Record food stamp enrollment defines Thanksgiving

Teri Webster
Examiner.com
November 22, 2012

A record number of Americans – nearly 50 million – will be using food stamps this year to buy turkeys, cranberry sauce and stuffing for their Thanksgiving dinners. The government shells out around $78 billion annually for food stamps, tying in with other efforts to shatter morale, create class warfare and encourage complacency.

Although the number of people on food stamps is expected to grow, that still doesn’t tell the entire story of just how poor our country is becoming.

Food pantries are struggling to meet the growing demand for assistance, a trend brought on by low-paying jobs and drought conditions that are driving up prices across the board. These community-based organizations are also seeing a cut in government food donations and that is limiting their ability to help people, according to Reuters. Requests for food baskets also increase around the holidays.

Talk show host Alex Jones has long warned that food stamps and other government programs are poverty traps designed to lull people into serfdom. People are highly delusional if they believe the government will take care of them, Jones says.

Insidiously, the government is drumming up recruits for food stamps while simultaneously making plans to cut funding for the program.

Over the summer, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $3 million on advertisements that encouraged people to apply for food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In fact, the stated goal of the ad campaign was to get as many people as possible on the dole.

To increase the nation’s growing Confederacy of Dunces, volunteer advocates were asked to “get the word out” about how to apply. The call to action included developing written materials geared toward a “low-literate audience.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“Test the materials with members of your audience, if possible – both in the draft and design stages,” reads a section of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s web site. “You can do this by giving them a copy of your material to read and asking them if it is easy to understand.”

Since 2007, about the same time the economy started tanking, the number of people on food stamps has grown by 135 percent. In addition to the economy, higher food prices and lower income levels are driving the spike in food stamps, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Reuters reported that “a record 47.1 million people used food stamps in August 2012, up from 45.8 million a year earlier.”

“The reason for the explosive growth in food stamps isn’t fraud or a sense of entitlement, as conservative pundits have claimed,” writes John Stoehr in the International Business Times. “It’s because people don’t have enough money, and given the government’s job forecasts, this is not a short-term trend.”

Median incomes for growing career fields in our country all pay $25,000 or less, Stoehr reported. For example, jobs are expected to grow in sales ($24,370) and food services ($18,770), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The picture is even bleaker because more people probably qualify for food stamps. According to Social Security Administration figures, about 75 million Americans are living at or slightly above the poverty line.

Factor in soaring food prices and drought conditions we have a recipe for a famine.

There’s another word for it: Genocide.

Recent news reports outline proposed cuts to the food stamp program at a time when enrollment is record levels. Whether you believe cutting food stamps is good or bad, one thing is certain. We have a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions waiting on the horizon.

All of this is designed at a global level, with the international banking and mega-corporation interests at the helm. The intent is to bankrupt the nation so badly that the public will accept anything to ease the suffering. Indeed, a lot of the misery we now see was brought on by nations around the globe attempting to “bail out” a banking system that willfully created fake derivatives and losses. When things really bottom out, the banksters will promise to save us, but only if we agree to more taxes and more restrictions on our daily lives.

That, of course, will only serve to destroy us and it will certainly not save us or feed us.

This article was posted: Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 12:32 pm

Tags: domestic news, food

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