Congress’s food-stamp cuts add to the hunger of women, children, and old people.
Without lifting a finger, just letting past legislation run out, Congress accomplished a $5 billion cutback of the food-stamp program (SNAP) last November. And as Democrats and Republicans left Washington for Christmas, they were squabbling over not whether, but how much more to cut food stamps after the holidays.
In “the richest country on earth,” jobs are so scarce and pay is so low that one fifth of all Americans depend on food stamps. Fully 68 million people used food stamps for at least one month last year, most of them single mothers with children and the elderly.
Even that is not an accurate count of the hungry, since it doesn’t include the low-paid immigrants and their families who are forced into the shadows by harsh laws that make them “illegal.”
Not even all those who qualify for food stamps benefit from the program. Partly to discourage immigrants from applying — even those with green cards — California, for instance, has put in place the most difficult application process in the country. (The federal government pays for food stamps, but the states dispense them.)
That has kept fully half of the people who should be getting food aid in California from doing so, almost five million people. Texas is number two in blocking millions of hungry people from getting food stamps.
Undocumented immigrants do not qualify for food stamps, but their U.S.-born children do. Making it difficult and fearsome for their parents to apply denies those children food that is rightfully theirs.
Federal food stamps began generations ago in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the bankers and industrialists who run the country wanted to keep the unemployed alive and functional for the next economic rebound (and — as it turned out — for the world war that preceded it).
During WWII and the post-war era, immigration from Latin America, particularly from Mexico, was encouraged — whether the workers were legal or “illegal.”
Today, a greater [italic<] percentage [>end italic]of people who qualify for food stamps are African-American or Latino. But the greatest [italic<] number [>end italic] of people who qualify for food stamps are white.
More and more “middle-class” Americans — black, brown, and especially white — are losing their jobs, houses, and wealth. Pushed out of the economy by computers and robots, they are being dispossessed and standing shoulder to shoulder in a new form of poverty.
Now the capitalist powers-that-be are willing to cut back their food — particularly for the children who would normally be the next generation of workers. Along with cutting back on their education, that shows that they do not expect the next generation to go to work.
Like it or not, this future threatens all of the 99 percent. Based on our basic right to food, defending our right to an adequate supply of food stamps is an important part of today’s fight for survival. There’s more than enough to go around, if we “share and share alike.”
