"Keep Working...

[MinutemanCO]

Couple this concept with the frequency of mob activity running unchecked through so many urban areas and you have some of the essentials needed for societal collapse. I am concerned for those who choose to live in major urban centers at this time. They need to get out.

[American Patriot]

Thought this might be a good place to put this:


La. health officials destroy 1,600 pounds of venison donated to homeless shelter

By Jessica Chasmar

-
The Washington Times
Monday, February 25, 2013





Louisiana hunters are outraged after health officials forced them to destroy 1,600 pounds of donated venison — about $8,000 worth — that was meant for the state’s homeless shelters.


The Department of Health and Hospitals ordered the staff at the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to throw the deer meat into garbage bins and douse it with chlorine bleach so other animals would not eat it.

“Deer meat is not permitted to be served in a shelter, restaurant or any other public eating establishment in Louisiana,” a health department official told Fox News in an email. “While we applaud the good intentions of the hunters who donated this meat, we must protect the people who eat at the Rescue Mission, and we cannot allow a potentially serious health threat to endanger the public.”


Hunters statewide are furious over the wasted manpower and carnage put into the effort.
“That’s a mild understatement,” Richard Campbell, one of the founders of Hunters for the Hungry, told Fox. “Hunters are going nuts over it. It’s created an outrage across our state and even over into Mississippi.”


The mission’s chef asked the officials if they could return the meat to the processing plant, but he was turned down.


“They actually took it out to the dumpsters, split the packages open and poured Clorox on it,” Henry Martin, executive director of the mission, told Fox.



He said the rescue mission serves 200,000 meals a year without any help from the state or federal governments. As many as 3,200 meals were lost that day.


“It seems like this was a senseless act,” Mr. Martin said. “I don’t think hungry people who come to our mission appreciate the fact they could have been eating some really good venison, and as it is now — no one can eat it.”


State Rep. Jeff Thompson said he is meeting with state lawmakers to make sure the rules are changed.


“As a hunter and somebody who has personally donated deer to this program, I’m outraged and very concerned,” he told Fox. “You hear about these stories anywhere and it’s a concern — but when it happens in your own backyard, it’s insulting.”

[Ryan Ruck]

Um, what?!?!

http://www.fhfh.org/Home.asp

Guess it's "dangerous" because it doesn't have the government's stamp of approval. I can't think of anything more healthy or organic than meat straight from the land.

[Ryan Ruck]

Food Stamps Put Rhode Island Town On Monthly Boom-And-Bust Cycle

March 16, 2013

The economy of Woonsocket was about to stir to life. Delivery trucks were moving down river roads, and stores were extending their hours. The bus company was warning riders to anticipate “heavy traffic.” A community bank, soon to experience a surge in deposits, was rolling a message across its electronic marquee on the night of Feb. 28: “Happy shopping! Enjoy the 1st.”

In the heart of downtown, Miguel Pichardo, 53, watched three trucks jockey for position at the loading dock of his family-run International Meat Market. For most of the month, his business operated as a humble milk-and-eggs corner store, but now 3,000 pounds of product were scheduled for delivery in the next few hours. He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”

“Today, we fill the store up with everything,” he said. “Tomorrow, we sell it all.”

At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks, beginning the monthly cycle that has helped Woonsocket survive.

Three years into an economic recovery, this is the lasting scar of collapse: a federal program that began as a last resort for a few million hungry people has grown into an economic lifeline for entire towns. Spending on SNAP has doubled in the past four years and tripled in the past decade, surpassing $78 billion last year. A record 47 million Americans receive the benefit — including 13,752 in Woonsocket, one-third of the town’s population, where the first of each month now reveals twin shortcomings of the U.S. economy:

So many people are forced to rely on government support.

The government is forced to support so many people.

The 1st is always circled on the office calendar at International Meat Market, where customers refer to the day in the familiar slang of a holiday. It is Check Day. Milk Day. Pay Day. Mother’s Day.

“Uncle Sam Day,” Pichardo said now, late on Feb. 28, as he watched new merchandise roll off the trucks. Out came 40 cases of Ramen Noodles. Out came 230 pounds of ground beef and 180 gallons of orange juice.

SNAP enrollment in Rhode Island had been rising for six years, up from 73,000 people to nearly 180,000, and now three-quarters of purchases at International Meat Market are paid for with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards. Government money had in effect funded the truckloads of food at Pichardo’s dock . . . and the three part-time employees he had hired to unload it . . . and the walk-in freezer he had installed to store surplus product . . . and the electric bills he paid to run that freezer, at nearly $2,000 each month.

Pichardo’s profits from SNAP had also helped pay for International Meat Market itself, a 10-aisle store in a yellow building that he had bought and refurbished in 2010, when the rise in government spending persuaded him to expand out of a smaller market down the block.

The son of a grocer in the Dominican Republic, Pichardo had immigrated to the United States in the 1980s because he expected everyone to have money — “a country of customers,” he had thought. He settled in Rhode Island with his brother, and together they opened a series of small supermarkets. He framed his first three $5s, his first three $20s and his first three $100s, the green bills lining a wall behind his register. But now he rarely dealt in cash, and he had built a plexiglass partition in front of the register to discourage his most desperate customers from coming after those framed bills when their EBT cards ran dry. The local unemployment rate was 12 percent. The shuttered textile mills along the river had become Section 8 housing. The median income had dropped by $10,000 in the last decade.

Of the few jobs still available in Woonsocket, many were part-time positions at grocery stores like his, with hours clustered around the first of the month.

Pichardo catered his store to the unique shopping rhythms of Rhode Island, where so much about the food industry revolved around the 1st. Other states had passed legislation to distribute SNAP benefits more gradually across the month, believing a one-day blitz was taxing for both retailers and customers. Maryland and Washington, D.C., had begun depositing benefits evenly across the first 10 days; Virginia had started doing it over four. But Rhode Island and seven other states had stuck to the old method — a retail flashpoint that sent shoppers scrambling to stores en masse.

Pichardo had placed a $10,000 product order to satisfy his diverse customers, half of them white, a quarter Hispanic, 15 percent African American, plus a dozen immigrant populations drawn to Woonsocket by the promise of cheap housing. He had ordered 150 pounds of the tenderloin steak favored by the newly poor, still clinging to old habits; and 200 cases of chicken gizzards for the inter-generationally poor, savvy enough to spot a deal at less than $2 a pound. He had bought pizza pockets for the working poor and plantains for the immigrant poor. He had stocked up on East African marinades, Spanish rice, Cuban snacks and Mexican fruit juice. The boxes piled up in the aisles and the whir of an electronic butcher’s knife reverberated from the back of the store.

Late on the 28th, a boyfriend and girlfriend arrived at Pichardo’s register with a small basket of food. “Finally! A customer,” Pichardo said, turning away from a Dominican League baseball game streaming on his computer. The last day of the month was always his slowest. The 1st was always his best, when he sometimes made 25 percent of his profits for the month. Pichardo rang up his last transaction of February: a gallon of milk, a box of pasta and a bag of discount cookies.

“That’s $5.28,” he said.

The boyfriend handed over his EBT card: “Sorry. Running low,” he said. “I only got $1.07 on there.”

The girlfriend handed over hers: “I got $3.20 on this one.”

They paid the remainder of their balance with change, and Pichardo dropped it into his nearly empty register. Slow days reminded him of times when he had worked 14-hour days to avoid paying employees and once faced charges for selling stolen merchandise. But now, thanks to SNAP, he had scheduled four extra employees to work the next morning, when they would hand out free eggs to big spenders.

Pichardo closed the register and totaled his sales for Feb. 28. He had made $526.

“Tomorrow, we do 15 times more,” he said.

****

The last meal of the month was almost always their worst.

Rebecka and Jourie Ortiz usually ran out of milk first, after about three weeks. Next went juice, fresh produce, cereal, meat and eggs. By the 27th or 28th, Rebecka, 21, was often making a dish she referred to in front of the kids as “rice-a-roni,” even though she and Jourie called it “rice-a-whatever.” It was boiled noodles with canned vegetables and beans. “Enough salt and hot sauce can make anything good,” she said.

Late on Feb. 28, Rebecka came home to their two-bedroom apartment to make a snack for her daughters, ages 1 and 3. The kitchen was the biggest room in their apartment, with a stove that doubled as a heater and a floral wall hanging bought at the dollar store that read: “All things are possible if you believe!” She opened the refrigerator. Its top shelf had been duct-taped and its cracked bottom shelf had been covered with a towel. Only a few jars of jelly, iced tea, rotten vegetables and some string cheese remained in between.

For the past three years, the Ortizes’ lives had unfolded in a series of exhausting, fractional decisions. Was it better to eat the string cheese now or to save it? To buy milk for $3.80 nearby or for $3.10 across town? Was it better to pay down the $600 they owed the landlord, or the $110 they owed for their cellphones, or the $75 they owed the tattoo parlor, or the $840 they owed the electric company?

They had been living together since Rebecka became pregnant during their senior year of high school, long enough to experience Woonsocket’s version of recession and recovery. Jourie had lost his job at a pharmacy late in 2010 because of downsizing, and Rebecka had lost hers in fast food for the same reason a few months later. They had filled out a one-page application for SNAP and been accepted on Oct. 11, 2011, awarded $518 for a family of four, to be delivered on the first of every month. “Check Day!” they had begun calling it. They had applied for jobs until finally, late in 2012, they had both been hired for the only work high school graduates were finding in a low-wage recovery: part time at a nearby supermarket, the nicest one in the area, a two-story Stop & Shop across the Massachusetts line.

She made $8 an hour, and he earned $9. She worked days in produce, and he worked nights as a stocker. Their combined monthly income of $1,700 was still near the poverty line, and they still qualified for SNAP.

Rebecka had read once that nobody starved to death in America, and she believed that was true. But she had also read that the average monthly SNAP benefit lasted a family 17 days, and she knew from personal experience the anxiety headaches that came at the end of every month, when their SNAP money had run out, their bank account was empty and she was left to ply Woonsocket’s circuit of emergency church food pantries. Saint Agatha’s on Mondays. All Saints’s on Tuesdays. Saint Charles’s on Thursdays, where the pantry opened at 10 a.m. but the line of regulars began forming at 6.

To steady her nerves and improve her mood near the end of the month, Rebecka had started making elaborate grocery lists to prepare for the 1st — “an OCD habit,” she said. She sorted the items in order of importance and then rewrote the list again and again, until her handwriting looked perfect and the list became irrelevant, because she had memorized it all.

Now she reached into the refrigerator and grabbed two string cheeses for her daughters. Then she reached back for a third.

“Do you want a snack for work?” she asked Jourie, who was getting dressed for his midnight shift.

“Do we have enough?”

“I think so,” she said, handing him the cheese. “But I’m shopping tomorrow.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, handing it back. He stood up and hugged her goodbye. “They’ll fire me if I’m late,” he said.

He had neither a driver’s license nor a car, so he always walked the mile to work. He headed out of their apartment building in a hooded sweatshirt and turned down Privilege Street. His feet crunched against the snow, and his head steamed in the cold air. He passed a U-Save Liquors, a Cheap-O Tires and an Instant Payday Loans. He passed four stores with signs advertising that they accepted SNAP.

The government had designated Woonsocket a “highly distressed community” in 2012, and at night Jourie thought it also seemed deserted, a town that disappeared into twisting two-lane roads, shadowy mills and abandoned smokestacks. He watched his reflection in the empty store windows as he walked, crossing the border into Massachusetts and cutting through a parking lot toward the Stop & Shop. Its lights glowed neon. Four trucks idled at the loading docks, the sign of an economy coming alive for the 1st.

Jourie had almost never shopped at the store himself; it was too expensive. His family would spend Check Day somewhere else. He punched his timecard at 10:57 p.m. and walked into the store, where he stocked the aisles with cat food as Feb. 28 ended and March 1 arrived.

****

The first five customers came to International Meat Market at 7 a.m., 30 minutes before the store opened. They leaned on shopping carts and smoked cigarettes, passing around a yellow flier that advertised the market’s bulk deals for the 1st. The flier detailed eight “Meat Packs.” Five pounds of deli cuts went for $12.99; 28 pounds of beef for $49.99; a 58-pound variety pack with pork, pig’s feet, chicken wings and London broil for $99.99.

Pichardo unlocked the store and led the customers to the meat counter, where both the butcher and his apron were already smeared with blood.

“Lucky. You get first pick,” Pichardo told his customers, gesturing at the full meat counter. “Place your orders, and we’ll fill them as fast as we can.”

Every store had a gimmick for the 1st, and Pichardo’s was the meat packs, which accounted for most of his sales. The idea was to sell merchandise in bulk when customers were hungry and most likely to splurge, hours after the government had deposited an average benefit payment of $265 onto their EBT cards. The nearby Shaw’s Market had started a dollar aisle, and the dollar store had 50-cent specials. Wal-Mart stayed open 24 hours, and customers sometimes waited out the final minutes of the month with full carts near the registers, counting down to midnight.

Grocery store chains had started discount spinoffs. Farmers markets had incentivized SNAP shopping by rewarding customers with $2 extra for every $5 of government money spent. Restaurants, long forbidden from accepting SNAP, had begun a major lobbying campaign in Washington, and now a handful of Subways in Rhode Island were accepting the benefit as part of a pilot program.

But SNAP recipients at International Meat Market were allowed to spend their money only on uncooked foods — nothing hot or pre-prepared, no paper products, pet food, alcohol or cigarettes. A line formed at Pichardo’s register, and he lifted one heavy cardboard box of meat after the next.

A part-time janitor came through with a meat pack, vegetable oil and canned tomatoes. “That’s $132.20,” Pichardo said.

An unemployed welder with two meat packs and a 24-pack of Ramen. “One-hundred and-ten,” Pichardo said.

A retired teacher. A single mother of three. A Salvadoran immigrant who wanted the meat pack flier translated into Spanish. A part-time employee at International Meat Market, hired for the day, buying $69.99 worth of meat with a SNAP card during his 20-minute break.

“Thank you,” Pichardo told one customer.

“Gracias,” he told the next.

“Okay, my friend.”

“See you next month.”

By noon his shirt was drenched and his feet were swollen. His thumb and index finger were stained brown after grabbing and sliding 120 EBT cards in the past four hours. The store smelled like meat and sweat, and the aisles were a trail of discarded items. The exhausted butcher behind the meat counter had started mumbling under his breath in Spanish: “No mas. No mas. No mas.”

Pichardo noticed none of it. His store had already sold more than $5,000, with $4,700 paid for in SNAP.

****

Rebecka went shopping early that afternoon. Jourie was still sleeping off his midnight shift, so she decided to take the girls by herself. She wanted to visit at least two stores to capitalize on the best deals. She packed snacks and diaper bags and loaded the girls into the car, a 2004 Mitsubishi Galant leased on 18 percent interest for $90 a week. They drove across town to Price Rite, the cheapest chain in Woonsocket, and the town’s epicenter of the SNAP economy.

Nearly 150 cars filled the lot, and stray shopping carts edged into the adjacent road. The sign in front of the store advertised “Impossibly, Incredibly, Inconceivably Low Prices.” A city bus had stopped at the entrance a few minutes earlier to drop off 30 shoppers before turning back to pick up 30 more. The residents of Woonsocket had petitioned for the route in 2011, but now buses suffered from overcrowding on the 1st and drivers enforced a limit of seven grocery bags per person on the way home. A line of opportunistic cab drivers had begun waiting outside Price Rite on the 1st, ready for customers with more than seven bags and with $4.75 for the fare.

Rebecka moved quickly through the lot and lifted her 1-year-old, Jaeliece, and her 3-year-old, Sariah, into an empty shopping cart.

“Please keep your hands in the cart,” she told them. “Only Mommy gets to do the shopping.”

The first tantrum came before they reached the front door. Sariah wanted a balloon, and then a gum ball, and then a bag of oranges off a display near the entrance. That was the trouble with shopping on the 1st, after a week of skimping and rice-a-whatever: There were so many things to want, and stores designed themselves to maximize temptation. Juices were placed low within reach of the kids. Candy and Coke displays blocked the aisles. A six-foot-tall mountain of Oreos towered just inside the Price Rite entrance, a temporary display for the 1st that Sariah was reaching for now.

“No,” Rebecka said. “That’s not on the list.”

“Mine,” Sariah said, grabbing a bag of cookies.

“No.”

“Mine!” Other customers turned to look. Rebecka still had two stores and 70 items left on her shopping list for the day.

“Fine,” she said. “You can hold it.” She moved past the cookies and hustled through the store, weaving between customers who were shopping with two carts and grabbing items by the cardboard crate. Little boys ran around retirees on their motorized scooters. Rebecka focused on the list and calculated prices in her head. She grabbed two boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch ($2.49), a four-gallon bottle of cooking oil ($5.99) and three gallons of milk ($3.10). She pushed the kids toward checkout, where long lines snaked behind all 12 registers. Sariah started throwing items out of their cart. Jaeliece began to cry. “Damn it,” Rebecka said. She pushed her cart into an express lane for 10 items or less and set her 22 items on the conveyer belt. “I’m sorry,” she told the cashier. Then she handed over her EBT card, paid $49.20, and loaded the kids back into the car for Wal-Mart.

The crowds got bigger.

The prices got higher.

The tantrums got worse.

“Damn it!” Rebecka said again, racing around the store, oblivious to her own list, picking up anything that looked healthy or filling and dropping it into the cart. Sariah grabbed a box of Goldfish off the shelf and opened it. “I guess we have to buy that now,” Rebecka said. Jaeliece opened a string cheese and threw it on the floor. “I guess we have to buy that, too,” Rebecka said. Sariah ran away, and Rebecka ran after her. Sariah hid, and Rebecka searched for her in produce.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said, after almost an hour in Wal-Mart. She pushed the kids toward the checkout line. Another SNAP shopper was already in front of her with $230 worth of food on the conveyer belt, so they had to wait. Sariah grabbed a package of Play-Doh off the shelf and ripped it open, throwing green putty on the floor. “Are you serious?” Rebecka said. “That’s another $6.50 you just cost me.”

“I’ve been there,” said the shopper in front of her, turning to help clean up the Play-Doh.

“I’m flipping,” Rebecka said.

“The best and the worst day of the month,” the shopper said.

Rebecka paid $168 and returned to the parking lot. Sariah fell on the gravel and started to cry. “We’ll stop at Burger King,” Rebecka said, crying now, too, so tired she didn’t care what lunch would cost. They went to the drive-through and continued home. She left the groceries in the car, and Jourie hauled them up to the apartment. They wedged the boxes into the fridge. “I couldn’t get it all,” she told Jourie, explaining that she had made it only halfway through her list. She had spent about two weeks of SNAP money on groceries that would last seven or eight days.

Later that night, as the kids went to bed and Jourie readied for another shift at work, Rebecka grabbed a calendar off the wall and turned the page to March. The 1st was almost over. Price Rite had closed. The buses had stopped running. Pichardo and his employees at International Meat Market had all gone home, after mopping meat from the aisles at the end of an $8,200 day.

Rebecka touched each empty box on the calendar with her finger and counted out loud, plotting the long decline before the cycle of a SNAP economy began again.

“Thirty more days,” she said.

[Ryan Ruck]

Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise Of Disability In America

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don't show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs -- who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that -- is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It's the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

For the past six months, I've been reporting on the growth of federal disability programs. I've been trying to understand what disability means for American workers, and, more broadly, what it means for poor people in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it. Here's what I found.

Hale County, Alabama

In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.

Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.

"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.
"I have high blood pressure," the man said.
"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"
"I have diabetes."
"So do I."

There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.

I talked to lots of people in Hale County who were on disability. Sometimes, the disability seemed unambiguous.

"I was in a 1990 Jeep Cherokee Laredo," Dane Mitchell, a 23-year-old guy I met in a coffee shop, told me. "I flipped it both ways, flew 165 feet from the Jeep, going through 12 to 14,000 volts of electrical lines. Then I landed into a briar patch. I broke all five of my right toes, my right hip, seven of my vertebrae, shattering one, breaking a right rib, punctured my lung, and then I cracked my neck."

Other stories seemed less clear. I sat with lots of women in Hale County who told me how their backs kept them up at night and made it hard for them to stand on the job. "I used to cry to try to work," one woman told me. "It was so painful."

People don't seem to be faking this pain, but it gets confusing. I have back pain. My editor has a herniated disc, and he works harder than anyone I know. There must be millions of people with asthma and diabetes who go to work every day. Who gets to decide whether, say, back pain makes someone disabled?

As far as the federal government is concerned, you're disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it's a judgment call made in doctors' offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment -- back pain, mental illness -- are among the fastest growing causes of disability.

In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began to wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program.

After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.

"We talk about the pain and what it’s like," he says. "I always ask them, 'What grade did you finish?'"

What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren't going to be able to get a sit-down job.

Dr. Timberlake is making a judgment call that if you have a particular back problem and a college degree, you're not disabled. Without the degree, you are.

Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"

One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.

At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There's the McDonald's, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I went down a list of job openings -- Occupational Therapist, McDonald's, McDonald's, Truck Driver (heavy lifting), KFC, Registered Nurse, McDonald's.

I actually think it might be possible that Ethel could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain.

Aberdeen, Washington

There's a story we hear all the time these days that doesn't, on its face, seem to have anything to do with disability: Local Mill Shuts Down. Or, maybe: Factory To Close.

Four years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Seattle, I did that story. I stood with workers in a dead mill in Aberdeen, Washington and memorialized the era when you could graduate from high school and get a job at a mill and live a good life. That was the end of the story.

But after I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed. One of them, Scott Birdsall, went to lots of meetings where he learned about retraining programs and educational opportunities. At one meeting, he says, a staff member pulled him aside.

"Scotty, I'm gonna be honest with you," the guy told him. "There's nobody gonna hire you … We're just hiding you guys." The staff member's advice to Scott was blunt: "Just suck all the benefits you can out of the system until everything is gone, and then you're on your own."

Scott, who was 56 years old at the time, says it was the most real thing anyone had said to him in a while.

There used to be a lot of jobs that you could do with just a high school degree, and that paid enough to be considered middle class. I knew, of course, that those have been disappearing for decades. What surprised me was what has been happening to many of the people who lost those jobs: They've been going on disability.



Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, "Since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry to about this stuff anymore." It worked; Scott is now on disability.

Scott's dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there'd been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he'd have done that too. But there wasn't a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn't just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path -- one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.

I don't know what that rogue staffer meant when he told Scott Birdsall they were trying to hide those mill guys. But signing up for disability benefits is an excellent way to stay hidden in one key way: People on disability are not counted among the unemployed.

"That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market," David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. "Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program."

Part of the rise in the number of people on disability is simply driven by the fact that the workforce is getting older, and older people tend to have more health problems.

But disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills. But it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet. Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work. Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since then, one economist told me.

People who leave the workforce and go on disability qualify for Medicare, the government health care program that also covers the elderly. They also get disability payments from the government of about $13,000 a year. This isn't great. But if your alternative is a minimum wage job that will pay you at most $15,000 a year, and probably does not include health insurance, disability may be a better option.

But going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work. Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life. That's the deal. And it's a deal 14 million Americans have signed up for.

Jahleel Duroc is on disability

As I got further into this story, I started hearing about another group of people on disability: kids. People in Hale County told me that what you want is a kid who can "pull a check." Many people mentioned this, but I basically ignored it. It seemed like one of those things that maybe happened once or twice, got written up in the paper and became conversational fact among neighbors.

Then I looked at the numbers. I found that the number of kids on a program called Supplemental Security Income -- a program for children and adults who are both poor and disabled -- is almost seven times larger than it was 30 years ago.



Jahleel Duroc (pictured above) is gap-toothed, 10 and vibrating with enthusiasm. He's excited to talk to someone new, excited to show me his map of his neighborhood in the Bronx. He's disabled in the eyes of the government because he has a learning disability.

"I like school," he told me. "My favorite periods are math and science and art, and lunch and recess and snack … social studies and writing are my favorite."

His favorite thing about school, in other words, is everything.

When you are an adult applying for disability you have to prove you cannot function in a "work-like setting." When you are a kid, a disability can be anything that prevents you from progressing in school. Two-thirds of all kids on the program today have been diagnosed with mental or intellectual problems.

Jahleel is a kid you can imagine doing very well for himself. He is delayed. But given the right circumstances and support, it's easy to believe that over the course of his schooling Jahleel could catch up.

Let's imagine that happens. Jahleel starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities. He doesn't need the disability program anymore. That would seem to be great for everyone, except for one thing: It would threaten his family's livelihood. Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability.

Jahleel's mom wants him to do well in school. That is absolutely clear. But her livelihood depends on Jahleel struggling in school. This tension only increases as kids get older. One mother told me her teenage son wanted to work, but she didn't want him to get a job because if he did, the family would lose its disability check.

I haven't taken a survey or anything, but I'm guessing a large majority of Americans would be in favor of some form of government support for disabled children living in poverty. We would have a hard time agreeing on exactly how we want to offer support, but I think there are some basic things we'd all agree on.

Kids should be encouraged to go to school. Kids should want to do well in school. Parents should want their kids to do well in school. Kids should be confident their parents can provide for them regardless of how they do in school. Kids should become more and more independent as they grow older and hopefully be able to support themselves at around age 18.

The disability program stands in opposition to every one of these aims.

Bill Clinton signs welfare reform into law (1996).

A federal program for disabled people was first proposed in the 1930s. Even then, a Social Security actuary was worried. "You will have workers like those in the Dust Bowl area, people who have migrated to California and elsewhere, who perhaps have not worked in a year or two, who will imagine they are disabled," the actuary wrote. The cost of the program could be higher than "anything that can be forecast."

The actuary's warning gets at a central tension in a much bigger debate: What should we, as a country, do for people who aren't making it? Americans want to be generous. But Americans don't want to be chumps.

The first key pieces of the modern safety net were created in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt. The first federal disability program was created in the '50s. A few years later, Lyndon Johnson pushed to expand the federal safety net further.

In the '80s, Ronald Reagan argued that a robust economy would do more to eliminate poverty than any federal program. When Reagan used the term "welfare queen," it was clear where he stood. He didn't want to be a chump.

Bill Clinton tried to appease both sides. He expanded many programs for the working poor, but he also promised to "end welfare as we know it" -- to nudge people off of public assistance, give them some job training, and force them to make it on their own. "A society rooted in responsibility must first promote the value of work, not welfare," Clinton said. History has judged Clinton's welfare reform a big success.

But when you include disability in the story of welfare reform, the picture looks more ambiguous.



Part of Clinton's welfare reform plan pushed states to get people on welfare into jobs, partly by making states pay a much larger share of welfare costs. The incentive seemed to work; the welfare rolls shrank. But not everyone who left welfare went to work.

*****

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn't cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help.

PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. "What we're offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria," Pat Coakley, who runs PCG's Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.

The company has an office in eastern Washington state that's basically a call center, full of headsetted women in cubicles who make calls all day long to potentially disabled Americans, trying to help them discover and document their disabilities:

"The high blood pressure, how long have you been taking medications for that?" one PCG employee asked over the phone the day I visited the company. "Can you think of anything else that's been bothering you and disabling you and preventing you from working?"

The PCG agents help the potentially disabled fill out the Social Security disability application over the phone. And by help, I mean the agents actually do the filling out. When the potentially disabled don't have the right medical documentation to prove a disability, the agents at PCG help them get it. They call doctors' offices; they get records faxed. If the right medical records do not exist, PCG sets up doctors' appointments and calls applicants the day before to remind them of those appointments.

PCG also works very, very hard to make the people who work at the Social Security happy. Whenever the company wins a new contract, Coakley will personally introduce himself at the local Social Security Administration office, and see how he can make things as easy as possible for the administrators there.

"We go through even to the point, frankly, of do you like things to be stapled or paper-clipped?" he told me. "Paper clips wins out a lot of times because they need to make photocopies and they don't want to be taking staples out."

There's a reason PCG goes to all this trouble. The company gets paid by the state every time it moves someone off of welfare and onto disability. In recent contract negotiations with Missouri, PCG asked for $2,300 per person. For Missouri, that's a deal -- every time someone goes on disability, it means Missouri no longer has to send them cash payments every month. For the nation as a whole, it means one more person added to the disability rolls.

Files at Binder and Binder, a law firm that handles some 30,000 disability cases each year.

In the past few decades, an entire disability-industrial complex has emerged. It has just one goal: Push more people onto disability. And, sometimes, it seems like the government is outmatched. This is especially true in the legal system.

Daytime TV in many places is full of ads from lawyers who promise to fight the government and win the disability benefits you deserve. There are tons of YouTube videos about getting disability -- one lawyer, one webcam. The standard form is a let's-get-real chat about how to win this thing.

There is one man who takes much of the credit for this industry: Charles Binder. "When we started," Binder told me, "I don't think anybody else was advertising." What's more, most people who applied for disability were denied and never had a hearing. Binder, and the lawyers who followed him, changed that. "I've created some of the problems for the government because so many people appeal," Binder says.

When he started in 1979, Binder represented fewer than 50 clients. Last year, his firm represented 30,000 people. Thirty thousand people who were denied disability appealed with the help of Charles Binder's firm. In one year. Last year, Binder and Binder made $68.7 million in fees for disability cases.

The way Binder tells it, he's is a guy helping desperate people get the support they deserve. He is a cowboy-hatted Lone Ranger going to court to fight the good fight for the everyman.

Who is making the case for the other side? Who is defending the government's decision to deny disability?

Nobody.

"You might imagine a courtroom where on one side there's the claimant and on the other side there's a government attorney who is saying, 'We need to protect the public interest and your client is not sufficiently deserving,'" the economist David Autor says. "Actually, it doesn't work like that. There is no government lawyer on the other side of the room."

The Social Security Administration says disability hearings were never meant to be adversarial. In these courtrooms, the judges are employees of Social Security. So the judges are supposed to both represent the government and make a fair and objective determination. But the judges themselves say this role can be difficult.

Judge Randy Frye, who hears disability cases in North Carolina, told me he often finds himself glancing to where he imagines there should be a chair for the government attorney, as there would be in a normal case. "There are always moments where you are concerned maybe you missed something," he says.

"You would turn to that chair and say, 'Counsel, I'm having trouble with this issue. Why does the government think this case should not be reversed?'"



Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some fundamental ways. There are now millions of Americans who do not have the skills or education to make it in this country.

Politicians pay lip service to this problem during election cycles, but American leaders have not sat down and come up with a comprehensive plan.

In the meantime, federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan. The two big disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost some $260 billion a year.

People at the Social Security Administration, which runs the federal disability programs, say we cannot afford this. The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016, Steve Goss, the chief actuary at Social Security, told me.

Goss is confident that Congress will act to keep disability payments flowing, probably by taking money from the Social Security retirement fund. Of course, the retirement fund itself is on track to run out of money by 2035.

Goss and his colleagues have worked out a temporary fix under which the retirement and disability funds will both run out of money by 2033. He says he hopes the country will have come up with a better plan by then.

[American Patriot]

Hypertension is a disability????????????????????????????????????

[Ryan Ruck]

Dead Bomber, Family On Welfare Before Boston Marathon Blast: Report

April 24, 2013

He’s the ultimate ingrate.

US-hating terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev took government handouts even as he delved deep into the world of violent, radical Islam, officials said.

Tsarnaev, his wife Katherine Russell and their 3-year-old daughter were on the state dole as recently as 2012, officials with the state’s Office of Health and Human Services told the Boston Herald.

The dead Boston Marathon bomber and his family stopped receiving benefits because his hard-working wife, toiling for up 80 hours a week, brought home enough bread to make them ineligible for government assistance.

The home health-care aide supported her deadbeat husband, who stayed at home with the child.

Tsarnaev’s younger brother, bombing suspect Dzhokar, and their parents also received benefits when they were younger.

Relatives have said Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s journey to violent hate began around 2008 or 2009.

Tamerlan was killed last week, hours after cops released pictures of the suspected brother bombers.

Cops shot Tamerlan but were still going to take him alive when fleeing Dzhokar accidentally ran over his big brother early Friday morning.

Despite their low-income lives, the brothers allegedly collected just enough green to fashion bombs that probably cost less than $100 apiece to construct.

The crude bombs allegedly fashioned by the Tsarnaev brothers were made of affordable kitchen pressure cookers, filled with BBs and other small pieces of metal.

“There is no barrier here to two men doing this on their own,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a Rand Corp. adviser and terrorism expert, told the Boston Globe.

“You could easily do this for under $100 per bomb. . . . This is an investment even someone with modest means can make.”

A lawyer for Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife said his client was the hard-working bread winner of the family.

“She has been living in Cambridge, raising her child, and working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves,’’ said Amato DeLuca, representing Katherine Russell.

Dzhokhar was clearly on a better path than his big brothers Tamerlan, having won scholarship money for his education at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

He still struggled for pocket money, and resorted to selling marijuana to classmates, several students told the Globe.

And what he wasn’t selling, Dzhokhar was smoking.

“There was a permanent stench of marijuana in his room,” said one observer.

Local mechanic Gilberto Junior recalled Dzhokhar bringing friends to his garage to fix their cars. Junior said Dzhokhar was determined to buy a new car after graduating from college.

Meanwhile, US investigators are in contact with the parents of the two suspects in southern Russia and working with Russian security officials to shed light on the deadly attack, a US Embassy official said Wednesday.

The Americans traveled Tuesday from Moscow to the predominantly Muslim province of Dagestan "because the investigation is ongoing, it's not over," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He said the US team is working with the Russian security services, the FSB.

"This is a horrible tragedy for our country, but one positive development might be closer cooperation on this set of issues with the Russian government," the embassy official said.

On Wednesday, their mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, was inside the FSB building in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, where she was believed to be speaking further to US and Russian investigators.

Heda Saratova, a prominent Chechen rights activist providing support to the distraught mother, said Tsarnaeva first went in for questioning on Tuesday, returning late at night. Saratova said she had no details about the discussions, but Tsarnaeva said they were "cordial."

The father, Anzor Tsarnaev, also was summoned to the FSB headquarters but did not go because he felt ill.

[Ryan Ruck]

http://www.foodstampscovers.com/index.php

You don't have to feel uncomfortable everytime you use your food stamps card. Customize your food stamps card today and "Pay with Ease while Protecting Your Privacy" !

With more than 70 different designs to choose from, food stamps skins are colorful...fun...attractive skins that can be placed on your benefits card. And applying the skin is easy! Simply clean the card surface, peel the backing from the skin and apply it to your card! And you're done!

[American Patriot]

LOL

OMG this guy and the people around him view him as a demigod!

This is the most unbelievable society....

[Phil Fiord]

In Virginia the account number is on front of a card so doing this cover will make it unable to be manually entered if the mag strip fails.

[Ryan Ruck]

Pretty sure that's the way the Ohio card is too Phil.

[American Patriot]

Who CARES if they can enter it? As long as we can gaze upon Obama's countenance....

[vector7]

Heritage's $6.3 trillion based on amnestied illegal aliens doing as well as today's U.S. citizens of same education level

By Roy Beck, Monday, May 6, 2013, 12:39 PM EDT - posted on NumbersUSA

Many senators are doing everything possible to pretend there would be no price tag for making some 80 federal welfare programs plus all entitlements available to millions of mostly low-education, low-skill illegal aliens.

The Senators have heard from lots of billionaires and special-interest lobbyists who stand to make money off the cheap-labor aspect of the amnesty.

Now, each Senator needs to hear from thousands of taxpayers who say NO to subsidizing that "cheap" labor with $6.3 trillion of taxpayer funds.
We hope citizens are making sure that their Senators' fax machines are full of messages of urgency to stop an amnesty that is sure to plunge the nation deeper into a debt crisis.

Chief researcher Robert Rector at his press conference this morning noted that the costs are predicted primarily by the education level of the illegal aliens. The study assumes, for example, that amnestied illegal aliens with only a high school degree will have roughly the same net costs to government as American citizens with only a high school degree.

Rector said:

• 75% of illegal aliens have no more than a high school degree.
• The average education level of illegal aliens is 10th grade

Rector said U.S. citizens with those kinds of education levels are immensely costly to the government because they take so much more in services than they pay in taxes. He indicated that it is preposterous for supporters of amnesty to claim that amnestied illegal aliens with a 10th grade education will somehow cost less than U.S. citizens with a 10th grade education.

The $6.3 trillion number is so high that it may be difficult to contemplate the extraordinary magnitude of it. But it amounts to an incredible financial liability that this Congress would hang around the necks of our children and grandchildren to pay for this amnesty the rest of their lives.

Former Sen. Jim De-Mint, President of Heritage, said Senators who support the amnesty will hide behind the accounting trick of putting off most costs until after 10 years. hey tend to talk about the first 10 years when the bill forbids use of most welfare and entitlements. In fact, Rector says, the net costs will go down to about $50 billion a year the first decade as many illegal aliens start working ON the books.

But Rector says the costs will explode around the 13th or 14th year of the amnesty and grow worse over the decades, especially as the amnestied illegal aliens start collecting medicare and Social Security.

Rector says he used the methodology developed by the National Academy of Sciences and that all the variable costs are pulled from official government studies.

Some critics of the Heritage numbers claim that maybe the amnestied illegal aliens will cost a lot of money but that all of their kids will make a lot more money and pay taxes to cover the costs of their parents.
Rector says he studied that and found that the children are likely to have better education and be less costly to the government.

But he says all data suggests that the children of illegal aliens will also be a net cost to government over their lifetimes.

Those costs, however, are not included in the $6.3 trillion figure.
In fact, he says, only if every single child of an amnestied illegal alien were to get a college degree, would they not be a cost to the government. Even then, though, their net tax additions still would not come close to paying back the $6.3 trillion price tag for their parents.

http://hub.numbersusa.com/route/10/5...00000/245633/9

[Ryan Ruck]

10,962,532: U.S. Disability Beneficiaries Exceed Population of Greece

May 7, 2013

The total number of people in the United States now receiving federal disability benefits hit a record 10,962,532 million in April, which exceeds the 10,815,197 people who live in the nation of Greece.

According to newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the record 10,962,532 total disability beneficiaries in April, included a record 8,865,586 disabled workers (up from 8,853,614 in March), 1,936,236 children of disabled workers, and 160,710 spouses of disabled workers.

According to its latest census, Greece had only 10,815,197 residents.

April was the 195th straight month that the number of American workers collecting federal disability payments increased. The last time the number of Americans collecting disability decreased was in January 1997. That month the number of workers taking disability dropped by 249 people—from 4,385,623 in December 1996 to 4,385,374 in January 1997.

As the overall number of American workers collecting disability has increased, the ratio of full-time workers to disability-collecting workers has decreased.

In December 1968, 1,295,428 American workers collected disability and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 65,630,000 worked full-time. Thus, there were about 51 full-time workers for each worker collecting disability. In April 2013, with a record 8,865,586 American workers collecting disability and 116,053,000 working full-time, there were only 13 Americans working full-time for each worker on disability.

[vector7]

Many Americans say they can't retire until their 70s or 80s

New retirement reality: Work until you're 80? (Susana Gonzalez / Bloomberg / June 5, 2012)

May 7, 2013, 11:37 a.m.

It’s the new retirement: More than four in 10 Americans think they’ll have to work into their 70s or 80s because they can’t afford to retire, according to a new survey.

One in 10 people expects to toil into their 80s, while 32% expect to be on the job into their 70s, according to the report by insurer Northwestern Mutual.

On average, those surveyed expect to leave work at age 68. However, the report points out, that doesn’t jibe with reality.

The mean age of those already retired is 59, the study said.

An increasing number of people figure they’ll simply work longer to make up for inadequate nest-egg savings these days, not realizing how layoffs, poor health or other forces pushed their forebears out of the workforce far sooner than they wanted.

“The incredible contrast between how long people expect to work, and how financially prepared they feel to live long lives, dramatically underscores how far behind people feel in their financial planning,” Greg Oberland, Northwestern Mutual executive vice president, said in a statement.

“We’re seeing the average retirement age being pushed further out, due in large part to widespread feelings of long-term financial insecurity," Oberland said. "That adds up to people feeling squeezed during a period of their lives when their financial obligations really should be easing.”

Overall, 51% of Americans say they’re less financially secure than they thought they’d be at this point in their lives. Only 6% think they can retire before age 60.

[Ryan Ruck]

Store Owner Arrested For Using Food Stamps To Stock Shelves

April 2, 2013

A convenience store owner in Daytona Beach, Fla.was arrested Monday for running a food stamp scam, using tax dollars to stock his shelves.

Bassam Abu Diab and his son Matthew were buying food stamp cards for 20 to 40 cents on the dollar and using them to shop at Walmart and Save-A-Lot stores for items they sold in their convenience store, police said, according the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

An undercover agent sold EBT cards to Abu Diab, which he used to purchase items at other stores and then paid the agent less than half the value of the cards. Federal, state and local officers raided the Abu Diabs’ 4M Food Mart after a 3-month investigation.

“This guy is running a business on the taxpayers back,” said Daytona Beach Police Chief Michael Chitwood, according to local tv station WFTV Channel 9. “It’s a fraud. He’s unscrupulous and clearly he didn’t learn from the last time we hit the store.”

Detectives said Abu Diab’s register had $88,000 in EBT card transactions, according to WFTV.

This is the second time Abu Diab has faced the same charges, according to WFTV. The Daytona Beach News-Journal said he was accused of running a pawn shop without a license in December.

[American Patriot]

WTF?

You know... there shouldn't be a law made.

No, no, no... if they get rid of the system and there is NO system, it's difficult to then GAME the SYSTEM.

Punish them all.

[Ryan Ruck]

Shocking US Government Leaflet Tells Mexican Immigrants They Can Collect Food Stamp Benefits Without Admitting They're In The Country Illegally

April 26, 2013

A Spanish-language leaflet that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided to the Mexican Embassy in Washington advises border-crossing Mexicans that they can collect taxpayer-funded food stamp benefits for their children without admitting that they're illegal immigrants.

Underlined and in boldface type, the document tells immigrants who are unlawfully in the United States that, 'You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.'

The USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, is funded in order to prevent hunger by helping poor families maintain a basic level of nutrition for both adults and children.

The Agriculture Department says SNAP benefits are only to be distributed to U.S. citizens and other legal residents. On its website, it acknowledges an education 'partnership' with the Mexican government, but insists that its aim is to help educate only 'eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States' about nutrition benefits for which they might qualify.

That education partnership is carried out through a program called 'Ventanillas de Salud,' meaning 'Windows to Health,' implemented through 50 Mexican consulates in the U.S.

Judicial Watch obtained the Spanish language leaflet through a Freedom of Information Act request. An attached email dates the document to March 2009, just months after President Barack Obama took office.

In an email, a spokesperson for the SNAP program told The Daily Caller, which first reported on the leaflet, that “non-citizens who are unlawfully present, are not, nor have they ever been, eligible to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

The leaflet, released late Thursday by the conservative group Judicial Watch, will raise questions about the Obama administration's commitment to limiting the expenditure of taxpayer funds to eligible Mexican nationals - meaning those with legal permission to reside in the United States.

'The revelation that the USDA is actively working with the Mexican government to promote food stamps for illegal aliens should have a direct impact on the fate of the immigration bill now being debated in Congress,' Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement.

'These disclosures further confirm the fact that the Obama administration cannot be trusted to protect our borders or enforce our immigration laws. And the coordination with a foreign government to attack the policies of an American state is contemptible.'

Fitton's group also obtained a March 2010 USDA flyer advertising a taxpayer-funded online seminar for nonprofits serving Hispanic communities. The teaching session, promoted as being 'free for all participants,' taught activists how to get USDA funding to provide free lunches during the summer.

And in a March 2012 communication, Judicial Watch said, the USDA asked the Mexican Embassy to approve a letter addressed to that country's 50 consulates. That letter encouraged staff at those Mexican diplomatic missions to learn in another webinar how to encourage more of 'the needy families that the consulates serve' to enroll in the SNAP program.

Judicial Watch said Thursday that the 2012 document did not discriminate between legal US residents and illegal immigrants.

In August, Agriculture Under Secretary Kevin Concannon rolled out a new range of anti-fraud programs aimed at preventing food stamp funds from going to ineligible recipients.

'USDA has a zero tolerance policy for SNAP fraud,' Concannon said when announcing new measures to clamp down on abuse of the program that he promised would 'help us hold bad actors even more accountable than in the past and discourage them from abusing the public's trust.'

The agency's press release, however, made no mention of efforts intended to deny SNAP benefits to illegal immigrants.

Last year Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions complained in writing to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack that, 'It defies rational thinking for the United States – now dangerously $16 trillion in debt – to partner with foreign governments to help us place more foreign nationals on American welfare.'

An estimated 11 million illegal immigrants are living in the United States. President Obama and a bipartisan group of eight U.S. Senators are gathering support for comprehensive immigration reform legislation that would put most of them on a path to legal residence and, conservatives allege, both amnesty and citizenship.

[Ryan Ruck]

Hope you've taken your blood pressure medication...

Illegal Immigrant Mother Of Seven Given Food Stamps, Meds, Housing, And Social Security - For 20 Years

Fox News reports Maritha Nelson's $240 in food stamps has run out, leaving her $9 in cash and seven people to feed. The 50-year-old single mother, who entered the U.S. by swimming across the Rio Grande, has government funded housing, medication, and $700 a month in Social Security. She's been on assistance for 20 years, and wants others to know that help is available. Florida is teeming with food stamp recruiters…who have a goal: increase federal aid to Florida by $1 billion a year.

There's video at the link.

[American Patriot]

Fortunately, Ryan, I took my meds today. I'm happy and calm and ready to support our alien overlords....



I really don't know what to say about this, except to say, "Yeah, it has been going on for as long as the welfare system has been in existence" so I am neither surprised nor angry. It's time to kick them out of the country, along with the Congress members who voted for this kind of shit, fire anyone associated with the IRS, welfare, Congress, being President....


ack