Disability Caucus 7/23/16: Welfare 'Reform' and Food Stamp Sanctions
Life is hell when you're disabled and the possibility of a decent, sustainable job is anything but open to you. It's even worse when you have to spend month after month submitting tons and tons of job searches and 'education' activities that do nothing to actually improve the situation. Worst of all, if you miss anything by even ONE day, you face the strong possibility of being 'sanctioned': That is, you're cut off from food stamps for one month. And that's just the first delinquency. Next is three months, then six.
I was almost sanctioned 3 months for one such mistake despite being very timely on every. Single. Thing. That didn't matter to my case worker. After all, it isn't her job to actually help me despite the fake smile and transparent platitudes and such. No, her job is to get as many people off the rolls as possible by any means necessary, disabilities or other circumstances be damned.
I've been doing this crap for 6 straight months: 39 job searches and 41 activity hours each month, and it's all amounted to absolutely nothing. But I have no choice but to keep doing it and humoring everyone because you know, the real world or some stupid shit.
On another note, I found my medical records dating back to 1989 that I've kept with me since after my court hearing for Social Security failed over 10 years ago. This documents everything from the Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy to my left heel-cord operation to my left leg being 3/4 of an inch shorter...oh, and a case of Lordosis to top it all off (Along with the recent Asperger's diagnosis).
I just know I'm sick and tired of the charade and the stress that goes with it. It's tearing me apart, and it isn't doing my wife or family any favors.
See ya around,
Aspie
Comments
Have you contacted a lawyer yet about your case?
I don't understand how you could have been considered disabled earlier, but now you aren't any longer.
It's not only food stamps that is being attacked. Almost every social program that was set up to help the poor and disabled is being defunded. After waiting for over 2 years to get a housing voucher, I got one. However the amount of money for rent that I qualify for is so low that there aren't any places available. I found 3 places that are in very bad parts of the city I live in. I looked at one place which was an apartment complex and the people were doing drugs out in the open.
When my voucher was almost expired, I called the person who is in charge and told her of my difficulties in finding a place.
She just said that she can't help me with that, but extended the voucher one month. The only way to get another extension is to be hospitalized.
This country or should I say our government is so fucked up with its priorities.
Plenty of money for subsidies for corporations that don't need them but get them anyway even though they don't have to pay taxes in this country while they get to use the infrastructure and have access to the things that the rest of us pay taxes on.
People who have more money than they need get tax cuts while we see our society programs cut because there isn't enough money to fund them.
Then there is the ungodly amount of money spent on our illegal wars that are only fought so that companies can steal other country's resources while the troops provide protection for them.
Our military isn't fighting against terrorism, especially since our government and our allies are creating and funding those so called moderate terrorists. It's fighting to overthrow elected government officials that won't let 'US interests' either take their resources or put in pipelines like in Syria where Russia has had a pipeline there for decades.
I feel your pain and frustration. And your anger.
I feel the same way you do.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
That is some cruel shit, to punish by withdrawing food stamps
So what are you supposed to eat for that month?
I wonder if there is a way to automate the crap you have to do each month so that all or most of it is done by computer and you turn it in as if you had been hard at work?
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There is always...
peanut butter past expiration date and stale GMO corn dogs from the food bank to eat with a plastic spoon. Hallelujelah! But, to tell you the truth, I's rather live next door to a bunch of tattooed crack heads in the "bad" part of town than with a bunch of twice divorced clones in the suburbs...
From the Light House.
It's happening to Social Security too.
My wife turns 65 before the end of the year. She's finding the process to "qualify" for Social Security to be another rat maze. First of all, if you try to do it online, you're not doing it through the Social Security Administration. It's been outsourced to Experian. (So when did they slip that under our noses?) They try to get a complete life history out of you, work and residence addresses, and for the benefit of whom? Not the beneficiary and not even the government. Fucking Experian. How much did they pay politicians for that corporate "entitlement?"
If you don't fit their neat little middle class paradigm, you have to go see the Social Security Administration people in person. Of course, they've reduced the number of their offices so you'll have a long drive and wait. It used to be that you'd get an annual statement of your earnings and what benefits you were entitled to, but that was stopped. Now you have to go through Experian just to get that.
Of course, everything has to be done on just such and such a date. Not too early. Not too late. Fail to fit the definition of "middle class," like not having a land line, and you'll have to spend a few days down with SSA.
Such bullshit. Show up with a birth certificate or passport to show you are the person with that SS # and that should be it.
I know that I felt back in the 80s that we Boomers would never get SS. It hasn't quite gotten to that point--but if Clinton had had his way with privatization rather than Monica it would have--but they are trying to make it such an arduous process that some people will give up or die before they start getting checks.
What in the seven hells
has a credit bureau got to do with social security?! It SHOULD be once you turn 65 all you have to do it sign paperwork saying you'd like to receive benefits. Not that SS is enough for most people to live on in the first place; I don't understand all the unnecessary hoops you have to jump through.
This shit is bananas.