> > Similar to the other 'terror' tactic: keeping the beggars on the streets
>> and in plain sight of everyone, when it would take next to nothing to
>> feed them and house them.
>
>This is I think a pretty accurate account of the 'objective" results of
>treatment of the homeless in the u.s. But as with many of the horrors of
>capitalism, including many of those horrors which seem most deliberate,
>I suspect that they (for the most part) not the result of deliberate
>planning.
Welfare reform is no accident. They know what they are doing and they have very good reasons for doing it. Quite simply, the capitalist economic system cannot operate without have nots. The welfare system was invented because capitalism was threatened by too many of us, but some poverty must continue to exist, as Joanna explains, as a terror tactic against the working class. If poverty threatens to naturally disappear, due to increased wealth production, it must be artificially created.
Capitalism would collapse without poverty. Yet poverty is quite unnatural in a place like the USA, where a vast surplus of wealth is created. So Carrol's suggestion that poverty is is somehow unintended and accidental is entirely too charitable an interpretation of the situation.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas