The New York Times crunched some federal data back in January and found that 6 million Americans now receive food stamps but no other form of income. Today, a new investigation from ColorLines in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute has uncovered one key to their survival: selling their food stamps on the black market for cash.
As a recent Depression-era diary edited by Big Money's James Ledbetter documents, during the bank closures of the 1930s, desperate families would sell their passbooks to shuttered banks for 50 or 60 cents on the dollar. Reporting in 2010 in the severely "recessed" city of Hartford, Connecticut, which has been struggling for decades to rebuild from the death of manufacturing, I had a case of déjà vu. There I met several unemployed mothers who've surpassed their lifetime welfare limits who told me they sell their food stamps at the corner bodega for 70 cents on the dollar just to cover basics like utility bills and winter shoes for their kids.
"Nobody's had work for a few years now," Carmen Cordero, a longtime welfare rights activist with the Hartford-based group Vecinos Unidos, told me. "People need a base. They need a safety net. They need continued support. Women have to make horrible choices when they lose cash."
One woman I met, Eva Hernandez (she asked me not to use her real name because selling food stamps is illegal), a 28-year-old mother of two young girls, is now precipitously close to the edge. After working low-wage jobs at places like Dunkin Donuts and KFC for close to a decade, tapping public assistance off and on over the years to supplement her poverty wages, Eva used up her lifetime allotment of cash assistance. Last March, in the midst of the worst job crisis in at least a generation, Eva opened the last welfare check she will ever receive. Now, unable to find any work at all, she's been pushed to break the law to get by.
Welcome to the post-welfare world, where Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich's 1996 welfare reform meets the great recession and double-digit unemployment.
See the full investigation at ColorLines and The Investigative Fund.
Current Extensions Set to Expire at the End of February 2010 - Take Action Now
The recent reauthorization the Recovery Act unemployment provisions (including the federal extensions, additional $25 per week, and COBRA subsidies) by Congress is only in effect until February 2010 - meaning that the extensions and additional support millions of unemployed workers are relying on will soon start to phase out. With so many jobs lost, and periods of unemployment lasting nearly seven months, it's crucial that Congress provide the extensions, additional benefit supplement, and COBRA through the end of the year. Read more.
Take action Call on Congress, as its FIRST order of business, to pass a stand-alone UI and COBRA extension through the end of 2010. Also consider becoming a media spokesperson on why the extension is so important to you and your family. Sign up on our Share Your Story page and we'll be in touch with you about media opportunities.
And, please visit our Ask the Expert page for answers to frequently asked questions about the current extensions, UI eligibility, and more.
What's New
Food stamps come on a card like a credit card nowadays. All they do is take someone with them to shop and pay for the groceries. The clerk doesn't know who's food it is, and doesn't care. After they get in the car, the person "buying" the food stamps gives the food stamp recipient the cash for the amount of groceries purchased. Everyone doesn't do the less than dollar value split. Most people who actually need the cash for real needs, not drugs or alcohol, simply takes a relative or close friend with them to the store and just trade dollar for food stamp dollar. It's been going on since the first day governments issued the cards and will continue as long as people have a need for cash.
This familiarity among all those eating from the same table certainly did not produce harmony between the richest and poorest, but each side knew that the other was watching. This served to govern greed and callousness to a welcome degree. The boundaries of allowable exploitation were always tested, but they were also often respected, because they could be determined. Like in a tug of war, the workers and the owners could feel their counterpart when they pulled on the rope.
Now we have an elongated globalized food chain. The ownership class is often multinational, distant and secluded from the observing eyes of the worker ants. Layers of empire surround financial power like moats. Against the worker of today stands a machine, a system. We are not all in the mix together, we will not pass on the street. When the food chain is elongated, it is easier to walk away from the social contract that binds a society.
If companies paid decent, livable wages*, didn't ship off thousands of jobs overseas, etc., there would be little to no need for UI, food stamps, TANF, etc. It's simple economics. You don't need to support a man who's able to support himself.
* Henry Ford, in 1914, DOUBLED his workers' wages. Why? So they could BUY the autos they produced. Yeah, radical concept - your workers and customers are one and the SAME. This fact escapes modern business. Wall St. railed at him, saying he'd go bankrupt. Well, he didn't. He and his employees both prospered, transformed the industrial world and Ford Motor is still going strong.
Further, I will remind anyone who looks down on assistance to the poor that it took ten years to get the last minimum wage increase. TEN YEARS!! But Congress - the wealthy - never had a problem giving themselves a yearly raise. It is the grossly inequitable nature and mentality of capitalism. Give to the rich and screw everyone else.
It should be no surprise to the adherents of unfettered capitalism that It is axiomatic that the poor are driven to survive by any means necessary when all manner of safety net protection is withdrawn. Capitalists see this as an opportunity to profit from construction and contracting as they build and maintain the now vast American privately owned prison system.
They see the opportunity to benefit from these destitute wretches, cast aside by this America, while the banking systems profits from the distribution of food stamps and other transfer payments which the government must make and do so through the banking system.
If enough of those cast aside by this America are severely pressed for survival when the Ides of March have passed, we can expect a very warm Summer.
It would do well to have a "Biscuit" Party Rebellion to coincide with the "Tea" Party Rebellion.
Did you read Joe Stacks screed? He is being dismissed by too many as a crazy lone wolf Tea Bagger...that's completely incorrect and dangerously, willfully ignorant. When the Joe Stacks and the Eva Hernandezes come together there will be real bloodshed. Further fueled by the rhetoric of idiots like Beck and Pawlenty....
When Michelle Obama said " for the first time...." she spoke too soon...we have much to be ashamed of and very little of which to be proud these days.
Eventually, you have an ice cream cone tree balanced on a toothpick.
This article makes it so incredibly clear that we need to radically transform how we approach public assistance in the United States. There is much work to be done to provide meaningful changes in our regional and national policies that provide real opportunities for people to not just live, but to live well.
Thank you for this, Mr. Wessler.
Here are just some links about the current Congress cutting 58 million dollars from it's Section 8 budget causing over 3000 NYC men, women and children, many elderly and many severely disabled to become homeless. I found the links in 2 seconds on Google. Remember this is just for NYC. Who knows how many across America are living on the streets because of what the current Congress, under Obama, has done.
http://www.vosizneias.com/45126/2009/12/17/new-york-ny-city-revoking-more-than-3000-section-8-housing-vouchers
http://www.iahh.org/advocacy/3000-broken-promises/thousands-lose-vouchers
http://www.ny1.com/1-all-boroughs-news-content/the_call/the_call_blog/110704/city-yanks-section-8-vouchers/
My own father and mother came over from Cuba, with not a cent in their pockets. My mother had never worked, and had to take a job cleaning bathrooms in a flee bag hotel. So please, I am here to tell those who are unemployed to do whatever it takes to survive. You wont die from doing menial work, you will be stronger for it! And yeah...... I have been unemployed, faced tough times and pulled myself up and out of the "pity party".
When she needed help from breathing the asbestos at her job, it was over for her. At 48 she went from Independent, happy, loving & giving to defeated. That's happening to millions right now.
Plus, over 1000 people die every day from MISDIAGNOSIS alone, let alone NO health care. So you see, over a half million die from health care per year. That's way more than those who die from no health care.
Our health care is so bad, you're safer with no care
The bigger point... a single person on SSDI getting around $800/mo is only eligible for $16 (sixteen dollars) in food credit per month.
That's not even worth the paperwork and sitting in a dreary welfare office all day long for. Certainly isn't worth facing Federal charges for attempting to sell the thing.
Excuse me? I receive just under $900 a month in SSDI benefits and my food stamp allotment is $185 a month.
SOmething is askew somewhere.......