With all the focus on foreign wars, let’s not forget another vicious war that is being waged in the US and that is the war on the poor. The Republicans in the US Congress are proposing to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program (the one that used to be called ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion. These disgusting people, who think that raising the taxes of the immensely wealthy by even the slightest amount is a travesty of justice, think that we need to reduce aid to those people who are already struggling mightily to just survive.
In their efforts to demonize the poor, these people have found this generation’s equivalent of < Ronald Reagan's 'welfare queen', some surfer guy in California who abuses the program.
Greenslate is an unemployed San Diego surfer dude seen in a Fox News report using his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP card, to buy sushi and lobster. The story from correspondent John Roberts was reportedly circulated to GOP lawmakers.
The report shows Greenslate heading to the automated checkout counter and paying with his food stamp card. “Two hundred dollars a month, and you just go like, boom,” Greenlate says on camera. “Just like that, all paid for by our wonderful tax dollars.”
In reality, the vast majority of SNAP recipients either work or are children, disabled or elderly. Jason Greenslate is the exception, rather than the rule.
You can always find some idiot who blows his entire month’s allowance on one binge. But that does not mean that the 3.8 million people who have to stretch their support out over the month should be punished. Of course, it is not enough for the Republicans and Tea Party types to increase the hunger and suffering of the poor and disabled. As Stephen Colbert points out, they are also intent on publicly shaming them.
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive
(This clip aired on September 16, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
There is more than one war in the USA. There are quite a few. Enough to keep all of us busy.
1. Don’t forget the War on Halloween. It’s almost here and thank Cthulhu. It’s been a long time since the War on Easter.
2. And the big one. The War on Xmas and the War on the War on Xmas.
Fundies don’t have holidays. They have wars on holidays.
A huge number of federal and state food aid recipients are…infants and children. Oh well, it’s their own fault for being born poor.
Someone must have read Nathanial Hawthorne to them.
Will they have to wear a scarlet “F.S.” whenever they use their food stamps?
Don’t forget the War on
MinoritiesDrugs.Hmmm… video says:
Perhaps my sense of humour isn’t properly engaged today, because I didn’t find that terribly, incredibly amusing. Although, coming on a video about why moving to America might not be that much of an improvement on staying put, it is quite precious.
And right under the video it says:
In case you can’t be bothered to jump through the hoops, it’s Colbert ripping a load of right-wing media for exactly the same kind of denigration of poor people we here in the UK have seen daily in our own right-wing press for years.
I like to call it the War on the Drugs Used by Those People.
Meanwhile, more than one trillion dollars in taxes were uncollected because of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. And Obama extended the cuts, guaranteeing another trillion will be lost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/bush-era-tax-cuts-revenue-expire_n_1828657.html
And nobody is reporting on this form of welfare, of the wealthy living at taxpayer expense.