Glitch Or Threat?

Sometimes, it can be hard to tell:

Shoppers around the country could not use their EBT food stamp cards because of a computer problem Saturday.

KGAN-TV reported that North Carolina was one of several states impacted and others included Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Maine, Pennsylvania and New York.

Xerox spokeswoman Karen Arena confirmed via email Saturday that some Electronic Benefits Transfer systems are experiencing temporary connectivity issues, according to the Associated Press....

The outage is not related to the government shutdown, said U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe.

...and sometimes, it seems all too clear:

States across the country are being told to stop the supplemental nutrition assistance program for the month of November, pending further notice.

That’s according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Fox 13 obtained a copy from the Crossroads Urban Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Crossroads says if Utah families don’t get food stamps, they’ll turn to the local food pantries, which are already strapped due to the government shutdown. Homeless people Fox 13 talked to, some who use SNAP, say losing food stamps would mean going hungry.

“This is going to create a huge hardship for the people we serve here in our food pantry,” says Bill Tibbits who is the Associate Director at Crossroads Urban Center.... “What this means if there’s not a deal, if Congress doesn’t reach a deal to get federal government back up and running, in Utah about 100,000 families won’t get food stamp benefit,” says Tibbits.

In other words, tens of thousands of Utah families may not be able to feed their children come November.

People out on the streets like Richard Phillips says, “It could impact us and it’s going to cause problems because you’re going to come to find out that people are going to steal and do what they have to do to survive.”

Let's leave aside the unwisdom of becoming dependent on a single benefactor -- any benefactor -- for your necessities. Let's even leave aside the folly of entrusting the provision of those necessities to a government. Those are not arguable points; anyway, the Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch are already aware of them. What does it say to those of us who value public peace that many millions of persons already addicted to this government program are about to have the benefit cut off? And what does it say about the motives of the Obama Administration that it openly contemplates doing that?

"People are going to steal and do what they have to do to survive." Indeed they will, even if their interpretation of the word "survive" strikes the rest of us as overstrained. They've been told that the assistance of the SNAP / EBT program is theirs "by right." Many of them have internalized the notion. Combine the sense of being deprived of a "right" with "survival pressures" Americans haven't faced for many decades, and what do you see coming?

Don't all rush at once, now.

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Last Saturday's EBT-card outage provoked massively unruly, lawless behavior in several locales. Several stores reported a degree of disorder that effectively closed them for normal operations. Even that brief cessation of the benefit proved to be something to be feared.

What if it wasn't the "temporary connectivity issue" Xerox claimed it to be? What if it was a planned event -- a demonstration of the chaos the Administration could inflict upon the nation should it choose to do so?

Conservatives have contended for some time that the Obamunist agenda is essentially the Cloward-Piven strategy for crashing our market-based economy. Though no one can be confident that he knows the exact number of dependents that would precipitate a wholesale convulsion in the sociopolitical order, it seems clear that the percentage must be less than 50%. There simply aren't enough earners far enough above subsistence for each of them to carry someone else on his back.

There's no question that the Administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have greatly increased the number of Americans receiving some sort of benefit from the federal government. As of the last measures, approximately 47 million persons were receiving SNAP benefits. One in five Americans is officially "poor," and most of those are entitled to WIC benefits. That's quite an army of the disaffected. It's hard to imagine that the economy as it stands could support any further increase without buckling under the load.

But if the events cited above can legitimately be read as political moves intended to frighten House Republicans into surrendering to the Administration, we're not looking at a purely economic phenomenon. We're looking at political extortion.

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Author and commentator Matt Bracken articulated the most enraging and frightening possibilities at Western Rifle Shooters just yesterday:

It looks like Obama plans to crash the economy and instigate massive food riots in November. This will be blamed, naturally, on the Evil White Racist Tea Party Republicans. American Pravda, (ABCNNBCBS, the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT) will dutifully serve as Obama’s microphone for this scapegoating....

Last Saturday’s hours-long EBT “glitch” led to mass panic and near riots in 17 states. Was that just a “warning” from the regime to the GOP to extend his infinite debt ceiling pronto, “or else?” If the EBT system is shut down for even three days, every supermarket will be looted, and riots will sweep our cities that will make 1968 look like a picnic. This is not an accident, this is deliberate.

We’ve seen this kind of deliberate provocation before: Reichstag Fire, anyone? I’m beginning to feel like it’s Berlin, 1933, and my name is Goldstein. And the new “Berlin Zeitung” will be the NYT and the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, malice in such matters is a difficult thing to prove. Even if the Obamunists were to state openly that they were terminating EBT benefits to force an end to the current partial government shutdown and compel the House of Representatives to accede to an unconditional budgetary resolution and rise in the debt limit, millions of Americans would refuse to hold it against them. The song would be "They're doing it for the good of the country." It would be near to impossible to convince the singers otherwise.

Worse, the magnitude of the convulsions likely to sweep the country would preclude the appropriate response from patriotic Americans. Except for the most fortunate of us, we'd be too busy guarding our own neighborhoods and pantries to march on Washington and remove the Administration by force. Survival does trump political correction.

There's no way to know how this will turn out, and every reason to fear that it will turn out badly. Be prepared.