Monday, December 14th 2009 - The article below was the origin of the articles and my comments beneath the Bloomberg item concerning this, published later on the web site of 'Information Clearing House': "Food Stamps Go to a Record 37.2 Million, USDA Says." - By Alan Bjerga - December 11, 2009 (Bloomberg) - Dec. 8 -- A record 37.2 million people, or about one out of every eight Americans, received food stamps in September, as the recession drove a surging jobless rate, according to a government report.Recipients of the subsidy for retail-food purchases climbed 18 percent from a year earlier, according to a statement posted today on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site. Participation has set records for 10 straight months.
The government boosted food aid as unemployment soared, heading to a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October. The jobless rate cooled to 10 percent last month, the Labor Department said on Dec. 4. “We’ve been working to get that money out the door” to families that need assistance, Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan said last week in an interview.
Nevada had the biggest increase in food-stamp participation rates from a year earlier, surging 54 percent, followed by a 46.5 percent jump in Utah, according to the USDA. Texas had the most recipients at 3.1 million, followed by California with 2.9 million and New York with 2.6 million. Recipients increased in every state and the District of Columbia, except Louisiana. Because of a sharp rise after Hurricanes Ike and Gustav in 2008, the number of people in Louisiana getting food stamps fell 65 percent in September from a year earlier. Gains of more than 30 percent from 2008 were reported in 18 states.
35 MILLION BUDGETED
About 35 million people are expected to receive food stamps each month through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, according to the budget that President Barack Obama sent to Congress in May. “In this economic time, SNAP has been essential,” Merrigan said. The participation rate of state residents who are eligible for food stamps varies widely, the USDA said last month in a report based on 2007 data. In Missouri, about 100 percent who were eligible that year took advantage of the program, the highest rate in the nation, followed by residents of Maine and Michigan, at 91 percent and 89 percent, respectively, the USDA said. Wyoming’s participation rate of 47 percent was the lowest in fiscal 2007, followed by California and Idaho at 48 percent and 50 percent, according to the study.
Nationwide, participation in the food-stamp program was 66 percent of those eligible for the aid in 2007, the USDA said. The department has budgeted for a rate of 68 percent in the current 2010 fiscal year. “We know of a lot of people who are SNAP-eligible who are not participating in the program,” Merrigan said. “We are working with states to improve participation.” - To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Bjerga in Washington at abjerga@bloomberg.net.- Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24163.htm
UC? It's getting worse and worse. So many decades, films, books, speeches, complaints and articles later, and the rich are getting more wealthy than ever, as always at the expense of the killing and suffering millions of human beings. Also in the [not at all] United States. Food stamps or not: people starve to death.
MANIPULATING THE PRICES
Most of us understand how the prices of food too are manipulated, and already ten years ago the U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics told a damning tale. It was published in the November/December 2002 Issue of the Mother Jones Magazine and the caption read: "Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America."
Most Americans may find it hard to accept that millions in this nation are suffering from hunger -- an affliction most often associated with war-torn Africa or flood-ravaged Bengal. It flies in the face of everything we've been told about our nation's prosperity. First the Clinton and then the Bush administration have led us to believe that poverty is under control, pointing to the mass exodus from the welfare rolls since the 1996 reforms were launched. The $27 billion cut in food stamps? Justified, lawmakers told us, because the poor are working and feeding themselves. Hunger, it is commonly understood, has long since vanished, along with the 7 million people who no longer receive public assistance.
Yet recent U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics tell a more damning tale. A 1999 study showed that more than 36 million Americans -- one-third of them children under the age of 12 -- suffer from "limited or uncertain" access to food. In 1998, a food relief organization found that as many as 1 in 10 Americans had relied on soup kitchens and emergency food centers in order to eat.
HUNGER; THE HUMAN FACE
In Growing Up Empty, Loretta Schwartz-Nobel sets out to put a human face on these and other statistics through vivid on-the-ground reporting. She witnesses children rummaging through a Philadelphia garbage can for half-eaten chicken legs. She opens the barren refrigerator of a Marine and his family in a Virginia training camp. She meets an angry rural Mississippi woman trying to feed her four children on $80 a month in food stamps.
A North Philadelphia mother says she got so used to hunger that her "stomach ached like rubber bands was tied around it." The result is a harrowing compendium of human stories that tumble into one urgent message: Hunger is a pervasive, hidden, and completely avoidable disease in the United States, a nation that wastes 27 percent of its food supply.
Rampant hunger is as difficult to reconcile with our national image today as it was more than a quarter century ago when Schwartz-Nobel first encountered it. In 1974, as a young reporter, she stopped on a Philadelphia street to help a crippled 84-year-old woman. She bought the woman a bag of groceries that day and would drop by with food from time to time. Several months later, Schwartz-Nobel came calling, only to find that the woman had died alone, of hunger. The wrenching experience led the author to discover that millions of other Americans were quietly starving. In 1981, the results of her reporting were published in the award-winning book Starving in the Shadow of Plenty.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration cut $12 billion from the federal food program, and one of his advisers boasted that "poverty has been virtually wiped out in the United States." Growing Up Empty turns that claim on its head. By all rights, our food coffers today should be far more bountiful. America is even more prosperous, and more than 140,000 food relief organizations exist today where there were only a few two decades ago. Yet hunger persists, and the reasons are a direct result of government policy.
NO ACCESS TO FOOD RELIEF
Welfare reforms shredded the financial safety net for the nation's poor while simultaneously pushing low-income workers into poverty-level jobs with no access to food relief or health insurance. No wonder that last year the U.S. Council of Mayors reported that record numbers of the working poor were standing on lines to feed their families." - [end excerpt] - Source: Mother Jones Magazine - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yhw6co6
You'll see the same dramatic incline in hunger nearly everywhere on earth, and the people - on purpose made into paupers - are dying. The Evil Empire has devastated hundreds of millions of lives and we are all complicit, thanks to our government(s), in the ruination of lives and exploitation of human energies. So, the question is: Who are the real criminals and profiteers, for centuries already living in their own 'Vatican' of the finance world, their own 'State within a State' in London? Where only their inhuman usury rules and no law counts? Whodunit? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yj7gd7d
MUD CAKES
"Haiti: Mud cakes become staple diet as cost of food soars beyond a family's reach. With little cash and import prices rocketing half the population faces starvation. - [ ] - "It stops the hunger," said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. "You eat them when you have to." These days many people have to. The global food and fuel crisis has hit Haiti harder than perhaps any other country, pushing a population mired in extreme poverty towards starvation and revolt. Hunger burns are called "swallowing Clorox", a brand of bleach.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts Haiti's food import bill will leap 80% this year, the fastest in the world. Food riots toppled the prime minister and left five dead in April. Emergency subsidies curbed prices and bought calm but the cash-strapped government is gradually lifting them. Fresh unrest is expected." - [end excerpt] - Source: The Guardian (UK) - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5ddz5k
'THE EVIL EMPIRE' IS MAKING BILLIONS
The Economist of course defends the inhuman activities of the tax payers vampires, the predators of 'The City' being the Rothschild banking cartel in the old 'State within a State' in London, where no global law is valid. They think and behave as if they were untouchables. It's one of the most evil empires one can revisit. Millions upon millions of human beings have already died, die at present, and - if those humanoids are not stopped - will die in the future and only for the profit of those usurping and usuring multinationals, the cartel and its assorted other criminals.
The prices of fuel and food (transport) are for instance decided here too. This is the Evil Empire where many of the Bilderberger's multinationals make their billions upon billions, at the expenses of millions upon millions of dead people. Since 'they' own most of the international major propaganda media, people hardly ever hear about it. They are given bread and circuses. Getting used to a permanent propaganda diet of gutter level entertainment. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/hvtxo
THE LOOMING FOOD CRISIS IN NUMBERS
Three billion: expected increase in world population by 2050
250 million: acres of fertile soil lost every year due to drought, deforestation and climate instability - roughly the size of Ukraine.
73 million: people who depend on food handouts from the UN’s World Food Programme.
40: days it would take for the world’s current grain stocks to run out - the lowest it’s ever been.
240: kilos of maize needed to fill one tank of a US Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) with biofuel - enough to feed a person for a year.
250 million: extra tonnage of grain fed to cattle and other livestock over the last 20 years - enough to feed Brazil for 25 years. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/49k9ug
FOOD IS A WEAPON
In this connection it's too often forgotten what Michel Chossudovsky wrote about concerning the totally shameless global swindle, this so called 'climate conference' in the Danish capital, based on evil reports again based on malignant emails. The way any country however, the harvest and thus the food could be manipulated already many decades ago was excluded from the Copenhagen agenda: "Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and Climate Change. - The manipulation of climate for military use. - In 2007, The Daily Express reported - following the release and declassification of British government papers from the National Archives - that:
"The [declassified] documents reveal that both the US, which led the field, and the Soviet Union had secret military programmes with the goal of controlling the world's climate. "By the year 2025 the United States will own the weather, " one scientist is said to have boasted.
These claims are dismissed by sceptics as wild conspiracy theories and the stuff of James Bond movies but there is growing evidence that the boundaries between science fiction and fact are becoming increasingly blurred. The Americans now admit that they invested L12million over five years during the Vietnam war on "cloud seeding" - deliberately creating heavy rainfall to wash away enemy crops and destroy supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in an operation codenamed Project Popeye.
It is claimed that rainfall was increased by a third in targeted areas, making the weather-manipulation weapon a success. At the time, government officials said the region was prone to heavy rain. (Weather War?, Daily Express, July 16, 2007)
The possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military agenda, while formally acknowledged by official government documents and the US military, has never been considered relevant to the Climate debate. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter, and environmentalists are strung on global warming and the Kyoto protocol.
HOW? THE HAARP PROGRAM!
The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) based in Gokona, Alaska, has been in existence since 1992. It is part of a new generation of sophisticated weaponry under the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating "controlled local modifications of the ionosphere" [upper layer of the atmosphere]:
HAARP has been presented to public opinion as a program of scientific and academic research. US military documents seem to suggest, however, that HAARP's main objective is to "exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes." (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: "Owning the Weather" for Military Use, Global Research, September 27, 2004" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y8q5kly
What 'Heinrich' Kissinger said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people," is as usual applied on the globe, but more disastrous than ever. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yb8gzhb
Hunger? It's all about more control and the depopulation of many countries on earth.
For those humanoids human beings never count. Never!
They are like Kleenex tissues:
Used and thrown away...
HENK RUYSSENAARS
RELATED:
* Thanksgiving? Half of US Kids on Food Stamps. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yasjogg
* The Herald in Scotland published on 8 Mar 2008 a special report by Kate Smith and Rob Edwards about this too : 2008: The year of global food crisis. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y96ylby
* UNICEF: EVEN IN SO CALLED 'RICH' (FOR WHOM?) COUNTRIES CHILDREN DO NOT FARE TOO WELL - "In rich countries children’s basic needs have been generally met but there is scope for further progress in child well-being." - Url.: www.unicef.org/media/media_38299.html
* US 'BABY GENOCIDE' DEFENDED: Former U.S. PNAC-Secr. of State Madeleine Albright-Korbel, 10 years ago in her comment on the at least HALF A MILLION dead children in Iraq, which now is estimated at ONE MILLION MORE BY UNICEF: "WE THINK THE PRICE IS WORTH IT" - On CBS '60 Minutes' - Url.: tinyurl.com/2vmc8
* DEMOCRACY? - DEATH MADE IN AMERICA - PICTURES MADE BY A DOCTOR WHO WONDERS: ''IF YOUR CONSCIENCE IS STILL ANESTHETIZED'' - Url.: tinyurl.com/pbkyh
* SPREADING DEADLY 'DEMOCRACY' - IRAQ: UN REPORT CITES VAST UNDER-NUTRITION AMONG CHILDREN - Url.: informationclearinghouse.info/article12981.htm
* PRESENT AND PAST - UNICEF REPORTS ON ANOTHER PNAC HOLOCAUST: 'The under-5 infant mortality for 2003 was 110,000 in occupied Iraq, 292,000 in occupied Afghanistan.' - Gideon Polya: 'Non-reportage of US-linked infant mass mortality' - December 23, 2004 - Url.: tinyurl.com/rb3rx
* The 'PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY' is HOLOCAUSTING MORE TODDLERS: "Children Continue To Be the Main Victims Of the U.S. War Crimes." - By Dr. César Chelala - Url.: tinyurl.com/oys87
* "PEOPLE DO NOT FORGET. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: tinyurl.com/9cyeq
* The Nuremberg principles: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment." - Url.: tinyurl.com/byurp
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