Mother Jones has a must-read piece out today describing how Governor John Kasich has systematically increased food insecurity in minority-heavy districts in Ohio while protecting rural districts with predominantly white constituents. It's well worth your time.
While in Congress in 1996, "moderate""blue-collar""Christian" Kasich was the architect of welfare reform legislation that, in his preferred language, eliminated food aid for a million people per month. Even that was too extreme for the Republican-led 104th US Congress, and Kasich greased the wheels for passage by inserting a provision that would create time-limited exemptions for regions under particular duress. State governors are afforded discretion in the implementation of those exemptions, and Kasich has been particularly clever in depriving communities of color of these exemptions while directing them toward white majority constituencies more likely to vote for Republican candidates.
In 1996, then-Congressman John Kasich cosponsored a welfare reform bill that, for the first time ever, put a time limit on recipients' access to food stamps. Healthy, childless adults would be able to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for no more than three months in any three-year period, unless they were employed or in a training program for at least 20 hours a week. When Congress balked at a rule that would cause an estimated 1 million people to lose food aid each month, Kasich added an exception that would allow states to seek time-limit waivers for areas with especially high unemployment.Ohio was hit particularly hard by the recession, with unemployment peaking at 11% in 2009, and Kasich used statewide waivers to shelter Ohioans from the devastating impacts of his own legislation during the worst years. But those waivers have mysteriously dried up for the very districts that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, while select rural, white-dominant communities that voted for the opposition have been granted a longer reprieve and greater food security.Twenty years later, in his second term as Ohio's governor, the GOP presidential hopeful is taking advantage of these waivers, as most governors have done. But Ohio civil rights groups and economic analysts say Kasich's administration is using the waivers unequally: It applies for waivers in some regions of the state but refuses them in others, in a pattern that has disproportionately protected white communities and hurt minority populations.
Due to a struggling economy and high unemployment, Ohio had qualified for and accepted this statewide waiver from the US Department of Agriculture every year since 2007, including during most of Kasich's first term as governor. But this time, Kasich rejected the waiver for the next two years in most of the state's 88 counties. His administration did accept them for 16 counties in 2014 and for 17 counties in 2015. Most of these were rural counties with small and predominantly white populations. Urban counties and cities, most of which had high minority populations, did not get waivers.The result is white supremacy in action. The selection for the 16 counties receiving food stamp exemptions could not have been more, erm, "arbitrary". Need-based? No. The only distinguishing factor seems to be the demographic composition of those counties.
"I've never seen the math that illustrates how they came up with these 16 to begin with," says McGarvey, one of the authors of the civil complaint. "When we looked at the data, what we saw was that if they were just cutting it off at the 16 highest unemployment counties, purely using a mathematical formula, those would not have been the 16."The racial disparity in food stamp distribution is now so extreme that it strains credibility to put it down to anything but political retribution against non-white communities who have no supported the GOP in recent elections. If you can't beat, starve 'em!"I've never seen the math that illustrates how they came up with these 16 to begin with."
"It was not a mathematical selection," says Patton.
Across the 16 counties the state had selected for waivers, about 94 percent of food stamp recipients were white. Overall in Ohio in December 2013—immediately before the new policy's effects began to surface—food stamp recipients were 65 percent white.The article details how food pantries are now swelling, pandhandling increasing, and dumpster diving rampant, putting the lie to a cosmetic 5% state unemployment rate that the Governor is pinning his Presidential campaign hopes to. This is Kasich's Ohio, now the state with the greatest incidence of food insecurity in the Midwest.
Please read the full article to familiarize yourself with yet another benchmark of cruelty in the GOP's interminable war on minorities and the poor.