This is my eighth year as a full time Internet activist. The longer I’m fighting this “War on Evil”, the more I’m concerned with the effectiveness of resistance. No matter what our cause, liberty, false-flag terrorism, free Palestine, debt-free currency, New World Order, Illuminati, chemtrails, vaccination, cancer cures, drug prohibition, or historic revisionism, we must first and foremost make a conscience decision about what’s more important to us, being right or resisting effectively.
Police restrain crowd from taking food after supermarket eviction
AUGUSTA, GA (WFXG) -Law enforcement officials pushed back hundreds of people who were crowding around a large pile of merchandise outside an Augusta grocery store Tuesday afternoon.
But the goods sitting in the parking lot of the Laney Supermarket didn’t make into anyone’s hands.
Instead, the food people hoped to take home was tossed into the trash.
“People have children out here that are hungry, thirsty, could be anything. Why throw it away when you could be issuing it out?” asked Robertstine Lambert.
The Marshal of Richmond County, Steve Smith, says the food wasn’t theirs to give away, so they had to trash it.
“We don’t have authority to take possession of the property; we just have to make sure that it’s handled, disposed of by law,” Smith, said.
SunTrust Bank in Atlanta owns the property and they’re sending the merchandise to the landfill after evicting the Chois, the owners of the grocery store.
The Chois didn’t want to speak on camera but they say they were kicked out by the bank because they owe them thousands of dollars.
They say they offered the food to a church, but members didn’t show up to claim it.
That’s when word that store products were abandoned spread through the community.
About 300 people came to take merchandise home, but they were held back by law enforcement.
“These are brand new items; we saw the potential for a riot was extremely high,” said Sheriff Richard Roundtree.
Jennifer Santiago was forced to leave empty handed and she says trashing the merchandise is truly a waste.
“For them to do this is a low blow. A lot of people are sad, a lot of people aren’t going to have food to put on their table; this is ridiculous,” she said.
The Chois say they were notified by the bank on Friday that they would be evicted on Tuesday.
They say they didn’t move out earlier because they wanted to work up to the last minute.
Three large trash bins filled with merchandise from Laney Supermarket, 843 Laney-Walker Boulevard, were stored overnight at a warehouse of Thompson Building and Wrecking, a company hired by the grocery’s property manager for disposal of the items.
A handful of staff members separated canned foods from household items, and boxed the items Wednesday morning. A Golden Harvest truck retrieved the load, which filled about half the truck.
Perishable items, including meat and produce, were taken to the landfill, said Hiram Thompson, president of Thompson Building and Wrecking.
“We had the option of taking it to the landfill or doing something good with it,” Thompson said.
The grocery store tenant, Il Ki Choi, was evicted Tuesday after he failed to obey a 30-day notice that its lease would not be renewed. The eviction notice was served Feb. 13.
On Tuesday, hundreds crowded the grocery store parking lot hoping to make off with merchandise piled outside the store before the Richmond County sheriff’s and marshal’s offices said they would not be allowed to take away any goods.
Travis McNeal, Golden Harvest’s executive director, said the food bank will sort and inspect the items before they are distributed to the hungry.
“The most sad thing is a lot of food got dirty or messed up because it was all thrown in there together,” McNeal said.
Perishable items, even if retrieved immediately from the store, might not have been salvageable, McNeal said. It would have been difficult to know whether meat had been properly refrigerated.
Thompson said when his business received the call from property manager FirstService Residential Realty to deliver trash bins quickly to the site, it did not know the situation with the food.
A truck driver alerted the company’s dispatch office, and additional Thompson Wrecking and Building crews arrived to assist a few workers that were already there.
Golden Harvest receives donated perishable items from major grocery store chains almost daily, McNeal said. Occasionally, restaurants or catering businesses going out of business will donate items.
The food bank is responsible for checking items and adhering to guidelines set by the federal Food and Drug Administration, he said.
House Republicans Unanimously Vote Down Minimum Wage Increase
The Huffington Post | By Will Wrigley Posted: 03/15/2013 6:25 pm EDT | Updated: 03/15/2013 6:41 pm EDT
House Republicans voted unanimously against raising the federal minimum wage Friday.
A proposal by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over the next two years and increase the wage for tipped employees to 70 percent of the minimum wage was defeated, with every House Republican voting against the motion. On the Democratic side, six lawmakers voted against the measure, and 184 Democrats voted for it.
Miller’s proposal was more than a dollar higher than what President Barack Obama proposed during his State of the Union address in February. Obama said in his speech that Congress and the White House should work to “raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.”
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Embracing the concerns of Arkansas businesses, a Democrat-controlled House panel on Tuesday rejected a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage by $2, to $8.25 an hour.
The House Committee on Public Health voted 10-6 against the bill, with Democratic Reps. Deborah Ferguson and Mark Perry joining Republicans who opposed the measure.
Rep. Butch Wilkins, D-Bono, said he sponsored the bill to improve the lives of working families, noting that the state has one of the lowest minimum wages in the country.
“It’s not going to make someone rich who was poor,” he told lawmakers. “We’ve got some catching up to do in Arkansas.”
Proponents of raising the minimum wage said it would actually spur economic growth because struggling, low-income households were more likely to spend any additional money at local businesses, rather than save it.
The state’s minimum wage has been $6.25 since lawmakers last approved an increase in 2006. Some Arkansas workers are subject to the higher, federal minimum wage of $7.25.
A worker making the state minimum wage earns $250 a week before taxes, or $13,000 a year. The federal poverty level is $11,170 annually.
President Barack Obama’s recent proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour by the end of 2015 has an unlikely ally: a sizable swath of America’s 6 million small employers. Historically, lobbyists representing small business almost unanimously condemned any increases in the federal minimum wage, arguing employers would be forced to fire workers. Now, with public anger over income inequality deepening and economic research challenging the notion that higher wages suppress employment, a growing number of small business advocates support a hike.
That includes dozens of business groups and networks composed primarily of small business owners such as the Main Street Alliance, the National Latino Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association, and the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. “Our women [business owners] who pay a living wage have an advantage over their larger counterparts who don’t,” says Margot Dorfman, chief executive officer of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, an organization with 500,000 members, three-quarters of whom are small business owners. “Whether Obama’s proposal is high enough or the time frame is fast enough is the question.”
Taking inflation into account, a worker earning a minimum wage today is worse off than one who made the base hourly wage of $1.60 in 1968. “It’s just really ridiculous to think that business owners can’t pay today at least as much as what they paid four decades ago,” says Holly Sklar, founder of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, which has attracted support from more than 4,000 small business groups and owners. Main Street businesses suffer if “the economy is falling apart around them,” she says. “If the customer base is undermined because wages are so low, they feel it directly.”
After President Barack Obama proposed raising the federal minimum wage earlier this year, my colleagues Karen E. Klein and Nick Leiber reported on the changing stance of small business owners on the issue:
“Historically, lobbyists representing small business almost unanimously condemned any increases in the federal minimum wage, arguing employers would be forced to fire workers. Now, with public anger over income inequality deepening and economic research challenging the notion that higher wages suppress employment, a growing number of small business advocates support a hike.”
Indeed, when Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Representative George Miller (D-Calif.) announced a new bill today that would gradually raise minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016, from $7.25 today, the lawmakers enlisted a lineup of small business owners to speak in support of the legislation. (Among the proponents of the bill: a Washington, D.C., restaurant owner, who said that fair pay was fundamental to his success, and the managing partner of a St. Louis music store, who said that a wage hike would have a trickle-up effect.)
Now let’s be honest. We all know that unless something goes extremely wrong we will not be seeing any zombies like the ones in the Hollywood Horror flicks B or otherwise. The CDC claims they are using the term tongue in cheek to get younger people interested in preparedness. Ok, I can deal with that. However, more than just the CDC are referring to zombies. So what exactly are they referring to if they are not talking about the brain eating , gnaw on your entrails kind of zombie?
Well in most instances they are referring to those who have laughed when approached with the concept of preparing for a potential disaster. Neighbors, Co- workers, family members, people that we run into in our everyday lives You know who they are , we have all run into them now and again. Some maybe more than others. Or the multitude that will become ill from lack of medicine, water, hygiene as well as accidents.
Now I really think that referring to these people as zombies is a bit over the top. However, I think we can agree that in a disaster scenario where despair , hunger or perhaps injury of themselves or a loved one will propel anyone of these individuals to an act of violence in the grips of fear .
All one need do is watch a video of the Black Friday Madness, or what happens during a blackout to understand what the potential for violence and lawlessness can be. Think Hurricane Katrina and the scenario in New Orleans. Think Hurricane Sandy and the multitude of people who were unprepared. How many resorted to dumpster diving because they had nothing to eat in their homes and there was nothing available in the surrounding area. If Occupy had not taken it upon themselves to start helping when FEMA and the government failed to do their job, what could have developed?
Now let’s go a bit further and imagine with all the people affected by Hurricane Sandy. What happens if there are neighbors that they are aware of had been storing food and water. The government is not helping. FEMA is not helping. Occupy had not been a factor. Their children are going hungry, they have elderly that must be cared for and they neither have food nor supplies. Now please understand I am an eternal optimist and I believe there are a lot of good people out there. However, if there is something life has taught me is that there are not so good people out there as well. This is what you must prepare for. The good people, the ones that understand that violence is not the answer will not be an issue.
What do you do about the ones who are?
Have you considered it?
Have you prepared?
Can you tell me aside from the fact that zombies are dead and out to eat you rather than your supplies what the difference would be? In either case they would threaten the survival of your loved ones and yourself. And , well there is always the possibility that the development of mutant and killer virus’ in government and military research labs should be a concern to everyone.
As we already know things will be difficult enough with the sheer amount of people that will be sickened and dying in a scenario such as this lasting an extended period of time especially in a collapse , as the following article details……
Electricity hasn’t been around all that long. For most of our history mankind has managed very well without it. Large numbers of people around the world still live without an electricity supply. If the grid goes down does it really mean the end of the human race?
On June 3rd I did a post about pandemics. I said in the introduction, that in my opinion only two things could be serious enough to put an end to humans. Pandemic and grid failure. Looking at the figures for the 1918-1920 pandemic, and using those percentages with current population, it seems I may have been wrong in my assumptions about pandemics.
So, onto grid failure, which to cover all the things that would be affected, and the speed at which they would be affected would need a large book, it is way too big a subject for an article. This article is based the things we have all heard, that 99% of the population of the United States would be dead within a year and that the world population will plummet. Let’s see.
I have chosen 2010 as the year all of the figures relate to, as that is the closest year that has a full set of statistics available. Figures are taken from World Health Organization records, love them or hate them they are very good pen pushers and compile statistics about anything and everything.
Okay, we all know that if the grid goes down, so does everything else in short order. Food supply chain, large scale agriculture,hospitals, traffic lights, everything that we regard as part of the very fabric of our lives. We have come to rely on electricity to such an extent that should it vanish from our lives it really would mean the end of the world as we know it. The question is though, would it be an extinction level event?
In 2010 there were 133,000,000 million births and 57,000,000 deaths from all causes. The WHO records the following for 2010:
34,000,000 known type 1 diabetics world wide.
64,234,000 known COPD (chronic obstructive airways disease sufferers)world wide.
22,800,000 known cancer sufferers world wide.
These conditions are considered to be those that contribute most to the mean global death rates. Now I am not a statistician, and it is impossible to know the life expectancy of the people suffering from these conditions, so, for the purposes of the exercise I am going to assume they all die in the first year.
This would add 120,000,000 deaths to the 57,000,0000 ‘usual’ deaths giving us 177,000,000 deaths for the first year. On top of this there would be a rise in the murder rate, the death rate from heart attacks would soar, mainly due to unfit people having to engage in hard physical labor, and deaths from lack of medication and medical intervention would skyrocket, as would deaths from malnutrition and disease.
Then we have those in the Prepper and non Prepper community usually at odds with the way one or the other chooses to prepare . As well as their outlook. Not to mention those who outright ridicule and insult those who seriously prepare for a future unseen disaster scenario. Anyone who has seriously embarked on preparing and have tried to explain to family and friends why they should as well, have experienced this. So you are well aware of what I mean when I say this…..
Why is there such a chasm between preppers and non-preppers? It’s because of ignorance on BOTH sides.
1. Preppers look down on non-preppers.
Many seem to be thinking that non-preppers are silly, ignorant little children.
2. Non-preppers think that preppers are insane.
They think that preppers are focused on ridiculous problems and wasting money on solutions that they will never use.
Both are wrong.
Most people ARE preppers.
You might be a prepper if:
*you check your car’s spare tire
*you keep bandaids in your house
*you are saving money for a rainy day
*you keep a can of Fix-a-flat in your car
Those are preps!
There are more preppers than either side is willing to admit.
WE aren’t arguing apples and oranges. We are arguing about how many apples we need. It’s a matter of scale.
It isn’t a matter of intelligence. It’s a matter of having different priorities.
And then we have those unprepared neighbors that you spoke to early on and tried to get them to think seriously about prepping. All they would do was kid you about your preparing for the end of the world. Laugh a little at you , shake their heads and walk away always turning your concerned advice into jokes and an opportunity to poke fun at you. If not just outright call you nuts?
The following is an episode from the Twilight Zone. Yes it is just a show , it’s not real. However, if you watch it , you will see in the developing drama that everything that happens is indeed plausible. If you watch it you can see how a scenario like that can easily develop even among people you thought you knew well. One never knows and can never be sure how any one individual will react or behave in a situation such as this. Watch the videos and think about it….. I bet the possibility of it taking place won’t seem so crazy then…..
A Twilight Zone episode called “The Shelter” illustrates one scenario in being surrounded by people who are unprepared yet know you have been preparing and scoff at your efforts. I thought I would share this with everyone and thank DEMCAD for bringing it to my attention
Here we have a situation that is growing incrementally with every passing day in the US alone. We have seen the devastating circumstances in Greece, Spain and throughout the Middle East. Austerity, government corrupt exorbitant spending, rising food and energy prices, loss of jobs, corrupt banks and financial institutions, etc , etc , etc.
The number of homeless can no longer be ignored. For those who deny that there is a problem and that the economy is indeed recovering. Those who choose to believe the lies and the manipulated numbers for unemployment and job creation wake up and face reality. The homeless of today are working middle class that have lost their jobs, their homes . They live in tent cities, in their cars, in public parks when they can. They hide their homelessness and their need due to pride and those who refuse to see the truth accept the subterfuge because it is easier to lie to themselves than admit that it could very well happen to them.
Why do you lie to yourselves?
How long do you believe you can keep those blinkers on?
Do you really believe that ignoring reality will change it or make it go away?
The longer it is ignored the longer it goes unchallenged the worse it will get.
How many children have to be homeless for those of you in denial to get it ?
How many children in the US have to go hungry before you can deal with the truth of what is going on beneath your very nose?
I don’t know about you , but I see people now more than ever on the street asking for help because they are homeless and unemployed. Today a man with a sign stating that they were homeless and he had 3 children with him. Everyone looking the other way.
How can you live with yourself?
I gave what I had. Granted I don’t have much but no matter how bad off I am I have a roof over my head and even if it is peanut butter sandwiches I have food to eat even on the worst day. So many just passed by this man and his children not even giving them a passing glance. How sad , how very sad that we have turned into this kind of Nation.
Well I am here to disturb your little fantasy world. These are videos of the very real homeless situation in this country. If you know of anyone in denial please bring it to their attention. If you have heard but are not sure you believe , please take some time to watch and see the suffering , the need and the tragedy that has befallen these people. Understand that this could happen to anyone and it is not reason to look down nor feel ashamed.
As time goes by one must understand that this situation will continue to worsen, unless by some miracle the lunacy that has gripped the government and the financial world is dealt with. For those who are preppers I urge you to take this into account. I know things are tight for most, trust me I know this very well as I sometimes find it difficult to purchase staples for our everyday living . Much less items for storage. I think about this often and every time I buy an item for my storage I think of how it can be used or prepared to maximize the amount of people it can feed . Thereby , ensuring that I will be able to feed any additional people that may show up in need and hungry.
The government will not be helping, look at the victims of Hurricane Sandy. What kind of help did they receive? It will be up to us to take care of each other. Which means preparing to extend a hand to those who were unable or too poor to prepare.
This MC-TV documentary tells the story of one homeless person in rural Western Illinois. Thru her story we see the special challenges that confront those individuals who find themselves homeless in area with limited services.
……
Homeless In America Families Living In Cars
……
homeless in america…….part 1
……
“Signs of The Time” a homeless documentary
Published on Jun 25, 2012
A feature documentary about homelessness in the Seattle and surrounding areas
I know there are quite a few people who have been preparing for quite sometime. Just as I know there are people who recently started or are starting now to prepare. Please, please take this to heart and understand what the possibilities are so that you can properly prepare and survive whatever may occur. Please know that I am not trying to belittle anyone. This has been on my mind for quite sometime and I simply did not know how to present it . Ready or not , presentable or not here it is . Please accept it in the spirit in which it has been given. A heartfelt wish that all who read this may prepare , be safe and help as many people as they are able.
Agricultural economist Peter Rosset is with the Center for the Study of Rural Change in Mexico and the Land Research Action Network. He is also a member of the technical support team of Via Campesina. Beverly Bell talked with Peter Rosset in Havana in 2009; they updated the interview in 2012.
There are several fundamental pillars that are necessary to take control over food and agricultural systems. One is to force even reluctant or reactionary governments to regain control over their national borders from the flow of imported food. That means canceling free trade agreements and not signing WTO agreements. It means stopping the import either of incredibly cheap, subsidized food from agro-export countries which drives local producers out of business, or of food made ridiculously expensive by food speculation.
Governments also need to support peasant and small-farmer agriculture as the fundamental source of food for national economies. Why not big farms or agribusiness? It’s more than proven in any country in the world that if agribusiness controls the majority of the land, there will not be enough food for people because agribusiness just doesn’t produce food for local people. What agribusiness does, be it the United States or Thailand, is produce exports.
Sometimes those exports are not even food for people but soybeans for animals, or ethanol, or biodiesel for automobiles in other part of the world.
Every day, we use materials from the earth without thinking, for free. But what if we had to pay for their true value: would it make us more careful about what we use and what we waste? Think of Pavan Sukhdev as nature’s banker — assessing the value of the Earth’s assets. Eye-opening charts will make you think differently about the cost of air, water, trees. teebweb.org
TED Talk at TED Global 2011 – Filmed July 2011
More than a decade after North Korea was struck by a famine that killed up to a million people, the country’s poorest are once again facing starvation, reports Peter Foster in Yanji
Image 1 of 3
North Koreans sell small food items from a roadside stall on the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea
It was an ice-cold day in theNorth Koreanborder town of Musan when a small crowd gathered round what looked like a bundle of rags on the platform of the railway station.
“I went up to see what they were looking at,” recalled 63-year-old Lee Sun Ok, a North Korean farmer who had come to the city to sell some small rice-cakes she had made to earn money. “And then I saw it was the body of an old man with a piece of cloth placed over his face.
“I asked if he had fallen down because he was sick, but the people shook their heads and said, ‘No, he was just too hungry and died for lack of something to eat.’”
Mrs Lee’s account is among shocking first hand testimony about the dramatically worsening living conditions in the secretive Stalinist state obtained by The Sunday Telegraph last week.
In almost 10 hours of interviews during clandestine meetings with The Sunday Telegraph just inside China, four North Koreans who recently risked their lives to flee across the tightly-guarded border from their homeland described the desperate plight of those left behind.
Kim Yeong, 68, told how families were being forced to scour the countryside for wild plants to boil up for food in a desperate attempt to stave off starvation.
“People are very poor again, they are going to the mountains to get grasses and weeds to make into soup,” he said. “Some people are having to eat manure when they cannot get any rice or corn.”
The UN’s World Food Programme says North Korea faces its worst food shortage in a decade, with six million people at risk – a consequence of poor economic management of its centrally planned system, a series of bad harvests caused by harsh winters, flooding and exhausted agricultural land, and the regime’s unwillingness to spend its dwindling hard currency reserves on buying food for its 24 million people.
But the world has been slow to react for fear of propping up the increasingly belligerent government of Kim Jong-il, which is vigorously pursuing a nuclear weapons programme and threatening its South Korean neighbour – leading the US to suspend food aid in 2008.
Aid agencies report that government food rations for some have been cut to just 200g a day – barely one tenth of what is needed.
Last week, after making its own assessment, the European Commission offered €10m in emergency food aid to Pyongyang, warning that 500,000 people faced possible starvation, with children already suffering acute malnutrition.
Ordinary North Koreans are denied the chance to speak openly by the all-controlling regime of Kim Jong-il and are almost never heard by the outside world. The four who spoke to The Sunday Telegraph – a businessman, a farmer, a factory worker and a housewife – did so in the Chinese town of Yanji, where they are living and working in secret to support their families back home.
Many Chinese citizens in this border region are Korean by ethnic origin and maintain their language and customs, making it possible for illegal migrants to blend in.
When we met in an empty apartment in a nondescript suburb of Yanji, Mrs Lee was visibly nervous, fretful for her security in a city where the police pay rewards to anyone who denounces a North Korean migrant. The interviews, arranged through intermediaries, were conducted sitting on the floor of the sparsely furnished apartment, below the line of sight of anyone outside.
Mrs Lee was carefully made up and nervously fingered her cheap, plastic jewellery as she spoke – knowing that if caught she would be sent back to North Korea to spend months in the gulags on starvation rations.
But, she said, the situation at home was so desperate she had no option but to risk all and leave, and now she wanted the world to know what was happening in her country.
In January, a month after seeing the dead man in the station, Mrs Lee stood in the doorway of her farmhouse, surveyed the barren hillsides around, and decided it was time to go. Everything that could be used for firewood had been stripped from the land over previous decades as families battled for warmth winter; now all was bare and infertile.
“When I was young, the woods outside my house were so thick you could get lost coming home,” she recalled. “But now there is only bare land – even the roots of the trees are gone. I couldn’t see how I could continue to live in North Korea.”
So in a leave of absence from her agricultural work unit, timed to coincide with a moonless night, she put on her warmest clothes and walked eight miles to the frozen Tumen river, the dividing line between destitute North Korea and economically booming China.
PUBLISHED: 11:11 EST, 27 January 2013 | UPDATED: 03:10 EST, 28 January 2013
A starving man in North Korea has been executed after murdering his two children for food, reports from inside the secretive state claim.
A ‘hidden famine’ in the farming provinces of North and South Hwanghae is believed to have killed up to 10,000 people and there are fears that incidents of cannibalism have risen.
The grim story is just one to emerge as residents battle starvation after a drought hit farms and shortages were compounded by party officials confiscating food.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has spent vast sums of money on two rocket launches despite reports of desperate food shortages in the country and concerns that 10,000 people have died in a famine
Undercover reporters from Asia Press told the Sunday Times that one man dug up his grandchild’s corpse and ate it. Another, boiled his own child for food.
Despite reports of the widespread famine, Kim Jong Un, 30, has spent vast sums of money on two rocket launches in recent months.
There are fears he is planning a nuclear test in protest at a UN Security Council punishment for the recent rocket launches and to counter what it sees as US hostility.
One informant was quoted as saying: ‘In my village in May a man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed by a firing squad.’
Farming communities, such as these pictured outside the capital Pyongyang last year, have been desperately hit by drought which has led to reports of people turning to cannibalism in a bid to ward off starvation
The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to over 128 million today. A shocking new research paper by Patrick Tyrrell and William W. Beach contains that statistic and a whole bunch of other very revealing numbers. According to their research, the federal government hands out money to 41.3 percent of the entire population of the United States each month. Overall, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to what they call “dependence-creating programs”. It is the most massive wealth redistribution scheme in the history of the world, and it continues to grow at a very rapid pace with each passing month. But can we really afford this? Of course we never want to see a single person go without food to eat or a roof to sleep under, but can the federal government really afford to support 128 million Americans every month? If millions more Americans keep jumping on to the “safety net” each year, how long will it be before it breaks and it is not there for anyone? The federal government is already drowning in debt. This year the U.S. national debt will easily blow past the 17 trillion dollar mark and we are rapidly heading toward financial oblivion. We are stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day with no end in sight. If we don’t get our finances in order as a nation, what will the end result be?
According to Tyrrell and Beach, federal spending on entitlement programs has been rising more than 6 times as fast as population growth has in recent years…
Between 1988 and 2011, spending on dependence-creating federal government programs has increased 180 percent versus “only” a 62 percent increase in the number of people who are enrolled in federal government programs, and a 27 percent increase in the population. Not only are more people enrolled in government programs than ever before, but more US taxpayer dollars are being spent on each recipient every year.
But even though the numbers that Tyrrell and Beach present in their paper are incredibly shocking, the truth is that they have probably underestimated the true scope of government dependence in America today. Just consider the following numbers…
Food Stamps
Back in the year 2000, there were about 17 million Americans on food stamps. That number has exploded to more than 47 million today.
Right now, there are more than 53 million Americans on Social Security, and that number is projected to absolutely explode as huge waves of Baby Boomers retire in the coming years.
Medicare
As I wrote about in a previous article, the number of Americans on Medicare is expected to grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
And those are only four examples of government programs that have seen their numbers explode in recent years. There are so many more that could be mentioned. Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs“, and almost all of them are experiencing explosive growth.
So is the “128 million” figure that Tyrrell and Beach have come up with actually too low? I believe that it is. But in any event, nobody can deny that the “welfare state” in the U.S. has absolutely mushroomed in size since the turn of the century.
According to one recent poll, 55 percent of all Americans say that they have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives. We are a nation that has become very comfortable leaning on Uncle Sam for help.
And poor people from all around the globe see how good things are here and they are eager to get a seat at the table. In a previous article, I talked about a federal government website (“WelcomeToUSA.gov“) that actually teaches new immigrants how to apply for welfare once they are able to get into the United States.
Will we all eventually becoming dependent on the government? If that happens will we still be free men and women?
Once someone is dependent on the government, they become forced to do what the government tells them to do in order to survive. If we all eventually become dependent on the federal government, how much power will that give them over us?
That is something to think about.
Another thing to ponder is how the U.S. middle class is rapidly disappearing.
There will always be poor people, and we should always take care of them, but what we should be truly alarmed about is how the middle class in America has been dramatically shrinking in recent years.
One of the biggest reasons why so many Americans are applying for government assistance these days is because there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone. Politicians from both political parties have fully embraced the one world “free trade” economic agenda of the global elite, and as a result millions of our jobs are being shipped out of the country. Big corporations can either choose to pay U.S. workers a living wage with benefits, or they can choose to set up shop on the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay workers slave labor wages with no benefits. Plus there are much fewer taxes and regulations to deal with typically on the other side of the globe.
As long as this nation pursues this “one world economic agenda”, there will never be enough jobs in the United States ever again. Chronic unemployment will become the new normal. Our formerly great manufacturing cities will continue to degenerate into gang-infested war zones.
Apologists for the current system continue to insist that the answer is “more education”, but the truth is that government dependence is even exploding among those with advanced degrees. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article on The Chronicle Of Higher Education…
15-Year-Old Kelvin Doe is an engineering whiz living in Sierra Leone who scours the trash bins for spare parts, which he uses to build batteries, generators and transmitters. Completely self-taught, Kelvin has created his own radio station where he broadcasts news and plays music under the moniker, DJ Focus.
Kelvin became the youngest person in history to be invited to the “Visiting Practitioner’s Program” at MIT. THNKR had exclusive access to Kelvin and his life-changing journey – experiencing the US for the first time, exploring incredible opportunities, contending with homesickness, and mapping out his future.
A Via Campesina march in Hong Kong, 2005, demanding an end to WTO trade negotiations over agriculture. (Photo courtesy of Via Campesina)
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has spent vast sums of money on two rocket launches despite reports of desperate food shortages in the country and concerns that 10,000 people have died in a famine
Farming communities, such as these pictured outside the capital Pyongyang last year, have been desperately hit by drought which has led to reports of people turning to cannibalism in a bid to ward off starvation
By Michael,
