Gropenfuhrer Wants to Gut Welfare

[Rich Gibson <rgibson@pipeline.com>]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-budget8jan08,0,2873625.story?coll=la-home-headlines

For the most part, levels of welfare benefits represent the amount of 
resistance and unity among the working classes, on one hand, and on the 
other hand, the balance of treasure available for elites to dole out. In 
the US, welfare rolls and benefits have consistently expanded in periods of 
open rebellion, and rapidly contracted as rebellions ebbed.

Welfare benefits (around $600 a month for a single parent three person 
family in California) are the real minimum wage, what has to be exceeded in 
order to get people to work. While wage rates do not always drop in 
response to welfare cuts, they usually do. An injury to one goes before an 
injury to all.

The attacks on the welfare system were initiated by the Carter 
administration, which attacked the weakest people in the working class 
first, the mentally ill. Carter, under the name of doing good, destroyed 
the existing mental health system, nationwide, and the US once again 
experienced mass homelessness.

Then came bizarre eligibility requirements for welfare, the rolls were cut 
along with benefits, and demands for concessions began to emanate from 
public and private employers.

Reagan, of course, picked up the ball and drove home the notion of forced 
work programs, which frequently make people laid off from public jobs, work 
those jobs for welfare benefits.

Racism, of course, plays a key role. Racism makes it possible to pass 
draconian welfare cuts, with hardly a whimper from the middle classes, who 
never seem to grasp that most people on welfare are kids, and of them white 
kids. But even if that was not true, it remains that standing by and 
letting welfare cuts happen only strengthens the enemies of most people in 
the US, and hurts the rest. Racism also sets up people of color as examples 
to white people, of what could happen to them.

Some major beneficiaries of welfare are medical corporations (I doubt any 
cheating welfare mom every surpassed the doctors cheating on the welfare 
system), and agricultural businesses (why have food stamps but to control 
what people buy?), and, of course, middle class welfare workers whose jobs 
depend on the system itself, many but not all of them pretending that the 
problem poor people have is psychological, rather than the simple fact that 
the poor do not have money, or inheritances.

No surprise that NCLB supporters will be supporting some form of welfare 
cuts. Children will be left behind, hungry and homeless, and zoned out in 
classrooms. Elites who support NCLB care nothing for poor and working class 
kids. No one should suggest that their motives are somehow good, that there 
is some believable element in NCLB that indicates it is meant to help kids 
who were forgotten before. Who forgot them? Probably not the teachers. Nor 
the social workers who see them all the time.

But there is an expensive war on. Somebody has to pay for it.

That does not have to be us. I hope educators will see this as an attack on 
all our kids and respond as if every one of them was our own.

best r

PS, as far as I know, the Cloward and Piven book, Regulating the Poor, is 
still the classic on welfare.