Working Poor and Mendacious Narratives

[Content Note: Class warfare; food insecurity.]

Anyone who has been paying attention to the world around them and the people in it almost certainly already knows this, and anyone who is resistant to facts that might undermine their self-aggrandizing cruelty won't fucking care, but here it is anyway:

A report from Feeding America on food insecurity and food costs in the United States sheds new light on the real targets of the conservative media's crusade against food stamps.

...[The reality is] that almost 41% of recipients live in a household with earnings, and according to the USDA program fraud is below one cent on the dollar.

Feeding America's report on the county and congressional district level food insecurity and county food costs in the United States paints a startlingly different picture of the food insecure than the one the right-wing media typically pushes. Feeding America found that more than 47 million people in the United States are food-insecure, meaning that they have "limited or uncertain access to adequate food," and that 16 million of those people are children. On average, about 71% of the food-insecure throughout the country fall below 185% of the poverty line, making them eligible to receive SNAP benefits.

I know I'm the brokenest of all the broken records that have ever been broken, but the incessant yammering about "bootstraps" and "takers" and "moochers" and people who can't be "convinced" to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" is FUCKING GARBAGE.

Indecent, dishonest, execrable, inexcusable garbage.

I have nothing but voluminous contempt for anyone who barfs up this resoundingly discredited garbage, who scapegoats working people who don't have enough to eat as lazy, system-gaming scoundrels, in a futile bid to mask their reprehensible agenda of "reducing dependence on government"—a gross euphemism for vile social Darwinism justified by bullshit beliefs about bootstraps and fairy tales about how people earn what they deserve, designed to ensure that the wealthiest fuckers in the wealthiest nation don't have to pay a penny more in taxes in order that the workers they exploit to become billionaires might have enough food to stay alive and drag their exhausted, malnourished asses to jobs that won't pay them a livable wage, because profits are more important than people.

This isn't, and will never be, about whether people are working hard enough.

This is about the fact that Republicans think people aren't entitled to food. And they're too cowardly to say it plainly. So they tell lies about lazy people who game the system—a breathtaking bit of projection that would be laughable, if only it weren't so fucking tragic.