POORHOUSE POLITICS

...1 Mobilize demonstrations in local communities across the nation by union members, civil-rights groups, women's groups, human-service workers, students, and sympathetic religious groups...

...Most women on welfare are not passive or dependent, although we might well expect that pauper-level benefits, coupled with harassment by welfare-agency staff and denunciations by politicians, are bad for morale...

...The Personal Responsibility Act would deny any aid whatsoever to families headed by young mothers—those under eighteen years of age or, at state option, under twenty-one—and to those who cannot officially establish paternity...

...Even tiny percentages produce a few smiling and successful women for the TV talk shows...

...The work argument doesn't make much sense, either...

...Franklin Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, helped focus the nation's attention on broad, economic conditions that were transforming American life...

...Most people don't support Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but they also think the government spends too little, not too much, on poor kids...

...The Personal Responsibility Act is being considered by the new Congress, and when the first 100 days are up in April, the Act may well be law, and the programs that support low-income people in the United States will be in shreds...

...f Fill the jails by organizing in civil disobedience...

...Most legal immigrants will be denied any kind of aid beyond emergency medical care...

...We do not need endless meetings and committees...

...But Gingrich certainly didn't invent the assault on welfare...

...However, such programs cost big money, and much more than cash assistance...

...Five million heads of families earn close to the minimum wage, which now falls short of the poverty line for a family of three...

...And most people think women with preschool children, or with part-time work, should not be forced to work full time...

...The provisions are chilling...

...Accordingly, Clinton took office with a small horde of social-policy experts in tow, and welfare reform was high on his agenda...

...Welfare sometimes provides an opening— to go back to school or enter a good training program that would be impossible without some assured income...

...Worse, the future is wrenchingly uncertain...

...We are already organized in countless groups and organizations...

...Americans don't like welfare...

...Roosevelt tried one strategy after another, and he used the bully pulpit of the Presidency to make clear the class stakes in New Deal interventions...

...Because they did, they were able to build public support for government programs that would moderate the impact of those changes...

...Neither President Clinton nor the Democrats have had much to say to ease economic anxieties...

...This is almost certainly the result of epochal changes in sexual and family mores, and not the result of the American AFDC program...

...The work is hard and discouraging—whether in the new manufacturing sites like chicken-processing factories, or garbage-recycling plants, or in speeded-up service-sector jobs, where computers monitor keystrokes and bathroom breaks...

...Bill Clinton hit upon "ending welfare as we know it" during the 1992 campaign, when the pollsters reported it was his most popular campaign issue...

...These arguments are by now so familiar that they have worn ruts in our minds...

...The National Organization for Women has been a stalwart defender of women on welfare for some time, but other feminist networks are also beginning to pay attention...

...We may not win this battle, but at least a public confrontation will make clear the historic turn American public policy is taking...

...There are, of course, good reasons why the American public is dissatisfied and anxious...

...Concerned people all over the country must take the initiative...

...All of these proposals would presumably make it possible for mothers to work and earn enough to raise their families above the poverty level...

...And he has used his Presidential soapbox to tell a story about America's travails that points to women on welfare as the source of our troubles...

...And underlying attitudes toward poor mothers are far kinder than the current feeding frenzy suggests...

...What has changed is that marital birth rates have declined...

...The bipartisan coalition against the poor may be overreaching...

...Rather, it's about symbolic politics...

...Some 70 percent last fewer than two years...

...But the Personal Responsibility Act slashes a broad range of supports, not only to welfare mothers, but to poor people generally...

...Moreover, the all-too-familiar view that welfare is the cause of illegitimacy among black women does not stand up...

...But Clinton is reluctant to use the Presidency in this way, since he and other Democrats are so concerned with business investment, bond market stability, and fat-cat campaign contributions...

...And palpable evidence of economic trauma is on the increase, in the form of visible poverty and pathology, of beggars and spreading homeless encampments in all major cities...

...Sending mothers of young children "off to work" makes no sense given current labor-market conditions...

...But no TV host invites the women who couldn't make it in the jobs they got and had to return to welfare...

...The press tends to credit Newt Gingrich with this Nineteenth Century scenario, embodied in the House Republicans' Contract with America...

...The Republican plan presumes that there are jobs out there, adequate to support a family, that are going begging because women prefer the average cash welfare grant of $370 a month...

...The non-marital birth rates of black women have not changed in two decades...

...At first, the Administration's welfare working-group schemes were fuzzy, as the experts talked not only of ending welfare with "two years and off to work," but of big new initiatives in training, job creation, health care, and day care...

...The money thus "saved" would fund a block grant that states could use to establish orphanages, programs to prevent pregnancy, or group homes for teen moms...

...Children raised on welfare, the argument goes, turn into school dropouts and delinquents, and then into welfare users themselves...

...The story works as well as it does because it meshes with our racism and our chauvinism, and our obsessive sexual preoccupations...

...We can all begin mobilizing, separately but in concert, in our local communities: 1 Phone, write, and send petitions to the White House and Congress by the tens of thousands...

...And everyone would face a lifetime limit of five years—or as little as two years if the states so decide—on cash or workfare assistance...

...So, as the dollars mounted, the services and the job-opportunity side of the plan shrank...

...Democrats and Republicans alike have hit upon welfare-bashing as a way to appease an anxious and increasingly angry electorate...

...If we protest for 100 days, maybe we can turn the tide.M Frances Fox Piven is a professor of political science and sociology at the City University of New York and co-author with Richard Cloward of "Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare...

...He only had to modify a script written and rehearsed by the Clinton Administration, and then by Congress, where some twenty welfare "reform" bills were introduced over the past year...

...Furthermore, birth rates, which are about the same for welfare families as other families, are higher in states where benefits are low, and lower in states where benefits are high...

...By election night, Phil Gramm was proudly telling Michael Kinsley on CNN that all means-tested programs should simply be eliminated...

...Most people think children will be hurt by welfare cutoffs...

...Instead, Clinton has opted to pander to the worst strains in American politics...

...In just two decades, as overall wealth increased, most wages fell, and fell steeply...

...1 Organize senior citizens to come to the defense of poor children by picketing against cuts at welfare centers, prenatal clinics, and offices providing nutritional supplements...

...To stay in place, more people are working longer and harder than ever...

...Cultural changes are also contributing to the widespread unease...

...But while out-of-wedlock births are indeed increasing, they are increasing in all strata of the society and not only among welfare recipients or potential recipients...

...The welfare debate is not about policy-making in the sense of rational and informed government plans to solve a problem...

...1 And inform the press of your plans...

...IUse the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to swell the vote of welfare clients in 1996...

...But most poor women take work when they can get it, and when it pays enough to feed their kids...

...They escalated the rhetoric of welfare-bashing, and then began to talk of stripping away the modest services the Democrats had proposed, and slashing cash assistance even more...

...Nevertheless, more than half of all stints on welfare last less than a year...

...And money for these programs would no longer increase to meet increased need...

...The Government would cut food assistance, housing assistance, and all other forms of aid to the impoverished, aged, and disabled...

...For twenty-five years, we have been "solving" the welfare problem with a series of much-heralded welfare-to-work programs, all based on the idea that what welfare mothers need is a little training and a big shove to make it in the job market...

...And once they are self-reliant, those that are raising children will become better mothers as well...

...The programs increase the job success of women by tiny percentages, when they increase job placement at all...

...It was inevitable that the Republicans would try to go Clinton one better...

...If anything, it is increasingly the low-wage job with no mobility that is the trap...

...The concrete results of workfare efforts show the absurdity of this strategy...

...But even during this economic upturn, the labor market is saturated, with eight million officially unemployed, and some twenty-five million part-time and temporary workers, many of whom would prefer full-time work if they could get it...

...It matters greatly how leaders talk to an anxious and confused public...

...Fewer and fewer of these jobs pay health or pension benefits...

...Slashing welfare is a way to seal the low-wage trap...

...If the usual claims for why we need to end welfare as we know it make no sense, then we have to look beyond these claims...

...And once on the dole, these women are trapped, becoming passive and dependent, so that they can't summon the spirit and initiative to get off, much less socialize their children properly...

...Still, all hope is not lost...

...For twenty-five years, we have been discovering that the results of these reforms in various states are trivial or nonexistent...

...Irregular work, a sick child, or the need to escape an abusive male partner lead many women to turn to welfare more than once...

...American welfare practices denigrate people on welfare by keeping them so miserably poor that they are outside the mainstream of American life, by endlessly investigating and disciplining them, stripping them of rights, and even going so far as to criminalize impoverished women with such procedures as fingerprinting...

...This bizarre competition moved AFDC, a relatively small program that costs only about 1 percent of the Federal budget, to the center of American politics...

...Welfare is said to be the cause of a tide of "illegitimacy," and the polemics can get very excited, as when Charles Murray announced in The Wall Street Journal in 1993 that illegitimacy was "the most important social problem of our time," driving poverty, crime, drugs, illiteracy, and homelessness...

...Our welfare policies have gone wrong not because they have coddled the poor, but because they have punished the poor...

...Welfare encourages women to quit school or work and have babies out of wedlock, according to the conventional wisdom...

...Not least, sexual mores are in flux, eroding a world in which the rules for mating and family life were clear...

...Some 60 percent of male wage-earners lost on average more than 20 percent of their pay...

...The Feds will combine food-assistance programs into one block grant and turn it over to the states to run as they see fit, with no guarantee of support for anyone in need...

...The core argument in the rhetorical assault on welfare by Democrats and Republicans alike is that it is a system of perverse incentives, and the source of moral rot that is spreading in American society...

...The solution: Eliminate the perverse incentives...

...Poor women turn to welfare as a lifeline when they have to, and many women work while they are on welfare, to supplement inadequate benefit checks...

...Confronting militantly well-organized Republican opposition, he has borrowed their strategy of invoking cultural anxieties with speeches about family values and individual responsibility...

...They are increasing in all Western countries...

...In the end, the enduring feature of the Clinton proposal was the two-year limit on cash assistance...

...They have a similarly negligible effect on earnings...

...Government interventions to reverse declining wages and widening inequalities are inherently difficult in an international economy...

...And no one invites the mothers who suffer the indignity of being hustled from one foolish work-preparedness scheme to another, and who are sanctioned with slashed benefits if they do not cooperate...

...But all of them are based on myths...

...States would also have to establish work programs for welfare recipients to pay off their benefits at less than the minimum wage—$2.43 an hour on average...

...The most alarming proposals specifically target poor mothers and children on AFDC...

...This can generate a distinctive terror, and these cultural insecurities have helped fuel the rise of Christian fundamentalism...

...Organizations that steered clear of the welfare issue when it was a Clinton initiative have begun to stir, including civil-rights groups and the Children's Defense Fund...

...The signs are that the new Republican majority in Congress may have spurred a real fight...

...Those are the facts, though the talk of wanton women is so inflamed that one has to wonder whether the facts matter...

...But the way out of the Great Depression was uncharted, too...

...Real wages are falling, especially for the unskilled and young, whose pay has been plummeting since the early 1970s...

...1 Enlist clergy to hold funerals to mourn in advance the children who may die from malnutrition or denied health care...

...It's an old story, but it is way off the mark...

...This "tough love" approach will force poor mothers to take jobs and discourage them from having babies in the first place...