Saturday, April 2, 2011

Food Stamp Record

As some Americans managed to find part-time and temporary jobs in March, some other Americans dropped below the poverty level threshold. 105 thousand in one month to be precise. The total foodstamp participation in January hit an all time record 44,187,831 according to the USDA. But fear not, here's the bullish spin... sorry, there is no way to spin this.

And while there is no positive spin, here is the negative: the average monthly benefit on a per person and per household basis, has been declining for two years straight and is now at the lowest it has been since April 2009.

In summary: more Americans than ever are living on government subsistence, but at least the amount these people are receiving is the lowest since 2009, or $132.81 per month. Unfortunately, America's attempt to recreate communism may not be working out all that well.
Link Here..

7 comments:

  1. The amount of food stamp money depends on your circumstances and the state you live in. I have one friend at poverty level ($7500), with a monthly mortgage of $300. She gets about $150 a month in food stamps. I, on the other hand, have a higher income ($10,000) and my house is paid for. My food stamp allotment would be $25 a month.

    Please tell the effing Republicans (and some of the nasty posters here) that she and I are not lazy, shiftless people, sitting in front of the TV all day, living high on the hog at the government's expense. We both have medical problems and we live in rural areas with a dearth of jobs. To save money we eat whatever's on sale, we keep the thermostat at 55 degrees or less, and we drive old patched-together vehicles. Communism, my ass.

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  2. The abuse has been going on for so long you will find there is very little pity. This was posted here on October 4, 2010. When people feel that their hard earned money goes for these kinds of things, unfortunately, you will dumped into the group! If so many people didn't take advantage/abuse the system, you would find a more generous public. Since you feel the Democrats are so virtuous, I'll leave it at that.


    Welfare Money Spent On Vacations

    More than $69 million in California welfare money, meant to help the needy pay their rent and clothe their children, has been spent or withdrawn outside the state in recent years, including millions in Las Vegas, hundreds of thousands in Hawaii and thousands on cruise ships sailing from Miami.
    State-issued aid cards have been used at hotels, shops, restaurants, ATMs and other places in 49 other states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam, according to data obtained by The Times from the California Department of Social Services. Las Vegas drew $11.8 million of the cash benefits, far more than any other destination. The money was accessed from January 2007 through May 2010.
    Welfare recipients must prove they can't afford life's necessities without government aid: A single parent with two children generally must earn less than $14,436 a year to qualify for the cash assistance and becomes ineligible once his or her income exceeds about $20,000, said Lizelda Lopez, spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services.
    More on the 10-04-10 posting!

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  3. Seattle business owner admits to $1.5 million food stamp fraud


    SEATTLE -- The owner of a small Seattle herb store walked into a federal courtroom Wednesday morning and pleaded guilty to defrauding the food stamp program.

    Elsa Kwong agreed to pay back more than $1.5 million that she improperly obtained from the federal food program. She also forfeited $140,000 cash and two expensive automobiles.

    Kwong was charged last fall after Seattle Police and the United States Department of Agriculture, which runs the food stamp program, raided two businesses at 12th Ave. South and South Jackson Street.

    Charging documents showed Seattle Chinese Herb and Grocery had around $100,000 in inventory in its store, yet it submitted more than $1.5 million in food stamps to be redeemed by the USDA.

    Before Kwong’s arrest last year, the KING 5 Investigators documented how the store was paying food stamp clients half the value of their food stamps in cash, and then making a profit by redeeming them for full value from the taxpayer funded food stamp program.

    Hundreds of articles like these all over the web!

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  4. “America's attempt to recreate communism may not be working out all that well.”

    “Communism” “Socialism” is the problem in an insolvent bankrupt Ponzi America !!! ???

    Pull the other leg!

    Or ,is this article , just part of the American elites propaganda, an attempt to preserve an insolvent capitalism in which the elite have already accumulated, by capitalist success ,most of the existing property and asset base and monetary wealth in America ?

    And where investments from that hoard of capitals profits are used for making debt claims to all possible future incomes from an indebted nation of debt peons.

    The assumption made here, is that America is still a profitable industrial productive of wealth economy ,only being dragged down by lazy bludgers getting government handouts .

    This is not True.

    The fact is that the failed Ponzi American economy is being dragged down further by trillions of $ HANDOUTS to bankster capitalists abusing the national purse .

    The system can no longer keep millions of Americans in jobs.

    The welfare “handouts” are small change refunds from the elite owned government in a desperate attempt to prevent any opposition from rioting with pitchforks against looting, kleptomaniac,Crony Corporate State capitalism.

    Those handouts are “sit on your ass quietly and shut your mouth” bribe money, financed by government money printing on behalf of the ruling elite to create an illusion of care.

    But ,there is competition from the ruling elites dependent on getting its profits on government money printed handouts and the share of that deficit spending flowing to the unemployed, the underemployed and those made dependent on pauper handouts.

    Capital naturally wants to claim all the printed by the Fed deficit spending money as its own ,by a cut back on handouts. With Austerity not only for “welfare” but with wages reductions for working people. Even governments own services “workers” benefits are under attack as we saw in Wisconsin.

    These claims by capital to a bigger share of the wealth competing with ordinary Americans for preserving their old income levels and standard of living in a collapsing unproductive of profits economy, where government revenues are falling ,are mutually exclusive.

    This old economy (except for the drug sector) is not working out well for ordinary American people now the Ponzi has imploded in a sea of government ,commercial and private debt to bondholders.


    The old economy was based on the dollar hegemony credit system, allowing transfers of cheap third world commodity wealth and credit to an unproductive of physical commodity wealth exchangeable with the rest of the world economy.

    High waged America became a militarized, but de-industrialized ,services based consumers economy .
    Jobs and industry were sent by their capitalist owners to the third world in a search for profits in a free trade for capital globalized world.

    In the last couple of decades consumption by Americans was financed on credit ,including credit gained by the middle class owning housing. By cashing in on a housing bubble valuations using their house as an ATM.

    Since the TARP bi-partisan supported financial coup you have been witnessing ,first a socialization of the past losses of capital ,followed by the largest looting of the property wealth and savings of a middle class by the elite owners of capital in the history of mankind.

    Millions are now losing their houses as the Ponzi economy credit supply for mortgages ,credit card debt etc for consumers has past its limits of possible repayment.

    Deficit spending ,by printing paper money as debt for financing government services and social security obligations and wars for empire has past its repayable limits too.

    So, falling tax revenues for government have already been promised to the bondholders foreign and American ,of the “national debt” as dividends .
    Fed Debts created “out of fresh air” but now “owned” by the American peons.

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  5. Lots of Noise is being posted here about people abusing the welfare system .

    Someone trolling here with horror stories on behalf of the Squid?

    3.09 reports that Mrs Kwong ,small capitalist business owner ripped the system off for 1.5 million!

    3.05 reports
    That the truly enormous
    sum of 11.8 millions was spent by out of state visitors to Las Vegus .
    OVER THREE AND A HALF YEARS in a $14 trillion dollar economy!!

    For all we know a lot of that out of California state spending, even in Hawaii may have been spent whole searching for a job, or just buying food in shopping across state borders.

    The squid poster conveniently neglects to mention the TRILLIONS of welfare payments being made to the bondholders and capitalist losers in an insolvent economy .

    Or the $ billions of government subsidies to businesses in the military industrial complex.

    Many individual wall st. banksters abusing their own welfare bailout system have got paid bonuses, subsidized by government of more than that entire 11.8 million spent in Las Vegas.

    Now that’s real big time abuse of welfare for the rich.

    Half of a those on food stamps also appear to be vacationing in luxury on the QE2 liner along with the Florida palm beach retired Squid set !

    Sure its those $ millions of implied welfare abuse that is causing the economic collapse and the necessity of millions tolive on food stamps.

    Not socializing the Trillion dollar losses of the banking sector welfare bums

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  6. The funny thing is that Sharonsj thinks a ‘left”sock puppet will be better than a “right” sock puppet for working people .
    And that her vote still counts in a Diebold machine voting Corporate state.

    Millions of pauperized food stamp and underemployed American people still hope that Obama will improve their lot with "hope and change" .
    After all The other Party more openly aligned with big business and the banksters promises them little.
    Obama promised a left more liberal anti –war and humane Austerity system .It was the choice for frogs between the fire and the hope and change of a slow boil austerity pot .
    A no brained for some already welfare dependent Black and some poor white single moms people dependent on government income subsidies.

    Obama has made an alliance with “left” government worker unions especially the SEIU
    concerned with preserving the privileges of bribed government services workers in the coming austerity period . Just as Hitler had Socialist “left” class collaborationist labor unions on side.
    In the end after seizing power, Hitler turned on the SA when it had passed its use by date.

    SEIU works for often highly paid government officials.
    As it says about itself:
    "Of SEIU's over 2 million members, more than half work for federal, state, or local governments." Some say this is brown shirt SA “socialism”.
    As the only socialism that Obama knows about is the bi-partisan support for the Bush republican led TARP bailout for the socializing the losses of capital.

    This bailout required careful “left” sock puppet Management as a “right” pro business party president could not have continued to pull it off ,without to much of a stink from obvious corruption .

    A suitable black “lefty” was found to ensure a black vote too. The discredited Republicans were discarded or sidelined by the elite, so that a whine about “communists” and "socialist" liberals stuffing up a good system with excessive welfare could be started as a diversion from continuing trillion dollar bailouts for the bankrupt finance sector.

    I notice ,that the bought off liberal left Anti war movement hooked into the Democrat party do not shout ‘No blood for oil” when another bombing attack on a third word country is made by a more acceptable to them ‘left” , Blackface Actor Democrat Party President .

    Bush bribed the labor aristocracy baby boomers with Pharmaceutical benefits to entrench the profits of big Pharma ,Corporate State socialism.

    Now Obama is promising an improved reformed healthcare system withy enforced premium taxes that primarily will benefit the insurance company and big Pharma.

    Some baby boomers hope to pick a few benefit crumbs on the side of that corporate state deal.

    If Bush did the same as Obama the labor aristocracy would be whining about their lost privileges and bribes.

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  7. 6:08 is very indicative of the successful propaganda campaign being waged by the billionaires and their minions - blame the poverty stricken for all of our woes when it is the million and billionaire Wall Street fraudsters and top five banksters who have impoverished our nation. If the entire population of our nation was abusing food stamps and other government programs we still wouldn't approach the amount of wealth which has been stolen by the banks and Wall Street. Soon, there will be nothing left, but we'll still have the Gulf oil disaster, the hemorrhaging nuclear reactors and the billionaires stealing our wealth and our futures. It is so very easy to blame those who cannot defend themselves and are not connected to the top echelons of power. Shame on those of you who do. Tragically, 2:30 is indicative of most Americans these days and oh, yeah, lest I forget - this isn't capitalism anymore. It's a radical authoritarian looting machine which functions under the banner of 'free market' capitalism. Free market, my ass.

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