Disgusted, worn out, and dismayed

kactus's picture
words by kactus posted September 11, 2005 - 2:11pm

One of the main things I keep reading and hearing since Katrina is how suddenly America has had to confront the fact of poverty. Excuse me? Where has everybody been the last 229+ years? I'm simply amazed, disgusted, and shocked that so many liberal bloggers are amazed, disgusted and shocked by the reality of the poor in their midst.

What the fuck? And now, this morning, I get to read on my favorite blog that one of Clinton's big successes was the welfare reform act, and how he got so many people off the rolls and "gave them dignity."

Dignity means nothing if you are off welfare but still can't feed your family. Dignity means nothing when your children spend more time in daycare than they do with you, their own mother. Dignity means shit when you've been sanctioned and the landlord evicts you. In Milwaukee dignity translates into increased infant mortality rates among African American children, overcrowded shelters, overworked and underpaid/unpaid mothers, and children who are being raised by daycares.

I'm sorry, but I'm royally pissed at having to explain over and over to the clueless coddled class that poverty exists, probably even as close as right around the corner from them, but they simply find it easier to not notice or mention it. How can liberal bloggers who live in DC, which has an ENORMOUS amount of poor people, pretend to amazement that there are poor people in New Orleans? Everytime I've gone to DC I've had to step over more homeless people sleeping on the streets than I've ever seen in my life. You don't have to watch the news to see the "wretched refuse"--all you have to do is open your eyes and walk down the street.

Nothing really about Hurricane Katrina surprised me. That the displaced and dying and dead were 99.9% poor was no shock. That the right-wing is blaming them for their predicament is old news.

I think one of the reasons for the invisibility of the poor in America is not just because it's so depressing to think about poverty, ick, let's talk about something different, okay? A good amount of it has to do with the fact that the poor have been silenced into being almost nothing but an afterthought. Middle class intellectuals write books and give speeches about the poor, and make money doing it. Politicos and pundits hold conferences asking what to do about poverty, but they exclude the real poverty experts from planning any of it.

Where are the voices of poor and disaffected people in America? Here and there you hear them, but too often they are ignored. Maybe the grammar isn't correct (ebonics, anybody?) or the syntax is different, or the person is just too angry about her plight. Better shut her up. Let the "professionals" speak for the poor--they do a much more palatable job of it.

I swear, if I hear one more lament about "the poor, the poor, oh my goodness there are really poor people here in America!" I'm going to scream. Because we're here, we've always been here, and we're obviously not going away. Take off your blinders, folks. It's time to get real.


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The incubation of economic equality
Comment by dblhelix posted September 12, 2005 - 2:04am

How can liberal bloggers who live in DC, which has an ENORMOUS amount of poor people, pretend to amazement that there are poor people in New Orleans?

Or Philadelphia, or any urban center in the US.


Middle class intellectuals write books and give speeches about the poor, and make money doing it. Politicos and pundits hold conferences asking what to do about poverty, but they exclude the real poverty experts

This has been my chief disapointment this summer as I looked to progressive/liberal blogs to hear other voices (aside from the ones in my head, of course ;-). The medium is still young and perhaps heavily dominated by a particular mindset. I am uncomfortable passing judgment, so suffice it to say that if anything, both the online musings and events of this summer have served to erode and undermine my "party identification" even more.

I recently noticed a new blogad for an $8 pamphlet on "How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party." While I didn't purchase the pamphlet, I did do a search to find other articles by the author. I quote from an article at bostonreview.net:

The problem that followed from the McGovern campaign was that when people thought about the Democratic Party, the image that came to mind was toxic to Democratic candidates electoral fortunes, especially in the South and parts of Middle America. The image was of people who burned the flag, of homosexuals and feminists traducing the traditional family, of a reflexive disdain for the projection of American power abroad, of tax-and-spend liberals who lectured Middle America about its moral shortcomings. Most damagingly, the reforms of the 1960s and 70s were interpreted as a payoff to uppity blacks. An extreme form of that perception was expressed by the longtime Democratic Party warhorse Harry McPherson, who told The Washington Post after Walter Mondale s 1984 defeat, 'Blacks own the Democratic Party. White Protestant male Democrats are an endangered species.'? A more realistic indictment came from the DLC s Will Marshall. He said of that 1984 election, 'It helped convince me that the national Democratic Party drag was such that good candidates were carrying an albatross around their necks with the words '

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kactus's picture
true that
Comment by kactus posted September 12, 2005 - 11:05am

How can liberal bloggers who live in DC, which has an ENORMOUS amount of poor people, pretend to amazement that there are poor people in New Orleans?

Or Philadelphia, or any urban center in the US.

Absolutely right. Especially here in Milwaukee, where I live on the eastern edge of the central city (the ghetto).

But I was thinking of two bloggers in particular when I wrote that, so DC was the city of choice.

My "dirty little secret" is that I don't think more than 2% of any politicians at any given time, if even that, are really looking out for the citizens' interests. I'm so cynical that things will change--my best hope anymore is to make a difference in my own life and in a few others. That's sad.


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Not how it was pitched - war on the poor
Comment by Maruta posted September 12, 2005 - 6:52am

Let's review how this played out. From Johnson's "War on Poverty" to Reagan's War on the Poor.

Johnson had a War on Poverty with a war on Vietnam that was going nowhere.

Nixon ran on a policy that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Gasoline prices soared in the first embargo. Nixon resigned and Vice President Ford lost to Carter.

The economy was a mess with high oil prices and high interest rates and trouble in the Middle East with "America held hostage" by Iran (Iraq was our big ally at the time).

Reagan came in and said the problems had to do with America not being respected and too much money spent on fighting poverty. He said if the rich got richer, everyone would get richer because the rich would have more money to spend buying stuff. Giving money to the poor only mean everyone got poor.

Reaganomics = rich getting richer makes everyone richer.

In the popular perception to this day, Johnson had tried to get people above the poverty line and wasted tax dollars and impoverished everyone. But I will never forget the right wing rhetoric of the day that slums exist because they are inhabited by "people with slum personalities." (Remember Barbara Bush's comment in Houston? Same thing.)

Although the oil prices were never exactly blamed for high oil costs, it was situational that we could not help the poor with prices up at the pump - and other problems as well.

Anyway, Reagan was going to make things better. How?

Cut taxes.

What has to go? Programs for the poor. This meant more money for the rich. The richer you were, the bigger the cut. How to cut taxes? Cut programs to the poor and under this pressure the poor would find work like "the rest us working stiffs" and with the extra tax money from these cuts, we could spend on other stuff - like higher gas prices.

The national debt skyrocketed with military spending.

The people below the poverty line simply fell off the radar.

In retrospect, people speak with contempt for Johnson's plan to eliminate poverty and blame it for the economic woes. Vietnam was Johnson's doing, but I am not so sure that the oil embargo was.

But somehow we are in a mess, again. Conservative David Brooks said, there currently seems to be a loss in confidence in institutions across the board - and he compares our situation to that in the late 1970's. Brooks says the Democrats, the Press, the Military, and certainly the Administration ALL are equally disrespected.

We also have to remember we have a generation of voters who only know Reagan. Johnson and Kennedy are as far away Woodrow Wilson. They do not remember when the government used to actual do something besides wage war on other nations and snoop on people.

So that was how it was done.

Giving to the poor became voluntary - called faith based initiatives.

Give to the rich became mandatory - called tax relief.

Money could be spent on Reagan's laser beams (Star War) to shoot down enemy missiles, but not on fixing up America.

The Republicans long worried about the poor helping themselves to the public trough. When the rich did it? That was Reaganomics and all would be well.

The New Orleans Disaster proves the myth that Reagan was able to foist and we are finally presented with "the bill."

And irony of ironies, there are those in Congress and elsewhere - some vocal fools and some more clever ones who are keeping their mouths shut - who will try to stiff the American people on the recovery effort... but that's grist for another mill.

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