EBT card food stamp recipients ransack Wal-Mart stores, stealing carts full of food during federal computer glitch

Monday, October 14, 2013 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: EBT cards, Walmart, looting

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(NaturalNews) When the federal EBT food stamp system suffered a critical failure on Saturday, local retailers were disconnected from the federal food stamp database that keeps track of how much credit is left on each individual EBT card. Seizing the opportunity provided by the glitch, EBT card holders in Louisiana ransacked their local Wal-Mart stores, stuffing their shopping carts full of groceries and "paying" for them with near-empty EBT cards that essentially had unlimited account balances because all accounting was offline.

When the EBT database came back online and card purchase limits were suddenly restored, EBT card holders abandoned their full carts and just walked away, probably miffed that they missed out on participating in the felony theft of groceries.

Click here to see video from CBS News.

This happened at Wal-Mart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA. As local news station KSLA reports:

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

The story goes on to report that one woman who racked up $700 worth of groceries had only 49 cents on her card. That's $699.51 in theft.

But that's the mindset of many (but not all) EBT card holders, you see: it's all about how much they can get away with stealing without getting caught. As it is virtually impossible to retrieve all these stolen items from EBT cardholders, these losses are going to have to be absorbed by either Wal-Mart or the federal government. In either case, other people must burden the cost of the theft.

For the record, not everyone on EBT cards is a social parasite. Some are truly hard-working moms and dads and others who really need a short-term safety net, and I'm all for supporting those who need a helping hand to get back on their feet. If someone is working, trying to make ends meet and needs some short-term assistance, we must have the compassion to help them. But far too many people today are simply unwilling to work, and their entire economic plan is to suck off the system and collect as much as they can off everyone else while refusing to contribute to society themselves. That's the mindset of a great many EBT card holders who engage in widespread abuse and fraud. Some even sell their EBT cards to crooked shop owners who pay them cash. That cash is often used to buy crack or other street drugs.

This is now what characterizes the EBT program in America: massive fraud and abuse.

An important lesson in the twisted morality of those who engage in "proxy theft" of food and money

In analyzing this behavior, what I'm about to share with you here is hugely important for anyone who wants to survive the coming social chaos and urban death traps that will unfold when a real crisis hits. Please help me get this story posted at SurvivalBlog.com, DailyPaul.com and other liberty / preparedness sites where it may be of use.

Here's the life-or-death lesson in all this:

Most people who live off the government have no concept of private property. They literally do not believe that stealing large quantities of food from someone else is morally wrong. In fact, they believe that YOUR stored food actually belongs to THEM because they are "entitled" to live off you like parasites. This is the only life they know, and this is how they are born, raised and trained by the Democrats to remain wholly subservient to the government for their entire lives.

As proof of this, read some of the comments posted on this article. You will find, in astonishment, that nearly all the comments are from people who say there is nothing wrong from stealing food from Wal-Mart because it's a "rich" corporation. Instead of condemning the people stealing shopping carts full of food from Wal-Mart, they are condemning me for daring to write about this issue. Apparently, I am bad for opposing the theft of food. In fact, according to some comments, I am engaged in a "hate crime" for even pointing out that stealing food is wrong.

These comments demonstrate exactly my point. We now live in a society that's so pathetic and so twisted in its moral code that the ransacking of a retailer by EBT card holders is considered morally justifiable. Anyone who opposes it is accused of spewing "hate crimes." Don't put much weight into those attacking this story, by the way. Many of them are the very same people who will not survive the coming federal financial default. In their denial of reality, they can only resort to lashing out against those who are trying to save them by alerting them to the truth.

How will the federal government reach a state of default? The reversal of morals and ethics is precisely what drives the acceleration of the welfare state into ever larger handouts for the demanding masses until the whole system reaches a point of unsustainable default. Once individual morality is gone, the morality of the nation quickly falls. And today, we are witnessing a wholesale decline of morals in the minds of individual EBT recipients.

As this small EBT card glitch clearly demonstrates, if given half a chance, many EBT card holders will immediately engage in the mass looting of food and supplies as long as they can get away with it. This was not one or two isolated people; this involved masses of people who spontaneously transformed into a rampaging mob of looting maniacs that ransacked a private business and caused huge losses in stolen goods and displaced inventory.

To clarify, I am not saying that all EBT card holders are one trigger away from slipping into a raging mob of looters. But many of them are. Food stamps are just a "safe" way for them to mug you, indirectly, through the "proxy theft" of government. Every paycheck you earn is already being looted against your will, and a significant portion of that money is going to pay for the "benefits" of many people who flat-out refuse to work or to take any responsibility for their own lives.



Why does any of this matter? Because this is exactly the same way these people will behave when the federal government goes into default and nearly 50 million EBT cards stop working nationwide.

Fifty million. Consider that for a moment. Most of those 50 million people live in high-density cities. Many are proud owners of Obama phones, Obama food stamps, Obama unemployment checks and Obama subsidized housing. They have absolutely no clue that the government upon which they wholly depend to put food on the table is teetering on the verge of permanent collapse. (Seriously, they cannot conceive of the idea of government "running out of money" because they do not understand where money comes from.) Because of this distorted belief, they do not prepare for any future events other than more Obama handouts. Their entire "preparedness" plan is to vote for Democrats, because that's who they know will give them the most handouts. And they will always win the popular vote, too, because any politician promising to restore responsible fiscal spending to the government by cutting programs will be viciously accused of being "mean" or involved in "hating poor people." So the government handouts will only ratchet higher and higher, ensnaring more and more people, until the entire system is unsustainable and collapses under its own weight.

When that system of dependence fails, those who depend on it will panic in mere hours. As proof of this, consider the fact that this mass looting of Wal-Mart stores happened in less than three hours after the Saturday EBT card glitch struck. Police had to be called in to prevent the situation from getting completely out of control, and it was offline for only part of one day.

Now imagine what will happen when EBT cards go offline for 24, 48 or even 72 hours. And imagine it happening in every U.S. city simultaneously.

When that scenario goes down, you are going to have a 50-million-person EBT panic happening nationwide. The panicked masses will quickly become mobs, and the mobs will, within 72 hours or so, become murderous gangs willing to do absolutely anything to get food. After all, YOUR food already belongs to THEM, so they are simply claiming their "share" of your "collective" stash. In their minds, their total lack of preparedness in no way means they have any less of a claim on your food. After all, they already have a claim on your income (via taxes redirected as entitlement programs), so why not your food, too?

Remember: They already justify stealing from Wal-Mart by claiming it is a "rich corporation." By the same logic, they will steal from you by labeling you as a "rich person" because you have stored food thanks to your preparedness efforts.

You probably already realize this, but any household or family in the path of these mobs will be utterly ransacked just like Wal-Mart was on Saturday.

Violence is inevitable

It goes without saying that violence will quickly erupt. Once EBT card holders realize the local police are wildly out-numbered (which they are in every large U.S. city), the guns will come out and hungry mobs will become armed gangs of violent looters going house to house, apartment to apartment, ransacking everything in sight, stealing jewelry, cash, food, guns and anything else they believe to be portable and valuable. (How do I know this? Because I used to volunteer with the police department of a large U.S. city, and I've seen firsthand what happens to society when a local police presence is unavailable...)

Those few families who can protect themselves through the combustion-assisted rapid acceleration of small, high density projectiles directed at intended targets will be in a unique position to survive the onslaught of desperate murderous looters. The outcome of this crisis, in other words, will ultimately be determined by the laws of physics. Those who possess modern-day hardware that best harnesses the laws of physics to stop aggressors will obviously be far more likely to survive than those who do not. And no, I'm not referring to slingshots.

Calling 911 will, of course, be utterly useless, as will being unarmed. To make matters worse, the federal government -- if it still stands at all -- will likely declare Martial Law and order the National Guard to go door to door, disarming responsible preppers and leaving them utterly defenseless against the violent mobs that return each night to continue looting those left defenseless by the government. This is exactly what happened in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

How to survive the permanent crash of the EBT system

There is really only way one to ensure you don't get caught up in all this: Don't be there. Don't be in the path of the mobs nor the path of the National Guard.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to relocate your butt to the countryside prior to the federal failure of the EBT card system. There, your odds of survival are vastly increased, and you are unlikely to encounter any door-to-door gun confiscation patrols as those soldiers will be completely tied up trying to prevent the cities from crashing into total chaos.

In the countryside, you have a real shot at reestablishing trade and barter within your local community. Only through trade and barter can you survive long-term, because specialization of skills leads to efficiencies of production. Barter and trade allow those efficiencies to be mutually and voluntarily multiplied across all those who participate in open commerce. Practically stated, if you grow tomatoes and you're really good at growing tomatoes but you suck at welding, you'll do much better overall by focusing on growing tomatoes and trading them for welding services with the welder (who probably sucks at growing tomatoes). Expert specialization + free trade = abundance. This is a foundation principle of civilization.

But you'll need to specialize in something that has value in desperate times. During a collapse, nobody cares about your 3D animation skills and your long resume working for Disney. Or maybe you were one of those programmers who screwed up Healthcare.gov. None of those skills matter anymore. To survive, you'll need real-world skills like clothing repair, tools repair, medical skills, farming, seed saving, tactical defense, food ingredient processing and more.

No matter what your skills or specialty, you'll also need to be able to defend your production from those former EBT card holders who still can't understand why they have to produce anything on their own. Many of these people will, of course, die in the weeks or months following the failure of the EBT system, but those who don't will always be hard-wired to steal from you because that's the only paradigm of existence they truly grasp. They probably won't last long in an honest economy, of course. In the real world, they will either need to change or die.

Ultimately, this is what America needs to get back to: an economy where people are rewarded for contributing to society, not feeding off others like social parasites. Imagine a world where people actually earn what they receive and pay their debts on time. It's an alien concept to today's government, and that's exactly why it is now on the verge of financial collapse.

Sooner or later, people who actually produce something and contribute to society can no longer be guilt-tripped into carrying the burden of all those who refuse to produce but who vote politicians into office who confiscate wealth for them. This "proxy theft" system of government entitlements we are witnessing today will soon crash, and when it does, natural selection will quickly sort out those best adapted to survive.

EBT cards will go down in history as a grotesque symbol of a failed welfare society built on a financial house of cards.