#DeVos

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Iowa's starvation strategy

I don’t really buy that “the cruelty is the point.” I’m a materialist. Money talks, bullshit walks. When billionaires fund unimaginably cruel policies, I think the cruelty is a tactic, a way to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, policies that grow the fortune of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us have a natural 99% disapproval rating.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

So when some monstrous new law or policy comes down the pike, it’s best understood as a way of getting frightened, angry — and often hateful — people to vote for policies that will actively harm them, by claiming that they will harm others — brown and Black people, women, queers, and the “undeserving” poor.

Pro-oligarch policies don’t win democratic support — but policies that inflict harm a ginned-up group of enemies might. Oligarchs need frightened, hateful people to vote for policies that will secure and expand the power of the rich. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the strategy. The point isn’t cruelty, it’s power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/#no-i-in-uterus

But that doesn’t change the fact that the policies are cruel indeed. Take Iowa, whose billionaire-backed far-right legislature is on a tear, a killing spree that includes active collaboration with rapists, through a law that denies abortion care to survivors of rape and forces them to bear and care for their rapists’ babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/politics/iowa-kamala-harris-abortion.html

The forced birth movement is part of the wider far-right tactic of standing up for imaginary children (e.g. “the unborn,” fictional victims of Hollywood pedo cabals), and utterly abandons real children: poor kids who can’t afford school lunches, kids in cages, kids victimized by youth pastors, kids forced into child labor, etc.

So Iowa isn’t just a forced birth state, it’s a state where children are now to be starved, literally. The state legislature has just authorized an $18m project to kick people off of SNAP (aka food stamps). 270,000 people in Iowa rely on SNAP: elderly people, disabled people, and parents who can’t feed their kids.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kyle Swenson profiles some of these Iowans, like an elderly woman who visited Lisa Spitler’s food pantry for help and said that state officials had told her that she was only eligible for $23/month in assistance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/16/iowa-snap-restrictions-food-stamps/

That’s because Iowa governor KimReynolds signed a bill cutting the additional SNAP aid — federally funded, and free to the state taxpayers of Iowa — that had been made available during the lockdown. Since then, food pantries have been left to paper over the cracks in the system, as Iowans begin to starve.

Before the pandemic, Spitler’s food pantry saw 30 new families a month. Now it’s 100 — and growing. Many of these families have been kicked off of SNAP because they failed to complete useless and confusing paperwork, or did so but missed the short deadlines now imposed by the state. For example, people with permanent disabilities and elderly people who no longer work must continuously file new paperwork confirming that their income hasn’t changed. Their income never changes.

SNAP recipients often work, borrow from relations, and visit food pantries, and still can’t make ends meet, like Amy Cunningham, a 31 year old mother of four in Charlton. She works at a Subway, has tapped her relatives for all they can afford, and relies on her $594/month in SNAP to keep her kids from going hungry. She missed her notice of an annual review and was kicked off the program. Getting kicked off took an instant. Getting reinstated took a starving eternity.

Iowa has a budget surplus of $1.91B. This doesn’t stop ghouls like Iowa House speaker Pat Grassley (a born-rich nepobaby whose grandpa is Senator Chuck Grassley) from claiming that the cuts were a necessity: “[SNAP is] growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities.”

Grassley’s caucus passed legislation on Jan 30 to kick people off of SNAP if their combined assets, including their work vehicle, total to more than $15,000. SNAP recipients will be subject to invasive means-testing and verification, which will raise the cost of administering SNAP from $2.2m to $18m. Anyone who gets flagged by the system has 10 days to respond or they’ll be kicked off of SNAP.

The state GOP justifies this by claiming that SNAP has an “error rate” of 11.81%. But that “error rate” includes people who were kicked off SNAP erroneously, a circumstance that is much more common than fraud, which is almost nonexistent in SNAP programs. Iowa’s error rate is in line with the national average.

Iowa’s pro-starvation law was authored by a conservative dark-money “think tank” based in Florida: the Opportunity Solutions Project, the lobbying arm of Foundation For Government Accountability, run by Tarren Bragdon, a Maine politician with a knack for getting money from the Koch Network and the DeVos family for projects that punish, humiliate and kill marginalized people. The Iowa bill mirrors provisions passed in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere — and goes beyond them.

The law was wildly unpopular, but it passed anyway. It’s part of the GOP’s push for massive increases in government spending and bureaucracy — but only when those increases go to punishing poor people, policing poor people, jailing poor people, and spying on poor people. It’s truly amazing that the “party of small government” would increase bureaucratic spending to administer SNAP by 800% — and do it with a straight face.

In his essay “The Utopia of Rules,” David Graeber (Rest in Power) described this pathology: just a couple decades ago, the right told us that our biggest threat was Soviet expansion, which would end the “American way of life” and replace it with a dismal world where you spent endless hours filling in pointless forms, endured hunger and substandard housing, and shopped at identical stores that all carried the same goods:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

A society that can’t feed, house and educate its residents is a failed state. America’s inability to do politics without giving corporations a fat and undeserved share is immiserating an ever-larger share of its people. Federally, SNAP is under huge stress, thanks to the “public-private partnership” at the root of a badly needed “digital overhaul” of the program.

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein describes how the USDA changed SNAP rules to let people pay with SNAP for groceries ordered online, as a way to deal with the growing problem of food deserts in poor and rural communities:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-19-retail-surveils-food-stamp-users/

It’s a good idea — in theory. But it was sabotaged from the start: first, the proposed rule was altered to ban paying for delivery costs with SNAP, meaning that anyone who ordered food online would have to use scarce cash reserves to pay delivery fees. Then, the USDA declined to negotiate discounts on behalf of the 40 million SNAP users. Finally, the SNAP ecommerce rules don’t include any privacy protections, which will be a bonanza for shadowy data-brokers, who’ll mine SNAP recipients’ data to create marketing lists for scammers, predatory lenders, and other bottom-feeder:

https://www.democraticmedia.org/sites/default/files/field/public-files/2020/cdd_snap_report_ff.pdf

The GOP’s best weapon in this war is statistical illiteracy. While racist, sexist and queerphobic policies mean that marginalized people are more likely than white people to be poor, America’s large population of white people — including elderly white people who are the immovable core of the GOP base — means that policies that target poor people inevitably inflict vast harms on the GOP’s most devoted followers.

Getting these turkeys to vote for Christmas is a sound investment for the ultra-rich, who claim a larger share of the American pie every year. The rich may or may not be racist, or sexist, or queerphobic — some of them surely are — but the reason they pour money into campaigns to stoke divisions among working people isn’t because they get off on hatred. The hatred is a tactic. The cruelty is a tactic. The strategic goal is wealth and power.

Tomorrow (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: The Iowa state-house. On the right side of the steps is an engraved drawing of Oliver Twist, holding out his porridge bowl. On the left side is the cook, denying him an extra portion. Peeking out from behind the dome is a business-man in a suit with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

Image: Iqkotze (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_State_Capitol_April_2010.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[oldshowbiz]

The DeVos Family has been a corrupting force in American politics for several generations.

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

These guys are calling themselves the "Fearsome Foursome" which I guess is better than calling themselves the Frightful Four... but it's mostly the same thing...

[detournementsmineurs]

Emmanuelle Devos dans "Arrête ou Je Continue" de Sophie Fillières (2014), octobre 2024.

[thoughtportal]

DeVos loses!

[ausetkmt]

[beeclops]

[upnorthprogressive]

Frisky Friske Update: Nazi Legacy OUT – DeVos Stooge Running for Jodi Decker’s Seat

The dust settled over Michigan on August 6, 2024, and there were happy surprises. In State House District 107, Neil Friske (R-Watch me chase a stripper while armed and receive no charges!) lost his primary race to represent the Northern Lower Peninsula district for another term. In a statement, Friske stated: In Lansing, where conformity often overshadows conviction, I’ve made it my mission to…

[joyfultunes]

Devotional thoughts

Proverbs makes a lot of promises about how much better your life will be if you search out wisdom and instruction from God.

Proverbs 3:4-5 specifically states: Let not mercy and truth forsake thee...so shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man.

When I first read this verse, my first thoughts were that I really want good favor in the sight of man. My autism means I frequently am misunderstood and it drives me crazy. Then I realized how wrong that is. Not that I don't want to be misunderstood, but that I didn't first seek to gain the first part of that verse--favor with God. That is way more important. Help me, Lord to seek your favor more than the understanding of my peers. Help me to care what You think more than I care what my friends around me might think or say.

[romanceddawn]

[oldshowbiz]

The hysteria claiming that there's a free speech crisis on college campuses is largely funded by the far-right billionaire families of DeVos and Koch.

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

This bromance is probably one of my favorite things in the books...

[detournementsmineurs]

"L'Homme d'Argile" d'Anaïs Tellenne vaec Raphaël Thiéry, Emmanuelle Devos, Marie-Christine Orry et Mireille Pitot, février 2024.

[uwmspeccoll]

The author, Angela Hovak Johnston.

Johnston and Marjorie Tungwenuk Tahbone, traditional tattoo artist.

Catherine Niptanatiak: "I designed my own, something that represents me and who I am, something that I would be proud to wear and show off, and something that would make me feel confident and beautiful. . . . I have daughters and I would like to teach them what I know. I would like for them to want to practice our traditions and keep our culture alive."

Cecile Nelvana Lyall: "On my hand tattoos, from the top down, the triangles represent the mountains. . . . The Ys are the tools used in seal hunting. . . . The dots are my ancestors. . . . I am so excited to be able to truly call myself and Inuk woman."

Colleen Nivingalok: "The tattoos on my face represent my family and me. The lines on my chin are my four children -- my two older boys on the outside protecting my daughters. The lines on my cheeks represent the two boys and the two girls on either side. The one on my forehead represents their father and me. Together, we live for our children."

Doreen Ayalikyoak Evyagotailak: "I have thought about getting traditional tattoos since I was a teenager. . . . When I asked the elders if I could have my own meaning for my tattoos, they said it wouldn't matter. My tattoos symbolize my kids."

Mary Angele Takletok: "I always wanted traditional tattoos like the women in the old days. I wanted them on my wrists and my fingers so I could show I'm Inuk."

Melissa MacDonald Hinanik: "As a part of celebrating my heritage and revitalizing important traditional customs that form my identity, I believe I have earned my tattoos. I am a beautiful, strong young woman. I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend, and an active community member. I reclaim the traditional customs as mine, I re-own them as a part of who I am."

Star Westwood: "We still have some of our culture, but some things are slowly dying. Having tattoos helps us keep our culture alive. . . . . My tattoos represent my dad and my dad's dad. The ones closest to my wrists represent my sisters."

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National Tattoo Day

July 17 is National Tattoo Day. To celebrate, we present some images from Reawakening Our Ancestors' Lines: Revitalizing Inuit Traditional Tattooing, compiled by Angela Hovak Johnston, co-founder with Marjorie Tahbone of the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project, with photographs by Inuit photographer Cora DeVos, and published in Iqaluit, Nunavut by Inhabit Media Inc. in 2017.

For thousands of years, Inuit have practiced the traditional art of tattooing. Created the ancient way, with bone needles and caribou sinew soaked in seal oil, sod, or soot, these tattoos were an important tradition for many Inuit women, symbols etched on their skin that connected them to their families and communities. But with the rise of missionaries and residential schools in the North, the tradition of tattooing was almost lost. In 2005, when Angela Hovak Johnston heard that the last Inuk woman tattooed in the old way had died, she set out to tattoo herself in tribute to this ancient custom and learn how to tattoo others. What was at first a personal quest became a project to bring the art of traditional tattooing back to Inuit women across Nunavut.

Collected in this book are photos and stories from more than two dozen women who participated in Johnston's project. Together, these women have united to bring to life an ancient tradition, reawakening their ancestors' lines and sharing this knowledge with future generations. Hovak Johnston writes: "Never again will these Inuit traditions be close to extinction, or only a part of history you read about in books. This is my mission."

Reawakening Our Ancestors' Lines forms part of our Indigenous America Literature Collection.

Angela Hovak Johnston (right) with her cousin Janelle Angulalik and her aunt Millie Navalik Angulalik.

View other posts from our Indigenous America Literature Collection.

[markscherz]

now accepting guesses as to what this embryo becomes when it matures

[cheezitofthevalley]

70s/80s music blinkies Pt 1

not including most of the talking heads ones because I already posted most of those.