USDA Suggests ‘Food Stamp Parties’ to Boost Enrollment
MUST WATCH VIDEO: FOX BUSINESS
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USDA suggests food stamp parties, games to increase participation
While spending on the food stamp program has increased 100 percent under President Barack Obama, the government continues to push more Americans to enroll in the welfare program.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has embraced
entire promotional campaigns designed to encourage eligible Americans to
participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or
food stamps.
A pamphlet currently posted at the USDA website encourages local SNAP
offices to throw parties as one way to get potentially eligible seniors
to enroll in the program.
“Throw a Great Party. Host social events where people mix and mingle,” the agency advises.
“Make it fun by having activities, games, food, and entertainment, and
provide information about SNAP. Putting SNAP information in a game
format like BINGO, crossword puzzles, or even a ‘true/false’ quiz is fun
and helps get your message across in a memorable way.”
The Right Mix for Reaching Seniors
The agency’s most recent outreach effort targets California, Texas,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and the New York metro area with radio ads.
The ads have been running since March and are scheduled to continue
through the end of June — at a cost of $2.5 million — $3 million, CNN
Money reported Monday.
CNN Money further noted that the USDA began running paid radio ads in
2004, under President George W. Bush, who oversaw a 63 percent increase
in average food stamp participation.
In the 1970s, one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today
one our of every seven receive the benefit. After the recession, the
ratio is expected to hover around one out of every nine, according to
the Congressional Budget Office.
Despite the high rate of food stamp participation, the USDA has numerous blueprints posted on their website aimed at getting more people to enroll in SNAP. A 2009 State Outreach Plan Guidance explains why the agency believes states should adopt strategies to get more people on the rolls:
Outreach Can Help Increase Participation in SNAP
Resulting in Multiple Benefits for Participants, States, and
Communities: SNAP is the cornerstone of the nation’s nutrition safety
net and an investment in our future. SNAP offers the opportunity for
improved nutrition and progress toward economic self-sufficiency for
participants who become stronger members of the community. However, too
many low income people, especially seniors, working people, and legal
immigrants, who are eligible for SNAP do not participate and thus forego
assistance that could stretch their food dollars and help improve their
nutrition.
According to the USDA, greater food stamp usage can be an economic plus for states and communities.
“Every $5 in new SNAP benefits generates $9.20 in an additional
community spending,” the USDA contends in their outreach guidance. “If
the national participation rate rose five percentage points, 1.9 million
more low-income people would have an additional $1.3 billion in
benefits per year to use to purchase healthy food and $2.5 billion total
in new economic activity would be generated nationwide.”
During debate on the 2012 farm bill earlier this month, Senate Republicans pushed for amendments aimed at reducing the cost and participation in the food stamp program.
The Democratically controlled Senate voted down Republican efforts —
denying amendments targeting the swelling rolls that were introduced by
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and others from Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions — arguing they could reduce access to those in need.
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This administration is obviously using the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming our sytem in order to destroy it. (read more about this strategy below):
The Cloward-Piven Strategy: Overwhelm The System In Order To Destroy It
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University
sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven
Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government
bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis
and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of
Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a
black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article
titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966
issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented
30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven
Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the
ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social
safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only
when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on
September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs,
wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the
welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and
financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt;
only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to
expose the
inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited
radical
organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to
their
(sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for
Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute,
every Judaeo-Christian
moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract,
human
agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to
its rule
book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the
capitalist
"rule book" with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting
on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than
half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a
"massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven
calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to
demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted,
would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash
"powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive
organizers"
to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated
by threats
of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government
for help.
Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by
friendly, leftwing
journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income
redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all --
working
and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea
like
drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to
implement
it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to
act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse
movements -- mass
movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to
the
downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into
service as
revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to
overwhelm
government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those
agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the
budget, jam
the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing
down. Fear,
turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown
--
providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was
the theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer
named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley
founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely
followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His
followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently --
bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law
"entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500
families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times
commented on
September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers,
including
a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several
thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted
police, tear
gas, arrests -- and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors,
overturned
desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones.
"These methods proved
effective. The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams,"
writes Sol Stern in the
City Journal.
"From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent
households on
welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush
economic
times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New
York City
for every two working in the city's private economy."
As a direct
result of its
massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy
in
1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The
Cloward-Piven
strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once
society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare
crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in
"the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare,
along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven
attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and
Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the
late 1990s.
As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused
the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they
had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani
charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't
supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the
maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as
candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in
subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When
the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on,
applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected
weakness.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a
new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed
this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George
Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and
Human SERVE, both founded in 1982.
Project Vote is an ACORN front group,
launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE
was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former
NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and
Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter
law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993.
The Motor-Voter bill is
largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid
registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people
-- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter
disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter
registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with
systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits,
unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action"
(street protests, violent or otherwise).
Just as they swamped America's welfare
offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's
understaffed and poorly policed electoral system.
Their tactics set the stage
for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear,
tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third
World countries.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend
heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his
"Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to
provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.
Cloward-Piven Obama link
Health Reform by Cloward and Piven
Cloward & Piven Connecting The Dots To Obama
THE CLOWARD & PIVEN STRATEGY BY GLENN BECK (VIDEOS)
CLOWARD PIVEN & OBAMACARE
Socialism, Obamacare and America
WHO IS FRANCES FOX PIVEN?
THE CLOWARD-PIVEN PLAN TO DESTROY GOVERNMENTS
FRANCES FOX PIVEN APPEARS ON IRANS PRESSTV
