The Liberal Politics & Current Events Book Club discussion
activist alerts
>
Tell Your Representative to Reject Cuts to SNAP (USA)
date
newest »
newest »
my congressperson is one of those participating in the challenge to live on the $4.25 per day that is currently allowed under this regulation. i don't have to worry about how she votes, but i will thank her for working so hard for those of us who need the safety netsplease get in touch with your rep -- either to urge the proper vote or to thank them for it. don't assume that they will keep doing the right thing if you don't communicate with them.
I'm sure that my Congresswoman is doing the right thing, too. Maybe we're in the same district. I live in the Chicago area also.
I'm the Ninth - Jan Schakowsky's district. She did the food stamp challenge a year or two ago and posted her menu for the week on-line. It's almost impossible to eat on $21 per week.
Jan is also a really good representative. i was in her district until i moved a few years ago. good for us, huh? to be represented by two intelligent, amazing, forward-thinking women.
Yes, we're really lucky. I lived in the far suburbs before I moved here and felt like I was in exile. Anyway, it's too bad that more of the representatives aren't like them.
Where I live, petitioning an (inevitably Republican) representative *not* to be flagrantly evil would be like petitioning Godzilla not to stomp on Tokyo. I cannot even imagine a more pointless and counterproductive waste of paper than to write my representative about anything.
My representative Jan Schakowsky always does the right thing without my writing but sometimes I do anyway. As "A Place At the Table Shows", we need to do something. I spent Tuesday mornin volunteering at a charity program just like the film shows. The people in it are doing their best, but it can't replace having a government that is actually involved in preventing malnutrition. http://recipesforabetterworld.blogspo....
Next week, I'll blog about it. I guess from my mother's computer, blogspot won't let me get into my account to post.
In one sense, since they have become the driving force in the government (or an actively lethal blockade that cannot be circumvented), the Tea Partiers are right. They represent a self-fulfilling ideology that government is worse than nothing. Certainly, they are worse than anything imaginable. Except at the local and state level in irreversibly blue states, and to the extent that Obama is willing to sign vetoes and exercise executive powers (which latter extent seems virtually to be nil), government cannot and will not do anything but seek further to destroy non-wealthy people. In my opinion, we have long since passed the tipping point, and the patient is not curable. You can't "reform" a cancer. This system can no more be reformed than Nazi Germany could -- and no outside alliance is going to step in to defeat it. Realistically, I am afraid the only sane thing for the remaining, sanity-accessible states to do would be to drop the baggage of the intractably inhuman Confederacy (and other hyperconservative states) and form a separate nation, but that will never happen, either, and anyway, the real source of the cancer is the plutocracy pulling the strings, which is not localized, or even confined to the United States. Honestly, I think there is no way out, and we might as well stick a fork in ourselves. Accept that we're going to be a nation of wholly dispossessed, wholly disempowered, impoverished peasants, utterly without human rights. I tend to pessimism, though, and would be more than happy to be persuaded that something else, such as a universal strike, might work, but the chess-playing part of my brain says no: this is clearly and ineluctably a losing position, and one might as well stop playing. The fact that I think it's hopeless, though, should certainly not dissuade you from continuing to "fight the good fight." Even I still write screeds, for all that I consider them to represent a futile exercise.
Hopefully, history will prove your pessimism to be wrong and in the end, we will defeat the Tea Partyers and others who want to choke all non-rich people to death. In the meantime, I feel that I have to do what I can even if it's futile to address the situation.I also feel that America has become to big in population to be able to effectively govern itself. I think we would be better off as a confederation of regional governments. For a start, we can let the South secede as I have suggested in other posts.
I am strongly inclined to support that idea. I do think economic support would have to be provided to allow people who wanted to (and anyone sane would want to) to escape the South prior to the separation. Strictly as a humanitarian imperative, members of minority groups and women who wanted to would have to be spared the doom of remaining in the totalitarian, American Taliban theocracy that would then reemerge, completely unrestrained, in the South. Of course, this wouldn't solve the problem of the plutocracy, but voting rights might be able to be preserved in the non-Southern states, and (at least, non-rural) residents of those states have generally been less open to appeals to bigotry, misogyny and ignorance that induce people to vote against their own economic best interests. Since Wisconsin and Ohio have already fallen to Sauron, though, it's clearly not strictly a Southern problem. I think that eliminating the effects of redistricting, though, perhaps by eliminating the lower chambers of legislatures (I think states -- and the country -- should be governed by a strict popular vote), might solve the problem.Unfortunately, this is a utopian scenario (dystopian, for residents of the South it would leave behind), and it's never going to happen.
Accept that we're going to be a nation of wholly dispossessed, wholly disempowered, impoverished peasants, utterly without human rights....It's a worldwide problem.
The forces of business and government are international in scope. They co-operate with each other all the time to keep their money and power flowing.
Just working in one small quadrant, such as a single country, will not change the over all situation. It's the same way the US operates able to provide full scale national leadership from any one of the 50 states. Their are 100 primary and hundreds more secondary potential heads of state in this country alone. Add up all the other countries and there are too many to mention. The place where you purchase or don't purchase your products can make all the difference in the world if enough people cared. You don't even have to boycott or go without, all you have to do is shift your product purchasing from one company to another every month or so. You have to buy apples but you can support a different apple orchard every month. The bulk of a companies sales drying up for months on end until everyone comes back round again could make company owners think about how they interact with customers and workers. The current randomness of the purchasing decisions keeps the power flowing over a wide front minimizing problems at the top.
Robert - You're absolutely right that the corporatocracy is multinational. I think the degree to which citizens in individual countries may be able to resist economic rape and the abolition of human rights will depend on their degree of awareness and their cultural aversion to authoritarianism and oppression. The Scandinavian countries are currently faring best, in this respect, and the US dead last by orders of magnitude among the wealthier nations. It's partly because our citizens are massively ignorant and misinformed, and much more susceptible to manipulation, and partly because of a very large contingent of culturally conservative bigots and misogynists among them, whose backward attitudes have always been successfully exploited to provide a political base of support for sociopathic plutocrats who can easily push their buttons.I think this staggering ignorance on the part of much of the population, and a broad cultural aversion to economic activism, would tend to undermine "cyclical boycotts" of the sort you're proposing, and it's a certainty that any group seeking to organize them would face tremendous persecution, not excluding death threats, murder, and the use of government to suppress their activity, from business interests thus threatened. Not that it isn't a creative attempt to find a solution.
It’s a national shame that one in five children in America are at risk of hunger while companies like Apple skirt taxes on at least $74 billion in profit. This is the price America pays when Congress refuses to fix our rigged tax system that lets corporations and the rich get away with it.
The bottom line is that children should not go hungry to pay for corporate tax giveaways – for Apple or other big businesses.
The full House votes soon on whether to accept these cuts. Send your representative a message right now telling them to put nutritional aid before corporate subsidies.