Feel the Bern, Nevada! American Realities and Bernie's Heartfelt Credibilities!

(D)ude: Man! Food banks are feeling the weight of over twenty-two states reinstating time limits and work requirements in order for people to qualify for government food assistance through SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps) this presidential election cycle. Remember that it was Bill Clinton’s presidency that enforced time limits and work requirements on people before they could qualify for food assistance. 

(M)an: Dude! The over twenty-two states are imposing these time and worker restrictions despite these states still suffering from high unemployment rates themselves. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 500,000 Adults will lose Benefits in 2016 as Waivers Expire: Affected Unemployed Childless Individuals are very poor; Few Qualify for Other Help, and as of the January 21, 2016 update of an article by the same headline,

One of the harshest pieces of the 1996 welfare law, this provision limits such individuals to three months of SNAP benefits in any 36-month period when they aren’t employed or in a work or training program for at least 20 hours a week.  Even SNAP recipients whose state operates few or no employment programs and fails to offer them a spot in a work or training program — which is the case in most states — have their benefits cut off after three months irrespective of whether they are searching diligently for a job.  Because this provision denies basic food assistance to people who want to work and will accept any job or work program slot offered, it is effectively a severe time limit rather than a work requirement, as such requirements are commonly understood.  Work requirements in public assistance programs typically require people to look for work and accept any job or employment program slot that is offered but do not cut off people who are willing to work and looking for a job simply because they can’t find one.  In fact, SNAP has separate work requirement authority much like this, where states can require individuals to participate in job search or a training program but cannot terminate them if no program is available.

D: Man! But didn’t the Great Recession end the stringent rules since the economy had been and was plummeting as George Walker Bush finished his second term and exited the White House?

M: Dude! According to the article I’m quoting, there are harsh discrepancies in place today like,

In the past few years, the three-month limit hasn’t been in effect in most states.  The 1996 welfare law allows states to suspend the three-month limit in areas with high and sustained unemployment; many states qualified to waive the time limit throughout the state due to high unemployment rates during and since the Great Recession.  But as unemployment rates fall, fewer areas are qualifying for statewide waivers.  Most states have counties and other localities that are eligible for waivers because they continue to have especially high unemployment.

D: Man! Hillary Rodham Clinton has not been able to disconnect from her husband physically this campaign season as well! How can we the people and electorate be guaranteed a leader in someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton when we see just how debilitating her husband has proved to be as her campaign surrogate? And what’s up with her utilizing a teleprompter to give her cessation speech in New Hampshire?

M: Dude! Bill Clinton is ruining her election chances by campaigning so degradingly and authoritarian-like, as if we’re in for another eight years of him, rather than her! Bill Clinton is not an emissary, he’s an anathema!

D: Man! What are the racial characteristics of individuals affected by these SNAP cuts?

M: Dude! According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the numbers are as follow,

The indigent individuals at risk are diverse. More than 40 percent are women.  Close to one-third are over age 40.  Among those who report their race, about half are white, a third African American, and a tenth are Hispanic.  Half have only a high school diploma or GED, and one-quarter have not completed high school.  They live in all areas of the country, and among those for whom data on metropolitan status are available, close to 40 percent live in urban areas, 40 percent in suburban areas, and over 20 percent in rural areas.

D: Man! Have you heard the commercials for earthquake and flood insurance policies on the radio? I called up my parents’ home insurance company and they informed me that their home was not necessarily in a flood or earthquake zone as of right now. And I saw family of four sized tornado shelters available for purchase outside the hardware store the other day. What’s up with that?

M: Dude! The climate change deniers may be denying global warming and the long-term effects of fracking in Washington, DC, but they are shareholders in these insurance companies that are forming in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex! It’s reprehensible! My parents are already spending hundreds on regular home insurance and have had to get their air conditioning repaired recently. Did you know that companies like Old Republic Home Protection actually send out non-Better Business Bureau-approved companies out for repairs despite having an A rating from the BBB themselves?

D: Man! What about these tornado shelters at the hardware stores? What’s going to happen to those of us without the means to accommodate such apparatuses? Are we in for tornado season this year?

M: Dude! Ask Governor of Texas Greg Abbott! Speaking of which, did you hear Robert Reich characterize the present-day as the second gilded age somewhere on MSNBC this week?

D: Man! Mark Twain came up with the term “the gilded age” and he had every right to do so because of the obscene Newport, Rhode Island estates that went up all over the United States map back then. But I agree, we are living in a second gilded age at the moment, and are in need of another Sherman Anti-Trust Act to end the reign of such obscene wealth seeping into our democracy alongside the seeping hatred for the disenfranchised in our society.

M: Dude! We have a clear choice to make between shantytowns and another well-crafted Sherman Anti-Trust Act for right now. According to Robert L. Barker’s Social Work Dictionary, that federal law enacted in 1890 to eliminate business monopolies and and conspiracies in the restraint of trade and commerce brought back the collective bargaining rights of labor unions that had been targeted and shutout from engaging with government, like what the members of the Republican Governors Association have done to dismantle the powers and rights of the labor unions today. Remember Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker prancing like an excited chicken from his presidential campaign tour bus, bragging about how the Republican Party had severed the influence of the labor unions?

D: Man! The only reason the Republican Party and the Clintons run for the presidency is to raise money for themselves. Since 2010’s Citizen’s United ruling by the Supreme Court, there is no means to trace just where the money gathered from campaign fundraisers goes. How convenient for the Republican Party and Bill and Hillary Clinton to want to campaign with as many as ten candidates on their side running for the presidency!

M: Dude! The only way we’re ever going to achieve an anti-trust act and restoration of unions in the new millennium is if Senator Bernie Sanders becomes the next president of the United States! Robert L. Barker’s Social Work Dictionary defines shantytowns as follows on page 440,

Densely populated settlements of impoverished people who have built homes of scrap materials on land they do not own. Because these people usually occupy the land illegally, they cannot demand public services and have little fire and police protection, water and sanitary facilities, or schools. Shantytowns are growing rapidly, especially in Third World nations, and are also found in more affluent nations that do not provide adequately for their poor populations.

D: Man! According to a Washington Post article dated February 22, 2015,

But recalling the benefits that union membership might have brought before the 2011 law stripped most public-sector unions of their collective-bargaining rights is difficult when workers consider the challenges of the present.

“I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” said Dan Anliker, a 34-year-old technology teacher and father of two in Reedsburg, a tiny city about 60 miles northwest of Madison.

The law required most public employees to pay more for health insurance and to pay more into retirement savings, resulting in an 8 to 10 percent drop in take-home pay. To help compensate for the loss, Anliker said he took an additional 10-hour-a-week job.

“Everyone’s on their own island now,” he said. “If you do a good job, everything will take care of itself. The money I’d spend on dues is way more valuable to buy groceries for my family.”

Sean Karsten, a 32-year-old middle and high school reading instructor in his first year of teaching in Reedsburg, said the unions are “just not something I concern myself with.”

“I just look to keep improving my teaching in the best way I can and try to keep my nose out of the other stuff,” he said.

M: Dude! That guy’s just numbing himself to the pain of having lost everything! Yet he continues on for the sake of his students! Maybe they will construct legislation in their professional futures to rectify what their instructor lost!

D: Man! The article continues and clarifies the ridiculousness of Governor Walker’s conservative crusade against liberalism. I believe the fact is that Governor Walker and his cronies are pocketing the following three billion dollars he boasts about having saved for Wisconsin,

Walker has pointed to the unions’ membership troubles as a victory — presenting himself as a conservative warrior unafraid of taking on big battles against liberal interests.

Walker’s administration has said forcing public employees to contribute more to retirement plans and health insurance helped local governments save $3 billion. The governor also has credited the 2011 law with saving homeowners money on property taxes while giving school districts the ability to make reforms that increased third-grade reading levels and high school graduation rates. And the law has emboldened Republican state lawmakers to further challenge Wisconsin’s labor movement this year by pushing right-to-work legislation that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of paying union dues — a measure Walker has said he would sign.  

M: Dude! Speaking of crooks, Jeb Bush is campaigning around insisting that people need to just work more hours than they already are on minimum wage, while Hillary Rodham Clinton’s telling folks she’s better for Black America than Bernie Sanders due to her and her husband’s history with Black communities. But I think Antonio Moore’s opinion piece, Hillary Clinton Should Ask for Black America’s Forgiveness Before She Asks for Its Vote in the Huffington Post, summarizes the truth about the Black Vote and the Clintons fairly,

The woman that was supposedly married to America's first black president is now hoping that it is Black America that buoys her campaign. The problem is that regardless of whether Bill Clinton believes, as he has recently stated, that "we are all mixed-race people...", he is white and the Clintons were far from good for Black America in their last go around in the White House.

Whether we look at "The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act" signed by President Clinton in 1994, a piece of legislation which led to more black men being incarcerated than we had seen in all of America's dark history, which is saying a lot. Or, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which nearly gutted black media ownership by removing caps on corporate media ownership.

D: Man! Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to raise the minimum wage to twelve dollars, while Bernie Sanders will raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. That’s a difference of twenty-four dollars a day that could be spent on groceries for a family of four! That’s what’s at stake in this election! I see it every Wednesday morning when I pass by the church food pantry. That’s when families and individuals congregate outside for the opportunity at being able to get their needs met for an entire week. Recently, I saw a frustrated mother and her equally flustered child eating pudding outside the pantry and wondered whether the mother had run out of food supplies earlier than expected, hence their aching appetites.

M: Dude! Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman ought to ponder that scene and circumstance long and hard before labeling everything Bernie Sanders stands for as “voodoo economics”!

D: Man! If Krugman wants to argue over deceptive simplicities in his field of study, there’s nothing simpler and more natural than a mother’s struggle to address her child’s distress, especially hunger!