I would normally sit back and let BruinKid expertly handle this from last night's Daily Show but this take down of Eric Bolling and Fox for their Poverty Shaming is just too ripe, too juicy, too succulent, too fruity, too tangy - to ignore.
Mmmmm... delicious. (Also available on Hulu)
Partial summary for the Youtube Challenged via Raw Story (Or you can check Bruinkid's Version).
http://www.rawstory.com/...
Stewart found that while Bolling and his Fox comrades were apopleptic over the estimated $3 billion worth of fraud found in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, they were all too willing to declare $4 billion in wasted federal subsidy money going to corporations “a pittance.”
"What I have learned today from my ‘teacher’ is that $3 billion dollars of taxpayer money is greater than $4 billion dollars in taxpayer money,” Stewart determined. “I think we’re done here. You’re the worst math teacher I ever had.”
“What I’m getting from Fox is this: Exploiting government largesse, while morally reprehensible and corrupting for an individual is a-ok for corporations,” Stewart said, before offering a suggestion. “Maybe this will help: Don’t think about food stamps and HeadStart and programs like that as feeding and helping a small child. Think about it as investing in a promising start-up with a liquidity problem.”
...
“Your favorite network has created the narrative that ties people’s poverty to their own lack of virtue, and says that programs created to serve the impoverished are in fact, the reason that those are still impoverished,” Stewart said. “Sort of the idea being, if they weren’t such sh*tty people, they wouldn’t be poor. And those food stamps are just making them sh*ttier.”
Yes, that is exactly the argument they are presenting - just as Paul Ryan has attempted to do repeatedly, including yesterday with his bogus "
Poverty Trap" diatribe and then earlier this week when he
falsified a plagarized story about a boy receiving free school lunches - that wasn't getting free school lunches in the story at all but simply preferred to avoid being
Food Shamed. Even when his own reports on the effectiveness of poverty programs proves that
they are effective,
Ryan ignores it - and lies about it.
They are attempting to generate Benefits Envy of the poor in order to justify and white-wash the viciousness of stripping away of their safety net, and instead cast it as false tough love, meanwhile they let corporate abuse of government funds and corporate tax avoidance schemes off the hook Scott Free. They constantly claim that their is an impending Kristallnacht of the alleged "Job Creators" - ignoring the fact that true job creators are consumers with disposable cash who drive demand - and that the true genocide of the middle-class and the poor is already underway.
The goal is simple, if you can demonize a class of people any disgusting thing you then do to them later - is fully "Justified". A "kindness" even.
Now to be fair, i'm going to provide some equal time and show the segment that Stewart was responding too where Bollling attempts to "School" him on the issue.
In this section he claims - and it's a point that isn't addressed by Stewart - that...
Stewart : Food Stamps are used for Food. It's a fact you can remember with this little pneumonic I used. F.O.O.D. It stands for "Food Stamps Can Only be used for Food. Oh Oh. Dummy."
Bolling: Well let me School you Mr. Stewart, a lot of clowns are withdrawing cash from their EBT Cards and then spending it on other things like Booze, Weed and Lap Dances. You're welcome to come on the show anytime to debate it. Dummy.
Tsk. touchy touchy.
Since Jon didn't technically address this point, let me take a moment to step in to School Mr. Bolling myself since I've had direct experience on the matter. I gained that experience after I finally quit the abusive Nightmare of a Job where I had been working until last December to focus full time on building my own Start Up Internet CMS Business. (PS. Since I currently have no advertising budget - I can use all the clients and good word of mouth I can get!)
For the time being until my business truly takes off, I'm getting Food Stamps. That's how I and my wife eat now, and have for the last few months. I can personally vouch that you can't buy anything but food with it because any ATM with EBT capabilities tracks what you buy and separates which is food and what isn't. If you attempt to pay for it with your EBT there will be an automatic remaining balance for all non-food items. This is not optional, it's built into the machines. If I try to buy beer or wine - the EBT card won't work - so I have to pay for my booze with own cash. I don't do weed, I've never done any drug - and Lap Dances are simply Right Out considering the wife of 23 years and counting, who will not mix well with the really hard to disguise stench of Stripper Perfume, which tends to linger. I was young, dumb, horny and single once, I remember.
Now technically there is a "Cash" option on the card, but you can't use that option unless you're getting Cash benefits from General Assistance, not from SNAP. And if you're getting Cash from General Assistance you can Spend It On Anything You WANT because that's what you do with Cash. The "Cash" Portion of the EBT card is separate from the "Food" section because they're supplied from different sources, when you purchase you have to choose either "Food" or "Cash". If you don't have Cash benefits (which I don't), that option won't work. Trust me, I've already tried it.
So in short, Bolling is completely Full of Shit on this point, I'll swear to it in a court of law.
If you want to confirm this, go to any grocery and ask the cashier - they all know the score because anytime someone uses an EBT card it prints out that fact, and their current balance on the receipt. Or else go the USDA Website and read the link that says "What Can SNAP Benefits Buy?"
Foods for the household to eat, such as:
breads and cereals;
fruits and vegetables;
meats, fish and poultry; and
dairy products.
Seeds and plants which produce food for the household to eat.
In some areas, restaurants can be authorized to accept SNAP benefits from qualified homeless, elderly, or disabled people in exchange for low-cost meals.
Households CANNOT use SNAP benefits to buy:
Beer, wine, liquor, cigarettes or tobacco
Any nonfood items, such as:
pet foods
soaps, paper products
household supplies
Vitamins and medicines
Food that will be eaten in the store
Hot foods
Also... when it comes to Junk Food and "Luxury" items.
Soft drinks, candy, cookies, snack crackers, and ice cream are food items and are therefore eligible items
Seafood, steak, and bakery cakes are also food items and are therefore eligible items
They are allowed. I think it's
dumb to spend your $5 per day (on the average) on Lobster and Steak, but if that's what you want to eat - you can - although it'll probably be
all that you eat for a few days. Nothing (legally or morally) wrong with it.
So just to recap, you can't buy Lap Dances, you can't buy Beer (and that one kills me, I swear), but You can BUY STEAK and SEAFOOD if you want.
Getting back to the issue of the income Gap and the punishing of the poor, I've recently found a set of movies on NetFlix that brilliantly illustrate the depth of the issue.
The first is a Documentary "The One Percent" made by Jaime Johnson, the great-grandson of the founder of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals. He takes us not just on a walk behind the curtain into the world of people born into super wealth, but also an amazing view of how they view the rest of the world and how they manipulate it to fill their own pockets.
Amazingly, this film was produced and released in 2006, before the Great Recession, while George W. Bush was still President. The prescience of it is truly astonishing and it operates as an amazing counter-balance to the Hyper-Entitled perspective of the Netflix documentary "Mitt", especially when they talk to Nicole Buffet, the free-spirit, artist grand-daughter of Warren Buffet.
Next we have "We're Not Broke" which talks about the U.S. Uncut movement which started on Facebook and predates Occupy in it's efforts to fight the idea that America has "Run out of Money" and therefore earned benefits programs for the most vulnerable need to be slashed.
http://werenotbrokemovie.com/
Lastly I have "Inequality For All" a 2013 film by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich which is taken from his courses at Berkeley, but is at the same time a surprisingly personal perspective on how he's been motivated to think about economics in terms of how it helps and benefits the most people. He tells how he has always been impacted by a genetic disorder that never allowed him to grow any taller he minimized the tendency for larger bullies to pick on him by building alliances with older boys, he then talks about how his life was forever changed when one of his boyhood protectors was tortured and murdered as he tried to promote voter registration in the Jim Crow South. His friend had been one of the three boys killed in the story that eventually became the center of the film "Mississippi Burning".
http://www.inequalityforall.com
He talks about how he first met Bill Clinton (aboard a ship that was taking both of them to attend Oxford as they were both chosen as Rhodes Scholars), and how much later as Bill was running for President he was invited to run the Clinton economic transition team as Bill had apparently read all of his books and was eager to implement his ideas into his platform. As you probably know the Clinton Administration presided over the greatest economic boom in living memory while expanding jobs, creating greater wealth and ultimately balancing the budget. What unfortunately they didn't do - is address the increasing income gap and get a better control of increasing power of corporate money in our politics, an issue which Reich ultimately determines they didn't "do enough to address".
Yeah, ya think, Bob?
These three films do a fantastic and well documented job of laying out the challenges ahead for the middle class as they continue to fight the creeping Fuedalization of our economy which began under Reagan and his famous "WelFare Queen" (who very likely never actually existed) with his tax and regulation polices which turned the Rich become the Quantum Rich, while the Middle class is dismantled piece by piece and the Poor are slowly crushed into a fine powder.
Bolling is nothing more than a lackey and verbal footsoldier of the Oligarch Class, once you realize this it become clear why he and the other corporatist shills at Fox News would vilify the vulnerable and venerate the rich. That's what their Paid To Do.
Fighting Back against this tide of increasing greed by the already well monied, IMO, will be the defining battle of the 21st Century in the decades to come. President Obama, like President Clinton before him is clearly sensitive and sympathetic to this issue and has made moves - such as raising the minimum wage for Federal Contractors and implementing his now overtime rules - but as Reich laments, it's probably not going to be enough to reverse the growing Income Gap.
This is why 2014 is so critical, if the GOP remains in power in Congress they'll do nothing more than continue to be a roadblock and sabotage the economic prosperity of the middle class and of America on the whole. It would be a tragedy for the final two years of the Obama Presidency to be drowned under the weight of corporate funded Republican obstruction, Democrats simply can not afford to sit on our hands and wait for Hillary to swoop in in 2016 - that might not even Happen. This battle is going on right now, and we need all hands on deck, Now - not later.
Vyan
4:02 PM PT: And Also#Mconnellling via Hulu which immediately followed this segment.