"A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained...It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity."
-Jimmy Carter, 1976
CBP and Epstein Jenn Budd
How the Epstein Network is Privatizing the Government & Building Out the Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb) The Chris Hedges Report
Books and Bread: Free Grocery Stores in Libraries Tackle Food Insecurity
The New York Times, gift article: “Customers are able to choose their own groceries, often in private, instead of visiting a food pantry for whatever is available on a given day…
Unlike at some food pantries, customers shopping at free grocery stores are able to choose their own foods, often in private, instead of standing in line for whatever is available on a given day. Many families are facing difficult trade-offs between food and other necessities or being forced to change their buying habits to stay within budget. Overall, the price of food has increased about 3.1 percent between May 2025 and May 2026. In Prince George’s, free grocery stores are another way to help those people still reeling from the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees last year.
In Maryland alone, more than more than 29,000 federal workers lost their jobs between January 2025 and April 2026. In addition, more than 39,000 people in the state have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — the government’s main tool to address hunger — because of stricter eligibility requirements adopted by the Trump administration.
“You have so many people who have worked their entire lives in the federal government, and then all of a sudden, the rug is pulled from under them,” said Shayla Adams-Stafford, a Prince George’s County Council member who helped bring the store to the community. “The impact of what happened on the federal level is very real in this region.” Shay Leach, a mother of five in Hyattsville, Md., lost her job as a federal contractor last year. She eventually moved in with a relative to cut costs. Ms. Leach, 34, visited the Fairmount store for the first time in June, stocking up on milk, eggs, lunch meat, cereal, granola bars and pasta.
“I finally found a new job — I am not on the streets, but I still have debt over my head,” she said. “I have had a really hard time. This food is a big help.” The concept of free grocery stores — often operated as partnerships between local governments, nonprofits and hunger relief companies — is not new, but more have opened as the cost of basic living has skyrocketed since the pandemic. They exist in high schools, churches, senior centers and at least one hospital.
Earlier this year, Savannah State University in Georgia teamed up with Goodr and Amazon to open a free minimart on campus. And in July, a former traditional food pantry in Newark, N.J., reopened as a free, choice-based market. In Maryland, the Fairmount and Spauldings locations are among the few that have opened in neighborhood libraries and are part of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System…”
