The coming EBT riots: What will happen when government entitlements stop?

Saturday, November 17, 2012
by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) EBT cards are modern-day food stamps, except they’re electronic. In essence, they are government-issued debit cards that allow recipients to spend taxpayer money for their own groceries. But EBT cards aren’t merely good on food staples like beans and rice, they can be spent on processed junk food that promotes diabetes and obesity. That’s the “dirty little secret” of the EBT scheme: It encourages low-income Americans to become high-profit customers of the pharmaceutical industry by eating their way to obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

That’s why the food industry loves EBT cards, too: Most EBT users are low-education consumers who understand virtually nothing about nutrition. They tend to buy the most nutritionally-depleted processed foods available, and that equates to high-profit foods for the processed food industry. (The highest-profit foods are the ones with the least nutrition, it turns out.)

EBT stands for “Electronic Benefit Transfer,” and it means transferring money from the pockets of working taxpayers into the hands of those who, for one reason or another, are either not working at all or are living below the poverty requirements set by the government. This transference is done at gunpoint, essentially, through the enforcement of federal tax collection. EBT benefits have more than doubled during the Obama administration’s last four years, creating tens of millions of new dependents who now vote based almost entirely on who gives them the most handouts.

The purchase of vitamins is specifically prohibited by the EBT program. This is done as a way to keep EBT recipients sick and diseased while suffering from nutritional deficiencies, which is precisely what the federal government wants.

EBT cards are also a form of corporate welfare

EBT cards create high-profit handouts to corporations, too: Pharmaceutical companies and the sick-care industry; Big Government which gets re-elected based on entitlement handouts; global banks which earn a percentage off every swipe; and even the processed junk food industry which preys upon nutritional ignorance of the poor.

In fact, for every dollar’s worth of food handed out to EBT recipients under the program, at least 50 cents is driven right into the profit coffers of wealthy corporations. That’s why EBT programs are allowed to exist: Not because they benefit the poor, but because they benefit the rich! Do you have any idea how much profit there is in a package of Oreo cookies?

The “EBT culture” of dependence, poverty and ignorance is perhaps best shown in the now-famous YouTube music video “My EBT”. There, a rapper brags about how he’s using taxpayer money to buy Oreos, chips, sandwiches, breakfast cereals, McDonald’s food and more. He sings about how he wishes he could use it to buy weed.

This article, however, isn’t about how welfare creates long-term dependence and poverty while destroying the dignity of many who come to depend on it. Rather, it’s about what’s going to happen when the EBT card system goes down and stays down.

EBT food stamp systems goes down for hours across multiple states

Yesterday, the EBT card system, which is managed by JP Morgan Chase, suffered a six-hour outage across ten states.

Wal-Mart, one of the favorite destinations of EBT card users, proceeded to run transactions manually and then batched them into the JP Morgan Chase processing system once the system came back online. But elsewhere, stores were met with growing frustration from EBT card holders who were angry that their government money cards suddenly stopped working.

In this case, the EBT outage only lasted less than one day. But given that they are tied into a globalist bank which looks almost certain to fail once the global debt collapse unfolds, the question of the day is this: What’s going to happen when the bank running all the EBT transactions goes belly up?

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