NY Times Claims Cash For Poor People Is "Unpopular"

The Gray Lady might be ostentatiously clutching her pearls over Donald Trump's anti-social treatment of migrants and refugee children, but that doesn't mean its sympathy for the downtrodden is universal.

On the contrary. In a well-buried (Page A17) article outlining Trump's latest plans to demonize and punish the poor by labeling nearly all social safety net and entitlement programs with the dog-whistle "welfare," the Times explains:

The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare. (my bold.)

Unpopular with whom? The Times doesn't say. But the implication is that everybody - the dwindling number of people receiving the paltry stipends and people who heartily resent those receiving paltry stipends - are just as disgusted as the conservative politicians and the real welfare kings and queens of America: the billionaires and the corporations.

 Nor does the newspaper explain that, thanks to Bill Clinton's cruel "reform" of welfare in 1996 and the discontinuation of long-term direct cash aid to the poor, giving money directly to families is nothing but a misty memory of the New Deal anyway.

FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children was replaced with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants. Since this program limits cash aid to two years and imposes job requirements upon poor mothers with few or no child care subsidies, perhaps the Times meant to say that it's the mechanics of this meager substitute, which has actually plunged millions of people into extreme poverty since its inception, that is so unpopular with beneficiaries. The hoops that must be jumped through and the paperwork that is commonly lost before those temporary checks ever come trickling in is a feature, not a bug, of TANF. The mental aggravation and shame it engenders might actually be called an "unpopular" impediment to those thinking of applying for help.

As reported by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in fact, less than one-fourth of all qualifying poor people eligible for TANF ever get benefits. This is down from the 68% of eligible people who signed up for aid in 1997.

Decreased access to TANF benefits has left the poorest families without resources needed to meet their basic needs.  TANF’s predecessor, AFDC, played a significant role in reaching families, particularly those with children and those in deep poverty.  TANF has failed to maintain that standard.  TANF benefits are not sufficient to lift families out of poverty in any state,^[9] and TANF does far less than AFDC did to lift families out of deep poverty.  While AFDC lifted more than 2.5 million children out of deep poverty in 1995, TANF lifted only 420,000 children out of deep poverty in 2014. (See Figure 4.)  In 1995, only three states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving AFDC.  By 2016, the vast majority of states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving TANF.  
Under TANF, the poorest families have become worse off.  In the decade after TANF’s creation, average incomes fell by 18 percent among the poorest children in single-mother families, reflecting a large drop in the receipt of cash assistance.  These families recouped some of these losses after 2005 due to expansions of SNAP, while their average income from TANF benefits continued to decline during the Great Recession.  Still, between 2005 and 2012, these single-mother families lost further ground.

Figure 4

Meanwhile, the Times article continues, the consolidation of the remaining New Deal and Great Society programs into one super-agency under the authoritarian directorship of one bureaucrat will make them that much easier to cut, if not abolish outright.

“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”

I think, especially in light of the recent border atrocities, we all should realize by now the value that our political system places on families and children. While the Republicans are viciously punishing people, the Democrats feebly promise to "invest" in them as long as they stay in school, work hard, and play by all the cutthroat rules of the relay race we call Life.

In other words, neoliberal capitalism kills, and it kills absolutely. 

Rebranding programs which help children, the unemployed, the disabled and the elderly along with millions of working poor people struggling to get by on stagnant wages as "welfare" would presumably be greeted with wide public support, by both liberals and conservatives, educated and uneducated alike. This is because most polling is slanted toward the interests of the rich.

For example, one recent Los Angeles Times survey about public attitudes toward government aid to the poor was conducted with funding from the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute. Is it any surprise that respondents answered the questions in the manner most pleasing to the oligarchs paying for the "research?" For example, most of the thousand or so people contacted agreed that government "welfare" has failed to bring people out of poverty.

Ominously, therefore, slapping the welfare label on workers who qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, despite earning above the official ridiculous $24,000 cutoff of the poverty line for a family of four, might make it easier to demonize whole new swaths and new generations of struggling Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

Extra cash money for the poor and near-poor? According to the Times, this is such an unpopular concept that it doesn't even bear discussion, let alone pride of place on the front page alongside Trump's much more important, outrage-engendering tweets and his exciting fascist rallies.

 Nor has there been any prominent coverage of this weekend's Poor People's Campaign march on Washington for social and economic justice and an end to endless wars and militarism. Maybe that is because the corporate sponsors of our corporate media don't consider tens or hundreds of thousands of poor people taking matters into their own hands and taking to the streets to be all that "popular," either. The last thing they want is for too many voters to start adding the word "poor" to the prescribed list of political identities.

They'd prefer you just identified as a person who aspires to join the ephemeral middle class and whose only civic duty is to vote every two or four years.

Neoliberal New Year: Goody Bags For the Homeless

The best part of the New Year for me so far is that the flood of fundraising appeals from political organizations and parties and charities has suddenly dried right up, virtually overnight. Especially annoying were those hysterical come-ons promising that my monetary gift would be triple-matched by some mystery mogul. If I didn't give, the implication was, this pathocratic jerk would just keep hoarding his excess cash out of pure, miserable spite.

Even more annoying than the year-end money grubs were the false pretenses under which the money was being grubbed. And out of the hundreds of appeals I've received over the past few weeks, none was more disgusting than the mawkish missive I received from former president Barack Obama.

In this cruel winter of brutal cold, with homelessness and opioid addiction reaching record levels, Obama took some time out from his umpteenth tropical vacation to thaw out the hearts of his donors with his own award-winning brand of contagious inspiration.

If you ever listened to his insipid weekly addresses to the nation during his  eight-year tenure, you should know the formula by now.  It always starts out with the obligatory gushy gaslighting - since life is so good and optimistic for him, then it naturally follows that it has to be good for you, too. If you're not solidly in the middle class, then at least you can aspire to membership by dint of hard work and magical thinking. Pay no attention to the harsh realities surrounding you, lest you become jaded. The dismal results of austerity for the masses and riches for the rich are mere "challenges" to be confronted with the same old piecemeal solutions contained in shiny new gift-wrap.

There will apparently never be an end to his victim-shaming, financialized way of seeing things, aptly described by Adolph Reed, Jr. as a "vacuous-to-repressive" worldview. Obama writes in his latest email to potential donors:

I know optimism isn't always fashionable. Certainly not when we're fed a steady stream of cynicism on television and an on social media. We face some extraordinary challenges, but consider the long view. If you think about it, by almost every measure, America and the world are better off than they were fifty, twenty, even ten years ago.

(And they still wonder why Hillary "America Is Good Because America is Great" Clinton lost to the cruel but occasionally brutally honest Donald Trump?  Of course, in politician-speak, "America" is code for the Plutonomy, which is indeed better off than ever before, at the expense of the rest of us.)

But because Obama was the first cosmetically Black person to be elected president, it just naturally follows that all Black people are better off as a result, despite the fact that they became much worse off during his tenure. Still, he blithely reassures his wealthy potential donors that because they elevated the first technically Black person to the presidency, there's no need to worry their coddled little heads about the rest of the Black population. He avoids the obvious truth: that the Owner Class has always allowed a few women and people of color to advance as a way of keeping white supremacy and wealth inequality alive and well and immune from liberal criticism:

I was born at a time when women and people of color were systematically, routinely excluded from huge portions of American (read: plutocracy) life.. Today women and minorities are rising up in the ranks of business, politics and everywhere else. That's just one of the significant shifts we've seen And when you measure it against the scope of human history - it happened in an instant!

Since Gilens and Page established that the wealthy donor class, as a group, are adamantly opposed to government spending on social programs, health care, and public education, Obama willingly feeds this gilded age pathology by denying reality every bit as viciously as his faux-nemesis, Donald J. Trump. In a time of rising death rates in this country, deaths due to outright despair and rank poverty, Obama actually schmoozes:

Around the world, we live at a time when fewer people are dying young and more people are not only living longer, but better.

Remember that Obama is talking to the wealthy donor class. I doubt that many of the world's poor people got to read his Happy New Year telegram. They not only don't have the Internet, they often don't even have electricity (like half of Puerto Rico), or are otherwise occupied fleeing violence or scavenging for food. But maybe they will rise up eventually, though not in the mawkish way that Obama pretends to envision.

The fact is that more people are living short, nasty, brutish lives. Obama seems to be cherry-picking his happy statistics in order to make his donors feel better about their own unfair share of the pie. To make a terrible situation look good, corporation-beholden entities like the World Bank measure income inequality when they should be measuring wealth inequality. Also, the very definition of poverty has been diluted down to make things seem rosier than they really are. Even though poverty has been steadily increasing over the last several decades, the actual number of poor people is artificially decreasing, thanks to capitalistic measurement tools based upon bullshit rather than upon math. The United Nations' Millennium Campaign, for example, currently defines extreme poverty as living on a dollar a day. In actuality, though, in such rich countries as the US, people who scrape by on $2 cash a day are correctly defined as being extremely poor. As a matter of fact, the US government itself calculated more than a decade ago that people needed at least $4.50 a day to meet even basic minimum nutrition requirements.

Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics calls the baseline poverty definition used by Obama and his neoliberal cohort absurdly unrealistic. If Obama used honest parameters, though, he'd have have to admit that at least 80 percent of the world's population now lives in abject poverty. And that might make the rich greedsters feel very poorly about themselves. So poorly, in fact, that they might not give their unearned and untaxed wealth to the tax-exempt Obama Foundation for Oligarchic Feel-Goodery.

Family-Friendly Brutalism

So to prove that this is the best of all possible worlds, Obama offers three anecdotes about the sunny side of Dystopia. Two of his stories involve the oppressed helping the oppressed in order to achieve the desired inspiring level of Bootstrapping Nirvana. And, because tax-dodging philanthrocapitalism is the solution of last resort as social programs get cut and slashed by the oligarch-run government, Obama also gushes over a multimillionaire sports star who is donating his paychecks to fund scholarships for a whole new generation of Baracks and Michelles.

Concerned about the epidemic of homelessness? Don't be. Who needs a roof over one's head when one can be blessed with goody bags? Obama writes:

At five years old, Jahkil Jackson had witnessed the struggles of Chicago's homeless when his aunt took him to Lower Wacker Drive to hand out food to those camped there. He found himself restless, wanting to do more. With a spark of inspiration and the help of his family, Jahkil created Blessing Bags - kits full of socks, toiletries and snacks that he could offer to those in need.

"Let them eat goody bags" is so much more heartwarming than Trump's heartless "let them eat paper towels" response to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, is it not?

Now, to be fair to Obama, he is just echoing the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless's own piecemeal solutions to the lack of permanent affordable housing for poor people. Perhaps (I think cynically to myself) with the windfall profits from their new permanent tax breaks, such corporate sponsors as JP Morgan Chase can build some actual houses for the homeless, rather than continuing to corner the market on the same homes they foreclosed (often illegally) during Obama's tenure.

If you happen to be among the millions of people devastated by last year's record storms and fires, Obama doesn't want you to complain about how slow and meager the response from Trump's government has been.  Instead, we must follow the example of the Houston wedding planner who, rather than waste a whole banquet, helped the bride to distribute all that excess food around the neighborhood. Why hector your congress critters for actual monetary aid and government help when you can augment your wedding planning business by starting your own Facebook page to organize debris-clearing parties, and then dub it "Recovery Houston?" It certainly gets FEMA off the hook.

Are you a rich athlete who's making out like a bandit from Trump's tax cuts?  Then aspire to be like Philadelphia linebacker Chris Long, and donate some of your paychecks to fund a few scholarships, and thereby tamp down both racist hate and all that unicorny talk of free college from the likes of Bernie Sanders.

Barack Obama, that glib and glittering neoliberal tool of Wall Street, is retooling himself as an international goodwill ambassador of continuing austerity for the many and prosperity for the few. Rather than demand more generous government disaster aid, construction of public housing, and an end to lifetimes full of crushing student debt, he's simply continuing to do what what he did as president. He is calling for tiny symbolic gestures and using his own celebrity persona as a beacon of hope and inspiration. He is continuing his career as a consummate bullshitter.

Taking this inspirational bullshitting journey with Barack Obama will cost a lot of money. Therefore, rather than direct private or public cash aid to the poor and vulnerable, Barack Obama wants the money to be sent directly to him, to fund his continued lecturing to the poor and minorities, but mainly for the construction a $500 million shrine to himself in Chicago, complete with golf course. "Transaction fees" to cover your digital donations will be extra. Besides boring old cash and checks, wire transfers will also be cheerfully accepted - not least because, just like Obama's fantastical list of global recovery improvements, they "happen in an instant." Especially during this latest stock market bubble, there's no need to even redeem any your marketable securities. For your full tax-deductible convenience, just have your broker or your private wealth manager fill out the paperwork so that both you and Obama can get the most bang for your charity buck.

***

My own New Year's resolution, as I enter my eighth year of blogging, is to do my best to keep exposing neoliberalism as the deadly germ warfare of rich versus poor that it truly is.

So... here's to a realistically hopeful and happy 2018 to everybody except the billionaires, the Trumps, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and most members of Congress.

The Hard War Against Disposable Youth

This is shocking but not really surprising: Baltimore teenagers appear to have been deliberately set up by government officials and cops on Monday for purposes of accelerating the school-to-prison pipeline, transforming it into a virtual downhill luge event of Olympic Malthusian proportions.

The ruling cartel seized upon a rumor of a "purge" of the police department by roving street gangs in the wake of Freddie Gray's funeral, and got the bright idea of closing the schools early and cancelling the public transportation that is the only way home for many of the kids. Instead of being greeted by school buses, students were greeted by a phalanx of cops in riot gear.

And what a surprise when the kids reacted by fighting back and breaking stuff. It's been a made-for-cable TV spectacle to make the rest of the world forget that a man had died in police custody for the crime of making eye contact with cops and then having the audacity to run away from them. It made the rest of the world forget that city and state officials have stalled on releasing an autopsy report, lest it foment further unrest. Lest it make them look bad.

Baltimore is only the latest, and so far the largest, front in the ongoing "hard war against disposable youth," as explained by writer and social critic Henry Giroux of McMaster University. Just days before the latest outbreak of state-instigated urban violence in Maryland, Henry had sent me a link to a recent CBC radio interview and SPUR talk he gave in Toronto. Listen to the whole thing in the context of Baltimore, and everything becomes disturbingly crystal-clear.

There is both a soft war and hard war against youth. The soft war, waged by the free market and the advertising industry, is an insidious way to infantilize young people, teaching them to become consumers instead of socially responsible citizens.

The hard war is a means of trapping them in the Youth Criminal Control Complex -- "a site of terminal exclusion" --  when they are deemed by cruel design to have become "failed consumers." This is not hyperbole. Every year, 500,000 young people are imprisoned, out of the 2.5 million who are arrested. By the time they reach the age of 23, one-third of Americans are arrested for a crime.

Using the tried and true neoliberal tradition of never letting a crisis go to waste, Maryland Gov. Larry "Law & Order" Hogan promptly suspended Habeas Corpus in the name of protecting the public from the public. More than 200 protesters arrested for disorderly conduct and other relatively minor offenses are being held on high bail that they can't possibly meet. One youth charged with theft, rioting and disorderly conduct is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail. Others, including first time offenders and even journalists, remain jailed because they are unable to pay a cash bond of $100,000. This, while the police officers temporarily suspended from duty while the death of Freddie Gray is being investigated, remain free while drawing their paychecks.

Once the Republican governor eventually rescinds his emergency order, the backlog of defendants awaiting bail hearings and arraignment will be a feature, not a bug, of how punishment is meted out to poor people.

"The plight of the outcast has expanded to include a whole generation," Giroux observes in the CBC program. 

And the race to the bottom (or off the rails) of the Malthusian Luge Run is proceeding at breakneck speed, with the US going for the gold for highest death rates and most rampant child poverty in the civilized world. Eduardo Porter lays out the grisly details:

American babies born to white, college-educated, married women survive as often as those born to advantaged women in Europe. It’s the babies born to nonwhite, nonmarried, nonprosperous women who die so young.

Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.

Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way.

It's not just globalization and horrific trade deals like NAFTA and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership and its grotesque cousin, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It's the fact that "government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together."

 Reactionary right-wing moralizing from the likes of Charles Murray and David Brooks notwithstanding, America is not a welfare state. At least, it's not a welfare state for its people. It is, however, a full-fledged corporate nanny state giving non-stop succor to the plutocracy, multinational businesses, and the permawar industry.

Meanwhile, the poobahs of the media-political complex persist in calling an abused urban population with a youth unemployment rate of over 80% a bunch of "thugs." It's made to order divide-and-conquer propaganda for the One Percent. Pit the poor whites and the poor browns and blacks against one another so that plutocratic power can remain entrenched. It worked for Tricky Dick Nixon and his Silent Majority, and it's working again. Archie Bunker lives, even in the elite educated reader comments section of the New York Times. Instead of police brutality and crushing poverty, we hear the same old themes of black-on-black crime and drug use that are the remnants of a slavery society. The Civil War never really ended.

 It's been only a few generations since the phony truce was signed between a couple of generals.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is announcing a presidential challenge (unfortunately within the cloying confines of the Democratic Party) to Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, that self-styled Boudica of the hard-soft wars, gave a rousing speech for social justice. But she has also just hired Charlie Baker, whose lobby shop helped orchestrate billionaire austerian Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt." That's the astroturf campaign against the already too-thin social safety net. Besides acting as her new chief administrative officer, says the New York Times, Baker will also coordinate slush funding for other Democratic candidates.

The truly damaging burning and looting -- and partisan rooting, and own-horn tooting -- continues unabated at the very highest levels. 

The corporate media celebrate the concern-trolling elites at the same time that they force our glazed eyes toward the shell of a chain drugstore within the shell of a city neighborhood that itself has been smoldering and collapsing for decades. Visuals of destruction are engineered for blame-the-victim purposes. How dare the lower classes destroy a monolith of commerce erected just for them by their betters? 

It's no accident that CNN was prominently looping film of a Newt Gingrich-inspired volunteer janitorial crew cleaning up the mess at "their" store as though it is a worker-owned cooperative and CVS isn't hoarding its insurance check. These are the "respectable" poor people told to be patient while the leaders engage in another National Conversation. 

Meanwhile, for all those at the bottom, still resisting and calling out respectability for the sham it is, here's Bob Marley:

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too
 Could not recognize the faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in uniforms of brutality.

The P Word

Deep within the bowels of the Democratic party platform are a few  gratuitous paragraphs about the need to eradicate poverty in America. The document also pays lip service to gun control and climate change, two other verboten topics in this year's presidential contest between the two apparatchiks of the One Percent.

But this political manifesto, like others before it, is more of a Christmas wish list than a literal agenda. Like the Bible, party platforms are cobbled together and hammered out over time by several different factions with diverse agendas. Also like the Bible, they shouldn't be taken literally. They're aspirational things, peppered with a lot of fiction. What is not in them is often more telling than what is.

But thanks in part to the Democrats' odd choice of Charlotte as its party city, that dreaded P word is in evidence right out in the open. That is because there is a dearth of hotels and motels to house all the conventioneers. So when the rich people came to town looking for lodging, the poor people previously housed in the city's temporary digs have been unceremoniously kicked out of them. Charlotte's homeless population skyrocketed an unbelievable 40% in 2010 and another 20% last year -- an increase caused in large part by impoverished rural families fleeing to the city to take advantage of its shelter system.

News reporters converging on the city can't help but notice all the poor people living on the streets. They are literally tripping over them on their way to the heavily policed elite events.

The New York Daily News tells the story of Lakia Ramsey, who was forced to take refuge in a church when her welfare motel jacked up its rates without warning. "They kicked us out like we were trash," the 28-year-old mother of two small children told the News. Another family had been renting a room and paying for it from the husband's low-paying restaurant job in Charlotte. They are now sleeping on a cement loading dock in order to make room for the out-of-towners.

Poverty is so rampant in what is known as Wall Street South that the Charlotte News Observer even has a specialized indigence beat. Fred Clasen-Kelly, the reporter who writes about poor people, was himself interviewed by Democracy Now! this week. He said that Charlotte is big on boosterism, trying to tout itself as a booming city in the New South. The propaganda campaign has been so effective that struggling people have flocked to this ephemeral Mecca hoping to find a better life. And the same big banks that caused so much misery and hardship in the first place now literally loom over hordes of people sleeping on the streets and waiting in bread lines.

The ironic part (he says) of being here at the convention is all these thousands of people going to very fancy parties with lots of suits on are really less than a mile away from the city’s largest homeless shelters, in places like Crisis Assistance Ministries, where people go for financial assistance to get—to stop eviction and to keep their power on. And so, it provides quite a contrast if you walk just a short distance from the convention site and the corporate towers that are downtown. Every morning, in these places like Crisis Assistance Ministries or the homeless shelter, you’ll see hundreds of people lined up outside waiting for food, waiting for money to be able to stay in their homes.

According to an Observer story co-written by Clasen-Kelly, members of the Occupy movement have been trying to recruit the city's poor people to join in their protests, without much success. The poor often have no faith in politics and may suffer from physical ailments preventing them from marching. Others have to work at more than one minimum wage job just to keep body and soul together, and haven't the spare time to demonstrate. The article didn't mention that the massive police presence in Charlotte also tends to put a damper on resistance by people for whom police brutality is an ongoing reality of daily life. After the Occupiers and conventioneers leave, they'll be stuck there. 

But they're still for President Obama, who despite their disappointment in him, is more palatable than Mitt Romney. For the marginalized minorities, Obama is the thin patina of aspiration covering their layers upon layers of despair.