Reading Mark Bittman’s blog this morning I saw this lead-in to a link I had to follow:

Here’s the thing. A lot of stuff isn’t directly about food, but TB – that’s tuberculosis – is becoming, has become, antibiotic-resistant. And a lot of antibiotic resistance may be because there are so many antibiotics around. And there are so many antibiotics around because most of them are given to animals as growth drugs, or at least prophylactically. So the biotics – germs – have a lot of practice becoming resistant. Therefore when you, that is, you or me personally, need an antibiotic, it may not work. Etc. Here’s a piece by Maryn McKenna (also worth looking at regularly) about how TB is forgotten but not gone.

The headline says it all: Why Cut Subsidies to Multinational Corporations When You Can Cut Food Stamps Instead? Thank you, Justin Rohrlich. More on this in my column next week.

So, of course I had to check it out…

This is the United States of America, yet 44.1 million people — 13.1% of the population — struggle to afford food.

Well, what better time to further entrench automatic subsidy payments to monolithic agribusiness multinationals and cut unnecessary expenditures like the SNAP program, otherwise known as “food stamps.”

Tim Fernholz at the National Journal writes:

The House Agriculture Committee endorsed a letter this week to Budget Chairman Paul Ryan arguing that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps low-income Americans purchase food, would make a better target for cuts than automatic subsidies to farms.

via Why Cut Subsidies To Multinational Corporations When You Can Cut Food Stamps Instead? | The Daily Feed | Minyanville.com.

I was just on the phone with my mother and we were asking each other what it is our Republican leaders think they are doing. It’s got to penetrate at some point that you can’t keep cutting taxes on the rich and cutting services to the rest forever…At some point “the rest” are not going to take it any more. And now that all over the country, law enforcement officers  are being laid off along with the teachers, the street repair workers, and the garbage collectors, who is going to come when you call?