EBT (Food Stamps) to Shut Down in November

According to InfoWars:

The USDA is directing states to withhold Electronic Transfer Benefits for the month of November until further notice, setting up a potential food stamp crisis that could very easily lead to riots and widespread looting if the government shutdown drags on.

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In other words, up to 47 million Americans who rely on food stamps to feed themselves face the prospect of going hungry next month.

An EBT system failure that occurred this past weekend led to “mini-riots” and looting at several Walmart stores. In Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, shelves were cleared as frenzied customers tried to exploit unlimited credit balances that had temporarily been applied to their EBT cards as a result of the system glitch. Store managers also had to close a Walmart and call police in Philadelphia, Mississippi aftercustomers began rioting when their EBT cards stopped functioning.

EBT card users responded by invoking the threat of widespread riots if the system went down again for any sustained period of time. More conspiratorial types even suggested that Saturday’s glitch was a beta test for a future total food stamp shutdown.

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Richard Phillips, a homeless man who relies on food stamps, told Fox 13, “It’s going to cause problems… because then you’re going to come to find out that you’re going to have people starting to steal and do what they have to do to survive.”

So the havoc we saw take pace in Louisiana this past weekend during a 2 hour EBT shut down is about to spread across the entire nation.  What do you think will happen for an entire month if it took just two hours for Walmart customers to nearly riot?  

Riots at Walmart

According to KSLA:

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits. 

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

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Lynd explained the cards weren't showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman  said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn't press charges if she left the food.

Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left.

"Just about everything is gone, I've never seen it in that condition," said Mansfield Walmart customer Anthony Fuller.

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 "I was just thinking, I'm so glad my mom doesn't work here [Walmart] anymore, that's the only thing I could think about, those employees working, that would have to restock all that stuff," said O.J Evans who took cell phone video of the overflowing shopping carts at the Mansfield Walmart.

Evans believes it was natural human reaction that led people to fill up their carts during the glitch, but Walmart shoppers Stan and Judy Garcia feel very differently. "That's plain theft, that's stealing that's all I got to say about it," said Garcia.

This was all with in hours of the system going down.  Imagine what will happen  when it does down a for a day or a week?  The masses will start rioting with in no time at all.  This was just a glimpse of what's to come. 

On a slightly positive note, although I could spin it otherwise, it seems Walmart actually did something good for others this one time.  The article goes on to say:

Kayla Whaling, a spokesperson for Walmart, tells KSLA News 12 that the company was "fully engaged and monitoring the situation and transactions during the outage."

"We did make the decision to continue to accept EBT cards (and purchases on WIC and SNAP) during the outage so that they could get food for their families.

Big Mac Causes Police Car Chase

According to The Smoking Gun:

After exiting a McDonald’s drive-thru lane, an intoxicated Ohio motorist led cops on a short chase because he “just wanted to eat his Big Mac before he stopped,” according to a police report.

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“I initiated a traffic stop and the subject failed to stop,” noted Officer Clifford Smith, who added that he chased Miller until the motorist pulled over. Miller, who smelled of booze and was slurring his speech, apologized to Smith, saying he “was too drunk and he just wanted to eat his Big Mac before he stopped.”

I'm surprised this guy wasn't shot to death for running from the cops.  But aside from that what else is there to say about this story except the fact that Big Macs are so addictive they will make a man risk arrest and possible execution just to finish eating one.  

Food Stamps (EBT) Not Being Accepted in 17 States.

According to a Boston CBS Affiliate:

People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.

At about 9 a.m. Saturday, reports from across the country began pouring in that customers’ EBT cards were not working in stores.

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Wasmer said the affected states also included Alabama, California, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

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Shoppers left carts of groceries behind at a packed Market Basket grocery store in Biddeford, Maine, because they couldn't get their benefits, said fellow shopper Barbara Colman, of Saco, Maine. The manager put up a sign saying the EBT system was not in use.

“That’s a problem. There are a lot of families who are not going to be able to feed children because the system is being maintenanced,” Colman said. She planned to reach out to local officials. “You don’t want children going hungry tonight because of stupidity,” she said.

Glitch in the system during routine maintenance or a prequel of things to come...?

Gitmo Guards still Torturing Kidnapped Inmates to this Day.

Mos Def Willingly Being Force Fed

So you think the Gauntanamo Bay torture scandal was a thing of the past?  Think not.  To this day guards at the infamous rendition and enhanced interrogation camp are still putting these inmates through incredible mistreatment that the American people seem to have become desensitized to at this point.  

According to RT:

Guantanamo guards were conducting regular night raids on inmates’ cells, putting prisoners in solitary confinement and manipulating temperature in the cells to force an end to the months’ long hunger strike in the camp, detainees claim.

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The hunger strike, which began in February after authorities confiscated personal possessions from the detainees’ rooms and became a wider protest against indefinite detention, grew to include more than a hundred people by July. Last month, US authorities announced that the strike had petered out.


“The US authorities have, with some glee, announced the hunger strike to be over. What they fail to tell you is the horrific things they did to crush the hunger strikers' spirits, as my clients have described. And yet still there are at least 16 men striking and being brutally force-fed twice a day,” said Cori Crider, a lawyer at Reprieve, a charity that represents some of the inmates.

One inmate had this to say of the treatment of a fellow inmate he had witnessed:

“The riot squad uses the excuse of giving him water and food and medicine to storm his cell again,” 

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“They took him to the clinic, tore his clothes off and left him with only his underwear for long hours, taunting him.”

Americans are not good people, we are not exceptional, we do not spread peace and democracy around the globe.  Many Americans are terrible people who find pleasure in others suffering.  They have been desensitized by decades of actions flicks and shoot 'em up games.  They've had their minds warped by millions upon millions of pharmaceutical prescriptions preventing them from properly perceiving reality.  They've lived a life of luxury and lavishes (yes even what used to be of the middle class) that separates them from the rest of the world creating a them vs us mentality that make's it simpler for us to allow our government to kill millions of people while the majority of us focus on football and Dancing with the Stars.  

America is not special.  America has become a breeding ground for the type of person who is willing to torture someone else based on false claims by an untrustworthy government.  Yet somehow these idiots in power still find people even dumber than them willing to "just follow orders".  There are good people in America, there are smart, caring people in this country.  The sad thing is they are not the ones who are in power, the ones in power are greedy, evil bastards willing to maim, murder and mutilate anyone who gets in their way.  

McDonalds CEO would rather have his Employees arrested than Acknowledge their Concerns.

According to RT:

A Chicago woman was arrested late last week after confronting the president of her long-time employer McDonald’s over the low wages she earns as she struggles to raise two young children.

Nancy Salgado, 26, interrupted a speech by McDonald’s Corporation President Jeff Stratton at the Union League Club of Chicago on Friday, saying her wages weren’t enough for her to supply her kids with basic necessities like shoes.

“Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 [per hour] when I've worked for McDonald's for 10 years?” Salgado, who claimed never to have received a raise in that time, said at the gathering as Stratton stood at a podium.

"I've been there 40 years," Stratton replied, the extent of his response to Salgado.

“The thing is that I need a raise. But you're not helping your employees. How is this possible?” Salgado continued at Stratton. “To your employees you haven't done anything.”

She and six other protesters were arrested and given tickets for trespassing.

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Salgado said she was quickly approached by authorities at the event and told she would be arrested.

“I remember just telling them … because I have to speak out my mind and I had to tell the president the poverty wage I'm living in, that's just against the law?” she told The Real News.

I work for a rather large company, and boy do they take care of their employees.  It sickens me to hear about something like this, someone just trying to make their voice heard being arrested for simply questioning the CEO of the company they work for.  If that isn't representative of a corporatocracy I am not quiet sure that is.  Ask a question of a CEO that he does not like and go to jail ... 

Food and Drug Administration Not Inspecting Food

With all the hoopla over the partial shut down of the Federal Government, one story that has gone under reported is that the Food and Drug Administration is one of the many federal agencies whose furloughed employees are off the clock.  So all the imported seafood and domestic produce on the shelves in the coming weeks will have gone through no inspection process to be deemed safe.  According to Gizmodo:

FDA food safety inspectors are furloughed right now and have been all week. Which, as Quartz explains, is problematic because, in addition to finding the source of outbreaks, the FDA also monitors 80 percent of all U.S. food and especially imports. And don't think for a second that the food safety inspectors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren't on Furlough too, because they are.

Fruits, vegetables, seafood and and basically anything else that comes through US customs isn't being safety checked by the FDA right now.

The first thing that occurred to me while reading this article though was a statistic I had run across recently.  One that apparently MSNBC was reporting on back in 2009:

Meanwhile, the FDA is so understaffed, it’s only able to inspect roughly 1 percent of foods that are imported into the country. And the rate of inspections at U.S. plants isn't much better. The FDA had not inspected Peanut Corporation of America’s Georgia plant since 2001. Investigators say PCA’s own internal tests repeatedly found salmonella traces, but it continued to sell peanut butter products.

So make of this latest development in the ever expanding series of unfortunate consequences resulting from the Federal Governments 18% shut down.  However with 99% of food getting through the system while bypassing inspection to begin with I'm not too worried about that last 1% getting a pass for a week.