By: DeNeice Kenehan | Jan. 30, 2014
On Wednesday 89 Democrats voted with Republicans in the House to slash food stamps...and to boost the CROP INSURANCE $7 billion. Guess who bought a big CROP INSURANCE company in October and will be selling govt-subsidized insurance under the program? I'll give you two guesses and first two don't count. Yeah. Monsanto.
But let's look at what the Democrats are up to, after all the lobbying by Monsanto et al on this crop insurance deal. - DeNeice
Popular Resistance: "Whatever happened to the so-called “war on poverty” and the rhetoric about looking out for the poor? In a vote on Wednesday, 89 DEMOCRATS joined 162 Republicans in the US House of Representatives to cut food stamp funding by $8.6 billion over a 10-year period.
“They are gutting a program to provide food for hungry people to pay for corporate welfare,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger.
Anti-hunger advocates like Berg say CROP INSURANCE EXPANSION would come at the expense of millions of people who depend on food stamps.
We start with Congress itself. It was widely expected that the Republican-dominated House of Representatives would throw every roadblock in the books to curb unemployment compensation, while at the same time cutting food stamps to the bone. But what about the Democratic-dominated Senate, which many looked to for protection of workers’ rights and benefits?
Doesn’t this double-barreled attack against the working class by Democratic Party politicians (with some exceptions) raise fundamental questions as to which side these people are on? After all, they agreed previously, with only one dissenting vote in the Senate, to cut food stamp funding by $4.1 billion. And they unanimously approved the Ryan-Murray budget deal excluding unemployment benefits, leaving it to the tender mercy of the Republicans to restore the benefits in separate legislation.
Welcome to the age of austerity. And welcome to the new normal. In the past, unemployment insurance was routinely extended with no demand for “offsets,” which is the Republicans’ battle cry today.
It took former Tennessee member of the U.S. House of Representative Harold Ford, Jr. to state the obvious truth: The Democrats are responsible for what happened because they needlessly opened the door widely for Republican obstructionism when the Democrats failed to insist that extension of jobless compensation be included in the budget deal. The Republicans would have been forced to go along with the inclusion because they certainly could not afford to shut down the government again, justifying it on the ground that it was the Democrats’ fault for refusing to drop a critically needed benefit for the long-term unemployed."
http://www.popularresistance.org/where-is-labors.../
-----------------------
Yesterday we discovered that chemical "Goliath"- Monsanto, spent nearly $1 billion for a crop insurance company started by two Google employees. "Climate Corporation" (acquired by Monsanto in October) currently sells both federally subsidized crop insurance and supplemental plans that pay out additional benefits when crops go awry. While federal insurance repays farmers up to the break-even point for a failed crop, Climate Corporation insures the lost profits as well. Monsanto says it will maintain this insurance business.
http://m.motherjones.com/.../monsanto-profit-climate...
----------------------
"The White House threatened last year to veto any bill that contained deep cuts, advocated by House Republicans, to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.With congressional elections looming in November, Obama has highlighted social safety-net programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance as a way to combat the widening income gap in the United States."
http://www.insurancejournal.com/.../2014/01/29/318726.htm
---------------------------
"... five-year farm bill would slash spending by $23 billion over the next 10 years, including $8 billion in cuts to food stamps and $4 billion in cuts to conservation programs. But despite those cuts, there is one program that is expected to see a $7 billion increase over the next decade: crop insurance.
Last year, the farm bill was the sixth-most heavily lobbied measure on Capitol Hill, with 350 organizations spending cash to get their voices heard as it was being shaped. Crop INSURANCE was the issue that appeared the most frequently on lobby reports. Since 2006, the American Association of Crop Insurers and the National Association of Wheat Growers, for example, have each mentioned crop insurance in lobbying disclosure reports more than 60 times.
Together, the crop insurers association and wheat crop production industries in 2013 alone spent more than $57.5 million on lobbying, with chemical giant MONSANTO spending $36 million of that alone."
http://www.opensecrets.org/.../special-interests-heavily...
Where Is Labor’s Opposition To Cuts In Food Stamps, Unemployment? | PopularResistance.Org
No comments:
Post a Comment