Bill Clinton and Our 30% Permanent “Untouchable” Under-Caste

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solutions
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Bill Clinton and Our 30% Permanent “Untouchable” Under-Caste

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---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Matthew Desmond’s Housing-Voucher Proposal
From: Solutions
Date: Sat, May 14, 2016 9:04 am - MDT
To: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
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Dear John,

I have just finished reading your Suggested Discussion Outline.

Do you really think that The Establishment would permit Matthew Desmond’s Housing-Voucher proposal to be enacted?

Your friend,

Solutions


---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Bill Clinton and Our 30% Permanent “Untouchable” Under-Caste
From: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
Date: Sun, May 15, 2016 3:41 am - MDT
To: Solutions
Attachment: US Health & Human Services Department Historical Summary of the Aid For Dependent Children Program
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Dear Solutions,

Thank you for your e-mail. I apologize for not responding sooner, but I wanted “to sleep on” my reply.

You may not be aware that Bill Clinton managed to win the 1992 Presidential Election with only 43.0% of the popular vote based in part on his campaign pledge “to end welfare as we know it”!!!

[Ross Perot came in third with 18.9%; Bill Clinton did better in 1996 with 49.2% as Perot dropped to 8.4%.]

In the middle of his 1996 Re-Election Campaign, Bill Clinton was able to honor his 1992 campaign pledge “to end welfare as we know it” by revoking the 60-year-old Aid For Dependent Children Program.

Attached for your convenience is a summary of the Aid For Dependent Children Program from the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

[Editorial Note: The DHHS summary is posted below as a Reply to this posting.]

The Aid For Dependent Children Program was enacted in 1935 as part of the Social Security Act “to provide cash welfare payments for needy children who had been deprived of parental support or care because their father or mother was absent from the home, incapacitated, deceased or unemployed.”

Our pols, starting with Bill Clinton, campaigned against Aid For Dependent Children in a sustained, brutal attack against what became known as “Welfare Queens”!!!

Defined as inner-city teenage girls who allegedly would decide to have children in order to get their own apartments!!!

I can testify that Bill Clinton’s campaign was a fraud!!!

Because, as I’m sure you have heard more times than you would care to remember, I was involved during the 1990’s with The “I Have A Dream”® Foundation whose 178 programs in 51 American cities provided tutoring and mentoring for inner-city children as they progressed from third grade through high-school graduation with a guarantee of college tuition.

My own program covered 200 children in public-housing projects and I served as the volunteer national treasurer of the IHAD-National Foundation.

In both capacities, I made it a part of our fund-raising efforts to ascertain why the mothers of our Dreamers had decided to have children for whom they were unable to care absent the Aid For Dependent Children program.

And it was NOT the mantra of our pols that the so-called Welfare Queens wanted to have their own apartments!!!

Instead, almost invariably the young Mom felt there had never been anyone in her life who had cared about her and By God she was going to create something that had no choice but to love her!!!

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What Hath Bill Clinton Wrought???

The famous budget-balancing by Bill Clinton was accomplished by eliminating Aid For Dependent Children -- immediately for any child born after 1998 and 5 years later for any child born before 1999.

So why is anyone surprised at the conditions described by Matthew Desmond???

After all, he is simply describing conditions in our inner-city ghettos 20 years after Bill Clinton’s “signature accomplishment”!!!

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Do I Think Bill Clinton’s “Signature Accomplishment” Can Be Reversed???

After all, Matthew Desmond’s Rent Voucher Program is nothing more than a resurrection of Aid For Dependent Children with the extra feature that everyone qualifies for it, not just Dependent Children.

So why would The Establishment (which we have defined as The Billionaires who “own” virtually all the pols of both political parties as a result of campaign contributions, and who “own” many, if not most, influential members of the American news media) permit such a thing to happen???

That conundrum is why I remembered how all the pictures of Vietnam’s Buddhist Monks immolating themselves on the front pages of America’s newspapers for months on end were instrumental in turning American public opinion against the Vietnam War.

And why I theorized that if enough of our inner-city Moms who are driven by despair to commit suicide, spontaneously do so by self-immolation rather than over-dosing on drugs, reversing Bill Clinton’s “signature accomplishment” might be possible.

BUT ONLY IF THE AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA WILL PUBLISH PICTURES OF SUCH MOMS IMMOLATING THEMSELVES!!!

Which, personally, I think is a forlorn hope after the performance of 43 news-media superstars 2009-2011 during the litigation against 15 of the world’s largest financial institutions to pay the $84 billion that they owed me and that had long since been pledged in legally-binding fashion to provide IHAD or IHAD-style programs for 10 million inner-city children (please see, for more details, the third and fourth sections of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org).

Since the 43 news-media superstars starting with Chris Matthews and Gwen Ifill turned their backs on the inner-city children even though every one of the 43 superstars knew that any one of them lifting a single finger might have been sufficient to enable the 10 million inner-city children to escape “a fate worse than death”!!!

Query -- Can we expect Matthew Desmond Jr. to write a sequel to his father’s book on which we are currently focusing, describing what happened to the 10 million inner-city children condemned to “a fate worse than death” by Chris Matthews, et al.???

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Whether Rent Vouchers Should Receive Priority Over IHAD or IHAD-Style Programs

In addition to my “hero stories” about nearly being assassinated in 1966 while working for the U.S. Government to eliminate the de jure dual-school system of the Old Confederacy and about my involvement with IHAD and about my fund-raising for UNEP at the personal request of the U.N. Under-Secretary General for the Environment --

you have also heard probably more times than you care to remember about how I was a Co-Founder in the 1970’s of the first Homeless Shelter in Fairfield County CT.

Yes, some residents of homeless shelters are temporarily “down on their luck”!!!

But except for brief periods such as The Economic Meltdown of 2008 when there are mass foreclosures/evictions, most residents of homeless shelters are druggies, virtually all of whom you have no chance of reforming. So, as a practical matter, you are just making them comfortable until The End.

That, incidentally, is why in 1986 when Eugene Lang was on CBS’s 60 Minutes and on the front page of the NY Times about how he had invented and established the first IHAD program with students from Harlem Public School 121, I had AN EPIHANY!!!

We are engaged in classic TRIAGE on a battlefield (for your convenience, “triage” is prioritizing whom you will save since you cannot save everyone).

And the children, whose lives can still be transformed, should be the priority!!!

And, yes, as the volunteer treasurer of IHAD-National, I became intimately familiar with all of the Identical Twin Studies which, over the decades, have continually and consistently shown that inner-city children have the same IQ as suburban children.

Identical Twin Studies are The Gold Standard for determining what is genetic and what is environmental. And all of the studies over the decades of inner-city identical twins orphaned before their first birthday where one is adopted by a suburban family and the other is adopted by another inner-city family -- have always shown that the identical twins adopted by suburban families generate measured IQ’s equal to average suburban IQ’s, and the identical twins adopted by other inner-city families generate measured IQ’s equal to average inner-city IQ’s.

The genius of Eugene Lang was to enclose an entire grade level of children in a protective cocoon where education and accomplishment were worshipped rather than ridiculed!!!

And inside which the tutors and mentors become SURROGATE PARENTS!!!

So that even though the typical high-school graduation rates for the classes immediately preceding and immediately following our 178 Dreamer cocoons were SINGLE DIGITS, the Dreamers were typically graduating at a 65% rate.

Until Yours Truly discovered that 50% of the female Dreamers were becoming pregnant. Which meant, as a practical matter, that they dropped out.

That was how Yours Truly stumbled across the fact that the 50% of the female Dreamers who had become pregnant felt that there was nobody in their lives who cared about them and By God, they were going to create somebody who had no choice but to love them.

And how Yours Truly then stumbled across the fact that the other 50% of the female Dreamers who had NOT become pregnant DID have someone in their lives (typically an IHAD tutor or mentor) who DID care about them and who had told them that they could make something of themselves with the IHAD program and it “would break the heart” of the tutor/mentor if the Dreamer didn’t!!!

So that when we were able to provide a Heads Up to IHAD Programs whose Dreamers had not yet graduated from High School that they should have their tutors and mentors be sure to make their feelings known to their Dreamers, the high-school graduation - college matriculation rates shot up over 90%!!!

So yes, if I had another opportunity to spend another 14 years trying to earn another $84 billion, I would be delighted once again to dedicate it to providing IHAD or IHAD-style programs for 10 million inner-city children!!!

But if the Chris Matthews’ and Gwen Ifill’s of the world are ONLY willing to promote the resurrection and enlargement of the Aid For Dependent Children Program, anything would be better than nothing!!!

Thank you again for your inquiry.

Your friend,

John K.

solutions
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Posts: 212
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Bill Clinton and Our 30% Permanent “Untouchable” Under-Caste

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Currently available from the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services = aspe.hhs.gov/aid-families-dependent-children-afdc-and-temporary-assistance-needy-families-tanf-overview-0


Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) - Overview

11/30/2009

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was established by the Social Security Act of 1935 as a grant program to enable states to provide cash welfare payments for needy children who had been deprived of parental support or care because their father or mother was absent from the home, incapacitated, deceased, or unemployed. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands operated an AFDC program. States defined "need," set their own benefit levels, established (within federal limitations) income and resource limits, and administered the program or supervised its administration. States were entitled to unlimited federal funds for reimbursement of benefit payments, at "matching" rates that were inversely related to state per capita income. States were required to provide aid to all persons who were in classes eligible under federal law and whose income and resources were within state-set limits.

During the 1990s, the federal government increasingly used its authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to waive portions of the federal requirements under AFDC. This allowed states to test such changes as expanded earned income disregards, increased work requirements and stronger sanctions for failure to comply with them, time limits on benefits, and expanded access to transitional benefits such as child care and medical assistance. As a condition of receiving waivers, states were required to conduct rigorous evaluations of the impacts of these changes on the welfare receipt, employment, and earnings of participants.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) replaced AFDC, AFDC administration, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS) program, and the Emergency Assistance (EA) program with a cash welfare block grant called the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Key elements of TANF include a lifetime limit of five years (60 months) on the amount of time a family with an adult can receive assistance funded with federal funds, increasing work participation rate requirements which states must meet, and broad state flexibility on program design. Spending through the TANF block grant is capped and funded at $16.5 billion per year, slightly above fiscal year 1995 federal expenditures for the four component programs. States must also meet a "maintenance of effort (MOE) requirement" by spending on needy families at least 75 percent of the amount of state funds used in FY 1994 on these programs (80 percent if they fail work participation rate requirements).

TANF gives states wide latitude in spending both Federal TANF funds and state MOE funds. Subject to a few restrictions, TANF funds may be used in any way that supports one of the four statutory purposes of TANF: to provide assistance to needy families so that children can be cared for at home; to end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work and marriage; to prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

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For current information about the TANF program, see ACF web site on TANF or the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, look up program 93.558.

solutions
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Posts: 212
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:38 pm

Dollar Example of Impact of Bill Clinton's War on Poor Women

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Excerpt from p. 126 of If Only They Listened To Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear (Simon & Schuster 2007)
By Melinda Henneberger (long-time NY Times Reporter and Newsweek Contributing Editor) --


“Heads started nodding around the room when Carrie, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of six, talks about how hard it is to live on a welfare check even if you do manage to qualify. ‘Kids born after ’98, you can’t get aid for them, so my oldest two get aid but the younger ones, no. You get five hundred and fifty-five dollars for two’ children for the month. Until the five-year national limit on welfare kicks in, that is, and you are bumped off the rolls for good, as required by law since President Clinton made good on his promise to ‘end welfare as we know it.’ These are the first women I’ve talked to who are keenly aware that Clinton succeeded in that. And they know it was a Democrat who put a stop to the entitlement formerly known as Aid for Dependent Children, maybe it is not so irrational that they do not necessarily see Clinton’s party as their natural protector.”

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