Billionaires Bully Babies

• President Trump pronounced that from here on in, participation in food stamps, WIC, and School meals will be based solely on merit. “Merit” will be judged upon the successful completion of a new 57-page form that, among other things, requires applicants to write a 3,000-word essay describing in vivid detail why their current state of misery and overall worthlessness as a human being justifies receipt of the crumbs generously awarded by His Majesty.
• Additionally, participants will sign a pledge prohibiting them from using federal benefits to purchase food from companies with DEI policies. This prohibition extends to the purchase of any “trans” (transgenic?) food. The Administration is awaiting further guidance from the Secretary of Agriculture concerning the meaning of “trans.”
• All participants over the age of 6 and under the age of 90 will be expected to work at least 20-hours per week in one or more Trump or Musk-owned companies, or any other approved billionaire run facility for little or no pay.
• Gender extremism among children participating in school meal programs will be firmly and resolutely terminated. Children showing any ambivalence as to their gender identity will be subject to an unannounced inspection on the premises. School meals will be denied to any individuals or persons expressing “radical” and “extreme” political views considered contrary to being a patriotic, God-fearing American. Children coming from Evangelical homes will be given twice the amount of food at half the price charged to non-Evangelicals.
• The Thrifty Food Plan, a sick and communist-inspired action of the Biden Administration, will now be based on the price of a loaf of bread and gallon of milk in 1969. Alternative measures for lowering the benefit levels will be developed that include determining the minimum amount of food that can be fed to an adult before severe hunger pangs set in.

Think this is joke? It may not be for long if the Trump/Musk Administration gets their way. Eviscerating the nation’s most essential safety net programs, the ones that nourish people—SNAP, WIC, School Meals—would be their way of turning their noses up at America’s most vulnerable people while steering hundreds of billions of “saved” dollars into more tax breaks for the country’s wealthiest individuals. It’s Godzilla run amok; Attila the Hun pillaging the countryside, and Hitler’s Panzer divisions eating up Europe. Yes, the barbarians are at the gate!

• The nutrition safety net—complicated but largely effective at keeping hunger at bay—began to weave itself together during the 1930s with federal food coupons, designed to help starving Dust Bowl victims as much as struggling farmers. Good nutrition would find itself institutionalized as federal policy when Harry S. Truman created the national school lunch program shortly after World War II. Multiple innovations and diversifications would follow over time leading to school breakfast, after-school snacks, farm-to-school initiatives, a dramatic improvement in the quality and health of school meals, and community eligibility which is gradually making good school food free for all.
• The food stamp program, later known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would come to life in the early days of John F. Kennedy’s administration. It too would undergo a number of diversifications and alterations in the decades to come. The last major weft in the nation’s nutrition weave would appear through the addition of the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program enacted in 1972 under Richard Nixon. It would bring infants, children up the age of 5, and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers into a healthy cocoon of local care.
• Always an easy target for those who want to denigrate government and snip the safety net’s strands, SNAP in particular has been accused of every form of chicanery that the flesh is heir to—a repository for lazy, filet mignon-eating welfare cheats who’d rather rip off Uncle Sam than put in put in an honest day’s work. Little to no evidence is available to validate any of those claims, of course. But the evidence does show that out of SNAP’s current 42 million recipients, the largest category is comprised of children (36 percent) trailed closely by those over 65 years of age (11.5 percent). For those who claim SNAP’s caseload is riddled with illegal immigrants, fully 82 percent of its adults and 97 percent of its children were born in the U.S. And if you’re a red-state Republican from the South (which is most of the South), you might be concerned that 40 percent of all U.S. food stamp recipients live in your region). What the data says about food stamps in the U.S. | Pew Research Center
• When you add in the WIC and School Meal programs—some mothers, but the vast majority infants and children—these federal nutrition programs are more than a safety net, they are the cornerstone to the healthy development of tens of millions of America’s lower income young people. I dare anyone to identify a better public or private investment in our nation’s future.
• Arrayed against those receiving nutrition assistance are America’s billionaires including a President who, with his minions, demonstrate a sensitivity to the needs of others akin to Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. They are already eviscerating U.S.A.I.D., thus elevating the level of hunger and even starvation worldwide. Let’s not be subtle with our analysis: every dollar taken from the mouths of children or from an agricultural development program for small African farmers is another dollar available for tax cuts for the rich.
• Sadly, all of this is in keeping with the ever-widening economic gaps in the U.S. where 20 percent of all individual income (and 35 percent of capital) goes to less than 1 percent of the people. In 1913, near the end of the Gilded Age, 19 percent went to the 1 percent. But through progressive government policies and rising national equality, that number had been chopped down to 8 percent for the 1 percent by 1976. Not only has our march to equality gone terribly backwards since then, we are now seeing the realization of what the economist Thomas Piketty predicted in his award-winning book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), that an inequitable concentration of wealth not only means that the rich get richer, they also become more powerful politically. Welcome to America 2025!
• With a kind of macho zeal associated with tattooed bikers, the Republican members of Congress are vying to see who can be the biggest bad-ass when it comes to taking food from children. They are throwing around proposals to cut billions of dollars from SNAP, alter the Biden-revised Thrifty Food Plan that gave SNAP recipients a long-over-due 23 percent boost in benefits, and cut $12 billion from Community Eligibility which has worked miracles increasing participation in school meals. These proposals are mindless, heartless, and soulless! If you think so too, let all your members of Congress, both your representatives and senators, know that we invest in our children and those who need a helping hand (think LA fire victims for whom SNAP has come to the rescue) to ensure a better future for everyone.
• If you’re involved with a food pantry or food bank, you better ratchet up your advocacy efforts right away before the thousands of new hungry mouths show up on your doorstep. The Food Research Action Center (FRAC) has one way for you to be in contact with your lawmakers. Here it is: FRAC Federal Nutrition Programs Update. Be sure to get on their mailing list so that you can stay apprised of further developments. (As a footnote, FRAC might consider finding alternatives to Facebook and X for obvious reasons).
• I go back to the days when Ronald Reagan began to scythe down the programs and services that were finally lifting people out of poverty. He began his demolition just about the time that America was getting a handle on economic inequality (see above). But even then, there was the vestige of a morality that put guardrails on policies and displayed a modicum of care for others. With Trump, his self-centered Silicon Valley frat boys, unqualified sycophants taking cabinet posts, and 1600 pardoned, cop-beating “brown shirts,” there is an unprecedented disregard for who might be harmed, the rule of law, and moral boundaries. The American people are far better than that. They will not accept the unprecedented cruelty being heaped upon their brothers and sisters, both here and abroad. They are willing to fight for the well-being of others, unlike those who only care for themselves.