This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, there had been rich American presidents before, but never a billionaire. And it wasn't a mistake either that this country already in a nosedive of inequality elected Donald Trump president in 2016 (though who knows how much he's really worth). Nor was it a mistake that he and the Republican Congress that arrived with him moved decisively in an all-too-striking, if expectable, direction. They passed a staggering tax cut that mainly benefited the richest Americans (including you-know-who), slashed the corporate tax rate, and, in the long run, added an estimated $1.9 trillion dollars to the U.S. deficit. Consider that a trickle-down bonanza for the wealthy that simply never trickled down.
We are, of course, in the age of the billionaire, both globally and in the United States. Their numbers jumped by 30% across the planet in just the first year-plus of the pandemic. It's no small indicator of our moment that, while so many Americans have suffered and more than a million extra of us have died during the pandemic years, this country's billionaires had the time of their lives. They made money hand over fist, even taking it into space with them. Their wealth rose by an estimated 62% or $1.8 trillion between March 2020 and August 2021, as inequality in the United States grew.
Meanwhile, as TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign Liz Theoharis makes clear today, poor Americans suffered terribly in that same period (and were only blamed for it). Just the other day, for instance, the news came in that another 3.7 million children yes, you read that figure right! fell into poverty this January as Congress refused to renew the Child Tax Credit. Give Joe Manchin and all those Trumpist Republicans a little credit for that and then let Theoharis fill you in on our country's ongoing crisis and why those who are going to suffer the most from it will be blamed the most for it, too. Tom
Joe Manchin's America
The Resurgence of the Culture-of-Poverty Debate
As if killing the Child Tax Credit, blocking voting rights, gutting key climate legislation, and refusing living wages wasn't enough, West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is now promoting legislation that further punishes the poor and marginalized. Along with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, he's introduced the PIPES Act, which undercuts key harm-reduction funding from the Department of Health and Human Services. It arrives with a media campaign launched by Fox News and other conservative outlets pushing bogus claims that the Biden administration is using government funds to buy "crack pipes," tapping into a decades-long campaign to scapegoat vulnerable populations rather than address the root causes of the unconscionable conditions under which they live.
Paired with Manchin's moralizing and obstruction when it comes to President Biden's Build Back Better Bill because he "cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality," his new legislation is more evidence that he privileges rich donors over actual constituents in West Virginia and is truly willing to punish the poor. He's claimed that families in his state would use money from the Child Tax Credit to buy drugs, that work requirements rather than more resources will lift poor kids out of poverty, and that, as the Huffington Post reported, "Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips."
All of this represents a painful return to the "culture of poverty" debates of the 1960s. Indeed, despite being discredited by scholars and poverty experts over and over since its invention, such anti-poor propaganda seems to rear its head whenever popular opinion and public action might actually lead to improvements in the lives of poor and low-income people.
The Culture of Poverty
American anthropologist Oscar Lewis first suggested there was a culture of poverty in the mid-1960s, an idea quickly championed by the political right. Republican administrations from President Ronald Reagan on, buttressed by right-wing groups like the Moral Majority, claimed that the true origins of poverty lay in immoral personal choices and ways of life that led to broken families and terrible life decisions.
Such ideas were particularly appealing to politicians and the wealthy since they identified the causes of poverty not as a problem of society at large, but of the poor themselves. It was, as they saw it, one that lay deep in an "autonomous subculture [that] exists among the poor, one that is self-perpetuating and self-defeating." To encourage such thinking, they invented and endlessly publicized hyper-racialized caricatures of the poor like the "welfare queen," while pushing the idea that poor people were lazy, crazy, and stupid. Then they criminalized poverty, while cutting government programs like welfare and public housing legislative acts guaranteed to harm millions of Americans across multiple generations.
This culture-of-poverty debate and the legislative action to uphold it have become deeply ingrained in this country and not just among conservatives. In 1996, after all, it was the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton that ended "welfare as we know it," its officials having armed themselves with tales about the backwardness of the poor and their need to finally take "personal responsibility" for their lives.
A neoliberal approach to governing has had a hold on significant parts of both parties ever since, while structural poverty and inequality have only deepened. The poor have been pathologized so effectively that culture-of-poverty distortions have even made their way into more progressive media and scholarly accounts of their lives. There, too, poor people are often depicted as incapable of analyzing their own situations or understanding the dilemmas they face, let alone engaging in the sort of strategic thinking that might begin to overcome inequality.
Even, for example, those heralded scholars of poor people's movements, Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, argued that the history of organizing the poor did not originate among the poor themselves. Instead, they suggested that, in the twentieth century, such organizing efforts were "largely stimulated by the federal government through its Great Society programs" and through anti-poverty agencies, civil-rights activists, and student groups. What such a perspective cut out were the struggles of poor and low-income organizers like Johnnie Tillmon of Arkansas and Annie Smart of Louisiana, both poor mothers and important initiators of the welfare rights movement, as well as other twentieth-century campaigns led by the poor to lift the load of poverty.
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