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This week on CounterSpin: The 10-year mark since Hurricane Katrina has occasioned some journalistic looks back at the devastation, and, to a lesser extent, how and why that devastation was disproportionately born by black and poor people — and to a still lesser extent, how those same people are missing from the “silver lining” improvement or “opportunity” narratives now presented.
Would that even that degree of critical consideration would be granted to the anniversary of another disaster for low-income communities of color: the move to “end welfare as we know it,” signed into law in August 1996 by Bill Clinton. If you don’t remember the media stampede — Black women having babies for government checks! Pregnant teenagers draining public resources! — that’s partly because elite media, having championed hard for the dismantling of the safety net, were markedly less interested in tracking the human fallout.
We talk about what was called “reform” of what was called “welfare” with associate professor of history at the University of Vermont Felicia Kornbluh, author (with Gwendolyn Mink) of the forthcoming Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform After 20 Years.
And first, as usual, a quick look back at the week’s press.
LINK:
- “Poor Mothers Don’t Matter in Welfare Policy,” by Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink (Common Dreams, 8/23/15)
A little walk through history:
Almost immediately after LBJ (who created anti-poverty and welfare programs which mostly helped poor women who’ve always suffered the most and the worst effects of sexism and discrimination) left office and Nixon got elected, there was an immediate backlash against LBJ’s Great Society social programs for the poor. In fact, it began even before that—resistance was mounted by well-heeled interests, and led by professional middle class academicians while Johnson was trying to get his poverty relief measures pushed through during his 1963-64 Poverty Tour.
In the early 1970’s, lawmakers in the state of Nevada where prostitution is legal and “regulated” and most of the brothels are owned by members of the Bonano crime family, passed a law forcing poor younger women who applied for welfare to first take “work” in the legal brothels (since prostitution is legal there, it is a “job just like any other”).
The National Welfare Rights Union, which was a grassroots org spearheaded by poor single mothers receiving a paltry welfare benefit under AFDC, launched a massive protest right out in front of Nevada’s infamous Mustang Ranch brothel to protest poor women being forced into prostitution by the state (which essentially made the state of Nevada guilty of human trafficking).
Several feminists, including Gloria Steinem, joined in and protested with the National Welfare Rights Union. The protests forced the state lawmakers (many whom were brothel owners themselves) to back down because the public outcry was tremendous.
As a poor older woman who is a survivor of child sex trafficking, I never got a chance for a job after escaping my traffickers 31 years ago no matter what/how hard I tried in order to be “worthy” of a chance for a job. I was shut out of any and all jobs my entire working age life due to an unfair prostitution record that held me back and rendered me unemployable—a record I incurred from when I was trafficked into prostitution as a homeless orphaned child from age 12/13 -17.
After I managed by sheer dumb luck to escape that hell, I never got a chance for a job no matter what hoops I jumped through in order to be “worthy” of a chance for a job—while getting told by smug, arrogant middle classers that I “have it made compared to the poor in other countries”, and that “no one owes you a job” and that if I was poor and not making it, it was my own damn fault for “not trying hard enough.”
I never in my entire 48 years of life had access to adequate medical and dental care and some semblance of a stable life.
Ever since I was trafficked, and throughout the past 31 years since escaping my traffickers, I have never known what it was like to be able to experience one full year of not having one or more basic utilities cut off for lack of any money or income to afford the bills.
I don’t know what it’s like to be able to afford three meals a day. I often can’t afford to eat even just one meal a day. I experienced and observed this classist, sexist, misogynous “Me First” male-dominated society in its shit-stained underwear—not its fancy lecture suit.
The very short-lived Great Society programs “failed” because they were sabotaged by the servants of privilege and power: privileged academicians from elite universities, policymakers, Congress and every president after LBJ. The sabotaging of anti-poverty programs began almost immediately after LBJ implemented them, thanks to the middle class/rich white male dominated political climate that has always been deeply entrenched in this country, which still thoroughly permeates society to this day.
Upper-middle class academicians deliberately stood on their privileges to lead the War on the Poor, particularly against poor women, starting with the Moynihan report. The Moynihan report not only racialized poverty to the point of erasing both female poverty and white poverty, it also dehumanized ALL of the poor in general.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report was influenced heavily by Harvard urbanologist, Edward C. Banfield who was a “leading scholar of his generation.” Banfield was also one of Moynihan’s drinking buddies. According to Banfield, the poor “have no interest in the public good” and are “pre-occupied with having sex.”
Banfield held that the only way to ensure that the poor got chances for jobs was to abolish the minimum wage. He also suggested that the only way to get rid of poverty was to get rid of the poor—preferably by “auctioning off poor women’s babies to the highest normal class bidder.”
Banfield not only influenced Moynihan’s report, he also served as an advisor to former presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.
Since Ivy League academia as a bastion of privilege produced “scholarship” claiming that poor women couldn’t keep their legs shut because of the lower class’s “pre-occupation with having sex”, it’s no wonder that America’s privileged classes decided that prostitution was the only thing poor women were good for.
When Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” in 1996, nothing was done to ensure that this country’s poorest women would be welcomed into middle class jobs during those “better times” when there were a lot more jobs to go around than there are today.
Nothing was done to remedy the problem of sex discrimination in hiring/firing promotion/pay.
Nothing was done to ensure that poor women being thrown off of their measly $4K annual welfare aid, which never was enough to live on, would have access to advanced educations, apprenticeships, and have any legally enforceable and protected right to a toehold onto even the lowest rung of the middle class jobs ladder.
Nothing was ever done to guarantee 100% full employment for all who are able to work so that nobody—regardless of age, race, gender or disability—would be socially and economically excluded and left unable to economically fend for themselves.
All of the funding cuts to welfare and the elimination of other social programs for the poor starting with Reagan leading up to Clinton’s Welfare Reform was a real boon for johns—men with middle class incomes who use their money to buy rape tickets, who are nothing but socially shielded child rapists if we’re going to be honest about it.
These same rape ticket buyers are also the most ardent opponents of equal opportunity employment laws with teeth and any legitimate welfare social safety net for the jobless poor—things that would greatly reduce (if not eliminate) the number one condition of vulnerability that forces poor women and girls into prostitution or puts them at high risk of being trafficked: Absolute poverty due to structural oppression and systemic economic/job discrimination and a real lack of enough jobs in a country that would rather enrich pimps and traffickers and socially shield middle class/rich rapists than acknowledge, affirm and uphold poor women’s human and social rights.
Our domestic sex trafficking crisis in The US is one of the most shameful, darkest legacies of America’s War on the Poor because poor women and girls were not merely collateral damage in these past 40+ years of the War on the Poor—we were the primary target.
Those with the most privileges in this country say “well why aren’t the poor dying in the streets like over in the slums of Mumbai?” without looking at the countless POOR WOMEN who died out on the streets of America that were written off as “No Human Involved” as official police procedure on official homicide reports because of being “only prostitutes” by cops—who often extort money and “free samples” from poor prostituted/trafficked women while these same fascist jackbooted thugs are enjoying middle class incomes, job security plus medical and dental benefits, paid vacations, and pension plans.
And of course, no one questioned how/why so many poor women and girls got pressed into the commercial rape trade in the first place, either—they already knew the answer to that. Society already decided that the gutter and an early grave was the only place poor women deserved.
I don’t know how many of my fallen trafficked/prostituted sisters’ bodies have gone unclaimed in morgues after their deaths didn’t even make a blip on the news. Nobody has been counting them. Nobody ever cared.
For those tiny few of us who managed to escape and survive, I don’t know of more than two who ever made it to even the lowest rung of the middle class. We’re mostly all poor. We’re STILL treated as sub-humans and denied jobs and looked down on as garbage by everybody else in society—even those of us who are accomplished self-published authors, even those of us who managed to get educations and built high tech skills around the obstacles of extreme, soul-crushing poverty.
You would not believe the degree of danger and the constant threats of harm that are aimed at the few of us who escaped and survived. For speaking our truths, we get doxxed, stalked, threatened, slandered and discredited—by very privileged people with upper-middle class jobs and the luxury of lots of free time to spend attacking poor trafficking survivors who dare to hold personal fundraisers as our only way of getting any money to be able TO survive. We literally have NO support at all. Not socially, economically, or otherwise. Nobody cares about us. They never did.
And of course, not a single middle class raindrop ever believed they were responsible for causing the flood.
Systems of oppression do not happen by accident in a fit of collective absent-mindedness; they’re upheld and perpetuated by deliberate intent. And that deliberate intent is all about preserving privileges for some at the expense of others—those without privilege.
Systemic oppression is a privilege transfer vehicle that serves up the human rights of consumable, disposable people in economies of scale. Privilege occupies the space where someone else’s human and social rights belong.
Lillie Harden—along with every poor dead trafficked and prostituted woman and teen who wouldn’t have been trafficked or otherwise forced into prostitution in the first place if not for a real lack of an adequate economic safety net—are the dead albatrosses that the Left should hang around every middle class and rich liberal’s necks, starting with both of the Clintons.