OCT-NOV 97 - HOME

Welfare Deform

BY LOISE NEVILLE

According to Ernie Graff, Mid-Atlan-tic Director for the Industrial Areas Founda-tion, speaking on listener-sponsored KPFA, Berkeley, the training program for former welfare recipients is not a jobs program per se but a way employers can get low pay workers for two years, pay them as "trainees," then after the two years lay them off and hire new trainees. Graff declares that, as a result, industry has a never-ending supply of low- wage workers as former welfare recipients seek jobs and job training. Little do they know that there is nothing in their contract that says they will be permanently employed after their training program is completed. The AFDC is a bonanza for employers and a farce for welfare workers who find themselves now working for less money than it costs them to live.

Marie Monra, Director of Policy at AFSC in Washington DC, also speaking on KPFA, quoted a New York Times article about temporary agencies in Salt Lake City that expressed delight with the AFDC program because it would keep wages down for all workers at a time when employment was "getting tight" and they were expecting to have to raise wages. And employers get a welfare grant from government to employ welfare recipients during the training program. Welfare workers work alongside regular employees who make a far better wage while doing exactly the same job.

Workers' advocates complain of the degrading conditions and even dangers for welfare workers hired to pick up trash of all sorts, including used hypodermic needles, without the use of gloves and with their lunch bags beside their trash containers. It is believed that this puts their health and safety at risk. Is this what the American public wants to support?

Steve Williams, Director of the General Assistance Rights Union of San Francisco, sees a game of musical chairs in this "Welfare Deform" program, one that pits low income workers against welfare workers, who are pitted against immigrants for the inadequate number of jobs available across our land.

Ah, but corporations are the notorious real U.S. welfare recipients through subsidies of tax money to help them be more "competitive" in the international marketplace. Won't the grants given to these corporations to hire former welfare recipients add greatly to their own welfare money? That suggests that no government money has been saved to aid the U.S. budget balance, but that the money has merely changed hands from needy citizens to cunneedy orporations. A shell game? If so, it serves two purposes: the corporations increase their oligarchic power that already comes close to monarchial, plus a peasant class is created to work for near slave labor financial rewards and is so busy trying to survive that it will have no energy left with which to make trouble for its leaders by practicing "democracy."

Is an enslaved populace the real aim of current government-corporate legislation? A return to the past? The media-government gives us two pictures, according to its purposes. One moment, U.S. rich and powerful, runs the world. The next moment, the U.S. is so impoverished it cannot afford to support its own citizens or repair the infrastructure of its own nation. Which picture is true?

It may be that Americans should stop getting their opinions from either the corporate media or corporate-controlled Washington, D.C. and start assessing facts and thinking for themselves before it is too late. I say, stop buying the scams and THINK!



Government Experiments
on Civilians

Is it legal for the government to experiment on its citizens without their know-ledge? The answer is yes. A statute was passed in January 1996 that makes it legal for the Department of Defense to spray U.S. civilians with deadly chemical and biological agents.

If in doubt, call your local law library and ask a librarian to read to you: USCA United States Code Annotated Title 50, Chapter 32, Sections 15-20. This information has been corroborated by law students from Cornell and the University of Texas and by Major Joyce Riley of the Texas War Vets in Houston. They say the code reads as follows:

The Department of Defense may conduct tests involving the use of chemical or biological agents on civilian populations. All the statute requires is:
1. The Armed Service Committees of both houses of Congress are notified.
2. The tests may not begin until 30 days after local civilian officials are notified.
No notification of the public is required, and "local" authorities is not defined.

It should come as no surprise that our soldiers were made military guinea pigs when even the taxpayers, whose money supports the U.S. government, can legally be subjected to the same treatment. The Gulf War Syndrome is not being treated. It is being concealed.

Nurse Joyce Riley is only the latest of many informants about the Gulf War Syndrome. For two years or more, both Britism and U.S. Gulf War veterans have been bombarding alternative radio with information, sometimes informing at risk of their own army jobs. Yet mainstream media touched only lightly on the unusual symptoms and the suffering of families who have contacted the disease, called "similar to AIDS," but actually stranger and more intense.

Taxpayers:
Citizen Dumpsters

You are a dumpster, I am a dumpster, we are all dumpsters for corporations, corporate welfare, corporate bills, corporate mistakes. It is we who pay to sustain them; it is we who pay for their costly mistakes. They dump the cost on us.

For example, PG& E and other U.S. utilities companies had heavy investments in nuclear energy and in the old coal-burning plants. They ran up big bills they could not or did not pay, especially with the excessive cost of nuclear energy plants. Why should they pay those billions now when gas burning utilities plants cost a whole lot less? Why should they pay them anyway when YOU and I are here? So they add the overdue bills to our utility bills and let us pay for their mistakes in judgment. Well, why not? We already support our corporations, don't we, with subsidies, corporate welfare to help them with initial costs? We support them to the point that some can afford to sell overseas for less than the cost of producing their products.

Remember the Savings & Loan banks debacle where new liberal laws allowed these S&Ls to gamble and lose on various enterprises, and were encouraged to gift politicians with hundreds of thousands of dollars to each for their election campaigns. When the S&Ls fell, small, stable commercial banks were also closed by the FDC, the federal banking agency, all at a loss to depositors of billions of dollars. More multi-millions were then allocated to the lawyers who were given the cushy job of "cleaning up the mess."

Little attention was given to the fact that commercial banks had for years decried the competition of savings and loan banks that gave customers better terms than they did or the fact that the new laws for S&Ls that weakened them and left them open to assault had been issued by the same Reagan administration that closed them down, or that big banking chains immediately bought up closed banks at bargain prices and added them to their own bank consortiums.

No mention at all was made of the fact that this was all done for the purpose of changing the U.S. banking system into a Eurobank system to match that of the other major world nations.

Did the banks have to pay for their reorganization? Not at all. It was decreed that you, the citizen, should pay for it as part of that "national debt" we citizens did not vote for, did not even know Washington was creating.

The citizen taxpayer was the dumpster into whose pocket all these debts were dumped. One could consider this a new form of "taxation without representation."

When it came time to pay the bills, the government, claiming penury, took the money out of citizens' needs-welfare, and all other programs that aided the citizen "dumpsters," totally ignoring the fact that welfare for corporations-subsidies-accounted for the big U.S. welfare costs. To add insult to injury, these rich "welfare recipients" were taxed little and in many cases paid no taxes at all. In addition to no taxes, due to "loop-holes," the corporations have more than ample representation. For them it is "no taxes, with representation," though we must not overlook that they pay richly for this service with multi-millions of dollars that put our legistators into their jobs-in short, "campaign contributions"-bribes to put through the bills that serve them while doing disservice to us citizen dumpsters.

This is the way democracy works today, the way the game is played. Is it any wonder that "democracies" is the new name for countries that were once called "dictatorships"?

Pundits proclaim that our presidents are also appointed, chosen by corporate powers, granted the funds and media coverage that results, schooled, shined up, and presented to us to vote into office. This is true of both "opponents" for the position, both chosen by the few to represent the many and both with almost the same agenda as a result, and almost the same performance once they are in office.

OCT-NOV 97 -- N.C.Xpress -- Archives -- Electrons to the Editor