Poverty“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” - FDR |
The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants. Francis Fox Piven
"The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today's problems in the inner city ghetto neighborhoods - crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on - are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work" William Julius Wilson: When Work Disappears.
SPLC: Southern Poverty Law Center
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