| Number 93 | November 10, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I apologize to my E-mail subscribers for sending out Nygaard Notes late last week. The publication day is supposed to be Friday, and I know some of you tend to read the Notes over breakfast on Saturday. I wish I could think of a good excuse, but I can only think of lousy ones, so please accept my apologies. Also, I have been remiss in not saying HELLO to all the new subscribers who have come along in the past few weeks. I hope you like the Notes. I am always nervous when people start getting the Notes, thinking that they will read one or two issues and think "OK, now I know what this is all about." Long-time readers know that the subject matter changes a lot, and I go on "jags" on a certain subject for a few weeks, then don't say a word about that subject for a long time. For example, I don't expect to say anything about elections or voting for a long time now, even though I surprised myself by saying much more on the subject recently than I ever have before. Sometimes the Notes is one or two longer-type essays, like this week, sometimes it's 6 or 7 short ones. Sometimes it's aimed at political activists, sometimes it's aimed at those who are not yet active. Sometimes it's more investigative journalism, sometimes it's more theoretical. Sometimes it's more opinion, sometimes it's more fact. Sometimes it's all on a single theme, sometimes it's a bunch of different stuff. Sometimes it's funny (I think) and sometimes it's not too funny at all. So I hope you new subscribers stick with it for a while before you decide if it is "for you" or not. If you're in doubt, just ask me and I will reassure you that it is for everyone. If they only knew... Happy Armistice Day, Nygaard |
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Next week I will give some resources for people to get specific information about the current status of the welfare "reform" struggle around the country. For local people, the best chance to get details on how it works in Minnesota looks to be next Wednesday's "Community Forum and Speak-Out on the Time Limit!" That's this coming Wednesday, November 14th, at 7:00 pm, in Room J of the Sabathani Community Center, 310 E 38th Street (just east of freeway 35W) in Minneapolis. Call 822-8020 for details or if you need child care or a ride. |
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The closest thing we have to any sort of national progressive presence on the radio (or TV) airwaves is Pacifica radio. And the best show that Pacifica distributes – indeed, the best show that anyone distributes – is the daily news show "Democracy Now!: The Exception to the Rulers," hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales. The future of this great show is in doubt, as part of a pattern to "mainstream" the whole of Pacifica. Read on for a brief summary of what is happening and what you can do about it. For several years now, there has been a concerted effort to "mainstream" the programming of the Pacifica Radio Network, with the apparent goal of increasing the listenership by diminishing the "controversial" content that has historically been produced by the (traditionally) fairly-autonomous local Pacifica affiliates. As anyone who reads Nygaard Notes knows, it doesn't take much to be considered "controversial" in today's United States. Historically, Pacifica has built its audience by courageously presenting good journalism with a social conscience. Now, the reactionary elements of the Pacifica board have apparently forsaken that strategy in favor of a bland "one-size-fits-all," mass-market approach. The process is similar to what has happened at National Public Radio over the years, although the loss is much greater since Pacifica has actually had a tradition of promoting social change, something that could never be said about NPR. The reason the board is doing this appears clear: "Credibility" with the powers-that-be. In the words of Michael Albert of Z Magazine,
The Pacifica board has already fired long-time Pacifica National Affairs correspondent Larry Bensky, and forced the departure of bureau chief Dan Coughlin and news anchor Verna Avery Brown from the Pacifica Network News. Resistance to these firings (and other board actions) has included mass protests, strikes, speakouts, and now lawsuits. The board's response is becoming increasingly clear: centralize authority, remove from any position of governance those who seem skeptical, and fire your critics. I am telling readers of Nygaard Notes about this because now we have gotten to the point where the Pacifica "leadership" is threatening the future of their signature program, "Democracy Now!" Pacifica "leadership" has threatened Amy Goodman with termination if she doesn't "tone down" her courageous reporting and in various other ways submit to the will of the mainstreamers on the board. Lots of people feel betrayed by this latest power-grab, including George Reiter, an unpaid programmer at Pacifica station KPFT in Houston, and a physics professor at the University of Houston. The day after attending a demonstration in support of Amy Goodman, Mr. Reiter was informed that his weekly show had been cancelled. I won't attempt to get too much into the details of the situation, but I encourage all of you who are interested in independent media to contact Pacifica and tell them what you think about all of this. For further information, check out the Save Pacifica website at http://www.savepacifica.net or the ZNet site at http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html. Or call the Coalition for a Democratic Pacifica in California (the original Pacifica station was in that state) at 510-594-4000, ext. 202. If you haven't yet tuned in to "Democracy Now!" it can be heard in the Twin Cities every weekday at noon, with replays at 5 am, on KFAI Radio. 90.7 or 106.7 FM on your dial. Local listings for other places around the country can be found on the Democracy Now website at www.pacifica.org/programs/democracy_now (Click on "More DN" and select "Stations") |
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"By all reports, welfare reform is a raging success. And look how quickly it succeeded! The rolls have already been cut in half, and by even more in some states. Everybody is happily and smoothly transitioning from welfare to work. Self-esteem is up and welfare payments are gloriously down. The story is so widely circulated that even some of our so-called ‘progressive' friends believe it. "The problem with this story is that it's not true." So writes Gary Delgado in an article entitled "Racing the Welfare Debate" in the Fall 2000 issue of the excellent quarterly magazine ColorLines. In the coming week or two I plan to give some specific information about what is actually happening with welfare in the United States these days, including telling you about resources and organizations you can look at, contact, and support as we work on this issue. The clock is ticking on welfare recipients in the new era of "five years and out!" and a new movement is emerging that hopes to, at the least, mitigate some of the worst effects of welfare "reform" and, at the best, start moving this country away from it's current war on poor people and toward a war on poverty. This week I will make some broad points about welfare in general, including where it came from, and then we'll go from there. What is "Welfare?" This seems like a simple question, doesn't it? But, as my cousin Lise pointed out during a visit last week, "It's always more complicated than it looks." Let's forget the dictionary's definition of welfare (my 2,129-page dictionary doesn't even have one!) and focus on what I think most people mean when they think of "welfare:" cash assistance provided by the government in which people must be, and remain, under a certain income level to qualify. For many years there were three main pillars in the federal welfare system: Medicaid, dating from the War on Poverty in the 1960s; Food Stamps, dating from the early 1960s; and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). AFDC is the oldest of the three pillars, having been instituted as part of the New Deal in the 1930s, and, according to Susan Schieffer of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, "was designed to aid children and women who had been left destitute by the desertion, death or divorce of fathers and husbands. Because women were not expected to be a part of the labor force when the program was designed, AFDC was intended to serve a small number of children of widows and other unmarried women." In other words, it was an anti-poverty program, born in the Great Depression. Things have certainly changed since then. By the 1960s, when Martin Luther King was calling for a guaranteed annual income and the direct abolition of poverty in America, mainstream America was beginning to rethink the premise of American welfare from the other direction, partly due to the increasing role of women in the workforce. What if the problem of poverty was not the unpredictability and harshness of the cyclical capitalist economy (which was often unable to provide full employment)? What if the problem was really the fault of poor people themselves, who simply were too lazy to work? This idea grew in popularity, fed by racist ideas about the character of "those" people (women and blacks, in the popular mind). Rather than expanding welfare to the levels necessary to really grapple with the social problem of poverty, many Americans began to think of poverty as an individual problem, the solution to which was to be found somewhere in the mysterious psyches of each of the millions of poor people residing in the Land of Plenty. Rather than understanding people's dependence on the government as a rational response to the untrustworthiness of the Free Market, political leaders began to frame popular dependence on the social safety net as a character flaw specific to poor people. As a consequence "The goal of these programs...shifted from reducing poverty to reducing dependency...a subtle, but very important, distinction," according to Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution. By the 1980s President Ronald Reagan could conjure up vivid images of "welfare queens," those mythical black moms driving Cadillacs paid for with their monthly welfare checks, or maybe by selling drugs or turning tricks as prostitutes. Whatever. The important thing was that all straight-thinking Americans should resent "them" and start thinking about how we can keep "them" from taking "our" money. By drawing on the enormous reservoirs of racism, sexism, and classism that characterize the U.S. political culture, the Gipper tapped into a very deep and powerful vein. Yesterday's Extremism is Today's Mainstream Skip ahead to 1995, on the eve of the "end of welfare." Here's what the very influential Heritage Foundation had to say in a paper entitled "Why Congress must Reform Welfare:"
The "bloated" program, AFDC, served about 14 million people and took up about one percent of federal spending at the time that report was published. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 eliminated AFDC entirely and replaced it with TANF, or "Temporary Assistance to Needy Families," a system of "block grants" given to each state to get people into the workforce ASAP. Importantly, the new law reflected the culmination of the fundamental change in goals that began in the 1960s, away from the reduction of poverty and toward a reduction of "dependency." In the words of the National Council of La Raza, in a report released a couple of months ago, "The law's primary goal was to lower the welfare rolls; it was not developed with the intent of reducing poverty and placing recipients into more stable employment with greater income potential." The La Raza report, entitled "Welfare Reform, TANF Caseload Changes, and Latinos: A Preliminary Assessment," continues,
Numerous other studies have come to similar conclusions, I might add. This is what Al Gore and other "leaders" are talking about when they talk about "the successes of welfare reform." Next week I'll give some specifics on the new realities of welfare in Clinton's (or Gore's, or Bush's) United States, on the state and national levels, and give some ideas about what we might do to turn this thing around. |