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I think they also genuinely enjoy it and believe somewhere in the future whoever is left will thank them for it

The funniest part is the stores and their suppliers are pushing for SNAP benefits in the interest of profits, so the profiteering is fighting itself.

I think it's more than that, they are heavily invested in a rather nasty version of the "just world hypothesis": if bad stuff happens to these people, like being poor and hungry, it's because they are bad and deserve it.

It's the same logic at play for blaming victims or rape and sexual violence.

Because the alternative, that the world isn't fair and horrible stuff happens to good people and good things also happen to horrible people, is too unpleasant and exhausting to contemplate and requires complex thought.

I just don’t get the “fuck you I got mine” mentality. There’s no empathy from these people. They think everyone who is poor made dumb choices and poor people should suffer for making those dumb choices. After all, just getting a job will sort everything right out according to conservatives, and getting a job is easy to them. They have never been affected by conditions that lead to poverty and it shows.

You're both right.

Or we just stop the system where the corporations could buy laws to enable this, and their brutal enforcement.

The reason why laws are important, why you believe they're just, is because they're supposed to be the aggregate will of the people, and in practice, they're just not.

The only people ive ever talked to who thought the state should need to support someone who was working full time with food and housing and stuff is tankies, actual ML's who believed that that should be the core of the state. I guess in their ideal world there wouldn't be anything fucked up about that, but we don't live there.

It's not just the laws that are fucked here, its the entire system of law as thing that expresses and protects what people and communities want that has been almost precisely reversed in function, and whose enforcers make all of us live in fear. That's what needs to be fixed. The underlying systems that are not doing what it says on the package, because that's not what they were ever for. To continue trying to tweak the gun to your head until it cleans dirt off your floor is insane and unreasonable.

What did the Walton's for example actually do to control this much of the economy, to direct so much of it to their own whims and personal enrichment with no regard for or even explicit exclusion of the rest of us? Who thinks it was anything that deserved that kind of wealth?

Edit: yeah, 'just'. Repeating wasted labor to fix a system that's working perfectly an only wants to manipulate you is a lot more work with greater human cost than ripping the band-aid off and remaking society.

Well, look at these moneybags with 187 a month. My elderly neighbor on a fixed income gets 17.00 a month.

Rice and beans have historically been pretty cheap. You can survive on SNAP if you've got a place to live and no other options. You certainly won't be thriving.

It's the economic equivalent of emergency life support.

I guess adding lead to it would change it.

Technically destruction is change.