Harvest of Shame

Trump Administration Wants To Decide What Food SNAP Recipients Will Get - NPR

We're in the William Gibson version of the future.

No flying cars (unless you're Elon Musk). No post-scarcity space communism a la Star Trek. No democracy.

Instead, corporations will supply, to an ever-increasing proletariat isolated from the upper reaches of the economy, "Food" Products(tm). These "Food" Products(tm) will be supplied by the lowest bidder, may actually kill you and most assuredly will have only the slightest resemblance to anything you and I might call healthy, fresh food.

It's "America's Harvest Box!" (No, really, that's the name, I am sadly not joking), a subsidiary of "Food" Products(tm), which Mick Mulvaney, first in line to the revolving door position of chief of staff to the President mainly because he has no ethical qualms about saying hilariously awful things like the end of this sentence, termed "a Blue Apron-type program!" with a straight face. You millennials love Blue Apron, right? Shut up and pay your college debt, we have a government to pillage here.

For, make no mistake, that is what this is. A tightly knit group of cronies (in both major parties) are manipulating the collapse of our government, solely with an eye towards short term profiteering. There's no thought to why the government might supply a subsistence level of food supply (you know, to actually prevent mass starvation in what is still one of the wealthiest countries on Earth), just that it has money that can be better spent on them. Directly (tax cuts defunding government) or indirectly - directing what little government exists into increasingly ridiculous privately-run boondoggles like this that exist primarily as scams. Because I guarantee you Perdue Chicken will be a primary supplier of "America's Harvest Box!"

And those not in on the pillaging will be fighting for the scraps of "Food" Products(tm). Maybe the mirrorshades will be affordable.