WASHINGTON – Tim Alberta reports for National Journal that the “Republican Study Committee [RSC]—a group of 172 conservative House members—has barred Heritage Foundation employees from attending its weekly meeting in the Capitol.” Heritage, a fiscally conservative Washington think-tank, has traditionally been involved in the closed-door meetings but no longer.
Through the summer, Heritage insisted that a relatively popular program, commonly known as “food stamps,” be voted on separately from subsidies to big agrobusiness.
In July, Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage arm Heritage Action, released a statement to that effect. It read, “The purpose of ending the unholy alliance that has dominated the food stamp and farm bill for decades is to allow substantive debate that would allow the House to show its conservative values. Also, Needham warned the RSC against “subsidies and government intervention that will continue to harm consumers and taxpayers alike.”
You can read more here about how powerful Republican Party politicians are in league against conservatives and with powerful farming special interests.
Nation Editor Barbara Ehrenreich said the Government’s Message to the Poor is ‘Die’
WASHINGTON – Barbara Ehrenreich, contributing editor at The Nation, suggested on August 15 that the government’s message to poor people is essentially to “die.” Asked by The Internet Chronicle about the roots of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program, Ehrenreich alluded to a Michigan woman’s struggle to escape a 30-day prison sentence for being unable to pay for a son’s incarceration. Ehrenreich was speaking at the Lamont Street Collective.
“There’s a punitive mentality in this country,” said Ehrenreich, “that is not entirely sane.”
New York City Police have a long-standing policy of halting, interrogating, and searching pedestrians – judicial critics have said, without probable cause. In an August 12 decision, federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected the city’s stop-and-frisk policy, saying that it amounted to “indirect racial profiling.” The vast majority of those stopped in 2012 alone were black or Hispanic.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the policy. And Tuesday, city attorneys sent a letter to Scheindlin citing statistics that use of the policy had declined by more than half over a year.
According to a statement by the American Civil Liberties Union, Edwina Nowlin, a Detroit, Michigan native, served 28 days of her sentence before the organization’s having successfully interceded.
Ehrenreich, the New York Times bestselling author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” blamed the rise of New York City’s financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s for the persecution of the poor. “Gentrification,” she said, has become rationale for targeting the impoverished.
Said Ehrenreich, Nowlin “was picked up by the cops on the street and charged with not only the usual homeless crime of being in the street and so forth but with failing to pay for her son’s – 16-year-old son’s – room and board in jail … So [Nowlin] gets picked up and she gets put in jail for that. Then she gets a paycheck. She thinks it can be applied to her son’s room and board, but no, it’s immediately confiscated for her room and board in jail.”
Added Ehrenreich, “Now, what is going on here? What are they thinking? I mean, the message to people who don’t have money is, ‘die;’ you know, just be dead; be gone.”
Ehrenreich also said that the mass incarceration of the poor – the design, she claims, of the Bloomberg administration’s embrace of stop-and-frisk – initiated under the aegis of beautification.
At the close of her talk, she said that her opposition to stop-and-frisk not due to its enforcement being racist but because police should not have grounds to randomly halt and interrogate innocent individuals whatsoever.
The author’s comments on August 15 are in the video below:
Snowden has proved the insidious discount card programs at Supermarkets track your every move.
MOSCOW, Russia – New leaks by Edward Snowden, the whistleblower responsible for unveiling NSA surveillance programs, show that all “discount cards” offered by supermarkets are in fact used as part of a ubiquitous data collection and surveillance program.
“Every time you swipe that card to save a few measly cents,” said Snowden, via collect call, “they collect information on everything you purchase. They know what you eat and drink, and they know how you pay for it.”
Supermarkets fired back at Snowden, claiming that the data isn’t identified with individuals unless it poses a clear and present danger.
But Snowden provided evidence to The Internet Chronicle showing that that was clearly not the case. In documents obtained during his tenure as elite hacker for the NSA, Snowden uncovered a program to profile every individual, including images taken from supermarket video surveillance, which has been in place for decades.
“They watch you pick up every item and can compare it with metadata,” warned Snowden. “Everyone has a file, and I wouldn’t be surprised if shoplifters were prosecuted 10, 20 years down the line when it’s possible to analyze this data in more detail.”
