What the Fuck!!?? Trump Regime Declares Poverty Has “Nearly Disappeared” in the USA

August 13, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On July 12, the Council of Economic Advisers declared that poverty in America has nearly disappeared and that the “war on poverty” is “largely over and a success.”

What the FUCK??!!! The actual truth is that MORE people live in poverty now than 50 years ago. Poverty has intensified for millions of people, especially Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. And millions of children go to bed hungry every night.

The war on poverty was launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson over 50 years ago. During the 1960s, urban rebellions of Black people erupted across the U.S. In the 1970s and ’80s, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the government granted some concessions like food stamps—while increasingly using “war on poverty” programs to insert repressive and counter-insurgency measures in the Black community.

Now henchmen for the fascist Trump/Pence regime are using their LIE—that the “war on poverty” has succeeded—to say that millions of people have been too reliant on benefits so they should be forced to work in order to get government help. And this is also being used to ratchet up the white supremacist demonization of poor people. For decades Black people and others on welfare have been attacked as being “just too lazy to work.” Now, under Trump, this has gone into 10th gear. Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson says poverty is largely “a state of mind” and wants to “get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people.”

Listening to Trump, you’d think only Black people get benefits. In 2017, a Black congressperson said welfare reforms would hurt her constituents, “not all of who were Black.” Trump replied, “Really? Then what are they?” In fact over 17 million white people live in poverty and more white people get food stamps than Black people. But a much higher percentage of Black people live in poverty and need welfare and food stamps. This is due to the very workings of capitalism and white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in the government and throughout society, and there is a whole history to this.

During the Great Migration (1916-1970), six million African Americans left the South, searching for a better life and a way to escape grinding poverty and exploitation, Jim Crow discrimination and oppression, and KKK terror. They were pulled to cities like Chicago and New York by the demands of growing capitalist industry—where they endured poverty, were given the hardest and lowest paying factory jobs and were segregated into ghettos. Then with automation and factories moving to suburbs and overseas, millions of Black people lost their jobs. Historically, Black unemployment rates have often been twice that of whites.

Government Policies and Poverty

Conscious government policies have intensified poverty, especially among Black people—with “welfare reform” delivered in a white supremacist envelope.

Republicans always had their racist rants about how Black people were taking handouts. Ronald Reagan liked to talk about lazy “welfare queens” eating steak on the government’s dime. When KKK Wizard David Duke was elected as a Louisiana state representative, he declared, “This isn’t a victory for me, it is a victory for those who ... choose to work hard rather than abuse welfare.”

But anyone who thinks the Democrats are any kind of answer to poverty, especially among Black people, should look at their ugly track record of attacks on the poor. Democrats have been just as racist in pushing welfare reform. Bill Clinton, who signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act said, “The current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and family, trapping generation after generation in dependency.” How different was this from Reagan’s attack on poor Black families? The reform imposed work requirements that kicked more than seven million people off public aid by 2001.

This is the same Clinton who, during his 1992 presidential campaign, in order to show his “tough on crime” stance, went to Arkansas to witness the execution of a brain-damaged Black man. This is the same Bill Clinton who before the Southern primaries, posed for a photo op in front of a chain gang of Black inmates at Stone Mountain, Georgia, second home of the Ku Klux Klan.

Then there was Obama, who attacked poor Black people with poison disguised as “fatherly (patriarchal) concern.” As unemployment and poverty increased, Obama continually chastised Black youth, and Black people generally, blaming them for the oppression they face under this system and telling the youth their problem was they didn’t pull up their pants and take “personal responsibility”! No talk here about the fact that automation and factories going overseas has meant the loss of millions of factory jobs—and what this might have to do with the high unemployment rate among Black youth.

In 1996, nearly 70 percent of poor families received benefits. Now it’s less than 25 percent. Is this because millions found decent jobs and developed the sense of “personal responsibility” and “self-sufficiency” Clinton preached about? NO! This white supremacist system of capitalism is still driving even more Black people into poverty. But the government continues to deny more people government benefits.

What Trump is doing now is the logical extension of all this. Republicans pushing welfare reforms explicitly compare this to what Clinton did and are in fact using his 1996 act as a template to carry out Trump’s plan to impose even stricter work requirements on those receiving benefits. Supposedly this would lead to lots of people “earning their way out of poverty.” In reality it will mean millions of people forced to work for minimum or lower starvation wages or denied aid because they can’t find a job, find affordable childcare, or can’t work because they need to take care of a disabled family member.

The Actual TRUTH About Poverty in the USA

1. There are actually MORE people living in poverty today than 50 years ago. In 1973, there were 23 million people living in poverty (11 percent of the population). In 2016, the poverty rate went slightly down, but given population growth, the actual number of people living in poverty was almost double what it was in 1973, at over 40 million (based on U.S. Census data and government poverty guidelines). Added to this are 100 million people living in “near-poverty,” where the loss of a job, illness, or a family emergency throws you into poverty.

In this supposedly “greatest country in the world,” tens of millions live in a situation as one poor person described: “Poverty is ... a constant state of insecurity ... choosing between food and electricity ... losing your teeth, because you can’t afford routine care ... moving in the middle of the night, from an apartment, when you can’t afford your rent ... is exhaustion, in every way ... and yes, poverty is being hungry.” And millions more are one step away from this.

2. Poverty is intensifying. The government defines “deep poverty” as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. In 1975 about a third of those living in poverty lived in “deep poverty.” Today almost half of those in poverty face “deep poverty”—about 18.5 million people.

In 2017, the homeless population in the U.S. grew for the first time since the Great Recession (2000s and early 2010s). On a given night, there are over 500,000 homeless people. Women with kids living in cars, trying to keep warm. People with mental illness and no medical care, riding the subway trains to get out of the freezing cold or extreme heat. Desperately poor men and women, working at shit-paying jobs and going “home” to sleep in the streets, because they’re still unable to afford any kind of rent.

3. Black, Latino, and Native American people face more and deeper poverty. A larger percentage of Black and Latino children live in poverty: In 1976, just over half of all children in poverty were Black or Latino. Today, almost two-thirds of children in poverty are Black and Latino. Native American, African American, and Latino children continue to face the highest poverty rates—about one-third live in poverty. Native American and African American children are three times more likely to be in poverty than white children. Black and Latino children experience hunger at double the rate of white children.
4. Millions of children live in poverty and go to bed hungry. Nearly a quarter of children in rural areas and 20 percent in urban areas live in poverty. The highest concentrations of child poverty overall are in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, and on Native American reservations.

One in six children, over 16 million, go to bed and to school hungry—living in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. Nearly half of all food stamp recipients are children.

One woman talked about how people get worried the government will say they are unfit parents and take their kids away because they cannot provide enough food for the family. She said, “You have to make sure to maintain a roof over their head, you have to make sure bills are paid, and sometimes to buy food, you have to buy food that’s not healthy. So by the end of the month, you’re running low, because you just don’t have the money to maintain the whole month.”

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In this so-called “greatest country in the world” people have no right to not live in poverty—no right to decent shelter, medical care, and food. Bob Avakian has pointed out:

One example that I’ve cited before...is the question of the “right to eat.” Or why, in reality, under this system, there is not a “right to eat.” Now, people can proclaim the “right to eat,” but there is no such right with the workings of this system. You cannot actually implement that as a right, given the dynamics of capitalism and the way in which, as we’ve seen illustrated very dramatically of late, it creates unemployment. It creates and maintains massive impoverishment. (To a certain extent, even while there is significant poverty in the imperialist countries, that is to some degree offset and masked by the extent of parasitism there; imperialism “feeds off” the extreme exploitation of people in the Third World in particular, and some of the “spoils” from this “filter down” in significant ways to the middle strata especially. But, if you look at the world as a whole, capitalism creates and maintains tremendous impoverishment.)

Many, many people cannot find enough to eat and cannot eat in a way that enables them to be healthy—and in general they cannot maintain conditions that enable them to be healthy. So even right down to something as basic as “the right to eat”—people don’t have that right under capitalism. If you were to declare it as a right, and people were to act on this and simply started going to where the food is sold as commodities and declaring “we have a more fundamental right than your right to distribute things as commodities and to accumulate capital—we have a right to eat”—and if they started taking the food, well then we know what would happen, and what has happened whenever people do this: “looters, shoot them down in the street.”

—BAsics 1:20

The U.S. presides over and is at the top of the food chain of a worldwide imperialist system. This capitalist-imperialist system, based on profit above all, means starvation, impoverished living conditions, child slavery... and more—all over the world. And here in the belly of the beast, it means tens of millions living in demeaning poverty.

Poverty and hunger are absolutely unnecessary. There is already enough food being produced to provide everyone on the planet with a healthy diet. There are enough resources for people to have decent living conditions. But the only reason people go hungry and die of starvation, the only reason so many live in poverty is because of this capitalist mode of production, the way the necessities of life and everything else are produced and distributed.

To get rid of poverty WITHOUT maintaining and replicating exploitative relations—both worldwide and in the United States, including the oppression of Black people—will take nothing short of a ACTUAL revolution that overthrows this system of capitalism-imperialism, and brings into being a radically different and far better system and society. This is represented by the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (CNSRNA), authored by Bob Avakian, a visionary and concrete blueprint for a whole new society with the goal of emancipating humanity worldwide.

As a principle and application of internationalism, for the foundation of the economy, the CNSRNA states, “The structure of production and the resource base of the socialist economy cannot depend on labor and materials from other countries—much less exploitation and domination.”

This is part of an overall process of a whole different economic and political system aimed at getting rid of all exploitation, oppression and antagonistic social divisions, in the U.S. and throughout the world. As the CNSRNA says: “The development of the socialist economy has as its source and relies upon the initiative and work, intellectual as well as physical, of the masses of people, of the members of society broadly, in conditions which are increasingly freed from relations of exploitation, and with the aim of overcoming all vestiges and aspects of such relations, and the effects of such relations, not only in this society but everywhere on the earth.” (p. 19)

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Resources:

“Declaring War on Poverty ‘Largely Over,’ White House Urges Work Requirements for Aid, New York Times, July 12, 2018

“One in nine U.S. workers are paid wages that can leave them in poverty, even when working full time,” Economic Snapshot by David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute, June 15, 2018

“The rise in child poverty reveals racial inequality, more than a failed War on Poverty,” Economic Snapshot by Valerie Wilson and Jessica Schieder, Economic Policy Institute, June 8, 2018

“One-third of Native American and African American children are (still) in poverty,” Economic Snapshot by Janelle Jones, Economic Policy Institute, September 20, 2017

Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016, Jessica L. Semega, Kayla R. Fontenot, and Melissa A. Kollar; U.S. Census Bureau, September 12, 2017

“MLK tackled many issues in his lifetime. Where are we now?,” Russell Contreras, Associated Press, April 1, 2018

“Report: Rural Poverty In America Is ‘An Emergency’,” Brakkton Booker, NPR, May 31, 2018

Hunger a Harsh Reality for 14 Million Children Nationwide, Annie E. Casey Foundation, April 2, 2018

“New Census Bureau Statistics Show How Young Adults Today Compare With Previous Generations in Neighborhoods Nationwide,” U.S. Census Bureau, December 04, 2014

“America’s homeless population rises for the first time since the Great Recession,” Guardian, December 6, 2017.

“The State of Homelessness in America,” National Alliance to End Homelessness

“What happens when a family runs out of food stamps” Emily Badger, Washington Post, December 9, 2015

The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, Jill Quadagno, Oxford University Press, 1994

“Deadbeat Democrats, How Bill Clinton set the stage for the GOP’s war on the poor,” Bryce Covert, New Republic, September 21, 2017

“Going to school hungry: A child and his mom tell their story,” Valerie Strauss, Washington Post, October 14, 2013

“What Poor Feels Like,” Shaunta Grimes, Huffington Post , March 15, 2017