The poor we will always have with us, goddamn them

Forgive me for quoting myself, but:

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

Since the dawn of the Progessive Era, if not earlier, when the Government began to get behind the idea that, quoting myself again:

...there is no heaven on earth and everybody can't have everything, everybody should have something.  Some things.  The things they truly need.

A decent job, a good school to send their kids to, a doctor within reach and whose bill they can pay, a life without fear that they will have to go hungry, or go sick, or go without a home, just because some rich guy finds it useful and profitable that they go hungry, sick, homeless and cold.

Everybody should be able to live without fear, of attack by enemies from outside and within their own neighborhoods and enemies who call themselves their bosses, their landlords, their betters...

[And] Government exists to help people secure those things they need...

it has been the creed of the Conservative Wing of the Republican Party, "Not on my dime, buster!"

Conservative Republicans, of which there are very few left, what we have now are mostly Right Wing Reactionaries, who are even more stubbornly stingy when it comes to making sure the Government doesn't cost them or the people who pay their bills a dime, have been very good at throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery of Progressive government.

They did it to the Progressives at the turn of the last century.  They did it with the New Deal.  As Erik Loomis pointed out in a comment on my post Conservative Folklore:

It's true that the New Deal didn't end the Depression. It did what FDR meant it to do--it gave hope to the American people, it put at least some Americans back to work, it stabilized the economy, it established further government regulation of the economy, and it undercut radical movements becoming overly popular.

But it did not end the Great Depression.

Why?

It simply wasn't big enough. The New Deal spent far too little money to end the Depression. The reason WWII did end the Depression was that the nation spent an amazing amount of money which put people back to work. Had FDR been able to spend the kind of money in the 30s as he could in the 40s, the Depression would have ended almost immediately.

They did it to the Great Society.  They've done it all along.  But as good political Luddites as they've been, they've had to be selective about which gears they jam, or at least very careful about which gears they could afford to be caught jamming.

So over the years programs whose main beneficiaries are the poor have been the primary targets for sabotage.

It's only lately that they've felt bold enough to go after programs that help the middle class.  The poor, though, were and still are their favorite prey.

The Republicans were always the party of the well-to-do even when they were truly the Party of Linclon, but they became the party of the Rich and of Big Business almost before Lincoln was cold in his grave.  After the Civil War they held a fire sale and the Railroads and the bankers bought them out lock, stock, and barrell.

I know there are good-hearted rich folk, kind, decent, generous to a fault; they freely give to charity and they have the common touch; some of them are even Democrats.  But if there's a corrollary to one bad apple not spoiling the barrell, it isn't one good one improves the whole lot to Grade A.

An awful lot of rich people just hate the poor.  And as we saw during the drowning of New Orleans an awful lot more of the rich's hangers-on, toadies, apologists, and political flunkeys in the blog world, on the radio, on the op-ed pages, and in Congress hate the poor even more on their masters and mistresses' behalf.

I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because it's hard to enjoy your seven course meal with all those hungry children's noses pressed up against the window.  Maybe it's because they see the Poor as jinxes, living reminders that your luck can turn in a heartbeat and they don't want to be reminded.  Or maybe it's just a reaction to vistigial twinges from their consciences reminding them of the teachings of the Chrisitianity so many of them so piously profess to believe.

Whatever the reason, they do hate the poor, and the Republican Party, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business Inc. and the coupon-clippers who run them and feed off them, has made a central platform plank out of that hatred.

The Poor can go suff!

Up until recently, though, they've been careful not to let themselves say "Let them in cake!" in public.

Their attacks on programs that help poor people were presented as brave and principled stands against Fraud, Waste, and Dependency and for Thrift, Prudence, and Self-Reliance.

There's no such thing as a free lunch, folks, unless you're flying business class.

Better fifty children go hungry than one imaginary Welfare Queen buys one more imaginary Cadillac.

They haven't been entirely successful.  For a long time they were the minority party.  The best they were able to do was to make the Democrats agree to take stands against Fraud and Waste too.  The idea, phrased benignly, was that only the truly needy---the Deserving Poor---should benefit from the Taxpayers' largesse.

The rules for applying for and collecting benefits were written in ways to make it as humiliating, inconvenient, troublesome, and complicated to apply and collect as possible.  That way, you see, only the most desperate, the truly needy, would bother.

Everybody else could go get a job, dammit!

Nevermind that most people who apply for benefits like Medicare and Food Stamps have jobs, jobs they would have to risk to go stand in long lines for hours to be sneered at, scorned, and lectured at by underpaid, overworked, and therefore highly irritable bureaucrats.

This kind of system, like all systems designed with the idea that money is more important than people, winds up costing more money and encouraging the cheating and wastefulness it was intended to prevent, so in most places where sensible people are in charge, the system has been streamlined and made if not exactly people-friendly at least not outright hostile.

Sensible people aren't in charge in California.

Arnold Schwartzenegger is.

And via Cali Dem at nite swimming I learned this morning that Arnold has vetoed a reform of the state food stamp program that would have made obtaining food stamps less complicated, less humiliating, and less onerous, and therefore more actually helpful to people who need the help.

Comments

[Shakespeare's Sister]

I know this is off topic, but as we all know, Right Wing Reactionaries hate gays at least as much as they hate the poor, and love peddling that hate more than just about anything. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is reintroducing the Federal Marriage Amendment. I've got some action items (they're quick and easy, I promise!) for anyone who wants to register their disgust and dissent. (Sorry for the blogwhore, Lance.)

[Kevin Wolf]

I do enjoy the clarity you bring to these issues, Lance. It really is as plain as that: hate and greed.

[Samuel]

The greatest appeal with blaming the poor for being poor is that you can congratulate yourself on having gotten rich or not being poor. You know when you go about believing you owe your success to no one and that you made it on your own, it follows that you think that those who aren't as successful as you are, deserve the blame for being so. Thats maybe another reason to hate the poor.

Is it just the rich alone who hate the poor. I think the middle class is equally guilty of it too. Again that is shaped by what I saw in India, the ever present cries from the middle class to beautify the city (read demolish the slums and move the poor to some place where the middle class does not have to see them). Ofcourse the rich are right on top bemoaning the wrong image the slums send to the world.

It is not uncommon to see a term like breeding like rabbits thrown around when referring to the urban poor in Mumbai, the financial capital of India.

The poor are a pretty strong voting block in India, something the middle class wails about all the time. And I am guessing that it is no accident that the poor don't seem to have a vote at all here in the USA.

[mrs. norman maine]

Sorry to bring Hollywood into this, but this exchange between Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt has been seared into my brain ever since I saw "A Year of Living Dangerously" about 25 years ago.

*********************************************
Dialogue Between:
Billy Kwan, seasoned freelance photo-journalist based in Jakarta, Indonesia
Guy Hamilton, Journalist, neophyte, foreign correspondent from Australia
 
BILLY: And the people asked him, saying, what shall we do then?
 
GUY: What's that?
 
BILLY: It's from Luke, chapter three, verse ten. What then must we do? Tolstoy asked the same question. He wrote a book with that title. He got so upset about the poverty in Moscow that he went one night into the poorest section and just gave away all his money. You could do that now. Five American dollars would be a fortune to one of these people.
 
GUY: Wouldn't do any good, just be a drop in the ocean.
 
BILLY: Ahh, that's the same conclusion Tolstoy came to. I disagree.
 
GUY: Oh, what's your solution?
 
BILLY: Well, I support the view that you just don't think about the major issues. You do whatever you can about the misery that's in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light. You think that's naive, don't you?
 
GUY: Yep.
 
BILLY: It's alright, most journalists do.
 
***********************************************
"Add your light to the sum of light." Isn't that beautiful?

[cali dem]

Terrific useage of Hollywood, Mrs. Maine. This is what makes this blog one of the best in blogdom. First Lance writes a knockout post and its almost always followed by a thread of comments worthy of the original post.

[Rasselas]

But the poor are often surly and ungrateful. Why should we extend ourselves to aid them when, in many cases, we might unintentionally aid the undeserving?

Or, to read the wrinkles of many a glowering television Republican, not merely the undeserving, but the non-white undeserving?

[coturnix]

"It's not shame being poor....but it's not a great honor either"

Tevye

[Auguste]

The majority of "the poor" work harder - at work, at life, at everything - than the majority of "the rich." That we have allowed the myth of the opposite to gain prominence by focusing on the exceptions to this rule is one of our great failings as a nation.

[Red Tory]

Sadly, the attitude that you’ve described here fits many those so-called conservatives who dearly wish to recreate the “gilded age” in a somewhat modernized incarnation. What is truly puzzling is why this has any appeal whatsoever to those who will be affected adversely by the fiscal policies of this administration. Hardly a novel observation, I know, the whole “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” thing, but it is rather inexplicable that people would sabotage their own best interests. Day by day, it seems that the distinction between the “poor” and “middle class” is diminishing.

[Melynda]

Hey folks,
I recommend the book, 'Beggars in Spain,' for a bit more discussion about the poor and the moral obligations of society. It is a discussion I wish our country would have, but I don't see the posts here as likely to start it. You're so satisfied with your own conclusion that people who disagree with you are evilly motivated (hate and greed).