Oh SNAP!

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Good Solstice to you. This is the long anticipated moment of returning summer light, of life lived out in the open, a surge of enthusiasm shouting at the top of its lungs, naked and reveling in the warmth of the season. A period of visibility, of engagement. A time to let it all hang out.

That’s the language we traditionally use to describe the feeling of expansion and freedom summer provides us, and language, as we know, is symbolic of our social and psychic experience. Summer is that time when we traditionally peel off clothes, pare back layers of complexity and strip away the isolation and intensity that winter encourages.

Politics are prone to take a breather around this time and get pretty silly, like the summer a few years back when Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin held sway as national court jesters. Or consider last summer, when Obama and Romney launched the most vapid, unrevealing and uninteresting presidential campaign of all time. This year that may not be the case, mainly because what’s been exposed under the watchful eye of the turbulent heavens is not acceptable in too many ways to count.

I’m not speaking to just the revelations about the NSA, on the table for examination thanks to our whistleblower in hiding, young Mr. Snowden. As so happens with a complicit universe, when one secret explodes into the open, the lid on so many others, hidden in plain sight, rattle themselves visible. This is especially true of what former lawmaker and presidential candidate Gary Hart calls the Intelligence Industrial Complex, but it doesn’t end there. Even as we try to unearth all that’s been hidden, layers of government are busily burying others — or trying to — as quickly as they can.

While many of us are up in arms about government spying, others seem nonchalant. The nation is split in terms of how we see this internal surveillance. What has us spun up, however, is not the deed itself so much as being hornswoggled into believing something that wasn’t true. Think what a rage we’d be in if we knew all the ways our thinking is manipulated! Ouch!

Still, there’s a bit of a bumper pad that exists between our pre-web and web existence, isn’t there? Some of us see the world as a very big place, others think its four walls are defined in 50 states. Some anticipate the future, others look back to the past. The distance between those who still refuse to be drawn into cyber-reality and those fully immersed widens by the day, but the gap — at least for now — remains.

And because the last decade has mushroomed us into a complex cyber-society, because news comes at us like a speeding train, bringing vast quantities of information into view, because we can’t duck the gory details even with a pillow over our heads, we are desperate for the whistleblowers of the world to come out from under the Cone of Silence and prove to us, yet again, that there are important things out there we should know about — but don’t.

For instance, are you aware that Obama’s zero-tolerance for whistleblowers has resulted in a truly disturbing internal policy called the Insider Threat Program, applicable in any government department handling classified documents (which is evidently most of them)? It not only encourages people to tattle on their neighbor, it holds them accountable to do so. Although this policy came on the heels of Manning’s revelations, and the administration attempted an even hand by beefing up internal whistleblower protections to allow gripes and accusations to be handled in-house, there’s no way to perceive the ITP as anything but chilling to truth and Orwellian in nature.

Did you see that Elizabeth Warren was one of a handful of senators who voted against Obama’s nominee for international trade representative? This is the person who will pick up the threads of negotiation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement being negotiated with ten other nations, on-going these last three years. What we know about these arrangements has surfaced, ironically, through leaks.

Spunky little Elizabeth put a spotlight on the classified information that has been withheld from the public. Warren said she was voting against the nomination because she believed a new direction was needed, one “that prioritizes transparency and public debate. The American people have the right to know more about the negotiations that will have dramatic impact on the future of the American economy. And that will have a dramatic impact on our working men and women, on the environment, on the Internet.”

Fellow progressive (and fire-breather,) Alan Grayson, reviewed a draft of the Trans-Pacific deal recently and complained that he was unable to tell the public what he’d discovered:

“What I saw was nothing that could possibly justify the secrecy that surrounds it,” Grayson said, referring to the draft Trans-Pacific deal. “It is ironic in a way that the government thinks it’s all right to have a record of every single call that an American makes, but not all right for an American citizen to know what sovereign powers the government is negotiating away.”

To be sure, there are other big programs out there we’ve barely noticed. Riffing on that lack of disclosure, The Nation featured an article this week called The $385 Billion Military-Industrial Boondoggle You’ve Never Heard Of. Just one of dozens of similar stories, I suspect.

These kinds of things are hidden in plain sight. Due to their secret profiles and their complexity, getting full information about them is not easy, making the very process of trying to unearth the facts an overwhelming task for which the average voter has little time or stomach. Some of these programs and situations are new. Some of them are familiar and we still avoid them.

Take the unwieldy farm bill John Boehner was unable to herd his motley crew of patriots into approving this week; second year in a row, I might add. It was full of buried details and covert plans that the public would probably not approve, should they have been privy to them. As illustration, did you know that subsidies to farmers, which total some 23 billion bucks a year, do not — let me repeat — DO NOT require that a farmer allow his land to lay fallow for the season, and are paid out even if that land produces at top dollar? Bet you didn’t.

This has been going on for decades, and in the last twenty or so years, farmer income has soared above the average citizen’s, putting to bed that old mental picture of the guy in faded overalls hand-milking the cow at o’dark-thirty or hopping on his old John Deere to head for the fields. And for all the conservative angst about poor downtrodden small business, $17.5 billion of that $23 billion goes into the pockets of the large, wealthy producers. Simply put, our food is produced for us by technocrats who may not have had dirt under their nails for years, and our taxes pay them to do it.

I’m not talking about Monsanto here, although that can’t be extracted from so tangled a scenario as food production in this nation, which is in crisis. Rather, the subsidy programs are a kind of farm welfare, similar to the billions paid out to energy companies and overseas corporations. These reflect agreements long obsolete, perks carved in stone that no longer bring any return to the public good. Political parties attempt changes to such agreements at their peril.

I would be remiss if I didn’t speak to some of the exceptions, and there are some. A decade and more of unstable weather has created drought in some areas, floods in others, making subsidy money important to those who actually use their land for food production. On the other hand, $2.5 billion of our taxpayer dollars go to factory farms in the form of crop insurance. Big producers suck up most of it, the little farms get a bit, not much.

Also, the notion that farming — necessary to the national good — is both risky and only marginally profitable disappeared with improved land management science, developed after the tragedy of the Dust Bowl in the early twentieth century. The failure rate for farms today comes in at a mere half-percent, while general business failure is seven percent, 14 times greater.

Part of the reason that this multi-billion dollar bill couldn’t make the grade had to do with the various riders and amendments — 103 of them, to be exact — added to it by special interests. In our current House of Representatives, the special interests are very Republican in nature. Banging their deficit drum, the budget they passed for 2014 established a goal of $3.4 billion in cuts per year from farm subsidies. Approved by the House Agricultural Committee, only 1.8 billion of those cuts came from subsidy. The remainder came from national nutrition programs.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Those who hold government redistribution of revenue in contempt need to be especially thoughtful. In this particular instance, public money is being directed into the pockets of the wealthier class, snatched right out of the mouths of those who do not make enough income to adequately feed themselves or their families. This proved too much for Blue Dog Dems, anxious for their constituents to keep their subsidies but not nearly cold-blooded enough to extract such a price from the poor. They may have been mindful, as well, of their president’s pledge to veto such a proposal. They killed the bill, as did some Pubs who wanted more draconian “entitlement” cuts.

By the time the sausage was stuffed on the farm bill, some $20.5 billion in food stamp cuts were on the table. We’re talking about the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP, for short. The sequestration has already pounded the hell out of Meals on Wheels, leaving seniors in the lurch. If SNAP is gutted next, we will have effectively pushed the most vulnerable of our citizens to the edge of the herd. Perhaps that’s the whole point, to kill not just government but those who depend on it. That’s a stark suggestion, but what else is there to think?

Once upon a time there was a president who liked fairy tales and he made one up about a Welfare Queen who sat on her fat ass and collected perks from a compliant Mommy State, popping out unwanted children to ensure her ability to stay on the dole and collect wads of dough from the taxpayers (and although there was never clarification, I believe this particular heroine was more inclined to be called Snow Black than Snow White). It was later proven that this character did not, in fact, exist, and was drawn from sheer imagination, but that didn’t stop the public, who trusted the avuncular president because he was So Darned Wholesome, from sucking up this narrative as gospel. Forty years later, the mythology still prevails for those who think somebody (undeserving) wants their stuff.

There never seems to be a discussion of food stamps or even unemployment insurance extension that doesn’t include a conservative scream for mandatory work programs or drug testing to go with. Americans are schizophrenic on this topic: in cases of earthquake, hurricane, fire or tsunami, we open our hearts and our wallets wide. When it comes to safety-net assistance, what remains of our innate Calvinism rises to the surface, thundering moralism from some invisible pulpit. There is a rule among the haughty in this nation: never need a helping hand for anything other than emergency circumstances (and we better have seen proof-positive video on CNN.)

Covering their arrogance with quasi-logic, the Pubs suggest that we can save billions by eliminating SNAP funds, but they do not take into consideration the stabilizing effect those grocery dollars have on local business, not to mention a family in need. Where would Midas-rich WalMart be without SNAP? Recent statistics show that your local Wally World costs the surrounding community some $900,000 in necessary social services to its employee’s.

Oh, and there’s that other pesky concept: ethics. Shall we allow our citizens to go hungry while banks and Wall Street and corporations remain unaccountable for their actions while raking in record-breaking profits? Is that the best we can do?

And do you know why the Farm Bill got our attention in the first place, mine anyway? Because SNAP put a human face on it. These ponderous problems that exist in the dry climes of our intellect can be endlessly, passionlessly discussed, unless someone shows us the blood, witnesses the tragedy, humanizes the suffering, injustice, victimization.

Even then the political response may remain flawed, but we begin to think of it differently. It becomes something beside a mental exercise, it becomes a matter of HEART that will eventually reach an acceptable solution. That’s what must remain with us when we think of the farm bill — the human face of hunger.

Summer starts us off deep in the Cancer terrain of feeling: home, family, children, nutrition. The Sibley chart has us a Cancerian country, deeply emotional. This is our national default energy, our home base. This melding of intuition and feeling is where we are comforted, where we define our value. We’re in the perfect place for a long look at what’s ahead.

In times such as these, overloaded with challenges and structural breakdown, boxed in by calcified politics and obsolete concepts, our true north remains deep within, not gone but seldom consulted. It’s always heart that leads to a better day, our best defined by kindness extended, assistance provided.

It feels to me, as we enter into this season of warmth and light, that we are at a point of selection. The government, heavy with inability to function, has all but come to standstill. We ARE the government, in all the ways that count, so perhaps this is our moment to change things up. People have stopped looking to government for answers to their problems, anyway. They’re turning to one another.

The way forward seems emotional without being hysterical, innovative and caring without being strident. It will create itself one person at a time, one neighborhood and community at a crack, sustained by willing hands and brought to the attention of those who are looking for solutions. It will have a human face, not a bureaucratic one. It will stop selling weapons and influence, stop putting people’s souls in jeopardy by asking them to squeal on one another, stop putting personal enrichment above commonwealth.

You’ll know we’ve put the old patriarchy to bed when we stop complaining about feeding the children and think outside the box to care for our old folks. If the government we see in front of us no longer reflects us, then it’s time to take charge of those changes; they won’t make themselves. We must put aside our fears that we don’t have anything to bring to this challenge. Even if all we have to offer is an open heart, here on the other side of 2012, I have a feeling that will be more than enough.