I think I know why food prices have gone up so much lately. At least this is part of the reason.

not new news but now news

How JP Morgan Makes Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars On Food Assistance Programs


Simon outlines how three different powerful industries profit from SNAP: food manufacturers like Coca-Cola and Kraft; food retailers like Walmart; and big banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase, which work with states to administer benefits.

While SNAP is a federal program, USDA and the states work together to administer the program. States contract with banks, who authorize payments (Electronic Bank Transfers or EBTs) from the Federal Reserve to retailers. J.P. Morgan Chase has contracts in half the states “indicating a lack of competition and significant market power,” according to Simon. How much are these deals worth? In New York, one seven-year deal originally gave the bank $112 million for its services, but was recently amended to add another $14.3 million.

How did J.P. Morgan Chase end up with such sweet deals in so many states? Lobbying, of course. The company lobbied USDA in 2011 specifically on EBTs and in 2008, the last time the Farm Bill was renewed, it lobbied both the House and Senate on five different provisions of the farm bill.

Who else administers EBTs? Northrop Grumman, better known as a defense contractor, oddly has multimillion dollar contracts with Montana and Illinois. Affiliated Computer Services (a Xerox subsidiary) runs 13 state systems and Fidelity National Information Services has another 11.

Thanks to weak transparency rules, we’re not able to determine just how much corporations benefit from these contracts, but large amounts are at stake and it appears that much of this money is going to enrich the administrators at the expense of SNAP’s beneficiaries. Simon estimated that in Florida J.P. Morgan Chase made $123 million from fees over five years — a 50 percent increase over the original contract. In New York, the state paid over $100 million in fees to the bank over five years.

[link to www.republicreport.org]

I saw two steaks wrapped in bacon, neither was the size of your palm for $35.

the big picture is more corrupt than we already imagined. it just gets dirtier and dirtier

thanks for your input. lots of things to think about

which grocer?

Food Stamp Corporate Welfare

If you think the SNAP food stamps debate is about poor people’s need to eat, you’re wrong. It’s about big corporations’ need to profit. “Xerox, JPMorgan Chase and eFunds Corporation have all successfully turned poverty into a profit center.” So have Coca Cola, Kroger, Wal-Mart, Kelloggs and a large slice of the rest of the Fortune 500 corporations.


“Discussions about government spending are inherently bogus because the elephant in the room, big business, is absent.”

The federal and state governments operate under a system which is of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Ordinary governmental functions which could easily be carried out with public money are instead privatized, depriving the public sector of revenue and jobs and making the neediest citizens unnecessarily dependent on the private sector. Governmental largesse on behalf of big business is focused primarily on poor people, the group most at the mercy of the system. Corporations collect child support payments and then imprison the poor people who can’t pay. While imprisoned, another corporation provides what passes for medical care. The crime is a perfect one.

When the Republicans demanded cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, the debate revolved around human need versus the call for fiscal austerity. Scarcely anyone mentioned that JPMorgan Chase, Xerox and eFunds Corporation make millions of dollars off of this system meant to help the poor.

It all came to light on October 12th, when many SNAP recipients in the states of Alabama, California, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia were unable to make purchases with their Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards because of a computer system malfunction at Xerox.

It may at first have seemed odd for a Fortune 500 corporation to have anything to do with the SNAP program, but Xerox, JPMorgan Chase and eFunds Corporation have all successfully turned poverty into a profit center. Food stamps were once literally stamps until the 1996 welfare reform act required all state SNAP benefits to be digitized. At that point JPMorgan, Xerox and eFunds were quite literally in the money. Only the state of Montana administers its own SNAP program. Every other state pays one of these three corporations millions of dollars in fees to do what they could do themselves. Since 2007, Florida has paid JP Morgan $90 million, Pennsylvania’s seven-year contract totaled $112 million and New York’s seven-year contract totaled $126 million.

[link to www.commondreams.org]

i have always said that all the food stamps are partly responsible for high food prices.

last time, i said it ... i got a lot of red karma

If you think about the pressures on the dollar right now they are insane. I think the BRICS agreement is the nail in the coffin for the dollar. The leverage could be higher than 65 to 1. They are creating to much inflation trying to keep the Titanic (market) afloat. The only way out is to scuttle the market and compromise our attention and health to some "bug". If you give it some thought this whole bola thing came out of a masterminds' trick bag. It just to clean and perfect.

Perfect

The biggest winners of the SNAP economy are the ones the government won’t tell you about.

It’s a paradox that the more people are struggling to get by, the more valuable food stamps become for business.


[link to www.slate.com]

Last year $76 billion flowed from the U.S. Treasury to people’s food stamp cards. That money then flowed into the revenue streams of about 240,000 stores across the country, all of which have been approved by the federal government to accept food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. You can look at SNAP as a government subsidy with two lives. First, low-income people enrolled in the program get financial help to buy food. Then, when they swipe their EBT cards at the checkout counters, the government pays those stores for that food—which is, of course, being sold at a profit.

So it seems worthwhile to pay attention to how this “second life” of a food stamp subsidy works. There’s just one problem: A lot of the information about how stores benefit from food stamps is confidential.

Even basic facts such as how many food stamp dollars go to a particular store in a particular location are not publicly available. For their part, stores don’t like to volunteer the information. “We don’t provide our market-share data on any categories like that—it’s generally proprietary in nature,” explains David Tovar, vice president of communications for Walmart, which caters to low-income customers and takes in a giant share of food stamp dollars. “I think any information that a retailer shares about how they’re serving customers and how they’re going to market would be interesting to lots of other retailers.”

But say you’re not a retailer—you’re just someone who wants to know where $76 billion of your tax dollars are going. For you it might be useful to know which companies profit the most off this federally funded program that Congress created to fight hunger. You might wonder: In what stores and neighborhoods are the most food stamp dollars spent? What kinds of foods do those stores promote and sell? What are the store’s business and labor practices? The answers to those questions might help you see how food stamp subsidies are serving a community—if they’re doing what they were meant to do.



It was these sorts of questions that Jonathan Ellis, a journalist at the Argus Leader in South Dakota, was pursuing when he stumbled into a legal battle with the federal government that is still unresolved. Ellis had requested information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture about exactly how much it reimburses each store for sales from EBT cards.

“Typically, if a business participates in a government program, you can get a copy of their contract and find out how much they’re being paid,” Ellis says. That’s how it works when the government pays a construction company to build a bridge, or a defense contractor to build a fighter plane. But when Ellis filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how much the government pays stores in the food stamp program, he was denied.

In refusing Ellis’ request, the USDA cited a provision dating back to the 1970s forbidding the government from sharing “relevant income and sales tax filing documents” that a store might submit in the course of applying to be part of the food stamp program. For many years officials at the USDA have interpreted that to mean no information can be released on how much an individual store or company makes in food stamp revenue. Ellis and his newspaper think that is a misinterpretation of the federal statute; recently a federal appeals judge agreed, and sent the issue back to a lower court for review.

It's the same reason medical bills are so expensive. They can charge such high prices because the insurance companies will pay it.

College tuition same thing. Tuition is increasing at an exponential rate, thanks in large part to the government student loan program.

red karma, really?

well, i've posted the proof here in this thread

so you were right, i am right and the system is fucking us seven ways from sunday

Walmart continues to refuse to disclose what percentage of their customers are SNAP recipients


[link to www.occupydemocrats.com]

bump

when a retailer have to put on the shelves products that do not sell enough to maintain a low price...they overprice it


fresh products logistic is expensive and if I as retailer I have to buy meat that monstly wont sell untill I sell it underpriced I would do better to not sell it at all.

but I have too

so the price are higher cause I have to pay the cost of logistic and also the products I have to trown in th the garbage

Ok we get it. Did you know jp morgan backs the food stamps? Because we all do. Its old news. Did you know if demand is high because like, I dont know, people are allowed to get it for free, then the store can charge higher prices? This is not surprising or any level of rocket science.

yes everyone knows about the jp morgan contract. that is not the topic of this thread

the topic of this thread is that food stamps are being doled out because of big corporate grocers profit increase and yes, then they price gouge. the topic is that the price gouging is at an all time high. the topic is that specific groups are given excessive amts of food stamps because they aren't fussy shoppers. the amount of SNAP recipients to specific groups within the population in certain areas of the country is designed to increase big corporate profits and the rest of the population is being killed off financially because of it.

its worthy of discussion

thanks for adding smug to the thread

buy stuff on special? buy a freezer and load up

i just paid over $7/lb for 80% lean ground beef

am i the only one that's freaking over that or what?

It was my understanding that beef was up due to thin herds after last year's drought. But we had a lot of corn this year so they should go down. Pork is up due to some porcine disease I think.

I think it is up so at Walmart because Walmart is hand in hand with Michelle Obama's obesity campaign and they are all up Humana's Vitality program with Obamacare. I think they are getting kickbacks to try to reduce America's red meat consumption, thinking that will help insurance profits be higher and help more poor teens make military weight standards.

captives, of a concrete plantation

and will continue, for 5 or 6 months

explain

Milk, butter and beef are all high because of the freeze and the mad cow. Pay attention if you are going to be a conspiracy theorist at least do it with research. Beef will come down when the herds rebuild. First they didn't have food for the cows so they were slaughtering them and beef was low and then the storm killed them off. Looks like the Mormons are on the right track owning half of Florida for cattle farms for their people. Funny how they planned that one. Now that's a theory. Overpricing food because people get food stamps. Come on man those people buy chicken.

i know this

if this is the only reason then explain why walmart, which bases all of their pricing to attract the bargain hunting poor, makes their meat, dairy and produce prices higher than even the more expensive grocery chains?

OK I'll bite.

Stores that sell imported items made in the far east for prices that seem cheap are actually making a tidy profit on SLAVE LABOR.

Fresh food for the most part is produced locally.

When a competitor of Walmart in a local market sells similar fresh food for 'bargain prices' it's most likely because they are catering to loyal customers who can see value and it keeps them from shopping Walmart or any other store.

It cracks me up to see those old timers who wait in long lines at the food store to save a nickel, instead of enjoying there golden years.

What would you do if all the shops closed?

It is unfortunate that poor peoples who lack mobility have little choice to shop bargains in neighboring areas.

Expect prices to continue rising because profits are the mothers milk of the economy.

Also expect TPTB to continue eating $500 steaks and fund raising $10,000 a plate dinners to finance there debauchery.

The hook here, the news peg, is that Walmart released its annual report and in it, there’s a paragraph that states:

"Our business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our control … These factors include … changes in the amount of payments made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public assistance plans, …"

The implication is that Walmart preys on the poor, that the retailer has somehow created poor people by paying low wages. That it relies on government assistance in a way that goes beyond accepting payment from shoppers via government programs. According to Business Insider:

Walmart, for the first time in its annual reports, acknowledges that taxpayer-funded social assistance programs are a significant factor in its revenue and profits. This makes sense, considering that Walmart caters to low-income consumers. But what’s news here is that the company now considers the level of social entitlements given to low-income working and unemployed Americans important enough to underscore it in its cautionary statement.

Not quite.

It’s not the first time Walmart noted that a reduction in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would hurt business. It may have been the first time it was mentioned in an annual report, but that’s because the reduction took effect during the fiscal year in question.

In November, benefits for a family of four were reduced by $36 a month. Benefits had been increased as part of the Recovery Act in 2009, but Congress allowed the increase to expire on Nov. 1, 2013.

An estimated 48 million Americans benefit from SNAP while roughly 80% of U.S. consumers shop at Walmart at some point during the year.

[link to www.forbes.com]

I was at my local Walmart yesterday and OMG, the price of beef is soooooo expensive. Milk too is expensive. Every time I go to the store the prices just seem to creep up.
I usually go to Save A Lot for milk and eggs, much cheaper. I just don't but meat there.

Time to switch to pork, turkey and chicken.

Eventually the prices will have to come back down, inflation or not, when people stop buying red meat.

pork and chicken were just as overpriced in the store i visited yesterday. pork was ridiculously expensive.

all of the meat, dairy, produce.... way way way overpriced

im not talking about inflation, im talking deliberate price gouging

but, nobody wants to have this discussion
i guess its too difficult to comprehend that the government is issuing food stamps then hiking prices so they can profit leaving the rest of us in the lurch barely able to sustain our families