Asshole Idiot Nation: Grocery Store Clerk Humiliates Food Stamp Recipient

You really have to hand it to asshole conservatives and the doctrinaire libertarians for how successful they have been in turning us plebes against one another so that we don't turn around and see that it's the face of the oligarchs that is connected to the big red, white a blue dick they are shoving up our asses on a daily basis. The brillance of their campaign to demonize poverty even as they strive hard to drive even more members of the former working and middle classes into poverty was on display again this week, as reported by Digital Journal:

Cindy Nerger of Warner Robins, Ga., who has been on a waiting list for kidney transplant for five years, was brought to tears at a supermarket last week when a clerk ridiculed her in the presence of other customers for using food stamps. Local TV station WMAZ, reported the incident after Nerger posted her story on the station's Facebook page.

She said she went shopping last week Tuesday at the Kroger off Watson Boulevard. When she got to the register, the clerk insisted wrongly that $10 worth of items were not covered. She said: "He told me I owed him 10 dollars and some change. I am not exactly sure what it was, but I told him, I said I am sorry sir, but there is nothing in my cart that is not covered by food stamps." According to Nerger, Kroger employees kept her on the line for half an hour.

A store manager finally intervened and told the clerk to give her the items. When she complained about the treatment she received, the the clerk said aloud: "Excuse me for working for a living and not relying on food stamps!" Nerger said at this point she was so embarrassed that she broke down in tears. She said: "I was upset, so, I was like, you know, I told you that it was covered under food stamps, you know, so, there was no need for all of this, you know, and he said, 'Well excuse me that I work for a living and don't rely on food stamps like you.'" She added: "I honestly was angry. I was angry at first, but it turned into tears because when I turned around and I saw the people there I was like, oh my goodness, and I just started crying."

According to The Huffington Post, Nerger, 28. said she and her husband were not proud to use food stamp debit card. She told The Huffington Post, "I felt shy when I used them and my husband does, too. I would try to hide the card." She said, "I didn't want to have to go there, you know, nobody wants to have to ask somebody for help, but it got to the point it was either ask for help or starve."

The Huffington Post reports Nerger said she started receiving food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assitance Program) after she fell ill in 2008 and became eligible for Medicare and Social Security Supplemental Income. While she is on waiting list for kidney transplant she cannot work because of daily 12-hr dialysis treatment. According to Nerger, her husband runs a carpentry business but does not make enough income to sustain the family without assistance.

No doubt that idiot grocery store clerk, who is probably living paycheck to paycheck himself, never gave a moment's thought that he could very easily find himself in Cindy Nerger's shoes at some point in the future. Funny that it is often those who are the closest to actually needing the social safety net who often times are the ones who scream the loudest about it.

I'd so like to take that asshole clerk for a visit to the corporate headquarters of Dyncorps International, or SAIC or General Dynamics so maybe he could get it through his thick fucking skull who the real welfare queens are. Those war contractor assholes and others of their ilk are sucking down many, many times more of his precious little tax dollars that all of the Cindy Nergers of the world combined. Or maybe a little tour of Wall Street and all of the giant financial firms that have been bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and whose executives continue to rake in millions of dollars in bonuses while laughing their asses off that fucking morons like him continue to listen to fat fucking pig Rush Limbaugh and to vote for the politicians that enable them to rob him and tens of millions of others like him of their livelihoods, security and futures.

Oh, who am I fucking kidding. Like there is ANY chance that a closed-minded simpleton who lacks even one iota of basic human empathy would fucking understand any of it even if you rubbed his fucking face in it. In fact, you know what? Fuck that asshole. Fuck him and every ignorant fucking piece of shit like him. I have had it with all of them. If someone in this country has to find themselves starving and destitute because of the heartless policies he so foolishly supports, let it someday BE him. I just hope I can be there when it happens to sneer and tell him to get a fucking job.


Bonus: Sorry, I think I was actually channeling angry Bill for a moment there

Why I Don't Care About the Chick-fil-A Controversy

I was really trying to avoid writing about this latest stupid media-manufactured controversy, but since it apparently refuses to go away I felt compelled to say something. I just love how liberals and progressives in this country are so smug about how conservatives and reactionaries often whip up "fake outrage" about a particular issue to get their supporters all fired up, and then they constantly turn around and allow themselves get easily trolled by an opposition that is well versed in what buttons it needs to push to provoke a reaction. Pavlov could not have trained his dog any better.

The latest kerfuffle started when Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy stated during an interview, "We are very much supportive of the family--the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that." Right on cue, pandering politicians like New York and Chicago Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emmanuel jumped into the fray, hoping to deflect people's attention from how their policies help fuck over the working and middle classes by demonstrating their "strong" support for gay rights. Because when it comes to massive distractions, few issues are a bigger winner for the non-Republican scum who hold high office throughout the land. Sadly, as a "leftist" officeholder you can get away with pushing through pretty much any old corporation-enriching government policy just so long as you prove your "Kum-ba-yah" credentials to your wine-sipping, brie-nibbling, NPR-listening, Daily Show-watching core supporters.

The whole brouhaha makes me tired for one very simple reason: I hated Chick-fil-A long before that horrible company's president made his idiotic and bigoted statement. Let's examine for a moment what Chick-fil-A really is: a predatory corporation which sells shitty, unhealthy food that greatly contributes to obesity and death from more than 1500 ugly ass stores blighting the lanscape from coast to coast while paying its employees shit wages and having the balls to claim the moral high ground because it gives those same beleaguered employees Sundays off so they can go to church. The fact that the company's president doesn't support gay marriage is just the cherry on a gigantic corporate shit sundae.

Calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A is particularly stupid. Fact is, if you are a liberal or progressive who really cares about social injustice, public health or the environment you shouldn't have been patronizing this shitty company to begin with, and all a boycott does is create a backlash that will make the reactionaries and conservatives more likely to go to Chick-fil-A for a crappy chicken sandwich instead of, say, Boston Market. In other words, a boycott will change nothing. Oh, and to those libertarians who are defending Chic-fil-A's right to be a bunch of homophobic assholes let me just say: fuck you. To paraphrase George Carlin, only in a nation of unenlightened half-wits would such a terrible company be able to thrive in the first place.

In the end, pointless arguments about Chick-fil-A's gay marriage stance actually serve to subtly legitimize it's horrible business model because in essence liberals and progressives are reduced to saying that it is all right to be a planet-raping, poison-dispensing, low wage-paying fast food chain just so long as you are nice to gay people. And once again through such meaningless distractions, the energy of the American left gets wasted on sheer wankery guaranteed to ensure that there will be no genuine social change in this country.


Bonus: "The clouds will part and the sky cracks open, and god himself will reach his fucking arm through, just to push you down, just to hold you down"

Minnesota Republican Lawmaker Says Food Stamps Are Like "Feeding Wild Animals"

The political nervous breakdown of the Republican Party seems to be accelerating. By now it should be readily apparent to any observer who reamins even somewhat tenuously connected to reality that, in the wake of their victories in the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans have dangerously overstepped their supposed mandate. Of course, this was entirely predictable given the officially sanctioned media narrative that Obama and the Democrats lost because they supposedly overreached, when in fact the opposite was true. Enthusiasm for President Hopey-Changey on the part of his own supporters waned dramatically as it became apparent that he was determined to do little more than carry on the disastrous Bush economic policies which got us into this mess in the first place.

The politically smart thing for the Republicans to do would have been to hammer on Obama for essentially giving Wall Street a pass on crashing the economy and causing the economic crisis. But since they are even more in the pockets of the oligarchs than are the Democrats, they obviously could not do that. So their strategy was to obstruct Obama even on the tepid reforms he did try to push while whipping up the culture war politics that had served them so well back when George Bush the Lesser was still happily farting behing the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

The problem for the Republicans was that they had pretty much gotten all the mileage they could get out of gay bashing, so they needed to look around for other ripe targets to rile up their troglodyte base. One choice was to take the war against "feminazis" to the next level, which explains the utterly misguided recent campaigns against not only abortion but contraception. The other and perhaps even more unfortunate tact was to ramp up the demonization of the poor at precisely the time when tens of millions of people are still suffering from the effects of the economic crash.

This "war on the poor" hit another low point with the recent comments from State Representative Mary Franson, who compared the Food Stamp program to "feeding wild animals." Here is The Raw Story with the details:

One Republican lawmaker in Minnesota expressed a peculiar but existing belief in GOP circles Friday afternoon, claiming that food stamps recipients are virtually similar to feeding wild animals.

State Rep. Mary Franson released a Youtube video describing her hopes of reducing the amount of time residents in Minnesota could stay on food stamps from five years to three.

“And here, it’s kind of ironic, I’ll read you this little funny clip that we got from a friend,” she said. “It says, ‘Isn’t it ironic that the food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever. Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to please not feed the animals, because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.”

Franson is not the first Republican to make this comparison. In 2010, then South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer said exactly the same thing.

According to the USDA, Todd County in Franson’s district contains one of Minnesota’s highest poverty rates, with 16.9 precent of residents in 2010.

That last sentence is particularly galling since it's not like this dingbat represents some lilly white prosperous suburb where poor folks are rare. Presumably, she is in a position to see with her own eyes what the economic crisis has done to her own community, and yet she's such a psychopath that it has obviously elicited exactly zero feelings of empathy in her. Nationally, of course, you would think that someone on the Republican side would recognize that bashing the poor is not a smart strategy when there are now so many more of them than there were a few years ago, but the party obviously got so used to claiming it creates its own reality that it has now made the fatal error of believing its own press clippings.

The biggest beneficiary of such audacious heartlessness, of course, is President Hopey-Changey himself. Absent another crash in the financial markets between now and November, all Obama will have to do is keep doing what he has been doing: pay lip service to being on the side of those who are hurting while continuing to take big fat campaign checks from Wall Street and pointing the finger at all of the crazy rhetoric spewing forth from the Republican side. In this manner he could breeze through to reelection without making any concrete promises to take on the oligarchs and start restoring basic fairness to the system. It's almost enough to make you wonder if useful idiots like Minnesota State Representative Mary Franson are secretly on the payroll of the president's reelection campaign.


Bonus: A song from a guy who actually does have a little empathy for the downtrodden

Georgia College Students: "Without Food Stamps We Wouldn't Be Able to Eat"

Pardon me for being so crude, but I simply cannot think of another way to express my feelings here other than to ask the question: how many more ways can we fuck over our young adults in this country? We brainwash the poor kinds into thinking that the MUST have a college education in order to succeed in this society (even as that becomes more of a cruel lie with every passing year), send them to institutions of alleged higher learning which charge them exorbitant fees and then saddle them with massive amounts if student loan debt. And then, when some of them have the audacity to try to help support themselves by applying for food stamps, we cut off that meager support because its "too expensive." Here is a local Georgia television station with the story:

Georgia's college students are facing the prospect of the HOPE Scholarship paying less and less toward their tuition in the next few years.

So how are they dealing with rising tuition and fees?

Many are working whatever part-time jobs they can rustle up, mornings, nights and weekends. But they're also tapping into an unconventional form of student financial aid: food stamps.

The "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" is providing college students who qualify with $200 a month toward their groceries, making them part of the 20 percent of Georgia's population currently receiving the benefit.

Here are two students' appalling stories:

"With the budget cuts, students are definitely going to have to think of different ways to get money and finances for things such as groceries," said Danielle Ford, a GSU Junior. "So food stamps will definitely be a big help, absolutely. Without food stamps, they wouldn't be able to eat."

Taylor is a full-time student with a part-time job.

"As a full-time student, my bill usually comes up to about almost $5,000 a semester. That's tuition alone," he said.

On top of that are his books and fees and his rent for an off-campus apartment, which is $600 a month.

One of the reasons he moved out of a campus dorm, Taylor said, is that GSU was requiring him to pay, in addition to his room cost, about $1,700 a semester for the university's meal plan.

Now, living off-campus and buying his own groceries, he understands why students are tapping into the SNAP program.

"I mean, I think it helps," said Taylor, "because these are students that I know that [like me] are working, like, jobs! And they're really tight on money. These are people who actually really, really need it, and they tell me it's a big help."

Alas:

Last year, Michigan cut 30,000 students from its food stamp rolls by tightening up the requirements for approval, in order to save $75 million a year.

Sadly, these kids don't know it but they are learning some hard lessons about the new realities in modern day America. They'd be much better off dropping out of school and joining the Occupy movement than driving themselves ever deeper into debt chasing an American Dream than has long since turned into an epic nightmare.


Bonus: "Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders...here are the young men, where have they been? We knocked on the doors of hell's darkest chamber...pushed to the limits, we dragged ourselves in"

Food Stamp Enrollment Surpasses 46 Million

As the chart above shows, Zero Hedge reported today that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) surged by another 423,000 Americans and now tops 46 million for the first time:

While the capital markets may be cheering that in the past month 120,000 people supposedly found jobs, even if these were largely temporary or part-time just in time for the year end shopping sprees, we wonder how they will react when learning that according to the latest update from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), some 423,000 Americans found their way to minimum way subsistence, courtesy of Food Stamp handouts from Uncle Sam. Since the start of the Second Great Depression, food stamp participation has increased by 18.7 million, and is now at an all time higher 46.3 million.

As I've said before, forget the manipulated official unemployment rate, the SNAP numbers are the true indicator of the real state of the economy given that one does not "drop off the rolls" unless one's income actually rises to a level in which they are no longer eligible for the benefit.

Zero Hedge didn't do this little bit of math, but the 18.7 million SNAP recipients gained since the start of the recession means that enrollment has increased by around 400,000 people every month for the past 47 months. That is a staggering figure to contemplate and shows that the collapse of the American economy continues unabated, official pronouncements and mainstream media cheerleading notwithstanding.

Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut are Lobbying to Get a Piece of the Food Stamp Action

I’ve written before about the explosion in the number of Americans who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, since the beginning of the Great Recession at the end of 2007. Currently, around 45 million people receive SNAP benefits at a rate of about $133 per participant, per month. That’s nearly 15% of the total population, and is a true (rather than government/media-manipulated) indicator of the state of the economy.

And now, in a story that should be as predictable as night following day, comes a report that one of America’s worst peddlers of the junk food causing our rampant obesity epidemic has been lobbying the government to get a piece of that action. Here’s USA Today with the story:

The number of businesses approved to accept food stamps grew by a third from 2005 to 2010, Department of Agriculture records show, as vendors from convenience and dollar discount stores to gas stations and pharmacies increasingly joined the growing entitlement program.

Now, restaurants, which typically have not participated in the program, are lobbying for a piece of the action.

Louisville-based Yum! Brands, whose restaurants include Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut, is trying to get restaurants more involved, federal lobbying records show.

So why are they so hot to trot to participate? The article goes on to state:

There is big money at stake. USDA records show food stamp benefits swelled from $28.5 billion to $64.7 billion in that period.

Four states accept restaurants, with Florida the most recent to begin a program.

"It makes perfect sense to expand a program that's working well in California, Arizona and Michigan, enabling the homeless, elderly and disabled to purchase prepared meals with SNAP benefits in a restaurant environment," Yum! spokesman Jonathan Blum said.

Ummm…I don’t wish to sound like a rude contrarian there, Mr. Blum, but it does not in fact “make perfect sense” to include your company in the SNAP program. Let me be perfectly frank with you if I may, sir. Your food is shit. It is barely fit for human consumption at all, let alone by poor people who have very limited culinary options as it is. You and your ilk are merchants of death who kill countless Americans every year through diabetes, heart disease and other obesity-related illnesses. Your company is right there with the tobacco companies, difference being that they only get their government agriculture subsidies on the producer end.

Sadly, we have become a nation so unmoored from basic common sense and decency that we could actually regard enabling someone to buy a large bucket of KFC poppers as an appropriate social welfare benefit. As it is, we already have the fattest poor people in the world because of corporate America loading much of what we eat with corn syrup and other unhealthy additives to get people addicted to the type of diets that are slowly killing them.

Make a profit getting people sick eating cheap, crappy food, and then profit again when they seek medical care and drugs to treat the resulting chronic health conditions. It’s a classic win-win right out of the Harvard Business School. For nothing in this country, not even our basic health and well being, is so sacred that you can't put a price tag on it.

The answer from the Department of Agriculture (which runs SNAP) to Yum! Brands and any other fast food chain which lobbies for approval to participate in the program should of course be: Hell No. But I’m certainly not holding my breath that it will be.

He Who Feeds You, Owns You – Food Stamp Enrollment Surges Above 44 Million

It was reported yesterday that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), still better known by its colloquial name, Food Stamps, rose to a new record high of just over 44 million Americans. As shown by the chart above (courtesy of Zero Hedge), the number of SNAP recipients has been marching steadily upwards since even before the beginning of the Great Recession, starting at around 26 million in February 2007 and surging by 18 million since then. For those of you keeping score at home, that means that our most basic social welfare program has been expanding at a rate of about 350,000 individuals a month for over four years now with no end in sight.

I’ve long argued that the untrustworthy and manipulated official unemployment statistics are no more reliable an indicator of what’s going on in the real economy than is the completely rigged Dow Jones Industrial Average. If you want a true picture of what is really happening on Main Street you need look no further than the SNAP figures, which show a tsunami-like surge of people living in abject poverty. The chart also shows that the percentage of Americans receiving food assistance has risen from just 8.7% at the beginning of 2007 to about 14.3% today. Sadly, according to Wikipedia, nearly half of all SNAP recipients are children.

Becoming a food stamp recipient means you have slid all the way down to the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, since in order to qualify you have to have no better than a poverty-level income. More importantly, being reliant upon the SNAP program means that your very survival is dependent upon the ability of the United States Government to service its debt and come up with the $133.12 it sends out to each recipient every month. The overall cost of the program is skyrocketing because of the huge surge in enrollment, and is just one of many factors putting upwards pressure on the federal deficit at a time when the nation's credit card is coming within sight of being maxed out.

It's also an indicator showing why the “debate” going on in Washington right now over lifting the federal debt limit is just so much sound and fury signifying nothing. For while it’s true that our nation’s “leaders" long ago stopped caring about the poor, that is only so long as they can manage to keep them invisible and their plight away from the national spotlight. Let the SNAP payments lapse for a few months and I’ll bet even our lapdog mainstream media might begin to notice when a large number of kids start showing up to school in poor areas looking like Ethiopian famine victims. For this reason alone the debt limit will eventually be raised, unless things really have gone completely off the rails in the nation’s capital.

So here we are, faced with yet another intractable problem that has been made exponentially worse by a feckless national political leadership that has allowed the wealth of the nation to be stripped down and stolen by the greedy elites who finance their campaigns. It was bad enough when huge numbers of blue collar and middle class jobs were being shipped overseas in the name of the corporate bottom line. But now, by driving America to the brink of insolvency they have virtually assured that the day will come in the not too distant future when the SNAP cards will fail to recharge at the beginning of the month. And that will unleash a humanitarian tragedy the likes of which this nation of historical food abundance has never seen before.