war on poverty

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Tue Mar 19 09:19:08 PST 2002


At 09:31 PM 03/18/2002 -0500, Chuck G wrote:
>If I were to personify the difference between
>the old liberalism and the new liberalism, I would list Justin and
>Nathan on the old list, and say Brad on the new side of the list.

Ooooh! You're in trouble now :)


>So if I imagine a new wave of poverty programs they would most likely
>be indirect benefits, supports, and extension to some aspect of a free
>market system: loans, grants, credits, vouchers, or some other
>exchange based chit---that is a meaningless substitute for money and
>no fundamental reform. These are only meaningless to the people baring
>the chit. To the institutions these chits are delivered to, well they
>are money in the bank.

Boy. You don't know how right you are; you're describing a lot of what is going on right now. A few years ago, my sister in law, her girlfriend, and their about-to-arrive baby were staying with me. They were recovering heroin addicts and needed help to get back on their feet. The girlfriend received welfare benefits and medicare/medicaid. Since they were living in my house, I got to see the whole welfare process and it was astonishing. First there were the three hundred pages of forms that had to be filled out (I'm not exaggerating by much.) The girlfriend was pretty smart and reasonably well educated, so she got through the forms all right, but I wonder how your more average not-so-well-educated welfare applicant fares with the mountain of paper. Next came the food stamps and the food give-a-ways. What was interesting about that is that the money you get is actually a very small part of your food endowment; the more major part consists of "coupons" that are "donated" by whole industries (like the dairy industry) or specific companies (like Kellogg's). Thing is, they'll give you a coupon for say $5.00 for a specific brand of cereal, but that cereal costs $3.80 at the supermarket: so you either "waste" 1.20 or you use your own non-existent money to get two boxes in order to redeem a coupon fully. No matter what you do, I'm willing to bet that the company gets a tax deduction worth the face value of the coupon. The other thing to note is that what you're getting, if you're poor, is both an expensive diet and a junky diet. I used to stand in line at the grocery store and watch indignant as the welfare mothers bought the most expensive/junky cereals, juices, etc. and wonder "what the hell is wrong with them? this is neither nutritious nor inexpensive..." Now I know. They have no choice. It's the junk or it's nothing. Add to this the further fact that most african-americans are lactose-intolerant and all those "gifts" of milk and cheese from the dairy industry add up to nothing more than an upset stomach.


>So, the larger goals of education, training, and so forth are all
>utterly corrupted into vocational training, as if a shit job is the
>end all be all of life. In fact I tried to argue once, that much of
>the technical training done in city or community colleges was actually
>engineering ignorance.
>
>In any event, such programs have become something like a smiling
>police-state extension of the corporate panopticon devoted to
>disciplining and punishing the marginally employed, that is the
>work-slacking working class. The new wave might call these
>productivity enhancements. Of course these programs, as noted above,
>are usually nothing but a front for pumping money into the privatized
>or quasi-privatized public edu-tainment of so called institutions of
>higher education industry.

I don't quite follow you here. Junior college/vocational training is just about the only way "up" for unskilled workers in this country: it's affordable and it's flexible. I'm not arguing against humanistic education; but, if I'm flipping burgers at MacDonald's, I need some kind of way out...eventually. I mean, an unskilled worker is a completely helpless worker: the army starts to look good!

Joanna



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