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(image: Matt Wuerker)
This week on CounterSpin: It was 20 years ago this month that Bill Clinton eliminated the federal guarantee of assistance to poor families. Corporate media played a key role in persuading the public that Aid to Families with Dependent Children—representing less than 1-and-a-half percent of federal outlay from 1964 to 1994—was somehow bleeding the country dry.
Now we’re told we’re in a moment of reconsideration—of tough-on-crime policies, of the deregulation of banks and, perhaps, of the notion that depriving needy people of assistance would lead to their gainful employment and well-being. Our guest says a true reconsideration of the 1990s welfare overhaul would require a so-far invisible recentering of the people in its crosshairs: low-income women, particularly mothers raising children on their own.
Felicia Kornbluh is associate professor of history and gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Vermont and president of the faculty union, United Academics. She’s author of The Battle for Welfare Rights and, with Gwendolyn Mink, of the forthcoming Ensuring Poverty: The History and Politics of Welfare Reform. She joins us today on CounterSpin to talk about what’s missing from even Democratic debates about the social safety net.
Transcript: ‘It’s a Kind of Original Sin of the Modern Democratic Party’
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And we take a look at the New York Times‘ use of Honduran violence as an advertisement for “American power.”
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Transcript, please; I’m deaf.
For all counterspins.
bc
We do put up transcripts of our shows–usually by Thursday of the following week. (Last week’s shows went up today, a little late.)
Thanks; I’ll look for it.
bc, loyal subscriber to Extra.
Since the 1960s and LBJ’s so called War On Poverty, the taxpayers of this country transferred over $19 Trillion of their hard earned (or borrowed) money to the poor and low income through means tested welfare programs. We have over 80 such programs. I do not count earned things like Social Security and Medicare and unemployment. All of this was to eliminate poverty. We still have a huge poverty problem and are $19 Trillion in debt. Between federal and state programs the cost for these means tested giveaway programs is now up to $1 Trillion a year and get passed from one “needy” generation to the next. I guess all that transferring of people’s earnings didn’t work out very well. The liberals want to try it again, maybe it will work better the next time. Maybe the money to pay for it will come from the moon.
Corporate welfare is far more costly and shrinks the economy.
Being taxed enough I am sure you are 100X more concerned about the wealthy people and corporations who are underpaying taxes and the wealthy people and corporations who actually have our tax dollars directed to their businesses. Of course that level of greed has nothing to do with the maintenance of poverty and wealth disparity.