Exploited and abused for generations by white colonial powers and manipulative economic structures, there is a growing feeling of solidarity within parts of the African continent, as exemplified by the #NoMore movement. Covid vaccine inequality and environmental injustice, together with recent events in Ethiopia, have galvanized people.
Ideas of African unity and rage against former imperial forces are nothing new; the chain of suppression and exploitation of African nations is long, running from slavery and colonialism (including colonial extraction) to wealth and climate inequality, racial capitalism and now Covid vaccine apartheid.
Despite the fact that many would say Africa was united long before Europe – family to tribe, tribe to nation, nation to continent, with 54 countries spread over a vast area – establishing a defined Union of Africa seems unlikely, if not impossible. Standing in solidarity, rejecting western intervention, challenging the exploitative status quo and reductive notions of development based on a defunct western model is not; indeed, if African nations are to prosper and create vibrant economies allowing its burgeoning young population to fulfill their enormous potential, they must.
Poverty amidst abundance of resources
Blessed with rich environments and vast natural resources, Sub-Saharan Africa should certainly not be poor. But for huge numbers of people across the continent grinding poverty and hardship are the norm.
According to the World Bank reportAccelerating Poverty Reduction in Africa, while those living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90 a day) has fallen in the last twenty years, the number of “poor people [living on $5 a day or less]…has increased from 278 million in 1990 to over 413 million” Over 80% of those living in stifling poverty are found in rural areas where education and health care are scarce.
Natural resources dominate many African economies and, along with agriculture, are central to the livelihoods of the poor rural majority. African natural resources that are owned by multi-national mining companies, dug out of the ground by grossly underpaid local workers, are exported for production in goods that are sold in the rich developed nations. This has been the role of Sub-Saharan Africa for generations, and is fundamental to the prosperity of advanced countries: they need the raw materials and they need them to be dirt cheap.
The handful of conglomerates that dominate, collude in enabling monopoly buying structures. Contracts agreed at national levels are administered by middle-men, often corrupt, in the pockets of the corporation; the local workforce has little choice but to accept whatever ‘terms of employment’ are offered; poverty entraps and silences rebellion.
It is a crippling model of suppression and exploitation; a form of wage slavery that holds not just the workers in its suffocating grip, but the nation and continent. It is one of the main reasons African nations that are overly dependent on raw materials, whether cotton or oil, coffee, diamonds or Cobalt, are poor. Poverty is political, the result of short-term political and economic decisions taken in The West by duplicitous corporate-controlled governments.
The other reasons that ensure Africa remains poor and dependent are historical and economic: Colonization, which persists as economic and cultural imperialism, together with a certain mind-set of superiority/inferiority. A mind-set that maintains consciously or unconsciously that some people (black, brown) are worth less than others and, as Covid vaccine inequities demonstrate, can be sacrificed. The economic structures, global institutions and economic ideologies championed by abusive self-centered governments and promoted in the business schools around the world are all designed to ensure Africa remains poor: Imperialism never ended, it just changed form.
When colonial powers withdrew from the global south they needed new ways of maintaining the enslavement of Africa and Africans. Three interrelated weapons where used to create dependency: Aid, debt and the toxic Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), the overarching umbrella of control.
In the 1980s SAP’s were introduced; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) gave highly conditional loan packages to African nations in order to aid their ‘development’; in fact, the loans/SAPs, which destroyed African economies and agriculture, were simply forms of debt entrapment. Once a country is indebted it becomes easy to control. SAPs hollowed out national economies and incorporated Africa into the global political economic system, dominated by the US. It’s economic warfare: the rich countries set up these unaccountable institutions and systems to control the poor nations.
The IMF, WB, World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), were given enormous political influence/control of African governments and economies. Funding for public services (e.g. education and health care) was slashed to repay loans; countries were forced to ‘liberalize’ their economies, and privatize, selling off key areas like utilities to western or western-backed companies.
In his book Confessions Of An Economic Hitman, John Perkins designates this process of economic terrorism as ‘Predatory Capitalism’: he describes how in an earlier period, during the 1950’s the IMF, CIA and US State Department set up a faceless bank to lend money to African countries that were producing raw materials; any national President that refused the loan was at risk of being handed over to the ‘Jackals’, as Perkins describes the CIA thugs that accompanied him.
At independence, many African countries were self-sufficient in food production and were, in fact, net exporters of food; SAPs and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, changed all that. Countries were forced to withdraw State subsidies to agriculture (while farmers in Europe and the US receive huge subsidies); farmers suffered, food prices increased, food insecurity was created, dependency on aid and Western benefactors ensured and with it control by the US and her puppets, of Africa, its direction and ‘development’, or, as these paranoid selfish states would have it, its non-development.
‘Development as Westernisation’
Within the narrow socio-economic paradigm that dominates global affairs, ‘development’ and perpetual economic ‘growth’ are regarded as all important. Dominated by quarterly national GDP figures, it is a reductive model designed by ‘donor’ nations to serve not the people of Africa or Asia, but western corporations and the unjust, defunct Ideology of Greed, so beloved.
The very idea of development has become synonymous with ‘Westernization’, including the way of life, the values, behavior and attitudes of the rich, ‘successful’ nations of The West: a hollow, deeply materialistic way of life rooted in division, selfishness and conformity that has poisoned and vandalized the natural environment, created unhealthy, unequal societies of anxious suppressed human beings.
In order to develop, economists maintain Africa must industrialise and manufacture – no country has ever ‘developed’ without manufacturing. All this is true, and some African nations, like Ethiopia, which has a vibrant leather industry, are beginning to do just this. But this is only true within the suffocating boundaries of the existing model of extreme capitalism based on unsustainable consumerism.
There must be another way; perhaps as we sit at this transitional time, not just for Africa, but for the world as a whole, the opportunity presents itself to re-design the socio-economic structures, reimagine civilization, and in so doing save the planet. And perhaps Africa, unburdened, energised and dynamic can play a leading role; working with the West, but rejecting the model of conformity and exploitation, the conditionality of support.
The existing development paradigm sits within the overarching political-economic system, a system of global monopolies, centralized control, massive inequality, grinding poverty, financial insecurity and stress. Not only should this model of development be rejected by Africa, and it would be were it not for the Noose of Debt, and the fact that it is presented as the one and only show in town, but the poisonous spring from which it flows – Market Fundamentalism as some call it – must also be radically dismantled.
It may appear impossible to challenge, but there are alternatives to the current unjust political-economic system. And as the environmental and social impact of the Neo-Liberal experiment becomes more apparent, as well as the economic pain of the majority, more and more people around the world, especially within Africa, where the environmental emergency has inspired powerful movements of activism, recognize the urgent need to reject this way of organizing life and are demanding change.
Western powers (dried-up imperial forces) do not want Africa and Africans to flourish and become strong, this is clear to all. Africa’s destiny must rest in the hands of Africans, in particular young Africans (the median age in Africa is around 20, Europe is a greying 43, US a complacent 39), who are increasingly standing up, organizing, particularly in regard to the environment, and calling for change.
But what should that change look like? Not a shadow of Western nations, but a creative evolving movement of development in which the people have a voice; social and environmental responsibility are championed and lasting human happiness sit at its core. Unity is essential, African unity is essential; together, not necessarily under some defined structure, but coordinated cooperation and support through the medium of the African Union and civil society.
The first and most basic step towards establishing a less brutal, more just system would be the equitable distribution of the resources of the world – the water, land and food; the machinery needed to build infrastructure; the skills, knowledge and expertise.
The world is one: We are brothers and sisters of one humanity. And if we are collectively, within Africa and the world, to establish An Alternative Way, this basic fact needs to form the foundation and provide the touchstone of new systems and modes of living. Only then will we begin to build a global society in which the values of unity, compassion, tolerance and sharing, which are found in tribal societies all over Africa, may flourish.f
New data shows that the ending of the popular Child Tax Credit payment program due to objections from conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) has resulted in a massive increase in the childhood poverty rate throughout the U.S.
Reviews of the payments showed that they had immediate and lasting impacts throughout the program’s six-month run. In the first month of payments, around 3 million children were kept out of poverty due to increases in monthly family incomes; by the last month, the number of children being kept out of poverty by the program went up to 3.7 million.
The program also had a remarkable success rate in terms of payments going toward necessities that families had previously struggled to afford. A study by the U.S. Census Bureau found that 91 percent of low-income families spent the monthly benefit on basic needs.
But new research shows the predictable outcome of ending the payment program — that millions of children across the U.S. have slipped back into poverty.
In December, the child poverty rate was 12 percent. In January, it climbed up to 17 percent — meaning that more than one in every six kids in the country are now living in poverty, versus close to one in eight last month.
The rate shows that 3.7 million children are now living in poverty that weren’t in December — the exact number that previous studies, cited above, showed were lifted out of poverty due to the child tax credit payments.
Most Democrats sought to make the tax credit payments permanent, or at the very least, to extend them beyond their December expiration date. But those efforts were dashed after Manchin derided the way the payments were being spent, parroting unverifiable claims that parents were using the payments to buy drugs in spite of evidence showing the payments were being used otherwise.
Manchin said that he wanted payments modified to exclude higher-income families, but his proposal could have lowered the threshold to families earning under $60,000, which is below the living wage for a family of four in nearly every state. Manchin also wanted to institute work requirements for people to receive the payments, a standard that has produced negative outcomes in other social safety net programs.
Critics of Manchin’s proposals said that they would be detrimental to the overall goal of helping children.
“If the point is to lift children out of poverty, then my personal opinion is that we should be designing the credit to do that as effectively as possible, rather than designing it in a way that claims it’s for the purpose of reducing poverty, but ends up being an incentive program for the adults,” said Elena Prager, an associate professor of strategy at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“Means testing doesn’t actually save money,” Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) said in October. “It only makes programs harder to administer, forces people to jump through hoops to get needed benefits and continues cycles of poverty.”
Progressives in Congress cited the report on child poverty that was released this week as reason to reinstate the child tax credit payments.
“How did this happen?” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Twitter, referencing the drastic rise in childhood poverty rates. “50 Republicans and 1 corporate Democrat allowed the $300 a month Child Tax Credit to expire. That is morally obscene.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) also suggested that Manchin was to blame for the rise in child poverty.
“One US Senator ‘heard stories’ about people allegedly using the Child Tax Credit ‘for drugs’ without any evidence or data to back it up,” she said. “He then used that as justification to nuke the entire national program, causing millions of kids to fall into poverty in weeks. Horrifying.”
Women, particularly those in the Third World, often find themselves with limited ability to participate in community organizations and political life because of the bondage poverty and their traditional sex role imposes on them. On them falls sole responsibility to care for their children and other family members, especially when sick; they maintain the home, cook the meals, wash the dishes, the clothes, bathe the children, clean the house, mend the clothes. This labor becomes unending manual labor when households have no electricity (consequently, no lights, no refrigerator, no labor-saving electrical devices), and no running water. The burden of this work impedes the social participation, self-expectations, and education of the female population.
In news that will anger a lot of people, banks look set to give their staff the biggest bonuses since the 2007-08 financial crash. At a time when the rest of us face a huge cost of living crisis, the banks’ actions will probably turn your stomach.
Bankers: laughing all the way to the…
The Guardianreported on bankers’ bonuses and pay. It noted that:
Mergers and acquisitions bankers got fees of £2.6bn in 2021. These bankers advise on company mergers.
HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest are “expected” to say they’re paying out £4bn in bonuses.
3,519 UK bankers earned more than £835,000 in 2021.
NatWest is expected to announce £4bn in profit for 2021 – while the public still own over 50% of it.
Overall, banks profits are expected to be £34bn – the highest since 2007.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are in the shit.
A crisis for the rest of us
As The Canary previously reported, the UK is facing its biggest cost of living crisis in recent years:
2.5 million families are struggling to pay rent and heat their homes.
Energy companies are putting prices up by over £600 a year.
The Tories are hiking national insurance by over 10%.
Over two million people could be destitute – the most extreme form of poverty.
Of course, all this comes after a decade of austerity – one which the bankers caused.
A decade of chaos
Successive governments cut 14% of all public sector spending in the last decade. This hit people reliant on social security particularly hard. Because Tory reform of the Department for Work and Pensions in 2016 led to policies like the:
Benefit cap: £1.62bn cut.
Benefit freeze: £10.2bn cut; 30% of households saw a reduction in money.
Two child limit: £5.35bn cut, affecting 3.8 million families.
“Abolition of £30 a week support for disabled people who were unfit for work (ESA WRAG)”: £1.365bn cut, affecting half a million disabled and sick people.
But clearly, none of this matters to the richest people in the UK. Because while bankers are getting huge bonuses, the Tories also recently gave the banks a tax cut. It shows that shocking inequality still exists in the UK. And it also shows that our country is still one of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
The poorest households are taking another hit to their finances. People could see broadband bills rise by 10% this year. It comes amid the ongoing Tory-enabled cost of living crisis and is yet another blow to households already struggling.
Cost of living: the crisis
The UK is facing its biggest cost of living crisis in recent years. As The Canary has already documented:
2.5 million families are struggling to pay rent and heat their homes.
15% of households live in food insecurity.
4% of households have used a foodbank.
In the coming months, things will get worse:
The Department for Work and Pensions is making a real terms cut to people’s social security.
Energy companies are putting prices up by over £600 a year.
The Tories are hiking national insurance by over 10%.
Over two million people could be destitute – the most extreme form of poverty.
And now, another area of people’s lives is set to become even more unaffordable – potentially impacting many other areas.
Communications: spiralling prices
Ofcom is the communications regulator. It deals with television, radio, internet, and telecommunications. On Tuesday 15 February, it released a report into how affordable communications services are. Ofcom’s findings showed that the price of mobile phones and broadband was also impacting the overall cost of living crisis. As the Guardianreported, Ofcom warned that mobile, telephone, and broadband bills could go up by over 10% this year. Based on an average bill, this would see households facing a yearly rise of just under £40.
This higher than inflation increase comes against a backdrop of people already struggling to keep up with their bills. Ofcom found that:
1.1m households (5%) are struggling with the affordability of their broadband. This included people cancelling services, missing payments, or cutting back on food to pay for it.
1m (4%) households are struggling with the affordability of their smart phone.
Predictably, it was the poorest households and those reliant on social security who struggled the most. Ofcom said that 11% of them were struggling with the affordability of broadband with 3% of low-income households cancelling services because they couldn’t afford them. Moreover, over 1m households (5%) don’t even have home broadband. They rely on mobile data for internet access or other devices. And 7% of this group struggled with these costs.
Social tariffs
Ofcom says part of the solution to broadband being too expensive is social tariffs. As it noted:
Special discounted broadband packages… are available to an estimated 4.2 million households in receipt of Universal Credit.
But only 55,000 homes have taken advantage of these discounted rates so far – just 1.2 per cent of those eligible. That means that millions of benefits recipients are missing out on an average annual broadband saving of £144 each.
Currently there are eight social tariffs available. Some of them are also available to people claiming other types of social security. But the prices and speeds of connection vary:
Ofcom says that 84% of social security claimants don’t even know about social tariffs. This is despite 6.8m households potentially being entitled to them.
Wider implications
Moreover, if people struggle to pay phone and broadband bills and get cut off, this will directly impact on other areas. For example, take the “out-of-work” Universal Credit claimant who Ofcom says spends 8.3% of their disposable income on broadband. They have to manage their social security claim online, so no internet or mobile data would mean chaos.
Historically, if you didn’t have internet access you could visit a library. But with Tory-led austerity closing over 800 libraries as of 2019, this is becoming less of an option. For children, the effect on education has also been stark, highlighted further by the pandemic. As Ofcom wrote:
4% [of children] relied solely on mobile internet access during the pandemic – with 2% only able to get online using a smartphone. School-aged children from the most financially vulnerable homes (5%) were more likely than those in the least financially vulnerable households (2%) to have mobile-only access.
Additionally, around one in five children (17%) did not have consistent access to a suitable device for their online home-learning. This increased to 27% of children from households classed as most financially vulnerable.
And none of this addresses the 3.3 million people in 2020 who had still never even used the internet. This figure includes two million chronically ill and disabled people.
A perfect storm for the poorest people
Struggling to eat, heat, and fuel their homes, the poorest people were already facing social exclusion, financial devastation, and overall socioeconomic hardship. Now, with the added impact of potentially no internet access, the situation for some of the most deprived and marginalised people in the UK is looking even more desperate.
So, community support and cohesion is crucial. We all need to be active in our local areas – offering mutual aid where needed and ensuring as few people as possible fall through the ever increasing cracks in a system collapsing in on itself.
During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels of bread purchased from the nearest baker.
But this winter, for desperate millions of Afghans, the bread isn’t there. The decades-long U.S. assault on Afghanistan’s people has now taken the vengeful form of freezing their shattered, starving country’s assets.
When I was in Afghanistan, our rented spaces, like most homes in the working class area where we lived, lacked central heating, refrigerators, flush toilets, and clean tap water. My Afghan friends lived quite simply, yet they energetically tried to share resources with people who were even less well-off.
They helped impoverished mothers earn a living wage by manufacturing heavy, life-saving blankets and then distributed the blankets in refugee camps where people had no money to buy fuel. They also organized a school for child laborers, working out ways to give the children’s families food rations in compensation for time spent studying rather than working as street vendors in Kabul.
Some of my young friends had conversations with me and with others in our group who had, between 1996 and 2003, traveled to Iraq where we witnessed the consequences of U.S.-led economic sanctions that directly contributed to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi children under the age of five. I remember the young Afghans I told this to shaking their heads, confused. They wondered why any country would want to punish infants and children who couldn’t possibly control a government.
After visiting Afghanistan late last year, Dominik Stillhart, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he felt livid over the collective punishment being imposed on Afghans through the freezing of the country’s assets. Referring to $9.5 billion dollars of Afghan assets presently frozen by the United States, he recently emphasized that economic sanctions “meant to punish those in power in Kabul are instead freezing millions of people across Afghanistan out of the basics they need to survive.” The myopic effort to punish the Taliban by freezing Afghan assets has left the country on the brink of starvation.
These $9.5 billion of frozen assets belong to the Afghan people, including those going without income and farmers who can no longer feed their livestock or cultivate their land. This money belongs to people who are freezing and going hungry, and who are being deprived of education and health care while the Afghan economy collapses under the weight of U.S. sanctions.
Recently, I received an email from a young friend in Kabul:
“Living conditions are very difficult for people who do not have bread to eat and fuel to heat their homes,” the young friend wrote. “A child died from cold in a house near me, and several families came to my house today to help them with money. One of them cried and told me that they had not eaten for forty-eight hours and that their two children were unconscious from the cold and hunger. She had no money to treat and feed them. I wanted to share my heartache with you.”
Forty-eight members of Congress have written to U.S. President Joe Biden calling for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s assets. “By denying international reserves to Afghanistan’s private sector—including more than $7 billion belonging to Afghanistan and deposited at the [U.S.] Federal Reserve—the U.S. government is impacting the general population.”
The Congressmembers added, “We fear, as aid groups do, that maintaining this policy could cause more civilian deaths in the coming year than were lost in twenty years of war.”
For two decades, the United States’ support for puppet regimes in Afghanistan made that country dependent on foreign assistance as though it were on life support. 95% of the population, more than three-quarters of whom are women and children, remained below the poverty line while corruption, mismanagement, embezzlement, waste and fraud benefited numerous warlords, including U.S. military contractors.
After the United States invaded their country and embroiled them in a pointless twenty-year nightmare, what the United States owes the Afghan people is reparations, not starvation.
The eminent human rights advocate and international law professor Richard Falk recently emailed U.S. peace activists encouraging an upcoming February 14 Valentine Day’s initiative, which calls for the unfreezing of Afghan assets, lifting any residual sanctions, and opposing their maintenance. Professor Falk acknowledges that the disastrous U.S. mission in Afghanistan amounted to “twenty years of expensive, bloody, destructive futility that has left the country in a shambles with bleak future prospects.”
“After the experience of the past twenty years,” Falk writes in the email, “it seems time for the Afghans to be allowed to solve their problems without outside interference. I am sure many people of good will tried to help Afghanistan achieve more humane results than were on the agenda of the Taliban, but foreign interference particularly by the United States is not the way to achieve positive state-building goals.”
Several friends and I were able to send a small amount of money to the friend who wrote and shared with us her heartache over being unable to help needy neighbors. “Thank you for hearing our Afghan pain,” she and her spouse responded.
Now is a crucial time to listen and not to look away.
The Conservative Party is once again causing an explosion in destitution. That’s the verdict of a new report. The think tank behind it previously warned that the number of families living in the poorest conditions had already sharply increased. And now, its warning is even more dire. Because government policies from the likes of Rishi Sunak could leave over two million people in the most abject of poverty.
One year ago…
The Canaryreported just under a year ago on the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). It looked into destitution levels in 2020. This is defined as:
a two-adult household living on less than £100 a week and a single-adult household on less than £70 a week after housing costs.
In real-world terms, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says destitution is:
going without the essentials we all need to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean.
In February 2021, NIESR said that destitution in 2020 had more than doubled. It found that the number of households living in this level of poverty had gone up from 197,400 to 421,500. NIESR also found that the amount of destitution was different across the UK. For example, in the North West of England rates were three times higher than the UK figure. And NIESR’s research is against a backdrop of increasing social decay.
Now, NIESR has produced another report. It says that destitution this year is once again going to explode.
“Powering Down”
NIESR released a report called Powering Down, Not Levelling Up. In it, NIESR made various economic forecasts. For example, it:
NIESR also looked at the government’s “levelling up” plan. It said that with no new money, the plan “severely limits the prospect for regional regeneration”. In real terms, NIESR said:
by the end of 2024, poorer regions in the North of England and the devolved nations will on average be some £7,500 worse off in terms of disposable income per person than in London and the South East.
NIESR also forecasts an increase in destitution for the financial year 2022-23. And it was this which was of most concern.
Destitution: set to explode
In short, the think tank said that based on its forecasts and current government policies, the number of destitute households will spiral. It said the:
impact of this inflation in energy and food prices is a 31 per cent rise in destitution, bringing the total number of destitute households to about 1 million.
It’s difficult to quantify how many people this will be. Previously as the Guardiannoted, 2020’s 220,000 rise in destitute households may have equated to around 500,000 people. So, based on that, NIESR’s forecast of one million destitute households could potentially mean over 2.2 million people will be living in the most abject poverty.
NIESR also said that the effects of destitution would be different across the UK. Despite the government’s levelling up agenda, this extreme poverty would hit the West Midlands and North East very hard. But its the North of Ireland that would destitution could hit the hardest:
The government: creating a crisis
The NIESR report paints a bleak picture of the next year. As it summed up:
The costs-of-living crisis is hitting the lowest income households hardest, as they spend a greater proportion of their income on fuel and food, while neither wage growth nor welfare benefits compensate for fast-rising inflation.
It also noted that the impact among the lowest income households would vary. This is because, as NIESR said, government changes to social security and the minimum wage:
benefit a slightly different segment of the population – not the poorest who are without stable jobs and falling through the cracks of the welfare system, but the poor yet slightly better off households who are lucky to retain their jobs.
However, even this small gain for this segment will soon be wiped out by increases in National Insurance contributions
2022-23 will see a perfect storm of destitution – created by the government – hit the poorest people in the UK. The economic and social shock will be huge. But the physical and mental impact of this on people already struggling will be even greater. Community will be everything – and as a community, we need to come together to support each other in the face of the government’s economic and social carnage.
One million Afghan children may die from starvation over the next several months, according to the United Nations. Nearly 23 million Afghans are facing “crisis levels of hunger” and 8.7 million are on the “brink of starvation.” This mass hunger has rendered millions of Afghans on the “verge of death,” according to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Alongside looming mass starvation, Afghans face below-freezing temperatures, severe shortages of life-saving medical supplies, and extreme poverty, making conditions in Afghanistan among the gravest of human rights crises on Earth.
This is not a natural disaster, nor is it the result of conflict internal to Afghanistan. This a human-made humanitarian catastrophe. United States-made, specifically.
The U.S.-allied Afghan government, most recently under the rule of Ashraf Ghani, was heavily dependent on foreign aid. Following the Taliban takeover in mid-August 2021, the Biden administration and the UN Security Council instituted devastating sanctions, sharply reducing foreign aid. The Biden administration froze 9.5 billion dollars’ worth of Afghanistan’s foreign currency reserves, roughly equivalent to 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Journalists Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota recently reported that the White House has “urged European partners and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to similarly starve the nation of capital.” This has led to the total collapse of Afghanistan’s economy, creating “an almost globally unprecedented level of economic shock.” Unemployment has skyrocketed, and the country’s health care infrastructure has been decimated.
As experts have noted, more Afghans are poised to die from U.S. sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and U.S. military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, U.S. establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.
The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the U.S. has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.
In 1990, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports.
These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians. The respected international diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, led the first UN delegation to Iraq shortly after the imposition of sanctions. The delegation reported that, “Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country.” The sanctions had produced “near apocalyptic results.”
Two years later, the World Food Program reported that the continuing sanctions had “virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment, [and] widespread human suffering…. A grave humanitarian tragedy is unfolding.”
The consequences of the sanctions for Iraq’s health care system were dramatic. Journalist Jeremy Scahill extensively covered Iraq under these sanctions and reported that, “Every pediatric hospital felt like a death row for infants.” Highly trained Iraqi doctors had the knowledge to save these infants, but the sanctions blocked them from acquiring basic medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, forcing doctors to reuse syringes multiples times and ultimately watch children die of perfectly treatable ailments. Iraqi hospitals “reeked of gasoline,” Scahill recalled, since desperate doctors were forced to substitute gasoline for sterilizer, disinfectant and bleach.
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday resigned his post in protest of the sanctions after serving as a UN diplomat for more than 30 years. During his resignation, he told the press that, “four thousand to five thousand children are dying unnecessarily every month due to the impact of sanctions because of the breakdown of water and sanitation, inadequate diet and the bad internal health situation.” He went on to label the U.S.-imposed sanctions “genocide.” His successor, German Diplomat Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in protest after fewer than two years, calling the sanctions a “true human tragedy that needs to be ended.”
A report by the UN Commission on Human Rights studying the impact of the sanctions on Iraq estimated the civilian death toll to be in the “range from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children.” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was confronted with this shocking statistic on “60 Minutes,” which led to this now-infamous exchange:
Lesley Stahl: We have heard that half-a-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Madelaine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice. But the price — we think — the price is worth it.
During this era of sanctions, then-Sen. Joe Biden was a member, and eventually chair, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances. The same cannot be said for Samantha Power.
Power is the current head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who was brought into the Biden administration to be a champion of human rights, “lifting up the vulnerable” and “ushering in a new era of human progress and development,” according to Biden’s nomination statement. Power was the founding director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, served as the Obama administration’s UN ambassador, and has a long list of human rights accolades. The nomination of this “human rights crusader,” as Politicoput it, was widely praised in the human rights community. Yet Power’s record on U.S. imposed sanctions — first in scholarship and then practice — is abysmal.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, describes the U.S. response to genocides of the 20th century, arguing that U.S. power should have been used to prevent atrocities and protect civilians. In the chapters surveying the 1990s, Power condemns the Clinton administration’s failure to intervene in Rwanda, intervene soon enough in the Balkans, and use U.S. military force to curb atrocities elsewhere.
Yet the U.S. sanctions regime that caused mass devastation to Iraqi civilians was conspicuously absent — it does not get a single mention in the book. For someone so dedicated to using U.S. power to protect civilians and stop atrocities, Power’s silence on the hundreds of thousands of children dead from U.S. sanctions is telling. Power is unrelenting — and rightfully so — in her condemnation of human rights abuses carried out by other countries. Yet even though the death toll of the U.S.-imposed sanctions rivaled or even exceeded the contemporaneous atrocities and genocides Power depicted in her book, when the U.S. was the perpetrator, she was silent. Unfortunately, her silence on sanctions, and their devastating human consequences, persists.
Power, as administrator of USAID, is now an active participant in the starvation of Afghan civilians. In response to pleas from the UN and humanitarian organizations working in Afghanistan, USAID increased humanitarian aid. But as experts have noted, meagerly increasing aid while imposing devastating sanctions and freezing nearly all of Afghanistan’s foreign assets will do nearly nothing to stop the “unprecedented level of economic shock.” There is near consensus among numerous humanitarian coordinators that the only way to curb the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy and prevent furthering the major humanitarian disaster already underway is to lift the sanctions. Unfortunately, Power, the celebrated defender of human rights, refuses to call for a lifting of the sanctions, and instead remains uncritical.
The devastating human toll of sanctions on Iraqi civilians in the ‘90s is a grim warning for what lies ahead if current U.S. policy continues. The Clinton administration’s sanctions caused mass death and suffering, and the Biden administration is dangerously close to following in their footsteps. The “human rights hawks” who lamented the humanitarian consequences of the fall of Kabul are now silent in the face of U.S.-imposed mass starvation, and the “human rights crusader” within the administration is complicit.
We must listen to the chorus of humanitarian organizations and pressure the Biden administration to immediately lift the sanctions before it is too late. Afghans have suffered at the hands of the U.S. for long enough.
Less than one year ago, the United States government enacted one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in modern history. The Child Tax Credit (CTC), originally established in 1997, was expanded through the American Rescue Plan to provide families with children substantially larger payments, delivered monthly, while making low-income families eligible for the full benefits. This expansion changed the face of child poverty in the United States, lifting over 4 million children above the poverty line—a decrease in poverty of more than 40% — and decreasing food insufficiency for families with children by an estimated 26%.
Unfortunately, despite its transformative impact, the expansion of the CTC is now at risk of being lost.
Like most countries, the Republic of South Sudan is a complex nation of shifting alliances and external influences.
Recently, President Salva Kiir, who sports a Stetson hat gifted him by George W. Bush, signed a peace agreement with old enemies, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-In Opposition. Around the same time, the so-called Embassy Troika consisting of the US, Britain, and Norway facilitated International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs for South Sudan.
When China proposes investment schemes, US politicians call it “debt-trap diplomacy.” As has been seen in South Sudan, when Western corporations seek to plunder poor, resource-rich nations, they call it “development.”
The West’s interest in South Sudan is oil. Invoking the colonial-era “white man’s burden” of 19th century imperialists, the US government-backed Voice of America recently justified foreign interference in South Sudan by pointing out that the country’s 3.5 billion proven barrels of crude cannot be easily exported due to the lack of pipeline infrastructure and financial mismanagement.
Some readers responded to one of my earlier columns urging the national progressive civic groups, with millions of members back home, to overcome the dominance of giant corporatism with a Ten-Year Plan1 budgeted at $1 billion a year (See, “Think Big to Overcome Losing Big to Corporatism,” January 7, 2022). Readers wanted to know more about the Plan and where the money would come from to implement this grand initiative.
New billionaires are proliferating in numbers reflecting the record stock market surges. Some are enlightened and worried enough to gather with citizen group leaders to review the Plan, the strategy, timetable, and required budget. Those who count themselves in, and want to back the Plan, would pledge to contribute the total pledges of $10 billion for the ten-year effort. After the funding is secured, (possibly augmented with internet crowdfunding), the Plan commences in several coterminous stages.
The First Stage is to get through Congress, vetoproof if necessary, the long overdue necessities for half of the U.S. population, which is poor, with collateral benefits for the entire country.
A Brain Trust will expertly draft legislation addressing the elements of ending endemic poverty. These include a living wage, Medicare for All insurance (already well drafted in H.R.1976 and supported by over 118 co-sponsors), affordable housing, adequate nutrition that abolishes hunger in America, personal and environmental health care with emphasis on prevention, necessary public services for families and communities, and a system of private retirement savings to supplement Social Security.
These conditions for good livelihoods, which were mostly secured years ago by some Western countries, lead to larger market demand, have consistent left/right support in Europe and in the U.S., and they make for strong economies. (See, Reframing the Politics of Polarization by Hazel Henderson, August 4, 2021).
The driving pressure to implement the Plan would come from civic offices staffed by two full-time people in each of the 435 Congressional Districts and for US Senators in all fifty states plus territories. Groups would be established with an expanding corps of citizen volunteers committing 500 hours and $500 annually forming a grassroots juggernaut. These citizen groups would focus intensely on their members of Congress, using precise petition-backed citizen summonses to their Senators and Representatives to appear at Town Meetings, which these organizers arrange with detailed and broadly supported agendas.
The yearly cost to establish these offices and recruit significant numbers of volunteers as the ever-deepening force is about $100 million a year. This sum would include inter-district coordinators and other facilities to organize the self-funded, expanding volunteer corps.
Passage of vital and overdue bills is less difficult than assumed by a society that is presently AWOL from the playing field of legislation. Such catch-up legislation can already count on the overt support of about thirty percent of Congress, with the latent support of at least a quarter of Congress once the organized rumble from the People is heard. (That was the case with Nixon Republicans in the 1960s and early 70s.)
Once the political tea leaves become clear, lawmakers become responsive. This is what happened in corporate President Richard Nixon’s first term, sometimes leading to great majorities behind environmental, consumer, and labor bills. Nixon even sent to Congress a basic minimum-income plan, a better health insurance proposal than Clinton offered as President, and congressional voting rights legislation for the District of Columbia. Congress did not pass these three reforms coming from a Republican White House. Nonetheless, Nixon felt he had to propose these bills.
The Second Stage, parallel to the first, is to create facilities that invite and enable an accelerated banding together of willing people in their various roles. People can have rights and remedies under the law, but without organized groups they are mostly not used, defended, or improved. Whether you are customers of insurance, utility and banking companies, or tenants, or consumers of food, energy, transportation, and healthcare or using government services, or have been wrongfully injured, membership in these “communities,” as organized advocacy groups is essential. Such groups would work to fundamentally change existing dysfunctional systems, extending to protections of children, services for students, and corporate control of the vast commons (public lands, public airwaves, etc.) that we the people already own.
Daily seeking their own interests, corporations are organized to the teeth by comparison to millions of citizens. This is why corporations control the major sectors of our government, our economy, and other societal institutions day by day. The large drug companies have 500 full-time lobbyists regularly working on Congress with large industry backup forces. The people are vastly outmatched. So what do we expect without a strong citizen team on the field?
Corporate power stems not from votes (corporations don’t vote, yet) nor so much from the campaign money. It comes as a byproduct of the almost wholly unorganized populace not utilizing its powerful exclusive sovereignty (“We the People”) under our Constitution. In our country’s history, it is remarkable what a small percentage of people (often under one percent) when organized and representing broad public concerns, have achieved against all odds. (See my book, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, 2016).
Much of the conceptual work on these legislated facilities has been developed and used to produce pilot projects vis-à-vis electric utility giants years ago by citizen organizations. (See, Banding Together: How Check Offs Will Revolutionize the Consumer Movement by Andrew Sharpless and Sarah Gallup, 1981).
To get these facilities set up and into action all around the country, with seed money for ten years, would annually cost about another $100 million. They would put the people and their expert champions at the table in more ways than one, with near immediate results. Right now, for example, according to consumer advocate, actuary, and former Federal Insurance Commissioner, Robert Hunter, about $30 billion is not being returned as state laws require, to motor vehicle owners by auto insurers that received a windfall when the pandemic reduced auto traffic and claims. Without state-by-state insurance consumer organizations, there will be few of these refunds.
Forthcoming columns will describe the uses for the remainder of the $800 million in the first of ten years.
Richard Parker, Here, the People Rule: A Constitutional Populist Manifesto, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
On January 15, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was leaving a planning meeting for the Poor People’s Campaign when he was called back into the room. It was his birthday — his last, it would turn out.
The staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would usually give King a new suit, but this year they wanted to make him laugh.
Xernona Clayton teased, “We know how fond you are of our president Lyndon Johnson,” which got a laugh. Then she pulled out a metal cup engraved: “We are cooperating with Lyndon’s War on Poverty. Drop coins and bills in cup.”
King laughed deeply, but the joke was all too true.
In 1968, the Vietnam War was costing billions while the War on Poverty fell to the side, like spare change in a cup. Today too, our government has said yes to increasing the military budget to $778 billion for next year alone — and no to $1.7 trillion over 10 years for the Build Back Better Act.
As a Christian ethicist who studies King, I think it’s important to remember that he spent his last months organizing a campaign of the poor to challenge political priorities like these.
He brought together poor people who were already organizing their communities, along with civil rights leaders and faith leaders. The plan was to bring 3,000 poor people of all races to occupy Washington, D.C., and confront the administration and Congress about their failure to address the triple evils of racism, poverty, and war.
Although King was assassinated before the campaign launched, the Poor People’s Campaign went forward in the spirit of King’s words from the year before, when he challenged the idea that coins in a cup were enough.
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” he said at his famous Riverside Church speech in 1967. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Calling for “a true revolution of values,” King also warned: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
His words ring too true today. True compassion is not flinging coins at poverty while spending four times as much on a war budget or watching the wealth of CEOs grow exponentially while workers’ wages lag decades behind.
As in 1968, it will take a campaign of the poor to move us towards the revolution of values we need in these times.
Launched in 2018 on the 50th anniversary of the original, the new Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has been growing across 40 states, organizing people impacted by systemic injustice and moral leaders to insist that our elected officials listen to our demands, defend our democracy, and pass a moral budget that restructures our poverty-producing system.
Amid a global pandemic and ongoing attacks on democracy and on the poor, we have asserted our right to far more than change in a cup. We are now organizing for the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington on June 18, 2022.
Already there are meetings happening in state coordinating committees across the country to plan massive delegations to Washington, D.C., pulling the 140 million poor and low-income people in the nation together across geography, partisan lines, race, and ethnicity. We are coming to demand that our elected officials make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up.
We want to observe King’s birthday the way he did — by building the power of the poor for a radical revolution of values.
For six months at the tail end of two tumultuous years, parents received direct payments — no strings attached — of as much as $300 per child in their bank accounts. By many accounts, that money delivered long-awaited relief for 61 million children, dropping rates of poverty and hunger.
This week will mark the first time since July that parents will go without a monthly payment.
The expanded child tax credit fell short of some of its biggest promises: It didn’t quite cut the child poverty rate in half, and millions of the most vulnerable families were still left out of receiving money. The full potential of the credit hinged on extending the new benefits permanently, advocates say — it was never expected to cut child poverty in just six months.
Now, the future of the credit hangs in the balance now as Congress debates whether to include any form of a permanent expansion in the Democrats’ Build Back Better package. Those negotiations are taking place as parents brace for another wave of COVID-19 cases that could shutter schools, limit job opportunities and undo some of the financial breathing room the credit created.
When the credit worked best this year, parents could count on it to manage the soaring cost of child care, pay for food, or cover the unexpected expenses that piled up during the pandemic, like the ones Rosa Walker’s family faced.
From July to December, the Oregon mom of three received $800 a month. It was one of the only moments when the pressure of the pandemic eased: She and her husband were forced to cut back hours at work, and the health of her entire family had suffered — she took six months to recover from COVID-19, her boys struggled with their mental health and her husband broke a rib in a roofing accident. When the new credit first arrived last summer, they had $10,000 in new credit card debt from trying to keep the wheels turning since the start of 2020.
With the credit, the family was able to cover higher child care costs for their 4-year-old. They were also able to budget for opportunities to enrich their children’s lives, allowing her 8- and 10-year-old to go to soccer. Walker, an early intervention occupational therapist who works with young children, said being able to provide those social supports helped ease some of the trauma of the pandemic for her children.
“For me, it’s so clear that this is where to invest, not just because these are going to be our adult leaders, but because they deserve the best as children right now,” she said.
The one-year expansion of the child tax credit through Congress’s coronavirus relief plan of early 2021 was modified to remove an income requirement so that the poorest families in the country, the majority of them Black and Latinx, could access the full amount. It changed the structure to a monthly stipend instead of an annual lump sum. The amount also went up, from a maximum of $2,000 to $3,600, and divvied up in payments from July to December of $300 each for kids under 6, and $250 each for kids 6 to 17. The second half of the payments will come in with taxes this year — if parents are able to successfully claim them. The Internal Revenue Service is expected to face significant pandemic-induced backlogs this filing season.
Many Democrats, the White House and advocates expected the policy to be extended beyond a one-year expansion — but that has now been reduced to little more than a pipe dream. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has been the loudest Democratic opponent to the credit, has said he will not support Congress’s Build Back Better plan, an economic package that includes a permanent expansion of the child tax credit, specifically because he believes that credit should be modified so higher-income families are excluded with an additional requirement that parents be working to receive the money.
Those changes will be major concessions for the Democrats who have pushed for the credit expansion, and time is running out to reach a deal. If the expansion does not become permanent, the child tax credit will revert to what it was before: An annual allowance capped at $2,000 — instead of the $3,600 maximum now per child — that was not available to the poorest families in full.
“It’s almost harder to have [the child tax credit] and have it taken away,” Walker said.
Walker fears the impact of that decision could affect families years later, in tangible ways like less access to nutritional food or enough food at all, and in more intangible ways like the impact of parents’ stress on their family.
“I know as a country we really value children, even if it can sometimes feel like we don’t, but I also think children and families aren’t always the loudest voices and I think it can be very easy to miss the impact of not moving forward with this until much later,” she said.
***
To understand the impact of the child tax credit, it’s important to measure what it was able to do in six months — and where it fell short.
In July, when the first payments went out, the IRS was able to reach 59.3 million children — about 88 percent of all kids in the country — and it increased that amount in subsequent months to more than 61 million.
A study by the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that between 3 and 3.8 million children were kept from poverty because of the payments from July to November, at which point the monthly child poverty rate had dropped by 29 percent. The most significant impacts were on Black and Latinx children. By November, Black child poverty had shrunk by 26 percent, and the Latinx child poverty rate was down 30 percent, the center found.
Prior to the expansion, 1 in 2 children of color were not getting the full credit, compared to 1 in 4 White children. These kids were also more likely to need the credit for fundamental needs like food. (Black and Latinx kids experience twice the rate of food insufficiency — a more severe form of food insecurity that measures whether a family has enough to eat — as White children.)
According to survey data from the Census Bureau, most parents who received the child tax credit were likely to spend it rather than save. Food topped the list, followed by essential bills, clothing, housing and school expenses. About 21 percent of parents used the money to pay down debt and about 17 percent saved it, per an analysis from July to August by the Social Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.
The funds were essential for parents like Karla McKinnie, a single mother in Detroit with a 10-year-old and 11-year-old. McKinnie lost her job as a server during the pandemic and was out of work for about six months in 2020, putting her behind on bills and rent. A job she took on as a caregiver for older people while she was out of work helped, but the work was sporadic.
The tax credit during the past year helped her pay the rent on time and provide WiFi for her kids so they could continue to do virtual learning.
“Being a single mom and living check to check — actually day to day, for me — just being able to have that reassurance that it was coming on the 15th [of every month], it made me stress out a lot less,” McKinnie said. “I knew that we would have groceries and it would be OK for me to go grocery shopping and get everything that we needed.”
She also used some of the money to put her daughter in guitar lessons. Now with the credit coming to an end, she is looking back at a time of scarcity.
“It’s back to paying for the necessities,” she said.
***
The greatest poverty-reducing power of the child tax credit was held in its ability to reach the people who had never received the full credit before — families that earned nothing at all or too little to file an income tax, or grandparents or parents with disabilities on a fixed income.
But many of those families weren’t reached at all, or only received partial payments. Researchers previously estimated that about 4 million children were at risk of not receiving the payments because their parents hadn’t filed taxes, would need to take additional steps to do so or faced language or technological barriers. They were most likely to be Black or Latinx kids in the lowest-income families in the nation.
The IRS initially sent automatic payments to anyone who had filed a tax return in 2019 or 2020 or signed up through the IRS for a coronavirus stimulus payment. Families who didn’t fall into that category and were earning under $24,800 as a family could sign up for the child tax credit through a simplified form in a portal the IRS set up in June, prior to the start of the first payments.
That sign-up process was cumbersome: The application was confusing, available only in English and did not come in a mobile phone version (low-income people are far more likely to have a phone than a laptop). A new portal in partnership with tech nonprofit Code for America became widely available in September, offering a simplified application that was mobile-friendly and available in Spanish.
More than 100,000 people signed up through that new portal, said Gabriel Zucker, associate policy director for the tax benefits team at Code for America. Most took about 10 minutes to get through the application and the majority used it on their phones. About 4 in 5 users said it was easy or extremely easy to use, he said.
Code for America also helped market the website through benefits agencies, allowing people who didn’t file taxes but did receive some kind of government assistance to become aware of the option.
Realistically though, they never expected to be able to capture everyone in the first year of a program — one of the reasons why Zucker believes an extension of the child tax credit will help it get closer to reaching its original objective.
“What we have shown is that this population can be reached, but it’s going to take time to get to everyone,” he said.
The delays in setting up the portals meant newly eligible families had less time to sign up, and much of the on-the-ground outreach effort was taking place at the community level by small organizations that were overwhelmed with clients.
Families where one family member was an undocumented immigrant with a tax filing number did not receive any payments in July, for example, because of a glitch in the IRS system. Many of those families got the money in two portions in August instead, but others reported never receiving it.
The same happened with parents of newborns who never got the option to claim those children for child tax credit payments this year, said Elaine Maag, a principal research associate at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
“It’s always the case that people that already face the most burdens and complexity in their lives have the least access to the services that are available,” Maag said.
On the ground, agencies helping people sign up for the credit reported a wide swath of problems, including tax forms that were filled out incorrectly by reputable organizations, absent parents who were wrongfully claiming the children instead, and credits that were marked as “issued” even though parents never received the money.
Melanie Malherbe, managing attorney of the welfare law unit at Greater Boston Legal Services, helped sign up low-income families through the portal. She said her caseload was immense — and complicated. Even for her, a trained lawyer, trying to get answers from the IRS and sorting through filing information was challenging, Malherbe said.
“What I’ve observed is that the program could be great — if it was extended. Look at the impact it’s already had on children in poverty,” she said. “But there is an additional level of help and resources needed to extend to people in deep poverty that doesn’t exist.”
The real-life impact of that is that families who expected to get a cash infusion were left in limbo.
Katie Walden and her family saw the upcoming arrival of the credit as an opportunity. Her husband had spent the pandemic trucking to keep the family afloat, work that was on a contract basis, low paid and required punishingly long hours. With the credit coming, they could afford for him to take a lower-paying job that was more stable, they thought.
The Waldens, who have a 3-, 7- and 9-year-old, should have received about $800 — they were eligible for the money and had received it in the past. But the credit never arrived. They couldn’t understand why. In September, they received what they thought was a back payment of $1,000, and then in October their status changed from “eligible” to “pending.” No one at the IRS could tell Walden what had happened.
“It took away the opportunity of feeling fulfilled and feeling like you can be out of panic mode,” Walden said. “I think people don’t really understand what it’s like to put groceries back or say, ‘We can’t get strawberries because they are not on sale.’ To have children have an understanding of, ‘Oh, we are poor,’ that’s really hard to deal with.”
They plan to claim the full amount this year in their taxes, but that money will now go into paying back their parents, who helped them with expenses when the credit didn’t arrive.
“It’s just that demoralizing thing every time you have to ask for help, and we wouldn’t have had to ask for help if it would have worked out,” Walden said.
***
The future of the child tax credit seems to hinge on two major proposed changes to the policy: the introduction of a work requirement and a lower income cap.
While prominent advocates for the expansion say they may be willing to discuss some specific details of the plan, many are adamant that it is functioning as intended. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the credit’s longtime champion, said in a statement to The 19th that “there is no need to be negotiating on the design.”
“What I am laser focused on is the consequences for the families that are harmed by the lack of extension,” DeLauro said, adding that she is optimistic “we can get the child tax credit over the finish line.”
Sen. Michael Bennet, who has also pushed for the credit’s expansion, said told The 19th that Congress has “to find a way to extend it, and I’ll continue to look for any opportunity to do so.”
Still, tax policy experts worry that the proposed changes to the program can make it even less accessible to the families who need it the most, negating the landmark changes that were implemented last year.
Megan Curran, the policy director at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy who wrote the report analyzing the monthly payments, said that a work requirement, in particular, would erase some of the gains of a program redesigned specifically for poverty reduction.
The former version of the child tax credit had income minimums for parents to qualify, which rose depending on how many kids were in the family. That resulted in about a third of children not accessing the credit, including half of all Black and Latinx kids whose parents were more likely to fail to meet the income requirements.
“I find it very difficult to make an argument as to why we should be able to return to that when we have been able to fix many of those issues,” Curran said.
Already, more than 95 percent of people who receive the tax credit are working or were recently working, a grandparent caring for a child, a person with a disability who is not working, or a parent of a very young child under 2 who has stopped working.
Studies of the credit have found no evidence it is leading people to stop working, and one study on census data by researchers at Washington University and Appalachian State University found that the rates of parents reporting they are unemployed to care for kids dropped from 26 percent to 20 percent after the credit went out, suggesting parents were using the funds on child care.
The question of changing the income cap has also been a point of contention for some time, with people including Manchin arguing that the program should not in any way help support higher income families. Currently, couples earning up to $400,000 or individuals earning up to $200,000 qualify for a smaller portion of the child tax credit, maximums were instituted during 2017 tax law changes.
Curran argues that the central point of the program was to help kids, regardless of parent’s income status. As the pandemic has shown, that income status can also swing quickly and suddenly.
“It’s meant to be for kids. I think it makes sense that it’s available largely regardless of family economic circumstance,” she said. “There’s not all of a sudden these cliffs that happen if you earn $100 more at a certain point or $1,000 more at a certain point, you lose this.”
The debate over how to incorporate either of the changes Manchin is requesting, however, is still fairly nebulous. It’s unclear what kind of compromise Democrats are considering, and whether it will even be enough.
Meanwhile, the second half of child tax credit payments still need to reach American households. The IRS has begun sending a letter to parents that contains the amount they will need to claim in their 2021 taxes to get their full share, but that process will face its own set of hurdles reaching families who have moved, or who may not have a permanent address.
“That will be confusing for a lot of families — it’s always confusing when the IRS sends a piece of mail to you,” said Maag at the Tax Policy Center. “You are going to have a lot of people who have not interacted with the tax system previously who are going to have to interact with it.”
One thing that may be more readily available this year will be tax filing sites that will open to coincide with the tax season, but because of the pandemic and a rise in Omicron variant cases, it’s likely those sites will be overwhelmed as it is.
And, Malherbe pointed out, the cases of the most vulnerable families are also the most complicated and sites may not have the resources to help people through the process.
Without that aid, something that can’t be added in one year but could in subsequent years if the program was extended, she said, the tax credit’s potential will continue to be stunted.
“I am worried that some of the people who completely have not gotten anything for their kids yet are not going to get it unless there is the kind of level of help we’ve been giving,” Malherbe said. “There are just a lot of potential pitfalls.”
In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty.
During the pandemic’s first year, schools across the country lost track of more than 400,000 homeless students.
As schools reopened their doors for in-person learning this year, the number of students identified as homeless began to creep back up.
But, with the end of the federal eviction moratorium, there are fears that the problem is worse than it appears on the surface. And that more children are disconnected from two anchors in their lives — school and home.
“With the disruptions that we saw last year, and now new disruptions, we’re concerned that whatever schools are observing is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education.
That concern is evident in school districts in cities such as San Diego, California, and Richmond, Virginia, that are bracing for more evictions that would uproot families or struggling to locate students who disappeared during the pandemic.
The U.S. Department of Education released $800 million in additional grants last year to help K-12 schools identify and support students experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. But the funding has yet to reach many school districts because of bureaucratic tie-ups and slow-moving state legislatures.
Experiencing homelessness can have grave consequences for a child’s future: youth who live through it are far less likely to graduate high school and far more likely to experience it later in life.
Marcella Middleton knows the struggle firsthand. She experienced homelessness as a child and young adult and is now co-director of A Way Home America, a nonprofit focused on youth homelessness.
“There’s the assumption that the broader society has that once you’re an adult, it’s really on you. You have to get yourself together because you’re grown now,” Middleton said. “But it’s like, well, if I experienced these things while I was young and trying to figure things out, that’s going to impact how I navigate life as an adult.”
The Center for Public Integrity interviewed Duffield and Middleton about how the pandemic made it tougher to identify students experiencing homelessness and what the government can do to identify and support families.
* Public Integrity edited the conversations for length and clarity.
Why have schools struggled to identify children experiencing homelessness during the pandemic?
Barbara Duffield: The pandemic and disruptions in learning really masked how many students are experiencing homelessness. Certainly, we know that the housing crisis has not gotten significantly better. We know there was a slow start to the rent relief distribution, and that’s still a lot of barriers there. We know that the eviction moratorium, the federal one was lifted, and have concerns about that. All of the systemic drivers of homelessness have not been abated, so, yes, we would expect that. But, in terms of our ability to actually know, it’s been very challenging.
Marcella Middleton: The pandemic has shut off so much of a connection that young people had. Resources and the connectivity to that for young people were already scarce. And so, when the pandemic hit, a lot of young people were shut off from the world and just shut off from different resources just because of the way we had to navigate based on policies [designed] to keep people safe.
What happens when students experience homelessness?
BD: If you don’t know where you’re going to stay every night, at least being able to go to the same school gives you some sense of stability, and normalcy, and routine. So, it becomes an oasis when everything else is turned upside down. School becomes that much more important. At the same time, it becomes very challenging to keep that oasis in focus. Because, you’re worried about where you’re going to sleep, you’re worried about what’s happening to your parents or your siblings, you may not know if you’re going to have supper that night. The stressors that accompany homelessness do make their way into the classroom, and of course, there’s a big challenge with just regular attendance.
MM: You fall immediately into this fight or flight mode, which creates a lot of toxic stress. It’s hard for you to focus on day-to-day things. For me at the time, going to school, making sure my family was okay, going to work, focusing on those things were really hard because I was in this fight or flight mode because I was experiencing homelessness. How can I focus and function on all these other things and all these other places if I don’t have anywhere safe to lay my head?
How can federal funding support students who are experiencing homelessness?
BD: I would say that it’s way too early to know the ultimate impact [of federal funding], but what we’re hopeful about is that many districts that never had dedicated funding before, will, for the first time, have some funding specifically targeted for identifying and supporting these students. The districts that did have some funding before, now have significantly more, so they can up their game and increase their capacity to support these students. We hope that they will allow schools to not just meet the needs of the day, and identify more students, but also really show what can be done on a longer-term basis.
MM: The pandemic has done a good job of showing us the things that we were fighting for before, like direct cash payments to young people experiencing homelessness … was something that we could do. We’d been fighting for that before the pandemic. And we kept getting, “No, no, no.” Now the pandemic has convinced people this is something we can do. That’s really important, to assess the things that the pandemic has forced out into the open that can actually be done.
Molly-Mae is just one in a long line of privileged people who peddle the myth that their success is simply down to hard work and self-belief, and that’s all it takes to ‘make it’. Curtis Daly explains why this is bullsh*t.
Video transcript
The idea that all you need to be “successful” in our society is to work hard, is as pervasive as it is toxic. It’s time for us to pick apart this myth.
Social media erupted after Instagram influencer Molly-Mae made comments about her success on The Diary of a CEO podcast.
As you saw from the video, Molly-Mae claims that the true path to success is an individual’s ability to just go for it, that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, and all we need to do to ‘make it’ is to work hard. Despite acknowledging different economic backgrounds, she then completely ignores it anyway and simply explains that if you want something bad enough, hard work equals success.
Her point is not a new one, it’s a classic Thatcherite take which we have all heard before.
Molly-Mae is completely wrong, and here’s why.
Firstly, we need to look at how we define success.
Most of Molly-Mae’s success came after appearing on Love Island, a scenario that doesn’t happen to most of us. Her chances of being on the show increased because she is white and meets societal beauty standards.
Molly-Mae is working with companies that profit from scandalous, poverty wages. Should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of people and the planet?
Off the back of Love Island, Molly-Mae secured a deal that earned her £500k in one year with Pretty Little Thing. The parent company is BooHoo, which was found to be paying their staff as little as £3.50 per hour in some instances. They also decided to keep their factories open during the height of the pandemic, with no regard for the health of their workers.
Molly-Mae, and other CEOs, are literally making money off low wages. She directly benefits from scandalous, poverty wages as it enriches her, and many others in her position.
Wage labour is exploitation. The value that you bring to the company is taken away from you, and then a cut of that value is given back to you.
Is this how we want to define “success”? Success should be about more than wealth accumulation. And should we really call anyone successful when their wealth is created by the exploitation of others?
Then there’s the question of whether just working hard gets you what you want.
Different walks of life do determine where you end up, or it’s at least an incredible indicator of someone’s future. If you’re born in a poorer household, then of course opportunities are limited; worse healthcare options, lower standards of education, harder to provide a varied and healthy diet and fewer social links to lucrative opportunities. The options you have are often limited at birth.
What if you are disabled, or suffer from chronic illnesses, and need support as a result? Without that support – and many sadly do go without it – how can we expect everyone to have access to the same level of opportunity in the same ‘24 hours in a day’?’.
With bigotry still prevalent in today’s society, opportunities for those in minority groups are often limited.
Austerity also negatively affects these groups much more, pushing individuals into worse economic situations.
The collapse of social democracy in favour of neoliberalism has had a huge impact on society at large, with a significant decline in social mobility.
The welfare state and public services have been slashed for over four decades. .
Neoliberalism has caused a huge spike in income inequality and people’s purchasing power has been in severe decline
It’s not because young people are buying too much avocado on toast that they’re struggling, it’s because the rules have changed.
Buying a house is out of reach of many people as a result of wages not keeping pace with skyrocketing costs.
A lot of the success stories you see in legacy media paint a picture of young individuals or couples in their early twenties purchasing their first home through a can-do attitude. But almost every single time you look a bit deeper, and see that it was actually thanks to mummy and daddy.
These stories are aimed at those who are lucky enough to even look at buying a house. In Britain we still have thousands who are homeless. What do we say to these people? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps? One day you too can be invited on to a reality show that will almost certainly give you endless possibilities afterwards?
If only rough sleepers use that spare change given by passers by and just simply invested in a startup or Bitcoin ( and don’t get me started on crypto currency).
Then there’s the factor of necessity due to everyday struggles. Humans will look at more immediate solutions when in more desperate situations.
When we worry about putting food on our table, paying bills, and rent, this can be overwhelming. Our immediate needs mean that long term planning and decisions will always be on the back foot and are already much harder to achieve.
Let’s look at this in a more radical way.
The issue with Molly-Mae’s comments is fundamentally a problem with capitalism.
How can we expect those at the bottom to simply just work harder to become successful, when capitalism literally rigs the system against those without capital in favour of those with it. That is why economic inequality explodes in a free market system, and social policies from the government ameliorate it.
Whether you work in a factory, retail, or hospitality, let’s say you bring in hundreds or even thousands of pounds for the company in an hour. The value was made through your human labour, yet in return, you will only receive 8,10, or maybe even 15 pounds an hour. The remainder of that value is never to be seen.
This is the reality – the reality of inequality under capitalism. It’s also a reality that inequality is being exacerbated further through social policy or a lack thereof, which means we need to understand the idea that simply working hard equals success is a load of bullshit.
In October 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released a report that received barely any attention: the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021, notably subtitled Unmasking disparities by ethnicity, caste, and gender. ‘Multidimensional poverty’ is a much more precise measurement of poverty than the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. It looks at ten indicators divided along three axes: health (nutrition, child mortality), education (years of schooling, school attendance), and standard of living (cooking fuel, sanitation, drinking water, electricity, housing, assets). The team studied multidimensional poverty across 109 countries, looking at the living conditions of 5.9 billion people. They found that 1.3 billion – one in five people – live in multidimensional poverty. The details of their lives are stark:
Roughly 644 million or half of these people are children under the age of 18.
Almost 85 per cent of them reside in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
One billion of them are exposed to solid cooking fuels (which creates respiratory ailments), inadequate sanitation, and substandard housing.
568 million people lack access to proper drinking water within a 30-minute round trip walk.
788 million multidimensionally poor people have at least one undernourished person in their home.
Nearly 66 per cent of them live in households where no one has completed at least six years of schooling.
678 million people have no access to electricity.
550 million people lack seven of eight assets identified in the study (a radio, television, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorcycle, or refrigerator). They also do not own a car.
The absolute numbers in the UNDP report are consistently lower than figures calculated by other researchers. Take their number of those with no access to electricity (678 million), for example. World Bank data shows that in 2019, 90 per cent of the world’s population had access to electricity, which means that 1.2 billion people had none. An important study from 2020 demonstrates that 3.5 billion people lack ‘reasonably reliable access’ to electricity. This is far more than the absolute numbers in the UNDP report, but, regardless of the specific figures, the trend lines are nonetheless horrific. We live on a planet with greatly increasing disparities.
For the first time, the UNDP has focused attention on the more granular aspects of these disparities, shining a light on ethnic, race, and caste hierarchies. Nothing is as wretched as social hierarchies, inheritances of the past that continue to sharply assault human dignity. Looking at the data from 41 countries, the UNDP found that multidimensional poverty disproportionately impacts those who face social discrimination. In India, for instance, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (‘scheduled’ because the government regards them as officially designated groups) face the brunt of terrible poverty and discrimination, which in turn exacerbates their impoverishment. Five out of six people who struggle with multidimensional poverty are from Scheduled Castes and Tribes. A study from 2010 showed that each year, at least 63 million people in India fall below the poverty line because of out-of-pocket health care costs (that’s two people per second). During the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers increased, though exact figures have not been easy to collect. Regardless, the five out of six people who are in multidimensional poverty – many of them from Scheduled Castes and Tribes – do not have any access to health care and are therefore not even included in that data. They exist largely outside formal health care systems, which has been catastrophic for these communities during the pandemic.
Last year, the secretary general of ALBA-TCP (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty), Sacha Llorenti, asked Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Instituto Simón Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela to start an international discussion responding to the broad crises of our times. We brought together twenty-six research institutes from around the world whose work has now culminated in a report called A Plan to Save the Planet. This plan is reproduced with a longer introduction in dossier no. 48 (January 2022).
We looked carefully at two kinds of texts: first, a range of plans produced by conservative and liberal think tanks around the world, from the World Economic Forum to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism; second, a set of demands from trade unions, left-wing political parties, and social movements. We drew from the latter to better understand the limitations of the former. For instance, we found that the liberal and conservative texts ignored the fact that during the pandemic, central banks – mostly in the Global North – raised $16 trillion to sustain a faltering capitalist system. Though money is available that could have gone towards the social good, it largely went to shore up the financial sector and industry instead. If money can be made available for those purposes, it can certainly be used to fully fund a robust public health system in every country and a fair transition from non-renewable fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, for example.
The plan covers twelve areas, from ‘democracy and the world order’ to ‘the digital world’. To give you a sense of the kinds of claims made in the plan, here are the recommendations in the section on education:
De-commodify education, which includes strengthening public education and preventing the privatisation of education.
Promote the role of teachers in the management of educational institutions.
Ensure that underprivileged sectors of society are trained to become teachers.
Bridge the electricity and digital divides.
Build publicly financed and publicly controlled high-speed broadband internet systems.
Ensure that all school children have access to all the elements of the educational process, including extra-curricular activities.
Develop channels through which students participate in decision-making processes in all forms of higher education.
Make education a lifelong experience, allowing people at every stage of life to enjoy the practice of learning in various kinds of institutions. This will foster the value that education is not only about building a career, but about building a society that supports the continuing growth and development of the mind and of the community.
Subsidise higher education and vocational courses for workers of all ages in areas related to their occupation.
Make education, including higher education, available to all in their spoken languages; ensure that governments take responsibility for providing educational materials in the spoken languages in their country through translations and other means.
Establish management educational institutes that cater to the needs of cooperatives in industrial, agricultural, and service sectors.
Tina Modotti, El Machete, 1926.
A Plan to Save the Planet is rooted in the principles of the United Nations Charter (1945), the document with the highest level of consensus in the world (193 member states of the UN have signed this binding treaty). We hope that you will read the plan and the dossier carefully. They have been produced for discussion and debate and are to be argued with and elaborated on. If you have any suggestions or ideas or would like to let us know how you were able to use the plan, please write to us at gro.latnenitnocirtehtnull@nalp.
Study has been a key instrument for the growth of working-class struggle, as shown by the impact of working-class newspapers, journals, and literature on the expansion of popular imaginations. In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed Mexican revolutionary farmers reading El Machete, the newspaper of their communist party. Modotti, one of the most luminous revolutionary photographers, reflected the sincere commitment of Mexican revolutionaries, of the Weimar Left, and of fighters in the Spanish Civil War. The farmers reading El Machete and the peasant organiser in India reading the Turkish communist poet Nâzim Hikmet in a hut during the great Bengal famine of 1943 depicted in the woodcut by Chittaprosad suggest places where we hope the plan will be discussed. We hope this plan will be used not merely as a critique of the present, but as a programme for a future society that we will build in the present.
W.E.B. DuBois: ‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.’
This documentary (see below, first one linked) is not news, and then, of course, it’s Trump in office blather, too. As if UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Portugal are havens for social and people and environmental justice.
How Poor People Survive in the USA — vapid.
The documentarian is done, really, through the auspices of Euro trash context, POV, narrative framing. Contrarily, you have to be in the mix, in the middle, from the chambers of power, schools, colleges, social work, to real journalism, and into the mess personally, with daily fear of losing the job and seeing savings go go go. That is the slippage in the death spiral of USA.
This is a Reservation/Rez Society. Boarding School Society. Celebrity Cults. Internment Camp FEMA Village (Soon). This entire unfolding of history the past 70 years has been this big time military propaganda operation embedding into all systems. Confusion creator. Mystical hatred or subservience while praying for that blue-eyed, blond hippie Jesus. Dirt poor, and loving Trump. College student loans over $100K, and loving AOC and Biden.
The enemy for me, and I’d say for 80 percent of USA, is that grouping — colonized Eichmann’s, the upper classes, the dream hoarders, the intelligence/knowledge workers, the higher ups in education-medicine-incarceration-pharma-medicine-energy-banking-data collecting-surveillance-real estate-Chamber of Commerce-AI-science-ag-retail-logistics-transportation, and then, MIC, congressional military complex. Join the mercenary forces, and lucky you, get your teeth pulled and a GI Bill.
I’ve asked why the stuff I send and publish elsewhere is no longer getting up on LA Progressive. No answer! Again, this documentary is broken (above), but that is documentary making, most times — focused, rarified, gatekeeping on steroids, with people on the projects not deep systems thinkers, and a willingness to leave out a lot.
Missing:
Tens of millions on the edge of the cliff of eviction, foreclosure, endless bad jobs, in the car or van, bunking up with family or friends, while working for middle managers who do not care, and the upper management and the billionaires and millionaires.
Inflammation — Capitalism is a complete, holistic, top-down disease, creating inflammation in the veins, brain, organs, belly. But worse — cuts the thinking process, deforms the mutual aid ethos, destroys collective action, kills the ability to squat and reappropriate wealth, land, whatever.
The rat race of those with a roof over their heads that continue to fuel prescriptions, Disneyland la-la-land thinking, buy-buy-buy, watching sports-stars-musicians, I got mine, you better fight to get yours
This country, USA, is the rotting roots and DNA of Europe, of that narrator above. These are not real people, and they are so sculpted in news speak, in priviledge.
This documentary doesn’t get to the fabric of colonization of cities, schools, the bullshit of privatization, and this wacky religious and wacky elitist country of Indian Removal, Enslavement then and now, and Nomadlands.
Americans are children, and that is thanks to the Media, the Boss, foolish k-6 education, and, well, we are here now, 355 million, and this is pre-covid crazies. Now? Complete imprisonment!
Oh, hell, the list is a thousand points long: Stan Brock, Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom. This is one fellow, and great heart, but in a world of Space Suits, Billionaires and Yachts, Lies Casted in Media-Banking-Digitalization, well, one guy. “He founded Remote Area Medical in 1985 to give people in need essential health care. Since then, RAM has provided free dental, vision and basic health care to more than 740,000 people.”
Here, the documentary on RAM above, description: During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media reporters and news crews and filmmakers failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap; it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event, from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.
This can’t be ramped up, taken to the ultimate level? It’s socialism, brothers and sisters, the only way forward. Forget the hate that the right and the middle of the road have against socialism. They will ply the words of “one world government.” Or, the “government controlling us.” They will talk about Universal Basic Income. They will say it is brainwashing, and communism, and, well, that socialism means all rights are taken, managed, given to and taken away by some master groups of dictators. So we are dead in the water with capitalism by any means necessary: predatory, parasitic, casino, dog-eat-dog, shock therapy, zombie, trickle down nothingness.
That is, you know, vaccine passport, no. But, there is no Forced Healthcare for All. No, Massive Take Over the Empty Lots and Buildings for Massive Rehousing. No guerrilla farming everywhere. Nothing. Because, well, Capitalism is All about “We are all champions. We are all the New Eve and Adam. You can rest assured that the masters will NOT take care of you, but at least you have the stars and bars, god almighty, baby-land.”
This exceptionalism is what has detroyed many in the 80 percent. Many. They will work and think and do things against their own well-being. When you are a lost dog in this country, a limping stray, a hungry desperate pooch, well, you will jump to the master, run for the beasts of slapping, kicking, yelling, and hitting. Under the table, curled up, belly and organs exposed as its tail is between the legs.
Inflamed — Moreover, they point out how modern medicine has often missed these necessary connections—to our global detriment. What is needed is “deep medicine,” which, according to the authors, “requires new cosmologies, ones that can braid our lives with the planet and the web of life around us.”
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel spoke to YES! about the ravages of colonialist capitalism, the failures of modern medicine to treat them, and, most importantly, how a “deep medicine” approach can heal us all.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Is the title of the book, Inflamed, a metaphor for what is happening to our planet and its living systems?
Rupa Marya: It’s not at all a metaphor. It’s a description of what’s happening inside of our bodies and around us on the planet and our societies. The inflammatory response is the body’s ancient evolutionarily conserved pathway to restoring its optimal working condition when it’s been thrown off by danger or damage or the threat of damage. (Source, Yes Magazine)
No jobs, no good jobs, decayed systems, penalties, bad credit, criminal offenses, drugs, booze, and bodies torn at a very young age with multiple chronic diseases, many many diseases.
https://youtu.be/YrEwPp2bG48
This is the system that the beautiful people in the sciences, in technology, in the Reset Star Chamber, all of those hoarding money and the opportunities have set loose, and these fascists want these people — us, we the people — on UBI, held as data pools — body snatchers, mind snatchers, attention snatchers, activity snatchers, all part of mining people, putting us, them, the 80 percent, in the cloud, in algorithms, in data banks, all mashed up for social impact — do as we say, follow what we command, eat-drink-think like we say, and you will get the tokens, man, the money, the slice of a 200-square-foot-per-person habitat. No pets allowed.
The lapse of Democrats’ expanded child tax credit program at the end of last month has progressive lawmakers and advocates vocally warning of a major spike in child poverty in the new year just as the Omicron variant wreaks havoc across the U.S., fueling a staggering rise in infections and hospitalizations.
While some research suggests the highly transmissible Omicron strain causes less severe disease than other mutations, the enormity of the current wave is driving fears of widespread and potentially sustained societal disruptions, with disproportionate impacts on families without the resources to weather more pandemic-induced economic chaos.
Approved as part of the coronavirus relief package that President Joe Biden signed into law in March 2021, the enhanced child tax credit (CTC) provided eligible families with monthly payments of up to $300 per child under the age of six and $250 per child between the ages of six and 17.
Recent survey data indicates that the payments brought millions out of poverty and helped many low-income families afford food, rent, medications, and other basic necessities.
But thanks to the opposition of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and every congressional Republican, the program expired at December’s end, cutting off a key lifeline at what anti-poverty activists see as the worst possible moment. The sixth and final monthly CTC payments were distributed to the families of more than 61 million children on December 15.
“Yet another sign of the misaligned priorities of this country,” the Rhode Island Poor People’s Campaign said Monday in response to the CTC’s expiration. “Programs of social uplift are sacrificed to the war economy and militarism.”
The New York Timesreported over the weekend that with Omicron surging, “economists warn that the one-two punch of expiring aid and rising cases could put a chill on the once red-hot economic recovery and cause severe hardship for millions of families already living close to the poverty line.”
Anna Lara, a mother of two young children in Huntington, West Virginia, told the Times that without the boosted CTC, “it’s going to be hard next month.”
“Just thinking about it, it really makes me want to bite my nails to the quick,” Lara said. “Honestly, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard going back to not having it.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote Monday that it is “totally unacceptable” for the Senate to let the CTC lapse. In November, the House of Representatives passed a version of the Build Back Better Act that would extend the enhanced CTC payments for another year.
“The Senate must act quickly to pass the Build Back Better Act and restore the child tax credit for millions of families who are counting on it,” Jayapal wrote. “The pandemic isn’t over — the relief to withstand it shouldn’t stop.”
More than a million people in the U.S. tested positive for coronavirus on Monday, a global daily record. The Washington Postreported early Tuesday that “more than 103,000 Americans were hospitalized with Covid-19 on Monday… the highest number since late summer, when the Delta variant of the coronavirus triggered a nationwide surge in cases.”
Pediatric hospitalizations have also risen at an alarming rate during the Omicron wave.
According to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly 10 million children “are at risk of slipping back below the poverty line or deeper into poverty” if Congress doesn’t extend the monthly CTC payments.
Without congressional action, the CTC will revert back to its previous — and far more exclusionary — form with yearly lump-sum payments.
The Senate Democratic leadership has vowed to move ahead with Build Back Better negotiations this month, but it’s unclear how much progress will be made toward a final deal as Manchin continues to obstruct.
On Sunday, Axiosreported that the corporate-backed West Virginia Democrat is “open to reengaging on the climate and child care provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda if the White House removes the enhanced child tax credit from the $1.75 trillion package — or dramatically lowers the income caps for eligible families.”
It’s not clear whether progressive lawmakers would be willing to accept such a trade-off.
“I’m hoping that Senator Manchin will understand that his constituents, like many of mine, live below the poverty line and they need this child tax credit,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said Sunday.
In a Twitter post late Monday afternoon, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — chair of the Senate Budget Committee — noted that “the American Rescue Plan reduced childhood poverty in America by over 40% through the expanded child tax credit.”
“It helped millions of families to survive,” Sanders added. “Unless Build Back Better is passed, the expansion will end and we will see a huge increase in childhood poverty.”
The world’s 10 richest billionaires added roughly $402 billion to their collective wealth in 2021, a year marked by continued suffering and economic dislocation fueled by the global coronavirus pandemic.
“Heading into 2022, the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world are all worth more than $100 billion,” CNBCnoted, citing the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks and ranks the fortunes of the planet’s richest people.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Sunday that the staggering growth of billionaire wealth amid a worldwide public health emergency and economic crisis should compel Congress to finally redress the fundamental injustices of the U.S. tax system.
“In 2022,” said Jayapal, “let’s tax the rich and invest in our communities.”
At the top of the Billionaires Index at the close of 2021 was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who added over $121 billion to his wealth last year as the pandemic both took and completely upended lives, pushing tens of millions of people into poverty and intensifying preexisting inequities. Just behind Musk on the list was former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who tacked $5 billion onto his net worth in 2021, leaving him with a total fortune of $195 billion.
In November, the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) outlined a proposal by which Musk — now the richest man in the world — and other U.S. billionaires could donate just 0.36% of their pandemic wealth gains to help 42 million people facing starvation.
“The $6.6 billion required would help those in most need in the following way: one meal a day, the basic needed to survive — costing $0.43 per person per day, averaged out across the 43 countries,” the WFP said. “This would feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine.”
The billionaires have not taken the WFP up on its modest plan to save millions of lives with a miniscule fraction of their pandemic profits.
The investigative outlet ProPublicareported in June that Musk, along with other U.S. billionaires, “paid $0 in federal income taxes” in 2018. Late last year, Musk garnered widespread publicity for selling off a portion of his Tesla stock, triggering a significant taxable event.
But as Bob Lord, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, observed in a recent blog post, Musk “has paid tax in 2021 — lots of it — because doing so was by far his best option.”
“Did he pay more tax than any American in history, as he claims? Probably,” Lord wrote. “But he also received compensation of more than $20 billion, which almost certainly dwarfs the compensation any other CEO in American history has ever been paid, from a company with profits not remotely commensurate with that level of compensation.”
2021 is coming to a close with the 10 richest people in the world all worth more than $100 billion https://t.co/EP8FwDGy1Q
The updated billionaire wealth figures come as Democrats in Congress are struggling to chart a path forward for their flagship social spending and climate legislation, which has been held up by corporate-backed Sen. Joe Manchin (D-Wa.).
The House-passed version of the Build Back Better Act includes a surtax on millionaires and other measures to help fund the bill’s investments and reduce out-of-control inequality. According to the Washington Post, Manchin recently told the Biden White House that he would be willing to support “some version” of a tax targeting billionaires, an idea that the West Virginia Democrat criticized in October.
“While the specifics of what Manchin would support remain unclear, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has unveiled a tax aimed at the accrued wealth of America’s approximately 700 billionaires,” the Post noted. “The measure is aimed at addressing the massive gains of the wealthiest Americans with a federal tax and probably would be unprecedented in how few people it affected… Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper has estimated it could raise as much as $550 billion over 10 years, or pay for more than one-quarter of the Democrats’ spending bill.”
In a social media post on New Year’s Day, the Patriotic Millionaires — a group composed of wealthy supporters of progressive taxation — warned that “history paints a bleak picture of what happens to extremely unequal societies.”
“For the well-being of rich and poor alike, it’s time to confront inequality and choose to tax the rich,” the group wrote. “If you don’t, then all the talk at Davos won’t change what’s coming — it’s taxes or pitchforks.”
National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad has asked if the Fiji government inquiry into the Office of the Auditor-General will be held in public.
Professor Prasad was responding to the announcement this week of a Commission of Inquiry into the OAG “to inquire into and report on: the conduct, operations and performance of the Office of the Auditor-General” and other issues concerning the office.
Prasad, an economist before his political career, said commissions of inquiry were usually held in public.
“So we ask the government if this will be a public inquiry?” he said.
“Will the public hear the allegations against the Auditor-General’s office? Will the Auditor-General be allowed to respond in public to the Government’s complaints?”
“The government refuses to talk about Walesi’s accounts. Even though Walesi’s accounts up to 2017 are ready, the government refuses to release them.”
Petty argument while people in poverty
The NFP leader said the government would end 2021 as a “laughing stock”.
He said government “only cares about winning a petty argument even when tens of thousands of people are still living in poverty and despair because of the pandemic”.
“We are once again threatened by the omicron variant,” he said.
“Many families are in isolation because they have tested positive in homes, in villages and settlements on Vanua Levu, are struggling and are in need of help.
“What is the government doing to help? We should be preparing for the cyclone season and ensuring our people are safe.”
Luke Nacei is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
P.S. Jalaja (India), We Surely Can Change the World, 2021.
Bittersweet is the passage of this year. There have been some immense victories and some catastrophic defeats, the most terrible being the failure of the Global North countries to adopt a democratic attitude towards confronting the COVID-19 pandemic and creating equitable access to key resources, from life-saving medical equipment to vaccines. Tragically, by the end of this pandemic, we will have learnt the Greek alphabet from the variants named after its letters (Delta, Omicron), which continue to emerge.
Cuba leads the world with the highest vaccination rates, using its indigenous vaccines to protect its population as well as those of countries from Venezuela to Vietnam, following a long history of medical solidarity. The countries with the lowest vaccination rates – currently led by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, South Sudan, Chad, and Yemen – are amongst the poorest in the world, reliant on foreign aid since their resources are essentially stolen, such as by being acquired at outrageously low prices by multinational companies. With 0.04% of Burundi’s 12 million people vaccinated as of 15 December 2021, at its current rate of vaccination the country would only achieve 70% coverage by January 2111.
In May 2021, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, said that ‘the world is in vaccine apartheid’. Little has changed since then. In late November, the African Union’s vaccine delivery co-chair Dr Ayoade Alakija said of the emergence of Omicron in southern Africa, ‘What is going on right now is inevitable. It’s a result of the world’s failure to vaccinate in an equitable, urgent, and speedy manner. It is as a result of hoarding [vaccines] by high-income countries of the world, and quite frankly it is unacceptable’. In mid-December, Ghebreyesus appointed Alakija as the WHO Special Envoy for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Her task is not easy, and her goal will only be met if, as she put it, ‘a life in Mumbai matters as much as in Brussels, if a life in São Paulo matters as much as a life in Geneva, and if a life in Harare matters as much as in Washington DC’.
Addis Gezehagn (Ethiopia), Floating City XVIII, 2020.
Vaccine apartheid is a part of a broader problem of medical apartheid, one of the four apartheids of our time, the others being food apartheid, money apartheid, and education apartheid. A new report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the population of undernourished people in Africa has increased by 89.1 million since 2014, reaching 281.6 million in 2020. It is worthwhile to consider Dr Alakija’s question about humanity, about the worth assigned to different human beings: can a life in Harare be valued as much as a life in Washington DC? Can we, as a people, overcome these apartheids and solve the elementary problems that are faced by the people of our planet and end the barbarous ways in which the current economic and political system tortures humankind and nature?
A question like that sounds naïve to those who have forgotten what it means to believe in something – if not in the idea of humanity itself, then at least in the binding United Nations Charter (1945) and the partly binding UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The Declaration calls upon us as a people to commit to upholding each other’s ‘inherent dignity’, a standard that has collapsed in the years since heads of governments signed onto the final text.
Nougat, The Sniper of Kaya, 2021, courtesy of BreakThrough News.
Despite these apartheids, several advances for humankind are worth highlighting:
The Chinese people eradicated extreme poverty, with nearly 100 million people lifting themselves out of absolute misery over the past eight years. Our first study in the series ‘Studies in Socialist Construction’, entitled Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, details how this remarkable feat was achieved.
Indian farmers bravely fought for the repeal of three laws which threatened to uberise their working conditions, and – after a year of struggle – they prevailed. This is the most significant labour victory in many years. Our June dossier, The Farmers’ Revolt in India, catalogued the struggle over land in India and the farmers’ militancy over the past decade.
Left governments came to power in Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras, overturning a history of coups and regime changes in these countries that run from 1973 (Chile) to 2009 (Honduras) to 2019 (Bolivia). A year ago, our January dossier, Twilight, considered the erosion of US control over global affairs and the emergence of a multipolar world. The failure of the United States to attain its objectives in these countries and to overthrow the Cuban Revolution and the Venezuelan revolutionary process through hybrid wars is a sign of great possibility for people in the American hemisphere. Trends show that in 2022, Lula da Silva will defeat whoever is the right’s candidate in Brazil, ending the atrocity of Jair Bolsonaro’s governance. Our May dossier, The Challenges Facing Brazil’s Left, is a good place to read up on the political dilemmas in Latin America’s largest country.
A rising tide of anger on the African continent against the increasing military presence of the United States and France found expression in the town of Kaya in the western part of Burkina Faso. When a French military convoy drove near the town in November, a crowd of demonstrators stopped it. At that point, the French launched a surveillance drone to monitor the crowd. Aliou Sawadogo (age 13) shot down the drone with his slingshot, ‘a Burkinabé David against the French Goliath’, wrote Jeune Afrique. Our July dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity, was co-published with the Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group and tracks the growth of the Western military presence on the continent.
We have seen strikes by care workers of all kinds across the world, from health workers to domestic workers. These workers have been hit hard by the cruelty of neoliberalism and by what we have called CoronaShock. But these workers have refused to cower, refused to surrender their dignity. Our March dossier, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus, provides a map of the pressures weighing on these workers and opens a window into their struggles.
Harrison Forman (US), Afghanistan, men surrounding storyteller in Kabul market, 1953.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. These are merely some of the benchmarks of progress. Not every advance is clear-cut. After twenty years, the United States was forced to finally withdraw from Afghanistan as it lost the war to the Taliban. None of the United States’ aims for its war seem to have been attained, and yet it continues to threaten this country of close to 39 million people with starvation. The United States has prevented Afghanistan from accessing its $9.5 billion in external reserves that sit in US banks, and it has prevented Afghanistan’s government from taking its place in the UN system. As a consequence of the collapse of foreign aid, which accounted for 43% of Afghanistan’s GDP last year, the UN Development Programme calculates that the country’s GDP will fall by 20% this year and then by 30% in subsequent years. Meanwhile, the UN report estimates that by 2022, the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97% of the population of Afghanistan will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility this winter. A life in the Wakhan Corridor is not valued as much as a life in London. The ‘inherent dignity’ of the human being – as the UN Declaration puts it – is not upheld.
This is not merely an Afghanistan matter. The newly released World Inequality Report 2022 shows that the poorest half of the world’s people owned merely 2% of the total private property (business and financial assets, net of debt, real estate), while the richest 10% owned 76% of the total private property. Gender inequality shapes these numbers, since women received barely 35% of labour income compared to men who received 65% (a slight improvement over 1990 figures, when women’s share was 31%). This inequality is another way of measuring the differential dignity afforded to people along class lines and along the hierarchies of gender and nationality.
In 1959, the Iranian communist poet Siavash Kasra’i wrote one of his elegies, Arash-e Kamangir (‘Arash the Archer’). Using the popular mythology of the ancient battle fought by the heroic archer Arash to liberate his country, Kasra’i depicts the anti-imperialist struggles of his time. But the poem is not only about struggles, for we also wonder about possibilities:
I told you life is beautiful.
Told and untold, there is a lot here.
The clear sky;
The golden sun;
The flower gardens;
The boundless plains;
The flowers peeping up through the snow;
The tender swing of fish dancing in crystal of water;
The scent of rain-swept dust on the mountainside;
The sleep of wheat fields in the spring of moonlight;
To come, to go, to run;
To love;
To lament for humankind;
And to revel arm-in-arm with the crowd’s joys.
When Congress passed welfare reform in 1996, states were given more autonomy over how they could use federal funding for aid to the poor. They could demand welfare recipients find work before receiving cash assistance. They could also use their federal “block grants” to fund employment and parenting courses or to subsidize childcare.
Twenty-five years later, however, states are using this freedom to do nothing at all with large sums of the money.
According to recently released federal data, states are sitting on $5.2 billion in unspent funds from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF. Nearly $700 million was added to the total during the 2019 and 2020 fiscal years, with Hawaii, Tennessee and Maine hoarding the most cash per person living at or below the federal poverty line.
States have held on to more of this welfare money amid rising poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.1% of children under age 18 lived in poverty in 2020, up from 14.4% the year before. The poverty rate also ticked up for people aged 18 to 64, from 9.4% to 10.4%. As unused TANF dollars have accumulated, applications to the cash assistance program have waned, though it’s not for a lack of need, say experts and people who have applied to the program.
Bonnie Bridgforth experienced the counterintuitive reality of a state, Maine, that is stockpiling more welfare money while using less to help those in need.
Two weeks away from giving birth near the end of 2014, the stay-at-home mom was thrust into the role of sole income provider when her then-husband was convicted and sentenced to jail time for possession of child pornography. Her family of five was left without a regular paycheck.
Bridgforth, then 35, turned to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where a caseworker looked past her pregnant belly and told her that to get aid she’d need to meet the state’s requirement that she get a job. After explaining that it would be difficult to find employment with her due date weeks away and four children at home, Bridgforth was approved for $981 a month in cash assistance with the understanding she would start working after she gave birth.
Soon, with two of her children in school and her infant, 2-year-old and 4-year-old in the care of extended family, Bridgforth started working at a gas station. She earned $8 an hour, 50 cents above Maine’s minimum wage at that time, later receiving a 50-cent raise. Bridgforth was also pursuing an associate degree in justice studies and taking a full course load.
Yet less than two years later, DHHS informed Bridgforth that she no longer qualified for assistance, including child care. The notice from the agency said her family did not meet the “deprivation” standard, a TANF requirement that assesses the extent to which children have been deprived of financial support from one or both parents. Bridgforth’s children no longer met the standard because her husband had been released from jail and they were now considered a two-parent household, even though the couple was estranged and he was not living with them. They divorced soon after.
In an email to a DHHS welfare specialist, Bridgforth asked for an explanation. “I think I have whip lash. It is exhausting,” Bridgforth wrote in the Aug. 30, 2016 email.
The specialist replied, “Sorry Bonnie. An eligibility worker was reviewing the case and it appears that a decision was made that deprivation does not exist, I am not an eligibility worker so cannot make this determination.”
Reflecting back on the rejection, Bridgforth told ProPublica, “No one seemed to care that we were living in significant poverty.” During this period, she said, she struggled to buy diapers, gas, clothing and her children’s school books. Her oldest daughter, who was 12, “felt very poor because we couldn’t buy the good shampoo,” Bridgforth recalled.
The same year Bridgforth was kicked off TANF, Maine was sitting on $111 million in unspent welfare dollars. It spent only $45 million on the program that year. The following year — as Bridgforth “fought to keep a roof over my kids’ heads” — the unspent welfare money continued to pile up, reaching $141 million. While its surplus has since declined, Maine continues to have one of the largest per-capita stockpiles of welfare money in the nation, $93 million as of fiscal year 2020. That comes out to $657 per person in poverty.
The unused welfare stash tells a larger story of how the 1996 welfare reform law has failed the poor: It allows states to not distribute cash assistance even when they have the money to do so.
Each year, the federal government awards states a block grant, or lump sum, of funding, with the intention that the money be spent to help poor people meet their basic needs, become employed and start two-parent families. States have discretion in how they can use, or not use, the money and have increasingly used it to fill unrelated budget gaps. Experts say it’s reasonable for states to have some TANF reserves, even as large as their annual block grant, but when they stockpile the money from year to year it’s cause for concern.
Tennessee has $790 million in federal welfare funding sitting around — the largest pool of unspent welfare dollars nationwide — though it has recently promised to spend it. Hawaii has $364 million idling in an account, equivalent to $2,923 per person living in poverty. And Oklahoma has $264 million, nearly double its annual TANF budget of $138 million.
Devin Stone, director of communications for the Tennessee Department of Human Services, said, “Fluctuations in caseload and decreased participation in the state’s TANF program resulted in a surplus of TANF funds accumulating over a period of several years.” In fiscal year 2020, Tennessee reported its lowest-ever TANF caseload, about 17,000, down from 68,100 cases in 2006.
Jackie Farwell, a spokesperson for the Maine DHHS, gave a similar explanation for that state’s unspent TANF funds, saying it was caused by the Maine Legislature limiting lifetime welfare eligibility to five years. As a result, “Maine’s TANF caseload rapidly declined from 13,522 in January of 2012 to 4,320 in January of 2018,” she said. “This reduction in the number of people served by the program in turn led to an increase in Maine’s TANF block grant balance.”
Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.
The coronavirus pandemic and accompanying economic travails did not make a dent in states’ TANF reserves. Between June and November 2020, the national poverty rate made its largest jump since the government began tracking it 60 years ago, from 2.4% to 11.7%. Other parts of the federal government’s social safety net increased aid to help some of the 7.8 million Americans who fell into poverty, with stimulus packages and expanded unemployment benefits. TANF, conversely, is helping fewer people.
TANF acceptance rates have steadily declined over the past few years, with some states — Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Nebraska — denying about 90% of applicants in fiscal year 2020, according to federal data.
“During the COVID pandemic, when unemployment rates and hunger rates were skyrocketing nationwide, TANF funds were still sitting unused,” said Ashley Burnside, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national advocacy organization for low-income Americans. The devastation wrought by the pandemic “is as much of a ‘rainy day’ as states could have had. If funds are still left unused, it makes me question what states are waiting to use this money for.”
Ty Bishop, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Human Services, which has the nation’s lowest TANF acceptance rate at just 7% of those who apply, said most applicants there “exceed the income and resource limits.” To qualify, a family with two children and one caretaker must have less than $1,000 in assets and a monthly income of less than $188. Those requirements haven’t changed despite the state’s $281 million in unspent TANF funds in fiscal year 2020.
In 1995, Congress debated a precursor to the welfare reform law that ultimately passed the following year. Then-Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, predicted some states would choose to not spend the federal dollars instead of distributing them to the poor. She proposed an amendment to prohibit states from carrying over unused welfare funds from year to year.
“If we send the states this money in a block grant, there is nothing to prohibit that state from saying we do not want to have assistance for poor children,” Moseley Braun said. “We are not going to address the issue of job creation. We are not going to train people to go back to work. We are not going to provide the children with any assistance. We are just going to further squeeze the amount of resources devoted to the whole issue of poverty in our state and we are going to take the money we get from the federal government and use that to go from year to year to year to year and not maintain our own effort. I think that would be a real tragedy.”
Moseley Braun’s “race-to-the-bottom amendment” — intended to prevent states from “trying to underbid one another” in assistance to the poor — did not make it into the final bill that President Bill Clinton signed in 1996.
Representatives of the human services departments in Maine, Tennessee and Hawaii said their states are working on plans to spend the welfare funds on new programs that will help families on the brink of poverty find greater financial stability.
Hawaii plans to use its surplus to extend employment services like job coaching and placement for noncustodial parents who have children receiving TANF and to provide diaper assistance to families that are eligible for the program, said Amanda Stevens, a spokesperson for the state. The state is also considering increasing benefits and offering monthly housing assistance, said Stevens.
In Maine, the money will be used to pay for a variety of programs and “system-wide improvements” to better serve the poor, said Farwell, the DHHS spokesperson. These include counting the pursuit of a high school diploma as an approved work activity for receiving benefits; updating the state’s application system so TANF recipients can recertify their eligibility online; and providing “coaches” to help families set goals and access resources.
Tennessee lawmakers passed legislation this year pledging to work with community “partners” to spend down the state’s $790 million in TANF reserves. The law, which went into effect in July, increased monthly cash assistance for a family of three to $387 a month, from $277. It also includes a two-year pilot program to allocate $50 million to community organizations that serve low-income families and to provide additional cash assistance to individuals pursuing educational opportunities.
Despite those efforts, advocates and state welfare caseworkers say, the steep decline in TANF applications nationwide shows the program has already irreparably lost the trust of the poor.
“Many families living below the poverty line are deciding that the benefits TANF provides are not worth the onerous upfront requirements to get on and stay on the program,” said LaDonna Pavetti, a welfare expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Reserves are going up because caseloads are going down.”
If they qualify for TANF, applicants also risk losing any child support they might receive from a noncustodial parent, said Moriah Geer, a caseworker at Maine Equal Justice, a legal aid organization that assisted Bridgforth as she navigated TANF.
“There are so many unknowns and confusing parts about the program,” Geer added. “Families don’t want to go through the indignity of applying to this program again, even if more funds and programs are now being offered. I have many clients who choose poverty over having to go back and beg for cash assistance to be able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.”
Sky Arnold, a spokesperson for Tennessee’s Department of Human Services, said there are other explanations for the decline in welfare applications, including that “less families need the money. Our economy has been gangbusters in recent years and this is a sign of it.
“Decreasing applicant numbers speak to our state’s ability to build families who no longer need assistance,” said Arnold, who recently left the agency.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state policies, disputes the notion that TANF’s decreasing numbers indicate families no longer need assistance. The organization designed a metric to show how many people living in poverty are actually helped by welfare. According to its “TANF to poverty ratio,” many states, including Tennessee, are largely failing to meet the needs of poor families. In 2019, the state assisted only 18 out of 100 poor families with children, down from 67 when the program began in 1996, according to the analysis.
A report this year found that TANF serves only one in four Maine children living at or below the federal poverty level, and that 84% of families in the state leaving the cash assistance program in 2019 were still living in poverty.
Today, Bridgforth, who completed her associate and bachelor’s degrees while remaining the sole breadwinner for her family (her ex-husband remains incarcerated; Bridgforth remarried in May 2021), works in special education. Her dream is to attend law school.
In September, she provided a written statement to the Maine Legislature about her experience with TANF and suggested how the state could improve the program.
“I made it despite the monthly attempts to kick me off TANF before I was ready,” Bridgeforth wrote in her statement. “I am no different from so many other women who find themselves on welfare.”
A few days ago people in Canberra awoke to the news that the ACT could be the first jurisdiction in Australia to provide free sanitary products in places like health facilities, public toilets, schools and libraries. The ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS) has been a key organisation researching and advocating in this area. Dr Gemma Killen and Dr Emma Campbell from the organisation share their insights.
For the first year after she began menstruating, Jess kept her period a secret from everyone, including her family. Not wanting anyone to know what was happening, she avoided tampons and pads. Instead, she fashioned menstrual products from scraps of fabric in her craft box and stolen from her mother and grandmother’s sewing stashes. She recalls using shoelaces to tie the ‘pads’ to her underwear and avoid embarrassing leaks. At the end of each day, she would hide the pads in the bottom of the bin.
For Jess, period stigma turned a normal physiological process into a stressful and shameful experience. When she finally told her mum she was menstruating, her family were kind and supportive, and able to provide her with the necessary products. Other families are not as privileged.
Period poverty is not only an issue impacting low-income countries. It affects many people in Canberra (and the rest of the country!) and manifests itself in various ways, including a lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, clean toilets, hand washing facilities or appropriate waste management. Not having access to these basic amenities compounds a sense of shame and keeps people from participating in school, work and social life.
Though research on period poverty is minimal, Period Pride’s recent ‘Bloody Big Survey’ showed that 15% of respondents in the ACT have been unable to afford period products at some point in their life. It is shocking that some members of the Canberra community are denied the basic dignity and hygiene afforded by the provision of period products.
More than a fifth of survey respondents reported improvising period products due to cost. For some people this means using toilet paper, newspaper or even old socks. Like Jess, many people who improvise these products feel a deep sense of shame about their periods.
Almost half of the survey respondents used products longer than recommended because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones. These practices put people at significant risk of developing toxic shock syndrome or pelvic inflammatory disease.
A recent report by Share the Dignity noted that educational achievement as well as emotional and mental health can be significantly impacted by period poverty. If they can’t afford the appropriate products, children and young people avoid school while on their periods.
For the ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS), fixing period poverty is a key element of our work on social justice. Period poverty affects those most disadvantaged by the high costs of living in the ACT, as well as other people including those experiencing family violence. We also know that for those experiencing homelessness, a lack of a safe place to sleep also means a lack of access to clean, safe toilets and disposal facilities.
Our member organisations spend significant sums on providing basic hygiene items including period products to people on low incomes. An average menstruator could have more than 450 periods in their lifetime. If they are spending an average of $20 a month on period products, this amounts to approximately $10,000. This is an extraordinary amount of money for someone living on income support.
With the end of the Coronavirus Supplement earlier this year, income support payments now provide a mere $44 a day to cover job searches, as well as the basics of life including food, clothing, petrol, rent and essentials like period products. For some people, this means choosing between feeding their families and accessing appropriate and hygienic period care.
Last week, ACTCOSS welcomed the introduction of a Bill to help address period poverty and the stigma associated with periods in the ACT. The draft Bill, released by ACT Labor backbencher Suzanne Orr MLA, aims to ensure reasonable access to free period products at places of education and at ACT Government-run locations, such as libraries. Service providers will also be able to apply to be included in the scheme and receive ACT Government assistance to provide free-of-charge period products.
Menstrual information and educational resources will also be provided in public schools and ACT Government-run locations. This will help to reduce the social stigma associated with periods and period poverty that keep people from participating in school, work or social life and enable us to talk about periods about their relevance to all aspects of life.
We need to ensure that everyone who menstruates has free and ongoing access to period products as well as clean and sanitary public toilets in which to use them.
Over summer, BroadAgenda is republishing some of its most popular articles. This one was first posted in 2020.
When Libra’s #BloodNormal commercial aired on prime-time TV last year showing a woman having her period and menstrual blood in a sanitary pad, outrage ensued.
Over 500 complaints were received by the Advertising Standards Board, claiming the ad was offensive, vulgar and inappropriate for ‘family viewing time’.
Although society has progressed, menstruation is still a taboo topic around the world.
However, in some cultures menstrual taboos have serious implications and consequences on women, with restrictions enforced on a woman’s daily life and activities impacting on her health and freedoms.
In December, Parbati Buda Rawat, a 21-year-old woman, was found dead in a remote district of far-west Nepal after being removed from the family home to a shed while menstruating in which she suffocated after lighting a fire to keep warm. And she isn’t the first.
Chhaupadi is a long withstanding tradition observed in some parts of Nepal, whereby a menstruating woman is required to stay in a small hut or shed, external to the family home,
for the duration of her menses.
Originating from Hindu mythology, the practice is observed as menstrual blood is believed to be impure and harmful to others. Many believe menstruating women are cursed and untouchable, requiring separation from others to prevent misfortune.
As a result, girls and women are prevented from normal duties and tasks, including prayer and visiting temples, bathing in or drinking from a public water sources, eating certain foods, entering the kitchen and touching certain objects and people. Chhaupadi is a particularly extreme form of menstrual restriction.
In many families, the pressure to adhere to the ritual is unavoidable … For many women, shunning the tradition results in social isolation and rejection.
In many families, the pressure to adhere to the ritual is unavoidable. Characteristics like age, caste and ethnicity and familial composition increase the likelihood a girl or woman will be required to observe chhaupadi.
Issues of social stratification and reputation are significant factors influencing who practices these traditions. For many women, shunning the tradition results in social isolation and rejection.
It is common for girls and women to be exiled to a menstrual hut by older female family members including mothers, aunts and grandmothers.
However, the perception of menstruation as a danger and impurity carries enough weight in some districts that menstruating girls or women may also choose to observe chhaupadi or self-impose their menstrual restrictions, often to avoid stigma, social exclusion and repercussions from her family and community.
Chhaupadi or menstrual exile occurs throughout Nepal. Not every Nepali woman will observe menstrual exile and it is least prevalent in Central and Eastern districts – including the capital of Kathmandu.
However, chhaupadi is observed at significantly higher rates in West and far West districts of the country, particularly in remote and geographically isolated regions. Recent research found 77% of adolescent girls in Achham, far West Nepal, practised chhaupadi each month. In nearby Doti, another study reported 89 per cent observed menstrual exile.
The way a menstruating woman observes chhaupadi can vary. Most commonly, she is required to stay inside an external hut or shelter, known as a chhaugoth, for the duration of the menstrual period.
The shelter is often located close to the home and may be purpose-built or normally used to house livestock. The confined space, lack of ventilation, heating and security, coupled with the ordinary difficulties of managing menstruation, pain and other symptoms, create an environment of extreme vulnerability.
A 2018 study found shelters often lacked electricity, windows and provision of mattresses or blankets – women slept on a sack, straw or the bare floor instead.
A 2018 study found shelters often lacked electricity, windows and provision of mattresses or blankets – women slept on a sack, straw or the bare floor instead.
The consequences of a stay in a chhaugoth can be fatal. Women are exposed to the elements and try to keep warm by lighting fires. The lack of adequate ventilation in a small space creates significant danger. Many women have died from smoke inhalation, hypoxia and burns.
There are other hazards too – bites from scorpions and snakes, or hypothermia and pneumonia caused by the frigid temperatures. There have also been multiple reports of sexual assault and rape.
For the women who make it through a stay in chhaupadi, the consequences on their health and wellbeing can be significant. Research shows women who observe chhaupadi are more likely to report health problems during menstruation than those who do not practice exile, including infection, anaemia, caloric insufficiency and being underweight.
Furthermore, the taboo of menstruation and the justification for chhaupadi creates a society where girls and women are discouraged from discussing normal and important questions about menstruation – is my flow normal? How long should my period go for? Should I be in pain?
Menstrual taboos also reduce opportunities for women to properly understand their own menstrual and reproductive health, including menstrual disorders such as endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome. This could have lifelong effects and impact on a woman’s health.
Menstrual taboos and chhaupadi can also undermine a woman’s mental health and wellbeing.
Studies have found girls and women who observe significant menstrual taboos or exile report feeling ashamed, worthless, lonely and embarrassed. A lack of bodily autonomy, disempowerment and being labelled ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ increases risk of distress, anxiety and depression.
The news of Parbati’s death is the 15th reported death of a woman while observing chhaupadi in just a decade.
These avoidable tragedies have resulted in local and community-led advocacy and awareness-raising efforts and have drawn global condemnation from organisations including Amnesty International and the United Nations. In 2017, the Government of Nepal outlawed chhaupadi. Anyone found to enforce menstrual exile can be fined or sentenced to a short-term in jail.
Several days after Parbati’s death, her brother-in-law was arrested and is being investigated for his involvement in her death. He is the first arrest since the new law was introduced, and many have questioned whether the laws are strong enough to actually reduce the prevalence of menstrual exile.
In response to increased attention and demands for action, local authorities and advocacy groups in Parbati’s district have begun destroying chhau huts to discourage the practice. The Government of Nepal is even offering rewards and incentives for those who destroy huts.
These actions may mark a significant turning point for Nepal. However, policing, monitoring and documenting the prevalence of chhaupadi is complicated and difficult in a country with sparse resources like Nepal.
Several Nepali organisations and advocacy groups have also raised concern over the effectiveness of tearing down menstrual huts or imposing fines on pro-chhaupadi individuals and groups when the stigmatising beliefs remain unchallenged.
Several Nepali organisations and advocacy groups have also raised concern over the effectiveness of tearing down menstrual huts or imposing fines on pro-chhaupadi individuals and groups when the stigmatising beliefs remain unchallenged.
What is needed are interventions designed to encourage and facilitate structural change to eradicate harmful beliefs and perceptions of menstruation.
Until this occurs, it is likely change will be temporary and menstrual taboos and restrictive practices will continue to impact the wellbeing, freedoms and rights of women to experience safe and dignified menstruation.
It’s the middle of winter now in Nepal, one of the most dangerous times of the year for a woman to practice chhaupadi. Many of the deaths in the past 10 years have occurred between December and February. Parbati’s death wasn’t the first as a result of chhaupadi, and she is unlikely to be the last either.
Despite years of preparations, New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell said there was no time to issue a mandatory evacuation order as Ida rapidly intensified into a powerful Category 4 hurricane. She urged city residents to “hunker down.” Mass evacuations require coordination among multiple parishes and states, and there wasn’t enough time. In several surrounding parishes, people were told to evacuate, but in low-lying and flood-prone areas, many residents couldn’t afford to leave.
Hurricane Ida became the most destructive storm of the busy 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, which ended Nov. 30. It was one of eight named storms to hit the U.S. as the season exhausted the list of 21 tropical storm names for only the third year on record.
Poverty in Wales would be halved if the Welsh Government established a universal basic income (UBI) system in the country, a major study has found.
The research, carried out by leading think tank Autonomy, found UBI would decrease overall poverty rates in Wales by 50%, and child poverty would decrease by 64%, bringing it to a rate of under 10% in Wales.
It is currently at 28% – the worst in the UK.
It also found nearly three quarters of people in Wales, 69%, support piloting UBI.
UBI is a government programme in which every citizen receives a set amount of money on a regular basis, regardless of their employment status.
It is a minimum payment, designed to meet basic needs, paid to everyone individually, unconditionally.
Pilot scheme
Earlier this year the Welsh Government announced its ambition to pilot a form of UBI in Wales, but suggested the scheme would focus on specific groups of people, like care leavers.
However, campaigners including UBI Lab Wales, the future generations commissioner Sophie Howe and more than 1,000 petitioners have since called on the first minister to ensure the pilot includes children, the employed, the unemployed and pensioners, as well as care leavers.
Howe, whose role was created under Wales’ Well-being of Future Generations Act, will give evidence to the Welsh Parliament’s Petitions Committee, alongside director of research at Autonomy Will Stronge, calling for a geographically-based universal basic income (UBI) scheme.
She said UBI could deliver “a more equal, prosperous Wales”. She continued:
Piloting a UBI trial here in Wales gives us a chance to increase the prosperity of every single person, giving more people a life jacket when they need to keep their head above the water – which has the potential to create a healthier, more equal population.
The findings in this report should excite leaders who say they want a true green and just recovery that makes life fairer for everyone.
“Bold changes” are needed
Stronge said:
The Covid-19 pandemic necessitates radical and bold changes to support people through future economic shocks.
As the economy and labour market struggles to find its feet, it’s clear that guaranteeing an income floor for all is the most progressive way of securing livelihoods.
Ewan Hilton and James Radcliffe, chief executive and head of policy at Platfform, a mental health and social change charity, will also be giving evidence at the session, as well as Lydia Godden, of Women’s Equality Network Wales (WEN Cymru).
A trial in Wales of 2,500 people, the report finds, could cost about £50m, with adults being paid from £60 per week.
Those who were already living in poor health, poverty or in marginalised communities are said to have been the hardest hit by the pandemic.
Rising living costs, combined with the end of the coronavirus job retention scheme, also known as furlough, on top of cuts to welfare benefits such as universal credit, is amounting to a “perfect storm” or “tsunami”, according to respondents to a Senedd Committee inquiry into debt and the pandemic held this month.
A review into a UBI pilot in Finland, which ran from 2017 to 2018, found people who took part were generally more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain, depression, sadness and loneliness.
They also worked slightly more than those on unemployment benefits and reported better cognitive functioning. The study researchers said that:
The basic income recipients were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain than the control group,
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” published in 1926 by Red Book magazine
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires while an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Indeed, the very rich are different. But it goes further than money. Much further.
The rich are vampires. In 2020, for example, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires while an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. Indeed, the very rich are different. But it goes further than money. Much further.
In early 2019, the Los Angeles Times wrote about “enormous wealth being focused on endeavors and technological breakthroughs that promise at least a shot at longevity, if not immortality.” The article details:
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has channeled much of his fortune into keeping the Grim Reaper at bay. Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page reportedly are heavy into anti-aging research, as is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Dmitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire, has launched the 2045 Initiative, which aims to map the brain so our minds can be downloaded into robot bodies or synced with holograms.
I’ve already told you about transhumanism, in general, but this is a more specific example. A company named Nectome claims it can “back up” your mind. It aims to do this by preserving your body for as long as it takes for technology to be able to turn your brain into a computer simulation. Again, the very rich are different. But it goes further than some delusional form of “immortality.” Much further.
The very rich have been paying hefty sums for transfusions of blood “harvested” from young people. Allegedly, this will slow the aging process by rejuvenating all those affluent organs. This is allegedly possible thanks to a heinous, Dr. Frankenstein-like procedure called parabiosis — surgically connecting two organisms or parts of two organisms.
You can look up the specifics if you dare. What I’ll end with are some questions:
How and why has aging become so stigmatized and who benefits from this perception?
Where are the “mandates” for basic self-care instead of experimental gene therapies?
Why can’t humans be encouraged and motivated to eat healthy, get enough sleep, do exercise each day, and practice stress management? Could it be that Big Pharma (and others) can’t make billions off such fundamentally helpful, free-from-side-effects guidance?
If “young blood” transfusions for the wealthy become more of a thing, where will all these young blood donors be found? What’s to stop the already thriving black market of trafficking children from “harvesting” blood for parasitic, billionaire vampires seeking immortality?
We already have things like tortured calves locked in veal crates to satisfy discerning palates. Why would anyone think the opulent class wouldn’t create young blood “harvesting” dens if they imagined it would allow them to live longer?
Coda: At a New York Times Dealbook conference in 2018, billionaire PayPal founder and parabiosis aficionado Peter Thiel stated: “I want to publicly tell you that I’m not a vampire. On the record, I am not a vampire.”
Thanks for the clarification. Sure sounds like something a non-vampire would say.
Reminder: The very rich are different from you and me.
Springfield, Missouri — The minivan leaves Springfield before the sun hits the limestone outcroppings of the Ozark Mountains, zipping past church-dotted roads and winding this way and that — deep, deep, deep into the hills. In its trunk are about a dozen boxes of Cuties and Huggies, sizes 4 and 5.
A handful of cars are already queued up when the van pulls into an otherwise empty shopping center — with a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it food pantry — in Forsyth, a town of about 2,500.
Kelly Brown unloads the boxes, her eyes on the cars in the line. Most are seniors coming for food — “I don’t need diapers, yet!” — but then she spots a child. About a quarter of children in this region live in poverty, and their parents, most of whom are working, can’t cover the cost of diapers — about $100 a month. In the back of Angela Colley’s Ford Excursion is her 3-year-old daughter in a booster chair. Brown bounds up to Colley’s window.
“Do you need any diapers for your kiddos?” she asks, wearing a black T-shirt that reads, “This shirt doubles as a cloth diaper.”
Colley’s eyebrows shoot straight up. Yes, she says, surprised. Brown quickly looks through their stores for a 74-pack of GoodNite pull-ups and stows it in Colley’s backseat. She hands the little girl a small stuffed cat.
Colley is at the food pantry to pick up food for her family of seven. She said she didn’t know she could also get diapers for free. Her 3-year-old isn’t fully potty trained just yet, and affordable pull-ups have been nearly impossible to find since the pandemic began. When she can’t, she’s done what she must: slapped a maxi pad onto toddler panties and prayed it could keep her daughter comfortable for at least a couple hours.
Colley has five children — ages 18, 10, 9, 8 and 3 — and she remembers a time when three of them were in diapers at once, running through as many as 10 to 12 a day each. Now, a pack will hold her daughter through the week, but in those days, the need for diapers brought her to her knees.
Their family wasn’t always struggling financially. Colley’s husband lost his job as a truck driver due to a health condition during the Great Recession. The family was evicted and became homeless. Her kids were just babies then. They could get food and clothes at a pantry or with food stamps, but diapers were a different story. So she began asking strangers for money to buy them.
“You cry — it’s very humbling to have to ask strangers for money for diapers,” Colley said.
Once, she gathered up all her silver jewelry, gifts from her family, and pawned it for $20 — enough to buy one big pack of Luvs. Another time, she found a pack of diapers for $8 at a thrift store, but all she could scrounge together in her car was $5 in change. She wept when she asked for a $3 discount that was denied. Later, she wrapped a towel around her child instead.
Diapers have rattled Colley’s conviction, sending her thoughts racing when her need was greatest: Am I even fit to be a mom?What if I don’t deserve these kids? Will my children get taken away from me?
Nationwide, studies have found that diaper need is a greater contributor to postpartum depression than food insecurity and housing instability. A landmark 2013 study in Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed medical journal, was the first to quantify the psychological trauma diaper need has on parents, some who reported leaving their children in soiled diapers for extended periods when they couldn’t find any, leading to urinary tract infections and diaper rash. Other parents skipped meals to pay for diapers. Almost always, mothers suffer the greatest impact.
“Because women are much more likely to be burdened by poverty … it becomes an issue that is not gender neutral,” said Megan Smith, the lead researcher in the Pediatrics study. “[Diaper need] was really just all-consuming for the mothers we talked to.”
During the pandemic, the cost of diapers ballooned about 14 percent on average, according to a Nielsen report. At the Family Dollar months ago, a pack was $9, Colley said. Now it’s $11. She spends $44 a month on pull-ups, even for a kid who is nearly 100 percent potty trained.
The frustration over diapers has given way to anger more times than Colley can count. The questions from others are almost always the same: Why did she have kids, if she couldn’t afford the diapers? Her family was doing OK when they had their older children, and then OK again when her 3-year-old was born. But poverty is not an identity — it’s a state, one you can move in and out of.
The inability to provide diapers is a silent struggle in this country. Unlike with food and clothes, diapers cannot be rationed or modified — the option is a disposable diaper or a cloth one, an expense that doesn’t qualify for federal aid under most public assistance programs, including food stamps.
That’s where organizations like the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks step in.
Welfare reform in the mid-1990s eliminated the cash assistance program the majority of low-income families relied on and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a program that less than a quarter of low-income families can now access. Shortly after, in the early 2000s, diaper banks — which collect diapers and distribute them to families in need for free — started popping up. The National Diaper Bank Network was created to help support banks across the country in 2011, around the same time the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks was founded by Jill Bright, a retired British nurse who learned about diaper need at a conference and brought the concept back to Springfield.
The bank started out in a closet of another nonprofit, with just seven partner agencies, distributing 50,000 diapers the first year. And then it exploded. For the first couple of years, distribution doubled annually. In 2021, it’s on track to distribute 1.2 million diapers through 105 partner agencies, covering one of the largest areas of any bank in the country — 50,000 square miles across 50 counties in the Ozarks — a region mostly made up of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas — into communities with only a couple hundred residents. It is the model for rural diaper bank distribution.
And yet, “it’s not good enough,” said Kelly Paparella, the bank’s assistant executive director who, along with Brown, represent the two paid staffers at the Diaper Bank of the Ozarks (both named Kelly). “We’re really looking at the gaps — who are the people who really need the services? — because we know that there’s inequities.”
But, so far, the public and political will has not been there to address it, and banks like the one in Missouri continue to string together a grassroots effort to reach into the poorest pockets of the state with barely enough resources to even get there.
The Diaper Bank of the Ozarks recently completed a study to see how many diapers it could distribute to meet just the supplemental need among low-income children in their region. The number wasn’t the 1.2 million they’ll distribute this year, an all-time high — not even close.
It was 27 million.
* * *
After the distribution in Forsyth, the Kellys hop back into their van and chart a course into the mountains toward Branson, a tourist town about 30 minutes away, known for its profusion of theaters, motels and family-style amusements — mini-golf courses, zip lines, thematic museums.
At another food pantry run by a Christian organization, the line of cars is already a half dozen deep as the van pulls in, long before the distribution is set to start. They go car by car, asking if anyone needs diapers for their kids — or their grandkids. Meth addiction has cost many children their parents here. About 20 percent of the people the Ozarks diaper bank helps are grandparents on a fixed income caring for grandchildren.
Brown and Paparella meet Heather Reeves, a grandmother of three children under 3, who can’t afford diapers with the income she gets from her disability payments. She relies on the bank to pick up diapers twice a month.
They give a couple of packs of diapers to Sommer Guthrie and her boyfriend, Colby Ball, who stop by every month for their 3-year-old. Ball works at LongHorn Steakhouse and they live in a hotel with a roommate. Guthrie has tried to look for work, but the pay wouldn’t be enough to cover day care. When her son was a baby, she asked the folks at the food pantry if they had diapers, and to her surprise, they did. She’s been coming back consistently since.
When the Kellys offer diapers to parents or grandparents, they can see the relief on their faces. That moment is why they describe this work as their calling.
“I found a role in my piece to be able to tackle poverty because I, too, was just completely dumbfounded [when I learned about diaper need],” Paparella said. “Everyone knows diapers are expensive. We joke about it: You’re pregnant and immediately the first thing was, ‘Oh wait ‘til you have to buy diapers.’”
Often to the surprise of parents, assistance programs, like food stamps or WIC, the supplemental program for low-income women and children, cannot be used to buy diapers. Both are nutritional assistance programs, and diapers don’t qualify because they are considered a hygiene product. Medicaid won’t cover them unless a doctor deems them “medically necessary” to treat a specific ailment like diaper rash, which can arise from parents not having enough diapers in the first place.
Only TANF provides cash assistance for low-income families that could conceivably be used to purchase diapers. But TANF is difficult to apply or qualify for, and it’s increasingly shrinking — in Missouri, only about 9 percent of the state’s TANF funds are spent on cash assistance for families.
And then consider the poverty tax: Diapers, when bought in bulk, are significantly cheaper per unit, but to do that, families have to spend more upfront, or have a membership to a big-box retailer like Costco. A single diaper may cost about $1.50, but in bulk the cost can drop to as little as a quarter per unit, said Kelley Massengale, the researcher who led the study in North Carolina.
The result of that inability to buy diapers in bulk shows up in just how much diapers soak up in a low-income family’s budget. The poorest 20 percent of families in the country spent nearly 14 percent of their household income in 2014 on diapers, according to an analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. For middle-income families, diapers absorbed about just 3 percent of their income.
That reality, though, is hard to convey in southwest Missouri, where the concept of giving away diapers for free is often met with questions about why parents aren’t “just” doing cloth instead, or why the parents aren’t working, why they had a child if they couldn’t afford the diapers.
Laura Mowery, who heads one of the Ozark bank’s partner agencies, a mobile unit that carries diapers to rural towns, said the struggles low-income families endure have been oversimplified to the point that some people internalize beliefs about what families should be able to do. She did it herself at first when her church asked for diaper donations.
“I myself swept it under the rug because I thought, ‘I’m not buying diapers. If you want them, go to work,’” Mowery said. “But let’s say you do have a kid and you are working — you’re working every day — but you have to pay your rent, and your utilities. Where’s your food money? Where’s your diapers? People really need to understand there’s more than just, ‘Get a job’ for these parents.”
Two-thirds of families experiencing diaper need are employed. Some of them can’t work because, without diapers, they can’t put their children in child care. Day cares typically change children’s diapers every two hours, and parents are expected to provide enough diapers up front to last the day. A 2017 study of diaper bank recipients in North Carolina found that 7 percent said they had to miss work because of diaper need. When diapers were provided to those families, 15 percent of parents reported it allowed them to return to work or school and 18 percent said it allowed them to put their children in child care.
The Ozarks diaper bank provides diapers to child care centers to have on hand in case a parent doesn’t have the necessary amount. Paparella said they realized parents weren’t changing their kids at home to ensure they could still go. One day care center would put a Sharpie mark on infants’ last diaper change of the day, and sometimes, that same diaper came back the next morning.
The bank’s cloth program, which Paparella leads and will talk about for hours if you get her started, also helps provide crucial services for parents. Cloth diapers, while reusable, can run from a couple dollars to $30 each, and parents need about two dozen. The bank gives parents all the cloth diapers they will need for free through the time their child is potty trained, eliminating the high cost barrier.
Paparella runs a class at the bank educating about the cost savings in the long run with cloth diapers and the best ways to wash them (you can’t use softener, for one). The bank estimates that the 64 cloth diaper kits it gave out last year equate to about 600,000 disposable diaper changes. But cloth isn’t for everyone: Some laundry facilities and day cares won’t accept them, and they are difficult to transport on public transit if you don’t have a car or a washer and dryer at home.
The Ozarks bank has tried to provide this education and expand as far as it can with the little resources it has. The first year Paparella joined the bank, for example, in 2017, it was serving 15 counties. Then 30 counties the next year. Now 65. Out here, where towns are far apart and most families still don’t know the diaper bank exists, their work is difficult. Most of the parents they saw on their trip to Forsyth and Branson were learning that diapers were available at the food pantries for the first time.
“Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes all of the collaborations of organizations and agencies in those communities to reach families,” Brown said. “Some of our partners travel four hours one-way to come get diapers, so we are dependent on them to carry out that mission in their community.”
* * *
Research on diapers is still in its nascent stages, but Massengale is helping conduct a nationwide study of diaper need with the help of 60 diaper banks, including the one in the Ozarks, surveying as many as 11,000 families.
The data could pave the road for more policy, showing that “whenever there is a diaper bank in a community, it’s helping to meet this basic human need for families,” Massengale said. “It’s also saving our health care system dollars, it’s providing access to early childhood education, it’s keeping families in the workforce.”
But currently, diaper need has been met with all but indifference while more and more families report struggling to even have enough food for their children. There has been, however, a precipitous rise in policy that supporters claim protects children.
In the past year, more states have enacted laws restricting abortion in 2021 than any other time in American history. After Texas, where a new law all but eliminates abortion access, Missouri’s patchwork of regulations is considered among the harshest in the country.
Many people specifically cite their inability to sustain their families financially as part of the reason they seek out abortions. And yet, there is far less impassioned discussion about what needs to happen to support families after a child is born.
Joanne Goldblum, the CEO of the National Diaper Bank Network — which now counts more than 225 members — estimates demand for diapers has grown 86 percent during the pandemic. Nationwide some diaper banks reported doubling their distribution; At one of the Ozark bank’s partner agencies in Ash Grove, a town of 1,400 a half hour outside Springfield, the number of families needing diapers has doubled, said Pattie Moulin, who runs the diaper pantry from the town’s United Methodist Presbyterian Church. Before March 2020 they were serving maybe 17 or 18 local families — now it’s 40.
The collision of those two things — a rise in poverty while abortion access shrinks — incites a complicated question about American ideology: Does the sanctity of life end after those first cries if, in practice, the United States fails to support children once they are out of the womb? In rural areas, where abortion is largely decried but aid is necessary, it gets even muddier.
“We’re very pro-life [in this region],” Paparella said. “You want to protect the unborn baby, but we need to protect the baby that’s born afterwards.”
Colley, the mom of five, is religious and doesn’t support abortion, but she can understand why someone would get one.
“You just gotta understand how hard it is for people to raise children in this world these days with no support,” she said. “If we’re making anti-abortion laws, we need to support the children that are here more.”
Yet, there has been almost no concrete action on diaper need at the federal level, despite a handful of bills that have been proposed to shuttle aid to diaper banks. It’s low-hanging fruit, advocates argue, that could help significantly reduce diaper need in the country. Most banks, like the one in the Ozarks, are run almost entirely by volunteers, who are led by a few paid employees and a budget of a couple hundred thousand dollars a year.
Meanwhile, the need is neither new nor diminishing. It’s a window into poverty, Goldblum said.
“I know that diapers are not the answer to ending homelessness, but sometimes diapers can be the difference for one family,” she said. “I think that’s what’s powerful about this — we are talking about basic human dignity. We’re not talking about complicated issues.”
There were moments in the pandemic when diaper need suddenly shot up to national prominence. Major publications carried stories about the cost of diapers rising; about big-box retailers running out of supplies; about a dad stealing a box for his kids, drawing a crackdown from his local police department and an outpouring of support from parents who came to his defense. It’s the kind of moment-in-time focus that also happened after the Great Recession, when President Barack Obama called for ending diaper need.
This year, two bipartisan bills emerged, the first time Republicans have cosponsored legislation.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst cosponsored a bill with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy that would provide $200 million in aid to diaper banks as a result of the pandemic. Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer joined Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat, in introducing companion legislation in the Senate to the End Diaper Need Act, a bill Reps. Barbara Lee and Rosa DeLauro have been pushing in the House for years. It would provide ongoing aid to diaper banks — $200 million a year through 2025 — as well as qualify diapers for use with a health savings account, and allow Medicaid recipients to receive diapers for older children with a medical necessity.
All potential watershed moments, and then — nothing. The bills sit in the record, unmoving. Perhaps there’s still not enough bipartisan support, or political will, or too many other priorities.
“This should be a lay-up,” said Audrey Symes, a volunteer lobbyist for the National Diaper Bank Network. “Why is it not happening? It’s not that expensive.”
Goldblum has come up against this reality endlessly in the two decades since she started a diaper bank in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the first in the country. Two decades of advocacy have turned up a handful of legislators willing to take on the cause, a couple proposed bills, some movement in some states, but not much else. Often, she is still explaining diaper need to people for the first time.
“Legislators tend to think about the big picture and the truth is nobody very much thinks about the little things,” Goldblum said. “But something as small as a diaper — I’ve had people say, ‘This to me can make the difference between being able to make ends meet at the end of the month.’”
Goldblum and the diaper banks have pushed for legislation that does not include diapers in food stamps or WIC because those are food assistance programs, they argue, that are already suffering from little funding as it is. They don’t want to see families weighing whether to use the money to feed or diaper their child. Instead they want to see individual set asides (the proposed legislation would be funded through the existing Social Services Block Grant, instead).
But previous attempts at doing that have been mocked. The first federal bill addressing diaper need, introduced in 2011 by DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, proposed that the federal government distribute diapers through child care centers. Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh lambasted DeLauro’s proposal as an example of “nanny-state” legislation that “gives a new meaning to the term ‘pampering the poor.’” Limbaugh argued the bill also left out parents whose kids were not in day care.
Lee, the Democrat from California, has tried a couple different directions, proposing removing sales tax on diapers — something 10 states now do, including California — sending grants to diaper banks and allowing parents to pay for diapers using pre-tax dollars in health savings accounts.
She said some of her fellow members of Congress have laughed at the idea, “They said, ‘OK Barbara, diapers? Why diapers?’” Lee said. It’s the same people who passionately decry abortion, and yet diapers has not been able to drum up the same attention, she said.
DeLauro knows this road well. This year, legislation to expand the child tax credit to the poorest families, something she’s been championing for decades with little bipartisan support until quite recently, finally passed. Parents have reported using the funds — up to $360 a month for the youngest children — for diapers.
But the child tax credit expansion is currently just for a year, and, besides, it’s not a targeted solution to diaper need, she said.
“People feel it’s not a front-burner issue,” DeLauro said. “With the child tax credit, it wasn’t opposition, but it was indifference. That may be the case here.”
* * *
In Branson, Kelly Paparella gets a phone call.
A mom in her cloth diaper program, Desiree Abbott, has just been to the doctor with her 10-month-old son and learned he’s allergic to coconut oil, the replacement for diaper rash cream that Paparella suggests parents use with cloth diapers. (It’s one of the main ingredients in most creams, and it’s better for the diapers). She doesn’t have any disposable diapers for the baby.
Abbott is living in a hotel with her husband, Steven Bryant, the baby and their 2-year-old.
“So, the address, we’re gonna text it to you, OK?” Paparella tells her from outside the food pantry. “You can just click it and get on over here, and you guys can get some food and diapers today.”
Abbott is only 25, but she and Bryant, 26, have faced more adversity in the past couple of years than most people see in a lifetime.
When her eldest son was born, she worked three jobs and cared for her sick grandfather. She was just a teenager. Her son was eventually adopted by her uncle. Last year, when Abbott was seven weeks pregnant with her youngest, doctors found an infection in the bone behind her left ear that caused partial facial paralysis. As she underwent treatment, she showed up to her job at McDonald’s with a picc line in her arm.
“I can’t not provide for my kids,” Abbott said. She lost a job this year as a housekeeper because she missed work while her middle son was in the hospital battling severe pneumonia.
They tried cloth diapers to save some money, and now even that isn’t quite working
Before Abbott arrives, Paparella prepares herself. What luck, she tells Kelly Brown, that they happen to be in Branson on the same day. But her job is tricky — she isn’t just distributing diapers. Sometimes, she’s acting as the connective tissue and different forms of aid. Paparella wants to help parents be self-sufficient, and some of that means keeping them accountable, making sure they are reaching out for all the help that’s available to them. That requires building trust.
She spots Abbott right away when her car pulls up to the line outside the pantry. Strapped to the top of her old red Nissan is a big black stroller. The two boys are in the back in their car seats, wearing matching tie-dye shorts and tank tops.
After volunteers pack the back seat quite literally to the roof of the car with diapers and wipes, Bryant takes the boys out and to a nearby park while Paparella talks through options with Abbott.
They have two nights left in their hotel, and then they have to go somewhere else. Some people have suggested she leave the kids at Isabel’s House in Springfield, an emergency services shelter. But Abbott is worried it could cost her custody of the boys. It could signal she isn’t fit to care for them.
Paparella also urges Abbott to leave the kids at Isabel’s House. It won’t put her custody in jeopardy, she tells her.
“To put myself in your shoes,” Paparella tells her, gently, “I would understand completely, because when I first learned about that, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, how do you build trust with somebody to allow your kids to be staying with them?’ When you meet the staff and when you see what’s going on in there, they want and encourage you to want to come all the time. That’s why I want you guys to move to Springfield.”
Paparella has been trying to encourage them to move out of rural Missouri, to where the aid is more concentrated, where she can reach them. She wants Abbott to be connected to every resource available, because “one thing I understand, in everything that you’ve ever said is, this is your life,” Paparella tells her, motioning with her index finger at Abbott’s family in the distance.
Abbott and Bryant’s lives are so clearly built around their children. It’s purposeful: Bryant didn’t grow up with his dad, and being a father felt like a calling for him long before he became one. When he and Abbott found out they were pregnant with their first child, he carried the positive pregnancy test in his pocket. On his left bicep is a tattoo that reads “Ohana.” Family.
When they’ve had diapers, things are OK, they can provide. When they haven’t, they’ve fallen into periods of severe depression.
It’s so upsetting, Bryant struggles to find the words to describe it. “It’s emotional,” Abbott says. “At that point, it makes me think, maybe my kids are better with someone else.”
Diapers for them are a symbol of who they are as parents. Without them, who are they?
As the COVID pandemic upended the economy in the spring and summer of 2020, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs and became ever more vulnerable to hunger. In consequence, the country’s network of food banks saw a sudden spike in usage.
Since then, that dizzying increase has leveled off or fallen somewhat in many places, but that doesn’t mean the country’s no longer suffering an epidemic of food insecurity. To the contrary: Large food banks around the country are still reporting far higher levels of need — and of food distribution to attempt to meet that need — than was the case prior to COVID.
In Washington, D.C. for example, the big food banks are reporting an increase in usage of more than 60 percent compared to 2019. Put simply, as Thanksgiving rolls around again, millions of Americans are struggling to feed their families the bare minimum on a daily basis. If they are able to have a big spread, it will likely be only thanks to food charities and their volunteers and donors.
Looked at one way, these numbers, and the resilience of SNAP in the face of long-standing conservative antipathy to the program, are success stories: Tens of millions of Americans do not have enough economic security to easily feed themselves and their families, but thankfully the country does not have an epidemic of starvation. Instead, its charitable networks have gone into overdrive — and a food distribution mechanism has been fine-tuned to keep hunger at bay for the vast majority of recipients. At the same time, SNAP has become the de facto success story of an otherwise withered social safety net.
Looked at another way, however, and these numbers are a devastating indictment of the current U.S. economic model: In the world’s richest country, with more billionaires than anywhere else on Earth, a large percentage of the population lacks the ability to set aside the financial resources to be able to easily feed themselves and their children. Instead, they have to fall back either on charity or on government assistance. Many people who rely on food aid have jobs — just not jobs that pay enough of a living wage to allow them to buy food for their families.
In the South, in particular, where in few places does the local minimum wage exceed the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour (less than half what it is in cities and states that moved toward the $15 per hour “living wage” in recent years), the scandal of food insecurity for the working poor remains omnipresent.
This is a crisis — magnified, though by no means created, by the pandemic — not of food-production failures but of skyrocketing inequality. There is, clearly, no shortage of food in the U.S., but there is a shortage of disposable income among a growing percentage of people at the bottom of the economy. We have, as a society, become inured to the stunning realities of families experiencing shortages of food amid a broader glut of staples.
Given that low-income Americans are also being particularly hard hit by surges in prices for housing, fuel, and a range of consumer goods such as used cars, the inflationary trends within the food industry threaten to render their economic tightrope walk even more dangerous.
