I have spent all my life as an advocate for social justice because once we abandon the vulnerable among us, hope withers on the vine. On November 1st, the government of the alleged most prosperous country on earth will consciously choose to starve the working poor, low-income earners and the vulnerable. This deliberate starvation policy began long before today. Back in spring, and without notice, the administration cut $500 million from the Emergency Food Assistance Program money that Congress had already appropriated.
This has resulted in the cancellation of 4,304 deliveries to food banks at a time when food insecurity is at the worst level since the Great Recession. Be in no doubt, Trump, as part of his socioeconomic agenda, has made the deliberate decision to adopt social Darwinism, where those considered non-productive should be targeted, humiliated and above all, punished for their lack of contribution to the king’s counting house.
It seems clear that under Trump, poverty has become an unwritten crime in America, for which the punishment will be slave wages or starvation. I actually believe that it’s part of a plan to create a labour pool to replace undocumented immigrants who are already themselves allegedly working in private detention centres for a dollar a day. 21st-century tech-driven plantations are about to become a reality, and the White House will become the new Big House.
The aim of cutting half a billion dollars appropriated to feed those struggling with food insecurity was a deliberate act of calculated cruelty designed to deny more expensive, healthy food and protein, because clearly, Trump believes that the poor don’t deserve access to meat and eggs, etc. That’s considered an extravagant expense that they are undeserving of. The truth is that these are the first items those struggling to survive will cast aside to make money they have stretch further, and the Emergency Food Assistance Program helped address that need.
If you want to see how the administration has deliberately withdrawn this assistance from food banks to this point, please read this excellent report by Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz from ProPublica, which outlines the timeline of the withdrawal of support. Make no mistake, this is premeditated and designed to dehumanise those who will starve without assistance. What we are seeing is the erosion of hope in a world where this administration wants recipients to feel shame and failure. It’s all part of implementing social Darwinism.
On November 1st, the world will witness a perfect storm as the cruelty hits millions of American families, many of them Trump voters, as the most basic means of survival are denied. The truly shocking news is that the contingency fund to prevent a lapse in nutritional assistance is being deliberately withheld for political leverage to force Democrats to reopen the government. This leaves blue states forced to step in to stop kids from going to bed hungry, but Trump has got that angle covered, too; he’s refusing to reimburse any stopgap funding supplied by states. If you happen to live in a red state, then get ready to eat grass, I’m afraid.
The cost of SNAP payments for a month is approximately $9 billion. While American families can no longer afford to buy food, Trump has sent $20 billion of taxpayer money, with an alleged further $20 billion promised from the private sector to a right-wing nut job running a basket case economy, Argentina. A country undercutting US farmers with little hope of making good on the billions gifted to him by Trump. This is not about Argentina, it’s about Trump and Bessent saving a couple of their rich buddies from losing their shirts if the Argentinian economy collapses.
My guess is that the $20 billion promised by the private sector was what would have been invested if Trump could not make a publicly funded bailout happen, so there was never $40 billion; it was always $20 billion. It’s my belief that the private sector was prepared to pony up if all else failed, but Trump saved them from having to do so. However you dice and slice it, this high-risk bailout could have fully funded SNAP for two months.
Concerning the administration’s bogus claim that it would not be legal to fund SNAP, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is pretty unequivocal in its assessment, which contradicts the House Speaker’s claim that it would not be legal to use contingency funding to prevent food assistance payments from being terminated.
Reporting from Dottie Rosenbaum on October 27th 2025, notes:
The Trump Administration recently claimed that SNAP benefits are not available for November 2025 because SNAP’s “contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits. This stands in opposition to the law and prior practice, including by the Trump Administration itself. Also, the Administration could use its legal transfer authority — the same authority it already used to provide additional funds to WIC — to supplement the contingency reserves, which alone are not enough to fund families’ full benefits for November. The Administration must use all available options to fund November benefits for the 1 in 8 people in the U.S. who need SNAP to afford their grocery bill.
Don’t you think it strange that contingency funding for SNAP is illegal, but accepting donations to give each member of the armed services a $100 check to allow the administration to portray that the military was being paid is legal, as is demolishing the entire East Wing of the White House with no planning approval or Congressional approval? Just another in a long list of lies being peddled by a felonious President to the American people.
Before we move on, I want to point out that in the alleged richest country on earth, 12.5% of Americans rely on SNAP to survive, and to add some important context, roughly half of non-disabled adults under 60 who receive SNAP are working. Now, call me old-fashioned, but why is the government not targeting the corporate welfare cheats who give rise to the need for SNAP to exist? I’m beginning to believe that people have entirely lost their ability to challenge the very fundamentals of this broken economic model. And I’m not just talking about this administration either.
Food banks in the 21st century are in themselves an indictment of a society in which corporate welfare has become a tool for the rich to abdicate their responsibility while expecting obscene tax breaks from the politicians they have bought. I say again, this is not an affordability issue; it’s a corruption and moral responsibility issue.
At the sake of repeating myself, it’s estimated that $1 trillion is lost to tax evasion EVERY YEAR, mainly from the wealthiest in America. If nothing changed other than these people paying the tax that they owe under the law, food insecurity could be eradicated along with homelessness, and there would be enough change to roll back the Medicare cuts in the Big Billionaire Benevolent Act. For those who would like more background on this, who may not have read my previous posts, I urge you to read this piece (I have gifted) in the New York Times by Alan Rappeport, first published in April 2021 and updated in October 2021. The heading reads:
Tax cheats cost the U.S. $1 trillion per year, I.R.S. chief says
What is more interesting is that the opening paragraph of the piece notes:
Charles Rettig, the I.R.S. commissioner, attributed the growing tax gap to the rise of the cryptocurrency and the abuse of pass-through provisions in the tax code by companies.
This was 4 years ago, so consider the implications of crypto today given Trump has expanded his wealth substantially this year as noted by Forbes on September 9th 2025 :
Donald Trump just had the most lucrative year of his life. The president is now worth a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024, when he was still running for office.
Those allegedly evading taxes include Trump and his family, who are noted as suspected serial offenders. That’s before we consider the alleged tax dodgers Trump has surrounded himself with while in office. Even from 2011 to 2013, the tax gap was estimated to be $441 billion, so the surge over a decade to $1 trillion may well prove an underestimate given the rate of growth.
The point is that the rich have learned to play the tax code like a Stradivarius, using loopholes such as pass-through provisions and opaque crypto manipulation. It’s an open secret that people suspect Trump is currently using crypto as a bribe pipeline for foreign actors and billionaires to influence policy and deregulation in a pay-to-play scam.
When will people wake up to the fact that tax cuts for the rich have NEVER delivered growth, and I really mean NEVER. There is zero evidence to support this claim, which is rolled out time and time again as part of their now famous greatest hits album ‘Bollocks’, which receives a remix every time they come into office. This time around, it was ‘Bollocks, the Project 2025 Remix’.
You know that an administration has reached economic desperation when it can’t compete in the global marketplace and is forced to resort to extortion and tariffs—a long-proven, failed trade mechanism for generating trade revenue rather than a targeted tool to protect specific industries. Trump is admitting to the world, by using them, that the US is a busted flush in international trade. Unfortunately for the American people, this has never been about trade for Trump; it’s about extortion and racketeering, ironically, never more so than when extorting his own citizens.
He has long advocated replacing income tax with a flat sales tax, and tariffs have merely served as an extension of this ludicrous ambition. It may seem that I have wandered way off piste at this point, but stick with me as I bring us back to SNAP. The bottom line is that the rich's refusal to pay their fair share is at the heart of what may soon look like a rerun of the Irish potato famine of 1845, if 24 million Americans can’t feed themselves.
In a consumer-driven economy, 49% of consumer spending is currently driven by the top 10% of earners. Meanwhile, many, not even at the lower end of the bottom 90% are being driven into the hands of a new generation of what can only be described as loan sharks masquerading under the new label of ‘buy now pay later’, to buy groceries. These companies are all owned by people in the top 10% for whom Trump has gutted regulations and removed consumer protections.
The middle class may be sitting there thinking they’re safe, but let me assure you that their rising electricity bills are funding AI data centres that are about to force them to downsize their lives as AI replaces their jobs. Anyone thinking about how low they can go —the likes of BlackRock — are buying up trailer parks to extort those who have nowhere to go after their lives fall apart.
Add to that, private equity is moving into the 401(k) space to sell retirees a promise-land vision for their retirement, just as banks sold the dream of homeownership to the poor before they lost everything. The stock market is now totally divorced from reality. Investors are playing Russian roulette, rolling the dice on who will be left holding the baby when the bubble bursts.
In my opinion, Trump is trying to stay ahead of an economic collapse he knows is inbound, and he’s shifting as much wealth from the bottom to the top before the collapse washes away the future of tens of millions of Americans. The removal of SNAP benefits is just a process of normalising the food insecurity for the bad times ahead, and not just for those currently on food stamps. In normal circumstances, this would be regarded as political suicide, but if you have no intention of ever holding free and fair elections, why be concerned?
I can’t square the circle anymore. What does he think is going to happen when millions can’t feed their families and have no healthcare? Food prices are out of control, and by no fault of their own, millions of federal workers are being forced into poverty. History tells us this is the stuff of violent revolution.
Trump is in no rush to reopen the government despite all the crocodile tears from Mike Johnson pretending he cares about those suffering as a result of a failed Republican economic agenda. Trump is happy to play chicken with the lives of millions to win the argument and retain the narrative. The bottom line is that people are going to die at the altar of performative politics, and Trump does not give a damn.
Every time we arrive at the same position, there is no political solution. The only answer remains economic disengagement, and there’s no shortage of campaigns waiting to recruit you for the various social media-driven missions. Terrifyingly, to me, far too many people are being encouraged to put their jobs on the line for organisations seeking glory without thinking it through. Engage in a spending strike by all means, but I urge people in all sincerity not to withdraw their labour, because Christmas without a job will be pretty grim. Be in no doubt, the generals who sent you over the top will have a jolly Christmas and will not be raising money for a solidarity fund, I suspect, as they play charades.
Since when did they ever care about Laws?
Excellent article’