all revolutions start as food riots

in 123 bce. gaius sempronius gracchus, who was tribune of the people that year, introduced a "corn dole"...it was not a free service in any way ( although the objectivist crypto-fascist cato institutue [ an extention of the koch brothers' "it all belongs to me philosophy] has a great deal to say about its corrosive effect on rome's population ) but was rather grain sold ( sold...get it? sold ) at subsidized prices...it was derided at the time as a populist move designed to ingratiate gracchus to he masses and was gradually rolled back in the latter empire ( augustus pretty much made it the bailiwick of the elite...feeding at the public trough...sound familiar? )...i am inclined to think it more served the function of keeping the roman rabble from becoming a starving roman rabble...food riots are ugly things..have a look at revolutions in history...more than a few began with some sort of fod riot/protest..france, russia, the "arab spring'..all connected to food in some way..so the elite sought to diffuse the mob through government supported programs...sensible..rational...and it can be cloaked as altruism for brownie points in government morality...the curent batch of objectivist shits in whoretown have lost sight of this rationality in their above-mention "it's all mine" viewpoint..i hear quite a bit of back channel windage from swamptown about the need to end the "broken" social security and medicare/medicaid systems...these are not free government provided services...i , for one, have paid well over $100,000 into these systems in my working career ( which seems to be in hiatus, at least, for the moment...that is another blog though )...i have ( in a non-threatening and, for me, reasonably polite way ) addressed this issue to my elected representatives in the senate...pointing out that i, and i presume many millions of other wage earners and taxpayers ( and voters...a point i brought out ) would consider the repeal of these programs without returning those monies i have paid into them directly to me a criminal act of extortion on the part of the congress and that blustering yahoo in the white house...there are some points that need to be brought home to the minority that control the government and the legislative levers that would allow them to legalize any criminal act they may entertain...it was never intended as a "government of the people" ( for the umpteenth time give the federalist paper a close reading )...still there ar limits ( or should be ) to what the "rabble" will tolerate from them...roman mobs were inclined to show their displeasure by hurling excrement at the elites in the streets...i will confine myself to saying "fuck these people"...and hope for a david meade-like lake of fire targeted specifically at them.