By Paul Kersey
10/16/2013
Glitched EBT cards lead to frenzy in Louisiana, but what happens when they stop working for good?
Last weekend saw the fourth season debut of the popular AMC show The Walking Dead, chronicling how a disparate group of Americans survive a zombie apocalypse. The show garnered its highest rating ever: 16.1 million viewers.No show could capture the zeitgeist better — because, simultaneously, Americans got a frightening glimpse into a future where government-dependent mobs become the dominant species.
Recipients of the SNAP EBT/Food Stamp card in 17 states saw their benefits cut-off when a simple test of a backup system by Xerox Corp., one of the contractors for the debit-style card, caused a system failure. People trying to make purchases were greeted with a “zero” balance when they tried to check out. [Computer Glitch Blamed For Nationwide EBT System Shutdown On Saturday, CBS Boston, October 12, 2013]
Unfortunately for the collapsing Custodial State, although EBT was down for less than a day, nature doesn’t take days off:
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.Note carefully: Less than one day of one simple system outage — and chaos erupts that eerily resembles the police looting the Wal-Mart in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. (This time local police may not have looted, but it seems not to have occurred to them to arrest any of the looters. They say they aren’t even going to investigate it unless asked by Wal-Mart. [Next step on food stamp fraud up to Wal-Mart, local police say, By Lauren McGaughy, NOLA.com, October 15, 2013 ]Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, "It was worse than any black Friday" that he’s ever seen.
[Walmart shelves in Springhill, Mansfield, cleared in EBT glitch, by Carolyn Roy, KLSA.com, October 13, 2013. VDARE.com Link added]
How can people not have sufficient amounts of food in their homes to cover meals for a mere 24-hour period?
Conservative websites, continuing their pattern of dog-whistling racial angst to generate hits and ad revenue, had a field-day reporting on the Tweets by those adversely effected by the EBT glitch: EBT System Goes Down: Obama Voters Threaten Mass Riots, by Andrea Ryan, TheGateWaypundit.Com, October 12, 2013
Significantly, no-one apparently wants to remember that a similar incident occurred in Clayton County, Georgia in 2011:
Anger and frustration from dozens of Clayton County parents who say their children are going hungry after their food stamps were suddenly cut off.If you can’t care for your children, why have them? Oh wait, that’s what Uncle Sam is for.State officials admit that something went wrong down in Clayton County at the office that administers food stamps and Medicaid but they're still not sure what.
Parents say they can’t buy food without those food stamps.
Terry Clark says she stood in line for more than six hours at Clayton County’s Human Services Office because food stamp help for her six children unexpectedly ended.
"There’s no telling my kids we can’t eat. I’m not taking no. We don’t deserve that. Nobody should go hungry here in Georgia," said Terry Clark.
State officials say the office was overwhelmed Tuesday with dozens of families facing a similar problem. The food stamps are just not there.
"Me and my kids they haven’t ate since this morning. I was supposed to get my food stamps yesterday and I got nothing," said a mother.
[Clayton County Food Stamp Snafu Angers Many, MyFoxAtlanta.com, August 10, 2011]
Today, some 47.6 million Americans — one in 6 — rely on EBT/SNAP benefits. Back in the good-ole’ responsible days of 2008, just 36 million Americans used them. Federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program reached $82 billion in 2013, according to Jeff Sessions. Back in 2008 it was just was $39 billion.
Who are these Americans? There does exist a racial breakdown for EBT/SNAP users, though it’s somewhat dated:
Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.At some point in their life, 90 percent of black children will reportedly be on food stamps — one of the costs imposed the tax-payer by the irresponsible sexual choices of black males and their female partners (be they white, black, Asian or Hispanic — the resultant off-spring is classified as “black”). See the New York Times’s interactive map, and my spreadsheet of EBT/SNAP card usage by counties based on America’s largest cities (broken down by race).[Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades, by Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff, New York Times, September 28, 2009]
And this doesn’t even include the Women Infant Children (WIC) benefit extended to the healthcare of low-income pregnant women. This form of racial socialism extends to the crib, where 62 percent of those receiving WIC benefits are either Hispanic or Black:
The proportion of Hispanic WIC recipients grew from 35.3 percent in 2000 to 41.9 percent in 2010 while the proportions of black and white WIC recipients have declined from 37.4 to 31.8 per- cent for whites and 21.9 to 20.1 percent for blacks (Conor et al. 2011). [VDARE.com note: This is misleadingly phrased. It means that e.g. about a fifth of WIC recipents are black, although blacks are only just over a tenth of the U.S. population. Similarly, whites underparticipate relative to their three-quarters' share of the U.S. population]. This increase in WIC enrollment among Hispanics, relative to whites and blacks, corresponds with a large growth in the Hispanic population from 33.7 million in 2000 to 49.9 million in 2010 (a 47.9 percent increase) and a large increase in the number of Hispanic poor from 7.1 million in 2000 to 13.2 million in 2010 (an 85.1 percent increase).Hard-working Americans are funding their own demographic displacement.[WIC Participants and Their Growing Need for Coverage, by Michael Martinez-Schiferl, Urban Institute, April 2012(PDF)]
But there’s good news: one company is making a mint off of administering the EBT-card explosion: JPMorgan Chase & Co.
"This business is a very important business to JPMorgan," Christopher Paton, managing director of JPMorgan’s public-sector payments business, told Bloomberg News in 2010. "It’s an important business in terms of its size and scale … Right now, volumes have gone through the roof in the past couple of years. The good news, from JPMorgan’s perspective, is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume."Thus racial socialism employs corporate welfare to facilitate the demographic tidal wave that could soon overwhelm the historic American nation. [Why JPMorgan Wants to See More Americans on Food Stamps, by David Zeizler, MoneyMorning.com, April 9, 2013]A study released last fall by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a government watchdog group, estimated that since 2004 JPMorgan had collected more than $560 million in fees from just 18 of the states with which it has EBT contracts. [JP Morgan’s Food Stamp Empire, By Peter Schweizer, Daily Beast, October 1, 2012]
But as we saw when a simple data-processing center went down, the system isn’t perfect. And instability, when it occurs, unleashes events no one can predict.
Those 32. 2 million eyeballs glued to The Walking Dead on AMC don’t have zombies to fear in real-life.
What they do have to fear is something infinitely more terrifying: The Day the EBT Card Runs Out.
Paul Kersey is the author of the blog SBPDL, and has published the books SBPDL Year One, Hollywood in Blackface and Escape From Detroit, Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White and Second City Confidential: The Black Experience in Chicagoland. His latest book is The Tragic City: Birmingham 1963-2013 .
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