March 31, 2013

The poor have always been the canary in the mine

Listen People, this "news" has not been shocking for the poor. In 1996 when Welfare Reform was passed and signed into law. we activists tried to tell you all what was coming, because that law in essence defined what was to come.

It said in essence that any job, whether or not it paid the rent was "successful" and it actually replaced good government jobs with "welfare-to-work" people. For instance, in NYC Guiliani used these people to replace his city workers because the welfare recipients "worked off their welfare" which is essence was less than $.50 cents an hour. This was under the approving eye of guess who? SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON who later went around the country with Joe Lieberman crowing about how "successful" Welfare Reform was. The only "success" that they could talk about was that the roles were reduced ~ they had *no* idea where these people went, what they were doing, or the impact of this law on struggling families.

Truth is they decided to cling to the myths and "forget" about the truth about poor people, mostly women on welfare. The truth was (and they knew it) that these women used welfare in order to get a leg up. Over 74% of these women went on to college and got livable wage jobs. Over 80% of them were married when they had their children, they did not get child support, which would have kept them off the rolls. Less than 15% of these women were teens on welfare. Now these women cannot go to school and any job, whether or not it supports them and their families is the *only* way welfare deems them "successful". So much in my book for Hillary to be a "feminist" when she actually was quite active into shoving these women and their kids deeper into poverty so her rich friends could live off the backs of the poor in order to get richer.

The other fatal mistake about this is about the widespread, quite disgusting, and very stoooopid refusal to admit that poverty is an institution, it is *not* a "choice".

From Websters:

in·sti·tu·tion
a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, as marriage: the institution of the family.

Institutions remain firmly ensconced in societies because they benefit the upper classes in spite of the horrible damage this institution promotes. The elite WANT more and more people to be poor so they can use them to enhance bank accounts. Other institutions that have been now and in the past are the Institution of Slavery, the Institution of marriage, the Institution of Racism, etc. theInstitution of Poverty is kept in place based on racism, sexism (including LGBTQ),classism, ageism, and disabilities.

Meanwhile the government was paying large corporations and mega-non-profits $millions to do the same thing - replacing workers with low income people who then replaced the jobs that made a livable wage. It then kept the low paying people and POOF! One by one, the good paying jobs were gone. I might add here with a little sadness and yes I TOLD YOU SO-ness that we told you people the next class they were going after was YOU.

See, while people were wildly applauding Welfare Reform they were so sure that this law did not apply to them: while trying to hide their prejudices ~ and using racism to the max since they assumed being poor meant "being brown" ~ and assuming wrongly that the Institution of Poverty meant "being lazy", they thought this law would just be for poor people, not THEIR "hard working" little butts. Well guess what? In America, it is illegal to pass laws for just one segment of the population, when laws are made, they apply to EVERYBODY. I might add here, that there were many people on DU who I have sparred with over the decade about this who maintained the same attitudes, but well, sad to say now that they are paying for it, they now know what I and other activists like me, had been trying to tell them for years.

The truth is the whole society is based on poverty because the upper classes depend on the poor for their own comforts. The poor are the ones who serve the upper classes and their "wages" have always been depressed. Now that the the falling middle class are vying for these jobs, well suddenly they are all surprised that what they wildly applauded in the 1990s was their fate. Even mega-non-profits use the poor in order for the rich to use them as their own private tax shelters, where "donating" merely means they give their riches and then get it back in tax breaks. they in essence "privatized" charity in order to use the poor, the disabled, women, people over the age of 50, and people of color as their slave labor, making sure there is no way out.

You will notice that "charity giving" is almost always mentioned as 2nd on the list for those shills like Ryan, Rand Paul, and their ilk who know that "donating' merely means more money from the government and it is not donating at all. they are really their own private "Cayman Islands" where they can hide more of their riches. These mega-nons are just corporations that do not pay taxes in order to give punitive, miserly "assistance" to the poor when in fact they pull in about $54,000-67,000 per client while giving on the average of only $2000 in services. These mega-nons also employ bored rich relatives in 6 figure "jobs". You can literally take a Stairway to Heaven" in these places. As you ascend, the lower floors are where the broken equipment and furniture lay and the poor work for wages that would be just a dinner at an exclusive restaurant for their "Executive Directors". As you go upwards the offices are nicer for the middle class where the case managers, social workers, accountants , and the like work as gatekeepers for the rich. The upper floors are where there is leather everywhere, original art, and new equipment.

Side note here: do *not* mistake megas with small non-profits because the little ones is where the REAL work is done, they get *nothing* from anyone, and they often operate on a budget that would not pay a social work manager's salary.

So basically, as many of us warned then when Welfare Reform was passed, they used the the Institution of Poverty to see whether or not this would work and VIOLA! Now these conditions apply to the rest of you. No it was not all Democrats, but let me tell you the key Dems today who were demonizing the poor were no different than the Repugs in this endeavor. Now they can hate you all, blame you for your poverty, make low wages impossible to live on, use their "mega-non-profits" to hide their money while making sure the palt5ry "services" they provide will make you feel like a piece of crap, all while their friends rake in the dough off your backs.

Ain't they sweet?


My disgusted 2 cents

Cat in Seattle
Board member of http://www.mamapower.org