From the New Deal to the New Steal-The Food Stamp (Cuts) to Prison Pipeline
A welfareQUEEN deconstructs the proposed billion dollar food stamp cuts
By tiny, daughter of Dee, mama of Tiburcio
Corporate welfare already stole our taxes on the real
From Politricksters to lying lawyers,
social workers to akademik researchers-
EVERYONE is eating
from this poor peoples meal
On this, the anniversary month of the War on Poverty – can we finally start to speak truth about the increasingly violent war ON us poor youth, adults and elders in Amerikkka.
To be clear, as much as people lavish praise on the original War on Poverty, it was rooted in wite-supremacist, scarcity model, US liberal values, and even at that was considered “revolutionary” in the hater Wite-Nation launched by settler colonizers on this stolen indigenous land. And who then made their filthy dollaz by stealing and killing all of our fierce, beautiful, brilliant indigenous Turtle Islanders and Afrikan peoples to do their free labor.
*Welfare QUEEN’s Herstorical WeSearch
Originally the New Deal was created to provide limited support to white widows of war veterans, anyone outside of that narrow, racist, sexist, classist stereotype was considered abberant, crazy, or incorrigible.
These positions of “outsider” fit nicely into the agendas of the original purveyors of the poverty industry, the settlement house social workers who on one hand “helped us” poor folks with their charity kkkrums and on the other set up laws to criminalize us like the Ugly Laws* of the 19th & 20th century, enabling them to create more and more industry on the backs of us poor folks which we live with today called benignly a Non-profit organization.
So the next big revolutionary (neo-liberal, racist, classist) move was by a neo-liberal senator in the 1960’s Daniel Moynihan who came into the projects in Harlem and with one swoop of his politrickster pen assessed the powerful single-mother headed households led by strong African women and their kin as crazy, broken and pathological. This is what African Descendent Scholars refer to as a **trans-substantive error.
Once again the kkkrums fix was locked in, tightening the grip of criminalization, racist and classist punitive measures around the already stressed necks of poor peoples in Amerikkka.
Beginning with jail time or ankle bracelets for poor mamas and daddys who might not claim as little as $5.00 on one of your thousands of proof of income forms required for the tiny welfare krum subsidies (which is NOT free money, you have to do ***new slavery work for every cent to highly criminalized underground economic strategies.
Fast foreward to the many lies of the evil-doer himself Ronald Regan who called us poor mamaz “Welfare Queens” and claimed we were all making out on our $341.00 dollar (welfare) crums and collecting checks and buying cadillacs.
Followed up by the fakkke War on drugs which like the the War on Poverty was filled with lies and resulted in the increased criminalization of poor folks using or selling drugs or medicine, and more and more poor mamaz and suns and daughters ending up in prison making money for the private prison corporations.
And then on to George Bush who said all us poor folks would be “fixed” if we just got married, while stealing literally billions of dollars and setting up corporate welfare and military industrial complex payouts for his corporate genocidal friends.
And now in the 21st century we have the second billion dollar cut being proposed to our last krum aka Food stamps that so many of us poor, disabled and low-wage working families, elders and folks actually rely on just to eat will in fact bring us full circle back to bread lines, feudalistic poverty.
The first cut which was approved in 2013 has already meant $34.00 less from this mamaz EBT card (food stamp). Now this might not sound like alot to most people but if you are poor, that means several gallons less milk, lettuce, tomatoes, bread or the choice of GMO-infused poison food just to make the tiny food stamp kkrums go further
And then more and more of us will need to do small underground strategies (read: crime) to survive resulting in more of us ending up in their corporate prisons.
But, again, notwithstanding the endless lies that the propaganda machine called Amerikkka will tell you, this horrendous situation is already written. We are worth more dead or in prison. Our schools are stripped of anything that would inspire, teach or help our children dream or think, our teachers with conscious suffer under these endless corporate agendas and the US imperial snakkkes continue to rape, pillage and destroy every last piece of Mama Earth in search of more natural resources to steal and more land to control.
As budget genocide continues to shrink our already shrinking access to food, shelter, healthcare and education, with the privatization and pimping of our housing, schooling and resources and now a proposed 8.7 billion dollar cut to Food Stamps which is estimated to impact over 850,000 people yes, it is important for us to fight for theses krums, to plead for mercy to billionaire politricksters like Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein so they will dane to throw down for us in front of openly hater GOP billionaires but it also equally important for us to envision the decolonization of our communities, our food and our lives from these lying settler-colonizer lies.
For those of us poor folks who aren’t too broken down by this endless war on our poor bodies of color to still think and act with revolution, we need to start naming the herstory of these acts of budget genocide, these school to prison pipelines, this destruction but more importantly, we need to take back our own strength, our own spirits as indigenous peoples in diaspora, our own streets to grow food, our children’s minds and our hope. And perhaps most important of all to remember to not let success be defined by the ones who oppress us.