Congress is back in session. Eric Cantor is the House Majority Leader, proud partisan patrician proponent of ... pulling plates off poor peoples' tables to plump up prodigious windfalls for his wealthy peers. He is aided and abetted in this by no fewer than 14 of his fellow Republican Representatives who benefited last year in multimillions of dollars from crop subsidies, among them the odious Tennesse Rep. Fincher:
Rep. Stephen Fincher, Republican of Tennessee, explains why the government needs to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrional Assistance Program that provides food to poor families:
Here in Tennessee, Mr. Fincher embraces that view. “We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” he said in May.
. As the
NYT Sunday editorial points out:
Instead of providing aid for the hungry, House Republicans want to reduce the food stamp program — the most basic part of the social safety net — with $40 billion in cuts across the next decade. A showdown vote over this cruel plan is expected this month. The House majority leader, Eric Cantor, is leading a propaganda drive that invokes reform as its cause while blaming the victims of hunger simply because the food stamp rolls had to double to nearly 48 million people in the crunch of recession.
The USDA says the 2012 rate of hungry people (
"food insecurity" is the preferred term, perhaps because it doesn't conjure up pictures of children going to bed with no supper or school with no breakfast) has not significantly fallen in the past year.
But for Fincher, Cantor and their cohort of anti-Food Stamp crusaders, that's irrelevant. The Environmental Working Group's database shows where subsidy moneys go. Tracing the totals to owners requires a little more effort.
Shall we look further into the nastiness that is the Tea Baggers' hold on Congress' purse strings, and their priorities when it comes to spending our tax dollars (that's right, Democrats: this is your money the Teawadhadjis are stealing!)?
Here's a Gee O Pee Teabagger's profile on this issue:
The falsehood that cutting food stamps is about saving government money is evident when the House plans rich increases in crop insurance subsidies for farmers. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, a Tea Party favorite who wants food stamps cut, collected nearly $3.5 million in government farm subsidies from 1999 to 2012. Yet he declared in a debate over food stamps, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
The Republicans play up a few abusers of the program to mask the central fact of their plan: the tens of millions of Americans who rely on food stamps are children, the disabled, the elderly and low-wage families. For their sake, Congress should reject the Cantor proposal as the national embarrassment it plainly is.
Note: the farmers who collect these subsidies are members of w's ownership society, among them the Honorable Representative Fincher of Tennessee: Let's see ... 2012-1999. That would be 13 years. Even if he only collected $3.25 million in 13 years, the Gee O Pee House Member would have socked away $250,000 per year in government farm subsidies. He got himself elected to the House during the Teawadhadji tsunami. What's he done since then? Obstruct, vote no, and refuse to do his job: represent his constituents fairly and honestly. Oh, and steal tax dollars in the form of more farm subsidies to fatten his own pockets, since his Congressional salary didn't suffice.
Quoth Gee O Pee star Fincher:
Surrounded by corn and soybean farms —including one owned by the local Republican congressman, Representative Stephen Fincher — Dyersburg, about 75 miles north of Memphis, provides an eye-opening view into Washington’s food stamp debate. Mr. Fincher, who was elected in 2010 on a Tea Party wave and collected nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government from 1999 to 2012, recently voted for a farm bill that omitted food stamps.
“The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country,” Mr. Fincher, whose office did not respond to interview requests, said after his vote in May. In response to a Democrat who invoked the Bible during the food stamp debate in Congress, Mr. Fincher cited his own biblical phrase. “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said.
Let him live by his claim.
The Gee O Pee will tell you that obesity among America's less-wealthy classes proves there's no such thing as hunger in America. The pictures the Gee O Pee and their media puppets provide will show overweight and obese Americans in urban settings (which has the added benefit of showing large numbers of brown and black skinned Americans, giving the Teawadhadjis their racism fix as well, and showing large numbers of Americans who are women not in the "cheerleader look" class, adding to the Teawadhadjis' delight by piling on misogyny. They don't dare admit that these obese urbanites include a lot of the deluded saps who vote for them in the misguided belief that if they just vote Gee O Pee hard enough someday they'll be rich too); in these areas, the cheapest food available -- particularly in neighborhoods bereft of farmers' markets and access to land on which to garden -- is usually not just highly-processed, but often calorie-enhanced with sugars and starches not necessary, or even detrimental, to the food's nutritional value. It's cheap, though.
Yet most of America's "food-insecure" are rural Americans, according to Feeding America, whose shocking map of Child Hunger darkens ominously in ... rural areas, where many children belong to the families of agricultural workers and people in small towns dependent on farming to keep their businesses and industries in operation.
So who's stealing your money to fatten themselves while voting not just to keep their subsidies coming in, but to further cut the SNAP program?
Alabama Republican Robert Aderholt. Texas Republican Blake Farenthold.
Missouri Republican Vicky Hartzler. Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher.
Minnesota Republican John Kline. California Republican Doug LaMalfa.
Iowa Republican Tom Latham. Oklahoma Republican Frank Lucas.
Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis. Texas Republican Randy "Baby Killer!" Neugebauer
South Dakota Republican Kristi Noem Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman
Texas Republican Mac Thornberry California Republican David Valadao
Two of these ... Congressmembers are from my part of Texas: Neugebauer and Thornberry.