POVERTY IS A HATE CRIME! ‘Inexcusable’ Indifference to Extreme Poverty March 14, 2012 by Lauren Feeney/ Frances Fox Priven; 144 Lauren Feeney: There’s been a lot of talk recently about growing inequality — how the richest of the rich just keep getting richer. But what’s going on with the poorest of the poor? Frances Fox Piven: Poverty has been increasing pretty rapidly, at least since 2000, and then there was another big spike with the financial crisis. The official poverty rate is about 15 percent [but] I think the most reasonable estimate is that one out of three Americans are now poor. The official poverty line in the United States is set much lower than it is in other rich countries. That’s because it’s based on the cost of a market basket of basic foods multiplied by three to cover all other costs, and those other costs have inflated much more rapidly than food costs. I want to count people who in other prosperous countries would also be called poor. We have another measure which we call extreme poverty — people who are living at half of the official poverty line — and the numbers in extreme poverty are increasing rapidly too. It’s a big problem, an inexcusable problem. Profits are increasing; the aggregate amount of wealth in this country does not in anyway justify having such a large pool of poor people and near poor people. We’re wiping out whatever progress has been made in the last half century in decreasing poverty. There was something like a safety net put in place gradually between the 1930s and the 1960s — that included the program we call welfare, the food stamp program, Medicaid, WIC (a nutritional program for pregnant women and infants), unemployment benefits. By the end of the 1960s, these programs had expanded to the point that they provided at least minimal assistance to the majority of the poor. It was a ragged safety net, but there was a safety net. After the protests of the 1960s subsided, there were steady cutbacks in the main program that is welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children we called it then. The cutbacks took mainly the form of failing to raise the benefit levels to take account of inflation, so in real terms the benefits sank. This was accompanied by an enormous outpouring of rhetoric blaming poor people — and black people and Hispanic people — for their own poverty. The culmination of all this occurred in 1996 when Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility Act, which essentially eliminated the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced it with another program know as TANF. Under TANF, the states have been given much more license to refuse people, and the consequence has been that far, far fewer people get any assistance from TANF than they did from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And this is of course called a success. under TANF, there are work requirements, time limits, restrictions for immigrants, talk of drug testing And much Finger pointing, all sorts of things. They have criminalized the act of applying for or receiving government benefits And people shrink under TANF, there are work requirements, time limits, restrictions for immigrants, talk of drug testing . But once your 60 month financial aid time limit runs out all can qualify for is food stamps. The truth is, for the people that lost financial benefits , we don’t even know how these people are surviving. By lumping everyone — or almost everyone — together, does the meme of “the 99 percent” overlook the overlook the problems of the extremely poor? The encampments that the Occupy movement established did welcome the homeless, feed the homeless at their food kitchens; I think they behaved in a very ethical and inclusive way. Something else is beginning to happen now. There are organizations of the poor, some of them who trace their origins back to the 1960s, and these organizations are very supportive of Occupy. This is not just a movement of college kids whose futures have been destroyed. This isn’t just a movement of workers who find their wages reduced. This should be a movement of all of the people who suffer the burdens of extreme inequality, especially the poor. Poor and minority people in the United States have been singled out, basically since about 1980, as the targets for right wing and Republican rhetoric — tremendous amounts of castigation of the poor, as if it were poor people’s fault that things are going wrong in America. The argument has been that the big moral problem of the United States is that “those people” don’t get up and work hard, “those people” have babies out of wedlock, “those people” hang out on the stoop and drink beer…. It’s relentless. This kind of propaganda is mainly designed for the great mass of working people in the U.S. to quell whatever sympathies they might have for the poor, but also to instill fear in them of the risk of falling into poverty, the risk of having to depend on a government program or a handout. But the poor are also an audience for this kind of castigating propaganda. It has an effect — it makes people shrink into themselves, and that’s a very bad thing, because then they can’t be citizens, they can’t be political, they can’t protest the conditions under which they live. If we all realized that this is the tactic and most of use sure actually members of the Poor Class in one degree or another and if we would link up with the larger protests, this will be an enormous boost to their sense of themselves, of their rights, and of their capacities to fight back against the policies that have brought them this low.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:24:39 +0000
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