Ph.Ds Now Come With Food Stamps

Dear Representative Pelosi,
I received your letter of the 12th in response to my views on the $5 billion cut to food stamps that went into effect on November 1. A typical political fluff letter that goes on for a page and a half and says nothing. It’s filled with platitudes and false promises; in each paragraph a carefully placed phrase that sounds good but is meaningless: “must protect,” “we must ensure,” “we must sustain,” “it must be protected,” “we must recognize,” and, finally, “I am committed to reigniting the American dream and building ladders of opportunity… ” I searched your web site for a statement on food stamps but found nothing; only in your Oct. 23 press conference was it mentioned and that in an attempt to deflect a reporters’ question about the Obamcare website disaster. What I’d like to know is what the hell you folks inside The Bubble do for us out here beyond the beltway. I don’t see impassioned speeches about the immorality of kicking millions of women, children, aged and disabled off the food stamp program. I don’t see any attempt to restore the $5 billion cut that went into effect on November 1 or any proposal to increase the food stamp budget. Yesterday’s NYT, carried a letter to the editor about tenured vs. non-tenured adjunct professors in America’s colleges and universities and how that creates a caste system: tenured professors with security, good salaries and good benefits while non-tenured adjuncts have poor salaries, no benefits and no security. The writer, Keith Hoeller, points to a long-term study showing adjuncts are better teachers than most tenured professors. Of course, the tenured community denounced this study as “flawed.” But the interesting part of his letter was a link to a May 14, 2012 article in The Chronicle For Higher Education: “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps” (http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/) which profiles an adjunct teaching at a small. community college in Arizona. She has a Ph.D. in Medieval History, this was the only job she could find, she has no benefits, no guarantee she’ll be re-hired next semester and her pay does not cover rent, gas, food and utilities. She needs Medicaid and food stamps just to survive. So while you secure, comfortable, coddled legislators sit in your comfortable seats of power and ignore inequality, injustice, and the maldistribution of wealth, while you use talking points to disparage the opposition and focus only on the next election cycle, the real problems of America fester. A pox on both your houses.
cc: Senator Feinstein
    Senator Barbara Boxer
    President Barack Obama