food stamps for all

FOOD STAMPS FOR ALL


The first test of the jerry rigged trailer skirting yesterday. Thirty mile an hour gusts, enough to blow over the propane tank sitting on top of a tote ( granted, it was only 2/5ths full ), and no damage. Its good to be Frugal King.

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One of the Three Amigo’s (http://tslrf.blogspot.com/ ) asked for a reference to my statement that the CIA supported Ho Chi Min ( I think I’ve been misspelling it but I don’t think anyone cares ), which I picked up from the book “ JFK “. Which, by the way, didn’t get any better after the first hundred pages continually repeating itself. Irritating, but I still think the book overall was worth its look from a different perspective- I don’t agree with the main premise but I did enjoy it. Why would the military industrial complex get that excited over not fighting in Vietnam, when there were plenty of opportunities elsewhere across the globe? But then, times were totally different then and I might be looking at it from the wrong perspective. Anyway, I looked in the notes and the index and couldn’t find a specific reference. Thus, I’m assuming it goes back to his original “source” which was the rumor from a boat captain as to the Okinawa stockpiled war material’s destination. That right there is the main flaw with any conspiracy theory. Critical information must be taken as an article of faith, kind of like religion ( not knocking religion, just pointing out the obvious ). Which is why most of my conspiracy theories I run across are entertainment more than anything else. Some of my rants might appear to be of the same ilk, but I try to stay on the side of the rational at least.

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Speaking of wild ass theories, today’s is that the next Mother Of All Bailouts ( to use Rawles’ terminology ), after the states debts, is most likely going to be a drastic increase in Food Stamps and other welfare programs. Simply because jobs are disappearing and that is the only safety net there is. Before we start, I’m not going to get all righteous or uppity about welfare. Back in the day, once upon a time, welfare payments actual had the capacity to screw up the countries finances. Now, even if everyone over 50 years old went on Social Security and Medicare, and if the Civil Servant roles doubled, and if the Food Stamp recipients tripled ( the last two very real possibilities ), even then I seriously doubt that would do as much damage as the federal governments complete bank bailout program is doing ( add in the direct money to the indirect real estate loans and corporate bailouts which subsidize their loans to the bankers and the effects of buying our own debt since China is too smart to keep that up ). When you add a few trillion here, then a few trillion there, even before the derivatives market implodes, by comparison a few hundred billion in welfare ain’t much to get excited about. At this point, collapse, if only economic, is baked into the cake. Welfare increases don’t make any difference. Now, having sugar coated the fact that we are approaching Soviet Union levels of percentage of the population on government trough payments, agreeing with everyone that no, it’s perfectly all right in a supposedly free market economy to put everyone on the dole, and having reluctantly agreed that in the coming months few of us will be able to exist without pimping out to Uncle Obammy, let’s get into specifics.

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The dole will be short lived. But as unemployment levels skyrocket it is inevitable that those benefiting from transfer payments, institutionally speaking, will gorge themselves until the very end. Under the guise of saving jobs, vast amounts of Monopoly money is already being used to bailout businesses ( one would surmise a direct correlation between percentage of debt to bankers and the choice of which industries are bailed out ). This, along with the very real need to avert social unrest, will prompt huge increases in welfare payments. I mean, this is just common sense. What is important to keep in mind is the timing. Remember the calm before the storm. Right before the fall, things never appear as prosperous. Don’t let this lull you into a false sense of security. In a complex system, and you can’t get much more complex than this ( the whole banking system supports the whole manufacturing system propped up by the trade system which is needed for the extraction system, protected by the military system, to use the transport system to bring us the oil we need for all of the above. It is interconnected, messy, and very vulnerable in a disruption to systematic failure ), things go along fine until the pivotal event brings down one aspect that topples all the rest. Who knows what it might be. Wheat rust and a drought coupled with decades of tapping the once existent grain reserve added to just in time delivery? A shooting war involving the Straights Of Hormuz started by Arabic retaliation to Israeli bombing Iran? A sudden derivatives hiccup closing down the banks and Wall Street? A dirty bomb detonated by the CIA to provoke martial law backfiring when most of the workforce panics and doesn’t report for work? It isn’t necessarily that one of these will happen, just that the probability for something major happening is so high. Once the unraveling starts, there isn’t a way to stop it. If Katrina and the GOM oil spill has taught us anything, it is that our complexity level has reached the point of not being able to be fixed ( this should be obvious, since a declining level of energy cannot support a civilization founded on a higher input of energy ).

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Do not confuse the arrival of a paycheck as solving a problem. When the money is fake, the solution is fake. Food Stamps don’t revitalize the soil, refill the aquifers, remove the asphalt from the top of the fields, clean up the pollution, bring back our nitrogen fertilizer plants from overseas or decentralize our agricultural system. Right before the famine, everyone will be eating very well, and probably for free.
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