Vietnam and Meat in the Sandwich

...The present $1.25 does not even assure the $3,000 national poverty income level...

...6. Much of the poverty program to date is little more than a beefing up of previous services, but one of the few real and welcome innovations was Community Action...

...5. One of the most promising programs launched by President Johnson was the elevation to cabinet level of the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...This indication that Vietnam will not be allowed to interfere with the essential improvement of the life of America's neediest, comes to hardly more than the cost of a lunar probe and far less than the cost of developing the proposed mach 3 commercial airliner...

...General Motors earned $2.1 billion in profits...

...Yet none of this can make the reality of the ghetto vanish...

...and all the transit workers in New York collectively won a few million increase or a few bucks for each man, which was assailed as exceeding the 3.2 formula...

...Militants have, on the whole, remained aloof, which has not helped either...

...4. The whole matter of how poverty is defined is not viewed with a fresh eye...

...And military appropriations of $50 or more billion a year for more than a decade have certainly kept destructive capacity well above the overkill level...

...Social dynamite continues to ac cumulate in the ghettos...

...The Negro Revolution has given it an ex plosive edge but the battle to end it has only begun...

...Between the clear call of the State of the Union message and the budget presented a week later, the total alloted for this purpose is $2.3 billions to be spread over six years, and for fiscal 1967$ 5,000,000...

...It is instructive to compare the methodology and objectives of the Freedom Budget with the Administration's social program for the alleviation of poverty...

...It not only estimates what it would cost but demonstrates where the money could come from...

...At least two recent precedents come to mind...

...It is true that there are many more white poor than black, but make no mistake, the fortunes of the War on Poverty depends on what happens to the ghettos...

...But they were to be counted in, and this sanction had a potential that could have been far-reaching...

...None of the messages, documents, and pronouncements emanating from the White House takes cognizance of this corruption of a program that presumably meant much to the Administration...

...This is a country where corporate retained earnings rose by a fantastic 29 per cent in a single year—last year, and where every index and fact around us proclaims that we are in the midst of unimagined abundance...

...Poverty at this stage of Ameri can history has become more expensive to maintain than to eliminate...

...Johnson is delighted with the decrease of unemployment last year among Negroes and generally, but we do not know how much of this is due to the stepped-up draft, which is taking a disproportionate share of poor youth for the simple reason that they are not eligible for student deferments...

...The fact that the Administration has recommitted itself to programs of social change means that the last word has not been said...

...But the scale, the seriousness of the commitment—these are in doubt...

...An increase of 3.2 per cent over $1.25 will also miss reaching the poverty line...

...There is little comfort in the President's assurance that unemployment is down to 4 per cent...

...For the President was no less ambiguous in declaring that Vietnam "must be the center of our concerns...

...It is difficult to see how poverty can be seriously attacked without an increase in the minimum wage to at least $2.00 an hour...

...1. Their encyclopedic spread tends to diffuse the national purpose and resources...

...Surely it will grow...

...Obviously poverty cannot be equated with a trip to the moon or road construction, but is it not time to approach the problem on a similar scale and with similar commitment...

...There is lots of movement, innovation, action in the program...

...New tactics, new strategies will have to be devised...

...Since what is left in this super-abundant economy is considerable, there will be money to carry on with reforms already set in motion, and to add a few new ones...

...The Freedom Budget tentatively projects outlays of the range of $40 billion...

...Vietnam has already deflected many of the energies of the Movement and divided it...

...Far-fetched, visionary, impractical beyond the means...

...It has changed the politi cal mood of the country, and prac tically monopolizes the mind of the national political leadership from the President on down...

...How does it all add up...

...It remains twice that among Negroes generally, and three to four times that among Negro youth...

...Politically this makes everything elusive for the President's critics...

...Early in the decade, when Kennedy set the target of landing a man on the moon by 1970, an expenditure of 20 billion dollars was projected and the ultimate cost, we may be sure, will exceed that...

...This is for central Harlem, not all of it...

...It is disappointing because it was Mr...

...But meanwhile there is really no hold on profits...

...One of the features of the "line" is that large numbers of people hover about it...

...But to bring people up to this level is hardly to remove them from the edge of the abyss...

...Johnson's idea, presented dramatically at the Howard University commencement last June...

...The bulk of the so-called Great Society programs are not concerned with poverty...

...There is no indication in the Presidential pronouncements that the whole notion of a $3,000 boundary which supposedly separates those who are poor from those who are not is being seriously questioned inside government and out...

...Community Action for the first time recognized that among the many faces of poverty was helplessness, dependence, powerlessness, lack of access to authority, and that at least part of the remedy lay in involving the poor in their own salvation...

...each year some moving over it and next year falling below again, for the simple reason that a $3000 income does not allow anyone to make a decisive break with his conditions...

...the implementation much less impressive...

...Nothing in the Johnson program is geared to reverse this trend...

...This is not today a country tightening its belt...

...3. Another glaring omission in the Johnson program is the absence of any proposal to raise the minimum wage...

...Granted this is only a start...

...For the first time a president had stepped beyond the legal bounds of government responsibility and proclaimed that the Administration would make it a matter of national policy to explore the means by which the Negro's accumulations of disabilities could finally be lifted...

...And, in fact $14,168,000,000 went for new roads in 1965—more than for the entire War on Poverty, Federal aid to education, and the entire foreign aid bill...

...The Johnson budget proposes to increase all the Great Society allocations by $2.7 billions in the next fiscal year, of which funds earmarked for the whole gamut of War on Poverty operations is to rise from $1.2 billions to $1.7 billions...

...and it would be frightful to countenance that necessity for so dismal an object as the Vietnam war...

...The inequity is too obvious...

...Still, seven per cent of the Gross National Product is devoted to goods and services in the military budget...

...But as everyone knows, Community Action, while it has not yet come a-cropper, is terribly sick...

...It's a grab bag and the danger in any grab bag is that those with the longest reach get away with the biggest prize...

...There are reported to be more jobless in Watts today than when it exploded...

...City Halls across the country, abetted sometimes innocently by what Saul Alinsky calls the social work industry, and sometimes by politicians and leaders of the Negro Establishment— these forces have combined to reduce what might have been a democratizing lever in the slums into another pork barrel...

...Thus far its reactions have been positively supine with respect to the systematic subversion of Community Action...

...But a preparatory meeting was held at the White House, out of which came not the Moynihan report, but an entirely new and revolutionary concept, the Freedom Budget...

...How then are we to evaluate the Administration's non-military proposals...

...They still have no place to go...

...As the Economic Report notes, "production for Vietnam accounts for less than one and one half per cent of our GNP...

...These are as essential to breaking the poverty cycle as the amount of annual earnings...

...Whatever one feels about the place of the automobile in American life, the point is that even during the political void of the Eisenhower era, a national problem was taken in hand and the money for it built into the Federal budget...

...A. Philip Randolph's remarks on the Freedom Budget idea appear elsewhere in this issue...

...It was a promising declaration...

...Whatever one's feelings about spending this much money for such a purpose, one cannot deny the boldness of the idea...

...Apart from the Republican nean derthals, no one can seriously entertain the siphoning of the annual economic increment into the Vietnam War...

...indeed, LBJ seems ready to abscond with the JFK trademark—"vigor...

...Indeed, the sections of presidential papers dealing with wages are concerned almost exclusively with holding the line at the 3.2 maximum allowable annual increase...

...However valuable the Administration's assertion may be in principle, the gap between rhetoric and proposals is very wide...

...and not for the half dozen other Harlems in the New York area, or the thousands of Har lems blighting the urban landscape...

...How different in scope and imagination from the piecemeal, fragmented, allocations of the Administration budget...

...The Great Society, the War on Poverty, and all the rest, will just have to get along on what is left...

...It is questionable whether it will survive at all...

...Besides, the Administration has linked wages and prices in a tight equation, and proposes to hold the line on both...

...The scale of appropriations projected by the Administration for social change has to be measured, after all, against a $725 billion economy that is growing at the rate of $47-50 billions a year...

...It makes a long range commitment to the elimination of the entire poverty syndrome...

...and that is a little qualification that concerns bread, and if not bread then what to put on it, for millions of people...

...But we are less cheered by what is disclosed in a critical scrutiny of practical commitments...

...The New York Times accurately calls it "one of the smallest items in the budget...

...The economy, as it presently functions, works in that direction anyway...

...Johnson proclaims a 29 per cent increase in a single year as a credit to his economic policy...

...Unfortunately, the poverty programs have yet to recognize the importance of job security, permanent employment, assurance of moving ahead both in income and function...

...The Freedom Budget could well become the new rallying cry, one that for the first time might bring the Civil Rights Movement into the ghettos...

...The War on Poverty is one phase, and in terms of funds, a small phase, of the many facets of national change inherited from the dormant Eisenhower years...

...Nothing as yet proposed by the Administration even begins to come to grips with this problem...

...But "between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow...

...but it also obscures and minimizes the depth and quality of the social change required to root out institutionalized exclusions and deprivations, the complex social and economic network which bars the poor from the blessings of plenty...

...An even more spectacular example was the presentation to Congress of President Eisenhower's plan to construct a national Inter-State Highway System of 41,000 miles of roads at a cost of 100 billion dollars over a period of years which was subsequently adopted as a 41 billion dollar program...

...His assertion that "we will not permit" Vietnam to deflect from "prosecuting with vigor and determination our war on poverty" keeps Negro rights and the Great Society programs on the public agenda...

...It reflected the reality of community action stimulated by the Civil Rights Movement...

...Unfortunately, it got bogged down in the Moynihan report even before it convened...

...But how far can one get with a pittance toward the starting line of "rebuilding completely on a scale never before attempted, entire central and slum areas of our cities...

...the poor were hardly to be handed control of large sums or to have the power to determine what should be done for them...

...But there is precious Iittle focus, no clear scale of priorities...

...Innumerable studies demonstrate that while the poor may not be getting poorer in absolute terms, the discrepancy between their living standards and that enjoyed by the great majority is widening...

...Never clearly defined, too quickly strapped into tight institutional molds, it is nevertheless an advance over previous approaches...

...Nowhere does the President indicate any awareness of this radically exciting approach to the problem he defined...

...This is not the place to discuss the formula itself which is arbitrary, inimical to collective bargaining, and not blended to specific needs...

...2. More specifically, there is a disappointing omission of any reference to the forthcoming White House conference which will convene under presidential auspices to evolve proposals that go beyond the securing of legal rights and begin to tackle the basic social, economic and educational problems of the Negro...

...One example: Herbert Bienstock, New York Regional Director for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in a paper on "The Facts of Poverty in New York City," estimates that in 1959 it took $5,970 for a family of four to survive at "level of adequate living," which is defined as providing 'according to prevailing standards, what is needed for health, efficiency, the nurture of children and for participation in social and community activities, as 'modest but adequate.' " Ironically, he notes that this budget has not been repriced since—that is, since the War on Poverty was proclaimed...

...The Freedom Budget takes a total approach...

...The living is still mighty easy and high—for many, but not for all...

...Should not this become the measuring rod by which we gauge the War on Poverty...

...Since the Elizabethan Poor Laws and before, such aid has been paternalistic on the implicit assumption that to be poor was also to be incompetent...

...Promising that is, in terms of the definition of its scope to rebuild entire core areas of our cities containing "in some cases as many as 100,000 people...

...The $3000 poverty line has become too quickly institutionalized as the national barometer...

...The majority of the beneficiaries of the Great Society programs will not be the underclass of 35 million poor, but the middle and upper classes...

...It is useful that the President, in his State of the Union and subsequent messages, acknowledged that the war in Vietnam could not be used to submerge every social requirement...

...This should not be overstated...

...More fundamentally what is lacking is the establishment of national responsibility to assure jobs for all...

...When former Borough President of Manhattan, Constance Baker Motley, had prepared a plan to reconstruct the core of central Harlem, she carefully refrained from pricing it, but several of those involved have indicated informally that it would run into the hundreds of millions and possibly a billion dollars...