#ebt

[chronicallycouchbound]

Let People On Food Stamps Eat Hot Meals

Particularly on cold, rainy days (like today), while unhoused, sometimes all I want is a hot meal but it’s so difficult (if not impossible) to cook outside in the rain.

On top of this, I’m physically disabled and chronically ill. Medically, I’m supposed to have assistance with making meals as part of in home care. But I can’t get in home care without a home.

I just finished making dinner for my partner and I, it took 2 hours (3 if you include clean up). My knees are burning, my back is aching in it’s core, I feel like I’m about to faint, and all my joints are screaming. But it’s the only way we could have a hot meal today and get some protein, which is vital for our health conditions.

People judge us for using what little funds we have on McDonald’s some days. Because sometimes, it’s the only hot meal we’ve had in days. And sometimes I’m physically unable to stand, move, and do all the actions needed to cook. Or I faint while cooking. Or the rain doesn’t let up. Or we don’t have access to a kitchen for the day. Or the fire danger outside is too high. The list goes on.

Without my own kitchen to use, I don’t get to sit down while I cook (right now, everything is wet from the rain), I can’t meal prep, I can’t stock up on freezer meals, I can’t use an oven or a microwave to reheat leftovers, I can’t just reach across the kitchen for a fridge item (we have a small amount of fridge space friends let us use), everything about cooking is exponentially harder.

And even if I had 24/7 access to an accessible, full kitchen, it’s not even physically safe to cook my own meals. Even then, having a pre-made, hot, ready-to-eat meal could keep me safe and give me independance.

And all the safety needs for hot meals aside, emotionally, hot meals are also life saving and comfort. Meals are a part of community, culture, love and art.

So many gatherings we have as communities center around food. Most people in the United States would think of ones that often hold great value to Western culture. Mother’s Day breakfast. Spaghetti fundraisers. Wedding cakes. Birthday dinners. Bake sales. Carnival treats. BBQs on weekends. Holiday roasts. Lunches with friends. Casseroles brought to grieving neighbors.

Our world revolves around food.

I firmly believe that no poor person could ever “take advantage” of a system designed to feed us by using food stamps on hot food. This restrictive rule serves no purpose but to punish the most vulnerable of poor people— unhoused, disabled, and those of us living in unsafe conditions.

It also serves to restrict our access to joy and comfort. The joy can sometimes come from the food itself, but also the joy from having shared experiences solidified by the sounds of laughter and forks clinking on plates. The comfort can sometimes also be from the food itself, but also the experience of being loved and cared for while your close friend brings you pizza from your favorite restaurant because you lost your drive to eat three weeks ago and they worry about you. They know you. Those slices of pizza bring color back into your world.

Poor people deserve to be able to have the comfort, joy, and care that goes into a hot meal. We deserve the autonomy to choose foods that are best for us ourselves. We deserve to be able to eat in ways that are accessible to us.

Above all, we deserve access to hot meals.

Originally posted to my blog on 6.3.22

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Iowa's starvation strategy

I don’t really buy that “the cruelty is the point.” I’m a materialist. Money talks, bullshit walks. When billionaires fund unimaginably cruel policies, I think the cruelty is a tactic, a way to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, policies that grow the fortune of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us have a natural 99% disapproval rating.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

So when some monstrous new law or policy comes down the pike, it’s best understood as a way of getting frightened, angry — and often hateful — people to vote for policies that will actively harm them, by claiming that they will harm others — brown and Black people, women, queers, and the “undeserving” poor.

Pro-oligarch policies don’t win democratic support — but policies that inflict harm a ginned-up group of enemies might. Oligarchs need frightened, hateful people to vote for policies that will secure and expand the power of the rich. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the strategy. The point isn’t cruelty, it’s power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/#no-i-in-uterus

But that doesn’t change the fact that the policies are cruel indeed. Take Iowa, whose billionaire-backed far-right legislature is on a tear, a killing spree that includes active collaboration with rapists, through a law that denies abortion care to survivors of rape and forces them to bear and care for their rapists’ babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/politics/iowa-kamala-harris-abortion.html

The forced birth movement is part of the wider far-right tactic of standing up for imaginary children (e.g. “the unborn,” fictional victims of Hollywood pedo cabals), and utterly abandons real children: poor kids who can’t afford school lunches, kids in cages, kids victimized by youth pastors, kids forced into child labor, etc.

So Iowa isn’t just a forced birth state, it’s a state where children are now to be starved, literally. The state legislature has just authorized an $18m project to kick people off of SNAP (aka food stamps). 270,000 people in Iowa rely on SNAP: elderly people, disabled people, and parents who can’t feed their kids.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kyle Swenson profiles some of these Iowans, like an elderly woman who visited Lisa Spitler’s food pantry for help and said that state officials had told her that she was only eligible for $23/month in assistance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/16/iowa-snap-restrictions-food-stamps/

That’s because Iowa governor KimReynolds signed a bill cutting the additional SNAP aid — federally funded, and free to the state taxpayers of Iowa — that had been made available during the lockdown. Since then, food pantries have been left to paper over the cracks in the system, as Iowans begin to starve.

Before the pandemic, Spitler’s food pantry saw 30 new families a month. Now it’s 100 — and growing. Many of these families have been kicked off of SNAP because they failed to complete useless and confusing paperwork, or did so but missed the short deadlines now imposed by the state. For example, people with permanent disabilities and elderly people who no longer work must continuously file new paperwork confirming that their income hasn’t changed. Their income never changes.

SNAP recipients often work, borrow from relations, and visit food pantries, and still can’t make ends meet, like Amy Cunningham, a 31 year old mother of four in Charlton. She works at a Subway, has tapped her relatives for all they can afford, and relies on her $594/month in SNAP to keep her kids from going hungry. She missed her notice of an annual review and was kicked off the program. Getting kicked off took an instant. Getting reinstated took a starving eternity.

Iowa has a budget surplus of $1.91B. This doesn’t stop ghouls like Iowa House speaker Pat Grassley (a born-rich nepobaby whose grandpa is Senator Chuck Grassley) from claiming that the cuts were a necessity: “[SNAP is] growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities.”

Grassley’s caucus passed legislation on Jan 30 to kick people off of SNAP if their combined assets, including their work vehicle, total to more than $15,000. SNAP recipients will be subject to invasive means-testing and verification, which will raise the cost of administering SNAP from $2.2m to $18m. Anyone who gets flagged by the system has 10 days to respond or they’ll be kicked off of SNAP.

The state GOP justifies this by claiming that SNAP has an “error rate” of 11.81%. But that “error rate” includes people who were kicked off SNAP erroneously, a circumstance that is much more common than fraud, which is almost nonexistent in SNAP programs. Iowa’s error rate is in line with the national average.

Iowa’s pro-starvation law was authored by a conservative dark-money “think tank” based in Florida: the Opportunity Solutions Project, the lobbying arm of Foundation For Government Accountability, run by Tarren Bragdon, a Maine politician with a knack for getting money from the Koch Network and the DeVos family for projects that punish, humiliate and kill marginalized people. The Iowa bill mirrors provisions passed in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere — and goes beyond them.

The law was wildly unpopular, but it passed anyway. It’s part of the GOP’s push for massive increases in government spending and bureaucracy — but only when those increases go to punishing poor people, policing poor people, jailing poor people, and spying on poor people. It’s truly amazing that the “party of small government” would increase bureaucratic spending to administer SNAP by 800% — and do it with a straight face.

In his essay “The Utopia of Rules,” David Graeber (Rest in Power) described this pathology: just a couple decades ago, the right told us that our biggest threat was Soviet expansion, which would end the “American way of life” and replace it with a dismal world where you spent endless hours filling in pointless forms, endured hunger and substandard housing, and shopped at identical stores that all carried the same goods:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

A society that can’t feed, house and educate its residents is a failed state. America’s inability to do politics without giving corporations a fat and undeserved share is immiserating an ever-larger share of its people. Federally, SNAP is under huge stress, thanks to the “public-private partnership” at the root of a badly needed “digital overhaul” of the program.

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein describes how the USDA changed SNAP rules to let people pay with SNAP for groceries ordered online, as a way to deal with the growing problem of food deserts in poor and rural communities:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-19-retail-surveils-food-stamp-users/

It’s a good idea — in theory. But it was sabotaged from the start: first, the proposed rule was altered to ban paying for delivery costs with SNAP, meaning that anyone who ordered food online would have to use scarce cash reserves to pay delivery fees. Then, the USDA declined to negotiate discounts on behalf of the 40 million SNAP users. Finally, the SNAP ecommerce rules don’t include any privacy protections, which will be a bonanza for shadowy data-brokers, who’ll mine SNAP recipients’ data to create marketing lists for scammers, predatory lenders, and other bottom-feeder:

https://www.democraticmedia.org/sites/default/files/field/public-files/2020/cdd_snap_report_ff.pdf

The GOP’s best weapon in this war is statistical illiteracy. While racist, sexist and queerphobic policies mean that marginalized people are more likely than white people to be poor, America’s large population of white people — including elderly white people who are the immovable core of the GOP base — means that policies that target poor people inevitably inflict vast harms on the GOP’s most devoted followers.

Getting these turkeys to vote for Christmas is a sound investment for the ultra-rich, who claim a larger share of the American pie every year. The rich may or may not be racist, or sexist, or queerphobic — some of them surely are — but the reason they pour money into campaigns to stoke divisions among working people isn’t because they get off on hatred. The hatred is a tactic. The cruelty is a tactic. The strategic goal is wealth and power.

Tomorrow (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: The Iowa state-house. On the right side of the steps is an engraved drawing of Oliver Twist, holding out his porridge bowl. On the left side is the cook, denying him an extra portion. Peeking out from behind the dome is a business-man in a suit with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

Image: Iqkotze (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_State_Capitol_April_2010.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[20th-century-railroading]

EBT narrow gauge locomotive, engine number 16, engine type 2-8-2 Freight train. Photographed: near Mt. Union, Pa., July 14, 1953.

[beauty-funny-trippy]

I didn't believe this post on facebook. I mean, what kind of monsters would stop money for food from getting to children living in poverty? It couldn't be true, right? Here's what I found…

• Republicans control Missouri's offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature. They turned down the money because of "dysfunction of the communication between different departments”. In other words, the Republican dysfunction is so bad, they can't coordinate how to get this money for food to the kids who need it. —Incompetent.

• Nebraska's Republican governor stopped the federal money, saying, “I don't believe in welfare." So, this Republican would literally prefer to see 175,000 children in his own state be malnourished, rather than let them receive help to pay for food. —Heartless.

• Iowa's Republican governor blocked the federal money because she's concerned about "childhood obesity". Unbelievably, this Republican's crazy "logic" is to deprive meals to all the starving children because some children are overweight. —Cruel.

And so, Who is responsible for this inhumanity — is it: the incompetent Republican Politicians who promote such heartless cruelty -or- the Voters who keep electing them?

[themadcapmathematician]

Let me put it another way: in the US, the maximum SNAP pay out is $281 a month.* In many states in the US, a one way ticket on the bus costs somewhere between $1.25-3. If someone makes a grocery run twice a week, nothing else, just goes out and gets groceries and uses the bus system, it costs somewhere between $20-48 a month just to get groceries. That's assuming no transfers, no other errands that might take more tickets, nothing else.

It doesn't even factor in that the average person who uses public transportation must spend nearly twice as long to get somewhere as someone who drives does, or that the way the SNAP payments are calculated assumes people will spend 14 hours a week preparing food if they want nutritious meals. It doesn't factor in that using the bus system restricts the amount of groceries you can buy at a time, or that many people on SNAP and who take public transit are disabled, single working parents, the elderly. It doesn't cover the human cost here, just the financial one

If youre poor enough to receive the maximum SNAP pay out (which, i can't stress enough, is incredibly stringent and most people don't qualify for), and have to use public transit to go grocery shopping, it costs around 7-17% of your monthly grocery budget to just get the groceries in the first place. Public transit fares are a poor tax

(*excluding Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the Virgin Islands, where the maximum is between $356 and $545, though transportation and food prices in those locations are also often severely inflated)

[metalmaul]

PLEASE SHARE!!

Making this post for Illinois residents:

I got a flyer in the mail from University of Illinois & Find Food IL for a website that has a map resource of everywhere that accepts SNAP benefits.

This includes grocery stores, food pantries, schools, meal sites, senior food resources, government offices, and the most exciting to me, farmers markets!!! I've never been to a farmers market before because I didn't think they accepted food stamps.

You can look up your city/town & any other surrounding cities/towns that might be accessible to you. Theres a button that I've circled in red that will show a list of all resources in the area you've chosen. You can also search by resource by clicking on one of these icons I've circled in blue (scroll horizontally for more.)

I'm using the mobile site, so on a computer this might look slightly different.

I would appreciate if, even if you don't live in Illinois, you could share this information. I'm not sure if everyone is aware of it, or if everyone got a flyer for it; I certainly had NO idea and it's really an exciting & life-changing kind of thing to think about being able to get fresh, locally grown food with SNAP.

Obviously, I've yet to actually go & check out my local options, so I'm not sure what the process will be like yet or if there are any limitations. Plus, naturally, everywhere is probably different. However, just to KNOW this exists is important enough to share the information.

The website is:

https://eat-move-save.extension.illinois.edu/

[moneymilf]

For anyone on SNAP benefits:

*Doordash, Instacart, & Uber Eats accept SNAP customers

* Amazon offers a discount on membership to SNAP customers

*Walmart+ subscription is only $6 for SNAP customers

*Ritas Italian Ice takes SNAP (double check if your local location does)

*The Providers app helps you track your SNAP benefits

[dingleshartbeaufoy]

I’m so sorry my family being hungry inconveniences you

[lifewithchronicpain]

Goddamn, EBT and SSDI are so fucking petty. I got a $12 cost of living increase in SSDI, so they Decreased my EBT benefits by $6. God forbid I get a dollar more than what little they deem I should have. And let's not forget EBT is for food, one of the most inflated costs of living. Thanks for nothing.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A "secure" system can be the most dangerous of all

Two decades ago, my life changed forever: hearing Bruce Schneier explain that “security” doesn’t exist in the abstract. You can only be secure from some threat. A fire alarm won’t protect you from burglaries. A condom won’t protect you from mass shootings. It seems obvious, but how often do we hear about “security” without any mention of who is being made secure, and from which threat?

Take the US welfare system. It is very “secure” in that it is hedged in by a thicket of red-tape, audits, inspections and onerous procedures. To get food stamps, housing vouchers, or cash aid, you must navigate a Soviet-grade bureaucratic system of Kafkaesque proportions. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the USA has become a “Utopia Of Rules” (as David Graeber put it), subjecting everyday people to the state-run bureacracies that the USAUSAUSA set endlessly ridiculed the USSR for:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

(The right says it wants to “shrink the US government until fits in a bathtub — and then drown it” — but not the whole government. They want unlimited government bloat for that part of the state that is dedicated to tormenting benefits claimants, especially if its functions are managed by a Beltway Bandit profiteer who bills Uncle Sucker up the wazoo for rubber-stamping “DENIED” on every claim.)

The US benefits system has a sophisticated, expensive, fully staffed anti-fraud system — but it’s a highly selective form of anti-fraud. The system is oriented solely to prevent fraud against itself, with no thought to protecting benefits recipients themselves from fraud.

And those recipients — by definition the poorest and most vulnerable among us — are easy pickings for continuous, ghastly, eye-watering acts of fraud. These benefits are distributed via prepaid debit cards — EBT Cards — that lack the basic security measures that every other kind of card has had for years. These are simple magstripe cards, lacking basic chip-and-pin defenses, to say nothing of contactless countermeasures.

That means that fraudsters can — and do — install skimmers in the point-of-sale terminals used by benefits recipients to withdraw their cash benefits, pay for food using SNAP (AKA Food Stamps), and receive other benefits.

It’s impossible to overstate how widespread these skimmers are, and how much money criminals make by stealing from poor people. Writing for Businessweek, Jessica Fu describes the mad scramble benefits recipients go through every month, standing by ATMs at midnight on the night of the first of every month in hopes of withdrawing the cash they use to pay for their rent and utility bills before it is stolen by a crook who captured their card number with a skimmer:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-28/ebt-theft-takes-millions-of-dollars-from-the-neediest-americans

One of Fu’s sources, Lexisnexis Risk Solutions’s Haywood Talcove, describes these EBT cards as having the security of a “glorified hotel room key.” He recounts how US police departments saw a massive explosion in EBT skimming: from 300 complaints in January 2022 to 18,000 in January 2023.

The skimmer rings are extremely well organized. The people who install the skimmers — working in pairs, with one person to distract the cashier while the other quickly installs the skimmer — don’t know who they work for. Neither do the people who use cards cloned from skimmer data to cash out benefits recipients’ accounts. When they are arrested, they refuse to turn on their immediate recruiters, fearing reprisals against their families.

These low-level crooks stroll up to ATMs and feed a succession of cloned cards into them, emptying account after account. Or they swipe cards at grocery checkouts, buying cases of Red Bull and other easily sold grocery products with some victim’s entire SNAP balance.

Some police agencies are pursuing these criminal gangs and trying figure out who’s running them, but the authorities who issue SNAP cards are doing little to nothing to stop the pipeline at their end. Simply upgrading SNAP terminals to chip-and-pin would exponentially raise the cost and complexity that thieves incur.

Indeed, that’s why every other kind of payment card uses these systems. How is it that these systems were upgraded, while SNAP cards remain in mired in 20th century “glorified hotel room key” territory? Well, as our friends on the right never cease to remind us: “incentives matter.”

When your credit card gets cloned, it’s your banks and credit card company that pays for the losses, not you. So the banks demanded (and funded) the upgrade to new anti-fraud measures. By contrast, most states have no system for refunding stolen benefits to skimmers’ victims.

In other words, all of the anti-fraud in the benefits system is devoted to catching benefits cheating — a phenomenon that is so rare as to be almost nonexistent (1.54%), notwithstanding right wingers’ fevered, Reagan-era folktales about “welfare queens”:

https://blog.gitnux.com/food-stamp-fraud-statistics/

Meanwhile, the most widespread and costly form of fraud in the benefits system — fraud perpetrated against benefits recipients — is blithely ignored.

Really, it’s worse than that. In deciding to protect the welfare system rather than welfare recipients, we’ve made it vastly harder for benefits claimants who’ve been victimized by fraudsters to remain fed and sheltered. After all, if we made it simple and straightforward for benefits recipients to re-claim money that was stolen from them, we’d make it that much easier to defraud the system.

“Security” is always and forever a matter of securing some specific thing, against some specific risk. In other words, security reflects values — it reveals whose risk matters, and whose doesn’t. For the American benefits system, risks to the system matter. Risks to people don’t.

It’s not just the welfare system that prioritizes its own risks against the people it exists to serve. Think of the systems used to fight drug abuse in clinical settings.

Medical facilities that use or dispense powerful pain-killers have exquisitely tuned, sophisticated, frequently audited security systems to prevent patients from tricking their doctors or pharmacists into administering extra drugs (especially opioids). “Extra” in this case means “more drugs than are strictly necessary to manage pain.”

The rationale for this is only incidentally medical. Someone who gets a little too much painkiller during a medical procedure or an acute pain episode is not at any particular risk of enduring harm — the risks are minor and easily managed (say, by keeping a patient in bed a little longer while they recover from sedation).

The real agenda here is preventing addiction and abuse by addicted people. There’s a genuine problem with opioid abuse, and that problem does have its origins in overprescription. But — crucially — that overprescription wasn’t the result of wimpy patients insisting on endless painkillers until they enslaved themselves to their pills.

Rather, the opioid epidemic has its origins in the billionaire Sackler crime family, whose Purdue Pharma used scientific fraud, cash incentives, and other deceptive practices to trick, coerce, or bribe doctors into systematically overprescribing their Oxycontin cash cow, even as they laundered their reputation with showy charitable donations:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions

The Sacklers got to keep their billions — and people undergoing painful medical procedures or living with chronic pain are left holding the bag, subject to tight pain-med controls that forces them to prove — through increasingly stringent systems — that they truly deserve their medicine.

In other words, the beneficiary of the opioid control system is the system itself — not the patients who need opioids.

There’s an extremely disturbing — even nightmarish — example of this in the news: the Yale Fertility Clinic, where hundreds of women endured unimaginably painful egg harvesting procedures with no anaesthesia at all.

These women had complained for years about the pain they suffered, and many had ended up needing emergency care after the fact because of traumatic injuries caused by undergoing the procedure without pain control. But the doctors and nurses at the Yale clinic ignored their screams of pain and their post-operative complaints.

It turned out that an opioid-addicted nurse had been swapping the fentanyl in the drug cabinet for saline, and taking the fentanyl home for her own use.

This made national headlines at the time, and it is the subject of “The Retrievals,” a new New York Times documentary series podcast:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html

If the pain medication management system was designed to manage pain, then these thefts would have been discovered early on. If the system was designed so that anyone who experienced pain was treated until the pain was under control, the deception would have been uncovered almost immediately.

As Stafford Beer said, “the purpose of any system is what it does.” The pain medication management system was designed to manage pain medication, not pain itself.

The system was designed to be secure from opioid-seeking addicted patients. It was not designed to make patients secure from pain. Its values — our values, as a society — were revealed through its workings.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/13/whose-security/#for-me-not-thee

[Image ID: A down-the-barrel view of a massive, battleship-gray artillery piece protruding from the brick battlement of a fortress. From the black depths of the barrel shines a red neon 'EBT' sign.]

Image: Bjarne Henning Kvaale (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarsborg_28cm_Krupp_cannon_4_-_panoramio.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[wack-ashimself]

Since I can not legally say 'in a free country' the words "I want to kill the USA president*" I will say this:

I hope every billionaire dies. And I don't care: I hope it's a drawn out (but not long), excruciating, impossible to cure, they are immobile AND incapable of communicating, death. LET THEM GOD DAMN SUFFER 10000x over what they have done to humanity. Maybe for their next couple lifetimes till the lesson sticks.

I hope every person who took or is taking bribes a billionaire dies. Legal or not (cuz it isn't moral any time). Same way they did.

I hope everyone who supports billionaires dies. Quickly. Idiots don't deserve to suffer.

Because I, myself, and millions of others are probably gonna starve to death due to billionaires. So if I die, I want ALLLLLL THOSE MOTHER FUCKERS TO DIE WITH ME.

So I heard they were requiring work requirements for food stamps. NOW. RIGHT NOW. During one of the largest unemployment times in ALL USA HISTORY, AND during what is now called the 'silent depression' which has been PROVEN WORSE than the great depression!

WHICH IS INSANE.

I have never in my life thought 'we should make the poorest most vulnerable PROVE they are poor, and EARN their FEW benefits.' NEVER ONCE. And I have had some dark, cruel, sick thoughts thru my life. BUT NEVER THAT.

Maybe cuz I grew up poor. Maybe cuz I had poor friends. Or maybe we are born on a shared planet, AND OWE NO ONE FOR THAT. NO ONE. Not a single god damn person owns this planet but we pay rent to them, cuz we were CONNED into believing it.

Anyways, they require EIGHTY HOURS A MONTH. Or you're disqualified**.

And either you have to have a job job (that, btw, YOU CAN NEVER QUIT. Seriously. It says that! You have to have a GREAT reason for leaving. FORCED LABOR. AND you can NEVER volunteer to take less than 30 hours a week if you got more than that. WTF?!)

You can VOLUNTEER for FREE work. So in other words, DO NOT GET PAID, but, get enough money in a month from food stamps for about....3 weeks. I have NEVER ONCE in my life had food stamps last the whole month. Not even when I was in CA 10 years ago. Indentured servitude, anyone?

OR you can do work training programs thru the state, to teach you USELESS SKILLS that fucking high school should have taught you. Again, UNPAID.

So 2 of the ways they want you to work is to work for free, never getting beyond just to QUALIFY getting enough food from food stamps for a couple weeks. GENIUS! <fucking morons>

But 80 hours. Mandatory. Every single month. (Btw, isn't that cutting into the BEST times of the days for me to apply for and interview for jobs? IDIOTS!)

Hey-I don't mind applying for jobs, interviews, and telling you all about them. I got tons of proof I am trying to get into the work force. I am trying to make an effort. I like security, go figure.

But I have been unemployed OVER TWO YEARS. Only THREE INTERVIEWS in those 2 years. NO JOB OFFER YET. Closest I got was a job interview requiring a covid jab, and there's no god damn way in hell you're forcing me to do something to my body in order for a job. FUCK OFF. MY BODY, MY RULES. Other they wanted me to sign an arbitration agreement, which ALWAYS FUCKS THE EMPLOYEE. It is NEVER to your advantage; they were created so LEGALLY you can't sue your employer. THAT IS IT. Seriously; look into it.

I would already be DEAD, not exaggerating, if not for the food stamp program I have right now.

So now I have to apply for ANY job, take ANY job, and have to stay there till I die or I won't get food? Never moving up? Never earning more money (cuz the second I do, I LOSE food stamps, costing me even more money?)

Even if I am mistreated to the point I am suicidal?

I genuinely would rather die than enable this evil abusive system. Sincerely.

But I'm not going to do so without a fight. And maybe taking out a billionaire or so with me. Cuz it doesn't matter how much power, protection, and secrecy they have. With enough time, thought, and planning, one bullet isn't that hard to meet it's target. Ha....and if you're smart enough, it's food poisoning anyways. They're SO fucking arrogant, they forget who makes their food and does all their work for them. <And if they get paranoid enough, they'll just quit eating and starve to death, like me.> ;)

They're pushing me to the edge, and I swear, I don't push back. I bring them down the cliff with me...if only so they can't do it to another.

So let's do this. Let's see who blinks. I have NOTHING to lose; you have EVERYTHING to lose, rich bitches.

*I promise, like they want to make homelessness illegal, and they made that solider who lit himself on fire an 'enemy' cuz he believed in anarchy (which SIMPLY means NO RULERS), they will start arresting anyone anti state. Which is ironic: if I was in jail, I'd be promised more food and shelter security, FOR FREE, paid for by the taxpayers (and costing them SUBSTANTIALLY more), than if I remained in my current situation. Oh, and don't forget, largest for profit prison population used as SLAVES. So they gain 2 ways: state pays them to imprison them THEN they get to use them as cheap labor. THIS IS AN EVIL GOD DAMN SYSTEM.

**Again, if I just went out, and knocked up ANY random woman, and she gave birth, I would be promised food stamps, no work, instantly. Love that catch. Bring a child into the world you can't afford, and we'll feed YOU. But if not, starve to death if you can't find work***. Every single thing is broken.

***This just made me realize...if you were working even...70 hours a month, they would require you to volunteer for another 10 to get food stamps. What if the volunteer work only occurs the same hours you're at your job? Jesus fuck, did NO ONE think this thru in ANY way!? It always fucking gets worse...

<Do you think even a billionaire does 80 hours a month in work? FUCK NO. But we BAIL THEM OUT every god damn time.>

[roebeanstalk]

hey hey!

My EBT renewal didn't go through so I have no funds for groceries right now. I'm seeing what I can figure out, but any help would be appreciated!! I have one dubious bagel, some rice and soy sauce left 💀

https://ko-fi.com/roebeanstalk

Shares are super appreciated 🥹💚

[arctic-hands]

So I tried to buy some good sleepy stuff for my insomnia on Walmart using my EBT Cash benefit (not SNAP, but Maryland has a program where they so graciously give EBT holders twenty-one dollars in cash every year, and since I--being housebound because I'm vulnerable to covid--haven't been able to spend it in person before finding out Walmart's site accepts EBT Cash, I have a whopping forty-two dollars I was gonna spend on good sleepy stuff, but no matter what I did it wouldn't accept my EBT payment even though everything was EBT Cash eligible.

I went so far as to contact a live agent and they swore to me up and down that everything was okay with the EBT payment it MUST be the fact that I was using my debit card to pick up a few extra dollars, so to contact my bank--even tho I had tried using my debit, theta's debit, and theta's credit card and it all came up with the same error message.

Whatevs, wouldn't hurt to message my bank and see if that's the issue. And they were like um, no, your card is fine this isn't our problem. Well damn, what do I do now?

Look it up on the internet of course. Where I find numerous recent reddit threads saying Walmart's site has been declining both EBT SNAP and EBT Cash for at least the last seventeen days and people who rely on Walmart delivery for groceries haven't been getting their food. So like Walmart's been aware of this problem for weeks and not only have not fixed it but are lying to people about it.

[20th-century-railroading]

EBT narrow gauge locomotive, engine number 16, engine type 2-8-2 Freight train. Photographed: near Three Springs, Pa., July 14, 1953.

[bobsliquorstore]