bombs from beauty parlor supply store chemicals.
The paper relates the counter-terror operation that nabbed him. The government intercepted e-mails, was quickly on the stick and tailed Zazi all the way to New York City.
The newspaper compares him to Mohammed Atta.
Atta, however, appeared to be no fool. And his efforts actually worked — spectacularly from the point of view of al Qaeda.
Zazi, on the other hand, was like many al Qaeda men who apparently believe everything they read in newspapers about how easy it is to make explosives from recipes found on the net. They reason that since it is in print, it must be so.
The bomb-making instructions the FBI recovered from Zazi’s e-mails showed sophistication. According to the FBI, 30 grams of the substance Zazi wrote about would be enough to blow up a concrete block. Zazi’s notes indicate he intended to make up to 10 pounds — enough to blow up subway cars and everyone in them, Olson said.
“These guys were familiar with the New York subway. They knew what trains are most crowded when, and that’s what they focused on.” Olson added. “It would have been catastrophic.”
But he was caught because, starting Aug. 28, 2009, he began trying to make the explosives in the hotel room and failed every time. He frantically e-mailed an al-Qaeda facilitator in Pak istan named Ahmad, and it was those e-mails that the FBI intercepted.
In the end, Zazi’s major undoing was that he was either a bad chemist or took poor notes, Olson said.
DD has long maintained the real world is not interested in the stupid beliefs of counter-terror men and would-be terrorists who think all kinds of insta-mayhem-magic is at their fingertips on the Internet.
However, one can judge the quality of the jihadist by their reliance on such things. And history has show, again and again, that quality is very poor. If one is going to make improvised explosive devices, there’ are shortcuts to be had when trying to acquire a practical capability.
The men in the 9/11 attack did not rely on received wisdoms read in newspapers or Internet recipes.
And, as a side bit of history, they illustrate that if you run through your best soldiers in a kamikaze attack, no matter how spectacular the success, you may not find such resourceful human capital again.
A reprint from the old blog, well over a year ago, originally entitled “How To When to Quit Your Country.”
Worth a couple laughs, it’s still fairly accurate. More recent events make one only very modestly more hopeful.
Today’s post comes courtesy of the parasite industry devoted to selling articles and services on how you can get a job in the dreadful economy.
DD cadged it off Yahoo a few weeks ago for it’s especially ludicrous nature: Ten signs on how to know when to quit your job because the business you work for is dreadful. Well, that would be more than half of the jobs in the United States, at least, DD reckons.
So I’ve chosen to steal it and rebrand the thing as a test on how to know when to quit your dreadful, or dysfunctional, country.
10 Signs Your Country is Dysfunctional
Does the United States drive you crazy? Do you sometimes wonder if you are the only sane person living in it? Is America dysfunctional, or is it you? Here’s how to find out!
Sign No. 1: Do large numbers of people in your country spout conspicuous value statements filled with vague but important-sounding words like “freedom” and so on.
Examples:
“America has the best healthcare in the world!” — see here.
“We’ve found each other and we’ve found our voice and we are determined to fight for our freedoms,” says [a man who’s last name is Scott], wearing a white ‘Freedom Czar’ baseball cap at the convention.” — see here.
These slogans are never based in reality. They’re just rubbish statements used to end reasonable arguments or cheer-leading pap.
Sign No. 2: Bringing up a problem is considered more as evidence of a personality defect rather than as an actual observation of reality.
Example: “Those who oppose waterboarding are moral fools.” — see here.
In a dysfunctional country, if you don’t adhere to a belief held by many, you are the problem. Anything horrendous, illegal or plainly evil is justified on the basis that it’s a necessity for national security.
Sign No. 3: If by chance there are problems, the usual solution is a motivational pep rally.
From the Associated Press:
First, the independent Ross Perot contingent. Then, the liberal ”netroots” mobilization. Now, the conservative ”tea party” coalition.
No doubt this is democracy at work, a quintessential part of America.
Will the latest political phenomenon become a society-changing movement influencing elections and beyond?
”We are people who understand something wrong is going on in this country, and we want to change it,” says Dan Garner, a married 40-year-old sales representative from nearby Carthage who is new to politics. Like so many others, he’s had enough. ”The core thing is a loss of individual liberty.”
Attitude is everything. In dysfunctional America, there’s always a mob on the loose — a self-abusive confused mob more interested in tearing things down, setting fire to the place and obeying the interests of wealthier and more powerful people outside the mob aimed at destroying the lives of the people who comprise the mob.
To appear sane you must pretend that the mob is a symbol of democracy, not just a nuts crowd. Dysfunctional America is full of crazy mobs but if you have a good attitude, you won’t mention it. Or you’ll glorify them as part of the way the country solves its problems.
From AP:
“‘America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this,” Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, told convention attendees Saturday.
Sign No. 4: Double messages are delivered with a straight face. Too many to list.
America is always ending war and bringing freedom by starting up more war or escalating whatever wars it is in.
From Krugman:
Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.
Sign No. 5: History is regularly edited to make executive decisions more correct.
Huge bankster salaries and bonuses for people who wrecked the economy require justification.
“Bonuses must be paid to retain top talent.”
Sign No. 6: Directives are threatening.
“Your seatbelt fine is $720.”
“The fine for that red-light infraction is $500.”
“[With] the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.”
Sign No. 7: Democracy means giving someone the power to do something and then watching them not do it.
Example: Obvious when you think of it, really.
Sign No. 8: Resources are tightly controlled.
The big pieces of the national swag pie go to the military/national security and Wall Street while little or nothing is diverted for the social good or advancement of the country.
Whatever is proposed with regards to advancement and social good, the first and loudest response is that it will saddle the country with ruinous debt.
Sign No. 9: You are expected to feel lucky to live here because America is always the greatest country in the world. And if you don’t like it you should get out, preferably to some other country regularly mocked even though that country has a higher standard of living.
Sign No. 10: Rules and success are enforced based on who you are.
In a dysfunctional country, there are clearly insiders and outsiders and everyone knows who belongs in each group. If you’re wealthy, powerful and/or a celebrity, you’re always an insider and it is everyone else’s job to be a lickspittle to you and to reward you who have so much with even more. Most of the outsiders know this and like it. Only a few don’t and they’re all losers with bad attitudes. Class war is forbidden unless you want to wage it on others in your own class or those in one beneath yours.
Little Tommy Friedman tries to come up with a new phrase for “innovations” that reduce people to penury. It won’t catch on and I’m not gonna repeat it. Doubtless it will wind up in the title of one of his next insta-books.
But he’s tagged onto the big world of Internet crowd-sourcing sites where hundreds of thousands of people work at largely pointless jobs, stuff that keeps the plutocracy and service economy humming a bit, but which pay pennies.
Friedman seems astonished at this progress in a world where most people don’t see any unless one counts the global destruction of making a living as improvement.
The new jobs and innovations have too often been described as disruptive technologies.
After well over a decade of seeing and hearing this poisonous pap come out of the Silicon Valley and tech industry it’s easy to redefine disruptive technology.
Disruptive technology is jargon for something invented that destroys your way to make a living by siphoning 99 percent of the profit into the hands of the “innovator.”
The most obvious recent example from the news is represented by Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
A great world discovery and invention was the vaccine for smallpox. Eradication of polio in the US through mass vaccination when I was a child was another fine leap forward. And if malaria is ever conquered, that will be another. (The first two, incidentally, did not result in fabulous riches for the creators. However the eventual benefits to the human condition are immeasurable — in a most grand way.)
Mechanical Turk, another Bezos innovation in which hundreds of thousands of people work free-lance for virtually zero doing no-social-value process tasks, is nothing to be proud of either although it doubtless makes much money.
Matt Barrie, is the founder of freelancer.com, which today lists 2.8 million freelancers offering every service you can imagine. “The whole world is connecting up now at an incredibly rapid pace,??? says Barrie, and many of these people are coming to freelancer.com to offer their talents. Barrie says he describes this rising global army of freelancers the way he describes his own team: “They all have Ph.D.’s. They are poor, hungry and driven: P.H.D.???
Barrie offered me a few examples on his site right now: Someone is looking for a designer to design “a fully functioning dune buggy.??? Forty people are now bidding on the job at an average price of $268. Someone is looking for an architect to design “a car-washing cafe.??? Thirty-seven people are bidding on that job at an average price of $168. Someone is looking to produce “six formulations of chewing gum??? suitable for the Australian market. Two people are bidding at an average price of $375. When Barrie needed a five-word speech to accept a Webby Award, he offered $1,000 for the best idea. He got 2,730 entries and accepted “The Tech Boom Is Back.??? Someone looking for “a rap song to help Chinese students learn English??? has three bids averaging $157.
While the inane (“The Tech Boom is Back,” acceptance of a “Webby”) is commonplace in Friedman’s world of free-lance opportunity, one thing is going missing from the great global talent pool: The capacity to make life better. All the work being done is of virtually no benefit except to those who either put together the Internet aggregator or very large corporations using labor pools to drive compensations for menial service work in corporate nuisance industries to the lowest possible levels.
You can glean the free-lance crowd-sourcing jobs junk pile for days and literally not find one that improves the human condition even slightly. I’ve tried.
There was the job of checking your cable tv movies on demand menu for the presence of a few specific titles. Then there was the job, devised by a couple college professors, to test how scared you were by a series of mock terrorist attacks as shown on fictitious news broadcasts. There are the jobs at rewriting and uploading articles seeded with keywords for those wishing to game Google with spam blogs and sites. And the bottomless ocean of transcribing audio from mind-numbing corporate meetings and lectures, all for a couple thin dimes.
The list presented by Friedman today as evidence of busy hubbub is no exception, and painfully so.
In southern California, notably in Pasadena, the idea of someone designing a “car-washing cafe” through global free-lance work is unintentionally hilarious. There’s no shortage of them. One down the street from me offers shoe-shines, massage chairs and an outdoor lounge while you wait.
Ninety-nine percent of the labor employed in it also qualifies as sweat-shop work. Thanks to the decades long effort to curb unions and destroy the rights of workers no one can make any real living at it unless they pack themselves in at the lowest level of existence manageable, seven or so to an apartment.
Of course, very stupid people will believe that using Internet crowd-sourced free-lance work to design such a car wash is really something.
“How Did the Robot End Up With My Job?” is the title of Friedman’s Sunday column.
Friedman has been indistinguishable from a robot for some time. So he certainly knows.
The trick is in getting those few slots where the robots, as exemplified by Friedman, are richly rewarded.
Here’s Friedman getting hit with a pie in a famous incident, set to my Captain Beefheart imitation.
New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stated that he’s worried that American young people will begin to riot in our streets because of their unemployment.
While the mayor and I disagree on most things, he might be onto to something here.
The rest of the column indicates he’s largely unaware of the growing protest on Wall Street — by mostly young people in the Occupy Wall Street campaign.
Nugent believes the young should riot against Obama (unsurprising, he believes everyone must riot against the president):
Young people are starting to figure out that our president conned them in the last election, claiming that he could fix everything, make the world safer, create jobs, provide for everybody, redistribute earnings, coddle the unemployed, etc …
Many of the people in the Wall Street protest are unemployed. Per se, they are not protesting the President. They are protesting at the seat of capitalism before the wizards of finance who tore apart the US and world economy in 2008 and are busy going about it again. It is the biggest and most deserving target.
Since Ted cannot figure out young Americans — he semi-regularly insults them in his column for a variety of imagined sins from playing too many computer games to being lazy — he bags on them again.
For playing too many computer games and having a liberal education:
Where are the protests by today’s unemployed and underemployed young people? Why aren’t they demanding answers to fundamental questions about their future? Why aren’t they yelling that hope and change was a con job? Why aren’t they demanding answers to the reality that their generation will be the first in the history of America not to have a future at least as good as what their parents enjoyed?
Who knows? Maybe they can’t break away from playing computer and video games long enough to look around at their condition and the condition of America. Because of the toxic, liberal education they received, maybe they haven’t figured out how America is supposed to work instead of how our president wants to transform it into something that would inspire our Founding Fathers to call for a second American revolution.
Today they forced the closing of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Find the photos of crazy mean and stupid ol’ Ted playing his acoustic guitar, perfect for use in “Tough Crowd Boogie.” Sepia-toning him was the right touch.
