HE DROPPED THE BOMB
Clinton's poverty tour exposes inhumane welfare cuts
By
Monica Moorehead
President Bill Clinton has just completed a four-day tour of
poverty stricken regions in the country. He visited the coal
mining region of Appalachia in eastern Kentucky; the Lakota
Nation's Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D.; Clarksdale, a poor,
predominantly African American town in the Mississippi Delta; a
Latino barrio in Phoenix, Ariz.; the mostly Black areas of East
St. Louis, Mo.; and the Watts neighborhood located in Los
Angeles.
This is the only such tour that Clinton has carried out into
this seventh year of his presidency.
Clinton's entourage included the Rev. Jesse Jackson along
with corporate executives, members of Congress and Clinton's
cabinet officers. The public purpose of Clinton's trip was to
promote a five-year plan for private corporate
investment--including small businesses--in poor, isolated
areas.
Clinton is urging Wall Street to invest $15 billion in urban
and rural areas. Simply put, Clinton wants to transform poverty
zones into "economic empowerment zones" similar to those
established in parts of Latin America and Asia.
Clinton is willing to offer $980 million in tax credits to
big business in return for $6 billion of investment. This is
corporate welfare. Clinton's increase for the Pentagon budget
is military welfare. But when it comes to the providing
legitimate welfare with a true living income for the poor,
Clinton's hands are empty.
This "show" of concern really indicates that all Clinton
really cares about is making more profits for Corporate America
at the expense of the poor. This amounts to capitalist
expansion within the areas that were ignored in the past by
corporate bosses. It remains to be seen whether or not they
will respond to Clinton's offer.
Clinton actually referred to the poor not as human beings
but as "human capital."
In Marxist terms this means the unemployed are--like other
workers--forced to sell their labor power to the capitalist
class to survive. This relationship leads to workers' labor
power being exploited to insure more profits for the
capitalists. When those workers are from nationally oppressed
communities, working at lower than average wages, this adds up
to super-exploitation of this labor by the class that owns the
means of production.
The only positive aspect about Clinton's tour is that
poverty in its many forms received some national exposure.
Millions of people saw the stark reality: poverty exists not
just in one isolated pocket but throughout this "land of
plenty" despite the current capitalist economic boom. Clinton
says his dream is to see this boom trickle down to the most
downtrodden and destitute masses.
Clinton enjoyed the media comparison of his trip to similar
trips taken by Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the
1960s. The big difference is that during the 1960s,
government-sponsored welfare and other social programs were
firmly intact and expanding, even though the U.S. was waging a
bloody, oppressive war in Asia.
This was the period known as the "Great Society." The big
debate at that time was over whether to increase the federal
government's economic relief for the poor, not over how much to
decrease it. There was much less emphasis on private investment
to solve these problems, except from conservative
Republicans.
Clinton will be forever remembered as the president who
gutted welfare for millions of single mothers and their
children, a criminal act that has deepened poverty.
Peter Edelman made this clear in an enlightening op-ed piece
in the July 8 New York Times exposing the social impact of the
so-called welfare reform act. Edelman had resigned as assistant
secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of
Health and Human Resources in 1996 in protest of Clinton
signing the anti-welfare bill.
In his editorial, Edelman cites some disturbing statistics.
Some 30-to-50 percent of those eliminated from the welfare
rolls don't find jobs. Since 1997, two-thirds of former welfare
recipients were unemployed for the first three months after
they lost welfare payments, according to unemployment
records.
From 1995 until 1997, the numbers of the extreme
poor--defined as a family of three living below $6, 750
annually--rose from 13.9 million to 14.6 million. The poorest
families headed by single mothers lost 15.2 percent of their
income over the same two years. In Mississippi, the poorest
state, the welfare rolls were reduced by 68 percent, but only
35 percent of former welfare recipients found jobs.
The 800 percent rise of women prisoners, especially Black
women, is directly tied to the welfare cuts, increased drug use
and lack of drug rehabilitation.
Edelman goes on to say, "States are sitting on large
surpluses of unspent federal welfare money while welfare to
work needs--child care, transportation, literacy, mental health
services and drug and alcohol treatment--continue to go unmet.
... In fact, the real issue isn't welfare. It's poverty."
Clinton's trip was a scathing expose of what his anti-poor,
anti-welfare policies have done to deepen poverty, not to
eliminate it. The U.S. government owes reparations to these
communities along with providing real job training for
union-wage jobs with decent benefits.
When Clinton visited the Pine Ridge reservation, a place
where the life expectancy for males is only 56 years along with
having the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide and diabetes, a
sign saying "Stop Lakota ethnic cleansing" greeted him.
Let's take that one step further and demand Clinton stop the
ethnic cleansing of all poor and oppressed people.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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