Free Republic

Yesterday’s jobs report was tremendous … if you have been dumbed down. The sad facts are that U6 underemployment has been above 13% for 60 months, the last month below 13% was November 2008. U6RATE_Max_630_378 And there are still 91.27 million people NOT in the labor force. nilf120713 Income inequality, as measured by the GINI coefficient, continues to rise. ginicoef2005 While real median household income has been falling since 2000 and house prices have been rising rapidly for the past two years. realmedincomcase What are the solutions to the employment problem? Nancy Pelosi (CA-D) made the following statement this past...

"....Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's office will cancel food stamp benefits for anyone who participated in a fraud and shopping spree catalyzed by an EBT malfunction....More than 12,000 people were sent an insufficient funds notice when the problem with the EBT cards was fixed on Oct. 12; those who transgressed may lose their EBT cards for a year....On October 11-12, at least 17 states experienced problems with their EBT card systems. In Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana, cards indicated they had no spending limits, so EBT holders went wild with purchases..... The stores that were cheated are bound to come up with...

It’s a welfare fraud scheme costing U.S. taxpayers $750 million a year. People are illegally selling their electronic food stamp cards on Craigslist and other social media sites for cash. CBS13 found two people here in Sacramento, both with the same idea, using Craigslist as free advertising to blatantly and illegally sell their state benefits. Our hidden cameras were rolling as a woman, who we’ll call Lorie, told our undercover producer about her brilliant idea to game the system for a quick buck. “Everyone said I was crazy, but I thought they’d say, ‘that’s freaking brilliant, man,’ ” she said....

**SNIP** If you have any questions, dial 800-645-8333 on your Obamaphone. There’s only one way to cope with this mean-spirited Republican attack on the leisure classes — get more EBT cards. You just go down to the welfare office and make a “self-declaration,” meaning nobody checks. That’s how come you read so often nowadays of illegals being pinched, and just before the traditional paragraph about the immigration detainer, you learn that the “dreamer” had two, or three, or even four EBT cards. Poor Campeo Armando Diaz-
Carola, sentenced to eight years in prison earlier this week after being caught with a...

It is late October, so Adrianne Flowers is out of money to buy food for her family. That is no surprise. Feeding five kids is expensive, and the roughly $600 in food stamps she gets from the federal government never lasts the whole month. "I'm barely making it," said the 31-year-old Washington, D.C., native and single mother. Starting Friday, the money is likely to run out even quicker. That is when Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits are set to fall for more than 47 million lower-income people -- 1 in 7 Americans -- most of whom live in...

Posted: Oct 30, 2013 2:11 PM CST Updated: Oct 30, 2013 2:50 PM CST By Carolyn Roy A Louisiana senator is calling for SNAP users who took advantage of the EBT card glitch earlier this month to lose their benefits. U.S. Sen. David Vitter on Wednesday sent a letter to Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell and the director of the state's Department of Children and Family Services asking for "aggressive action on the fraudulent events during the recent outage of the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system which led to massive theft of groceries in several Louisiana locations." "The outrageous theft...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Walmart shoppers in Many who may have taken advantage of last week's EBT glitch might soon find their faces posted online. In addition to the mega-retailer's Springhill and Mansfield locations in Louisiana, the store in Many saw customers filling up carts with goods paid for on EBT cards that weren't showing limits. The glitch only lasted for about 2 hours on the night of October 12, but it was long enough to create chaos in stores that opted not to set an emergency limit for the EBT SNAP card holders. According to the Many Police Department Facebook Page, "The MPD...

Food stamp recipients face a massive benefit cut set to kick in when stimulus funds expire Friday. The nationwide cut “is equivalent to about 16 meals a month for a family of three,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis using the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan.” CBPP called the roughly $5 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.” “If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New...

Food stamp recipients are turning the government handouts into quick cash with ads on Craigslist, despite efforts to stem fraud. The federally-funded grocery assistance coupons -- which are issued by states in the form of debit cards under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- are being sold on the online bulletin board as well as auction sites like eBay. FoxNews.com found several offerings at Craigslist sites around the country, where the sellers offered the welfare benefits at large discounts from face value.

Trick or treat!! The word, according to Neil Cavuto, is that the gazillions of food stamp recipients across the land are to have their “benefits” reduced as of November 1st, and that the Department of Homeland Security is gearing up for widespread riots. Such wonders abound in our neo-socialist dystopia of “hope & change.” For the past several years, the Obama administration has aggressively sought to solidify and expand the democrat party’s grip on power by encouraging as many people as they possibly can to sign up for food stamps and other government programs, to make dependency on government a...

This is Serious !! for them to spend 80 Million for protection means IT ON!! This is the 1st wave of cuts coming on November 1st! It will get worse , wave after wave! EBT set to start cut backs on November 1st 2013 !! Get ready Folks , EYES OPEN!

Many Police Department is looking to press charges against anyone who left the Many Walmart during the EBT glitch with carts full of food without stopping at the checkout counter. “We had people actually walking out of the store, apparently, without even going through the checkout line,” explained Many Police Detective JoAnn Carter. ”That’s called shoplifting, isn’t it?” The Many Police Department is reviewing the surveillance video with Walmart to identify who will be facing charges of shoplifting. “Walmart actually has a person who sits and that’s what she does with the loss and prevention,” Carter explained to 710 KEEL....

“Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Justice Louis Brandeis famously pointed out in his Olmstead dissent. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” When the government acts like a banana republic, the people will behave as though they live in one. Juxtaposing the chaotic footage of EBT cardholders conducting a legal looting at a Louisiana Walmart this past weekend with the constant cable-news loop of lawmakers conducting a legal looting of future generations affirms this. Both demonstrate the perils of letting one set of people spend another set of people’s money. “I...

Proud to be an American... Something is really wrong with this picture...

Every time an American signs up for food stamps in one of 23 states, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) adds to its revenue stream. That because JPMorgan Chase contracts to operate as the processor of the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards in those states. JPMorgan earns a fee for each recipient, ranging from 31 cents to $2.30, depending on the state, every month for the term of the contract. JPMorgan's seven-year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, the official name for the federal food stamp program) contract with New York state, for example, brought in more than $126 million of...

Almost 100% of our listeners were incensed at the actions of EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card holders this weekend at Walmarts in Mansfield and Springhill. In fact, one went so far as to call it, ‘legalized looting!’ So after everything you’ve seen in the past few days, you won’t be surprised to learn there are folks ‘working’ the system, a system designed to help folks going through hard times, to their advantage…as this woman explains.

In a speech at Harvard in 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: “There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. …” Yet...

Lost in the news shuffle of the government shutdown and debt ceiling debate this week was the story progressives are quite happy you likely missed. But the story is important to note now, especially since we are on the verge of a massive expansion of the welfare state. The Electronic Benefits Transfer system went down for a couple of days. The EBT system replaced food stamps with a debit card to remove the stigma attached to using food stamps and is “reloaded” with a recipient’s government allotment once per month. When the money is gone, it’s gone, until the next...

By now you’ve probably heard about the EBT card breakdown during a power outage in which shoppers at a couple of Louisiana Walmarts purposely took advantage of the situation by “buying” a huge number of groceries for amounts that greatly exceeded their EBT limits in normal times. You might say the Walmart managers were stupid not to ban the use of the cards for the duration of the problem, or limit the amount that could be charged on them. And if you said that, perhaps you’d be right. But perhaps they thought that if they did that they would face...