No Food For You - Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday the House narrowly voted to defeat a budget bill that would have cut funding for health and education services, but today they sliced plenty of social programs from the budget. Who cares about the poor when you can put tax money to good use like billion dollar contracts to companies that have already been investigated for trying to rip off our government like Halliburton? With the 200,000 people still displaced and living on assistance after hurricane Katrina, does it make sense to start kicking people off of food stamps? But that's exactly what our lovely government is going to do.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to cut $700 million from the food stamp program as part of a broad bill to reduce federal spending by $50 billion, despite objections from antihunger groups.

Some 235,000 people would lose food stamp benefits under the House bill, according to one analysis.
...States would have the option to continue offering free school lunches to families cut off of food stamps. The Center on Budget said it was unlikely all states would do so.

The House proposal also would require 70,000 legal immigrants in most cases to wait seven years to become eligible for food stamps, rather than the current five years.

If you've ever had the opportunity to work or volunteer at a school in a low-income area you'd notice that almost every kid there gets a free meal. What's sad about this, is that for most of the kids that is the only meal they are guaranteed to get in a day. Not only won't we help our own citizens from starving, we won't let other countries help us either. Here's a little seen but disturbing story about how we rejected 400,000 meals sent to Katrina victims immediately after the storm from the British government because of fears of mad cow disease. So instead, we decided to let people continue starving while FEMA scratched their heads trying to figure out how to get food to them. All of that food we eventually shipped to Guatemala, not good enough for us so let's just ship it to South America? Also ludicrous is the concept that America is safe from Mad Cow anyway, considering that it has been found to brake the brain blood barrier and we continued to allow cattle to be fed the blood of other cattle until two years ago. I find the entire thing highly ironic, as a someone who lived in England for 4 years during the height of mad cow disease I am not allowed to give blood (even though I'm a vegetarian and didn't eat the beef). America just wants to give the appearance of safe meat so it won't hurt our beef industry, which is the entire reason we ban other countries' meat anyway - less competition. But I digress.
Also cut by the house, student loans. That's right. Let's cut everyone off of Medicare and Medicaid, off of food stamps, no chance for a higher education, and no increase in minimum wage. The land of opportunity - for who?

So what can you do? Write a lovely letter to your representatives who voted for this bill.....you can find that list here. This bill was passed by TWO VOTES! TWO REPs DIDN't VOTE: DEMOCRATS BOSWELL AND TOWNS - send them an email telling them how much you appreciate them skipping work.

posted by Sarai @ 2:19 PM