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To hell with the poor


Throwing all those kids off welfare felt great — until they turned to crime to survive

By Jack Lessenberry


We have reason to celebrate this weekend: Michigan is cutting off welfare payments forever to nearly 30,000 poor children!

Good thing. Little bastards are eating too much, and if their growth isn't properly stunted and they are allowed to survive, they'll eventually start breeding too. Yes, I know we should castrate them.

Back in the day, we used to do that to Native American children, or the "feebleminded," as long as they weren't from Texas and didn't have family money. But the liberal do-gooders put a stop to that.

Thankfully, the so-called do-gooders haven't been able to stop this new wave of welfare reform, which will only continue to grow in scope because those 30,000 kids are only the start. Beginning Oct. 1, people will be kicked off welfare permanently, every day. That's because in July, the Michigan Legislature passed a law saying you can qualify for welfare cash payments for a maximum of four years. ...

Lifetime. Then you are cut off for good. What if you are badly injured and can't possibly look for a job at the end of that period? What if you have three small children, and absolutely no cash? What if there are no jobs, and hundreds of thousands of others are out of work? (Hey! That's what's happening right now! Who knew?)

Tough titties, kids.

Face facts, poor children of Michigan: Those in power in Lansing believe your low-class parents had no business having sex, let alone having you. If you think the state will save you, think again.

You're on your own.

If you think the above is dripping with sarcasm, you too can be a literary critic. Naturally, our leaders wouldn't put things that honestly. Mike Green, for example, the gauleiter — oops — state senator from someplace up in the thumb called Mayville, put it this way:

"These common sense reforms make sure that limited dollars get to those in need, while encouraging independence and rewarding hard work among able-bodied individuals."

How soothing. How Orwellian, actually. The truth is that these "reforms" cut off money to some of the neediest. And as for this "work brings freedom" attitude, there are two slight problems.........

The Spring is rich and green in California this year. In the fields the wild grass is ten inches high, and in the orchards and vineyards the grass is deep and nearly ready to be plowed under to enrich the soil. Already the flowers are starting to bloom. Very shortly one of the oil companies will be broadcasting the locations of the wild-flower masses. It is a beautiful spring.

There has been no war in California, no plague, no bombing of open towns and roads, no shelling of cities. It is a beautiful year. And thousands of families are starving in California. In the county seats the coroners are filling in "malnutrition" in the spaces left for "causes of death." For some reason, a coroner shrinks from writing "starvation" when a thin child is dead in a tent.

For it's in the tents you see along the roads and in the shacks built from dump heap material that the hunger is, and it isn't malnutrition. It is starvation. Malnutrition means you go without certain food essentials and take a long time to die, but starvation means no food at all. The green grass spreading right into the tent doorways and the orange trees are loaded. In the cotton fields, a few wisps of the old crop cling to the black stems. But the people who picked the cotton, and cut the peaches and apricots, who crawled all day in the rows of lettuce and beans are hungry. The men who harvested the crops of California, the women and girls who stood all day and half the night in the canneries, are starving.

It was so two years ago in Nipomo, it is so now, it will continue to be so until the rich produce of California can be grown and harvested on some other basis than that of stupidity and greed.

What is to be done about it? The Federal Government is trying to feed and give direct relief, but it is difficult to do quickly for there are forms to fill out, questions to ask, for fear someone who isn't actually starving may get something. The state relief organizations are trying to send those who haven't been in the state for a year back to the states they came from. The Associated Farmers, which presumes to speak for the farms of California and which is made up of such earth stained toilers as chain banks, public utilities, railroad companies and those huge corporations called land companies, this financial organization in the face of the crisis is conducting Americanism meetings and bawling about reds and foreign agitators. It has been invariably true in the past that when such a close knit financial group as the Associated Farmers becomes excited about our ancient liberties and foreign agitators, some one is about to lose something.

A wage cut has invariably followed such a campaign of pure Americanism. And of course any resentment of such a wage cut is set down as the work of foreign agitators. Anyway that is the Associated Farmers contribution to the hunger of the men and women who harvest their crops.

The small farmers, who do not belong to the Associated Farmers and cannot make the use of the slop chest, are helpless to do anything about it. The little store keepers at cross roads and in small towns have carried the accounts of the working people until they are near to bankruptcy.

And there are one thousand families in.....

.......If you buy a farm horse and only feed him when you work him, the horse will die. No one complains of the necessity of feeding the horse when he is not working. But we complain about feeding the men and women who work our lands. Is it possible that this state is so stupid, so vicious and so greedy that it cannot feed and clothe the men and women who help to make it the richest area in the world? Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?
Monterey Trader, April 15, 1938

......"Horses are not very cheap to care for. We are seeing a lot more abandoned animals now," Schaecher said.

He also said the animals owners can be charged with animal cruelty.

Tavis Smiley moderated a conversation on solutions for restoring America's prosperity. Topics included the white paper from Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA), released the previous day, titled At Risk: America's Poor During and After the Great Recession, which reveals the "new poor" and how the face of poverty in America has changed.


"Remaking America: From Poverty to Prosperity", was held at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.



Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

Government Joins the Looters of the Poor

You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. -- How the Working Poor Became Big Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.

These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributes about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of dollars in........