#foodriot — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

I haven't seen anything about this but there was a literal #foodRiot in Union square the Friday before thanksgiving.

I heard about it the day after and posted

But I have an update on what happened and what I saw myself today

The Asian community has organized and they go up in large groups of 10 to 15 people and swarm the table some showing pictures of #EBT cards. All of them wearing masks and speaking in Chinese at the same time, trying to get the golden tickets.* My friend A. who has been working these markets for 20 years and has seen any number of things happen was very impressive shutting it down

But she said that 20k was cleaned out of her summer market last week in the bronx.

And other people are missing out there was a guy with only one hand who was getting his EBT tokens and she just kept on yelling no more money no more money and the Asian phalanx went away... But she slipped me 40 surreptitiously and I was able to give the guy 20.

You can't blame people that are hungry.. if the system is being taken advantage of it it's such a tiny scale compared to what's happening elsewhere that it's hard to even get upset about that it's just that there is a zero-sum game when it comes to #publicBenefits and is getting even worse as time goes on and anyway a lot of thoughts about this including issues of cultural insensitivity etc but I just wanted to put it out there because I don't know if anyone's talking about it and it feels pretty important

*This is in its way a precursor to #universalBasicIncome and this type of abuse is going to be what slows down it's adoption because people will say #corruption is inevitable (which it isn't: this is such a slapdash ad hoc situation in the first place I have to respect the organization, in the second place I do a version of it myself by going from market to market to market I stand out it's hard to miss me there's no way I could do this but they go around the corner change clothes cover their faces and then try to get the $20 over and over again

#ubi