{"id":283434,"date":"2025-11-10T15:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T15:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/283434\/"},"modified":"2025-11-10T15:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T15:19:07","slug":"the-government-shutdown-has-escalated-the-us-war-on-the-poor-poverty-and-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/283434\/","title":{"rendered":"The government shutdown has escalated the US war on the poor | Poverty and Development"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the United States marks its 41st day of a\u00a0federal government shutdown<\/a> that has seen federal employees unpaid, air travel disrupted and millions of poor Americans losing food assistance.<\/p>\n

To be sure, this is\u00a0not the first time<\/a>\u00a0that the government of the reigning global superpower has deliberately ceased to function \u2013 although the current shutdown recently bagged the dubious distinction of being the longest in modern US history.<\/p>\n

And this time around, the political spectacle is beyond dystopian.<\/p>\n

In short, the suspension of government transpired as a result of a budgetary disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over draconian healthcare cuts favoured by President Donald Trump. This is the same Trump, of course, who fancied the US wealthy enough to propose a defence budget for fiscal year 2026 of more than $1 trillion.<\/p>\n

Following the shutdown, the Trump administration decided that poor and hungry Americans should pay the price, and on November 1, the nation\u2019s crucial Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) came to a halt for the first time since the programme\u2019s creation in 1964.<\/p>\n

Nearly 42 million Americans \u2013 or one in eight people \u2013 rely on SNAP to eat. According to the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US Department of Agriculture, children accounted for 39 percent of the programme\u2019s participants in the fiscal year 2023.<\/p>\n

When I visited the ERS\u00a0website<\/a> on Sunday, I encountered the following very professional alert at the top of the screen: \u201cDue to the Radical Left Democrat shutdown, this government website will not be updated during the funding lapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

The message continued in slightly smaller print: \u201cPresident Trump has made it clear he wants to keep the government open and support those who feed, fuel and clothe the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n

It could be funny, if only it weren\u2019t so macabre.<\/p>\n

Last week, the administration was forced to reverse its starvation campaign after a ruling by two federal judges that the freeze in SNAP benefits was unlawful. The resumption of food aid was, however, only partial \u2013 and came accompanied by an appeal to the Supreme Court to intervene in favour of mass hunger.<\/p>\n

These days, the top US judicial body rarely encounters<\/a> a sociopathic initiative that it doesn\u2019t endorse. And in this case too, it did not disappoint.<\/p>\n

On Friday, The Associated Press news agency reported that the Supreme Court had \u201cgranted the Trump administration\u2019s emergency appeal to temporarily block a court order to fully fund SNAP food aid payments amid the government shutdown, even though residents in some states already have received the funds\u201d.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is harder to think of a more pressing \u201cemergency\u201d than having to use the vast resources at one\u2019s disposal to ensure that one\u2019s own citizens do not starve.<\/p>\n

Given the Israeli military\u2019s contemporary\u00a0use of enforced starvation<\/a>\u00a0as a key component in its\u00a0US-backed genocide<\/a> of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, it may seem like a crass exaggeration to invoke such terminology in a domestic American context. But intentionally depriving people of the sustenance required for survival amounts to starvation plain and simple \u2013 whether it\u2019s as a weapon for genocide or simply as the latest iteration of the ongoing US war on the poor.<\/p>\n

On October 31, the day before the SNAP freeze, CNN ran an\u00a0article<\/a> headlined, \u201c\u2018I feel guilty eating a meal\u2019: Low-income families prepare to lose access to billions in federal aid,\u201d which quoted an Ohio mother who spoke of preemptively going without food on her children\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

Describing her family\u2019s suffering on account of the federal shutdown, the mother opined: \u201cIt\u2019s no longer a Democrat thing. It\u2019s no longer a Republican thing. It\u2019s our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the Democrats may come out looking like the more polite party against the present backdrop of Trump\u2019s unrepentant derangement, it\u2019s helpful to recall that the war on the poor has long been a bipartisan one. In the 1990s, for example, Democratic President Bill Clinton oversaw \u201creforms\u201d to the US welfare system that ultimately caused the number of Americans living in extreme poverty to skyrocket.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, both parties are firmly committed to upholding the\u00a0plutocracy<\/a> on which the US itself is founded \u2013 since you can\u2019t sustain the tyranny of an elite minority if everyone is created equal with equal rights, including the\u00a0right to adequate food.<\/p>\n

Rich Americans like to howl about the existential perils of taxing their wealth. But for the tens of millions of people now set to be deprived of necessary nourishment, the existential peril is real.<\/p>\n

Last night, eight Senate Democrats voted with Republicans as a first step to temporarily end the shutdown and resuscitate the government until January. Another vote in the House of Representatives is needed and then Trump\u2019s signature, which could take days. If passed, the bill would extend SNAP through September but fundamentally resolve zero issues. The hungry remain in limbo, and healthcare remains up in the air.<\/p>\n

Over recent weeks, some observers cast<\/a>\u00a0the possibility of mass\u00a0 starvation as \u201ccollateral damage\u201d of partisan bickering. And though the war terminology is no doubt apt, the poorest sectors of US society are far from just provisional \u201ccollateral\u201d casualties of the federal government shutdown.<\/p>\n

They are the intended targets of a capitalist system engineered to keep them down.<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera\u2019s editorial policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, the United States marks its 41st day of a\u00a0federal government shutdown that has seen federal employees unpaid,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283435,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,1201,47699,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-283434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-opinions","11":"tag-poverty-and-development","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-us-canada","18":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}