Peg Kerr's Journal

Keith Ellison is one of the thirteen Democratic members of Congress who is taking the Food Stamp Challenge, i.e., eating on a budget of about $4.50 a day to show solidarity with food stamp recipients who receive $32.59 a week. The personal thrift is part of a challenge organized by Fighting Poverty With Faith.

Food stamps have been a target of Republican-led budget cuts. House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) proposed transfering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, into a block grant program administered by the states.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) recently told ABC's "Top Line" that the food stamp program was "out of control" and being abused by "multimillion-dollar lottery winners." (After a Michigan man drew attention for still receiving food stamps despite winning the lottery, state lawmakers began asking recipients about their financial assets.)

The number of people relying on food stamps has risen as a consequence of the recession. Over 40 million individuals and 19 million households used the program in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The participants are:

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH)
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-CT)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Rep. Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands)
Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL)
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN)
Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA)
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA)
Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL)
Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC)

Representative Joe Courtney has been blogging and tweeting about the experience.

(No Republicans have signed up. Gee, I wonder why?)

I am grateful to minnehaha B., who introduced me to Glenn Greenwald's blog. You can pick up the RSS feed by friending unclaim_terr. He is a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges (including some of the highest-profile free speech cases over the past few years), civil rights cases, and corporate and security fraud matters. He is about to come out with a book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. Read the prologue here, and a review here. I have found his blog to be fascinating, with insightful legal analysis of breaking news stories of the day. Highly recommended. I will be reading his book (after minnehaha B. is done with it!)

alfreda89 is right: This speech by journalist Bill Moyers deserves a wider audience. Among the people he quotes is Berry Goldwater, lifelong conservative and former senator of Arizona. Stay with me until the end:

"The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of Constitutional liberty, an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people . . . representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups who speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community."

What is Moyers talking about? He is laying bare the means by which we have been betrayed. We thought we were sending honest people to Washington to make changes--but we have sent the whores into Babylon. They are owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by lobbyists, by corporate bigwigs, by the top 1% of income earners in our society--people who become richer as the middle class becomes poorer.

Please take a moment to read his speech. It's long, but worth your time--and it's broken into four sections, so you can bookmark it and return to it.

http://www.publicampaign.org/savingdemocracy/