“If a worker consumes more than the equivalent of a dollar a day, but engages in health-damaging labor to do so — whether by working excessive hours or by laboring under dangerous conditions — the Bank counts them as not being poor. According to this measure, workers at VKG are not poor.” —developingeconomics.org
We need to change the politics of the poor.
The logic by which economists, foundations, think tanks, lobbyists, politicians, bloggers, influencers, and well-meaning conservatives profit from poverty has become the currency of culture wars and covert racism which continually fans the fires of inequality, inequity, and injustice.
1. Actuarial Recidivism meets Econometrics
You can’t bootstrap your way out of poverty, morally or economically.
The algorithms and metrics are programmed to turn your morally ambiguous (albeit, questionable) life decisions into what I like to call “Marginality Moneyball”.
If you are lucky enough to be divorced, not-quite-white-enough, too black, disabled, old, at or above say, 125% of the FPL (federal poverty level), or in the wrong zip code — get ready to be psychologically castrated by the systems put in place by privatization(s).
Some undisclosed contractor, (MAXIMUS and Public Consulting Group) employs thousands, to farm YOUR personal data gathered for the agencies they now promise to make efficient and fiscally compliant. All in the name of a free-market right to create a poverty industry that allows them to generate billions off the poor they keep in poverty.
Where does it end? Ultimately with the loss of constitutional rights, warrantless searches, threats, coercion, your kids in hidden foster care, and incarceration. And more poverty. They are really, really good at what they do.
Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
“Over the past three decades, that is, since the race riots that shook the ghettos of its big cities and marked the closing of the Civil Rights revolution, America has launched into a social and political experiment without precedent or equivalent in the societies of the postwar West: the gradual replacement of a (semi-) welfare state by a police and penal state for which the criminalization of marginality and the punitive con-tainment of dispossessed categories serve as social policy at the lower end of the class and ethnic order.” —Loıc Wacquant
2. Capitalism’s War on the War on Poverty
They died.
Millions died.
They have been erased from history by conservative think tanks since the 70’s.
They — the poor.
There are always the poor. Who must be convinced to work — or die. In the name of progress. And money.
An Open Letter to Steven Pinker (and Bill Gates)…
“You say: “Hickel’s picture of the past is a romantic fairy tale, devoid of citations or evidence.” On the contrary, as the above makes clear, it is the graph of the past on which you so glibly rely that is devoid of meaningful evidence.
As to my actual claims about the past, my argument was straightforward. I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the Global South. If you have read any colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labor market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
You ask for citations. Here are some you might try: Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Ellen Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, and of course Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.
The process of forcibly integrating colonized peoples into the capitalist labor system caused widespread dislocation (a history I cover in The Divide). Remember, this is the period of the Belgian labor system in the Congo, which so upended local economies that 10 million people died — half the population. This is the period of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, which dispossessed the country’s black population of 90 percent of the country. This is the period of the famines in India, where 30 million died needlessly as a result of policies the British imposed on Indian agriculture. This is the period of the Opium Wars in China and the unequal treaties that immiserated the population. And don’t forget: all of this was conducted in the name of the “free market.”
All of this violence, and much more, gets elided in your narrative and repackaged as a happy story of progress. And you say I’m the one possessed of romantic fairy tales.
The Maddison database on which you rely might tell us what the dispossessed gained in GDP per capita (eventually), but it does not tell us whether those gains offset their loss of lands, commons, supportive communities, stable local economies. And it tells us nothing about what Global South economies might be like today had they been free to industrialize on their own terms (take the case of India, for instance).” —Jason Hickel
It seems to me that there should be the possibility of escaping extinction capitalism without being seen as a traitor to the ideals and outright greed of American politics.
If you agree - you are my tribe.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world” —Anne Frank
3. What?
This newsletter is personal for me.
Over the last 7 months I have done enough research to last a lifetime trying to protect my daughter, E., from a system of injustices I didn’t even know existed.
A system which provides core services; (legislators only statutorily define what isn’t a core service), which are, what I can only speculate are adminstrative services, billed to Medicaid, paid as a pass through, by DCF, to a private CBC (which can only provide 35% of the services they are mandated to provide) only to be contracted out to another private contractor(s). This whole mashup of services was created because DCF was so abysmal (children died) and someone thought we should let our local communities provide these same abysmal core services.
Really…
The CBC told the school that E’s children attend that she refused all their services. The same services which don’t seem to actually exist. Yup… she refused services she never recieved, so they could bill Medicaid through a matching-grant, so the State could reroute the funds to their general fund. They, too, are really, really good at what they do.
Again, what?
And then after months of dilligence and breaking the internet once or twice…
“For years, states have been using illusory schemes to maximize federal aid intended for Medicaid services-and then often diverting some or all of the resulting funds to other use. And states have help. Private revenue maximization consultants are hired by states to increase Medicaid claims, often for a contingency fee. We do not know the exact amount of federal Medicaid funds that has been diverted to state revenue and private profit each year, but it is in the billions.
The states' revenue strategies take advantage of the matching-grant structure of the Medicaid program. When state funds are spent on eligible health care services, the state can then claim federal Medicaid matching funds-intended to increase the amount of money available for the Medicaid services. For example, Maryland has a fifty percent match percentage for the Medicaid program. So when Maryland spends $500 dollars on eligible services, the state can claim another $500 from the federal government-for a total of $1,000 intended for health care for the poor.” —Daniel L. Hatcher
I am exhausted. But, at least — I’m not crazy.
Billions of dollars in Medicaid diversion demands that you qualify for welefare that only private contractors, corporate-tech grifters, and murky state operators benefit from. Their greed is supposed to justify the stigma associated with being targeted by the system, that we blindly believed, was created to help us up the ladder. There is no ladder. There is no up. There is just poverty, extreme poverty, starvation, disease, and death.
What is left of me now is extremely disillusioned.
But, being disillusioned has brought me to a place of hope.
To a place where I need to raise my small voice in a time of existential disillusionment in the world.
Please do not lose hope.
“We can dream of a world that has neither gulags nor indentured servitude, and I am such a romantic idealist that I believe such a world might even be possible…” —Nathan J. Robinson
Join me as a poverty abolitionist, a romantic idealist, and a believer — whatever road you are on, we are better together.
4. We all know what poverty looks like
If you’re still reading, “Thank you!”
If you’re still waiting for some great epipheny about how to craft world peace or end poverty. I got ‘nuthin. Plenty of ‘nuthin.
What I do know is that America’s version of capitalism is extreme. Our perceptions of free market idealism are molded by conservatives and steeped in patrotism — a myth and fantasy of conservative think tanks which have been operating since the 70’s with the single goal of sucking the life out of our poor dead hands.
“America’s founders recognized the danger of corporate capture: In 1816, Thomas Jefferson warned the new republic to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of their country.” Almost a century later, President Theodore Roosevelt, in his annual address to Congress in 1907, said:
The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign—that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole—some effective power of supervision over their corporate use.” —Liz Kennedy
The real welfare queens are the corporations receiving bailouts while the poor get services that only exist in a swamp of Medicaid diversion schemes.
5. Advocates for Change
There is no one true way to end poverty; with the help of corporate media, private contractors, conservative think tanks, and foundations funded by billionaires (who write much of our current legislation in Washington) — we have chosen not to.
We must choose to end poverty.
We must be advocates for change. No matter how small our voices.
NOTES:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780822392255-004/html
https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=gsswsr_pubs
https://developingeconomics.org/2023/01/13/why-global-value-chains-should-be-called-global-poverty-chains/#:~:text=Rather%20than%20take%20such%20propaganda,pay%20and%20health%2Ddamaging%20work.
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/43911/PDF/1/play/
https://jacobin.com/2019/02/steven-pinker-global-poverty-neoliberalism-progress
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2947227
https://rmapiny.org/poverty-abolitionists/
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2023/04/11/new-book-princeton-sociologist-matthew-desmond-urges-individuals-commit-abolishing
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/corporate-capture-threatens-democratic-government/