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chronicallycouchbound · 9 months

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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

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feckcops · 1 year

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Joe Biden Is Shrinking the Welfare State

“By the estimates of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 15 million people are going to lose their health insurance over the next few months, including 5.3 million kids. Worse, based on historical trends, 6.8 million of those people will lose their Medicaid coverage in spite of still being eligible for it simply because of bureaucratic trifles ...

“The effects of the declaration’s end will go well beyond this, affecting working people’s ability to get free tests, vaccines, and affordable treatment for the virus. It also means the end of extra food stamps, another generous program set to continue as long as the emergency exists and a vital lifeline for working people struggling to keep up with grocery bills in the face of inflation ...

“From a practical and moral standpoint, this is obviously a travesty. But it’s also a needless own goal for the president, putting an already deeply unpopular Biden in the position of running for reelection in a year’s time with millions of people losing their health insurance — and his potential Republican opponent being able to boast he’d been the one to extend it to them in the first place. More than that, it makes a mockery of his frequent public statements insisting that his administration will ‘continue to fight for racial justice,’ since, as the HHS, acknowledges, 15 percent of those who are about to lose their coverage as a result of his decision are black and one-third are Latino ...

“If the idea is that Americans are now tired of thinking and caring about the pandemic, making supporting any COVID-related policies politically toxic, then this is the wrong way to go about unwinding those. Americans didn’t hate that the pandemic response included protecting them from being kicked out of their homes by greedy landlords, getting financial support for the government while they were unemployed, or having health insurance and a variety of other health care needs guaranteed.”

#welfare #benefits #food stamps #welfare state #healthcare #health insurance #medicaid #health #pandemic #covid #joe biden #biden #donald trump #trump #usa #america #american politics #north america #politics

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yamimichi · 1 year

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Ya know, I can understand that some people who are disabled want to keep working. They don't want to apply for SSI or SSDI. And that's fine. More power to them.

What bothers me though is when they say things like "I don't want to live off the system" in a very derogatory manner.

Some of us can't work. And SSI and SSDI don't really give us enough to live on. So we need food stamps. Some of us rely on subsidized housing. We struggle to get through each month. And we don't need people being derogatory to us because of our disabilities. We don't need people acting like we're "less than" because of our disabilities. And we especially don't need this coming from other disabled people.

#disabled #disabilty #ssi #ssdi #food stamps #housing #wheelchair #chronic illness #chronic pain #fibromyalgia #heart disease #chronic degenerative disc disease #mental health

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beastofwant · 3 months

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my food stamps weren't renewed this month and in order to receive them my landlord, who is refusing to release my housing subsidy and let me move, needs to sign off on paperwork verifying I live where I say I do. Whether or not I can get food stamps is completely in his hands at this point, somehow, and considering how he has treated me I really don't think he's going to sign off on this

Vnm. alumirust

pypl. [email protected]

cshp. $doppelgougar

I need help with food until this situation is unfucked bc I am literally out and funds for moving, which is hopefully going to happen around the 12

I'm trying to move out of my current apartment because of an infestation LL has done nothing about as well as some other health concerns w the building and an on-going situation with my weird chaser neighbor upstairs who continues to escalate things to the point of stalking. My LL refuses to relinquish my housing subsidy and illegally extended my lease and now I have to go through a whole legal process to be allowed to leave.

on top of this a lot of my support team has not been helping me and dont seem to understand my issues with memory despite repeated reminders :s my situation is a whole mess, there are approximately a dozen things falling apart rn and I'm just kind of having to ride it down! It's a really scary time and I don't even know where I'm gonna end up.

#mutual aid #food stamps #my hss worker told me to be out on the 31st on the morning of the 29th #so I finished packing everything and got rid of a bunch of stuff including food (gave it away) assuming first that I'd be moving #and second that my foot stamps would be coming through #hhhh

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autistic-human · 7 months

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English teacher just asked this so I want y’all’s opinion

Should drug addicts get food stamps

any way I have been arguing that we as a society should not in fact starve people for struggling

#social justice #tw drugs #food stamps

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politijohn · 11 months

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Source

#politics #capitalism #snap #food stamps #eat the rich #tax the rich #welfare #social safety net #news #current events #us politics #government #the left

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theconcealedweapon · 8 months

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A poor person who collects food stamps is expected to feel ashamed because their food stamps came from other people's hard work.

Meanwhile, CEOs and landlords create an entire economic system in which they profit from other people's hard work while the workers struggle to survive.

The poor person who collects food stamps is considered a moocher while the rich person who underpays them and makes them need food stamps in the first place isn't.

#poverty #food stamps #wealthy privilege #classism

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jollysunflora · 6 months

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out of food stamps for the month.

can someone spot me some money so I can get food? paypal.me/jollysunflora venmo is avatarmary and cash app is jollysunflora

#signal boost #donations #mutual aid #food stamps #poverty #cash app #cashapp #venmo #paypal

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cheezitofthevalley · 7 days

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Food Stamps (Pt 1)

ngl I have no idea where most of these are from. If anyone knows comment and I'll give credit/remove if they want.

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mysharona1987 · 1 year

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#capitalism #politics #starbucks #socialism #democrats #republicans #gop #food stamps #liberals

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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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

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