No One Should Go Hungry

Moral Clarity in an Era of Nuance

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

Taking time to read the bourgeois press can be enlightening, it is enlightening because they genuinely try to frame horrible actions in the most sanitized way possible.

There has been an ongoing battle between the Trump administration, the government shutdown, and funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Due to the government shutdown, SNAP’s funding on a federal level is in limbo.

Trump says he wants to fund half of the program this month. This is absurd on so many levels, considering the nearly 40 million people who depend on SNAP, many of whom include children. It doesn’t help that the US Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to withhold full aid for the program.

It’s obviously fucked up to use hunger as a political pawn to dangle over the most vulnerable citizens in the supposed richest country in the world. However, I want to remind people that famine is a specialty of the USA.

Do not forget the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza, which has led to a manufactured famine in the area. Also, do not forget about the many who starve and die due to US economic sanctions in countries like Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Haiti, Cuba, etc.

The imperial boomrang, for those unfamiliar, refers to how imperialist methods abroad are eventually brought back home.

More specifically, the ‘imperial boomerang effect’ is a term for the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression, methods which can then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and deployed against the marginalised, subjugated and subaltern within. With weak moral and legal restrictions, empires are gifted a free hand to test new technologies and social hierarchies on colonised populations. Once honed, the circulation of personnel and knowledge through the empire spreads these repressive methods across colonies – and back into the domestic heartland.

The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis by Connor Woodman

What is happening to people in the US now is what the US has subjugated those it deems inferior abroad.

The cruelty of empire always returns home, It has to. The logic of domination cannot stay contained overseas as it metastasizes. Once you normalize starving entire nations through sanctions, it becomes easier to let your own citizens go hungry when a budget dispute stalls in Congress. Once you learn to frame collective punishment as “national security,” it becomes second nature to frame cutting SNAP as a “political dispute.”

The imperial boomerang doesn’t just describe policy it describes psychology. It’s how a population becomes groomed to accept suffering as order. When Americans read that children in Yemen or Gaza die of malnutrition, the headline says “shortages,” as if food evaporated in the desert sun rather than being blockaded by Western power. When they read that children in Mississippi or Detroit are food-insecure, the headline says “budget negotiations,” as if this were a natural event. In both cases, the same moral anesthesia applies: suffering is bureaucratized, cruelty made procedural.

Empire teaches its citizens to starve politely. To nod when pundits say there’s “no money” for food assistance, but billions for bombs. To accept that feeding people must be debated while funding genocide is automatic. The boomerang is moral before it is material. It bends the conscience.

This is why the SNAP crisis is not an isolated scandal but a mirror. The U.S. state is treating its poor the way it treats the Global South… As populations to be managed, not cared for; disciplined, not nourished. The same austerity logic that squeezes working families at home fuels the IMF’s debt programs abroad. The same bureaucratic cruelty that locks up baby food behind glass in Walmart locks entire regions behind sanctions.

The empire always needs hunger as hunger disciplines. It keeps labor cheap, populations quiet, and people too busy surviving to revolt. That is why both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, speak of the “working poor” as if poverty were a demographic, not a design. They call it a “safety net,” but it’s really a leash. The SNAP program isn’t generosity, it’s damage control for a system that refuses to let people live with dignity. Capitalism depends on peoples complacency and does not give them real freedom.

When the capitalist leash tightens, the press rushes in to explain it as an unfortunate side effect of partisanship, never as what it truly is: class war. The bourgeois press sanitizes structural violence into human-interest stories, translating cruelty into civility so that empire can continue feeding itself.

The basic indictment of this book – that U.S. policy serves mostly the favored few rather than the common people in this country and abroad – is given no recognition in mainstream political discussion and media commentary. From Argentina to Zaire, from East Timor to the Western Sahara, U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionary campaigns of attrition have taken millions of lives, with tens of millions wounded, maimed, emotionally shattered, displaced, or exiled. Yet one hears hardly a word about it in what passes for political discourse in this country. We are told that this nation is under an obligation to demonstrate its resolve, that it must constantly display its strenght, flex its muscles, and act like a great superpower so as not to be pushed around by some small upstart nation (an argument used to justify the pulverization of Vietnam and the massacre in Iraq). Any failure to apply our power, we hear, undermines our credibility and invites aggression. One might wonder why U.S. leaders feel such a need to convince everyone else that the United States is the strongest military power in the world – when everyone else is already painfully aware of that fact.

Against Imperialism by Michael Parenti

The imperial boomerang is not a metaphor, it’s a warning. Every sanction, every blockade, every act of economic strangulation abroad lays the groundwork for domestic austerity at home. Every “defense budget” is a prelude to a food desert.

So when we see the shelves empty and the benefits vanish, we are not witnessing a system error. We are witnessing its perfection. The hunger exported to Gaza, to Haiti, to Venezuela, has come home. The empire has run out of elsewhere to starve.

The purpose is to call out the empire for what it does: starve. We need the moral clarity and a sober analysis to call out the weapon of hunger against the people. It does not matter what people, as no people, should go hungry under the boot of empire.