Tag: Agriculture Reform. Food and Jobs Act of 2012 (S. 3240)

"The system just quit working (at about noon)," said Sunny Patel, manager at Tomboy Market in the Cass Corridor. "I called and they said the system is down everywhere. They said they're working to fix it, although they didn't give us a time. This happens a few times a year, but they usually fix it quicker. It's taking a long time today.

"The majority of our customers use (the system), so there's nobody here," Patel said.

Metro Foodland on Grand River near Southfield in northwest Detroit is also empty, store manager Charlonda Love said.

"In our neighborhood the majority of our customers use the Bridge Card, so we've been pretty much empty," she said.

REST

Indeed, JP Morgan's Christopher Paton told Bloomberg News that food stamps are big business for the big bank:

"We are the largest processor of food stamps in the country...[the EBT program] is a very important business to JP Morgan. It's an important business in terms of its size and scale.... Right now volumes have gone through the roof in the past couple of years or so. The good news from JP Morgan's perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume."

While some may be glad that a private company-not a government agency-is tasked with EBT transactions, the GAI report reveals that JP Morgan does not use the same fraud detection systems commonly used by today's credit card companies.  In fact, federal and state agencies--not EBT processors--are the ones tasked with policing food stamp fraud.

Nice gig, eh?  JP Morgan lobbies Ag Committee Chair Sen. Debbie Stabenow, for their graft then those of us that are taxpayers also get to pay for the policing of JP Morgan's transaction processing.  Think not?  

So how did EBT processors like JP Morgan land its lucrative half-billion dollars worth of contracts?

The GAI report, Profits From Poverty: How Food Stamps Make Corporations Money, says JP Morgan's political donations to members of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees (who oversee the food stamp program) skyrocketed once the bank entered the EBT market:

Between 1998 and 2002, JPMorgan's total contributions per election cycle averaged $82, 897. After JP Morgan entered the EBT services market until the 2010 election cycle, their average donation per cycle more than doubled to $215,120.... JPMorgan's donations to political campaigns also show a clear trend. During the 2008 election, Barack Obama received more than twice the contributions of John McCain: $807,000 for Obama compared to McCain's $345,505.

Today, one out of every seven people in America receive taxpayer-funded food stamps.

When it comes to funding campaigns, JP Morgan is Debbie Stabenow's third best friend.  Remember folks, the $500 billion Farm Bill that Sen. Stabenow, is now all of a sudden campaigning on while Arab Spring rages against America, is 80% EBT/SNAP money.  JP Morgan has paid Debbie handsomely for their share of that $400 million in food stamp monies her committee sent to the Senate floor.