For those cheering the spectacle of a government shutdown and the calculated strangulation of SNAP benefits, a small dose of reality may be in order. One in five American children (citizens of the richest empire in human history) subsist below the poverty line. Two and a half million have no home at all. Not because they failed, but because their “betters” did. Over eighty percent of food stamps distributed through SNAP go to households containing children, the elderly, or the disabled. More than half of all recipients are children. In any given month, nearly forty percent of the nation’s youth and one in eight senior citizens rely on welfare to eat. The beneficiaries, then, are not the indolent and undeserving of conservative mythology, but the defenseless at either end of life’s ledger: the very young and the very old.
Yet amid the ceaseless howling about “welfare fraud,” one detects not moral concern but moral cowardice. This convenient fiction allows the comfortable to sneer at the afflicted while keeping their own consciences spotless. Fraud, in fact, accounts for a paltry 2.67 percent of the total welfare budget (roughly $27 billion) and of that, 92 percent arises not from the moral degeneracy of the poor but from clerical errors, administrative incompetence, and the predictable grift of vendors. In short, almost all of the “freeloading” stems not from the cunning of paupers, but from the usual clerical bungling and vendor graft that passes for “efficiency” in government contracting.
The true parasites are not in line at the food bank; they are in the boardroom. Look to the Walmarts of the world, where executives ensure that full time employees earn so little, they must beg assistance from the very state their employers deride. This is not capitalism; it is feudalism with a marketing department.
Look, too, to the politicians who, with a sanctimonious twinkle, chip away at decimal points of the national debt while leaving untouched the vast temple of corporate welfare and who peddle this moral inversion, who sermonize about fiscal virtue while preserving the vast cathedral of corporate welfare, deserve neither your respect nor your vote. They are not reformers. They are pimps for plutocracy.
Observe the sleight-of-hand conducted by the politicians who trumpet their fiscal “discipline” by slashing aid to the poor. They parade before the cameras boasting of millions or even billions trimmed from “bloated welfare programs,” knowing full well that such sums, while impressive to the average taxpayer, barely register on the scale of a federal budget measured in the tens of trillions. It is political theater at its cheapest: symbolic cruelty sold as responsibility. They balance the books not by courageously confronting corporate excess or military waste, but by pilfering from the lunch money of children. These are not stewards of the public good. They are moral accountants of the lowest order, mistaking arithmetic for virtue and callousness for policy.
Zohran
House GOP blames Zohran Mamdani for government shutdown. Here's the NYC mayoral candidate's response.
Please please make Zohran the face of the democratic party...his message affordability and safety
an approach to the future that the 99% crave...share it billboard it make it into a bumper sticker (aside if I added one word it would be opportunity)
part one:
10 effective things citizens can do to make change in addition to attending a protest
Shelley Inglis is a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights (CGHR) at Rutgers University. Until July 1, 2025, she was a Senior Policy Advisor with the Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Shelley was formerly the executive director of the University of Dayton Human Rights Center and research professor of human rights and law. Prior to this, she was with from the United Nations Development Program where she held various management positions working on peace building, democratic governance, rule of law and human rights, and the Sustainable Development Agenda at the U.N. headquarters in New York and regionally based in Istanbul, Turkey.
Prior to joining UNDP, she held several other positions with the U.N. - the Rule of Law Unit in the office of the U.N. deputy secretary-general working on systemwide policy coordination and coherence in the field of rule of law; Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, and the U.N. Development Fund for Women. Her experience includes providing policy guidance and program support to U.N. workers in the field, particularly in conflict-affected and post-conflict environments; lead drafting of numerous reports of the secretary-general and policy and guidance materials of the organization, including in relation to gender equality and women’s empowerment; and conducting workshops and training in her areas of expertise.
Prior to joining the United Nations, Shelley worked extensively on the Balkans and Turkey, in particular with Save the Children U.S. in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Amnesty International Secretariat and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Kosovo. She also has practiced public interest family and criminal law in the United States and served as an adjunct professor at Barnard College.
