Bad American

The London Independent

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

Isn’t it ironic that it takes a British newspaper to tell the truth to the American people? You don’t have to look to the British press to know how bad it is on Main Street. I see the pain around here every day and it’s getting worse. And I’m in a small town that is still fairly flush by comparison with similar small towns in adjacent counties.

Let no one look down their nose in the checkout lines at people using food stamp cards anymore. There are a growing number of people who never in a million years thought they would need the food assistance program - but here they are.

I’m going to be blunt here - George Carlin once said: “we’re all Nixon’s ni**ers now.” Well guess what - We’re all George W. Bush’s ni**ers now.

More from the story:

Richard Enright, the manager at this Morgan Williams, says the numbers of customers on food stamps has been steady but he expects that to rise soon. “In this location, it’s still mostly old people and people who have retired from city jobs on stamps,” he says. Food stamp money was designed to supplement what people could buy rather than covering all the costs of a family’s groceries. But the problem now, Mr Enright says, is that soaring prices are squeezing the value of the benefits.

“Last St Patrick’s Day, we were selling Irish soda bread for $1.99. This year it was $2.99. Prices are just spiralling up, because of the cost of gas trucking the food into the city and because of commodity prices. People complain, but I tell them it’s not my fault everything is more expensive.”

The US Department of Agriculture says the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 per cent in 12 months. “The amount of food stamps per household hasn’t gone up with the food costs,” says Dayna Ballantyne, who runs a food bank in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our clients are finding they aren’t able to purchase food like they used to.”

Ladies and gentlemen, what we are seeing is just the beginning of what will be PERMANENTLY VERY BAD TIMES. The price of most foodstuffs are spiraling out of control for a number of reasons, chief of which are the rising fuel costs (costs to bring to market), and corn, especially, is being grown for ethanol production rather than food. Also, global climate change is starting to hurt certainly growing areas.

In fact there are now rice riots in several Southeast Asian countries as governments are putting an end to exporting rice since its needed for domestic consumption. This is going to happen in countries all over the world and, even in the United States, we’re going to have to shelve all the ‘global marketplace’ crap and start thinking about what we can do to feed ourselves more efficiently in the age of rising oil prices which also affect fertilizer products which make mass agriculture possible.

The most obscene part of all of this is that neither Bush, nor the three remaining candidates are being straight with the American people on what we face and will face in the near future. There is no room for any Churchillian “blood, sweat, toil and tears” speeches. They wouldn’t play well in focus groups.

But there will come a time in which no lies will be sufficient. The people will KNOW that things are very bad and, hopefully, will not tolerate being fed any more bullshit by their elected leaders. Someday soon, they will be forced, kicking and screaming, to tell the truth. Oil, water, food - its all in peril over the long run. We need to get real and start thinking about the world we’ll leave our children, before it’s too late.

In the meantime, if Americans want to read the truth about their own country, sadly, they will have to go to the foreign press. American journalism is dead - bought, paid for and ruthlessly controlled by corporate America.

HuffPo

Women’s Wear Daily/Memo Pad’s Stephanie D. Smith reports today that Wal-Mart’s corporate communications director, Daphne Moore, has responded with a statement:

“This is a very sad case and we understand that people will naturally have an emotional and sympathetic reaction. While the Shank case involves a tragic situation, the reality is that the health plan is required to protect its assets so that it can pay the future claims of other associates and their family members. These plans are funded by associate premiums and company contributions. Any money recovered is returned to the health plan, not to the business. This is done out of fairness to everyone who contributes to and benefits from the plan. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear an appeal of the case, which concludes all litigation. While Wal-Mart’s benefit plan was entitled to more than the amount that remained in the Shank trust, the plan only recovered the funds remaining in that trust,” which according to reports amounted to about $277,000.

Part of the reason I could never do public relations again is I’d have to whore out my basic human feelings like Daphne Moore. Well, perhaps she HAS no human feelings since she obviously voluntarily works for Wal-Mart. But just think: you have to actually sit there and type this out and know that your name is going to be attached to it.

Well, maybe she’s a regular at Lone Star Times so that doesn’t bother her.

In any case, Wal-Mart has just reached the nadir of bad PR anyway, but they’re a company that hasn’t, in the past, really cared about bad PR. But this all goes away for less than the yearly maintenance of the Walton family bunker.

In most cases, the media will never hear the vast majority of savagery capitalist America commits daily against the people of this country. Only rarely do stories like this hit the corporately controlled airwaves and even then, the most egregious examples. We’ll never hear about all the other people put in penury because they ran afoul of contract law which almost always has been written of the rich, by the rich and for the benefit of the rich.

But we heard about this one. And one would think that for a company that made $11 billion last year that they could hand over what would amount to petty cash (and probably tax deductible) to make it go away and keep people thinking good thoughts about Wal-Mart. But they may feel that the state of the Bush economy leaves their core customer base as slaves to the lower prices. They can’t go anywhere else so who cares what they think? Let them hate so long as they shop.

And this thing about “being fair” to the other users of the health plan? What bullshit. I’m sure most of them wouldn’t mind slicing a little down the middle to take care of one of their own. Or at least I would hope so.

And does this mean that Wal-Mart contributes so little to their employees’ health care plan that a little more would hurt all that much? Again, just because it pays for one doesn’t mean it’s bound to pay all future claims - the law and the courts are clearly on Wal-Mart’s side so in this case, it just becomes a matter of spending money on PR.

Again, Canadian single payer national health insurance is the best answer to all of this.

In the meantime, the best we can do is keep the heat on and hope that the bad publicity rolls over Wal-Mart to such a degree that they eventually give in. You can do your part by boycotting Wal-Mart (if you can and I know a lot of people can’t due to being on fixed incomes during the Bush economic disaster) and letting the store manager know why.