Reporter Miranda Green Noticed Something about the Food Stamp Cut that Most Commentators Missed — Better to Drag the Nation Down by Pretending to Do Good, rather than Profit by Actually Doing Good — with an Added Reference to Amanda Marcotte’s Take on the Delusion of Religious Rectitude

30 September 2013

Citation — to the Amanda Green article that kicks off this essay

Miranda Green, Supermarkets and Retailers Turn Blind Eye to Food Stamp Funding Cuts, Daily Beast (27 September 2013)

What’s the Matter with Kansas has expanded into “What’s the matter with the whole United States?”

Historian Thomas Frank’s 2004 book looked at how the Republican Party had culturally brainwashed financially unwell-off people into voting against their own interests.

Recently, reporter Miranda Green (implicitly) wrote that the phenomenon now carries over to major American corporations.

What Miranda Green discovered — Republican-oriented corporations are backing the Party, even against their own financial interests

Ms. Green explained that the food stamp program spends more than $74 billion annually. Much of this goes to food manufacturers, including (for example) Kellogg, Pepsi, and General Mills (which, she says, owns Yoplait, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury).

The 231,000 grocery stores that accept food stamps obviously also profit.

Ms. Green astutely noticed that:

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a measure that would slash nearly $40 billion in spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the next several years.

As debate has raged, food merchandisers, packaged goods manufacturers, and grocery stores—and the trade groups that represent them—haven’t made much noise.

Despite the obvious stake big supermarket stores and companies have in SNAP funding, many have turned a deaf ear to the program’s plight. Instead of lobbying to keep funding going strong they refuse to make a comment.

It seems that politics may be the main culprit at play.

[M]any of the same organizations are large Republican Party backers.

The grocer associations and food companies face a political conundrum. They can advocate publicly for businesses benefitting from SNAP funding, and thus ally themselves with the White House and liberal advocacy groups against Washington Republicans. Or they can stay mum on the topic and continue to back Republicans who generally support their agenda on trade, labor, tax, and regulatory issues.

Republican Party solidarity keeps the “Tsunami against the Poor” in motion

In addition to potentially stripping millions of people of their food stamps after 2013, the Center for American Progress once estimated that each Congressionally approved $1 billion cut in the food stamp program costs the economy 13,718 lost jobs.

See:

Jeffrey Thompson and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, The Economic Consequences of Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Center for American Progress (19 March 2012)

If we “times” the Center’s 2012 estimate by the $40 billion 2013 House cut, we get potentially 548,720 vanished jobs.

Although I find the magnitude of that this expanded jobs number hard to swallow — given the complexities of estimating rippling employment effects — it probably roughly reflects the disproportionate scope of House Republicans’ questionable thinking.

In essence, we have a political party and its supporters that do not give a rat’s behind about most of America’s people or the United States’ overall economy — in so long as its ethically twisted plutocrats continue to prosper.

The moral? — With facts like these, we see that Republican Party hypocrites are arguably neither patriotic nor Christian

However, Amanda Marcotte makes the insightful and cautionary point that:

In an age where your average Republican politician is thumping the Bible with one hand and trying to strip food from the mouths of the poor with the other, it’s become a sad cliché to point out how little the most outspoken Christians have in common with their charity-preaching, forgiveness-loving messiah.

It’s only gotten worse in recent years, with the followers of the man who cured lepers threatening to shut down the government if Obama insists on giving more people access to healthcare.

With religion . . . there’s no limits about what you can claim to believe. Jesus is a mythological character: he believes whatever the person speaking for him says he believes.

For one person, Jesus believes we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked. For another, Jesus didn’t really mean it when he said that stuff; he was just handing out goodies in order to recruit new believers.

[T]he sky’s the limit when making up reasons why what you believe counts as “Christian.”

That’s one reason politicians love to talk about religion, because they don’t have to prove anything. But that’s the major reason religion really has no place in politics.

I probably don’t go as far as Ms. Marcotte does in trashing the idea that religions usually contain an identifiable ethical core, which broadly changes with the prevailing times. That is different than saying, as she seems to, that religion can mean anything that an individual person wants it to.

With that quibble, I agree with Ms. Marcotte’s view is that political hypocrites represent nothing admirable or useful.

PeteFree.com

Reporter Miranda Green Noticed Something about the Food Stamp Cut that Most Commentators Missed — Better to Drag the Nation Down by Pretending to Do Good, rather than Profit by Actually Doing Good — with an Added Reference to Amanda Marcotte’s Take on the Delusion of Religious Rectitude