food stamps

So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

It may come as no great surprise, but it should still be alarming:

In all, more than 106,600 people received help from MANNA partner agencies at least once in 2009. More than 33,000 are children. The report found that 84 percent of respondents didn't know where they would get tomorrow's meal and 76 percent of pantries have seen an increase in need.

Three employees were let go for the first time in Mission Ministry's history, said Bill Warren, with the nonprofit in Marion. He's working the front lines of what he calls a “pandemic of poverty.” “But when you go and you look into the eyes of that person face to face and say, ‘I'm out of food today, there is none … That's very painful,” Warren said. “You go home and you don't sleep well.”

Don't have the cash for a Prius? Don't have a house to insulate? Want to make a difference starting today? Why not Cook for Good?

You can now eat well for just $1.12 a meal by using the Cook for Good shopping lists, menus, and recipes, down from $1.25 in January. Go green by using mostly organic and sustainably raised ingredients for just $1.88 a meal, up from $1.78 last month. These figures were gathered in Raleigh and Durham. The maximum food-stamp allowance for a family of four in North Carolina is $1.61 a meal, 48 cents more a meal than the Cook for Good regular plan. See the details on the Cook for Good savings page. (more below the fold)