Oh SNAP

S.N.A.P. is the acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

That would be a new name for an old program - our modern day food stamps program, now made more convenient and widely accessible with Electronic Benefit Transfer cards. Over 44.5 million Americans were enrolled in the program in 2011. As this infographic demonstrates, this is why we don't have the visual of long, winding breadlines at soup kitchens in cities across the nation that were the hallmark of the 1930's era Great Depression's landscape.

Thanks to the EBT program, the reality of our economic situation can be hidden from plain sight.

This is why mass media talking heads, pundits and "experts" can get away with lying in their broadcasts and publications, prevaricating that we are "in recovery."


Many folks on the conservative side of the so-called "aisle" often castigate the food stamp program as socialism. Wealth transfers from the producers to the non-producers.

The manosphere points out a different aspect of this wealth transfer - from working men to non-working, dependent single mothers married to the State.

Both points are true...but only partially so.

Don't forget who else gets their slice of the transfer lucre, like the Banksters-too-big-to-fail, (BTBTF) who distribute and administer the EBT system.

Don't forget too, that every single benefit transfer is an entitlement expenditure...one that is done with fiat currency printed up out of thin air by the Federal Reserve, for which we the enslaved sheeple are liable for in interest-bearing debt that adds to our ever escalating tax burden.

Don't forget that Big Ag gets it's cut of this "benefit" transfer as well. From the Eligible Food Items Page of the USDA's SNAP website:

 - 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.

- Since the current definition of food is a specific part of the Act, any change to this definition would require action by a member of Congress. Several times in the history of SNAP, Congress had considered placing limits on the types of food that could be purchased with program benefits. However, they concluded that designating foods as luxury or non-nutritious would be administratively costly and burdensome.

Oh sure, it would be costly and burdensome. It wouldn't have anything to do with allowing EBT transfers being made from the taxpayers debt burden to the Big Ag corporations that produce all the processed "food items?" Remember, it's not It’s not the snack aisle, the cereal aisle, or even the bread aisle...it’s the profit aisle:

There’s one big reason that industrial food manufacturers like Kraft (Nabisco, Snackwells, General Foods, many more), Con-Agra (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Healthy Choice, many more), Pepsico (Frito-Lay, Quaker), Kellogg’s (Kashi, Morningstar Farms, Nutrigrain, more) are huge and profitable.

It’s because grains are cheap, but the “foods” made from them aren’t.

One reason grains are so cheap in the USA, of course, is gigantic subsidies for commodity agriculture that, while advertised as helping farmers, go mostly to agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland ($62 billion in sales), Cargill ($108 billion), ConAgra ($12 billion), and Monsanto ($11 billion)...

I often shop at grocery stores adjacent or in the poorer neighborhoods of Hawaii. I see the shambling mounds of obesity with shopping carts brimming with processed foods, candy, junk food, cakes, chips, crackers, and cases of soda....all paid for with their EBT cards. Many also buy fresh produce and meat to take home and cook...but neraly all buy Big Ag junk food products with their 'benefit tranfers."

I also see many of these EBT recipients put the grocery divider on the conveyor belt to differentiate between all the food and feed they are acquiring, and the prohibited alcohol, tobacco, pet foods, etc. In other words, although the EBT program expressly forbids using the "benefits" to buy drugs and alcohol, because they don't have to spend their money on food, they have the extra income to pay for their vices...an indirect subsidy.



Another unique aspect to this program found here in Hawaii has to do with our love of eating mercury.

Because the Federal guidelines encourage recipients to buy raw meat and seafood to take home and cook, the ubiquitous poke and sashimi stations in every grocery store in the State accepts EBT cards for raw fish.

What a farce.

Raw fish is the primo luxury food item in the State. Prepared poke is never taken home and cooked for family meals.

It is eaten raw, and is the staple food for parties and get togethers.

It's usually $16-$20 a lb.

I've gone to my local grocery store to buy some poke, and stood in a long line that took me half an hour to get up to the counter for my turn to order my fish. The majority of the people in line were literally buying hundreds of dollars of raw fish with their EBT cards...of course, many of them also used the divider so as to ring up the beer and cigarette purchases!

Poke, sashimi, clams, oysters, tako (octopus)...a veritable cornucopia of premium sea food, for which people who are not enrolled in SNAP eat only on occasion, while our "poor" underclass literally feast on it regularly.

I've talked to the workers and they acknowledge that their manager finds out asap when the next EBT disbursements are handed out, so they can get ready for the rush of EBT poke sales. They have to literally make three times the normal daily amount of poke to handle all the benefit transfer purchases.

It's one helluva "benefits transfer" racket we got going on here.

So, let's take a step back and look at the big picture...

The Federal Government borrows the money from the Federal Reserve System to fund the entitlement spending programs like SNAP.

The BTBTF get their share for administering the EBT program.

The sheeple then use their benefits on all of the feed products produced by Big Ag.

Then, of course, after years of eating such crap, the sickness and obesity requires treatment by Big HealthCare, and renewable. lifetime maintenance prescription drugs that profit Big Pharma.

All of this money that goes to the BTBTF and Big Ag corporations are all interest bearing fiat dollars from the Federal Reserve System, continually adding to our exponentially expanding debt.

SNAP is not a direct transfer from the productive class to the non-productive welfare class as conservatives like to point out, nor is it simply a transfer from working men's tax dollars to fund single mothers and their out-of-wedlock entitlement claims.

In the long run, it's a total transfer from the 99% to the 1%. All the "BIG" entities in our "FREE MARKET" make all the profit while sticking us with the future debt burden, ill health and miserable deaths.