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Welfare as They Know It
Fifteen years ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton perched at a podium in the White House Rose Garden and signed the bill that would become known as welfare reform. Flanked by three former welfare recipients and looking glazed and smooth as a donut, he swept aside six decades of social welfare policy with a single triangulating stroke of his pen, reversing a course that had been set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal. In the process, he handed the law’s right-wing backers their first emboldening victory in a far bigger, dirtier, and still raging campaign to unravel the government safety net.
“Today we are ending welfare as we know it,” Clinton declared, the words “A New Beginning” emblazoned on the podium beneath him in case anyone missed the point. From that moment on, needy families would face a strict five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance. They would have to comply with stringent work requirements. Handouts would be replaced by a hand up, self-destruction would yield to self-sufficiency, and dependency would give way to the starchy respectability of personal responsibility.
Or, as Clinton promised, “Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.”
Exactly fifteen years later, a handful of welfare recipients gathered in Harlem, just a few blocks from Clinton’s post-presidency redoubt, to describe exactly what Bubba’s “second chance” has meant for them. They had been brought together by Community Voices Heard, a grassroots group of low-income people forged out of the fires of welfare reform, and their stories crisscrossed the spectrum of welfare experiences. They were several women and one man, they were white, black, and Latina, they were young and they were older – and their verdict was as swift and final as a guillotine.
“It’s a failure. It’s a total failure,” said Melissa McClure, a reedy-voiced 50-something with a Louise Brooks bob who successfully managed gift stores before falling on hard times and applying for welfare in early 2007.
“If I had a worst nightmare, this would be it,” said Ketny Jean-Francois, a Haitian-born single mother who spent four years in the welfare meat-grinder before managing to land a spot in a nursing program – against welfare reform rules – and then a job.
The lone man of the group, Bill, a single 49-year-old with a host of physical and psychological ailments, struggled to find the words before spitting out, “It’s definitely not achieving the goals of helping out,” he said. “The official line is, ‘If you’re not working, we want to see you working. If you have children, we want to help you so you [don’t] come back.’ But if that’s really the goal – no.”
Failure. Nightmare. Not achieving its goals. None of these descriptions are part of the official line peddled by welfare reform’s sponsors and backers. If you hear anything these days, it’s how dramatically welfare caseloads have dropped in the last 15 years – 57 percent! – and how salutary it’s been for the country. “We renewed the American spirit by emphasizing personal responsibility in place of generational dependency on government,” boated E. Clay Shaw Jr., former Republican congressman and drafter of 1996’s welfare reform law, in a recent Politico editorial. Indeed, far from questioning the law’s fundamental merits and efficacy, many Republicans (and a few Democrats) have taken to complaining that the law hasn’t gone far enough, that its implementation has been too lax and its lessons not fully adequately exported. “The job is not finished,” Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and Ways and Means Committee Chairman, said in a statement. “[O]ther programs can and should be reformed to follow suit.”
And yet, to listen to the people who know welfare reform best, to the “Reformed,” the reality of the 1996 law is not only a far cry from the compassionate conservative triumph it’s trumpeted to be, it’s a crucible for the failures of the stingy, starve-the-beast, punish-the-poor philosophy so in vogue among the Tea Bag brigades.
A hand up? More like a slap down, say those who’ve been through the system. The famously-touted welfare-to-work programs are little more than exercises in make-work and are often exploitative to boot. Childcare remains persistently scarce. Job training is poor to non-existent. And on the increasingly rare occasions when people do find jobs, these jobs are often low-wage gigs that fail to hoist them out of poverty.
Meanwhile, life on welfare has become shorter, harsher, and more strapped. Cash grants have stagnated or even fallen in a number of states, with the median benefit for a family of three now clocking in at $429 a month, just 28 percent of the federal poverty level, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Time limits have also gotten shorter. And while caseloads have certainly plummeted, it’s fairly clear that a hefty portion of this drop can be attributed to steep new barriers to entry – and time limits, of course. How else to explain the fact that at the height of the Great Recession only 28 percent of Americans living in poverty received welfare assistance while 75 percent got welfare help in 1995? In 13 states, welfare rolls actually declined during the recession, according to an Urban Institute report.
All of which suggests that for all the braying triumphalism, our nation’s great welfare reform experiment is little more than an elaborate shell game, a confidence trick in which poor people get shuffled this way and that while their lives remain essentially unchanged. Or get harder.
Take the case of Bill, the lone man at the Community Voices Heard gathering, who wore a charm bracelet of Catholic saints around his wrist and asked to keep his last name on the down-low since most of his family doesn’t know his situation. Bill is a college graduate who spent years working in and around the computer world until the recession conspired with a greedy landlord to take most of his income (he made only $6000 in 2008) and then his home. Eviction was followed by homelessness. Eventually he landed on Public Assistance, which immediately put him to work in New York’s notorious workfare program.
The city’s workfare program is the twisted, and nationally celebrated, brainchild of former New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and a small cadre of conservative think tank gurus. It requires public assistance recipients to spend 35 hours a week doing a mix of job search and work activities – or face losing part or all of their benefits. These work activities, grouped under the condescending title of the Work Experience Program (WEP), include jobs like sweeping streets, cleaning parks, doing security, filing – low-skilled, formerly union jobs for which the WEP workers are not paid, per se, because they are actually working off their benefits. Hence the comparisons to indentured servitude. Alternatives like education and training courses are generally forbidden, and exemptions for disabilities or disease are difficult to obtain. The reason: a “work-first” ethic so unrelenting that Giuliani’s most notorious welfare commissioner, Jason Turner, famously explained, “It’s work that sets you free.” (Apparently he skipped the chapter in his high school history book about the Holocaust.)
“Work-first,” however, has not set many welfare recipients free. It certainly didn’t help bill.
Bill is a man of many ailments, something that is apparent to the casual observer almost upon meeting him. Smart and sensitive, he is beset by the tics and torments of a man with serious depressive and anxiety disorders. He also underwent major surgery for a tear in his stomach in 2010. But within weeks of the operation, unable to bend, lift, or twist and suffering from pain and panic attacks, he was required to go back to his welfare-mandated job search and work activities. All so he could continue to receive $45 a month in cash assistance.
“It’s like trying to trip a handicapped person,” said Bill, who was recently judged disabled enough to qualify for Social Security Disability insurance and Supplemental Security Income – though not before suffering a year in the workfare trenches. “But I have to stress that there are so many people that are in a much, much worse situation, and they’re making them [work].… I saw guys nodding off in wheelchairs!”
Such stories reverberate throughout the archives of welfare reform, but even the stories that aren’t so patently bad aren’t so pretty either. Everyone has something to tell. For Ketny Jean-Francois, for instance, it was working a WEP assignment for the sanitation department in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, a swath of asphalt and misery famous for its brisk drug and prostitution trades. Each day she would head to her assignment picking up condoms, needles, and “doodoo” (as she delicately put it) in the protective company of one of her male co-workers, but that only seemed to encourage the Johns, who would invariably stop her “guard” to ask her going rate.
As for Cheina Goncalec, a petite 27-year-old with two young kids who moved to New York in search of work, her story revolved around her stint as a security guard at a West Harlem community center, a WEP experience that consisted of fending off the occasional cursing, threatening gym-goer without any self-defense training whatsoever. But that was just icing. There was the constant abuse by welfare agency workers. And the arbitrary closing of her case. And the welfare agency’s refusal to let her substitute education or training for WEP, even though “the only way to get out of welfare is getting a good job,” she said. And there was the fact that after a year-and-a-half spent doing “job search” and WEP, she was no closer to finding a permanent job – or climbing out of poverty.
Given such snags in a program widely touted as one of the jewels of welfare reform – so “successful” that it’s been used as a model for the creation of workfare programs in places as far-flung as Israel and London – it would seem like it might be long past time to re-evaluate. There are certainly plenty of smart ideas. And since the welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is set to be reauthorized in September, this would be the perfect time to debate, tweak, even radically reshape it.
Perhaps the most desperately-needed change is a philosophical one, a shift in purpose and focus from welfare reform as an experiment in punitive behavior modification and deterrence to welfare as a genuine anti-poverty program. From this, everything else would follow: welfare caseworkers caring and experienced enough to help applicants get the services they need (beginning with access to welfare) rather than deterring them; higher cash grants which would allow recipients to live rather than simply subsist; access to quality child care; programs and alternatives for people with barriers to employment; training programs that are tiered to meet recipients where they’re at – and prepare them for quality jobs; and above all, subsidized employment programs that would train and then place recipients in bona fide, living-wage paying jobs.
“During the Great Depression, they put people to work doing what they knew to do,” said Melissa McClure, offering an example of the kind of jobs program she’d like to see. “All that and you were paid, and it was promoting you into a better position.”
And yet, what are the chances? The government couldn’t – or, more accurately, wouldn’t – even maintain the TANF Emergency Fund, which provided subsidized jobs to some 240,000 unemployed people and was one of the few effective jobs programs created during the Great Recession; instead, it let its funding expire last September. And with Congress divided between slack do-nothings and rabid ideologues (the worst really are full of passionate intensity), the fight over “reform” has moved from the fringes of a fraying society to the center, from the question of entitlements to the poor to entitlements more broadly.
Welfare reform, it turns out, was just the warm-up. It was a test-case and a prophecy, “a new beginning” after all. And as the first hard yank on the threads holding together the country’s safety net – its social contract to provide for the needy – it should have been a clarion warning. Welfare reform was an attack on all of us.
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48 Comments so far
Show AllGlad to see someone revisit the "welfare reform" of the nineties. I hear so many talk about welfare programs like they exist like they used to. They seem to be totally unaware it's already been reformed. The only ones that profited from that reform are the new consultants and agencies that were created to syphon off the funds that used to go directly to the recipients or the state agencies that served them. Capitalism at work and not very productively. Here in California we have the "GAIN" program...a total crock that was instumental in creating a whole new industry of supportive agencies that actually never delivered on anything very supportive. But it propelled a few companies into profitability.
In mentioning the group that recently gathered in Harlem to discuss the state of welfare today, Ratner should have mentioned the group (banksters) in Manhatten that has been showered with unprecedented trillions of dollars in CORPORATE WELFARE.
When Slick Willy Clinton told the world he was" changing welfare as we know it", that was Clintonspeak for the Gov. spending more on corporate welfare than they ever spent on welfare as we knew it.
Ms. Ratner relates the following in her well-written article:
"All of which suggests that for all the braying triumphalism, our nation’s great welfare reform experiment is little more than an elaborate shell game, a confidence trick in which poor people get shuffled this way and that while their lives remain essentially unchanged."
The idea of a shell game, or cover-up, will probably be what defines this era to future historians.
It makes me think of the shell game that gave bankers cover, while leaving depressed homeowners out to dry.
And it gives rise to an analogy with how BP was allowed to handle the toxic oil surge in the Gulf... by treating it with a dangerous dose of the neuro-toxin, Cor-exit. All for the express purpose of masking symptoms to maintain a covert cover-up.
The media sanitizes war so that all the Christians, devout towards the premise of "Right to Life" need not view a pregnant woman or infant torn to bits.
Many more examples can be noted. Amerika now rules by deception, illusion, and dis-information, with the Truth masked at every turn.
I also found the author's concluding statements to be powerful, so perhaps they bear repeating:
"Welfare reform, it turns out, was just the warm-up. It was a test-case and a prophecy, “a new beginning” after all. And as the first hard yank on the threads holding together the country’s safety net – its social contract to provide for the needy – it should have been a clarion warning. Welfare reform was an attack on all of us."
Indeed.
Yeah, remember when Obama was elected, he said, "It's time to set aside childish things."
WTF was he talking about ???????? Veiled threat if I ever heard one.
But the childish selfish greedy ruling class won't have to set aside their things, will they.
Meanwhile down the street a new "home" is being built with 19 bathrooms.
Siouxrose,
Agreed. The conspiracy to destroy any vestige of humane and decent government policies was hatched years before Clinton participated in the first direct attack on the poor, but the preparatory rhetoric of demonizing the poor was already in place. This rhetoric has now evolved to demonizing anyone who isn't rich as a non-productive type of individual. Of course the reverse is true but any analysis of this period of history starting with Reagan would be incomplete if it did not underline the methodic preplanning that was (and is) taking place.
I just read a piece which dovetails with this Orwell speak in regard to Bernanke. Bernanke is pictured as the prudent sheriff warning congress to get its house in order. It was an amazing stream of lies going so far as to describe Bernanke as preaching sound economic policy with "evangelist" fervor.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/damianreece/8726254/Federal-Reserve-chairman-Ben-Bernanke-fires-a-warning-shot-at-Congress.html
I was gagging while I read this tripe. Here is what I responded.
R & D?!! Since WWII the US has fleeced the taxpaying citizens for government paid research that is then handed to corporations for private profit. Anyone not in this loop is not allowed to compete. Bernanke conveniently forgot the law that makes any patent unusable if "national security" is threatened (IOW, if an energy products (oil, coal, gas or nuclear) corporation or a technology corporation's bottom line is threatened).
ALL innovations that don't involve weapons of war have come from outside the US. Computers are the spinoff from military computer applications.
Free market? Are you kidding me? Ossified monopoly predatory capitalism is more like it. All competition is squashed.
Bernanke is merely engaging in code speech to give congress and the White House cover for destroying social programs. The real leach on the economy, wars for empire and fascist security agencies, will be untouched as the empire charges on in its mad dash to penury.
Bernanke is an integral part of the problem. Calling him a sheriff is ludicrous. Helicopter Ben is the antithesis of a prudent economist. He should be called what he is: A psychopathic shill for Wall Street.
Let's not forget about corporate welfare.
Iraq and Afghanistan alone are $5 Trillion dollar war subsidies for Big Oil and those occupations are planned to be permanent. And there are the offshore war contractors who steal our taxes and pay no taxes.
The examples are endless.
General Electric benefits from Federal contracts and pays little in the way of taxes.
The "libertarian" Koch brothers feed at the Federal trough with cattle grazing and the ethanol subsidy racket.
The criminal financial institutions were bailed out with our money.
Subsidies like these are part of the grand plan to transfer wealth from the many to the few thus creating more poverty.
Etc.
Yes, the whole system of capitalism is collapsing around us, except for the rich and the uber-rich, both of which are trying to squeeze more and more out of people and government. The reality is it's only going to get far far worse as machines do more and more of the jobs.
Now, the only way the left is going to be able to tackle all these problems, all at once, and win is to actually have a broad and long term strategy that addresses the roots of all the problems, the decline of democracy in the US. Ratify Article The First.
http://voltairez.hubpages.com/hub/Stop-Diluting-Democracy
No tax without representation, therefore, Direct Democracy...there is no one better who can represent my interests :) Its time to be rid of the antiquated dinasaur of the electoral college.
No representation without taxation. As far as the electoral college goes, it has enabled the Cubans of south Florida to elect 3 presidents for 6 terms.
"elect"?
More like SELECT, you mean, what with stealing and breaking rules and all.
The electoral college is really less of a problem than we think. Problematic, but more important would be to initiate Rank-Choice Voting (like instant runoff) and Proportional Representation. All groups would be represented. No one could win single-seat positions with less than 50%.
One quite simple fix (with or without an electoral college) would be: 1- MANDATORY Voting, plus 2- a binding "None of the Above." If NOTA wins, the election is annulled. This would fix many problems right away, even before the other reforms mentioned above.
If voting were mandatory, candidates would have to seed out support from everyone, not prevent voting as they do now. They'd have to be less acerbic, and "friendlier" to voters and to one another -- 'cause they'd be fighting ro everyone's votes.
You're right, of course. Taking the history of voting in this country, the politicians discourage and undermine voting because that is the thing that they are afraid of.
You're right, of course. Taking the history of voting in this country, the politicians discourage and undermine voting because that is the thing that they are afraid of.
I've often commented on my stint collecting food stamps back right before and right after this legislation passed. I'm going to confine my remarks to the following:
1) My husband and I were both college educated,stable, married, relatively healthy(even w/his chronic progressive disease which was in remission at the time), employed until his layoff, who didn't start our family until both of us were over 25 years old.
2) The original caseworkers gave us good information and processed our case firmly but kindly.They weren't arbitrary, and gave us other pointers on how to stretch our money further, though we already did most of that.
3) Those workers were soon replaced by make-it-up-as-you-go-along Tommy Thompson patronage hires, that were less educated and not trained. They treated me, a married, white, educated, well skilled woman like a POS; can you imagine how they treated poor,unmarried minority teen moms? I would catch these workers in lies, quote the applicable regulations to them and knew how to work the hierarchy to do the appeals processes; the stress would literally make us sick to our stomachs. How do you think things went for drop-outs and cognitive or physically disabled persons? I know it didn't go very well because we'd see each other at the end or the very beginning of the month at the food pantry and I'd help them go through initial reports to help them file timely or write the letter to initiate the appeals process if they'd been kick out of the system because they didn't have a stamp or access to the mail.
Now, I have a job at school where we have to do our best to complete filling the children's basic hierarchy of needs(Maslow) so that we have a possibility of being able to educate them. For the last 5 years, our current "crops" of students are showing up with smaller head sizes, less weight and shorter. We live in a poor, rural district. Parents are working their asses off to keep their subsistence jobs or to find a subsistence job. Each month more and more of our students have utility shutoffs. There is a line at both schools in the morning now at the gym showers. When I started 8 years ago, those showers were never used. The toilet paper used to disappear at homecoming week, now it disappears before,during and after school activities like basketball games with no signs of it in the neighborhood draped on trees. Staff now has their own locked in a cabinet in the bathroom, for which we need a key. The janitor now locks 3 or 4 bathroom stalls to keep down provisioning those stalls.
We used to have a dresser with a few changes of clothes in a range of sizes for the kid that didn't stay out of the mud puddle or "had an accident" etc. We now operate a "donated clothes closet" at one end of a portable classroom so children don't have to wear duct-taped shoes: unsnapped highwater jeans that still fit the legs and in the seats; bigger siblings' outgrown 2or 3 times rolled up shirts or pants; we solicit for new socks and underwear, shampoo, backpacks. Each year our free and reduced price meals programs see a rise in enrollment. Last year it was about 65%, this year it's ticking towards 70% and school begins this week so we anticipate we will be over 70% by the end of the month.
Adult sibling groups used to be able to help each other out if one was laid- off or sick but now everybody is tapped out. We are also encountering more and more doubled/tripled up family households where entire families are "couch surfing". There a still quite a few WWII generation or Boomer Teabag loudmouths, but more and more of them are shutting up as the fallout lands at their doorstep. Each week there's more. And now that Scott Walker's legislation has hit our paychecks, those of us that used to drop the shampoo and crayons off at that clothes trailer aren't going to be able to do that anymore. There are going to be some angry, hopeless children real soon at this rate. And I don't blame them one bit.
Thank you so much for this post.
Yes, I fear there will be "some angry, hopeless children real soon at this rate." And those children will be of all ages, from 4 to 100.
A few days ago there was an article about our "lost generation," which explores the similarities of the lassitude of our young people with Japan's "lost generation" of the 90s. "No jobs, can't leave home, who cares" kind of thinking. "Went to college, and all my friends and I can find is some piecework out of Craigslist with no healthcare, no job security, no nothing." “How can I start out with these dim outlooks and pay off my college debt?”
Hopefully more of those in their twenties will start to get that they have been fed a lie about "how to succeed in America" and get really pissed, get politically aware, learn some history, and start to question how to radically rethink our society and start questioning the strategies that have failed so badly this last half-century. Because I hate to say it, fellow progressives, but we’ve been pretty damned powerless, and doing the same thing and expecting different results is one form of insanity. We are going to see the awareness of extreme poverty heighten when more and more white people--those who went to college and did all the right things--are faced with the nightmare bureaucracy of our social programs. When they are sleeping in their cars or couch-surfing or learning to dumpster-dive. Then maybe there will come a social consciousness that we so dearly need.
Or maybe people will just go batshit crazy and start shooting each other. I’m hopeful, but greatly fear the latter possibility.
It appears that few, if any, of the families in your district fit the Heritage Foundation's description of the (not-so-poor) poor in its report last month - the ones who never had it so good because they supposedly have everything from washing machines to cable TV.
Thank you for this very moving comment.
I live in a black majority area of the Deep South. A new neighbor who moved into my building from out of state, a middle-aged white fellow, had his disability payments screwed up by his new state and was allowed only $16 a month in food stamps with no other income. He's already two months behind on rent and may be kicked out soon. His electricity will be cut off any day now. The SS disability people have been real creeps to this gentleman and are obviously trying to weed him out. They've told him he will have to re-apply for disability all over again and that it will take three months to rectify his problem. I've been going with him to various food pantries and seeing more and more white people lining up at them. I listen to a lot of the conversations in those lines.
A lot of the poorer blacks I hear don't really understand how much harder it's going to get. They seem to have some family or church support systems, although all the churches are strained around here. The very poorest are less fortunate. Some blacks still defend Obama, but most--especially the older men--are very suspicious of him.
A lot of the poor whites--who mostly listen to right-wing radio (because that's all there is in many places) and bad local TV McNews--know it's going to get worse and the mounting anxiety is on their faces and in their eyes. They talk the least. If they hear another white start to go off about how screwed up the government is they'll typically tell him or her to shut up, "Talking ain't going to do nothing about it," as one old white lady said. "Not talking about it ain't going to change it, either," as a middle-aged white guy replied. Then they all steamed in silence.
Last week I overheard my landlord's mother, an old money country-club dowager who idolizes Rush Limbaugh and never worked a job a day in her over-aged debutante life, yelling at one of the other behind-on-the-rent tenants who hasn't been able to find a job for over 16 months. He tried to explain to her, "The economy is a total wreck."
"TO HELL WITH THE ECONOMY!!" she exclaimed. Total disconnect from reality. She just can't understand why "her" struggling tenants just don't run right out and find jobs easy as pie. This is a Bush Republican who once "joked" to me, "The reason you're having such a hard time finding a job is you're not the right color and you don't speak Spanish."
This from a woman whose son, the landlord (a war profiteer in Iraq, BTW), has mostly Hispanic undocumented workers as tenants. She buys a new Lexus every year, takes month-long annual vacation cruises and otherwise spends her days at the club gossiping and playing tennis. She's in fantastic shape for a septuagenarian.
Her son owns his own plane and flies around the country or travels around Europe for two months every year. He spent his Iraq War training non-Iraqi "guest workers" to drive tractor trailer trucks hauling oil drilling equipment for Halliburton in Iraq. He never left the base, a vast complex out in the middle of the desert with its own bowling alley, movie theatre, fast food restaurants, etc., while the drivers took all the risks. He slept in an air conditioned trailer while the guest workers were six to an air conditioned shipping container with some windows punched in it. He made $120K a year for seven years--a sum he could never have made doing that in the U.S. Now he's back in the States reduced to driving a truck as a sub-sub-contractor for $38K a year--and griping about it non-stop.
They've been a little concerned lately, though, because thanks to our State's new anti-illegal immigrant law, two of the war profiteer's undocumented worker tenants fled the state. They won't rent to blacks and can't find any whites who aren't in financial trouble to rent to. It's a deep fried Republican quandry.
These people are so sick and twisted it's easy to see why this country is where it is when you observe these specimens--who control so much of the money and working-class living conditions in America. And there are roughly 58 million like them in this country.
I met a woman I hadn't seen for many years. I asked her how she was doing? She replied "Sick of paying taxes for single moms using their food stamps in the casinos." Of course, she is a good Christian woman.
For ten years I've been the treasurer and client advocate for an AIDS nonprofit for our county low income folks suffering with AIDS. We are all volunteers (4 of us) and all low income. We write grants and give each client $1300 a year and $50 for birthdays, $100 for Thanksgiving and $150 for the winter holidays. No questions are asked as we believe that the folks that contribute to us would not want people treated with anything but respect. None of us are good Christian people.
Funny how that works... I think the person those Christians worshiped talked about someone who did what you are doing, wasn't he a Samaritan or some other such lowlife too?
Stories like yours are reasons I almost believe in a god, the stories of how the poor got to where they are are among the reasons I don't believe in any god tho...
Well you know what they say, the Buddhists and christians have Christ like qualities, especially the Buddhists.
Perhaps we should forbid states from issuing payment to casinos. Why don't we already? I mean that's a non-brainer. Why was it ever allowed?
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/24/local/la-me-welfare-casinos-20100624
It would appear the "governator" allowed it to happen under his watch.
Well I have no problem if some single Mom somewhere DOES indeed spend money in a Casino, (they don't take food stamps there by the way). The one or two cents out of every tax dollar I have to pay that goes to welfare is money well spent..the welfare Mom will no doubt buy milk, bread and oh yes I'm sure junk food all of which goes into the local ecconomy. Perhaps in some small way she is able to scrape enough together to keep a roof over her family's head and maybe keep at least one kid out of prison just by loving them. If she keeps one kid out she saves me the tax payer more money that I 'donate'. No she can have my money and more if needs be till she can get on her feet .....but I DO resent BP EXXON etc etc taking my money, only to increase profits month after month and invest sweet FA in jobs etc. And I also resent the total of 53 cents I contribute to wars I believe to be wrong. I was talking to a woman who runs an organisation here in our little rural Mississippi town who tells me that last month she had 1000 families seeking financial help ( utility payments, doctors' bill etc etc) almost 4 times as many as she normally helps. The money all comes from church and individual donations but those are now less that they used to be, some of the people who are seeking help were in the position of donating until recently. She said to me, 'Those people in Washington don't understand' and I said to her, 'Its worse, those people in Washington don't want to!'
Bill Clinton is the architect of the destruction of the Democratic Party and ObomberBush is the enforcer.
Ask Haiti what a manager Bill is. Remember Haiti? No well I've seen the GW/Bill ads on tv lately. I guess we haven't donated enough to make reconstruction in Haiti viable. Sweatshops aren't willing to build unless the rest of us donate more to subsidize their businesses.
Haiti is the place where Bill C. was going to come to the rescue of those impoverished Haitians with much needed modern trailers. But as The Nation pointed out a few months ago those trailers turned out to be broken down and without air conditioning, something which is considered a necessity and not a luxury in a country like Haiti. Perhaps not surprisingly, when The Nation's reporters attempted to contact the former president via email for comment about the article, Clinton mysteriously decided not to reply to those requests.
Since Clinton the economy of the USA has been on a downhill slide, because it takes money out of the economy and results in the consolidation of wealth. The reason being that the forced contributions,withholding taxes, by taxing labor is transferred to capital. The USG is funded by the forced contributions of labor and common sense dictates that money confiscated from labor should be returned to labor. Instead it is transferred to Wall St., where it is used to create financial bubbles manipulated by Wall St., turning Wall St., into a USG.funded casino where Wall St., is the house, stock markets, and the house always wins. This fiasco has resulted in the creation of counterfeit stocks, options, even Treasury bonds which only exist in cyberspace if even for a nanosecond to manipulate stock prices using counterfeit securities. This is attributed to the technology which makes nanosecond transactions possible.Wall St., Wash., DC, is the Axis of Evil, AoE, a criminal conspiracy of unethical gangsterism.
Since Clinton the economy of the USA has been on a downhill slide, because it takes money out of the economy and results in the consolidation of wealth. The reason being that the forced contributions,withholding taxes, by taxing labor is transferred to capital. The USG is funded by the forced contributions of labor and common sense dictates that money confiscated from labor should be returned to labor. Instead it is transferred to Wall St., where it is used to create financial bubbles manipulated by Wall St., turning Wall St., into a USG.funded casino where Wall St., is the house, stock markets, and the house always wins. This fiasco has resulted in the creation of counterfeit stocks, options, even Treasury bonds which only exist in cyberspace if even for a nanosecond to manipulate stock prices using counterfeit securities. This is attributed to the technology which makes nanosecond transactions possible.Wall St., Wash., DC, is the Axis of Evil, AoE, a criminal conspiracy of unethical gangsterism.
"Welfare reform, it turns out, was just the warm-up. It was a test-case and a prophecy, “a new beginning” after all. And as the first hard yank on the threads holding together the country’s safety net – its social contract to provide for the needy – it should have been a clarion warning. Welfare reform was an attack on all of us.'
No the real attack on us all was "TARP"! Three pages of unconditional love meted out to the banks, which in return homed in on this nation and the world with their mandate of austerity cuts.
We purchased our own slavery. And we're supposed to smile about it. Besides handing us toxic assets, they dumped us with a meaningless marketing euphemism: "Jobless Recovery". There is no such thing. They recovered shortterm because we staked them, while prices were down. They were supposed to loan, but they didn't. They suffered no consequences because they didn't loan. It was much more advantageous to purchase oil and hold in off shore tankers until the price was manipulated up. They tripled our money. But we didn't get any return No wonder they could pay us back so fast.Now they are positioned to purchase our infrastructure at cut rate prices with profits they made with our money while forcing us to absorb all expenses.
We'll be selling used t-shirts like Zambia soon.
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/debt.html
Actually, this was an 8/3/11 headline: Money Still Owed In Federal Bailout: $1.5 Trillion Still Owed to Treasury, Federal Reserve per the Center for Media and Democracy
Well, you knew that the Fed would rather owe the Treasury the money rather than cheat them[US] out of it. We all know that. Oh, remember the 2008 bailout Congress KABUKI theater "debate" the right hand, while simultaneously the left hand was doling out $1.2 trillion never having been acknowledged. This is in addition to the $16 trillion Gentle Ben doled out to the foreign banksters.
At least he has the stain of impeachment on his record. That will always be on record. Not that it did his damn ego any harm.
Wasn't he the first best republican pres befote the creep know occupying the office?
My god, how can the rich asses be so damn cruel? Why isn't being rich enough without taking everything away from the rest of us? I sure hope there is a hell for these warmongering, greedy cretins.
They're not going to hell. They bought a first class ticket to heaven. Isn't that what indulgences are all about. That's why GW, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfield, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and ofthers have never been indicted for anything. They just keep floating to the top.
Clinton will be remember by me by how well he handles Haiti...and right now he handles it like he did an intern in the oval office. He wants satisfaction, and he couldn't care less about the conditions the intern that is meeting his needs is living under. My biggest problem with Clinton wasn't that he needed sex outside of marriage...it was that as the boss he felt he could control and force the actions of underlings and not be accountable. He was our "commanding officer", a highly paid executive, elected by the people, and he felt priveledged enough to exploit an intern.
I know he was impeached for lying. He did lie. He also, in the highest position of this nation exploited an underling. That's something I'll never forgive him of doing. And he felt confident enough to do it in the oval office. The oval office means nothing anymore. That's Bill's legacy.
Scum rises to the top and the newly created UCE, United Corporate Empire, formerly the USA, proves it in living color.
There's not a state in the country that allow food stamp debit cards to be used at casinoes. Are you republicans that stupid. Oh yeah, the single mom is driven to the casinoe by a single black woman on welfare, driving a pink cadilack. I forgot
Actually it would appear California under Arnold did. Not sure it's ended yet. I am as surprised as you are.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/24/local/la-me-welfare-casinos-20100624
http://thehive.modbee.com/node/21542
http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/06/24/california-welfare-cards-used-in-casinos/
Arnold has tried to blame Gray Davis, but I am not sure it's going to stick.
When I was a county social worker back in the mid-70s the welfare system was a dismaying set of contradictions and denial of human needs, although still reflecting LBJ's Great Society. It was impossible to live on a welfare grant without cheating even before the draconian changes brought by Clinton. It was especially demeaning to young women with children (for example slumlords knew they could get away with not making repairs---where were those women going to go, another slum?)
Then in the early 1980s during the first Great Recession I ended up homeless and trying to survive on General Assistance at under $90 a month plus Food Stamps. I survived by urban scavenging. It changes your perspective! Although today I am not exactly poor, I am instinctively frugal, I hoard, and never throw away an aluminum can. I know what drove my father, who grew up during the rural Great Depression, when his family survived by driving by horse cart into town once a week to sell eggs and butter, or barter. They had no electricity or plumbing. They saved their shoes for cold weather and Sunday church.
I understand why people of my father's generation (long dead) revered FDR. When I hear right-wingers talk about "austerity" and "belt-tightening" on the backs of the poor, I instinctively want to cap their knees. People younger than I am, with their iPods and care-free attitudes are in for a real shock, and are totally unprepared for what's coming. You don't have to experience war to develop PTSD! Just living in dog-eat-dog America is sufficient.
-30-
I'd have to agree. I wonder what these young people are going to do when their texting cell phones are turned off, and they find the local school libarries have already transfered their books out of their librariesl.
Broadband is not free. At least not currently for most citizens. Students seem to think it is. How much are they prepared to pay to connect?
OleManRiver,
Well said. The young these days are being distracted like Pinocchio in that place children were lured into for the purporse of converting them to donkeys.
A feudal, malthusian, dystopian existence of grinding poverty is what is planned for us and them.
You and those who replied to you (so far) are SO correct.
We've been had. Our country has been attacked both stealthily and frontally, and we've been stripped of organizations to unite us in defense of the Greatest Assault ever imagined against America.
So much for the "danger" of "Arab terrorists." Even if it were real, they'd have much to learn from our very own "leaders."
The UCE, United Corporate Empire, formerly the USA is going to be a country ruled like the "Lord of the Flies". I hope they still read it now that it is the training manual for how to live in the future.
From Welfare Reform to Debt Reform: one continuous Assault on the notion of America for All, on democratic process itself, on common sense or decency, on our media, on our legal system and on our wallets--by the most privileged and powerful. Your ability to KNOW about it, much less DO something about it has been reduced to near zero, and the Nation snores on...
We "save" money as we create a mockery of the very idea of National Security, Even as they push so much fear down our throats to make a dime (many, many of them) on the privatized "security solutions" they sell us, our very foundations are being attacked and weakened. Clinton and his"reform" helped this happen.
...meanwhile, the Nation snores on... and WHOM do we attack?? Not those who create the problems, but those who point such things out to us. Hmmm... I'd say, someone's bein' had.
This article looks at some of the roots planted by our dear, smiley Clinton who twisted the knife a few times while in office, even as they seemingly crucified him. Sound familiar??
I don't care how you cut it, human welfare costs us far less than corporate and military welfare. Even if you could produce a million welfare queens that the Republicans said existed at the time, but later admitted that they had made it all up so that they could enrage the American people. It would be cheaper for us to pay to support a million dead beat people than it costs us to support dead beat corporations and the military, industrial, congressional complex!
Amen!
It's never BEEN about "cheaper," however. It's about gaining and maintaining POWER -- whatever the cost!
It's way past time to admit that the Dems have been the vaseline for this ... uh ... slide. About a decade after FDR, the deal they cut with oligarchs was made to share a piece of power: you guys (the oligarchs) do whatever you need to do, and we'll make sure few know about it, and that there's not to much in the way of organized complaints or resistance.
Very well written especially on the last paragraph. It's unfortunate that people in this country don't wake up to such economic tyranny until it's too little too late. Even when they do, some believe that it'll all just go away. No people, it won't. If you can't unite, organize, snap out of classist mentality, or spiritually rise above the "more equal than others" dogma, then our welfare system will only get worse for us and better for the ruling class elites.
Isn't it amazing how the rightwing manipulated Bill Clinton into destroying the welfare program, all the while doing everything in their power to bring him and his presidency down; and have now manipulated Barak Obama into taking the first axe blow to the Social Security and Medicare programs, while also doing everything in their power to destroy his presidency, and discredit his entire life. Idiot men. Whatever possessed them?
What possessed them? It couldn't be the major donors of both the parties who happen to be the same people (or corporations). Wasn't it Gore Vidal who said something like the USA has one political party, with two right wings. Or something like that. Once you abandon the idea that the dems and the repubs are separate parties, their behaviour is consistent.
Welfare is a huge scam overall that benefits the rich far more than anyone else while actually impoverishing the poor and lower classes. The deal is all tied up in the false charity paradigm. That's not to say that there is no such thing as real charity. But there is also a false charity paradigm and this is how it works.
You teach people that they are worthless, their work is not valuable, and that they should expect to get little for their time because they are nothing more than a useless eater if not serving their betters at the price they deem appropriate. The same philosophy was taught by slavers who actually demanded that they were "supporting" their slaves and giving them food, etc., and a meaningful life, for without their generosity, these slaves would perish.
Now, lets take Walmart, for example. Walmart being a prime example because of the Clinton's affiliation with them and Welfare.. Walmart pays their employees so little that they are eligible for Welfare assistance. Walmart also calls itself providing health care for their employees when, in fact, they don't pay them enough to buy said health care. In the end, these people would perish without assistance.
Obviously, Walmart makes billions every year but they and other big shots like them have forced the society to accept the idea that paying employees a pittance for their time is acceptable. At the same time, we are taught to hold these low wage earners in contempt as they line up for assistance so they can eat and deal with life without health care access and earnings that afford them anything but a hand to mouth existence *** at best***.
Why is it acceptable for Walmart and others to control wages for millions and millions of people that do not lift people out of abject poverty. It is not because they are not making enough money to pay better. The reason is we are taught/forced to accept it. We are bombarded with articles and imagery from the phony lame stream media. They work tirelessly to portray these people as contemptible and a drain on society. This is all paid for by the same people who are making billions off of the hard, almost donated, time and work by millions of people just trying to play by the rules.
All the while these employees are working and building their lives around these giant corporations that put big money into making sure society sees these very same employees as being lowlifes and pitiful creatures that can't or won't take care of themselves. Always remember when someone is finding contempt for another it usually has motive behind it.
Remember, the false charity paradigm argument because even those defending the poor rarely use it to defend the egregious wealth amassing had on the backs of working poor. And the truth is, taxpayers are actually padding the bottom lines of companies like Walmart using this system. This is the argument that is taboo. This is the truth that must not be spoken. Why, because it exposes the false paradigm that makes the uber wealthy uber rich with no end in sight. These super wealthy then take all this money and turn around and use it to control our government and the political conversation which promotes this system ad nauseum .
This video says it all. Watch the whole thing and I promise you, you will start to cry.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8dxUqzrwU&list=PL50F17B91B87E0189&index=10&feature=plpp
I can identify with this after having been on Unemployment for several months. I have an advanced degree (and lots of student loan debt as a person who returned to school late in life) but my position was cut after only one year. There were no other jobs in my field, and I had no choice but to apply for UI benefits. We were treated as if we were on welfare; I had to attend a mandatory "training" session which consisted of watching boring, worthless videos for 3 hours. The videos offered such useful advice as "be sure to take a shower before your job interview," etc.
I tried to get out of attending the "workshop," explaining to Dept. of Labor staff that I had an advanced degree and many skills to offer, that I didn't need to learn how to conduct a job search, write a resume, or answer questions in an interview. I even offered to help people who lacked such skills by giving workshops on writing resumes and cover letters, but this wasn't allowed. I had to attend the workshop in order to continue receiving barely enough money to live on.
The problem isn't necessarily that people lack skills to find good jobs; the problem is the lack of suitable employment matching people to jobs that they would find both intrinsically and extriniscally rewarding. Those days are long gone.
The attitude seems to be that "work is good" even if the wages you earn aren't enough to live on, and you are forced to live without health care access or any hope of climbing out of poverty, let alone retiring comfortably one day.
I am no longer on unemployment but can honestly say that I don't have much motivation to look for a job where I'll be required to work long hours just to make ends meet-- all with the misleading promise that hard work leads to success and a better lifestyle.
Maybe it will lead to someone else's success and the improvement of their quality of life, but it won't be us workers who reap those rewards.
PS. I also think it's disgusting that some states are now requiring welfare recipients to undergo regular drug testing- even though Gov. Scott's wife's company is benefitting financially from this, so we know the real purpose behind it. (My understanding is that a whopping 2% of individuals were found to be using drugs.) I have been in debates with people over this; I have friends who think it's a good idea- because they don't want their tax dollars supporting people who just want to buy drugs with welfare money. I argued that the majority of people shouldn't be forced to undergo- and pay for!- testing that violates their rights just because a few people might be abusing the system. These same pro-drug testing people aren't advocating that we subject bankers, etc. to the same humiliating and degrading experience, even after I reminded them that our tax dollars bailed these bankers out. They still don't seem to get the point.